Industrial and noise pioneer William Bennett formed Whitehouse in 1980 with the goal of creating “the most extreme music ever recorded”, and over the next twenty-seven years he and fellow musicians like Philip Best, Kevin Tomkins (Sutcliffe Jügend), Steven Stapleton (Nurse With Wound), Australian drummer John Murphy, Andrew M. McKenzie (Hafler Trio), to name just a few, would lay down the foundations for an electronically-based avant-music meant to shock and offend even the most jaded of post-modern music consumers! Since it’s demise in 2007, Bennet has pursued his interest in linguistics and “unconscious communication” thru his experimental “mass hypnosis” project Extralinguistic Sequencing, which premiered at Tate Britain in 2010, as well as exploring an interest in African drumming and the ceremonial trance music of vaudou, thru his project Cut Hands.
Just in time for Halloween, Cut Hands will release Festival Of The Dead on October 13th via Blackest Ever Black, and the label describes it as, “a music both spectacular and ecstatic where…the spirits of santería and vaudou mix with raw electricity into burning diabolical polyrhythms”. Indeed, that gaunt loa of the dead, the elegantly sinister Mr. Ghede presides over the dark sonics of the “The Claw“, and while the industrial rhythms seem to be played on discarded scrap metal and broken bottles, in what sounds like an apocalyptic funeral procession, Ghede’s suffocating, black hole energy becomes that elephant in the room, a presence you just can’t deny!
