Hecate
Brew Hideous
Sublight Records / Zhark
Posted: Tuesday, July 25, 2006
By: Ilker Yucel
Editor
The dark mistress presents a sweltering array of glitch-laden industrial ambience and raucous black metal, creating a unique brew of deliciously hideous proportions.
Taking the moniker of Hecate, the Greek goddess of sorcery, and having released such albums as Nymphomatriarch (with Venetian Snares, composed from their sexual experiments while on tour) and The Seven Veils of Silence (whose concept stemmed from the story of Salome's dance for John the Baptist's beheading), it should come as no surprise that Rachael Kozak's music evokes an atmosphere of magical terror and simultaneous erotic bliss. Her audio concoctions combine dark ambience and harsh industrial noise with the clatter and clamor of black metal, yet without the cartoonish vampirism or Satanism. Her latest album, Brew Hideous only serves to up the ante from her previous work, taking her audio experimentations to new lengths.
The tracks on Brew Hideous seem to cover two extremes, with some tracks focusing more on black metal elements and others proceeding down a darker electronically-oriented direction. Yet, the album as a whole has a continuous flow of enraged darkness with nightmarish energy. "Coven in Heat" begins with a blistering wave of feedback and noise leading into a marching cadence of creepy electronics, skittering drum & bass beats, and vocals that sound as if Kozak is choking on glass shards in an attempt to arouse a coven of witches into a sexual bloodbath. "Exile/Dispossession/Nomadic Life" is even more dissonant, creating a collage of waves upon waves of discordant vocals and static noise reminiscent of Mark Spybey's work in Dead Voices on Air. The same can be said of "Wait in Chains" with its cacophony of electronic glitches and drones and the almost orchestral black mass of "Beyond the Pyre," which features a drumbeat that reminds this listener of the Nine Inch Nails/Aphex Twin track "At the Heart of It All." Other tracks like "Shards of Pan," "Brew Hideous," and especially the blistering "Trial By Ordeal" feature a dizzying array of violent guitars and pounding drumbeats coupled with Kozak's oddly stimulating rasp. It's music like this that puts the remnants of the Scandinavian black metal scene like Darkthrone and Satyricon to shame.
Brew Hideous is a deliciously hideous brew indeed, pushing the limits of hard electronic music even further, and cementing Hecate's place as the scene's dark mistress. This is not an album for everybody, and even fans of experimental industrial and dark ambient may find it disconcerting with its undertones of the sexual and the supernatural. Listening to Brew Hideous will leave a foul mark on your ear drums, causing the listener to alternate drastically from violent spasms of head banging to perverted flights of sanguine arousal. Only those with an ear for the darker corners of life’s great mysteries should dare to tread upon the ground Hecate has covered here, but those who do will be rewarded with an experience unlike any other in the realm of electronic music.
