GHOLD - Bludgeoning Simulations

A brutal treatise on themes of loss, abjection and isolation. These new tracks were forged in a furnace of anxiety and neurosis and thus shimmer with a sonic iridescence redolent of the nacreous bloom of oxidised metal.

Long time collaborators and founders of the original ‘Weight and Grunt’ sound, Alex Wilson and Paul Antony have taken Ghold’s musical palette to a place far beyond the pale. With the addition of Oli Martin and Alex Virji, they spent a week in Llanbadarn Fynydd at Giant Wafer studios with engineer and producer, Wayne Adams to add a glowing skin-suit to the stark intensity of the skeletal rehearsal demos that were made during the discordant and interstitial period of lockdown in 2020.

The agency of ‘Bludgeoning Simulations’ unfurls before you as a proboscis - coiled, serpentine and inquisitively searching for a saccharine hit of nectar. Instead, one’s taste buds are coated with the worryingly familiar ferric tang of blood. This album denies poetic revery yet delivers a kind of scorched catharsis - ill feeling, malintent and hopelessness are set ablaze and allowed to run free with reckless abandon. One’s arms flail as if preaching heresy, one’s ears sing with baleful howls, one’s eyes become dull, cloudy vessels for half remembered visions of calm.

Each track plunges one further into a Hadean dreamscape. Light fades and voices crack. The temporal alchemy that this music enacts is wonderfully maddening. It brews a heady liquor of present paranoia and atavistic fear. It is a record for our times yet also conjures visions of the psilocybin-soaked folk horror of Ben Wheatley’s, ‘A Field in England’.