Premature Burial - The Conjuring (2015)

New Atlantis Records is thrilled to present The Conjuring, the debut LP from Premature Burial. The unit takes it's name from an Edgar Allen Poe story in which the narrator suffers from episodes of catalepsy and fears being buried alive. The reader is taken through various stages of paranoia, forced to imagine being trapped inside a coffin, paralyzed and unable to communicate their mortal predicament to the world of the living.

The title of the album is an homage to director James Wan's 2013 film, The Conjuring, in which a family moves into a haunted house and is terrorized by an evil force that eventually takes possession of the mother. The private claustrophobia of coffin-death is traded for the collectivized fear of living in a cursed space, as feelings of helplessness and loathing are projected both outward and in.

It's with this shared imagery that we arrive at the sound world of Premature Burial. Comprised of Peter Evans, Matt Nelson, and Dan Peck, all three members use varying degrees of amplification; Evans presses up against a close mic at times while Nelson and Peck have a full array of effects pedals at their disposal. Combining a vast dynamic spectrum and versatility of form, the resulting pieces range from the sound of softly scurrying rats to pitch-shifted loon-calls from Hell. The recording session took place in a church, the acoustics of which enhance the illusion of the sounds having multiple/unclear origins and supply an added dimension of unease to the standstill moments.

Houses and churches often serve as safe havens, beacons of hope. Yet once something sinister is allowed in, it is difficult, if not impossible, to get out. In contrast to H.P. Lovecraft's haunted New England forests and Stephen King's pagan burial grounds, the horror of Premature Burial's The Conjuring is specifically that of a cursed interior space. Whereas the destruction emanating from the outside world exhibits a sort of timeless and ambivalent violence, the type of force occupying the inside of a space feels decidedly more insidious; more the deliberate actions of a sentient being, man-made. The church in which this album was recorded is in Wilkes-Barre, PA, a depressed Rust Belt town that in recent years has seen spikes in gang crime and unemployment. A broader definition of the word "haunted" could be applied to cities like these across the country, "ghost towns" where the progression of time and socio-economic development has seemed to creep backwards. The real darkness of Wilkes-Barre's past still resonates within it's interior spaces, and subtly exerts itself on this recording.