You know how the otherworldly is closer than it seems? And how music can convey its colors more accurately than any horror film? The correct answer is Blood Tape by ShiShi. Only he, through experimentation, dared to do something unusual, pushing the boundaries between the unknown and the musical. Here you’ll plunge into a sea of mystical futurism with special techniques that no one has created before.

Blood Tape by ShiShi is unlike anything I’ve heard. Artur from ShiShi makes music that sounds as if someone took industrial, shoegaze and ambient, put it all in a blender and forgot to turn it off. Blood Tape is his attempt to answer a question few people ask: what happens when you remove everything comprehensible from music and leave only texture, atmosphere, sensation? The five tracks here work like a laboratory experiment, where instead of the familiar verse-chorus-verse structure, you get fragments that change according to their own rules.

If it’s atmosphere, it speaks, as in Intro. If it’s a fateful night, it’s electric as in Doomnight. Each track erases the boundaries of the mystical, making you experience familiar phenomena differently, immerse yourself in a special atmosphere of the world, understand something new, unexplored, strange. A doomed ship, storm clouds, souls flying over a lake. Blood Tape definitively reveals the meaning of life’s phenomena, erasing the boundaries of the familiar. In this minor-key beauty, the fragile canvas of the world is reflected, and the combination of vocals with instruments breaks the boundaries of genre. This isn’t rock in its usual form, and not pop, and not electronic music—it’s some kind of magically incomprehensible genre that hasn’t been named yet.

The first track, Intro, mesmerized with mystical instruments. They hung in the air like falling stars above a barely perceptible pulse of melody. It seemed to me that these weren’t just dreams, but air in which unearthly beings dance, witches’ spirits whisper, enchanting the emerging melody. Thanks to special arrangements, it resembles a dance of reflections on water, now surfacing, now disappearing. A bit later, some electronics are added, but the track’s atmosphere doesn’t change. This is mysticism hovering over a frozen lake on a cloudy day, reviving long-forgotten secrets. A slow dance of extraterrestrial beings beyond heaven and hell. Absolute hypnosis!

Blood Tape, after which the album was named, announced itself with an assertively dark, tense pulsation of bass with rare flashes of melodies. An unexpected bursting wave of electronic instrument created a special pads, then a voice torn from the invisible world burst into the atmosphere of metal. Covered by the arrangement, it breaks out of the fog, grows stronger, becomes tangible, while the music scatters metallic sparks around itself, immersing you in a tense monologue. Sticky metal. Cold on the edge of worlds. This is exactly how I experienced this unusual, icy, borderline track that blurs the line of the otherworldly.

Next, I turned on Doomnight, which hit me with flashes of torn wires, metallic rock. ShiShi‘s soaring vocals piercingly announce themselves, striking with power. The roulades of metal create a sensation of electrified air, walking on damaged sparkling wires, burns of feelings. This is an ode to red-hot metal, to a soul’s cry in a fateful night, where wires hiss, sparkling with a scattering of sparks, combining beauty with incredible danger. But it’s precisely in such an environment that what’s hidden is revealed, making you think about the power of dangerous feelings that anyone can fall into. It’s like walking barefoot on sparking wires without danger to life. Real sparkling metal, the likes of which I’ve never encountered.

I unrealistically loved Rocket Ship to Hell. At first it takes up the intro’s continuation. The same mysticism, melody, but no longer a quiet lake, but an abyss of red-hot metal. A spaceship flying to the underworld in defiance of storming wind. Here and there, a tender melody breaks through in drops of keys, but it no longer restrains the movement. The ship, sparkling with electronic lights of synthesizers, flies into the abyss of space, of new realities. Soon a sensation of emptiness is created, sparkling with cosmic flashes of stars, but the assertive rhythm of bass adds anxiety to it. Overall, the track turned out incredible. Cosmically beautiful with notes of hellish doom without excessive darkness. A journey into the world of stars, open space, towards loneliness, emptiness. But there’s a charm in this, incredible beauty beyond musical canons.

The album concludes with Storm Clouds Gather. A powerful, saturated track with tired vocals, creating an incredible atmosphere. While clouds form in the sky, the ragged melody heats up the air, trying to reach the cosmos. A strong, large-scale track sounds unusual. There are many unexpected melodic turns, effects, alternation of icy calm with a soul’s cry, strength with weakness, warmth with coolness. Some atypical techniques surprise in earnest. For example, breaks with preservation of vocals outside familiar forms. There’s no otherworldly here anymore. Only a thunderstorm, growing strength, leaving drops of hail hitting car glass.

Blood Tape is a release for those tired of playlists where everything sounds uniformly convenient. ShiShi consciously goes in another direction: his music demands attention, concentration, readiness to immerse yourself in sound without familiar landmarks.

I enjoyed the journey into the world of departed souls, reflected in Blood Tape in combination with the album’s unexpected turns. ShiShi managed to combine the incredible, lifting the veil of the otherworldly. At first I thought the album would be entirely mystical, but the last track, Storm Clouds Gather, turned out to be quite earthly, pre-storm, invigorating, voluminous.

The album works best in cold, gloomy weather, when you have half an hour for immersion. Playing Blood Tape as background is pointless—it demands active listening, otherwise it simply turns into a set of strange sounds. But if you give it a chance, if you sit with headphones and let Artur lead you through his sound corridors, the album opens up completely differently. It’s evident that each track is constructed with attention to detail, that there are no random decisions here.

Are there flaws in Blood Tape—hmm, probably one: its niche appeal. This is music for a narrow audience, for those ready for experiments and strangeness. The mass listener will pass by, because there are no melodies here to latch onto, no familiar dynamics of rise and fall. But for those seeking an alternative to the mainstream, who miss the times when electronic music was dangerous and unpredictable, Blood Tape will be a discovery.

*This review was made possible by SubmitHub