musicAddicted

What makes a horror movie so compelling, almost fatally attractive? Liters of blood, loads of scream and tons of guts? Probably not. The unpredictability and slow gradations are the key elements, but what is the essence of horror? Waiting to see the face of devil who started up this game and plans to terminate it definitely? The uncertainty and guilty pleasure of freeing up the boundaries of fantasy and letting it come with a perversely and dangerously own and intimate form of the evil seems to be the right answer for me.

However, it’s the music what forces many to stay and torment themselves with fear and uncertainty what kind of beast hides in the shadows of human mind. It’s the droning, slow and patient mumble underneath the entire process of creating fear in the recipient’s mind what guarantees half of the success. Low frequencies combined with unexpected eruptions of dissonances excite the right physical reaction. Gregorian Chores or Gothic synthesizers are just the tools; the bottom line dwells in the long building of a surprise which comes unexpectedly abrupt.

Bobby Krlic, the artist behind The Haxan Cloak uses some of these techniques to his own success, but adds a lot more on these nightmarish foundations. Like Ben Frost he counts on dark deep drones and stark twists in the mood while his wide palette of contemporary classical elements combined with more decadent characteristics of the theatrical work most notably evolved by Belgian one-man band Kreng. However, these comparisons say just the technical part of the story. Oppression of a lunatic cello and resolute percussion work would not reach the horror state of art without Krlic’s deep understanding of how to gradate, then set back and afterwards hit the listener with a full force. This trick is just a one of few other that make his eponymous debut so absorbing.

This temptingly scary affair is being gradually built through more than thirty minutes of classical instruments in symbiotic relationship with heavy electronic manipulations which triumphantly peak in the ominous finale of The Growing. It starts abruptly in the middle of the most terrifying thunder with an uneasy transition into more structured adventure where the underlying processed beats remind of Amon Tobin’s cinematic El Wraith. Krlic is in no hurry to introduce the resolution to the mystery called The Haxan Cloak. Like the opening maelstrom, subsequent vibrating drone and a silence-before-storm-transition, everything takes its time to the greatest effect of nerve-wrenching agony. The Growing does not bring any release, it’s a collapse into depths of inhuman oppression. Jaw-dropping vision of hell.