the house in the woods: the spectral corridor

Moody transmissions from Martin Jenkins’ (Pye Corner Audio) sideline, The House In The Woods; an occasional project which grew into something special over the past 12 months, and now oozes out on Alessio Natalizia’s Ecstatic. RIYL Alessando Cortini, Abul Mogard, Tangerine Dream. Channelling early electronic mystery with a simmering edge of modern tension that borders on doom, The House In The Woods has been a go-to place for Jenkins’ darkest, most intense expressions since 2010. Recorded over the past year, Ecstatic now bring Jenkins back into the fold after a number of Head Technician releases for the project’s first album proper since 2013; a hexed hour+ of long, drifting pieces that scout the hinterlands where stygian drone metal meet avant electronics and bleakly evocative soundtrack styles. Perfect for midnight hour immersion and drift, ’Spectral Corridor’ scans long passages of introspective inquiry with near supernatural conclusions. Optimising a minimal setup of a Vermona PerFourMer and dusty Burns Bison guitar, woven with elegiac organ tones and elliptical tape loops, Jenkins coaxes out an absorbingly rich tone that gets the most out of careful, glacially paced gestures in a manner that never challenges patience, preferring a slow burn immanence over spectacle in a way that feels personally harmonised to your needs. As with all Jenkins work, any underlying technical complexity is subsumed into effortlessly organic results, perhaps most poignantly in the ecologically sound ‘Information Dust’ and ‘Grounded,’ which were inspired by field recordings of nature bathing walks, while the four parts of ‘Spectral Corridor’ best give up that patented, tip of tongue tone at its most hypnotic and bittersweet, with his signature pulse threaded into the tenebrous ‘Tone Intervals,’ and the haunting stasis of ‘Quadratic’ finds us sunk into the earth. oxblood coloured vinyl.