Bleep

Never afraid to explore the darker side of life, Houndstooth’s latest release finds the label commissioning dark music for dark times. The title of In Death’s Dream Kingdom comes from a line in T. S. Eliot’s 1925 poem ‘The Hollow Men’. When Houndstooth were gathering the artists to work on the music of this compilation, the brief they gave them was simple - use that line, or the whole of ‘The Hollow Men’, as inspiration. The breadth of responses gives this LP great range. Across the 25 tracks here we get solemn techno (Pye Corner Audio’s ‘Box In A Box’), incantatory drone (Pan Daijing’s ‘The Island Within’), powerful art-pop (Gazelle Twin’s ‘The Dream Ends’) and so much more. There are even moments of cautious optimism amid the gloom - Ian William Craig’s raggedly beautiful ‘An End Of Rooms’, for instance.