RAINFOREST SPIRITUAL ENSLAVEMENT レコード& CD

Review: The mighty Hospital Records is reissuing Green Graves, a classic album from Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement from back in 2016. It's an album that, as the title suggests, soundtracks a trip through the jungle with steamy pads and humid atmospheres, distant animal sounds and deep tribal rhythms. It's full of ambient and experimental mystery and intrigue, with suspenseful pads over barely-there skeletal drums that snake through the undergrowth on cuts like 'Red Protection Against Black Magic'. 'Nocturnal Anatomy' is darker and more dubby, hitting at the arrival of humans and their machines who come to destroy the forest.

Review: Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement is the duo of multi-media artist Dominick Fernow (who you will also known as the man behind the Prurient alias) and his musical sparring partner Phillipe Hallais a.k.a. Low Jack. This new EP is a sister release to their superb ambient offering Flying Fish Ambience. Opener 'Metallic Rain' exists in the cosmos thanks to the waning pads and sci-fi details, but with a heavy, scuffed up kick drum powering it along below. 'Jellyfish Reproduce Black Magic' is a delightful fusion of slow motion drums and gorgeously cinematic ambient designs while 'Blue Ocean Floor' closes with 13 epic minutes of underwater dub, synth modulations and sonic experimentation.

Review: Revered noise merchant Dominick Fernow returns under the Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement moniker, following up last year's Ambient Black Magic release - which featured Silent Servant and a dub techno remix by Substance aka DJ Pete. On Red Ants Genesis, Fernow is said to have utilised high volume microphone recordings of synthetic field ecologies, with further sound on sound processing applied by Philippe Hallais aka Low Jack - creating this series of meditative and trance inducing soundscapes. The remix on this release comes from Equiknoxx Music: the Jamaican music collective of Gavsborg and Time Cow, who hand in an introverted and very personal dub of the title track.

Review: Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement has long been one of the more intriguing aliases of prolific producer Dominic Fenrow. Unlike his better-known and highly politicized Vatican Shadow project, RSE has no dancefloor ambitions. Instead, it sees him take a deep dive into the world of ambient music, delivering tracks that fuse droning textures and the hazy pulse of dub techno with humid field recordings and picturesque electronics. Ambient Black Magic, the sixth RSE full-length, could well be the strongest yet. While it does include stretched-out moments of late night creepiness - a feature of previous albums - there are some stunningly melodious and meditative moments, too, not least opener "Jungle is a Shapeshifter", a near 35-minute co-production with Silent Servant whose fluid beauty is almost breathtaking.

Review: Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement has long been one of the more intriguing aliases of prolific producer Dominic Fenrow. Unlike his better-known and highly politicized Vatican Shadow project, RSE has no dancefloor ambitions. Instead, it sees him take a deep dive into the world of ambient music, delivering tracks that fuse droning textures and the hazy pulse of dub techno with humid field recordings and picturesque electronics. Ambient Black Magic, the sixth RSE full-length, could well be the strongest yet. While it does include stretched-out moments of late night creepiness - a feature of previous albums - there are some stunningly melodious and meditative moments, too, not least opener "Jungle is a Shapeshifter", a near 35-minute co-production with Silent Servant whose fluid beauty is almost breathtaking.

Review: Fans of Dominick "Vatican Shadow" Fenrow's suitably humid and out-there Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement project have been spoiled of late. The Hospital Productions founder has been reissuing a number of early explorations under the alias, all of which have previously been unavailable on vinyl. The latest is 2012's Jungle Black Magic & Highlands Green Sorcery album, a four-track ambient adventure built around atmospheric field recordings, gentle tribal drum rhythms, droning electronic textures and the sticky sound of tropical birdsong. It is, of course, hugely atmospheric, with Fenrow steering clear of melodic structure in favour of stretched-out audio collages and dusty, mind-altering soundscapes.

