Horchata - Isolated House

This album is heavily influenced by the numerous abandoned houses and factories I have explored in my life. The first of such houses was discovered and shown to me by Dieter von Schramm, who did the artwork for this release. When we were eleven years old, Dieter found an old house that had been gutted by fire. I remember looking in the boarded up windows and seeing a burned Hammond organ and a melted phone. Since then, I have been oddly drawn to such places. They are part of civilization, yet still remain outside of humanity, often being retaken by vegetation and animals. As I enter these places, I go through a liminal state, and the experience of exploration is almost a ritualistic process. One such adventure I was part of in the 1990’s was what we had termed a factory performance. We found an old textile factory (a woolen mill) in Charlottesville, VA, only accessible via a railroad bridge. There, we would improvise sound, and burn and break artwork that we hauled over for sacrifice. I also remember an old mansion in Charlottesville, VA that I often visited with friends. It had an elaborately decorated design in the bottom of the pool. We visited it one Halloween and the next day it burned to the ground. Such infiltrations have continued, and just a few years ago friends and I entered an old WWII military bunker on the seacoast of NH. Around the same time I read House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. I’d like to say that that excellent book influenced this project. It did and it did not. I felt that the soundtrack to such a house in the book would be single sounds, placed in an audio field of dead silence, with not even reverberations of the space that one was in. Still, I felt that a house itself could be an entity with its own soundtrack. This net releaese on the Dark Winter label is an attempt to compose a soundtrack for an isolated house.

Photographs and design by Dieter Von Schramm
www.overprocessed.com


Download High Resolution Artwork:
http://darkwinter.com/dw047/dw047-Horchata-Isolated_House.pdf