
Oscar Numbes is a London based producer who has previously worked with Cold Cave, Wolf Eyes and Jaimie Branch. Her latest release is a collection of her own material, including two pieces as a separate LP. Recorded over a period of a couple of months in late 2016–17.
The productions are hugely varied and throw a wide net of sounds at you. The dizzying noise of “The Fiery Furnace” is a gooey, warm synth melody, shaped by slow, reverberant loops and backed up by a steady, relentless bassline that conjures up a Greek chorus or a tribal drum circle. The album’s title is a reference to a scene from "The Fiery Furnace", in which a woman’s body is consumed by a burning furnace. It’s a wily and evocative track, and one of the most memorable in the album as well.
“The Erosian Gate” is a heady, claustrophobic instrumental that plays like it’s being sung by a choir. It’s a very different kind of vocal, as it sounds more like a human being’s voice than carvings and humanoid sculptures. It opens with a long, drawn out chant from a choir member, but it quickly finds a groove.
“Bloody Mottled Blunt” is another long, drawn out vocal track, with a dark, suffocating funk groove that sounds like it’s being played by some sort of sonic womb. It’s not quite a song—just a series of distorted, mournful tones that slowly lose their focus and drift away, leaving you dizzied with the dizziness and the distance.
“A Bitch Called the Ghost” reads as a poem, and it’s an emotional statement (“I am a chick”). It’s a one-of-a-kind piece of music that feels like it’s made from the mind of the same person who wrote it.
The other tracks on the record are more like radio playlists, or ambient spaces, or other sensory overlays. The entire record was recorded in an empty studio space, and the only other source is a black-and-white photo of the artist that was taken just a few days before the gig. Numbes has now claimed that the project was inspired by the subject of her own work. But the actual album is simply too good to be true.