Bobby Krlic, aka The Haxan Cloak, landed on our radar with a significant blast when his debut album was released in 2011. Precociously fully-formed for a first effort, it found the London-based musician carving out eerie, half-decayed spaces inhabited only by the creaking of ancient cellos and ghostly voices. He’s since signed to Tri Angle for the release of his upcoming second album and has been playing some cracking live shows as of late that have revealed his music to have been taking on an increasingly weighty, electronics-led form.
Now the first new track from Krlic’s new album, titled Excavation, has found its way onto the net. You can listen to ‘The Mirror Reflecting Part 2’ below. As with his recent live performances, it feels primarily synthetic, but that doesn’t take away from the sense that it’s grounded in a tangible physical location: it plays like one of Raster-Noton’s in-house producers has managed to get themselves lost on the Yorkshire moors and gradually gone feral.
Tri Angle have revealed that Excavation will see release on April 15th, and in keeping with ‘The Mirror Reflecting Part 2’, it promises to be more of an electronic-led affair than his previous work.
It’s also intended as a conceptual continuation from his debut, they explain in the text accompanying the album’s release: "If The Haxan Cloak was conceived as the soundtrack to a character’s journey towards death, Excavation is its sequel representing the journey after death. Excavation is about disconnecting entirely from this and entering upon a more astral plane, explaining some of the albums more ethereal, ambient moments that are in constant tension with jagged and aggressive elements. This journey isn’t supposed to represent an archetypal Heaven or Hell scenario, but something more abstract and unknowable; the abstraction of the situation being one of its most unsettling aspects."
The full tracklist for Excavation runs as follows, and his album artwork is below. Note the well-chosen final track, perhaps wise given this increasingly electronics-driven direction: listeners expecting something more obvious than his previous work will, one imagines, be disappointed at having to wait right until the end for the drop.
‘Consumed’
‘Excavation (Part 1)’
‘Excavation (Part 2)’
‘Mara’
‘Miste’
‘The Mirror Reflecting (Part 1)’
‘The Mirror Reflecting (Part 2)’
‘Dieu’
‘The Drop’
