Blood Rhythms & Leslie Keffer - Horror Pilation #1-6 (2022)
“Blood Rhythms is a long running collaborative enterprise of No Part Of It proprietor Arvo Zylo. He's welcomed Keffer onboard for the project's Horror Pilation series, each entry of which clocks in at around 40 minutes. The throughline is a droning repetition, echoing and, to one degree or another, meditative. The yoga aerie-appropriate Horror Pilation is followed by the heavy ebb and lava flow of Horror Pilation 2, a churning, chanted (theoretical) soundtrack to rite and ritual. Horror Pilation 3 is an extended liturgical exhalation, while the first side of Horror Pilation 5 introduces dips, uptilts and quavers to that concept before the flip slips into a black-lit corrosive delirium suggestive, in spirit, of the late 2000s material released by US black metal artist Xasthur. Of these I found myself drawn most frequently back to Horror Pilation 4, where the duo's synths and effects simmer and flicker. imitative of a wood flute, in what feels like a wide open space, evincing little change and zero resolution.”
-Raymond Cummings, The Wire January 2023
“Arvo Zylo is the main force behind Blood Rhythms, which is sometimes his solo project and sometimes a collaboration. The current incarnation is a duo with Leslie Keffer. The pairing sounds natural from the start, as the two side-long pieces on Horror Pilation churn through cycling drones and rising noise. It’s not easy to describe the progress that happens along the album’s 40 minutes, as Zylo and Keffer’s slowly-mutating sound sometimes disguises forward motion as stasis. By the end of Horror Pilation, though, you’ve gone places, whether or not you know exactly where. (Zylo has also recently released a benefit for Keffer that is worth supporting).”
-The Best Experimental Music on Bandcamp: September 2022
Horror Pilation #1
Horror Pilation #2
Horror Pilation #3
Horror Pilation #4
Horror Pilation #5
Horror Pilation #6
“Sitting in a Berlin apartment, I couldn’t figure out how to turn on the amplifier, so I hooked up a small speaker to my laptop and let the music play. Perhaps this is an entirely ‘wrong’ way of approaching this music (again!), but what is ‘wrong’ or ‘right’ anyway when it comes to playing music? Maybe this is only to be heard on a massive sound system and not a cheaper speaker? That said, there is something about this music that works very well, given the circumstances. Each record contains a twenty-minute drone piece; in the download version, some are way longer, and I am sure they don’t fit on the side of an LP. There are also three alternative versions of ‘Horror Pilation 6B’. Leslie Keffer and Arvo Zylo play very minimal drone, which, for all I know, is somewhere between the treatment of a single source and, most likely, this source is voice-related. Whatever the treatment is, it is stuck within what it is. There seems to be little movement, but a few layers play simultaneously. Within each of these pieces, there are only subtle differentiations, so superficially one could say it is the same thing that plays out to be six hours and twenty-six minutes long, moving around with different sound effects attached to it. Waiting for people, looking out over what in Germany is called a Hinterhof, with a greet and cold afternoon light over Berlin, there is something quite pleasing about the darkness of this music playing out on this not-so-great speaker. Maybe this speaker adds another layer of a drone to the music, is carefully placed on a table, and creates more subtle vibrations. This is not something that I would have approached similarly at home, or given the fact. Sometimes a change of place and mind is required, and while not always something that is easily found, this little trip provided the right occasion for it.”
- Vital Weekly #1376