Crowhurst’s Black Funeral Atmospheres was quietly self-released in 2016 and fell into the abyss, until Icelandic music and art collective FALK heard it and asked to reissue it. Now it is here for your streaming and cassette-based pleasure.
Crowhurst, aka Los Angeles-based Jay Gambit, has worked with Oxbow and Gnaw Their Tongues, among others, making metal, punk and freeee jazz. Black Funeral Atmospheres is something else again, recorded live in a single take and created a piece of howling, shimmering drone and cosmic heaviness.
French documentary filmmaker Thomas Jenkoe used Youtube footage from the UK riots of 2011, sparked by the police shooting and death of Mark Duggan, to make the video. “Before anyone removed these videos, I saved them onto a hard drive,” he says. “The first time I listened to Black Funeral Atmospheres, I thought a lot about those images. It’s the same mood, in a way. I decided to make a found footage film using all the resources of the cinema – cropping in scope, black-and-white calibration, colour filters – to make these images resonate and to reaffirm a powerful principle: the refusal to serve.”
You can listen to the whole of Black Funeral Atmospheres and buy the cassette here.
