vibracathedral orchestra: squeeze the lids through coming window

A piercing hum awakens alien skreeks and insect antennae and fluttering seedpod drifts and curled leaf wails… reedy twirlings dance above organic-machine wheeling thuds… hopping whistles accompany descending klangs, producing a rushing stasis, a clattering bliss, a reverential noise. Vibracathedral Orchestra’s trademark levitation drone returns to earth to offer two sidelong utopias, a revolving array of instruments selected in turn by the musicians, each inventing utterly distinctive lines of their own which nevertheless weave together rafts of joyous collective racket. New elements sometimes emerge discordantly but are folded into a diverse whole, each new plateau constructing itself from scraps then dissolving into raw sonic material for new configurations. Radical collective drone improvisation. Vibracathedral Orchestra dedicate their release to the pangolin. Pangolins are the most poached mammals in the world, partly because their scales and other body parts are trafficked for use in traditional medicine. One of the reasons for this is their unusual status as a mammal with ‘scales’ (in fact keratin plates, therefore closer to hair than to reptile skin). In her 1966 classic of anthropological theory Purity & Danger, Mary Douglas describes dirt and noise as dangerous and therefore powerful due to their appearance outside their proper places; she also identifies this kind of category-transgression as the origin of the cult of the pangolin, which is ‘capable of inspiring a profound meditation on the nature of purity and impurity and on the limitations of human contemplation and existence.’ Recognising this connection between the marginal power of noise and the pangolin, all profits from this release will be donated to the Pangolin Conservation Fund of the Zoological Society of London.