Location: Southern New Mexico
Country: USA
Genre: Experimental, ambient, electronica
Full length: ennui
Format: Digital album
Label: Independent
Release date: October 24, 2025
Besides being a musician, Marcy Angeles is also a painter, illustrator, author and journalist. Her paintings, which can be seen on her Facebook profile, are as dreamlike as her musical ventures, which are released under a variety of names I'm not sure if the different names are chosen for the sake of mystery or because they reflect the mood she’s in when recording. But from what I've heard, her work fluctuates in terms of gloom and discordant appeal, as if it stems from different sections of her psyche. So far I haven't heard the same theme more than once. Nor have I heard another musician write like her.
Angeles releases this album, titled "ennui." as The Virgin Wash. It's always agreeable when musicians find fresh ways to captivate you and ensnare you in their universe. Angeles does it by keeping her approach simple and putting healthy doses of feminine passion into it. Her range here includes goth, ambient, no wave, industrial noise, and electronic. Despite her wide variety, she does not need to be overly grandiose in her presentation, preferring to communicate her point in a straightforward manner.
On "ennui," The Virgin Wash creates repetitive, minimalist, trance-like progressions, embellishing them with hypnotic, seductive vocals and ethereal background arrangements, occasionally adding percussive pieces composed in other time measures. Guitar, bass, and percussion tracks are sometimes written at odds with one another. These arrangements are only barely perceptible, yet they seem purposefully designed to induce cognitive dissonance. Angeles relies heavily on echo and atmosphere to conjure a fog over chaotic, driven songwriting, giving impressions of a mind that is physically falling apart.
Angeles' vocals have a primitive intensity and eerie ghost-like vibrations significantly contributing to the nightmarish discord created by the instruments. Between her voice and the accompanying music, it feels as if her presence is all around you, encompassing you in its primal yearning. She has been recording since the late 2010s and appears to have mastered the art of conveying her limitless inner darkness. Or is it the ancient essence of Lilith longing for freedom? Something about her voice makes me feel as if her spirit is pushing against the barrier between our world and beyond with all she has.
The most profound use of bleak lightlessness, continuous drone, minimalism, supernaturally translucent vocals, and the psychological disharmony arising as time signatures overlap is in "List of Demands," "Petals of Eternity," "Blood Trust" and "The Performer." The ambient/electronic meeting of the tangible and mystical, visible and obscure, organic and mechanical, on "The Same Spirit," "Make Believe," and "Saccharine Petals" likewise deviates from what you could have anticipated at their outset.
I'm interested in seeing more of Angeles' paintings and reading her published works after listening to this and her earlier releases I wonder how much of her work she has published and how captivating her fiction will turn out to be. –Dave Wolff
Lineup:
Marcy Angeles: Vocals, lyrics, synthesizers, drum machines, electric guitar, bass, piano, electronics
Track list:
1. List Of Demands
2. Petals Of Eternity
3. Blood Trust
4. The Same Spirit
5. The Honey
6. Make Believe
7. Saccharine Petals
8. The Performer
9. Hotuho
10. eating the presets
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