** Pressed on Opaque Red vinyl. Layered, gloss overprint on matte gatefold, showing an anatomical drawing. Design and concept by Alonso Urbanos ** Few releases excavate the crypt as deftly as Schloss Tegal’s The Grand Guignol, an album that yokes terror to inquiry, pulling back the curtains of civilization to expose the primal mechanics beneath. Drawing inspiration from the notorious Parisian theater that immortalized grotesquerie, The Grand Guignol becomes less a pastiche and more a living archive, capturing the cold sweat of anticipation just as the axe is raised. Across its ten tracks, the album refuses cinematic bombast, instead conjuring menace in restrained swells: synthesized textures coil like smoke, field recordings pulse with forensic intent, and the specter of the unseen looms ever at the periphery.

The opening moments - ambient dread and spectral voices crawling out of static - set a tone of clinical unease. “Meatgaze (Gnillik)” and “The Cannibal” pile on unease through repetition as much as revelation, creating spaces where the mind’s eye conjures terrors more vivid than any explicit depiction. Rather than shock with volume, the record delivers its blows with measured, surgical precision; each sonic inflection is considered, as if arranged by a mortician intent on preserving the integrity of horror itself. The experience is immersive, not repellent - gruesome, yes, but in service of a larger meditation on the boundaries between audience and spectacle, perpetrator and witness.

In later tracks, fragments of unsettling melody emerge before being quickly subsumed by churning low frequencies and the ever-present hiss of something mechanically alive. The result is an album that navigates trauma’s echo, drawing from phonic sources both archival and imagined. Much as the original Grand Guignol blurred art and atrocity, Schloss Tegal charts a space where the listener is both voyeur and participant. This is sonic Grand Guignol transposed from Paris’ blood-splattered stage to the recesses of the subconscious. Here, ambience transforms into evidence, dread becomes doctrine, and articulated horror is simply the entry point to a darker, deeper hypnosis.