“The Devil’s Advocates” is one of the latest unholy dispatches from Ontario-based hauntological sonic misfit Phibes Praetorius — one of the great unsung necromancers of occult sound collage, a spectral artisan whose music seems to crawl out of abandoned radio towers and half-collapsed séances. For years, he has haunted the periphery of ECHØVEIL’s fevered dreams, like a distant, rag-wrapped older brother to UgUrGkuliktavikt, breathing static into our lungs long before we were born.
This new abomination — ultra-distorted, psychoactive, mutilated, demented beyond the realm of polite frequencies — is as good an initiation point as any. A fissure. A wound. A doorway held open with rusted nails. The first in a series of transmissions we shall exhume.
Imagine a Gothic castle collapsing under impossible Lovecraftian angles, stones screaming as they fall. Imagine a misshapen corpse pounding on your door, grinning with gums full of rot, asking politely to be let in. Imagine the echo of the echo of the echo of a murdered choir, spinning in the void like a broken prayer wheel. Imagine black clouds forming a mouth above you, drinking your soul like a milkshake, slurping with thunderous delight. Imagine the soundtrack to an underground satanic witch-cult film no one admits to having seen — a cursed reel spliced with nightmares, Hammer Horror on PCP, delirium in film-grain.
It is grandiose. It is riveting. It is deranged fun dredged from the abyss.
A nightmare that refuses to stop giving.
A ridiculous, gorgeous, over-the-top monstrosity.
A relic of darkness.
A beacon of madness.
And above all — it is unspeakably, obscenely, deliriously GOOD.
And then —
the tape folds,
the night exhales,
the whole album seems to grin sideways at you,
as if whispering: this was only the surface… the surface of the surface… the rumor of the surface…
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