Life is Art, Art is Life is songwriting duo Dominique Golden and Nik Clifford’s latest offering as SILKess Demon, and it marks a departure from their previous work as art-pop darlings and posits them deep in the heart of the folk-horror briar.
Life is Art, Art is Life is an assemblage of trad. detritus that juxtaposes finely latticed guitar playing with field recordings, haunting flute and primitive electronics in a memory-loop of Alan Garner/ Alan Clarke-style visions of Britain’s native music suffused with dread and obscure ritual.
SILKess Demon amplify the abstruse details of folk culture – the drizzling rain and the jangling ankle bells at the Morris dance, the decrepit fidelity of the old Topic LPs – emphasising its carnality and loneliness as much as its communality. It’s an approach that recalls Throbbing Gristle as much as their Hull counterparts, The Watersons. Indeed, Candle in a Cave sounds like TG’s Hamburger Lady with its lo-fi keyboard and backwards vocal giving expression to the ceaseless churning of an unwinding mind. Similarly, Playing in a Cloud is a flute solo in a moving car, soundtracked by the click-clack of windscreen wipers and the melancholy woosh of surrounding traffic.
But it’s not all sword-pentagrams and gum-peeling anxiety. Wyrd Attercop Poised has the spiralised cadence of a medieval madrigal. Whilst On the Manor Ship is a gorgeous acapella song which sounds like it’s been improvised into an answering machine in the manner of one of Captain Beefheart’s interludes on Trout Mask Replica transplanted to Romney Marsh. Ring Weeps Too Much has a similar sense of abandonment, as if singer, Dominique Golden, has fallen in love with the phonetic feeling of language in her mouth and it’s pouring out in a Joycean torrent where expression shortcuts meaning, or achieves a heightened, sensual meaning unencumbered by formal syntax. Elsewhere, Canal Chair Bone House is a slurred and willowy folk miniature, as open-hearted and raw as anything on Anne Briggs The Time Has Come album. And closing track Ring Weep Weep Ring is more redolent of SILKess Demon’s previous albums, with tumbling drums and electric guitars adding some thunder and lightening to their folk idyll.
Life is Art, Art is Life is a timely throw-back to an era in recent British history when the far-right were marching to seize control over the heart of a nation that they felt had been compromised by foreign immigrants and soft-left complacency. This racist unrest failed to acknowledge that the very people who were leading the charge were the same people who were dismantling the public services in the communities that created the sense of disenfranchisement. It feels like a John Barleycorn-style folk-curse that we are back in the same bog of eternal stench now, but with the aggressive algorithmic distortion of reality in 2026. I guess what I’m trying to say is, thank Pan for the quiet victories of the self-released, self-recorded creative works of neurotic, folk-inflected artistry such as these that helps make Britain bearable again.
Life is Art, Art is Life (May 11, 2026) Pearl Home Records
Digital/Lathe cut 12inch vinyl – https://silkessdemon.bandcamp.com/album/life-is-art-art-is-life