Vanessa Skantze Premieres Emotionally Gripping New Soundscape — Listen Here!

With a slew of sonic collaborators, the Seattle-area artist Vanessa Skantze has crafted the new album Writhing Treasure Feast, which features the soundtrack to a solo dance piece that she developed. The album will drop in full on April 10 via Scry Recordings and will be available both digitally and as a double CD accompanied by a 72-page book of photography, prints, and original writing from Skantze. Thematically, the album and accompanying dance explore the emotional themes of Skantze’s experience traveling to Mexico, Haiti, and a Vodou Sosyete (community) in New Orleans. Get an exclusive first listen below to the closing track off Writhing Treasure Feast, called “River” and featuring the sonic contributions of Noisepoetnobody and Cailleach.

The track begins with a solemnly understated yet cacophonous mixture of emotionally weighted-feeling tones gently mixing and flowing into and out of each other. The tones, ringing out like somber horn blasts across some ominous, overcast expanse, extend quite comprehensively to the point of enacting an immersive sense, even in the absence of more traditional beats and melodies. Eventually, faster segments creep in, and some of the tones began to streak across the mixture. While the core maelstrom continues on, streaking flashes of sound appear like lightning strikes across that overcast, emotionally still and chilling expanse.

The mixture, once the intensity picks up slightly towards the middle and end of “River,” feels tribally ethereal, like a dismal yet familiar return to a place of emotional roots. The music feels reminiscent of the kind of music that might soundtrack a lonesome funeral on a secluded hillside. Without any necessarily physically overwhelming components, those behind “River” have funneled piercing emotional intensity into the gradually growing stream of sound.

Photo via Anima Nocturna

Immerse in “River” below. Click through for pre-orders or nab them at this link.