Boduf Songs’ seventh album and first on Orindal Records (Gia Margaret, Julie Byrne, Advance Base) marks the Ohio-via-Southampton artist’s most detailed album yet, somehow voyaging into deeper recesses than ever before. Recorded in the depths of a basement, Abyss Versions will see the light of day on October 4, 2019.
Mat Sweet, the solitary figure behind Boduf Songs, has spent the better part of fifteen years cultivating an idiosyncratic strain of quiet menace, augmenting library-hushed vocals and brooding guitars with psychedelic flourishes from processed loops, field recordings, and distant, subliminal atmospheres.
Subtly acknowledging Boduf Songs’ beginnings, Abyss Versions echoes motifs from the first Boduf Songs album (2005’s Boduf Songs on Kranky Records), forming its own secret, circular path, encapsulating the journey from there to here. Sweet’s background in doom metal still seeps into the quiet, pensive world of Boduf Songs via mood and tone, balanced by shades of the fingerpicking mysticism of his first four albums. As always, the music of Boduf Songs is steeped in a palpable sense of darkness and dread, offset by a gorgeous and discreet sonic beauty. There is much prettiness here, albeit within an inescapably unsettling frame.
Hear Gimme Vortex, the first track from Abyss Versions, below:
Boduf Songs: Website / Bandcamp
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