New York/Portland instrumental duo, INSECT ARK have announced details of their upcoming new album, which will be their first for Profound Lore Records. Marrow Hymns will be released internationally on February 23, 2018 on all formats.
Marrow Hymns is INSECT ARK's first release written and recorded as a duo; it is the follow up to 2015's critically acclaimed album, Portal/Well. INSECT ARK’s intensely visual music weaves interludes of fragile beauty with crushing passages of swirling doom, wordlessly painting an ominous landscape.
Schechter describes INSECT ARK as being a voice when words fail to articulate emotions or experiences, a visceral form of communication through sonic submersion. The cathartic nature of the music INSECT ARKcreates is a document of life's many complex facets - perseverance and presence, chaos and meditation, birth and decay, brutality and delicacy, and of hope in the unknown. The first track to be made available from Marrow Hymns is In The Nest. Listen to In The Nest here
Residing on opposite coasts, the two halves of the INSECT ARK whole - comprised of Dana Schechter (bass, lap steel guitar, synthesizers) and Ashley Spungin (drums, synthesisers) - converged to record the album with engineer Ethan Donaldson at Mozart St Studios in Brooklyn, NY, over the course of eighteen months.
Overdubs and further writing/arrangements were done after Spungin’s return to Portland in the isolation of Schechter’s home studio. The sense of distance and vast emptiness remained intact in the songs, built out over many long nights. Marrow Hymns’ song themes of displacement, loss, and isolation are personal journals of that time period, as both members found themselves simultaneously experiencing existential crises. However, the album also tells a story of strength and determination, made from the marrow of these two women, a song for all things that struggle to survive.
Marrow Hymns track list
1. Thelema
2. Arp 9
3. In The Nest
4. Skin Walker
5. Slow Ray
6. Sea Harps
7. Tarnish
8. Windless
9. Daath