Hot Salvation

Kristen Gallerneaux is back at McClintic, in the domes again. Disembodied voices echo and swirl, accompanied by an increasingly feral grind. The backwoods industrial beat builds in intensity. Then, deep in it, but still clearly audible, "I'm trying to get..."

'Tryin’ to Get' - the second single and video from Kristen's forthcoming full-length, The McClintic Chorus - is a deeply haunted, head-caving bass-shuffle, a murky, textured mixture of human-made technologies contending with dense layers of nature and folklore in as tangible a way as Kristen can muster through beats. A triumph of un-scripted narrative, communication through pure sound and vision.

"It's about giving yourself over to chaos," Kristen says. "I always go to these spaces trying to represent some pure thing, but all the randomness of the place seeps in, and makes everything better. The literal and historical grit of the TNT domes, and our presence in them, becomes as integral a part of the captured soundscape as the nature that bleeds in from outside. There's a richness there that's better than anything I could have captured in isolation."

As with much of The McClintic Chorus, 'Tryin' to Get' translates Appalachian psychogeography and folklore into deep industrial and dub-inspired techno. Often manifesting as self-styled (and a bit tongue-in-cheek) "hospital ambient" and "backwoods industrial" soundworlds, The McClintic Chorus charts Kristen's field work and recordings in the old TNT domes nestled in the McClintic Wildlife Management Area near Point Pleasant, West Virginia, examining the lasting effects of a wartime manufacturing facility on the natural environment, local superstition, and - more universally - the impact of human phenomena on rural places.