Giles Corey

Giles Corey is the solo project of Have a Nice Life's Dan Barrett. First released in 2011, Giles Corey's self-titled debut is a bleak, intimate, and strangely beautiful record that turns depression, death, history, and the paranormal into something intensely personal. Over the fifteen years since it's release, Giles Corey's debut has accumulated a massive cult following, with listeners often describing their relationship with the album in the language of ritual or religious experience.

That devotion is no accident. Built largely from acoustic instrumentation, the record nevertheless feels crushing, like something unseen is pressing against every song. Guitar and piano are buried beneath ghostly choirs, heavy organ, field recordings, and sudden walls of sound, creating something that feels far larger than the sounds that make it up. Like the themes that run through the album, it possesses an uncanny quality that is difficult to explain, as though the music itself is carrying voices from somewhere just beyond reach. Songs emerge from near silence and build toward enormous cathartic outbursts, with Barrett's voice at the center of arrangements that seem constantly on the verge of swallowing him whole. Integral to Giles Corey is a 150-page book, available with select versions of this edition or separately from The Flenser. Moving between personal accounts of depression and suicide and the story of cult leader and afterlife theorist Robert Voor, the book expands the world of the album beyond the music itself. Voor also appears throughout Barrett's work, connecting Giles Corey to the lore surrounding Have a Nice Life's Deathconsciousness and Barrett's larger body of work. This new edition of Giles Corey has been remastered by Richard Chowenhill of Agriculture and includes "A Landless Earth," a bonus track never before officially released.