Horrorscores: Xunholm – Asleep In The Shattered Mirror (Skrot Up)

There she is, the woman of yr dreams, all silken coal hair and cherry sucking lips. You almost can’t believe she wasn’t standing there a moment ago. The incantation worked! The mirror lies broken, tesseracted, on the floor of the dingy rented room.

This is one possible scenario for the horror synth of Xunholm‘s Asleep In The Shattered Mirror, released as a limited edition cassette from the excellent Belgian label Skrot Up.

Xunholm is the solo synth project of Jason Sublette, formerly of the bands Ga’an and E.T. Habit, residing in rural Illinois, on the banks of the mighty Mississippi. Sublette describes Xunholm as “for fans of heavy stargazing and aural alchemy,” so that alone tells you it belongs here in the forest.

As i wrote about another sci-fi cassette tape recently, Brokenkites’ Days Of Distant Stars, soundtracks for movies that don’t exist is not entirely revolutionary, it does not make it any less mandatory, or as special.

As our fellow experimental scribes from the city of roses, Experimental Portland, mused recently about an album from a band called Okha:

The sounds of Okha and No Parades couldn’t be more different, but what they share to my ears is an immersive quality. They wrap you up completely in these blankets of sound until you can’t see or hear anything but what they are pumping out of their pedals and noisemakers. And I love that about them. While the rest of the music world tries passive-aggressively to get my attention, here are artists that lay it all out and, with No Parades, try to intoxicate me, and with Okha, dare me to stare into the abyss without blinking.

That immersive quality is what these types of music have in common; a hook to hang yr thoughts on, a way to remember, to relate, to internalize.

Cinematic music -whether directly made for film, or just evocative of it – inherently calls images and scenes to mind, adding another layer to the listening experience. And while yr favorite film music can transport you back to yr favorite film, imaginary soundtracks are different, as there’s no pre-existing imagery to cling to, and the mind is forced to fill in the blanks.

Because of this, this style of music remains one of my favorites, no matter how overdone it may be. It allows you to transform yr life into a genre piece of yr choosing. Reality selection, paradigm tuning; yr life can be what you make of it.

As such, imaginary soundtracks also make for killer soundtracks for yr own creative work. Xunholm’s

Asleep In The Shattered Mirror would be a perfect score for some rustbelt cyberpunk dystopia, or a futuristic zombie apocalypse. It’s both sterling shining chrome and crumbling decadence, all at the same time, which again, fits right in in these pages.

Although some people are growing tire of the horror synth, i include Asleep In The Shattered Mirror in our horrorscores series for a number of reasons:

1. We are attempting to trace the thread of the horror genre, in all its permutations, peeling back the surface layer, and looking for the gristly soul. This is qabalistic listening, deconstructing art down to its chromosomes, eliminating disparity, and embracing differences simultaneously.

2. Asleep In The Shattered Mirror was released on cassette from Skrot Up. While we’ve been fans and admirers of the cassette underground for a long, long time, abject poverty has forced us to admire from a distance, unable to fully experience the ferric weirdness and wonder of strange, obscure, and abstract cassette tapes. The warm wow-and-flutter serves these synthscapes perfectly, weird and warped and strange and hypnotic. Also, the cassette format lends itself to repeat listenings. You cannot imagine how many times i’ve flipped this short tape this weekend, sinking deeper and deeper into its fog machine.