Portland, Oregon’s Muscle and Marrow write music that is intense and vaporous. Formed in 2013 by Kira Clark (voice, guitar) and Keith McGraw (drums, sounds), Muscle and Marrow quickly discovered their distinctive sound. Taking inspiration from visual and feminist art, as well as contemporary poetry and literature, Muscle and Marrow is an entity that is as thoughtful as it is fervent and as experimental as it is immediate. They also take inspiration from potentially surprising musicians such as Grimes, Bjork, Lykke Li and Haxan Cloak. Their debut album The Human Cry was released in June 2014 by Belief Mower Records. Its songs were arresting, hysterical, and distinctly feminine. Pitchfork called it “gorgeous” with Clark’s voice alternating between plaintive wails and guttural moans that soared over waves of pulsing drums and guitars.   After the release of The Human Cry, Muscle and Marrow toured across the United States with bands like The Body and experimental electronic act Author and Punisher before heading east to record a new album. In October, 2015, the duo posted up at Machines with Magnets (The Body, Lightning Bolt, Battles, Marissa Nadler, Deer Tick) in Providence, RI with producers Seth Manchester and Keith Souza to record what was to become their sophomore album, Love, to be released by Flenser Records. The band took their time in the studio and laid down seven tracks that delve deeper into electronic territory and incorporate the familiar droning guitars, rumbling synth and tribal drums throughout. Clark’s vocals are ghostly and chilling—almost unnerving at times—weaving intricate layers over a sprawling web of guitar and McGraw’s rumbling textures and drums. Clark commented, “With The Human Cry, the songs were much more straightforward guitar and drum songs. I would hand Keith entire songs already written, but with this record we toiled away at the computer adding electronic elements and a lot of vocal layering, almost like my voice (being many voices) is desperately trying to reach some sort of surface, to break through, but ultimately cannot.”   Lyrically, Love is powerful and more realized, with elements of joy, strength and anger present. During the album’s writing process, Clark lost a family member and much of the lyrical content focuses on loss, but also on love in general. How to love better, more and at all, and what happens when someone else loves you—the trap of that love but also the freedom it affords. Additionally, Love touches on feminism and female archetypes, a topic that Kira Clark is very interested in. She commented, “It’s cathartic and alluring for me to delve into feminine madness because, of course, that character is inside me somewhere all of the time and to give her permission to surface in my art is powerful.” These new songs are just as beautiful and complex as those on the band’s debut, but on Love, Muscle and Marrow push their craft further, bringing them to the frontier of avant-garde dark music.

Father Murphy is the sound of the Catholic sense of Guilt. A downward spiral aiming at the bottom of the hollow, and then digging even deeper. Over the years the band became one of the most interesting and enigmatic musical entities coming out of Italy, part of that community that Simon Reynolds defined as “Italian Occult Psychedelia” and well known for their really intense live shows, something in between a rite and an artistic performance. Father Murphy furiously performed all over Europe and toured North America with Deerhoof, Dirty Beaches, Iceage and Xiu Xiu, and has been praised by the Archdruid Julian Cope, Michael Gira, Geoff Barrow, among lots of others. After five albums and a plethora of EPs and limited releases, The Italian outfit just finished their last effort, a trilogy on the Cross, consisting of Calvary (EP released in January 2015 by the British label Blue Tapes), Croce (album out March 2015 on the American The Flenser) and Lamentations (EP out November 2015 on the Italian Backwards).

Experimental rock, venomous noise music, progressive baroque hardcore, putting a label on this unusual band is no easy task. A crossroads that brings together diametrically opposed worlds and bridges the gap between extremes, led by a female voice at a cross between incantation and lyricism, Helium Horse Fly offers a musical journey that oscillates between tense breathing spells and cathartic violence.