Welcome back to our final stop in our Wrock Tour ‘Round the World, as we look at a band from America’s Hat, also known as Canadia! Wait, if Canada is America’s Hat, then is Alaska the dumb ponytail that comes out of the back of the trucker hat? Is Alaska America’s Ponytail? DID I JUST SOLVE ALASKA?!?!

Well, regardless of whether or not I solved that most confounding of states since the state of confusion, I do have a great old wrock band for you to check out – Essence of Dittany! Essence of Dittany is the side-project of The Vanishing Cabinet, who you might know from putting together the old Wrock Against Bullying charity comp, which was released back in the heyday of wizard rock comps (remember back when we got Voldemedia, Letters from Hogwarts, Wrock Against Bullying, and the first Wizards and Muggles all in the space of a few months? Great times indeed). Whereas The Vanishing Cabinet is your rather run-of-the-mill acoustic wrock, Essence of Dittany is something else entirely – electronic instrumental music, reminiscent of what a low-fi Icon of Coil mixed with the inimitable Homestuck catalogue (and a dash of Homework-era Daft Punk) would sound like.

This is not your poppy Ministry of Magic electronica, nor is it your melodic Luna’s Ceiling steampunk house electronic thing. While there is a definite sense of melody and rhythm to these tracks, Essence of Dittany is first and foremost about atmosphere, about scoring a scene and setting a mood, which makes it very similar indeed to Homestuck tracks like “Firefly Cloud“, “Austin, Atlantis“, “Rust Maid“, “Carapacian Dominion“, and “Derse Dreamers“.

Essence of Dittany is also pretty unique in that the music is all rather dark, and in some ways, their only album, “Splinch’d” (not including the split-album with The Vanishing Cabinet, A Vanishing Dittany Christmas), is the Split Seven Ways of the electronic side of wizard rock, even more so than Malfoy Manor (which is another band we’ll get to eventually). Songs like “The Riddle House” and “The House Ghosts” have an undeniable sense of dark, oppressive atmosphere, whereas songs like “Filthy Little Mudblood” have a delicious sense of dark, arrogant swagger.

My personal favorite, however, is “Dance of the Grindylows”, an eminently catchy tune that has almost no percussion but still would feel not out of place in a club. Best of all, it does what all thematic instrumental music should strive to do – create an undeniable image in the mind from the music itself – the strident pace of the song causes one to think of the grindylows, blooping about in their squid-like motions as the zoom around the lake.

Splinch’d was released for free, and probably is still hosted on mediafire somewhere, but any links to it were lost in the Great MySpace Blog Deletion of 2013. However, you can still listen to four songs of the six-song album on MySpace (click on “Music” on the left-hand sidebar to get to the fourth), and if we’re lucky, maybe someday Jenn will decide to put her music on Bandcamp or the like.

Next week, we triumphantly return home to America as we take a look at my second-favorite wizard rapper! Till then, Wrock Snob out.