Flange Circus - Katabasis (2023)

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.'

The best folk and horror stories focus on that point in time and space where the real and the unreal is at its thinnest - like a perpetual Samhain. It's something that occupies a special place within the album, marking not just a connection with spirits, but also the passing of time and the changes it brings.

'Liminal journeys like this always involve a movement from one realm to another and back again, during which a transformation occurs,' says the trio. 'Whether Katabasis can be deemed a transformation for Flange Circus is for others to decide. We would suggest it picks up where our first album Abandoned Glow finished. The same themes are present here - the otherworldly, the paranormal, the folkloric, the monstrous - on tracks such as Rhizolith, Three Foot Tall and Hairy, and I Find This Very Strange.

'Yet we've retained some of the sensibility of our second album Rural Eerie here as well, particularly on the dark pastoralism of tracks such as Curse of Milltown, Dew Flirt, Wasp Flute, and We're in a Now.'

While the album was trailed by two rather upbeat singles, the John Carpenter / Public Information Film music / Giallo soundtrack unholy trilogy of influences still makes itself known on Katabasis.

'On the basis of the positive feedback we've had for the two singles from the album, It's A Tree and Diabolical Bird, people are saying our sound has become more 'accessible'. Listeners and fans of our previous work will be pleased (possibly) to hear that this is not always the case on Katabasis.

'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.'