Tracehold by Schedra

Tracehold is not just sound; it’s the echo of a forgotten breath, the grit underfoot in a village swallowed whole. We tracked the Night of Four Shadows across the Outmark, that silent effacement of a border settlement, erasing lives from the very soil they stood upon. It was a harrowing score to lay down, really, listening to the drone feeds decay, seeing those skeletal traces disappear, moment by moment.

You’ll hear it in the anxious interplay of stone chimes and marimba, mapped to the fading aerials. That tension, the constant dread of the Tracefolk as they raced against the Courseries’ cold hand, trying to pull memory from the vanishing land before it was truly gone. We ran contact mics on everything—boots scuffing the studio floor, the brush of canvas, just to get that visceral sense of presence, the quiet footfall of scavengers. The wind harps, built from salvaged wire and bone, carry the mournful whispers of what’s left behind, weaving through the percussive patterns. It blurs, that line between the sound of the memory and the memory itself. Is that a rotted board collapsing, or the ghost of a door shutting for the last time? It’s hard to tell, and that’s the point.

For us, making *Tracehold* was a kind of desperate ritual. We were carving out a space for remembrance when the world itself was trying to forget. There's a moment, after the full weight of erasure descends – when the prepared snares and metal percussion just give way – where the silence feels like a physical void. But then, finding that hidden Guide Reel… projecting those lost images back onto the flaking walls of the Lattice, seeing echoes of that village flicker to life. It was a communal gasp, a defiance against the void. The handclaps in "Ash Marked, Never Gone" aren’t just rhythm; they’re the pulse of collective memory, a shared promise: 'What’s remembered leaves a mark.' It’s tactile, that track, almost infectious, a reminder that defiance can be found even in a simple, stubborn beat.

This album, it’s our dedication to the ones lost, and to the relentless work of holding onto what fades. Every hit, every field recording, is an archive, a fragile effigy against the tide. It's about how sound can become a monument, a stubborn refusal to let memory be erased. We hope it resonates, deep inside, and makes you, too, a keeper of what even memory cannot save.

Rusty transducers, weathered mallets, and salvaged field recordings – we harvest the whispers of abandoned places, transforming decay into deliberate rhythm. Every performance maps sonic archaeology through patient percussion. Listen for the ghosts we've documented.