The digital compilation In Death's Dream Kingdom contains 25 compositions inspired by
T.S. Eliot's 1925 poem "The Hollow Men." It's easily the most experimental release from Fabric sublabel Houndstooth, which typically focuses on forward-thinking club music. The artists do a fantastic job of interpreting the bleakness and hopelessness of
Eliot's poem through haunting soundscapes that occasionally harness erratic rhythms, but more often convey a looming sense of dread. When tracks do include beats, they usually seem broken, crumbled, and dissolved.
Lanark Artefax's deadly jungle deconstruction "Styx" is an early standout, and
Sophia Loizou's "Irregular Territories" similarly features mutated breakbeats bursting out from cold, vast space.
ASC and
Spatial both imply tense, glitchy drum'n'bass without fully tearing out.
Pye Corner Audio's cinematic "Box in a Box" has more of a consistent beat than most of the album, but it's still quite jittery, and submerged under frightening fog.
Hodge's "Sunlight on a Broken Column" also has a steady but broken beat, surrounded by sour synths and haunted voices.
Roly Porter and
Shapednoise both deliver their signature brands of crunchy, blown-out distortion, with
Shapednoise's "Ghostly Metafiction" being one of the most harrowing pieces on the entire collection. Not everything is quite so ominous, however.
Tomoko Sauvage, who records electro-acoustic music using water, bowls, and condenser microphones, takes a much more optimistic view with her "In Some Brighter Sphere," a slowly shifting drip-scape that is utterly mesmerizing and soothing when listened to using headphones. The poem famously ends "This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper," and the album's final selection is
Ian William Craig's "An End of Rooms," a slow-motion ethereal drone that disintegrates to a close. It may not be an explosive ending, but it's not a tossed-off disappointment, either; it's actually one of the most affecting tracks on the entire release. ~ Paul Simpson