XKatedral – psychotropic wonderland

May 26 2026

“XKatedral Anthology Series III” (XKatedral, 2026)

Tony D'Amico Current Album Reviews Compilations, Jessica Ekomane, Kali Malone, Maria W. Horn, Mats Erlandsson, Stephen O'Malley, XKatedral

Stockholm’s impeccably curated and darkly drone-centric XKatedral label celebrates their ten-year anniversary with this third volume in their “series of archival releases dedicated to presenting music by composers working within the realm of slowly evolving harmonic and timbral music.” As befits such an occasion, this latest collection focuses heavily on artists who have been involved with the label since its very beginnings (Kali Malone, Maria V. Horn, Mats Erlandsson, Daniel M Karlsson, David Granström, and Theodor Kentros), but there are also a couple of heavy hitters from outside that original circle (Jessica Ekomane and Stephen O’Malley). In short, this latest installment features yet another murderers’ row of some of the world’s most compelling and inventive contemporary composers, which is a damn impressive achievement for a project that first began as a DIY cassette label.

The album opens with a brief “compositional sketch” from Kali Malone that is essentially just a slow-motion descending melody, but it makes for a pretty effective introduction to the pleasures that follow, as it features septimal just intonation tuning, uneasy dissonances, and feels ragged and detuned into very cool and visceral way. The album soon begins kicking ass in earnest, however, as Maria W. Horn’s epic “Empyrean Flare” wields Arvo Pärt’s Tintinnabuli technique to “animate four supersaw oscillators” and weave a smoldering and spacy nightmare of air raid siren-like howls. It feels like a harrowing cross between an exorcism and slowed-down footage of a burning futuristic city on a distant planet, which easily secures it the honor of being one of the album’s clear highlights.

To my ears, the album’s other stone-cold killer is Jessica Ekomane’s extremely unexpected and decade-old “To Whoever Shall Inherit The Earth,” which was apparently the first solo piece that she ever recorded. The first time that I heard it, I actually had to re-check the track list to convince myself that it was not the Stephen O’Malley piece, as it sounds like a gorgeously smoldering maelstrom of gently billowing and heaving guitar noise and ephemeral chord shapes. At its peak, it feels like a darkly pulsating psychedelic cloud streaked with flickers of shimmering light, which stylistically evokes a more sensuous incarnation of New Zealand’s understated guitar noise sorcerers Surface of The Earth. I’m tempted to say that it is a bummer that Ekomane never pursued that direction further, but I am huge fan of Multivocal’s “Solid of Revolution” so I have to reluctantly conclude that her instincts were sound.

The album’s actual O’Malley composition, “Smoking Mother,” is a synth piece composed during a 2018 Fribourg residency that evokes a desolate horizon of windblown sand dunes. He mentions that Popul Vuh was a major inspiration, which is apt as it calls to mind an imagined and uncharacteristically dark and distortion-frayed Popul Vuh score for something like Dune or The Sheltering Sky. Theodor Kentros’ 2025 piece “This Will Be My Last Piece For Organ” is perhaps an even more otherworldly sounding gem, as he played “clustered oscillators through resonant feedback to synthesize the fluctuating frequencies heard wandering through physical space when detuning an organ.” In less technical terms, it sounds like smeary and quaveringly discordant organ drones with shifting and unfamiliar harmonies and a quietly gathering storm of feedback.

The remaining pieces are similarly compelling and unusual in their own distinctive ways. For example, David Granström’s “Tesselation” combines floating and frayed ambiance with percussion spasms that throb, crackle, and scrape in wonderfully visceral fashion, while Daniel M Karlsson’s “Fault Lines” sounds like a massive ghost-summoning cosmic didgeridoo. Elsewhere, Matt Erlandsson’s “Att Böja Själarna” is essentially a slowly flanging drone with distorted edges, but there are some very cool spatial tricks lurking in the background, as smoldering and hissing textures lazily pan back and forth. Notably, that Erlandsson piece previously appeared on a hyper-limited 2021 Irrlicht boxed set in which four artists were invited to record ten-minute cassette loops, but I definitely was not one of the 15 people who managed to snap that one up.

While that particular piece does not rank among my favorite Erlandsson creations, it nonetheless highlights a crucial feature of this series that is easy to forget given the quality of the material: all of these pieces are stray tracks that might have otherwise fallen through the cracks, as they are the products of unique circumstances, aborted directions, and one-off experiments that never made the cut for a proper album for whatever reason. While some could admittedly pass for outtakes, it is also true that several of these orphaned pieces are legitimately great and simply did not fit anywhere else until now.

