Sometimes things just come along at the right time. And more often than not, it’s when you least expect them to.
Over the course of a year, the beginning of March is always the strangest for me. This week, marking eight years since my wife passed away. It’s a bizarre feeling. As the years go on, you’re almost numb to it. Your heart, eviscerated. And most of what’s left of it, remade out of stone.
From its remains, there is room for hope. Like letting new love in (which I’m extremely lucky and privileged to have found). And art, which acts as the gateway to help reach such hopeful outcomes. Take Lillian Hexing’s The Sound of Spiders Hatching. The kind of album etched to tape that almost has you lost for words. So naked in its intimacy and power that it forces you to share personal stories like the one above.
Lillian Hexing is a project masked in mystery. Part of the Maine-based Starlight Hexing Family, what permeates like a religious cult gracefully moves beyond the contrived nature of one. There are no closed doors here, for the terrains Lillian Hexing explore are borderless.
Featuring Ivy Z, Anna Lucia Nissen (Anchoress), Asha Wells, Ellen Schloff, Jean Rivera and Old Saw’s Henry Birdsey, alongside Lillian, Julia, Valerie and Celestine Forever Hexing, The Sound of Spiders Hatching sees the collective build an indecipherable world. One that could be the from past, in the present, into the future, or all three combined. It could even be the bridge between heaven and hell?
Lillian Hexing - The Sound of Spiders HatchingWhatever it may be, there’s a wistfulness that is at the heart of these recordings. Something deeply pure and richly evocative. The claustrophobic opening piece, Intro, a ‘prayer’, delivered by the Mother Goody Hexing. Described as a “work of love made by the coven, across oceans and borders”, it’s far removed from the following two pieces that galvanise The Sound of Spiders Hatching.
Beginning with Witch’s Piss. A choral drone that wets the corners of the eyes, it’s akin a “little whisper from the hill”. Its source, a plethora of voices that form as a singular spirit who moves majestically across the Lillian Hexing sound world. And in doing so, it illuminates every part it of it.
Birdsey’s pedal steel resonates like something that effortlessly soars over the horizon. His performance gives these compositions even more layers and emotional depth. And while a low drone purrs through the speakers that passes off a homespun warmth, it’s a household where the doors are open. Where nature and humanity join as one, as told on the sparkling abstract second piece, Lucifer in Butterflies.
Expertly mastered by James Plotkin, The Sound of Spiders Hatching is devotional surrealism like never before. The time and space in these compositions, letting the mind ramble to tremendous places. It’s the chief design of psychedelia, however Lillian Hexing move beyond that, with a tenderness and catharsis that welcomes everyone in.
It’s music that mutates into different shapes, revealing new layers and meanings each time, making the Lillian Hexing experience impossible to decipher. Often the best art is incessantly elusive and orchestrated to never fully comprehend. Like life itself, where, indeed, sometimes things just come along at the right time. Things like Lillian Hexing’s The Sound of Spiders Hatching, which are exactly the type of moments that make life worth living for.
The Sound of Spiders Hatching is out now via Fiadh Productions / Stoned to Death. Purchase from Bandcamp.
