The Body Of Horror — Music Inspired By The Cinema Of David Cronenberg

Eighth Tower Records

Warning alarms sound their forlorn shrill as unanswered echoes down cavernous bone cavities. Bill Burroughs massages cancer-growth typewriters until they sprout dispatches from Interzone. Footsteps echo down abandoned hospital corridors. Vast factories sizzle with electrical invokkations and the alchemy of bulbous flesh…

These are bio-mechanical rituals for both the psyche and the sentient diodes that clamp into your body at night.

Maybe the body of work that has followed and paid tribute have done more to cement the aesthetics and philosophy of Cronenberg than his actual films, but it is an immediately distinct slant on body horror in which technology, sex, parasites, and disease collide; simultaneously erotic and repulsive. In either case, this compilation from Eight Tower Records summons those vividly through bold paths of drone, sound design, and horror electronics that are immediately Cronenbergian without being gimmicky, cinematic without being derivative.

In the tradition of their previous tributes to Lovecraft, Lucio Fulci, and Zdzisław Beksiński, this is so much more than a compilation. Raffaele Pezzella, as always, collects and masters a collection of tracks that is so much more than the sum of its parts, a singular aesthetic experience. Perhaps even more so that those albums, this one really finds its groove with the theme, mutating into a beautiful monstrosity that truly summons Cronenberg.

From pulses, drones, and bursts of static, eerie melodies emerge and at every sonic turn there is a new threat ominously lurking. Among many, absolute stand-out moments include Schloss Tegal’s Metaflesh through which we can almost see an industrial dancefloor while wormholing on some body-altering drugs, the samples of Bill Burroughs wielded by Desiderii Marginis, or the opening track — A cognitive island of fake tumor implants from Sigillum S — which unleashes hordes of bugs unknown to science from the speakers.

Listen too closely, and it might be you waking up strapped to a rusty gurney, with new, strange appendages grasping for that power socket.

BUY ON BANDCAMP