Cipher Productions

The arum lily (zantedeschia aethiopica) is a species of flowering plant in the family Araceae, native to southern Africa. What does this beautiful flower have to do with experimental industrial music? The rather obscure second album of Arum Lilies, a brainchild of Mark Groves (Von Einem, Dead Boomers, Red Wine & Sugar, etc.), does not provide answers.

What it does provide, however, is an album of vaguely unsettling, eerily obscure experimental electronics. Harrowing, subtle atmospherics clash with moments of eardrum shattering industrial noise; warbling pseudomelodies are offset by crackling static and piercing feedback; ominous vocal samples are layered on passages of tightly controlled minimalism. Subsurface Aquifers is a piece of music that migrates between poles, from an almost ambient sparsity of expression to exuberant bursts of chaos.

'Subsurface Aquifers' is not an album of shallow industrial nihilism or typical power electronics misanthropy. It does not allow itself to be defined so easily. As such, it demands more from the listener - but also offers more.

One of my favourite projects from one of my favourite people. Death Continues Records, 2023, limited to a mere 120 copies. Highly recommended!