Don’t look now — but Dominick Fernow is once again jumping into a phone booth and inconspicuously disrobing from his innocent journalist attire. The purveyor of Hospital Productions has given a fair amount of attention to his Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement persona over the past couple of years (releasing albums in both 2016 and 2017), and now he’s literally just released (as in: TODAY, Thursday, March 22) a brand new cassette — entitled Red Ants Genesis — which continues the RSE tradition of going at a slow pace and offering something slightly more sinister than your average Brian Eno ambient endeavor.
Supposedly the project overall has “nature and superstition” as its ethos, so perhaps it’s no surprise that much of last year’s Ambient Black Magic sounded ritualistic and like it was appealing to spirits, good and bad, who were previously just lounging around in their metaphysical La-Z-Boys.
Interestingly, according to Fernow, Red Ants Genesis also “shows the transformation of the project into a live entity.” All the music for the tape was recorded live “without audience” in an unspecified Paris venue, so maybe a whirlwind international tour yet looms on the label boss’s crowded horizon??? If nothing else, though, one might consider it a raw musical example of what he considers the pureest CORE of what Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement is all about: the theme of rain recurs throughout, and things still don’t seem entirely of this Earth. We should all be so ambivalent about what’s secretly going on out there, shouldn’t we?
Buy the new cassette here, and revisit the dank environs of Fernow’s ravaged rainforest aesthetic down below. Welcome (back) to the Jungle, baby.
Red Ants Genesis tracklisting:
01. Paris Live Take (Mics Mix)
02. Shield Ferns: Brown Pine Magic
03. Papua Land (Live Edit)
04. This Spirits (Version)