Some records shake the walls. This one is the walls—closing in, humming, breathing heavy. Folwark’s All Shadows Stretched isn’t something you listen to. It’s something you fall into, teeth clenched. Tracked in an abandoned mine and sounding like it was possessed there, the whole thing exhales mineral dust and dread. It doesn’t play – it looms.
Folwark – Italy’s cryptic duo from the spiritually bruised belly of Umbria – have never made music for comfort. Since 2014, they’ve been digging tunnels between the sacred and the broken, channeling something feral that lives somewhere between ritual and collapse. With this album, they’ve turned empty air into a weapon. Every echo, every pause — it cuts.
Don’t let anyone file this under “experimental psychedelic rock” and call it a day. That’s a genre tag. This is fallout. Francesco Marcolini’s guitar and synth don’t guide – they stalk. Each note feels like it’s crumbling mid-flight, flaring out in bursts of texture that land more like warnings than melodies. His vocals don’t front the mix – they haunt it. Meanwhile, Tommaso Faraci’s drumming isn’t keeping time – it’s dragging it, ripping it apart, then stitching it back up with rusted wire and theremin wail. The interplay is instinctive but frayed – like something ancient trying to remember itself.
The cover art doesn’t offer relief. It’s a fever of reds and crushed florals, maybe arches, maybe skulls—nothing sits still long enough to name. It looks like a cathedral dreamt by someone on the edge of heatstroke, sacred geometry liquefied. It doesn’t explain the music – it vibrates with it. Both the painting and the sound spiral out, refusing symmetry, refusing calm. You don’t decode either. You let them take you.
All Shadows Stretched doesn’t move like an album. It uncoils. It mutates. These aren’t tracks, they’re movements – fevered, collapsing, half-remembered. You don’t walk away humming riffs. There’s nothing to hum. Just that lingering buzz in your chest and the sense that something followed you out of it. The themes – light and dark, love and collapse – aren’t metaphors here. They’re real, elemental forces. Love isn’t soft. It’s sharp. Darkness isn’t absence – it’s memory, pressure, weight.
What Folwark are doing has nothing to do with scenes, algorithms, or sonic nostalgia. They’re pulling from deeper, stranger places. Sure, you can hear echoes – early Amon Düül II, the ritual murk of ZU, maybe the dread-glow of Coil – but this isn’t mimicry. It’s alchemy. They’re not quoting their influences. They’re channeling them into something unrepeatable.
All Shadows Stretched is for late hours, low lights, headphones pressed tight. It’s for listening when the night is too thick and your thoughts start folding in. It doesn’t want your attention. It demands your surrender.
Folwark aren’t interested in being liked. They’re building their own altar. The rest of us are just stumbling forward, ears fried, still trying to name what the hell we just felt.
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Released by Octopus Rising on April 18, 2025
Music source for review – Grand Sounds PR
