Music – Necromantic

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Emma Ruth Rundle – “The breath between things no one says”

The images below are for Emma Ruth Rundle’s single “Return,” from her upcoming album Engine of Hell. This song is delicately beautiful, raw, tender, and haunting. Her self-directed music video took inspiration from Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire, which is one of my favorite movies of all time.

Photography: Emma Wondra
Makeup: Blake Armstrong
Wardrobe: Hogan McLaughlin

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“My sadness has lost its cause”: Anhedonia – Chelsea Wolfe x Emma Ruth Rundle

This is the mournfully lovely new single from Chelsea Wolfe and Emma Ruth Rundle, mingling their haunting voices in a subdued and emotionally resonant melody.

I’ll be your silent witness
I’ll be your borderline

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Dehn Sora

Multidisciplinary artist and graphic designer Dehn Sora, also known as Vincent Petitjean, produces the most darkly beautiful and alluringly disturbing work. The exquisite textures are haunting, lyrical, and partake of the ashy fineness of a Shade’s dreams in the Underworld.

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Wrap me in your violent hair: Ruby Throat

Below is the oneiric music video for the song “Hu’u” by surrealist neofolk duo Ruby Throat. I have long admired Ruby Throat’s haunting, slowly sad melodies accompanied by KatieJane Garside’s lullaby-like, dreamy voice, which is filled with so much vulnerability that it is the ideal vehicle for a ghostly ballad or dirge. A voice draped with shimmering, trembling cobwebs… The quietly aching, mournful, both chilling and tender quality of their song speaks of bygone longing and obscure personal tragedy. It is described as “recall[ing] the etherealness and fragility of English folk music and the deepest black heart of Gothic Americana.” This title is off their album Stone Dress & Liar Flower, and also appears on Baby Darling Taporo.

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Twin Temple: Sex Magick

The following music video from self-styled “Satanic doo-wop” duo Twin Temple is charming, campy, fun, and lighthearted, with its nostalgically vintage palette and occult imagery.

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Without Love – Alice Glass

This is the nostalgically colorful and enchanting music video for “Without Love” by Alice Glass (formerly of Crystal Castles), directed by the enormously talented Floria Sigismondi. Among others, Sigismondi has also directed the music videos for Marilyn Manson’s “The Beautiful People,” The White Stripes’ “Blue Orchid,” and Sigur Rós’ “Untitled.” Her video work is consistently lyrical, beautifully vivid, and unforgettable. I have also long admired her photography, a few examples of which are below.

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A Rendered Splendor

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The Spiral Sacrifice

The Spiral Sacrifice is the thirteenth and probably the last album from Sopor Æternus & the Ensemble of Shadows, the musical brainchild of the ethereal and splendid Anna-Varney Cantodea. It is haunting, beautiful, and enthralling, full of both serenity and almost religious mystery. The distinctive darkwave/neo-medieval sound of Sopor Æternus is here subdued to a modulated theatricality, making it more effective and mature.

Its less blatantly melancholy tone mirrors the emotional development and dignity of the album’s lyrical themes. The richness, playfulness, and delightful atmosphere of its music opens up a vista, conjures an ethereal world – with its quality of medieval cloisters, crypts, cadaverous despairing souls, funereal draperies, obscure chambers, massive ruins, tenebrous fastnesses – with startling immediacy, a world of dark stone, veils, tears and lutes, drawing you into this realm so remote from modernity and present reality, so spectrally dramatic, delicately anguished – you can almost smell the odors of incense and dust, the dried roses…

The cooler and more abstract sound of the instrumentation provides background and juxtaposition for Anna-Varney’s vocals and lyrics, which as usual are highly personal, emotional, and deeply sad, yet also peaceful and not without a certain loving gladness. These songs speak of the agonies and beauties of failed, unfulfilled, or forfeited love and are achingly moving, with the full-hearted generous emotionality that is typical of Anna-Varney, who has said that “a good album should be…like a tombstone…a sepulcher, where a part of the artist lies buried.” They are filled with profound resignation, the final laying to rest of torment. Her lyrics are a pure incarnation of the roiling vicissitudes, the ecstasy and agony, joy and loss of love.

As always, Sopor Æternus is a breath of refreshing iconoclasm and unearthly atmosphere in a sea of musical sameness. It is one of the few projects that truly remind me of no other artist or band. It is the only one able to evoke the spirit and feeling of the Middle Ages in such an intimate way, a unique hybrid dream realm embodying this peculiar penumbral vision. Jubilant, mischievous, ominous, and sorrowful, this album brings together the best qualities of the chimerical Sopor Æternus & the Ensemble of Shadows and is animated throughout by Anna-Varney Cantodea’s lifeblood.

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Two Spirit

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Die Antwoord – Ugly Boy

Die Antwoord’s music video for “Ugly Boy” is quite visually striking. I love Yolandi’s uncanny dark-angel look as she sits upon her throne, and also the contrast between the jet-black and pure white clothing, the all-black eyes, and blood streaming down those preternatural faces.

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