Despite being a duo, Hototogisu have always had the vibe of a recluse within their music. There’s always been a distance and privacy in their sound since Matthew Bower (Skullflower / Sunroof!) and Marcia Bassett (Double Leopards / Zaimph) first teamed up a few records into Hototogisu’s discography. Within the morass of sounds there’s always been a huge human element, but it’s never been a consciously communicative voice. Hototogisu have always been unique in the field of drone rock, pushing competition into either straight up plagiarism or shunting them into reinvention.
This is music deeply seated in ritual and purging, a great human heaving of ideas and emotions, but never rooted in structure or the obvious. This Brooklyn / Leeds team-up are charging white horses through crowds of their peers, taking heads nonchalantly as they go. Even their sleeves add to the band’s mythology, from the cult metal logo and alchemically crafted artwork, there’s a focus on the darkly gothic, without the bullshit accoutrements. This cover features a big cat skull gripping a steel ball in front of shards of broken glass, a bizarre but oddly elegant image.
Their back catalogue is in good company with this LP, an astoundingly deep sounding record with minimal electronics and a lot of guitar action. Chimärendämmerung takes the guitar from its obvious forefront position and splits it open like a patient mid-operation. Using its tactility and historical connections to emotional peaks this pair wreck what a guitar is supposed to be for. While the song still squirms, they ride it between ceremonial blasts of drone and lost-in-the-wilderness sandstorm prayers. Bower and Bassett don’t just blow minds for a living; they do it on their weekends too. With Chimärendämmerung they avoid both the piebald wacky instrumentation and shambolic anything-goes of many acts that seem to have been pulled into their wake. There is a very substantial something made here from screaming feedback and patterns from other unidentifiable instruments. This is most clearly heard on the second untitled piece as it layers up a melody under nineteen minutes of high-energy feathered drone. This leaves cataracts of ravaged almost solos sitting happily alongside a snaking echoing alleyway whistle. Everything here sounds organic and alive; this is an album that demands immersion. Within Hototogisu’s flattened tones and squalls of scrap metal there’s an unsettling world underneath, whispering beneath the mess. Even still Hototogisu manage to summon up a cacophony of bell-like waterfalls of noise, but one that’s tempered with hope.
The record’s human heart comes through Bassett and Bower’s obsessive input, the constructed conflict between their instruments and white lightning sheets of energy and. For all the darkness associated with the drones of the band, they never slip into dredging the sounds of senescence and death. Hototogisu skilfully use a dab of metal’s grandeur and mood without all the pomposity (Hello there, Sunn O))))), pitching it into a rootless maelstrom. The three central pieces on the LP are shifting series of explosions of noises book ended by two shorter tracks (all untitled); the programming has each track brickwalling into the next with no gaps. The song’s layers of rise and fall hum and loops of melody work better upon close inspection. The record’s higher tones seem to congregate on the later parts of the record, the buzzing of a thousand corpse flies failing to obscure the scraping viola saws for too long. The prima facie view of something as deceptively rich as Bower/Bassett’s work is often one of a mere onslaught of noise. This pair didn’t build their reps from just sitting back and blasting people rigid in their seats, although they undoubtedly could.
Taking a wider look back at the Hototogisu back catalogue, this is as easily digestible a peak as they’ve ever reached. Bassett and Bower have settled, if you can use that word in association with something so deeply driven, into a majestic furrow of sound. Every sound seems handmade and purposefully placed with this duo, even in the molten heat of the thickest barricades of barbed feedback.
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