That aspect is a large part of why this series is so special, as it feels like a close-knit community came together to collectively assemble something great out of their own recontextualized odds and ends. It works because everyone involved is a serious artist with cool and unconventional ideas that are very likely to shape the future of drone and modern minimalist composition to come (if that sounds like mere hyperbole, check out how many pipe organ albums followed in the wake of Malone’s The Sacrificial Code). While this might not be the place to hear every artist’s finest work, it cumulatively feels like an excellent overview of drone-based music’s cutting edges, which is exactly why each new installment of this series feels like a major event.

Listen here.

February 25 2024

Maria W. Horn, “Panoptikon” (XKatedral, 2024)

Tony D'Amico archived brainwashed reviews Maria W. Horn, XKatedral

I tend to enjoy damn near everything that Sweden’s XKatedral label releases, but this half-disturbing/half-transcendent tour de force by co-founder Maria W. Horn still managed to completely blindside me. Panoptikon‘s four-part suite was originally composed for a macabre installation at the “disbanded Vita Duvan (White Dove) panopticon prison in Luleå, Sweden.” Being a panopticon, Vita Duvan had an unusual circular design “to create a sense of omniscient surveillance,” but that is just the tip of a very grim iceberg, as it was also known for its brutal isolation tactics as well as rampant torture and execution. While the prison mercifully ceased operations in 1979, I suspect I would’ve needed months of therapy to recover from Horn’s installation alone, as it pulsed in synchronization with the prison’s lights and the cells contained speakers broadcasting the imagined voices of the doomed prisoners. Thankfully, the decontextualized album is considerably less harrowing than its origin suggests, as its dark choral opening quickly expands into an immersive swirl of heady drones, spacy synths, and timelessly beautiful vocal motifs.

The heart of the album is the opening “Omnia citra mortem,” which borrows its name from a legal term that translates as “everything until death.” In the context of Vita Duvan, that meant that no one could be sentenced to death for a crime they did not confess to, but they could certainly be tortured until a confession was made. Needless to say, few were inclined to stick around very long, as being beheaded with an axe was vastly preferable to the alternative. According to Horn’s research, the crimes that could land one in Vita Duvan could be as minor as “drunkenness” or “vagrancy,” but several dozen unfortunate women met their end there because miscarriage and abortion were considered “child murder” at the time.

Horn initially channels that dark history with a deep drone and a haunting choral theme that roughly approximates the solemnity of a Gregorian chant, but that stark foundation gradually warms and becomes more polyphonic as more themes and voices are added. As the vocal melodies intertwine and harmonize with one another, the funereal feel gradually dissipates and the piece begins to evoke something more akin to newly liberated souls floating heavenward. That sublime transformation is reinforced further by the piece’s final section, as the voices fade away entirely to leave only a simple, pure, and radiant drone that slowly undulates its way into silence.

The remaining three pieces are a bit less intense (and shorter as well), but they are all similarly mesmerizing in their own ways. “Hæc est regula recti” borrows its title from a book on correcting childhood deformities and initially shares the “choral mass” feel of its predecessor, though the voices are massed in harmonized unison this time around. After a couple of minutes, however, the chorus again vanishes to unveil a gorgeous finale of immersively shimmering drones that flicker and spatially roam as a host of buried and whispering voices creep in. Horn then follows that pair of stunners with the unexpectedly spacy and hallucinatory title piece. “Panoptikon” initially reprises the same underlying drone as the earlier pieces, but soon takes on a bleary, shapeshifting sense of unreality as Horn’s synths swoop, plunge, buzz, and smear. On a compositional level, I am very impressed at how Horn managed to seamlessly blur the timeless feel of the earlier pieces into something futuristic-sounding, but the more striking feat is how the piece evokes both a prison riot of ghosts and an ancient church at the heart of a cyberpunk dystopia. The album then ends with one more inspired twist, as the closing “Längtans Vita Duva” is a surprisingly hopeful-sounding traditional choral piece that feels like an old spiritual.

I imagine composing music that could do justice to the sad and cruel story of Vita Duvan and its broken and damned inhabitants was one hell of a daunting task, but Horn was unquestionably the perfect artist for such an endeavor (especially given her healthy appreciation for psychoacoustic phenomena). In particular, I was struck by how deeply the prison’s history and the associated conceptual themes shaped both Horn’s music and the installation itself. For example, the speaker placement was designed to evoke the sense of voices “striving for community but hindered by the forced isolation of the prison architecture.” Moreover, the prison’s previous torture and execution practices were replaced by the different horror of three-year stretches of total isolation after 18th century prison reforms and that too was mirrored (“the only indication of the passing of time was found in cycles of daylight amongst the silence, uncertainty, and solitude”). I honestly do not know how this album could have been any better, as there is not a false step or wasted note to be found anywhere and these pieces cumulatively pack quite an emotional impact. To my ears, Panoptikon is easily the strongest and most memorable album of Horn’s career, but her larger achievement was turning something so soul-shreddingly dark into such a listenable thing of transcendent beauty. This album is a masterpiece.

Listen here.