What you’re about to hear is a piece of music that may make you imagine you’ve been taken hostage, with no real understanding of how it happened or why. Blindfolded and hands bound, strapped to a chair in a cold, lightless place, you hear the workings of brutal machinery and eerie vibrations that don’t seem to originate from any earthy transmitter. Your unseen captors go on horrific tirades that seem un-moored from sanity and magnify your fear and confusion. Trembling, you become convinced — this isn’t going to end well, and there’s no escape.
Well, those are one person’s nightmare impressions of the unnerving experience created by “This Body Aweigh“, which is the track we’re premiering today along with a video that manages to make the disorienting audio even more chilling.
The two Finnish authors of these sights and sounds, who appear hooded and noosed in the video, go by the name Vorare. Demented experimentalists at heart, they translate their blood-freezing inspirations through an amalgam of drone-doom, noise, industrial, and electronic music.
We got a first taste of what they were up to through an EP named The Drainage Rituals that was released this past May, and although we didn’t provide a completely comprehensive review, we did call out some of its signal features — that it sounded “both primitive and futuristic”, that “it may get you moving but may also loosen your teeth”, that it was “mysterious and disturbing, coiling the tension and building the fear factor”.
Turns out that EP was a placeholder, a compensation for covid-related delays in the release of their debut album Voyeur, which will finally be discharged on August 30th in collaboration with Total Dissonance Worship. And that album is the source of the song we’re now premiering.
When “The Body Aweigh” begins, you might feel your skull begin to fracture, like a pane of thick glass subjected to repeated mallet blows. You might begin to feel your mind crazing as well when tortured howls vent the words over those brutal echoing beats. Dim droning tones slowly surface like the hum of flies, and then wobble and warble in disconcerting fashion.
The tension that’s inchoate in the music swells and grows even more unnerving. The buzzing tones magnify, the vocals transform into shattering screams. There’s an interlude of weirdly vibrating electronics, followed by a different kind of hammering and a different sea of strange electronic transmissions and pulsating bass tones. However, the torment in the vocals is unabated, and as the electronics quiver, siren-like tones ring out.
It’s a chilling experience, and so are the visuals:
Voyeur will soon be available for pre-order at this location on Bandcamp. All Vorare social media links are assembled here. In case you missed The Drainage Rituals, we’ll make it easy for you to catch up: