ANTIChildLEAGUE — Holy Ghost

In terms of packaging, Holy Ghost is literally a bit of a mixed bag: a pro-pressed and pro-printed digipak CD, a sticker depicting the front cover (a painting of a wounded penis, surrounded by a cloud of flies), various sheets sourced from Islamic and Jehovah’s Witness literature, and a small plastic fly. So, we have a professional standard clashing with a more bedroom-derived aesthetic. The fly toy is confusing - it clearly links to the cover painting, but in itself it remains a plastic fly toy. The obvious point being that there’s no real emotional/physical/sensual resonance to it’s inclusion - whereas an actual dead fly on the inside of the digipak would be more visceral and affecting. Nor does the model appear to have any real aesthetic resonance, since the album doesn’t overtly refer to ideas of replication or artificiality - although the lyrics aren’t printed, so it’s possible that they do refer to these. The release has 13 tracks, with the longest nearly five minutes, which sit somewhere between industrial and power electronics - all the work of Gaya Donadio.

The album begins with a short introductory piece, Holy Ghost, which underpins a repeated sample from an organ/choirboy recording with an ominous bass drone. The sample feels like it’s cut short rather abruptly, but it’s an effective track regardless. After this, Holy Ghost can perhaps be characterised by two strong elements: beats, and vocals. The album is overwhelmingly rhythmic, using a variety of sounds - some synthetic, some junk derived, and both subject to processing. These are used to build up interlocking layers of percussion, or reduced to starker, more minimal rhythms. Thus, the general sound can often be quite skeletal, with added noise, feedback, and synths fleshing it out further. The vocals have two distinctions. For one thing, they’re often distorted (though still ‘clean’) which sometimes obscures the lyrics. For the second, the performances, and deployment, often remind the ear of the work of Diamanda Galas. Rather than the spectacular vocal contortions of Galas, though, ACL utilise different layers of vocals, interrupting each other like some argumentative narrative. Often Donadio whispers, close-up to the mic, and high in the mix - over the top of her distorted, screaming voice; this almost sounds like a whispered commentary on the screaming, drawing parallels with some of Galas’ frenetic, multi-tracked work. The spoken sections sometimes evoke Blixa Bargeld (from Einstürzende Neubauten), and help create a creepy, sometimes voyeuristic, atmosphere. There’s no general sense of the vocals being a blunt instrument of aggression - more often they are used to unsettle, and suggest notions of altered states and mental turmoil (again, the work of Galas…).

I must admit that initial listens did little for me, but over time it’s become a very listenable album. Apart from the last track - ZigZag Holy Mix, which is indeed noisy - the entire release has a very restrained hand, and a very clean production; there’s no chaotic feedback, saturation or anything remotely close to a wall of noise. This production, coupled with the distorted vocals, and the rhythmic basis, all combine to actually remind me of older acts like Skinny Puppy - and even the Wax Trax! axis of bands - and I can imagine this might be a sticking point for some people; however, the use of echo on the beats often gives Holy Ghost a charming (for want of a better word) sound, taking the mind back to earlier times, and acts like SPK. A lot of the percussion sounds really are very nice - the solid junk thuds of Pigeon Murder, or the beautiful reverberations of Penis Dead - and are clearly well crafted. This craft also shows in small details: there’s a point three-quarters through Penis Dead, where Donadio is screaming over a echoing beat, before fading in another scream, and at the crescendo cutting to just a clipped version of the beat. A small thing, perhaps, but the kind of attention to detail that appeals to me.