Aging ~ Land Trance

★★★★

Embassy Nocturnes TOMBED VISIONS. DL/LP

MOJO Rising alumnus Andrew PM Hunt heads down noir mean streets. Swift on the heels of his Dialect album, Under~Between (see MOJO’s albums of 2021), Andrew Hunt is back with fellow Liverpool-based collaborator, Ex-Easter Island Head’s Benjamin D. Duvall. As Land Trance the duo specialise in a charged psychedelic spiritualism, as evidenced on their mesmeric 2020 debut,

First Seance. Recording with David McLean’s Manchesterbased jazz quintet Aging, in the basement of Liverpool’s former Brazilian embassy, the pair have created a type of sepulchral noir score, smokey sax and forlorn trumpet imbued with a looking glass feel of inverted familiarity. Track titles such as Creeping Moonlight and Lights In The Driveway suggest Raymond Chandler by way of Thomas Ligotti, a dead genre reframed in the time slips and mythological spaces of post-Lynchian horror, the music’s nocturnal stillness constantly beset by electro-acoustic patterns of sonic unease. Andrew Male