There isn’t enough mystery left in the world. Technology, the bête noir of our shared existence, has dispelled nearly everything that science hasn’t shunned as superstition. Magical Realism is all but denuded (as are the mysterious depths of our once dense forests), so we turn to pure fantasy and speculative fiction to satisfy our desire for novelty, because, for us, novelty is the unknown.
Folk horror is a thriving genre, not because people wish to be scared (of course, they do), but because the unknown, the unexplainable, the intangible, satisfies our desire to not have all of the answers. Thus, hikers unwittingly wander their way into pagan ceremonies, witches snap twigs to hatch sinister plans, unsuspecting tourists are butchered by seemingly benign Scandivaian luddites…you get the idea. In essence, we crave the mystery that has been all but stolen from us. Enter Thorn Wych.
I’m not trying to suggest that Thorn Wych is purposely courting obscurity, but if she isn’t, she is certainly carving out a frightening mythos. And carve is the right word, for the instruments she employs on this, her debut album, are handmade and hewn from the natural world…by the artist herself.
Thorn Wych should, on paper, be a true artist of the people: instrument making, composition, and performance all being examples of folk art/community building. Which is ironic, because her output, the scratched out eyes of the cover art, the rough-hewn shape of her instruments, her desire for relative anonymity, and the challenging timbre and tone of the music itself, seem to shun easy connectivity. After all, this record is not for the faint of heart.
Which isn’t to say that, like Univers Zero’s harrowing excursion through darkness that is Heresie, there isn’t copious amounts of beauty to be found amidst all the incantations and glowering instrumentation. The album, to invert the title of one of Kevin Ayers’ best songs, begins with a curse, and ends with a blessing. One immediately understands with “Ouch Epi Ptoe” that one is in for a immersive and challenging experience.
The track establishes both the purposely lo-fi aesthetic of the recordings (actual lo-fi as opposed to how people throw the term around nowadays as meaning anything that isn’t hyper-slick and stylized) and the capacity of Thorn Wych to fully commit to exploring darkness. Strings scrape and wither under her bow to create a dank. and dusky atmosphere that, pursued for too long, would likely make one wish to escape it.
The following track, though, cracks open the cosmic egg. “Out of the Eater Came Something to Eat” remains flinty, sinewy, even unwieldy at times, but it also establishes the artist’s desire to indulge in transcendence. Multi-tracked strings, inscrutable chants, and treated sounds drone and repeat in a primal, perhaps primeval, manner, tapping into something universal, somatic, within the listener.
And there, in two tracks, we have the push and pull of an album that, for all its attempts to remind us that we are bone and gristle, simultaneously presents an alternative, that we are cosmic, ethereal beings with an inner lightness that balances our more unwieldy physical bits. Like I said before, this is not easy listening, but it sometimes fools you into thinking otherwise.
