The sense of enigmatic foreboding is unsettling and strong in Lula Asplund’s aptly titled “Awaken In The Marsh.” The energy is reminiscent of the vibe of old forgotten places. The slow cycling drones in subtle layers that interweave and complement one another in a background, ambient sound that creeps into your consciousness is undeniably engaging the way the sheer atmosphere of films like Carnival of Souls (1962) or the aesthetics of German Expressionist films. It sticks with you and lingers like a sound you’ve heard your whole life and which has settled into your consciousness that when gone, and when the song ends, you feel like something is missing until your brain re-adjusts. Think something like an earworm from a David Lynch-ian universe. Listen to “Awaken In The Marsh” on Spotify and follow Chicago-based artist Lula Asplund on Instagram.
Images in black and white, a woman laying on the ground looking into the near distance flanked by footage of the tides. Then tides coming in and in reverse out. Simple, ghostly synth melody echoing and then giving way to lightly distorted keyboard tracing a line that that goes up and slightly down as the tides move about and hints of another figure appears as a layer of the image over which the tides become slightly transparent. We see a man sitting in an alcove surrounded by an enclosure with foliage. This is how Raelism’s “Self-Soothe Mechanism” starts before the minimalistic percussion edges into the soundscape. The atmosphere of the song and the footage is reminiscent of what a sequel to the 1962 horror classic Carnival of Souls might look and sound like. Especially when the spooky glimmers of higher pitched synth bursts in with short lines answered by hovering, darkly ethereal drones. And then the color as the figure sings/speaks “I didn’t hit you, I didn’t cut you” in almost deadpan fashion. Then the male figure crawls menacing forward from his greened alcove juxtaposed with an image of him sitting at the top of a staircase and holding his face in his hands. It’s a psychological horror in short form and the title of the song might seem counter intuitive except that when someone repeats what he wants to believe to himself to soothe a guilty conscience over some actual or imagined wrong it definitely serves that purpose. Like a mantra that can also serve to heal through reaching into that personal darkness deeply and bringing forth deep seated feelings that haven’t been allowed expression by the conscious mind. And yet the chilling aspect of the composition especially given the video treatment while unsettling is also calming. The combination is like if Alien Sex Fiend made a chill, ambient track with an A24 director directing the music video except in this case it was Abigail Clarkson. Is that perhaps too on the nose connecting the name of this project with the UFO cult of the same name started by Claude Vorihon in the 1970s? Maybe so, but it’s another dimension to this fascinatingly unusual music. Watch the video for “Self-Soothe Mechanism” on YouTube and follow Raelism on Spotify. Look for The Enemy is Us EP set to release in 2022.
Queen City Sounds and Art 
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