From Middle Pillar Presents comes the long awaited new album by ZOAR: In the Bloodlit Dark. Their follow up to the critically acclaimed 1997 release Cassandra, In the Bloodlit Dark is their “lost album” representing an expansion of the aural-cinematic style of the band.

Using classical and contemporary authors for inspiration, ZOAR crafts their songs with unorthodox frameworks and changes. Like Edgar Allen Poe, ZOAR compositions drip with texture and mood leading the listener to uncharted areas of the subconscious. Using industrial atmospherics or found natural sounds as a base - the lonely sound of trains at night, thunderstorms, the sound of waves crashing on the beach - their distinctive audio storytelling expands to include traditional musical stimuli of cello, piano and guitar which enliven the senses and enlighten the mind. With only a song title to go on, listeners create their own hallucinogenic visual inspired by the piece. In this way, ZOAR becomes our guide to other worlds that we create.

The opening track “Wisteria” establishes the cinematic qualities of In The Bloodlit Dark as a mysterious rider on horseback leads us into the lands of ZOAR with a hypnotic piano melody and piercing guitars. Suddenly we’re lost “In The Bloodlit Dark” as the title track drips with ether, a peephole into the otherworldly planes of Poe and Lovecraft. As from beyond, so too below, “Nemo” swims around us, deep in layers of underwater guitars.

An eerie haunting cello and crying guitar spins “Spiderlace”, while “Ghosts and Molecules” nightmarish vision crawls inside the skull and scurries to find to place to perch. “The Beauty of Obscenity” is a walk through a Universal horror film, laughing at you as you try to escape a dark house, each door confusing you further.

The insane laughing of “A System of Senses” takes us to “Another Sky”, as disembodied voices drift through the electrified air of a coming storm. The epic “Secrets Of The Dead” closes out ITBD with a powerful melody intensified by a dark industrial beat. The track is the re-mixed version of the theme song to the PBS television series of the same name.

ZOAR has merged the beautiful and the sinister with In The Bloodlit Dark for a listening experience like no other.

Contact Zoar