Slaughter In The DogHouse - You Shower In Blood

by Gerald Gibson
(Portland, Oregon, United States of America)

Derek Leslie and Elad Muskatel are both string bass players.

Their duo, Slaughter in The DogHouse has no strings (but lots of bass). The two present an experimental concept, sitting in front of a few guitar pedals each, and using as a sound source, oddly enough, a dog barking on a YouTube video.

You Shower In Blood by Slaughter In The DogHouse

They manage to showcase a virtuoso control of the pedals and unique, unified compositional skills that make these altered dog barkings into a thick wall of dynamically shifting sounds, most as remote from a dog bark as from a string bass.

The audible landscapes generated by the pedals paint places from the human consciousness, places of dark apocalypse; of human suffering, of a never ending war; of our world falling apart by our own hands, and then for moments the sound picture shows a distant place in outer space; perhaps a point in the universe where energy moves differently, where life as we know it is insignificant.

“This part almost sounds like the sea.” But it’s not the sea. It’s dogs barking.

The textures keep on shifting, the dynamics keep on descending and ascending, and my imagination is sending me back and forth between different places in my organic brain.

A drone, sounding like some kind of a war machine, is accelerating into a zigzag rhythm, and boom! the blood shower is over.

“You shower in blood” is without a doubt a unique release. With an emotional intuition that reminds me of the works of Morton Feldman and early Schoenberg, all coming from such a seemingly simple source.

I would either bet that the two had involved more elements than just dogs and pedals, or would have to admit that the two are simply brilliant. This question will be resolved when I’ll see them play live, on my next visit to New York City.