Workaday Strangeness: Gyrating Death Throes From a Void Axiom' is the new LP from Glasgow-based music originator Wormhook. The music therein, we understand, emerged for highly personal therapeutic reasons; nevertheless to describe it as ‘idiosyncratic’ would do a disservice both to Wormhook and to the concept of idiosyncrasy. While the record is certainly a profoundly unique, irreplicable creation, its music is nevertheless based on a visceral, breathing human rhythm which is common to all living bodies. It represents a celebration of the act of creation as a means of processing psychic and spiritual conflict, unconscious thought leading to spontaneous musical discovery.
Through something approaching the musical equivalent of automatic writing, Wormhook gives birth to fluid, home-woven spectral incantations and an untutored, backward-masked concrète hymnody. Brittle-as-glass guitar and grainy, hand-processed electronics underpin cantorial, intuitively modal vocals delivering a kind of raw, revelatory yet anti-prophetic ur-poetry, bridging the centuries between Hildegard von Bingen and Lonnie Holley and fixing the solitary star of Wormhook within the hermetic constellation which these visionaries inhabit.
- Alasdair Roberts 2023
