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Why We Love – Salac

Salaċ is a Gaelic industrial duo whose music creates a Pagan dystopia as they whisper labyrinthine speech-to-song poetry over mystic beats. Clíona Ní Laoi and Max Kelan Pearce resemble some modern-day blue Bards, moulding audiovisual sorceries and anagogic poetry into a ritual of lunacy.

Part of the avant-garde Bristol collective Avon Terror Corps, the two orchestrate a resurgence of primal sound. Slithering noises and intricate inflections of their voices come together almost as if life and death are revealed to one another. Ceremonialists that speak to the wicked, Salaċ creates an epitome of disturbing magnetism through their ensembles of electronic distortions with obscure cadences.

The 13 songs on Sacred Movements take you for a trip through a clammy ambiance where softness and ragged vibrations come together in harmony. The heaviness of their performance is bewitching; it forges the album into a sanctuary of sunken alchemy. A twitching glow through a gloomy forest, an ode for the debauched and the midnight lords, this album is a remarkable eulogy to Gaelic ritualism.

Corybantic gyrations of sound will carry you away as you listen to The Dead Don’t Forget / Clouds Over The Moon. Spell-casting lyrics and daedal piano notes are as theatrical as they are auditory pleasing, testifying to the grand artistry of the two.

Illicit Rituals is another compilation of 13 pieces that evoke a sanctified dimension of industrial music, where mechanical whirring and ominous statics meet grave wailings. A thrilling mind trip that goes through legerdemain rhythmic pitches and sinister verses, the album is a cyber chaos that seems to come from the underworld.

Moony modulations inspired by an ancient world of magick and sacred initiation open the door to a realm of contemporary ceremonies of the depraved. A divination of the occult and a fascination with the natural world become apparent in the duo’s official video for Procession To The Underworld – the two burn sage and their bodies twist and turn as they summon hoary forces. Draped in gauzy veils and crowned with leafy branches, they dance to the convoluted buzzing and the vicious basslines.

Salaċ has a chilling and truly unique approach to industrial music. There is a fantastic peculiarity that makes their music a momentous expression of talent and affinity to the folk traditions as they get closer to their roots and depict repugnance towards the oppressors of the true Celtic spirit.

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