Insect Ark – “Portal/Well”

The immediate sense of depth is not deceitful. Dana Schechter, who learned bass directly from Sir Cliff Burton himself, has spent most of her artistic course adding deepness to countless projects – from Gira’s Angels Of Light to Gift Horse [a band co-founded with Jef Whitehead twenty years ago], not to mention the fruitful partnerships with J.G. Thirlwell, Thomas Wydler or Toby Dammit. And Insect Ark, which at first could be erroneously perceived as a bounded and limited bathysphere of ambient music, turns out to be, like its architect, a polysemantic, instrumental hydra.

Built on a voiceless steady basis, this debut full-length is positively self-absorbed in its own narratives of dark. And, even with electronic layers assuming in it a vital proportion, there is this latent sense of naturalism, of organicism. As if “Portal/Well” turns out to be an inexorable Arbeitsmaschine with a heart of velvet. Dense, symbolic – do check Alan Dubin’s visuals for the album, please –, detailed to the point of artistic perfectionism, but still carrying on its diacritic frame the always inevitable fissures of creation. As Flaubert once said, «As humanity perfects itself, man becomes degraded». Likewise, this record conjures both decay and supreme effectively on a journey of obscure percussions, nebulous basslines, spine-tingling mesomorphic guitars and granitic dynamics.