News: INSECT ARK: Atmospheric Noise/Doom Duo To Release Marrow Hymns Via Profound Lore This February; New Track Streaming

Combining elements of horror-film soundtracks, psychedelic doom, and atmospheric noise, New York City/Portland-based instrumental duo INSECT ARK presents their newest record, Marrow Hymns, to be released on Profound Lore Records, February 23rd, 2018.  

 

Comprised of Dana Schechter (M. Gira's Angels Of Light, Wrekmeister Harmonies, Zeal & Ardor, Gnaw) and Ashley Spungin (Taurus, Purple Rhinestone Eagle, Negative Queen), INSECT ARK's intensely visual music weaves interludes of fragile beauty with crushing passages of swirling doom, spinning like a backwards fever dream. Marrow Hymns is a wordless song, a hypnotic voice that screams and whispers from a place deep in the furrows, from the bones, from the blood. Defying easy categorization, INSECT ARK's uncommon sound is in part the amalgamation of these two women's passions: Schechter's sinister bass lines and unconventional use of lap steel guitar (and her complete omission of electric guitar), and Spungin's lucid, exacting drumming and synth work with her own hand-built analog noise pedals (Ormus Electronics).

 

Schechter describes INSECT ARK as being a voice when words fail to articulate emotions or experiences, a visceral form of communication through sonic submersion. The cathartic nature of the music INSECT ARK creates is a document of life's many complex facets - perseverance and presence, chaos and meditation, birth and decay, brutality and delicacy, and of hope in the unknown. 

 

Marrow Hymns was recorded and mixed with engineer Ethan Donaldson at Mozart Street Studios in Brooklyn, New York over the course of eighteen months. With the two halves of INSECT ARKresiding on opposite coasts, the album was largely skeletal in form upon commencement of recording. Overdubs and further writing/arrangements were done after Spungin's return to Portland in the isolation of Schechter's home studio. The sense of distance and vast emptiness remained intact in the songs, built out over many long nights. Marrow Hymns' song themes of displacement, loss, and isolation are personal journals of that time period, as both members found themselves simultaneously experiencing existential crises. However, the album also tells a story of strength and determination, made from the marrow of these two women, a song for all things that struggle to survive.  

 

Marrow Hymns will be available on CD, vinyl, and digital formats. Preorders to be unveiled in the coming weeks. In the meantime, sample the disquieting sounds of "In the Nest" at THIS LOCATION.

 

Marrow Hymns Track Listing:

1. Thelema

2. Arp 9

3. In the Nest

4. Skin Walker

5. Slow Ray

6. Sea Harps

7. Tarnish

8. Windless

9. Daath

 

Formed in 2011 by Schechter as a solo project, from its inception INSECT ARK has been about creating work that transports, both physically and psychologically. Spungin joined in 2015 for touring support of Portal/Well, and over the next year, INSECT ARK became something much greater than the sum of its parts. Both women have roots firmly in making work with no borders - they are DIY makers, multi-instrumentalists, gearheads, and visual artists. Spungin studies live sound, studio recording, programming, and analog electronics; Schechter composes music for film and is a video maker/animator for film/TV. A full-length video counterpart for live shows is to come shortly, integrating sound and visuals to build immersive sonic landscapes that echo in the empty spaces where the earth divides, offering the listener - and the band themselves - utter sensory submersion.  

 

"A monstrously slow meditation that feels more like an accumulation of stray sounds over eons than any kind of conventionally arranged song. Like some vast beast tossing in its sleep, they lurch from staccato chunks of bass to nightmarish cascades of synths, all the while maintaining a queasy, menacing dream logic." --Pitchfork on Portal/Well

 

INSECT ARK Is:

Dana Schechter - bass, lap steel guitar, synthesizers

Ashley Spungin - drums, synthesizers

 

INSECT ARK Discography:

Portal/Well, 12" Vinyl (2017, Sleeping Giant Glossolalia Records)

Long Arms/Maria w/ Horn Split CS (2016, XKatedral Records)

Portal/Well, CD/CS (2015, Autumnsongs Records / Geweih Ritual Documents)

Windless, 7" Lathe (2015, Utech Records)

Long Arms, 10" Vinyl  EP ( 2013, Geweih Ritual Documents)

Collapsar 7", (2012, Lancashire & Somerset Records)