Murder Ballads [Incest Songs] by Mick Harris & Martyn Bates
Martyn Bates who is primarily known for his Eyeless in Ghaza project and Mick Harris who has been gloriously overactive since his tenure in grind-core founding fathers of Napalm Death through free jazz noise core of Naked City and post-industrial rhythmical meanderings in now (supposedly but who knows) defunct Scorn and many other projects have been working together for quite a while now and it is not their first outing.
A glorious combination of Martyn’s poetic vocals and Mick’s accompanying sinister and post-isolationist electronic ambience create a perfect blend of elusiveness, poetry and something else.
It is a dialogue between two mature artists and there is no single sound here that is not utilised to its full potential.
An architecture of murmurs, purrs, interference and hypnotic slow movements and subtleties. An eerie sadness and stillness of unmatched quality.
Following Murder Ballads [Drift] Volume 1 (SRV506)
and Murder Ballads [Passages] Volume 2, (SRV514)
here is the last chapter of the trilogy:
Murder Ballads [Incest Songs] Volume 3 (SRV510).
First time on LP vinyl.
Incest Songs is the final chapter of the Murder Ballads trilogy, and its most fully realized expression. Where Drift and Passages explored the post-isolationist frame through voice and single instrument, this third volume dispenses with that approach entirely, opening instead onto a more labyrinthine sonic architecture - one built from overlapping, saturating, blurring voices, all of them Martyn Bates'. The decision feels both inevitable and quietly inspired. Bates' vocalizations unfold as layered calls and responses, muted and distant echoes, sung whispers and counter-melodies, ultimately resolving into a mesmeric conversation of musical inferences and correspondences. There is a mellifluous, dream-like quality to the whole - infused with that characteristic stillness that slow, hypnotic unfolding of gossamer subtlety - yet never quite losing a certain drugged, disquieting beauty beneath its surface.
Incest Songs pushes the post-isolationist form further out than either
of its predecessors, innovating and extemporising with a dazzling
assurance. And yet, remarkably, this remains a territory still almost
entirely unexplored by other artists - the sole province, it seems, of
M.J. Harris and Martyn Bates.
As Bates himself reflects: "I feel, in personal terms listening to it, I think it's easy to detect that the whole thing has been a truly exhilarating experience for the both of us, realising and developing this strange, sublime creature of ours and now I guess it's up to others to take up the challenge, to build on what we've done and I think that there are still SO MANY fantastic possibilities "
credits
released May 26, 2026
"May she comes and May she goes..."
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