A welcome, and brilliantly dream-like, mesmeric return by the British experimental electronica artist Elizabeth Bernholz, whose twilight world is extraordinary, innovative and otherworldly. Aside from a couple of EPs, this is her fifth album, with 2018’s Pastoral, and 2021 Deep England with the alternative vocal group NYX, particularly outstanding. This is a perfect release for Halloween time, the title inspired by childhood memories of seeing the outline of a black dog “moving by my bedside – not terrifying but lingering. Looping. Tailing. Restless. Keeping me awake.” With a rabid imagination and always breaking new sonic ground, her music traverses the conscious and subconscious world, the title track seeming to enter layers of reality, of unfolding blackness outside and inside that shadowy spectral animal. “Freedom is buried here,” she sings, mysteriously, on the opening track, I Disappear. Meanwhile Fear Keeps Us Alive seems to reside on multiple selves and time zones. With the nightmarish swirls of Two Worlds (“was I always here?”), the remorseless staccato march of Unstoppable Force, the woozy sythns of This House, and so much more, all the way to the piano of final track A Door Opens in which Bernholz’s singing is truly beautiful, this is strange wriggling, restless garden of mesmeric drones, white noise and ghostly, disembodied vocals, consciousness, sounds – unique, mesmeric, mysterious, pioneering. Sink into it with awe and wonder. Out of this world, and, out on Invada Records.
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