Skullflower Ophidian Vibrations

West Yorkshire’s peerless psych-noise unit Skullflower plant a thorny bouquet of beauties to conclude their first trilogy with Cairo's awesome, sprawling Nashazphone label.

Here revolving Matthew Bower & Samantha Davies, after decades of line-ups swirling Bower’s mast, Skullflower continue to reach other parts of the psych that others can only skim with ‘Ophidian Vibrations’. As characterised in the outstanding artwork, calliing to mind cave drawings as much as a frame from a Lynch nightmare, the duo extend an intuitively atavistic suite of work, uncoiling the metallic shred and banking atonal sheet noise of ‘Hrim’ for a transfixing 15 minute entrée.

The relatively shorter ‘Krim’ swims on the mind’s eye with a fractal patina of iridescent, lysergic textures as a fine palate cleanser, before ’Hum’ plunges us back into a dense overgrowth of gorse-like deep greens and piquant yellow riddled with adders and biblical serpents forming a horizontal blanket of the lushest harmonic distortion.