Karda Estra - Weird Tales
SKU
Cycl 171
"Weird Tales, with its title, its gothic lettering and its ethereally disturbing artwork, seems intended to evoke discourses of the uncanny and of existential darkness. It is another Karda Estra album, Voivode Dracula, that has an overt connection to the myth of the vampire, but the atmospheres of this one (or at least the atmospheres it invokes considered together with its visual presentation) put me in mind of both F.W. Murnau’s 1921 film Nosferatu and Werner Herzog’s 1979 remake. That it should remind me of a film, rather than another piece of music, is telling; this eight part composition is certainly a music of narrative progression, but it is powerfully, absorbingly atmospheric. Its effects are far from the hopeless terror an abandoned engagement with the atmosphere of the film I mentioned might induce, but it is full of a similar calm melancholy, and a weird beauty that offers to take the engaged listener far outside themself. It is an intelligent, masterfully crafted, and deeply moving record."-Oliver Arditi