Vampyric Screams… arrives disguised as a collection of supernatural horror, but its vampires are difficult to locate. There are no capes, castles, theatrical organs, or obvious black-metal gestures holding these six cassettes together. Instead, the box approaches vampirism as a process of extraction. History is drained into rumor. Human remains become archaeological data. Political murder becomes television footage. Folklore survives by feeding on real violence, while recorded sound feeds on places, documents, images, and bodies that can no longer answer back.
Released by Hospital Productions in 2015, the box gathers six separate programs by Alberich, Âmes Sanglantes, Dust Belt, Empty DNA, Geography of Hell, and Prurient. Each artist receives an entire cassette, giving the project a broader shape than an ordinary compilation. These are not isolated tracks arranged to demonstrate a scene. Each tape establishes its own sealed environment, and the full box becomes a sequence of chambers connected by recurring images of burial, blood, ruins, political collapse, archaic identity, and corrupted memory.
The packaging encourages the listener to treat the set as one object, but the music refuses a single genre. Alberich contributes over fifty minutes of disciplined power electronics. Âmes Sanglantes supplies a vast two-part industrial ritual. Dust Belt moves through archaeological vocabulary and rural death. Empty DNA constructs an entire imagined lineage from short electronic pieces. Geography of Hell transforms the execution of Nicolae Ceaușescu into environmental dread. Prurient closes the set with bodily noise, distorted electronics, and images of vulnerability sharpened into threat.
Alberich’s The Cave Allegory opens the box with two long sections. The title invokes Plato’s image of prisoners who mistake shadows for reality because shadows are all they have ever been permitted to see. In Alberich’s hands, the allegory loses its classroom clarity. There is no clean ascent from illusion into enlightenment. Repetition, electronics, distorted rhythm, and sustained pressure create a space where the difference between the cave and the outside world may no longer matter.
Alberich, the project of Kris Lapke, often builds music from military discipline, rigid sequencing, and power-electronic force. Here the familiar martial element is present but partially buried inside a long-form structure. Pulses repeat with mechanical patience, distorted textures gather around them, and the music advances without producing conventional development. Its movement resembles conditioning rather than travel.
The two-part division gives The Cave Allegory a false suggestion of progress. Part One does not simply establish a problem that Part Two resolves. Both sections occupy the same conceptual prison. New details enter, but every apparent opening leads into another enclosed zone. The listener is not educated out of the cave. The listener is trained to recognize its architecture.
Âmes Sanglantes follows with Procreation on Gravestones, another work divided across both sides of a cassette. The title is a perfect summary of the box’s relationship between death and continuation. Procreation ordinarily promises a future. Gravestones mark lives already concluded. Joining them suggests life feeding directly upon death, desire enacted on top of memory, or generations reproducing without escaping the violence beneath them.
The recording is immense and slow, extending for more than ninety minutes. Rather than attack continuously, Âmes Sanglantes allows low drones, distant metallic movement, and heavily degraded textures to gather with almost geological patience. The piece feels less composed than exhumed. Sounds rise gradually as though pressure beneath the ground were forcing them toward the surface.
Its length makes listening physical. Small changes acquire enormous importance because the surrounding environment remains so restrained. A shift in frequency can feel architectural. A distant impact can suggest a body moving somewhere beyond visibility. The tape format intensifies this effect. The listener eventually reaches the end of the first side, turns the cassette, and enters another portion of the same burial ground.
Dust Belt’s contribution is far more divided, consisting of ten separate tracks with titles such as “False Horizon,” “Ethnic Primordialism,” “Systematic Fieldwalking,” “Interpretations of Mass Graves,” and “Right Fourth Sternal Rib Used to Estimate Age.” The vocabulary is taken from archaeology, forensic anthropology, nationalism, excavation, and the study of human remains. Romantic vampirism is replaced by the physical labor of digging.
The tape repeatedly moves between landscape and evidence. A horizon appears, but may be false. Fieldwalking sounds pastoral until it is placed beside mass graves. Back gardens become possible burial sites. Ribs become tools for estimating age. The body is no longer a mysterious vessel of spirit. It is a damaged record from which trained observers attempt to reconstruct identity and circumstance.
Dust Belt’s shorter pieces give the cassette the form of a research notebook. Each track isolates another site or method, yet the accumulated effect is emotional rather than academic. Electronics, treated field recordings, noise, and sparse rhythm create a landscape haunted by procedures designed to make the dead legible.
“The Dawn of Wallachia” draws the tape directly toward the historical region most heavily associated with Western vampire mythology. Wallachia enters popular culture through Vlad the Impaler and the later Dracula tradition, but Dust Belt places the name among mass graves and excavation techniques. Folklore is returned to soil, bone, territorial conflict, and the historical production of ethnic identity.
“Ethnic Primordialism” is especially important. The term refers to the belief that ethnic identities are ancient, natural, and fixed rather than historically produced. Within the box, this fantasy of pure blood becomes another form of vampirism. The past is drained of complexity so that its remains can be used to authorize the present.
