Here’s is Zack Kouns’ description of his album A Catalogue of Erica’s Misfortunes…

“…examines in brief a fragile and lost human organism. The first track finds our young heroine speaking with her father, exhibiting early mental disorder and predilection to tragedy, hallucinating and choking with fear. The second track finds her many years later, a bystander happening upon her in a Public Restroom raped and left for dead. This horror encourages the bystander to muse about the abject misery of the often apparently random and brutally violent interactions between human beings. The third track concludes nothing, the subtle terror allowing the listener to draw upon their own reflections concerning the seeming brutality of God’s Holy Grace.”

Needless to say, this is an immensely disturbing album and is not for everyone. The three tracks are primarily instrumental with a few voices used to accent the emotional content rather than to carry on any narrative. However you feel about this album and its subject matter, there is no denying it is a moving if somewhat terrorizing experience. The first track starts out innocently enough with a Eastern drone and fragments of a melody. But the tension builds to a disquieting level and beyond. The second and third track adds to the discomfort and eventually descends in the nightmarish. While the composer’s above plot lines are helpful, I’m not sure the album needs it. With no narrative, this is still easily seen as a depressive and bleak look at our existence. Some listeners may be put off by the negativity of Kouns’ music and his conclusions but sometimes art has to pull us out of our hiding places.

The album released by the Clinical Archives net label and available in 320kbps MP3.

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