Review: Dominic Fernow's Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement project might not be the most productive of the man's monikers these days, but it is certainly not forgotten or overlooked by any team member of the Juno HQ. In fact, this reissue of 2011's Green Amulet Crafts Supernatural Qualities, out once again through Hospital Productions, has been missing from our shelves for quite some time, and we have to say that its reappearance is very much welcomed. Here goes - "A Slave Boy That Died An Awful Death For Not Keeping His Owner's Horses, He Helps People Who Are Looking For Lost Things" is a classic slice of RSE nastiness, where distant remnants of techno drums are overshadowed by vast plaines of rich power electronics and ghostly noise infusions of the deadliest variety; while this isn't exactly your classic, stand-up techno, it is very much a journey in its own right. On the flip we have another poem called "An Old Hag That Wears Shoes & Stomps Over People's Stomachs At Night Making Them Breathless", which is essentially a continuation of the prior track's descent into the fiery depths of the inferno, or rather, a casual studio session in Fernow's ever tenebrous mind. A hot tip, indeed!

Review: In case you were out of the loop, or living under a large slab of stone for the last 5 years, Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement is Dominick Fernow's more grey-scaled moniker, which is saying a lot for an artist who deals in doom and gloom through projects like Vatican Shadow and Prurient, among many others. This new 12" bombshell, out through the man's own mythical Hospital Productions, literally drops us head first into the deepest, darkest corners of the jungle, but this ain't no Pixar film; the mood is sombre and the monsters are out of their caves. This pair of twelve-minute experiments carefully gain momentum amid the sounds of the animal kingdom, growing and shifting into what sounds suspiciously like a ritualistic form of ancient techno. Could this be what they Mayans listened to? Is it an ode to the Gods? Fernow's the only one with the answer...

Review: It's been three long years since Dominick Fernow last donned the Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement alias. Here he resurrects the project for another trip into mind-altering ambient territory. In typical Fernow fashion, the album's nine tracks flit between foreboding creepiness, macabre darkness, droning mysticism, paranoid percussive hypnotism, and moments of intense, sun-bright beauty. It's a mixture that's fully in keeping with Fernow's previous work, although Green Graves does feature longer, more immersive tracks than many of his other projects. It's perhaps this aspect, as much as the undoubted quality of the music, which makes it an essential purchase.

Review: Previously released on cassette and digitally, Hospital Productions finally see fit to release Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement's excellent The Plant With Many Faces. If it weren't for its comparatively reassuring strand of percussion towering above the swell of growls, "Abaxial Masks With Sockets Closed To Hide The Face When The Destroyer Comes Alive" would be the definition of total doom, but its poignant structure gives the track a point of reference and instead of staring into an abyss of noise, guiding us gently by its ominous but irresistibly enticing bassline. "Out Of The Mess Came The Green Devil", on the other hand, loops a blockade of deranged field recordings into a quasi-groove; the same can be said for "Complex Rituals To Control Anthurium", a similarly marvellous escapade into the evolution of organic sounds. Finally, "Poisonous Spirit Species" morphs from calm to volatile, where sparse trickles of crackle and bang manoeuvre without care through the long and cavernous tunnel of white noise.

Review: Another essential cassette release from Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement finds itself the subject of a well deserved vinyl issue courtesy of Dominick Fernow's Hospital Productions. There are most definitely some dub elements running adrift in this selection of dread filled tracks from the artist, such as on the opener "Upside Down Left Eye" which is a real excursion into the lower frequencies of the sound spectrum. "Undrinkable Water" is as bleak a musical journey as you can get from Hospital, whilst "In Honduras Death Caused By Being Chased By Spirits" truly brings out the name of the artist into the limelight, where chirpy but sinister bird noises drop in and out of a chilling sphere of reverb. "The Spirit Wore The Shoes Of The Boy" is a comparatively more beat-led dub excursion, and it's one of the highlights, though all of this compelling and challenging journey into the tenebrous mind of Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement comes highly recommended.

Review: First surfacing via a glut of tape releases on the Hospital Productions label, the superbly monikered and anonymous Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement was accompanied by the sort of supposed back story that read like an established producer with the capacity for spinning luridly imaginative yarns. With their identity still under wraps, Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement resurfaces on the fledgling Bed Of Nails label run by Hospital boss Dominick Fernow. Much like the Blackest Ever Black issue earlier this year, Water Rose Above The Head pairs together two long form productions of macabre techno built from the DNA of field recordings and found sounds. It also wins the prize for track titles of the week with two absolute pearlers of GCSE level creative writing. Please note that both tracks play at 33rpm despite the centre-labels indicating otherwise!