Review Text
Vinyl LP pressing. The masterful 2022 album from Old Tower. Traditional and yet alien, the deconstruction of regression as transformation from man to beast, which conceptually was felt throughout the project's wanderings but steps forth fully from the shadows on The Old King of Witches. Shaving down to the bone and trimming the fat of the carcass to incant without rest and without resolution, Old Tower resurrects the dying breed of dark ambient with '90s deep electronics to conceive of a new breed of dark music. The most pure form of Old Tower always reaches for fictional reality and time stasis. Conceptually on The Old King of Witches you follow "a stranger" who enters a derelict domain, full of old and rotten pine trees, scattered rocks overgrown with dark green moss and strange reclusive inhabitants. Some of these inhabitants are witches who worship the ancient evil that roams this place. Through the use of forbidden magic, they slowly pull the "stranger" deeper into their forest world and we follow him on this journey through the woods, caverns, fields, and groves of this mysterious land. The Old King is the ruler of this land. Not a physical manifestation, but a symbol for the attraction of the mysterious and the dark. A place where the new comes to die, and the old tends to thrive. If you are lost, fall back on what is old and familiar, to find that new energy in places you have not visited in a while or never visited at all.
