Review Summary: For those who are already fans of Glass Throat music like Ruhr Hunter, this is a premiere ‘deep cut’ choice, and is going to offer the most brutally earthy culmination of anything Glass Throat has put out before. For those who are still edging their w
It opens with a low, reverberating sound – like the foreign, deep bellowing of a gargantuan steel drum from deep within a valley. As the echoing of the single, pounding bass note begins to fade, a sharp, smooth call rises over it. Halo Manash’s collection of instruments is wide and varying. It could be anything: a bone horn, perhaps, singing its highest registers. These are the sounds of the primordial Earth. These are the sounds that came before all sounds, the music that spanned the eons before there were beings to behold it. The scene painted on the opening track is one of an ancient, lonely world, when time moved more slowly, and where the organic sounds of surreal thunder and bizarre, foreign cries filled the air.
Welcome to the Language of Red Goats.
The album sleeve contains some words that could be interpreted as song titles. ‘Through The Gate of Horn – Slithering Spiraling Fluttering – Shrouded Messengers Gather. That, in its entirety, would be the title of the first twenty-two minute track. As soon as I read it, I thought: yes, this is the title. This has to be the title.
Halo Manash’s fifth release, it brings them closer to an organic, shamanic feel than ever before. This is the music that industrial musicians hear in their dreams after stumbling deep into the wilderness and consuming a variety of hallucinogenic herbs. This is not the music of a sober, waking consciousness. There’s nothing toe-tapping or head-bobbing about anything on Language of Red Goats. The rhythms, when they exist at all, are brief, abrupt series of notes, seemingly designed more to resonate within the most primal, elemental aspects of your mind than to inspire any musical adoration. To classify it in any musical genre would be troublesome and perhaps even disrespectful to what the music really is. It’s less ‘natural drone’ or ‘dark ambient’ and more ‘pagan ritual’.
Bells. Chimes. Undetermined, strange, distant noises that blend in with the thick fog of sound. One might suddenly realize that the second track has begun without any pause or hesitation. Really, Language of Red Goats is a single, fifty-minute track, divided into three segments. The latter two are titled: Feast on the Bitter Fluid – Flowing Through the Lips of Her Vulgar Womb – Ingest Inebriate Initiate, and Earthen Wheels Turn – Shifting Chariots of Moon – Drawn by Red Goats.
These words are how Halo Manash capture their music. Phrases like ‘earthen wheels’ and ‘vulgar womb’. It’s a window into how the artists culminate this bizarre symphony of otherworldly sound: by describing it in the most earthly, natural way possible. It seems to go so deep into incredibly alien soundscapes (enough to remind one of 2001: A Space Odyssey) that it transcends it entirely and somehow emerges from the Earth to paint the most primordially natural sound possible; the sounds that would be heard if the entire Earth silenced itself.
I am tempted to say that Halo Manash has achieved something very few musicians have ever done: created a truly spiritual sound. Glass Throat Recordings, known for the likes of Ruhr Hunter, The Elemental Chrysalis, and Beneath the Lake, constantly strive for a shamanic feel. So often they capture the beauty of the woodlands, painting images of deep, intoxicating natural worlds. But never had they come up with something that felt so raw and realistic. Never had they made something that didn’t seem to be replicating nature, but the sounds of nature itself – until Language of Red Goats.
But does that make it an enjoyable listen? Not necessarily. This is the music for sitting down cross-legged in the darkness with. These sounds are designed to indulge your soul in a meditation. And even then, if one does not give it the time and the interest in requests, it could seem boring or repetitious. An ‘acquired taste’ describes it less fittingly than perhaps, ‘not for everyone’. It’s not music to put on casually while you go about your day (though Halo Manash never has been).
But unlike even their previously releases, there’s nothing remotely accessible about it. Your first listen will likely be spent just beholding the oddities of the sounds, your second listen attempting to grasp them all. From there, you’ll either ‘get it’ or be fed up, and it will very likely depend – however oddly – on how willing the listener is to accept this music as the literal incarnation of the spiritual dream-world that Halo Manash creates, or dismissed as unexciting, ambient drone.
For those who are already fans of Glass Throat music like Ruhr Hunter, this is a premiere ‘deep cut’ choice, and is going to offer the most brutally earthy culmination of anything Glass Throat has put out before. For those who are still edging their way in to the slow, ethereal, druidic tastes, it would best be saved for later. Way later. 3/5.
