Ark Drane
(Chocolate Monk - choc.587) CDR $8.00
“Ark Drane’s debut is a collaboration between Karen Constance and Kristafer Abplanalp. ‘Hangnail Persistence’ dips the listener to a loping gate that fords up through the swales and circles round the midden, like if Brothers Quay whittled dub music out of wooden blocks forging a beat of wet earth stirred in memory dimly carried to bed at night on rainy days. ‘Laugh like Midwestern Wind Chimes’ is the resonating afterimage of finding yourself in an unfamiliar neighborhood liquor store asking for a six-pack of Peroni, only to be told that Peroni used to live down the block but has been locked up for ten years. ‘Monks on a Train’ produces the aural translation of the following Cormac McCarthy sentence: ‘Wasps pass through the laddered light of barn slats in a succession of strobic moments, between black and black, like fireflies in the serried upper gloom.’ Most of the source material to ‘Bloodline Stitches’ was reportedly recorded in a Kentucky hospital’s Cardiology Wing of an Intensive Care Unit, summer of 2021. From what this listener can discern, black husks of pupae swarm the purloined insurance agents rendering portraits of their noses, caked in enamel, framed in gold, with miniscule chains to fit under their clothes.” —Crozier Lathrop. Edition of 60