Friday, May 16, 2014

Ashburn County

Ashburn County is the sound collage project of a group of artists/musicians/maniacs in Louisiana.  The group just released "Our Dead Selves Rise - A Collection" on Belaten, and it's a creepy and icky soundtrack to a film that does not (and should not) exist.  There are some thematic and sonic elements in common with Hank III's "Gutter Town" album from a couple years ago, a mix of field recordings, Cajun music, and sinister clunks and thuds.  The band's own synopsis says more than i ever could:

In 2012, Leroy Delbert Quebedeaux and his friends decided to direct their own movie which would be a tribute to (sic) independent hick films and their grotesque humor set in the midst of a terrifying nature. But they had no cameras, no money, nothing. So they decided to work on the soundtrack of the film they would have done if they had the adequate equipment. They bought a digital handheld recording machine and, inspired by the soundtracks of Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Eaten Alive, they did some field recordings of instruments, agricultural machines or natural environment. So everything has been recorded with it : accordions, trombones, voices, synthesizers, cellos, etc. It gave a particular quality to the sound of all these instruments. By mixing traditional folk and Cajun culture with industrial collage, droning synthesizers, old rhythm boxes, neoclassical grandeur, samples and mechanized sounds, the musicians confronted themselves with ghosts of their own past and ghosts of the earth itself on which they have grown up and lived until now.

Pretty excellent and dark stuff.  Listen to "Cracks in the Wall (Alternate Mix)" below, download the album here, and grab the cassette here.

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