AOTW | 6 February – 12 February: Sandtimer – Leave with Us
Leave with Us takes up one of the saddest yet most fascinating parts of early Internet history: the Heaven’s Gate cult. In 1997, thirty-eight members of the cult committed ritual suicide at the behest of their leader Marshall Applewhite – who, true to his calling, died with his followers. Heaven’s Gate believed that earth “was about to be recycled” (as quoted from Applewhite himself), and that humanity’s only chance to escape was to catch a spaceship that coincided with the flyby of Comet Hale-Bopp, which completes a circuit around the Sun approximately once every 4400 years. It’s a story that is absolutely ripe for the dreampunk treatment. As we stated in our review on Sunbleach, HKE – operating here as Sandtimer – pulls it off with aplomb via a twenty-five-minute epic of pulsating electronica, samples from Applewhite’s initiation tapes, and decaying glitches. We semi-featured Leave with Us as a part of our Nirvana Port feature in November 2016, but it’s just so good that it’s worth featuring again.
Read the Sunbleach review here, and check out the music below: