Ascetic: - I Burn

Director/Editing - Jamie Helmer.
D.O.P - Shaun Thatcher
Concept/Art Direction - August Skipper, Saxon Jörgensen, Vijay Sing, Jamie Helmer
Special thanks to Jenny Atwood for her immaculate performance.

Exploring themes of union and dissociation, impossibly forgotten moments, process become form, ASCETIC:

Homepage

Biography
Drawn from a collective obsession with fringe philosophy and post-new-age consciousness, Self Initiation evokes the moods & spaces of 4AD's early roster (Swans, Dead Can Dance, Cocteau Twins), with a nod to contemporaries The Soft Moon, Factory Floor & Portishead's 'Third'. Thick pulsing rhythms erupt into glorious, cascading conclusion; from narcissistic rants, to sickly crooned anthems; from the outer regions of reality to the depths of the subconscious, a white shadow emerging from the process: ASCETIC.
Recorded, mixed & mastered at Birdland by Lindsay Gravina & Rob Long (HTRK, New War, Rowland S. Howard, Hungry Ghosts).
Ascetic: - Self Initiation will be released worldwide through OSCL Records on March 4th, 2013.

Ascetic – Self Initiation

Ascetic is from Melbourne, Australia. But on their Facebook page they say their current location is Berlin. However, their album Self Initiation was released 4th of March 2013 by OSCL Records.

Ascetic describe themselves as Bloom gloom, or this is what they write inside their biography “Drawn from a collective obsession with fringe philosophy and post-new-age consciousness, Self Initiation evokes the moods & spaces of 4AD’s early roster (Swans, Dead Can Dance, Cocteau Twins), with a nod to contemporaries The Soft Moon, Factory Floor & Portishead’s ‘Third’.”

For me this feels very much 80´s and I think their sound reminds very much of Joy Division, sometimes early The Cure. Self Initiation is a record that growing for each time I have listen to it, and I have now played it for more than 20 times in my car and at my home. Their songs got a high standard from the beginning til the end, the sound is like I said, very 80´s, gloomy and foggy sound-stage. They got kind of lay back attitude in which they succeeded with. I think this record somehow reminds of Night Sins, but Night Sins played a more traditional Gothic Rock and Ascetic is more into Post-Punk. Both of those two band went last year back to the roots to archive it for today’s generation. I give it a big recommendation, check them out.



This review can be found at Dark Reviews.