Miasma & The Carousel of Headless Horses are a British instrumental quintet that plays dark, antiquated sounding music encompassing elements of Eastern European folk, avant-rock, broken-down calliope music, and neo-classical film composition. In keeping with outsider tradition, their music can only be compared to many artists at once: In this case Angelo Badalamenti, Astor Piazzolla, Goblin, Art Bears, Les Baxter, Tom Waits, Sparks, King Crimson, Bach and Univers Zero. More a trip to an anachronistic world of neo-baroque psychedelia than a simple study in diced-up eclecticism, the music on “Perils” sways between lush chamber orientated melancholia, apocalyptic bombast, and epic ghost train high-drama.

The group consists of Daniel O'Sullivan and Dave Smith perform together in the avant-progressive noise rock band Guapo; O'Sullivan also plays in Æthenor with Stephen O'Malley and moonlights in the live line-up of Sunn O))); Orlando Harrison plays with pop band, Alabama 3 and is a main contributor to the improvised group, Amal Gamal Ensemble (featuring members of Coil and Cyclobe); Leo Smee plays in Cathedral and Chrome Hoof and Sara Hubrich who travels around Europe collaborating with the likes of Brian Eno, Heiner Goebbels, and Fran Barbe. Miasma & the Carousel of Headless Horses are, to say the very least, a striking sounding ensemble. With their Harmoniums, Autoharps, Violins, Violas, Pianos, Organs and Glockenspiels added to a top of the line rhythm section, the band very deliberately adheres to a Faustian melodrama of the angelic. Their dark, harrowing visions of some dense hellish musico-psychological dystopia shapeshift frequently before your eyes (ears), and become a very capable and Elizabethan sounding prog-baroque meteorite at the drop of a hat. Armed with these anachronistic tendencies the Miasmic vision never deviates, deriving its vocabulary exclusively from alchemically lined volumes in their arcane library of musical ideas.

The “Perils” recordings weave together a folkloric brew of masonic superstitions, alchemy, carnival mysticism, and lycanthropy creating a horror that is as unnervingly calculated and cerebral as it is deeply hypnotic and psychedelic. Relentless jazz inflected percussion and driving bass underpin a massive dynamic range of cascading piano, warbling organs, dexterous guitar anomalies and mesmerising violin melodies. Spooky chromatic themes nod to the hellish visions of Katherine Dunne (Geek Love) and Hans Bellmer whilst swooping grandiloquent refrains bring to mind the scores of Krzysztof Komeda and Ennio Morricone. Amidst the maelstrom are whispering voices from astral regions, a cackling dwarf, and the deaths-head tolling distant bells. Miasma have created the soundtrack to a nightmare that only the imaginations of Fritz Lang and Jan Svankmajer could conjure. Unique in their anachronistic tendencies, Miasma have taken secret histories and transcribed them into their own oblique musical invocations.

Source : http://www.riseaboverecords.com/artists/riseabove/miasma/