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LP
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LSSN 086LP
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$25.00
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 5/17/2024
"Circular patterns morphing through time, loop and ritual form the fabric of Proserpine, the latest work by Leeds-based musician, Teresa Winter. Recorded from a summer to a winter through 2021 and 2022, Proserpine is Winter's most cohesive, focused music to date: confidently reveling in space, fixating on isolated sounds and giving way to satisfying, swirling waves of vocal and electronic buzz. Proserpine is Teresa Winter's debut recording for Glasgow-based label, Night School. On Proserpine, musical patterns revolve and intersect with each other, transmogrifying the music's narrative. Over-arching themes emerge: continual change, elusiveness. Insubstantiality emerges into concrete reality in the form of recognizable field recordings: the purring of a pet cat, the hum of a live cable. The loops and patterns are sometimes just out of sight, the click and whirl on 'Child Of Nature' is the backdrop to hymnal vocalizations by Winter, who intones spell-like text in conversation with herself. While Proserpine references the myths and cults of the classical, pre-Christian era, Winter's restless preoccupation with the mechanics of religion informs the album in other ways. Ritual is present throughout, either in the mantra-like vocalizations or even the private rituals listeners are invited to witness: on 'Fireworks' the listener eave drops into the protagonist's private bonfire. On the stunning 'Lamento,' layers of choral vocal interlock in celestial patterns that recall catholic mass: it's an overt effect that simulates the ecstasy of religious fervor and also reminds the listener of the use of vocal that runs through Proserpine. Winter's vocals often echo with the euphoria of obliteration, of disintegrating in an awful bliss. It's an effect achieved with finality by the closer 'New Water' as the piece begins with voice before burning up in the atmosphere of elegiac violins and enveloping undertows of whirring synth patterns and ghostly pads. Proserpine is forever turning, changing, always elusive and quietly revelatory."
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LP
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RAVE 025LP
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What The Night Is For is Teresa Winter's engrossing second album for The Death of Rave. Unfolding around recollections of a bad dream about being murdered by her boyfriend and hidden under a hotel bed, Teresa's new side expands upon the morbid, psycho-sexual and occult fascinations of her cultishly acclaimed Untitled Death (RAVE 020LP, 2017) in a singular and unpredictable style of composition where avant-classical, acid-house and ambient dream-pop collapse in a confounding and traumatic account of her hauntological reality. Recorded in Northern England amid the socio-political tumult of 2018, What The Night Is For is concerned with notions of liberation and repression, both sexual, psychic and political, which feel ever more impending in the nocturnal, criminal state of mind conjured by capitalism's end times. Teresa's music reflects this sensation of heightened alertness and near-psychedelic intensity with an abstract dramatic narrative implicitly referencing on the one hand, the convention-challenging feminism of Jean Rollin's cinema fantastique and its soundtracks, and the charged atmospheres of Coil, as well as the sexually liberated writings of Amanda Carter and the Marquis De Sade. In its unfairly weighted formation, the album vertiginously drops into freefall with seven minutes of nightmarishly captivating dissonance in "Canticles of Ecstasy", landing in nine minutes of disquietingly lush ambient electronics and Teresa intoning "bestial, brutal" on "Heathen's Gate", marking her descent into night proper. The other side is an entirely different affair. From the wigged-out pipes and cinematic intrigue of "Vulgaire", Teresa plays out stark contrasts between the stellar acid-pop detournement of "For Murder", the palpably eerie electro-acoustic aura of "Apostrophising the Cunt", and a gut-wrenching one-two of Proustian fantasy in "Mother of Death", and the piloerect tristesse of "From so High that I Might Die". Like Cosey Fanni Tutti's seminal early artwork, created in the '70s against a backdrop of Yorkshire-based serial killers and the adult industry, Teresa's music can be taken as a form of psychic self-surgery, as a way of parsing her own ideas from the inherent violence of hetero-normativity and the lingering, insipid pall of Roman Catholicism and all its connotations of sexual repression. And like Cosey, Teresa obliquely acknowledges the female perspective defined in the Tarot card, "Eight of Swords" - she's damned if she does, but also damned if she doesn't. So f*ck it, here it is. Deal with it. Mastered and cut by Matt Colton. Edition of 300.
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LP
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RAVE 020LP
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Teresa Winter's LP debut Untitled Death is a hallucinogenic wormhole of sensuously ambiguous pop and electronic experiments primed for the after-after party and altered states of reception. Realized through a mesh of strategies from live, lo-fi tape recordings of synths, samplers, and vocals to nascent experiments with algorithmic software, Untitled Death is both a divine revelation of new aspects to Teresa's sound and an expansion of The Death of Rave's as-yet-unidentified aesthetic. Teresa's zoomed photos of magic mushrooms spattered in popping fluorescent oils which adorn the cover of Untitled Death hint at a more personalized insight and psycho-activity, a proper, lush trippiness. Just like the putative psilocybic experience, Untitled Death naturally comes on in waves of synaestically-heightened sensuality, from strangely libidinous stirrings to utter, eat-your-heart-out euphoria with a spectrum of hard-to-explain and unexpected sensations between. It's hard to recall a more seductive album opener than "Oh", which blossoms from plaintive drum machine and chiming pads to a half- or mis-heard beckon "I really like it/ when you let yourself go/ I really want you inside me/ I want to make you my own", before curdling into bittersweet partials and deliquescent hooks as ear-worming as anything from AFX's classic Selected Ambient Works 85-92 (1992). It's devastating in its simplicity and almost blush-worthy in effect, and is soon enough lopped curtly into the soundtrack-like enchantment of "Untitled Death", which could almost be a cue from some '60 Polish or Czech art-house film, serving to neatly set up the prickling, windswept scene of romantic introspection and dereliction in "Pain Of Outside" -- perhaps Teresa's most accomplished and affective pop turn to date; think Grouper awkwardly blissing out at 9am in the corner of a successful sesh/campsite/free party. From that perfectly damaged side closer, the B side opens to a different sort of spine-freezing beauty and sense of abandonment with plangent, dissonant harmonics describing rugged Yorkshire wolds and coast as much as a radiant lightshow on the back of flickering eyelids. RIYL: Grouper, F Ingers, Leyland Kirby, early AFX, Delia Derbyshire. Master and cut by Matt Colton.
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