Dana Schechter has a long history with music that’s both lulling and crushing. In the early ’90s, she co-founded the noise-rock band Gift Horse with Jef Whitehead (later of Wrest and Leviathan infamy). Following that, she played bass in Michael Gira’s para-Swans ensemble, Angels of Light. She also formed her own dark folk-rock outfit, Bee and Flower, which has released music on Neurosis’ label Neurot, and she’s served as a touring bassist of American Music Club. Her upcoming guest appearances include slide guitar on “An Index of Air” from Infinite Dissolution, the imminent full-length by the experimental metal/noise band Locrian. These projects are distinct, but together they help echolocate the lush, prickly drone of Schechter’s latest ongoing concern, Insect Ark.
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Portal/Well is Insect Ark’s debut album, after a pair of 7”s and a stellar 2013 EP, Long Arms. But where Long Arms seemed constricted by its three-song runtime, Portal/Well sprawls. Performed entirely by Schechter, the album is built primarily out of programmed drums, synthesizers, radically effected lap steel guitar, and ominously monumental basslines. In that sense it’s more or less a bedroom recording project—only the bedroom involved is in the locked attic of a decaying mansion that’s cocooned with cobwebs and haunted by shadowy memories.
That aura of estrangement, metamorphosis, and loss is mirrored in the gauzy blur of “Octavia”, a monstrously slow meditation that feels more like an accumulation of stray sounds over eons than any kind of conventionally arranged song. At the same time it’s Portal/Well’s most alluringly melodic track, even if that melody is telescoped into a cosmic smear of shoegaze ghostliness without anything so tidy as a resolution. “Octavia”, though, is a stadium anthem compared to “Low Moon”, whose minimalist incantations of static are more abstract and disorienting—a study in gray washes and grainy textures that defines the sonic envelope of Portal/Well, from the amp-hum ambience of “Parallel Twin” to the corroded majesty of “Taalith”. It’s a heavy record, both in timbre and disposition, but it avoids the apocalyptic template of tension-climax-aftermath in favor of something less rigid and linear, without even the cold comfort of a causal link between destruction and remorse.
As grim as it can get, Portal/Well isn’t another trite ode to annihilation. The title track oozes an eerie curiosity, with Schechter’s nomadic bass and slithering licks of guitar probing the deepest reaches of classic prog. It’s not as emotionally gripping as some of the album’s bleaker moments, but it grounds Insect Ark in a tradition—one of cerebral rock played with passion and without compromise. That approach doesn’t always work as well as it could; the aimlessly hallucinatory “Lowlands”, for example, barely serves as a brief interlude, let alone a song of its own. But taken as a whole, the album is more about enduring than ending, a doorway into hollowness and lonesomeness that contracts and dilates with a horrific rhythm.
Schechter has recently doubled the roster of Insect Ark by enlisting Ashley Spungin of the experimental doom duo Taurus on drums and electronics. Although Spungin doesn’t appear on Portal/Well, her addition to Insect Ark seems foreshadowed by the album; like Taurus, Insect Ark is informed by the unsettling, alienating ’70s soundtrack work of groups like Goblin and Tangerine Dream. That eerie, cinematic scope rears its head on “The Collector”, Portal/Well’s most evocative track. Like some vast beast tossing in its sleep, the song lurches from staccato chunks of bass to nightmarish cascades of synths, all the while maintaining a queasy, menacing dream logic. Portal/Well may not have a feature film to go with it, but with compositions as vivid and immersive as Schechter’s, it doesn’t need one.