For her Fact mix, Sarahsson obscures charm with grotesquerie, scraping ethereal series of consistency and light raw with squalls of harshness and mayhem.
The Horgenaith, the impressive launching album of hardcore classical vivisections from polymathic author, manufacturer, efficiency artist, DJ and instrument maker Sarahsson, takes its name from something the artist misheard. “My daddy is a huge Tom Waits fan,” she informed The Quietus, “and in ‘Cemetery Polka’ there’s the line “independent as a hog on ice”. As a kid, I misheard this as ‘Horgenaith.’ Because it sounds comparable to the word ‘Argonaut’ and I’d seen bits of the movie Jason And The Argonauts with the Hydra, I made this association in my head, and have had this concept ever consideringthat of a animal called The Horgenaith.” Describing the animal in an interview with Kaltblut as “a enormous thurse, a many-necked monster knocking and regreting and wrought of iron and clay, leather and moss, organ pipelines and bellows,” the conjuring of this mythopoetic monster serves to mirror the artist’s own transformative acts of queer cacophony. Drawing as much motivation from folklore and the natural world as she does extreme sound and gore, Sarahsson alloys classical structure with hardcore, metal and electronic experimentation, finding a shape-shifting noise inbetween recordings of a homemade daxophone, an speculative, electronic instrument crafted from tough wood, self-made samples and a patchwork of field recordings. Through and with all of this sound, the noise of the Horgenaith, she checksout queerness through the lens of “transmutation, embodying opposing parts of oneself,” as she explains: “finding familiarity in distinction is a lot of what queerness is about for me.”
Pursuing that which you have misheard, or can’t rather hear, is something Sarahsson continues to checkout with her expansive Fact mix. “One of the styles I’ve been interested in musically justrecently is this concept of ‘vague music,’ these kind of ideas of sounds and things that are nearly there however perhaps obfuscated or unclear in some method,” she describes. The Horgenaith opens with ‘Ancient Dildo Intro,’ a bracing blast of choral peals, sensuous squelches and distorted exhalations, the cry of the Horgenaith, every noise conserve for piano and birdsong made by the artist’s mouth. It’s an immediate intro, as well as effective declaration of intent, a singing warm up workout for an entity in consistent flux. Sarahsson pulls off a comparable technique for the intro to her mix, a smog cleaning assortment of Adele, Giant Claw’s skillful inversion of ‘Set Fire To The Rain’, and Lexxi & Elysia Crampton’s canonical ‘Esposas 2013 (No Drums)’, the integrated impact of which sounds like a MIDI orchestra tuning up, air horns blown in contrapuntal rhythm with pizzicato strings and flourishes of laser-focused oscillation. “A lot of the mix feels extremely autumnal, sort of turning inwards and growing through decay,” she continues. “The tracklist is mainly things I’ve been listening to whilst visiting and it feels like the various types of occasions I’ve been playing actually program in the range here, some extremely ambient minutes, some really extreme.” It’s a mix of significant contrasts, in which charm is obscured by grotesquerie, ethereal series of consistency and light scraped raw by squalls of harshness and turmoil.
Gabor Lazar’s artificial dissection of Jesse Osborne-Lanthier & Grischa Lichtenberger’s ‘Good Morning America’ is extended into the connective tissue inbetween the enthusiastic procession of Yves Tumor’s ‘Role In Creation’ and the MIDI harpsichord jam ‘Sunbeams Streaming Through Leaves on the Hill,’ a cult favourite cut from the Evergrace OST, carriedout by the internal band from the infamously uncompromising video videogame studio From Software. FKA branches, Future and efficiency artist Betty Apple are immersed deep into the Mariana trench by brand-new American metaphysicists 01168 and S280F, branches’ plain vocals and Future’s playarea sing-along set adrift on Joe Hisaishi secrets, wandering evenmore through field recordings made in Cork’s upper Blackwater Valley by agri-ambient artist Michael Lightborne and the progressive organ clusters of Ligeti’s ‘Volumina.’ “I actually suggest listening to the entire thing,” states Sarahsson of the structure, “it’s a truly puzzling feeling, particularly understanding that it’s simply an organ.” In maybe the most climactic, and motivated, series, the ravaging organ drones of Anna Von Hausswolff’s ‘Persefone’ are melted into a ‘slowed + reverb’ variation of System Of A Down’s ‘Chop Suey,’ every drop of the renowned track’s melodrama wrung out in a transcendent, elegiac crawl. Elsewhere we find music plucked from odd YouTube channels, the radioactive pains of Hildur Guðnadóttir’s halldorophone (an electro-acoustic cello) originating from Sam Slater’s ‘I Do Not Wish To Be Known As A Vandal’, doom prophet spoken word from Chino Amobi, music for motorised grand pianos and the opening style from unknown anime series Oban Star Racers.
“I like to thinkof my blends have a narrative component to them,” concludes Sarahsson. “Melodies endedupbeing plot points and shifts endedupbeing characters, whilst lyrics offer an architectural structure or setting.” In her Fact mix, inthemiddleof the sound, the striking power of voice pierces its method to the surfacearea. From the somnambulant sensuality of Tara’s ‘Duppy Ride’ and the haunting grace of author, singer and star Keeley Forsyth to the tense stagecraft of Kate Bush’s ‘Under Ice,’ the gut-wrenching pow wow necromancies of Joe Rainy and Delaram Kamareh’s jaw-dropping performance of Stravinsky’s ‘Chanson Du Rossignol,’ the splendour and the extremity of voice resounds as a grounding existence sentout skyward, around which the rest of the mix gravitates. Like The Horgenaith, Sarahsson’s mix unfolds as mentally charged testament, both transformative and changing, penetrating at the limitations of quee