“…these tracks are mainly designed to infiltrate a listener’s mind, not their muscles, and once inside, to viscerally create the afore-mentioned feelings brooding, tension, dread, hallucination, and terror.” – No Clean Singing
No Clean Singing presents an exclusive stream of the immersive Coma Filament, the sci-fi horror-inspired fifth full-length from Oakland, California-based cinematic/ambient synthwave act S.C.R.A.M. The album will be released this Wednesday, on the Fall Equinox.
The inspiration behind S.C.R.A.M. (Safety Control Rod Axe Man) has always been to make soundtracks for the movies in creator Pranjal Tiwari’s head. Coma Filament was inspired by a single image – a ghost ship in space. The idea of traveling in the outer reaches of space light years away from where any human has been before and encountering an abandoned spaceship became such an evocative and terrifying image, that it inspired the entire album. Space horror, in a loose sense. But there’s also an underlying sense of brooding and existential terror that comes from being in space, a vibe inspired directly by the Andrei Tarkovsky classic film, Solaris.
Tiwari performed all music on Coma Filament utilizing multiple synths, a sampler, guitar, bass, a mini-saxophone, and an array of effects and pedals. Additionally, Berlin-based American visual and musical artist, author, and the spiritual leader Zeena Schreck provides ambient vocals in the opening track “Forgotten Language.” The album was mixed and mastered by Greg Wilkinson at Earhammer Studios (Autopsy, Ulthar, Leila Abdul-Rauf).
With the album on the verge of its release, Tiwari states, “S.C.R.A.M. is a true labor of love, the solo project through which I get to make soundtracks to the movies in my head. The movies I want to see. So, the simple question that inspired Coma Filament was, ‘What if Andrei Tarkovsky had directed the first Alien movie? What would that movie feel like and sound like?’ That’s the sort of question that puts my imagination on overdrive.
“I love Tarkovsky, especially his film Solaris, which is set in space. I also love the more lurid, violent subgenre of ‘space horror;’ movies like Lifeforce, Event Horizon, and the first two Alien films. Very different movies, but what they all have in common is the underlying atmosphere, the sense of claustrophobic anxiety created by feeling trapped on a spaceship surrounded by the infinite, black void of space. The constant, gnawing tension lurking right outside the hull. That overarching dread feels existential, the ultimate, most intense form of megalophobia imaginable. In Solaris, that brooding terror alone is enough to drive the crew to the point of crisis. In Lifeforce and Alien there’s also fucking vampires and xenomorphs chasing you around the ship. It’s enough to make you feel like the walls are closing in, even though there’s the impossibly vast expanse of the universe right outside… That’s the crazy contradiction at the heart of the space horror genre that makes it so effective, and that’s the atmosphere I wanted to convey through Coma Filament.
“I’m very excited by how the album turned out. Listening back to it made me chew my fingernails, and I kept looking over my shoulder waiting for someone or something to creep up behind me. I’d say that’s a success right there. But you should go listen through the album, take the journey yourself and see what images, what monsters are conjured up for you.”
In their deep critique of the album accompanying their early stream of the record, No Clean Singing writes, “”…it’s a changing experience, and one of many facets. The ingredients include a wide array of sweeping, ‘surround-sound’ electronic radiations that are sometimes wondrous but almost always unsettling, as well as glitchy pulsating tones, deeply worming and warbling frequencies, shrill darting and quivering manifestations, woozy saxophone exhalations, blood-freezing drones, hideous gasps, ominously ringing piano keys, something like the sound of ruined choral voices, and more… Having said that, these tracks are mainly designed to infiltrate a listener’s mind, not their muscles, and once inside, to viscerally create the afore-mentioned feelings brooding, tension, dread, hallucination, and terror.”
Venture into the outer reaches of S.C.R.A.M.’s haunting Coma Filament vision early at No Clean Singing HERE.
Coma Filament will be digitally released on the Fall Equinox, this Wednesday, September 23rd. Find preorders HERE, and watch the ghostly video for “The Hunter” HERE.
Formed in the isolation of the 2020 COVID lockdowns, S.C.R.A.M. is the solo project of Pranjal Tiwari. Known for his work with the long-running cult doom metal band Cardinal Wyrm, Finnish-language hardcore band Ransu’s Revenge, psychotropic techno outfit Warday, and more, Tiwari utilizes this project to create cinematic, experimental, ambient, electronic, and heavily instrumental passages, focusing tension and negative space to create immersive auras. With four albums, an EP, and a split record with Gridfailure, the outfit’s fifth album arrives with Coma Filament.
The album title Coma Filament is named for a galaxy thread that forms part of the Coma Wall, one of the largest known superstructures in the observable universe. Most of the track titles are based on deep space objects like planets, galaxy clusters, and constellations. “The Hunter” is another name for Aries, a constellation that we all know from the Western zodiac. The tracks “Seven Mansions Of The Black Tortoise” and “Flight Of The Vermillion Bird” are both based on Chinese asterisms, the names of constellations from traditional Chinese astronomy. “Haris al-Sama” means “the keeper of heaven” and is an old Arabic name for the red giant star Arcturus. Tiwari felt that naming the album and its tracks after these astronomical objects, and alluding to their historical and mythological significance, helped create an overarching structure and a background of awe and dread, a setting for the space horror story within the music.
“…a chilling, cinematic soundtrack addressing some of humanity’s greatest fears.” – Everything Is Noise
“As you continue to listen, certain parts of the songs make you start slightly. It’s not a jump scare reaction, but something more subtle, more implied, as if you’re being watched by an invisible something from an unknown place. “Coma Filament” has a chilling effect very similar to that of darkwave, dark ambient, and dungeon synth art displayed in the 1990s, multiplied by a factor of ten or higher.” – Asphyxium Zine
“We are talking dark sometimes foreboding sci-fi/horror soundtrack, there are some rather tasty synth sounds, there is that underlying sense of brooding and existential terror that you let creep up on you, it does have a David Lynch touch or two and certainly a John Carpenter feel and you kind of know that when the people from his other bands go to find out where Pranjal Tiwari has got to it will be too late and this collection of pieces of music (with titles like Seven Mansions of the Black Tortoise or Derelict Spacecraft) will have consumed him completely…” – The Organ
https://scramofficial.bandcamp.com
https://www.instagram.com/scramofficial
The post S.C.R.A.M.: No Clean Singing Premieres Sci-Fi Horror-Inspired Coma Filament Album From Oakland Cinematic Synthwave Project; Record Sees Release On The Fall Equinox first appeared on Earsplit Compound.