Audio Satori

Shinjuku Thieves

I have always been a sucker for cool album packaging, and these Shinjuku Thief releases are awesome. Both are limited to 100 copies in this format. I missed out on these when they were first came out,    because I was in a different musical landscape then, but I remembered the cool wooden boxes at the local record emporium.

Discogs,  (dangerous place that it is) came to the rescue and I ordered these from some overseas sellers.

Shinjuku Thief could best be described as dark ambient, or gothic industrial. The music has a very cinematic feel and they progress more like film scores than anything. In the case of the Medea release, this is especially apparent seeing as it was in fact the soundtrack to a theatrical performance of the Euripdes play, Medea in 2003. The Witch Trilogy box is three albums packaged together.

“The trilogy runs from 1993 (The Witch Hammer), to 1995 (The Witch Hunter) and 2002 (The Witch Haven). The first two consist of orchestral samples but by the third he had what he calls ‘a decent orchestra in a box’ and was able to write and recontextualise existing tracks.

You might get the idea simply by the album titles, or not. There’s so much Gothic ambient/devil-worshipping music around, I blame Demdike Stare, for everything, including the current economical crisis. But hold on, the very fact that most of this consists of stitched together orchestral works really makes it stand out. God knows what he sampled, but I don’t recognise any of it, which means little since I know next to nothing about Classical music.
Think Hammer Horror (yes, you would), Vincent Price…Hilary Dwyer…mmmm…sorry, drifted off there. It’s all one long soundtrack to witch-burning, black cat-bothering, dreams & nightmares, misty graveyards, spells, the living dead (no, not Mumford & Sons fans, but yes, if you like), hexes, chants, Dennis Wheatley, taverns populated by locals who don’t like to talk about that house on the hill…and so on. Good. very good.”

I have subsequently ordered essentially the whole     Shinjuku Thief discography via Discogs…

Well worth a listen if you’re into something a bit different.

 

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Neil