Death Hags - Lost in the Triangle d'Or (Official Soundtrack for the novel Bad Eminence)

Death Hags aka Lola G. has been working on an epic seven-album series titled Big Grey Sun. We’ve been following the installments, but in between those albums Death Hags created Lost in the Triangle d’Or - a soundtrack for the novel Bad Eminence by James Greer. The novel follows Vanessa Salmon, “a privileged and misanthropic French-American translator hailing from a wealthy Parisian family” whose work translating an experimental thriller novel is responsible for, “leading Vanessa down into a literary hell of traps and con games and sadism and doppelgangers and mystic visions and strange assignations and, finally, the secret of life itself.”

I’ve never heard a soundtrack for a novel before, but given the experimental and hypertextual content, it seems fitting that there should exist a musical response to it. Lost in the Triangle d’Or is in turn, hypnogogic and hallucinatory - full of washes of synthesizers filling the stereo field with panning textural pads, to cold drum machine driven numbers that pulse with a detached coolness and nocturnal, hypnotic drive. The whole album, once it’s over, feels like a wonderful disjointed and strangely sexy dream. Field recordings, heavy kraut synthesizers are omnipresent - Death Hags voice here, when it is present, is thick with a heavy French accent and distant, removed delivery - a sound non unlike Lou Rebecca or Marie Davidson’s “Un Autre Voyage”, Stereolab or Broadcast’s Trish Keenan. A well placed Grimes cover brings the whole project home.

Lost in the Triangle d’Or is a hauntingly beautiful piece of work that exists in this liminal zone between mediums. An evoking of the playful and hypertextual content of the book, this latest project by Death Hags is an album that reveals few secrets - but that’s how we want it. Let the mystery be.