Gosha Hniu wrote to send us his Iká (RAASH RECORDS RCA016) cassette, where he teamed up with Mexican guitarist Miguel Pérez and called themselves The Skull Mask. Guitar and hurdy-gurdy – also called the “wheel lyre” in the notes – on two long-form excursions, both captured at live events.
On the August 2022 item, recorded at Cafe Oto in London, it’s as if Sun City Girls slowed down their natural instincts for high-speed murder, and visited even lesser known parts of the Arab world on their exotic voyages. Or the alternate soundtrack for an Iranian science fiction movie beset with purple foliage. Tremendous invention from Hniu and Pérez, who keep finding new ways to restate their droney themes and lifting yet another lid to uncover a new secret compartment in their instruments. You’ll believe a guitar can also be used to store magic potions, and the hurdy-gurdy can make dead bones dance.
Three days later they swooped down into the Supernormal Festival. I have never assisted at this event, but I assume it’s a foregathering of warm and friendly freakish types, and I expect that The Skull Mask must have exceeded all expectations. This second performance gets my vote as it’s more impassioned and much more unpredictable, conveying the sense of a wheel spinning off its hinges and mutating into a multi-tentacled monster. And the sounds are also weirder. The hurdy-gurdy seems to be whining like the siren on a spaceship, and Pérez is reinventing himself as the best acoustic guitarist who never had a record on Tacoma.
Both Gosha Hniu and Miguel Pérez are part of the Staraya Derevnya collective, a combo of improvisers often producing open-ended porous music of such cavernous space that you could live in it. From 15 May 2023.