Portland’s Spookiest Bands part II
Welcome back for more of ELEVEN’s exploration of Portland’s odious heathens, ones that promise to gore with gothic horrors, aid you in the aftermath of your parties and booty hauls, and help you celebrate what’s deceased.
Part II
Day of the Dread: Afterlife Bands
Descending Pharaohs
“There are Djinns everywhere in our compositions—some invited, some uninvited,” says Descending Pharaohs, our adept kings of eastern-tinged, shadow kraut. Bass and oud player Theodore Khoury, the drummer-menace Andy Levy, and Ricardo Esway, their guitar god of dangerously heady riffs, mutate notes to lord over us. After all, Esway has a malfeasant wish that “the audience to receive trepanation from us directly during shows.” For those gentler folk, that means they want our skulls scraped! And you should oblige, for their mainly instrumental songs “often take on a dark modal character but seem to always keep one foot in the abstract.” You’ll journey with Descending Pharaohs, then be spit out of a dynasty, made brainless by their psychedelic natron.
Eternity isn’t ever far from their creativity; it emanates from endless troves of influence, like gamelan and an Arab Futurism that is “always in our minds, [and] so is ’70s electric music from that part of the world.” Just as Egyptian pyramids are both perfect royal cubits and houses of unknown mysteries, so do the Descending Pharaohs “take on half-structured and half-improvisational approaches to creating music.” Khoury expresses that Egyptian folklore and the “Pharaonism practiced in Coptic rituals” feeds them. But Descending Pharaohs deepen the lore. Khoury continues, speaking like a Sphinx: “The exit of the pharaohs to another plane holds a lot of intrigue.” For certain, esoteric correlations fog their work. Khoury’s upbringing haunts him, “I grew up in the Antiochian Orthodox Church service. I was an altar boy when sermons that go back hundreds of years. I didn’t speak Greek, so all these ancient hymns, incense shakers, and chants are deep within me,” but Khoury reveals, “they often get translated through a New Wave Of British Heavy Metal lens.”
Descending Pharaohs will mess you up in the marshes, boat you amidst their lyrical constructs of characters and storyscapes, and shove you underground until entombed. Alas, there may be redemption in the afterlife if your heart is light and your riff is heavy, for Khoury promises “quarter tones can heal.”
Mummy up with their forthcoming album, Ritual of Light, from 2182 Recording Company later this November. Follow them on Instagram.
Die Geister Beschwören
This band wins for the most haunted moniker! Repeat “Die Geister Beschwören,” which translates to “Summon the Spirits,” and helpful daemons are invoked. Their dark folk will comfort you as long as you slash the forest of sounds and traverse the shady lands of samples and original field recordings. Membered by former Portlander Oryan Peterson-Jones (sitar and classical guitars, synth, etc.) and Portlanders Andrew Pritchard (bass, slide, etc.) and Joey Binhammer (twelve-string, drums, bass, etc.), they flesh out with their death doula, the musical saw player Evar Restad. Ever-searing, they possess audiences with a singular beauty.
This band’s spiritualism is as diverse as the spectral blob of ethnomusicology and outsider Americana from which it derives musical inspiration. Founder Peterson-Jones’ personal pantheon folds in aspects of Sufism to shamanism to Santeria and Gnostic mysticism. He clarifies that “these influences are merely theoretical. To be fair, we have assimilated quite a bit of mythology and symbology from various nooks and crannies of the globe,” indicating that magick is afoot but primarily reserved for the individual. Dogma-less, amorphous, the Die Geister members’ “totems, visions, and divine relations get woven into the fabric of Die Geister Beschwören’s tapestry.”
Such textured musical material can sustain experimentation and, more importantly, document our current state. Their latest album, Ghosts, This Is Survival, explores a real horror, the viral fall-out of the corpse of corporatism. Recently released by Australian label Ramble Records, it is often called their “plague phase.” Recorded at the height of the pandemic, along with friends on all sorts of instruments, the band managed to “capture the zeitgeist in amber.” They got monstrous with it, incorporating what Peterson Jones calls “more sinister elements like the utilization of frequencies intended to stimulate nausea,” admitting to purposely “provoking discomfort by using sound strategically to make the listener distressed.” But not to worry, dear listener, Ghosts, This Is Survival won’t totally disembody you. It does offer redemption—an opening in the goblin cave of our demise. “We are haunted, but we survived,” Peterson-Jones concludes.
If you are ever lucky—or damned—enough to catch a live show, don’t hesitate to enter their seance. They frequently commence with “Restad leading a meditation and setting intent” and then move into what Peterson-Jones describes as an effort to “retire the ego, offer up the reins, and allow the energy of space and time to guide us. We perform as conduits. Not unlike the Whirling Dervishes, who chaperone their congregations’ path to rapturous deliverance.” And in that, there is no better container for spinning one’s murky depths into gold than entering this band’s wounds of sound.
Call up Die Geister Beschworen on Bandcamp for albums and live releases.
Dry Wedding
Fear has a sound, and it saturates the vampires that are Dry Wedding, sweating or rambunctiously seething out of Chadwick Ferguson (bass), Jarrod Green (guitar, synth), Tom Fuller (drums), and their very own Dracula, Davey Ferchow (vocals and guitar). It’s a sound that can hurl listeners into ominous landscapes, deserted-nether-desert worlds you can’t exactly escape. Ferchow describes it as “a blend of eerie instrumentation, dynamic baritone vocals, and the Southern Gothic-inspired lyricism. Each element comes together to craft a haunting listening experience that aims to evoke lasting visceral and intellectual reactions.”
Dry Wedding’s resonance does penetrate long after listening, forever punctured by Ferchow’s once-in-a-generation vocals and writing that employs “narrative structures, extensive use of metaphor, and highly-detailed depictions of harsh realities [that] stem from universal hardships and the complex emotions they conjure.” Such bloodsucking only makes room for fresh blood production, however, for Dry Wedding is also designed to guide you “amidst the intensity and despair of our concrete imagery, [where] there are glimmers of clarity and hope that intend to help us connect with our audience and share in a communal catharsis.”
With psychopompic rock and pompadours, Dry Wedding’s mayhem is a cauldron of familiars: ‘By drawing influence from the gloom of post-punk, the heaviness of black metal and doom metal, the propulsive rhythms of noise rock, and the sepulchral songcraft of traditional blues, country, and folk, the melding of all these influences is how we craft the core of our somber and chaotic compositions.” So while you will get prodded with dark western and pricked by a Cormac McCarthy apocalypt-ethos, what you sink your teeth into will be up to you.
Devour the wait for next year’s The Back Of Beyond by trashing your garlic and undergoing Dry Wedding.
