Debut album from Brooklyn composer
INSECT ARK’s debut full-length album, Portal/Well is the result of a full year of work in composer/multi-instrumentalist Dana Schechter’s Brooklyn studio. Exploring themes of corruption of the natural world, and facing oblivion, Portal/Well continues the wordless existential narratives already established on 2013’s Long Arms EP and 2012’s Collapsar 7″ single.
Portal/Well finds its voice in the sound of elements burning and crashing into each other; in the haunting groans and swells of the lap steel guitar, the stalking bass, the insistent drum programming, and the deep oscillations of synthesizers. From this morass songs are born, deeply melodic, dense, austere, and wildly unhinged.
To call Portal/Well a dark album would be a grave understatement – INSECT ARK is often called “Experimental/Doom” – but there are moments infused with bright shards of light, and respite to breathe clear air, before submerging the listener once again into a deep cavern of lustrous shadow.
