In Praise of Blood Fountains – Floods:

Drowning voices of exotic spirits siren forth from within the canvas as we drift closer toward the heart of artist Stephen Kasner’s latest musical release, Blood Fountains, ‘FLOODS’.  The experience is a slow, soothing soundscape of droning, lush dreamscapes with forbidden incantations surrounding your every thought.  Angelic delirium whispering a mere glimpse at Kasner’s dark romantic madness, deliverable despair and the crimson aroma of the forbidden minimalist.

— Dwid Hellion of Integrity (As printed in Vice Magazine)

Floods marks the final chapter of the URSK series, a sound/art collaboration marrying the dark aural palette of nine Utech Records releases with the supernal imagery of visionary painter Stephen Kasner. Kasner’s imagery has reacted to and synthesized each of the soundscapes it inhabited in the course of this collaboration — paired with Aluk Todolo’s opus Finsternis, it became a totem on charred ritual ground, a bleached human torso protruding through darkness as a memory of corporeal death; Kasner’s imagery helped Runhild Gammelsæter conjure the smallest of microorganisms from primordial space in her solo record Amplicon; it successfully evoked a blackened visage for the maniacal, buzzing guitar drones of Skullflower’s outstanding Desire for a Holy War; and it re-cast RST’s electric vibrations in a universe of contrasting contingencies. It is fitting that Kasner’s own Blood Fountains would bring fruition to the URSK project, which by now has become a vital part of the new dark-psych musical landscape as well as one of the best examples of creative symbiosis that I can remember.

Floods is a truly magnificent record, offering such a complete representation of Kasner’s cosmic vision that it could serve as a travel-guide through URSK’s entire spectral universe. Here, Kasner’s painting depicts a faintly glowing halo against an infinity of unfathomable blackness. The halo beckons as far-away galaxies might, luring us out from earthly existence and into the initial dread, eventual terror and ultimate apotheosis of the unknown. This image, more than any other image in the series, captures the sublime essence found at the limits of human consciousness, the transcendence we may attempt to experience through ritual, meditation, magickal or religious practice, rigorous self-discipline, etc. In a universe like URSK’s, the violence, darkness and apparent chaos of any challenging artwork is entirely consistent with our responsibility as sentient beings; here, such a work represents an attempt to utter the ineffable, to grasp at the unreachable, and to extend experience beyond that which is already known to man.

Sonic fibers are slowly unfurled into an ever-shifting canvas of textured drones. You may discern the sources of some of these sounds — a guitar quietly buzzes, a Rhodes churns, Bloody Panda’s Yoshiko Ohara utters a ritual incantation from a far-away place — but together the voices strike a profoundly unified and otherworldly tone. The pacing of these compositions is methodical and perfect, both organic and esoteric, like a slow accumulation of magickal power. There is a definite structure to every track, but it’s as if their formative elements have been blown apart by a breeze, gently torn into a silken skein that may momentarily vanish into ether, forever lost to our worldly souls.

— Jenks Miller of Horseback

First heard on the Nymphaea disc of Darsombra remixes that came out on Public Guilt last year, Blood Fountains is the new musical venture from artist Stephen Kasner, whose creepy, disturbing portraits and oceans of deep blacks and greys have graced album covers for bands as diverse as Integrity and Khlyst, Lotus Eaters and Himsa, and anyone who’s been paying attention to underground metal and hardcore for the past fifteen years will be familiar with at least one of his images. I’ve been a huge fan of Kasner’s work since the latter half of the 90’s and have followed his output ever since, finally getting to the point this year of actually commissioning artwork from him for the new Subarachnoid Space album, Eight Bells. So I was intrigued when I heard that he had this new project in the works. I liked the Blood Fountains remix for Darsombra, which pointed towards a deep, murky dark ambience, but that was only a vague stirring of what his solo material would fully evolve into, a kind of gorgeous black-kosmiche psychedelia that takes form on his first full length, Floods. Released by Utech, who has also been partnering with Kasner lately for the majority of their cd package designs, Floods is a collaborative effort that sees Kasner creating sprawling, shadow-covered ambient soundscapes of Lustmordian darkness and spectral drones with help from a number of musicians, including Matt Woods (Beyond The Sixth Seal) on guitar, experimental jazz flutist Cheryl Pyle, guitarist David Beaver, and vocalist Yoshiko Ohara from Bloody Panda. According to Kasner, the music of Blood Fountains is meant to be a sonic extension of the strange otherworldly imagery found in his artwork, but this is nowhere as grim and horrific as I thought it was going to be. Floods is actually quite beautiful, as each of the six long tracks drift through fields of dark drift and jazzy ambience that sometimes feels like the extended tones of a dusty, moldy Rhodes piano being stretched across time, while thick black smears of buzzing psych guitar and crumbling distorted amp-drones snake their way through these mysterious soundscapes. Bloody Panda fans will especially love this album, as Yoshiko Ohara’s vocals are all over it, though her performance here is restrained compared to the violent shrieks and ecstatic howls she uses in BP…instead, Yoshiko’s voice floats disembodied across Kasner’s midnight-drenched poppy fields, cooing whispers and uttering deep gutteral Tuvan-esque throat singing on thick clouds of druggy reverb that always seems to be on the verge of being swept away on a tide of nocturnal blackness. Imagine Bloody Panda at their softest, and filtered through the dark freeform psychedelia of Keiji Haino and ghoulish graveyard dream-bliss of Aghast, or a more ominous and weighty Onna-Kodomo mixed with Tangerine Dream or Klaus Schulze and drenched in shimmering jazzy dark ambience. I knew this was going to be good, but Floods still ended up taking me by surprise with how beautiful it is, especially the blissed out ten minute “White Wax Blood”. That’s my favorite song on here, with cascading crystalline guitar melodies and delicate wisps of digital glitchery drifting into a gleaming cosmic fug of flutes and wispy female voices and deep bass pulses and peals of black acid guitar, forming into something akin to a Cocteau Twins song stripped down to an ethereal cloud of dark pop bliss and pitched into the abyss. Dark and beautifully creepy, this one is definitely recommended. Comes in that signature style of Utech sleeve, with Kasner handling the artwork, of course.

— Adam Wright-Carmean / Crucial Blast Records