Insect Ark

Insect Ark

The Vanishing

Profound Lore

Evoking visions of dripping and lurching horror films, outer space travel, and gritty noir textures, NYC-based instrumental band Insect Ark is led by founder Dana Schechter. Using delay-drenched lap steel, distorted bass and synths, and acoustic and electronic drums, the band’s music creates a sonic mural both uncomfortably intimate and icy cold. The follow-up to 2018’s Marrow Hymns, The Vanishing sees Schechter team up with drummer Andy Patterson (Subrosa), resulting in their most expansive, immersive, and intricately crafted album to date. Recorded and mixed by Colin Marston (Krallice, Dysrhythmia), the album flourishes through a sound canvas so immense and enveloping, cinematic and grandiose yet hypnotic, trance-inducing, and alluring, all at the same time. Bridging the gap between experimentation and song form, a heavy focus is on composition, but Insect Ark is not content to stay in the studio. It is very much a live experience, with emphasis on the live instrumentation of bass, lap steel, drums, and synths using intricate live analog looping techniques to achieve a monster “wall of sound” with only one or two people on stage, accompanied by mind-bending animated visuals—also made by Schechter, who works as a video artist in the film business—completes the live experience to envelop and crush the senses. Schechter has worked as a collaborator for studio / stage with Swans, Angels Of Light, Zeal & Ardor, Arabrot, Wrekmeister Harmonies, Gnaw, Bee and Flower, and Gifthorse. Starting in the spring of 2020, she will be joining Swans as a primary touring member of...

Insect Ark

Marrow Hymns

Profound Lore

***BACK IN STOCK!!!  Combining elements of horror-film soundtracks, psychedelic doom, and atmospheric noise, NYC / Portland-based instrumental duo Insect Ark presents their newest record, Marrow Hymns.  Comprised of Dana Schechter (bass, lap steel guitar, synthesizers) and Ashley Spungin (drums, synthesizers), Insect Ark’s intensely visual music weaves interludes of fragile beauty with crushing passages of swirling doom, spinning like a backwards fever dream. This album is a wordless song, a hypnotic voice that screams and whispers from a place deep in the furrows, from the bones, from the blood. Defying easy categorization, their uncommon sound is in part the amalgamation of these two women’s passions: Schechter’s sinister bass lines and unconventional use of lap steel guitar (and her complete omission of electric guitar), and Spungin’s lucid, exacting drumming and synth work with her own hand-built analog noise pedals (Ormus Electronics). With the two halves of the band residing on opposite coasts, the album was largely skeletal in form upon commencement of recording. Overdubs and further writing / arrangements were done after Spungin’s return to Portland in the isolation of Schechter’s home studio. The sense of distance and vast emptiness remained intact in the songs, built out over many long nights.  These songs of displacement, loss, and isolation are personal journals of that time period, as both members found themselves simultaneously experiencing existential crises. However, the album also tells a story of strength and determination, made from the marrow of these two women, a song for all things that struggle...

Insect Ark

Portal / Well

Sleeping Giant Glossolalia

***Beginning in New York City in late 2011 as the one-woman solo project of bassist / multi-instrumentalist DANA SCHECHTER (ANGELS OF LIGHT, BEE AND FLOWER), the band became a duo in 2015 with the addition of Portland-based drummer ASHLEY SPUNGIN (TAURUS). Largely instrumental, the band are equally inspired by experimental doom/drone, '60s horror film soundtracks, psych, and traditional classical composers. Creating a personal soundtrack to the human psyche’s underbelly, Insect Ark weaves a brooding, textural landscape, a starless night spiked with light and flash. The music braids together delay-drenched lap steel guitar, acoustic and electronic drums, distorted bass & synths to create a sonic mural both uncomfortably intimate and icy cold. Portal / Well delivers on what Pitchfork called Insect Ark's sense of "metamorphosis, loss, and menacing dream logic" while The Wire has stated that Insect Ark "stand in the lineage of other crypto-metal solo projects—Earth circa Phase 3: Thrones And Dominions, or ex-Earth associate Joe Preston’s project Thrones and that "a spacious, noir-ish jazz elegance permeates, approaching the atmosphere of Germany’s Bohren and Der Club Of Gore." Beautiful screen printed jackets, limited pressing.  You’ve likely encountered Schechter’s large and eclectic body of work through her collaborations with Locrian, Enablers, and Gnaw, her earliest efforts in Gifthorse(with Leviathan/Lurker of Chalice’s Jef Whitehead), or stints with American Music Club and 4AD’s Tarnation.