Smote

Baba Yaga's Hut Presents: Smote

SMOTE, once a solo endeavor by Daniel Foggin, now expanded to a fuller ensemble blends traditional instrumentation - creaking strings, funeral drums, somber winds - with thunderous synth work and desolate guitar to craft drone and dirge.

The new album “A Grand Stream” (Rocket Recordings 2024) is a full-scale psychic voyage into the ether and a drone-and-repetition-fuelled series of incantations that takes simple, primal ingredients and utilises them for the purposes of aural sorcery, summoning spectres and revelations aplenty in its wake.

Smote’s austerity is one that refreshingly escapes the usual trappings of avant-garde music, simply by the force of its elemental vitality and its grounding of negative aural space. Its overpowering wall of sound still holds enough natural grace that it escapes the oppressive abusiveness of, say, Swans, and yet it is relentless in its forward thrust.

“A Grand Stream” takes the band - one who’ve always eschewed the cliches and stumbling blocks of all contemporary psych rock in favour of their own unique and wyrd vision - into a realm in which they transcend through willpower and skill alike into something preternaturally thrilling and intimidating, mapping out their own crepuscular new territory in the paranormal.

This is an 18+ event