Lydia Lunch, Zahra Mani & Mia Zabelka — Medusa’s Bed

“Medusa’s Bed” is a brooding ‘n’ dread filled mix of electro fed ambience, stark & nightmarish violin drift, and foreboding ‘n’ sinister female spoken word elements. This release brings together Vienna based Violinist & sound artist Mia Zabelka. Austria and Croatia based composer and multi-instrumentalist Zahra Mani, and New York based new wave legend, singer & poet Lydia Lunch.

The release takes in ten track in all, and these last between just over the two minute mark to nearing the ten minute mark.  And each track is a unsettling & nightmarish sonic soup of Zahra Mani's psycho-ambient textures, which bring together electronics, field recordings, bass & guitar textures. Mia Zabelka's scuttling, slowly brooding, and lo-fi sound-scaping, which brings together elements of violin, electronics & processed vocals. And Lydia Lunch’s aged, cigarette croaked & chilling spoken word vocals.

All of the tracks flow in a fairly slow, languished, and unwell pace, with each been as unsettling as each other. The main players here are really Mani & Zabelka, with Lunch drifting in ever so often to add an extra layer of unsettle-ment with fairly vague yet highly effective texts about troubled relationships, unbalanced minds, doomed trips, and abandoned places.

So “Medusa’s Bed” is a rather effective trip into a hazed, unwell, and nightmarish sonic otherworld that’s diseased & depraved, yet oddly entrancing & compelling too.