Empty DNA’s tape carries this concern into a more synthetic and melodic form. Its twelve tracks include “White Fire,” “Archaic Speech,” “Memory of Venice,” “Three Bloodlines,” “Overgrown Watchtower,” “Crescent Lock,” and “Present Day Romania.” The titles resemble fragments from an unfinished historical fantasy, but the music avoids grand cinematic drama.
Compact electronic pieces move through repeating patterns, faint melodies, processed textures, and rhythm that occasionally approaches industrial techno without fully entering the club. Empty DNA creates an imagined cultural memory from incomplete signals. Nothing is presented with enough detail to become a complete narrative. Instead, each track behaves like an emblem found without its explanatory text.
The name Empty DNA suggests inheritance after content has been removed. The structure remains capable of carrying identity, but what it once transmitted has disappeared. This suits the tape’s obsession with bloodlines, ruins, old speech, swords, watchtowers, and modern Romania. Historical identity is repeatedly invoked, yet every source appears partially vacant.
“Three Bloodlines” is the cassette’s clearest link to vampirism, but blood is treated as genealogy rather than gore. A bloodline organizes descent, belonging, exclusion, and the fantasy that identity can remain pure across generations. Empty DNA surrounds that fantasy with electronic emptiness. The lineage continues, but its certainty has been hollowed out.
“Present Day Romania” closes the tape by collapsing the distance between medieval image and contemporary geography. Romania is not permitted to remain a Gothic dream manufactured for outsiders. The phrase insists upon a current nation existing beneath and beyond Dracula tourism, Cold War imagery, Ceaușescu, ruined architecture, and imported fantasies of the East.
Geography of Hell turns toward one exact event: December 25, 1989, Târgoviște. That date and location identify the execution of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife Elena after a hurried military trial during the Romanian Revolution. Their deaths were filmed, photographed, broadcast, repeated, and absorbed into the global image economy of collapsing communism.
The two-part recording does not dramatize the execution through dialogue or narrative reconstruction. Geography of Hell works through environmental sound, low-frequency movement, distant activity, and uneasy spatial detail. The location matters more than an explanatory account. Târgoviște becomes a coordinate where political theater, military procedure, public vengeance, and media documentation converge.
The project’s name describes its method. Hell is not treated as a supernatural location beneath the earth. It has addresses, landscapes, buildings, weather, traffic, rooms, and microphones. Evil is geographic because violence always occurs somewhere. A political image can circulate globally, but the body still falls at one particular site.
Placing the Ceaușescu execution inside a box called Vampyric Screams… produces a complicated relation between dictator and vampire. Ceaușescu’s state extracted labor, obedience, information, and fear from the population. After his death, media systems extracted images from his body. The executed ruler became another spectacle consumed by audiences far from the conditions that produced him.
Prurient’s closing cassette brings the box back to private flesh. Tracks such as “Hanging Ivy,” “Skeleton Tort,” “Boy Trap,” “Inflatable Bag,” “Young Penis,” “Long Fingers,” “Stinging Nettles,” and “Female Replica” combine bodily images, plants, sexual vulnerability, artificial substitution, and physical restraint. Dominick Fernow’s electronics move between abrasive bursts, crude rhythm, damaged synthesis, and passages that seem ready to collapse into silence.
Where Geography of Hell concentrates on public political death, Prurient works through smaller images of entrapment and exposure. “Boy Trap” and “Young Penis” are deliberately uncomfortable titles, presenting masculinity not as authority but as something vulnerable to capture, injury, desire, and shame. “Female Replica” introduces the artificial body, an image of femininity reconstructed as object or replacement.
The music does not connect these titles through a stable story. Prurient’s strength lies in producing emotional continuity from fragments that remain unresolved. Noise is used as abrasion, but also as concealment. Rhythm appears, then deteriorates. Synthesizer lines carry traces of beauty before distortion strips away their safety.
“Hanging Ivy” returns the set to overgrowth and ruins. Ivy beautifies a decaying structure while contributing to its destruction. It is both decoration and parasite, another natural vampire surviving through attachment. “Stinging Nettles” transforms plant life into bodily sensation. The environment touches back.
Across the full five hours, the box repeatedly removes the vampire from the individual monster. Vampirism becomes political extraction, historical appropriation, genealogy, archaeological invasion, sexual compulsion, media consumption, and the preservation of the dead as useful imagery. Blood appears less often as liquid than as a system for organizing belonging.
The six-cassette format is essential to that argument. Each tape is a body within the larger coffin of the box. It must be removed, handled, played, turned, and returned. Listening becomes slow archival labor. There is no convenient shuffle capable of flattening the set into highlights without damaging its intended scale.
Hospital Productions had already established the cassette box as a form capable of joining obsession, scarcity, labor, and excess. Vampyric Screams… uses that form with unusual coherence. The artists do not sound alike, yet their differences create an expanding map. Alberich supplies the cave. Âmes Sanglantes supplies the graveyard. Dust Belt excavates the bones. Empty DNA imagines what those bones inherited. Geography of Hell identifies the execution site. Prurient returns the entire history to exposed nerves and private bodies.
The title’s ellipsis is appropriate. These are not the screams themselves, neatly delivered and identified. They are what continues after the scream: echo, report, excavation, image, folklore, recording, and the appetite of another generation searching through the remains.
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