400 LONELY THINGS - 'The New Twilight'

CD in digipak with 12pp booklet.
Barcode: 0641871746330





Tumble back into the nebulous and murky psychedelic haze of 70's-80’s VHS horror!

Explore grimy palimpsests from the film studio to the grindhouse with 400 Lonely Things in "The New Twilight": eleven creepy yet sublime analogue microdoses of vintage genre and exploitation audio sampled and filtered through the darkly ambient, melodically droning, melancholic nerd soul.

CD pack / Download includes a fascinating booklet of tantalizing visual clues!

Adjacent genres: hauntology • dark ambient • experimental ​ electronics • psychedelic • drone • soundtrack • plunderphonics

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It's been said by many over the years that Horror is the most flexible genre. So many ideas, themes, and styles flow through it.

Craig Varian of 400 Lonely Things has spent a half-century on earth exploring almost all of it, and finds a particular sweet spot in the glut of films released in the VHS boom of the 80's.

Varian developed a fascination for the worlds of sound revealed by audio sampling after first encountering an Ensoniq Mirage in the 1980s. While he found sampling music interesting and often surprising, it was the overlooked moments in the audio environments of horror films in particular that seemed to provide the most fertile wealth of inexplicably sublime material. More often than not, samples from these sources seemed eager to twist themselves into moments of smeary, effusive beauty and when looped and treated, often veered directly into mysterious assemblies of warm melancholia - meditative poetics that were never implied in their lurid lo-fi grindhouse presentations. And, of course, sometimes they were just creepy.

While a couple previous releases by 400 Lonely Things in this realm have focused on specific film-titles (2008's "Tonight Of The Living Dead" and 2022's "Nigths And Profecy") with similar results, their 17th album "The New Twilight" is the first 400 Lonely Things release to take a slight step back to widen that perspective a bit, to focus on the overall genre itself. With the exception of one single track, each song (and song title) is sourced from a single film. To further this theme, the chronologically ordered booklet included in the physical packaging (and digital booklet included with Bandcamp purchases) uses the same techniques to extract a hazy and dreamlike visual reference from the murky celluloid sources.

Track Listing:

1. Life Plus (8:37)
2. Dark And Lonely Water (7:27)
3. The New Twilight (9:32)
4. The Fifth Wind (8:24)
5. Nitrate Webs (3:17)
6. VHS-M155 (6:19)
7. A Used Ohm (3:34)
8. Potter's Bluff (10:09)
9. The Lake (6:02)
10. The Sun Stood Still (6:33)
11. Take Me To Your Secret World Again (7:02)



REVIEWS:

"11 freaky tracks of dark ambient and drone music... majestic ghoulishness" (Electronic Sound).

"A loopy and dreamy ambience with very dark undertones... for me, this album is more about atmospheres than it is about, for example, the creepiness of FX or storylines that those movies are famous for... 'The New Twilight' is the best I've heard from 400 Lonely Things and a great example of what you will find when combining dark ambient, experimental electronics, psychedelic, drone, soundtrack and plunderphonics... The many layers on this album will keep you occupied for more than one listening. The tagline from 'The Beyond' fits this release perfectly: 'And you will face the sea of darkness, and all therein that may be explored" (Vital Weekly).

"Craig Varian digs deep for 'The New Twilight'... He samples the unlikely moments in horror films. If it was 'Psycho' it wouldn't be the shower scene, more likely something from the lead up to the death of Arbogast, the private eye... Each track [focusses] on a different film. Have fun working out which films" (Moonbuilding)

"The  synths  capture  the  atmosphere  of  a  horror  movie  soundtrack... A  very  great  sounding  mixture  of  dark  ambient,  drone,  experimental  and  electronic" (Dark Underground Music Zine)

"Een intrigerend klankenpakket... Varian neemt ons niet alleen mee naar de griezelige geluidsomgevingen, er hangt ook een bizarre melodieuze kosmische waas in zijn mystieke vintage exploraties... Een markant luisteravontuur waarbij het old school gevoel ons op een nadrukkelijke wijze in een melancholische tijdscapsule duwde. De oude herinneringszoektochten naar platen met obscure horrorgeluiden (onder andere van de BBC eind jaren 80) krijgen door The New Twilight een opnieuw een vaste plaats in onze harddisk. We kunnen niet anders dan dit geweldige album voor alle liefhebbers van uitdagende en avontuurlijke elektronische muziek aanraden. " (Luminous Dash).

VHS NIGHTMARE:



VHS Nightmare is 400 LONELY THING's follow up to their grindhouse VHS horror-based music video "VHS-M155" (taken from "The New Twilight"). This time around, the source material comes from a home-recorded collection of British television programming from the 70's and 80's... 45 minutes of heartwarming entertainment for the whole family.