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All Mine Enemys Whispers - The Story of Mary Ann Cotton

by ATTRITION

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Robert Wallace
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Robert Wallace Creepy...will get under your skin and play with your emotions...love it. Favorite track: What Shall I Sing?.
rikm
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rikm Haunting and unsettling "All Mine Enemys Whispers" finds Attrition at their evocative and cinematic best, making dark music for scary nights.

An especially impressive installment in a very impressive catalog of work...
Jsinner
Jsinner thumbnail
Jsinner All the uneasiness, scariness and unsettling atmosphere. All ramped up when listened to at night.

This album is described as the "musical exploration of the life and death of Mary Ann Cotton", which is extremely accurate. Favorite track: The Trial.
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    Limited edition digi pack version with 4 reproduction Victorian poison bottle stickers inside... use them on your medecine or spice jars :)

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    Includes a free download of the 8 track "Introduction to ATTRITION, with a selection of tracks from our 40 year career

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The Trial 06:35
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about

The Story.

Mary Ann Cotton was born October 1832 in County Durham , Northern England .
Possibly the greatest female mass murderer Britain has ever known, she left a trail of death throughout her life, killing between 16 to 21 of her children and former husbands over many years by arsenic poisoning .
She was eventually arrested, tried and hanged in Durham Jail on the 24th March 1873.
The Police officer that arrested Mary Ann Cotton was a Sergeant Tom McCutcheon.
Coincidentally, his daughter, Louisa McCutcheon, had worked for a while for Mary as a seamstress..
On departing for Durham jail Mary gave Louisa her prized sewing box as the only way she could now pay her for her work…
The sewing box was kept in Louisa's family and passed down through the generations.
Rather uneasily considering what it represented…
My own father met a by then very old Louisa when he was a young child in the 1940's
- He recently recounted this story and passed on the box on to me.
Louisa McCutcheon was my great great great aunt….

Martin Bowes. 2007

credits

released July 18, 2008

Originally released on Projekt records in 2008.

Attrition - All mine enemys whispers - review from Key 64

There are tones and ranges of sound that can channel emotional response directly into one's consciousness... Rhythmic entrainment and psychoacoustics are capable of eliciting specific emotional responses and constructing narrative experience. Few musicians are able to construct tracks in such a way as to accomplish this feat successfully, and fewer still are able to sustain such an experience across an entire album.

Attrition is certainly one of those few.. this is easily the most unsettling album I've heard in years, as deeply disturbing as anything I've come across in any piece of media. The album's six tracks are spaces against which the mind unfolds the full tale of Mary Ann Cotton, a soundtrack conjuring her essence. If any sequence of music has a chance of evoking a specific entity, this is the one.
It begins with an evokation, the children's rhyme that opens the very first track

"Mary Ann Cotton, She's dead and she's rotten
She lies in her bed, With her eyes wide open
Sing, sing, oh, what can I sing,
Mary Ann Cotton is tied up with string
Where, where? Up in the air
Sellin' black puddens a penny a pair."

Legend has it that When the walls are thin between the world of the living and the dead on Halloween, reciting this rhyme over her grave was enough to call the spirits of those she'd killed to audible experience. Whispers of long dead children are heard, bemoaning their painful deaths at her hands.

In those days, arsenic was often used for murder but few were as prolific, or as reviled, as Britain's Mass Murderess Mary Ann Cotton by the time she was publicly executed. (One particularly interesting bit of trivia, newspapers had deliberately coarsened Mary Ann's features in what is likely the earliest incidents of airbrushing.)

At first listen this may seem like a soundtrack to a horror film, but this album is much more intentional and holds up to repeated listening in ways a soundtrack never could, subservient as they generally are to the director's vision--rather, this is a evocation of the essence of Mary Ann Cotton's story, linked by way of the sewing box she once held in her hand.

Martin Bowes great great great aunt Louisa McCutheon, a seamstress, recieved as payment from Mary Ann Cotton a sewing box, prior to her incarceration and subsequent public execution in March of 1873. This same sewing box can now be heard on track five, 'played' by Martin Bowes to provide texture to one of the most moving tracks on the cd.

The first track, "What shall i sing?" is available for download via Attrition's website , and provides a stunning introduction to this piece of work, but my favorite track is easily the fifth. A chilling piece entitled "The Gates of Eternity" split into two sections, i. A short Drop and ii. Rock of Ages , an incredible ten and a half minute track that sumons Cotton's public execution to the mind's eye while conjuring wind and ghosts through Bowes' soundscaping and Erica Mulkey's complex cello arrangement of Mary Ann Cotton's self-professed favorite hymnal. Emilie Autumn's vocals on ii.Rock of Ages manage to be both purifying and lost, a melodic anchor that fleshes out the mental construct the entire album creates.

The album comes to a close with the sixth track, "Heaven is my home or the other side of Jordan..." an auditory experience of the veils of space and time ripping apart to reveal some glorious afterlife and the deep fabric of souls wailing in harmonics outside of human hearing. This is an album you feel as much as hear, an album of dark ambient neoclassical compositions constructed both acoustically and electronically by a master of the craft.

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ATTRITION UK

official page for legendary UK dark industrial electronic act ATTRITION

"Forever there will be the speculation that the exploration of darkness as a beautiful place will lessen our fear of it all, ease the pain a little..."

" Creating and exploring rich shadowy electronic soundscapes...interweaving the ephemeral with the operatic, the sound can at once calm your soul and chill your bones..."
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