Deep Fade: Oblivion Spell

The Deep Fade experience is like being heaved into the vortex. Built on turbulence and disruption, the feral noise unit of vocalist / multi-instrumentalist Amanda Votta and gadget wranglers, Neddal Ayad (also Votta’s bandmate in The Spectral Light) and Grey Malkin first began perforating eardrums early in 2024 with their debut long-player, Line of Flight.

A greyscale siren call from the same high seas that adorn the album’s cover art, Line of Flight was the first of two Deep Fade releases in 2024; the second being Further. As far removed from its predecessor as its title suggests, Deep Fade produced a fractured, doom-laden neo-folk epic, setting down a clear marker: they were a band stylistically unbound from anything including themselves, and on their third release, Oblivion Spell, they continue their quest to not make the same record twice.

Like her solo project, the aptly dubbed The Floating World, Oblivion Spell sees Votta going it alone this time around. The extra responsibility is no burden, either; Votta, thriving in the same vortex as her audience. Take the penultimate track, Void-Fucked Entropy – an accurate depiction of this diseased world, and on Oblivion Spell, Votta explores the most ferocious frontiers of it, with something that is the embodiment of sensory overload.

It’s the production that makes Oblivion Spell such a frightening feat. Mixed with layers that reach all the way to the earth’s core, on Hologrammatization, Votta’s voice unfurls with hypnotic flashes between harsh metallic walls of sound. It’s the occupation of liminal space between the post-apocalypse and a warehouse rave.

Following is Possessor – industrial maximalism where scanner-like noise flays like skin from bone. For those who think Seth Manchester is the master of reducing noise down to its most ruinous forms, there’s no doubt that Votta provides healthy competition. Here she doesn’t just blacken nightmares, she obliterates them before making new ones. And the title track is the perfect hellscape for such milieus; the kind of acidic noise collage likened to Throbbing Gristle and Ministry tussling in the world’s darkest corners.

Mirrors of Disappearance is equally bleak. Votta’s vocals, like a spectre’s whisper through the rubble, and as sporadic beats pulsate underneath the mix, your senses struggle to keep up in what feels more like cerebral subterfuge.

Closing with To Fire You Come At Last, Votta hasn’t sounded so defiant on tape. While Further saw her inspired by the allures of the avant-garde as her voice rode against the music, here she launches into the crescendo with a performance likened to a clarion call.

Moving between Boston and Northern Britain, Votta’s very own floating world comes to life through the Deep Fade lens. Her large cache of influences, not limited to Boston’s Brutalist Government and Erich Lindemann Mental Health centers, photocopied zines, Julia Kristeva, Maurice Blanchot, and Votta’s own work as a medical anthropologist, all provide scope and depth to what Oblivion Spell is. A core-shuddering, visceral snapshot of the Deep Fade story, and throughout Votta’s many years of making music, she hasn’t sounded more extreme.

Oblivion Spell is out via Phage Tapes. Purchase from Bandcamp.