“A collection of vivid and expertly executed cues crying out to be used in a real film”
Electronic Sound Magazine

“Part Lynchian time-loop nightmare, pretty shimmers complement perfectly a strange sense of dread”
Underscore Magazine


Anonymous UK electronic act Pram of Dogs return to Phantom Limb’s Spirituals imprint with their third album Cantus Lapides, an industrial-choral record of splendour, corruption, grace, and desolation.

Pram of Dogs is a project born from an obsession with archival choir recordings, forgotten film scores, eschatology, and cult cinema. New album Cantus Lapides sees the project expand to its flexible, occasional mode as a duo, both musicians revealing the rare biographical detail that they enjoy respectable careers in composition for film and television, but, true to form, their identities remain undisclosed.

Cantus Lapides is described as “a requiem for a dying empire, set in a blasted, ossified landscape where a vast city state once stood.” Its sonics range from bleak to beautiful, descending further into discordance and gloom than their previous records, but always able to shine coloured and shimmering lights into the darkness to redress the balance. Its strange, jittery glitching appears like stargate broadcasts, enshrouded in psychotropic fog.

Appropriately, the record was born from heavy emotional states. “Countless hours of multitracking vocals and piecing together harmonies took a toll on my mind,” they write. “The record sings a dying world into being, capturing both its beauty and horror.”

Opener and single “I” (every track is named for its place in the sequence, given only a Roman numeral) begins with spinning luminescent brilliances as a watery, garbled voice sings from beyond a distant veil. It proceeds like this, haunting and pretty, until a moment of darkness cuts the scene dead and any escaping mote of prettiness is sucked into the apocalyptic greyscale portal of the track’s coda.

Later in the record, “IV” is a deathly elegy, monochromatic and churchly, powerfully redolent of Pram of Dogs’ dying world with slo-mo choirs singing not as angels but as ghosts. It plays like a cinematic Disintegration Loop, a scene of despair and elegance as one.

Pram of Dogs join Nigerian violist Ibukun Sunday, Georgian electronic artist Beqa Ungiadze, South Korean solo drummer Chloe Kim 김예지, Spain’s ambient pioneers Suso Saíz and Menhir, Iranian-American composer Aria Rostami, Taiwanese noise artist Imryll, acclaimed cellist / Jewish music historian Francsesca Ter-Berg and UK ambient musicians Dylan Henner and Dau on Phantom Limb’s Spirituals imprint, a new sub-label offering works of high grade, emotive ambient and experimental music from emerging artists from across the world.