Thursday 1 September 2016

Enter the Shadow Kingdom

Currently listening to the 2009 double CD Shadow Kingdom, by the great French experimental psych-folk duo Natural Snow Buildings. I own some thanks to some recent Jack Kirby interest for putting the album in mind this evening - UK label Blackest Rainbow put this out in a limited run of 500 copies and accompanying the CDs is a beautiful 16 page comic book with illustrations by one half of Natural Snow Buildings duo Solange Gularte. I managed to snap this up a few years ago and it's one of those items in my collection that I cherish - not just for the music - a sort of experimental acoustic folk with post-rock licks, eastern exotica, kosmische–style ragas, atmospheric drones and ambient soundscapes spead across two discs, or for the bewitching packaging, but that it's one of the few Natural Snow Buildings albums to earn a CD release, the home produced CD-R being the duo's low-key weapon of choice...



Horror and dark fantasy is a perennial obsession of Natural Snow Buildings and peppered throughout their releases are cult film references - album titles like Laurie Bird, Daughter of Darkness, as well as song titles like “John Carpenter”, “Santa Sangre” and “Mary Brown” - presumably a reference to The Blair Witch Project. The Shadow Kingdom album has some nice allusions to Horror Cinema also, with song titles such as "Gorgon", "The Faceless" and "The Crystal Bird"

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