Sentient Ruin is honored to present A Wound Of Body, the first part of Common Eider, King Eider’s "Wound" duology, two separate releases linked sonically, visually and spiritually, together forming the group’s most focused and fully realized work to date. The two releases together offer up a sprawling, audial exploration of wounds at once physical and spiritual, social and societal, natural and environmental.
Sonically, A Wound Of Body is a beautifully stark soundscape, dolorously dense, suffocatingly oppressive and utterly claustrophobic. An immersive black hole of bleak, cavernous dronemusic and disquieting, desolate ambience, each track a hushed and harrowing ritual; the surface minimalism underpinned by a churning morass of sound, a layered liturgy of blackened invocations and nebulous strings hovering in the shadows.
Haunting melodies and disembodied voices surface throughout, A Wound Of Body’s impenetrable darkness only barely tempered by hopeful glimmers of light and subtle shades of washed out color. Shards of melody drift and dissipate, wreathed in smoldering blurs of disembodied guitar and transformed into ghostly streaks of ashen grey. Dolorous violas unfurl aching threnodies that drift on languid seas of smeared gongs and darkly devotional vocal incantations, all hymns to the spirits that animate us, a reminder of the transience of our physical form and the impermanence of our existence. But at the same time a reminder that the fleeting nature of our place in the universe does not lessen our impact on the world around us.
COMMON EIDER, KING EIDER
A Wound Of Body
1. Remembrance - A Threnody
2. Sinew Stretched Over Crumbling Bones
3. We Sing Over These Bones So That They May Rise Up and Run Away Into the Night
4. Hélène
5. River of Blood
States the band:
"The wounds of the body, and of the spirit, are in part the result of unfettered capitalism and a patriarchy run rampant. We remain, even in a comparatively enlightened era, cogs in the capitalist machine, and beholden to a leadership and a code of ethics that seemingly remains indifferent to our humanity. We have lost our connection to our bodies, to the sacred, to our sexuality, to the primacy of what makes us human. Which in turn has seemingly severed our connections to nature and wilderness, our wounds perpetuating our relationships with the world around us via land development and resource exploitation, with both our bodies and the world we live in viewed by many simply as commodities to own, sell, exploit and destroy."
A Wound Of Body is presented on cassette in a minimal black J-card, on textured paper, and printed in silver metallic ink. The tape J-card is adorned with the CEKE sigil, while the LP comes in a duo-tone silver/black printed jacket with black flood inside and printed inner sleeve, and both the LP and tape come with images of a micro-landscape rendered in bone, a stark image of the alien, otherworldly topography that lurks beneath the skin, emblematic of the inevitable decay and disintegration of our physical forms: the ruin we become, and the ruin we leave behind.
A Wound Of Body is slated to be released on tape and vinyl for the US through Sentient Ruin and on CD and vinyl for the EU by Cyclic Law. Pre-orders are now available on our Bandcamp and store, while a track has been made available in advance exclusively through CVLT Nation.
