NEW ALBUM RELEASE: Bornwithhair: 'When the Witches Fall' is out today on Trepanation Recordings
Bornwithhair release new album of blackened death rock
NEW ALBUM RELEASE: 'When the Witches Fall' is out today on Trepanation Recordings.
Bornwithhair's new album is now available via Bandcamp and all of the major streaming services. Pick it up on limited edition cassette or digital.
All songs were written, performed, and recorded by the multi-instrumentalist duo of Jean Farraige and Weirding Batweilder. The album was recorded and mixed throughout the summer of 2021 and features seven songs combining avant-garde black metal, noise and gothic rock, and dark psychedelia into a fresh form of blackened death rock. Heavily influenced by experimental and underground film, the duo refer to their sound as Arthouse Metal.
The cassette release artwork was designed by the band and features a painting in the public domain composed by the 19th century artist William Holbrook Beard. The band has been issuing coded messages, ciphers, and puzzles publicly for some time and the cassette insert also features a coded message as a dedication. Regarding the release itself, fifty percent of sales of the cassette version goes to Trepanation Recordings (support independent record lables!) and the other fifty percent goes to UNICEF. Please consider donating directly to UNICEF as well.
The album itself tells tales of reality both slipping away and coming into focus. As the band explained in Astral Noize: “This album started as a sort of short story written by JF. The story begins just after a bomb has gone off. And the bomber is taking inventory of all of their body parts strewn across the site of the explosion. We used that idea of taking inventory as a means of organizing the album. It’s an album featuring a host of cult members, serial killers and paranoid and unhinged persons, but they are all taking inventory of what they have done. There is an interview with a killer and his victims. There is a recounting of brainwashing strategies. There is the confession of a murderer which itself devolves into a sort of disturbing chronicling of the stalking of a victim. In the end, it’s an album about how we remember things and how we attempt to deal with what constitutes reality once our understanding of reality has broken. And we spent a long time trying to make the music and the sound of the recording itself reflect that brokenness.”
REVIEWS
"This duo of multi-instrumentalists Weirding Batweilder and Jean Farraige variously characterize their music as Blackened Death Rock or Arthouse Metal. I’ve slept on them way too long, but no longer." — No Clean Singing
"Experimental metal duo Bornwithhair have been twisting the genre’s blueprints ever since their debut dropped back in early 2020, but it is their fourth release When The Witches Fall that most resolutely captures their dense and intoxicating avant-garde approach." — Astral Noize
"Very few names are able to execute anything like this on this kind of level with such consistency." — Head-Banger Reviews
"A musical style that takes avant-garde black metal and death rock and mixes them together to create a sound of their own." — A Different Shade of Black Metal
"Do you like weird stuff? I like weird stuff, and so does this multi instrumentalist duo called Bornwithhair. The elements in this avant-garde cocktail comes from all over the places. The core is some kind of blackened death rock, spiced up with slow droning buzz, hypnotizing psychedelic space soundscapes and airy post rock. Both harsh and clean vocals. Everything shrouded in an extremely eerie mystery." — Doomed and Gloomed
ABOUT
Bornwithhair is the duo of multi instrumentalists Jean Farraige and Weirding Batweilder. Working in the context of heavy and dark music, the pair draw on avant-garde compositional techniques, improvisation, and lo-fi home recording methods to explore themes of historical and psychological interest. GoblinGuard b/w Werewolf and Phantom, and the subsequent Abramelinic Delusions b/w The Possessorist, were both released in 2019 and exhibited the band's blending of black metal, industrial noise, and experimental songwriting.
"Bornwithhair have a sound that’s all to their own... Eerie, trippy, complex – all intriguing aspects of a sound that’s better off being heard than simply described. For those seeking something off-kiler and interesting." — Dead Rhetoric
Their debut, Radical Moon (2020) hinted at a conceptual approach that would be more fully realized on their sophomore release, 2020's Smoleńska. Envisioned as a musical exploration of the life a young woman caught in the midst of the Nazi occupation of Warsaw, the album showed the range of the duo's capabilities with passages of blackened death metal and trad metal riffs shifting into spoken word experiments and electro-acoustic freak folk and free improvisation before veering into sheets of noise.
"The musicianship and composition is, without doubt, extremely well orchestrated. The depth and layers contain uncountable treasures, and atmospherically, it is as deep and explosive a plummet into the human psyche as one can hope for." — Everything is Noise
In 2021, Bornwithhair released Someplace to Haunt. Balancing more accessible song forms against a landscape of obfuscated lyrics, the album set the stage for the band's fourth release, When the Witches Fall (2021). Noisy and dense, the album, released on Trepanation Recordings, took as subject matter the interior lives of cult members, serial killers, and subjects of government experiments and laid the foundation for what the group called Arthouse Metal.
"This music makes me want to eat grubs in the forest while covered in mud." — Viking's Choice
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