Between Heaven and Hell


26-track album of spoken word, atmospheric and doom-laden recordings; moans & chants, mysticism & magic, poetry, folk & nursery rhymes; bird-mask paganism and dog-face demons, and babies thrown downstairs.

Between Heaven and Hell is a sublime example of natural forces hard at work in the vigorous entertainment of the senses: the first of the soul; the second of the body. And it is therefore with great pleasure that we commit this body to the ground, get paid for our efforts, and in spirit rise effortlessly and phantasmically to the great beyond, a-wailing and a-moaning as we go.

Collaboration incestuous by nature between the artist and somnambulist extraordinaire, The Phantom, did result in the spiritual disembodiment and traumatic birth-pleasures of spoken word and dark ambient imaginisms. It is not insignificant that empathy played its part in the ecstatic regeneration of body-parts in murmur-magic, and in the unholiness of time from which The Phantom (in her symbiotic relationship with the poet) gained much profit. It was while in this deep ditch of whorish pleasure that The Phantom made sounds of a frightful nature, utterances most strange, audible to mortal men and cloistered nuns which the enviable poet was later able to record on a 4-track tape.

We particularly enjoy the exhilaration of spoken word. In order to obtain ecstatic breathlessness we shout with a loud shout into the microphone - the ‘meat of god’ is recorded, and we are well pleased with ourself. So much so that the desire to excite compassion with low moans often proceeds from mournful chants, and we despatch the dead with general applause. We play tapes backwards, fabricated for sinister purposes; and, in the prime of life, we recite nursery rhymes, as if the dread ghost of Constance Kent is upon us. It is an obscure eccentricity, between heaven and hell. The whole of English folkery and whimsy will bring men to discover a thousand strange events; and women, being swooned away at the taking of the pins, will run a course of all diseases of the head. This unrestrained indulgence excites pity amongst the rascal classes. But we shout our thoughts loud and clear, whence they become words of terror for which we gladly encounter torture and death.