Sinister soundscapes, half-forgotten folk tales and frightening short stories lie at the heart of Katabasis by Flange Circus. The new album from the North West’s finest purveyors of dark and doomy elegies to the Otherworld sees the trio amp up the suspense and bring forth the fear as they create the soundtrack to nightmares you’ve forgotten you had endured – until now.
Flange Circus play hauntronica – an unnerving concoction of electronics and the phantasmagorical. They are fascinated (some would say obsessed) with the absurd, the otherworldly, the strange, the supernatural, the spooked and the eerie. The resulting compositions are an edifying journey through soundscapes, field recordings, neo-kraut, drones, industrialism, horror soundtracks, and channelled samples.
The band has a taste for the folkloric and the fearful, as the album title suggests. They say: ‘Katabasis denotes a mythological journey to the underworld or the realm of the dead. In Greek mythology this realm is Hades – a place where our psyches go when they are separated from our corpse.
‘Calling the album Katabasis seemed appropriate given its gestation, writing and some of its recording occurred during the pandemic. We all felt, along with millions of others, that during this period we, and our psyches, stood at the limen of the underworld and a very dark place.’
‘Furthermore, the album is as cross-genre-bending as ever. Expect crushing industrialism, spectral cinematics, phantasmic techno, megalithic slow burners, and boggart beats. Recorded online and in person across a time where we all journeyed to shadowy places and times never seen before in our lifetimes, Katabasis is very much a Flange Circus release – with all that implies and suggests. It still spooks us out now.’