Monolith Cocktail Blog

ALBUM REVIEW/Graham Domain

Welcoming the newest contributor to the Monolith Cocktail fold, musician and artist Graham Domain joins our team in 2022. The offspring of Scott Walker and David Slyvian, Graham has charmed us with his plaintive adroit music for years, and so we’re happy to have him on board. Here then is Graham’s inaugural review to kick off the New Year. 

Omega Institute ‘Panic Mount’
(Liquid Library) Available Now

Panic Mount is the debut tape release by Omega Institute via Liquid Library. The Bristol Experimental Four Piece provide 6 tracks of Night Terror Jazz and Plastic Faced Clown Fear Hauntology to soundtrack those lonely winter nights where you find yourself all dressed up with nowhere to go – alien abduction an attractive option.

Reminiscent in parts of early Factory releases where the atrocities of a severe Industrial past seem to lurk in the walls of the music (think Winter Hill by ACR). ‘Spine Ellipsis’ provides a good example, the improvised music soon succumbing to a drop in temperature as a cold spectral sound bleeds into the mix as though played back from the fabric of the old building itself.

‘Pulse Ritual’, meanwhile, starts off like a sci-fi space theme by the Barry Gray Orchestra before it slowly becomes engulfed by a flock of squawking space birds and forced to crash-land on a dead planet. This one is my favourite tracks on the album.

‘Power Imbalance’ features psychedelic drones and hypnotic drums as the landscape into which a lone cornet wanders lost and forlorn while cold synth oscillations compete for centre stage.

The final track, ‘Jupiter Square Ascendant’ finds Louis Armstrong taken on board a UFO and questioned by mind probe where he is only able to scream out his answers in the language of jazz cornet.

A challenging but rewarding album. The music sounds great on headphones and would undoubtedly sound fantastic played through a large PA system perhaps as a precursor to the entrance of any decent band.