These devious Polish gentlemen came up with an ambient work of twin dronescapes, one seemingly filled with lightness and the other its dark mirror-opposite doppelganger. Yet all is not completely black-and-white: the darker twin turns out not to be all that menacing but instead offering perhaps another view of the worlds offered by its blander sibling, one more nuanced and all the more fascinating, mysterious and substantial.

The music on the first half of the second track “Substrate B” is the more interesting as the sounds can be quite loud and clear yet soft and fading to near-nothingness at the same time, and the music’s texture extends to fuzz, almost noise in parts. Perhaps the strength of the album lies in the two musicians’ ability to shape their sonic universe in a way that makes it vast and weighty, deep and complex, yet capable of very subtle, small change that can lead to the entire cosmos becoming transformed.

In their respective musical universes Dylan Carlson (Earth) and Kevin Martin aka The Bug have been stretching the limits of what’s possible for nearly 30 years and have found paths to horizons previously unknown. Fate decreed they should meet each other through various wormholes and work together; and so they did, firstly on a short collaboration “Boa / Cold” back in 2014, and then on the album “Concrete Desert” in late 2017. As with “Boa / Cold”, this recording is at once unlike anything either Earth or The Bug have done in the past and yet the music will be very familiar to Earth fans and fans of Kevin Martin’s various projects: it is at once warm, spacious and without limit, roaming over a wide red or brown desert land, noting vast horizons and opportunities; and it can also be cold, remote, forbidding, sinister and redolent of a post-industrial machine world collapsing in on itself. The album title is a reference to the dystopian fantasies of concrete and high technology of 20th-century English writer J G Ballard; the track titles speak of these worlds themselves and the inhabitants that now scurry through them at gutter level.

The album starts from the two polar extremes that Carlson and Martin represent: tracks 1 and 2 show where both artists are coming from in their familiar genres of desert Western doom and isolationist techno dub respectively, though each track also features an underlay of the opposed musical extreme that flavours the primary musical style with atmospheric and tonal contrast. As the album continues with tracks like “Agoraphobia” and beyond, the two styles blend into one music that is truly expansive. Carlson’s starkly minimal and laid-back guitar highlights Martin’s sinister machine beats and rhythms which in turn underline the Earth guitarist’s atmospheric desert drone style. Each track ends up being a descriptive ambient snapshot of a vast alien soundscape, full of vibrant colour, strange textures, weird life-forms and geological formations that defy belief. The music may be highly repetitive but each musical loop adds extra depth to the strange universe that unfolds behind your eyes and between your ears.

From “Broke” and “American Dream” onward, the music becomes darker and grittier, describing a much more desolate and bleak world where shadow freeways criss-cross all over the place but never to any definite destination, and high-rises and skyscrapers in-between stand lonely and empty. This universe is as vast as the previous one we passed through but here life-forms are artificial rather than natural (though they may be cyborgs with just the minimum organic material they need to sustain their silicon structures and blood) and there is a constant feeling of decay, of things gradually running down and falling apart. The music bristles with dark shadow and drone, and while beats are clear, nothing is clean and pure in tone. At this point there is hardly much to distinguish between Carlson’s playing and Martin’s beats and rhythms, save perhaps in “Other Side of the World” where Carlson’s guitar calls listeners’ attention to another, brighter and perhaps better world than the dark post-industrial apocalypse of America after 9/11.

The final track – it’s also the title piece – plays like an elegy to the dreamworld long promised by Hollywood and which drew generations of immigrants to California and the United States generally. It has an eerie sorrowful feel and while it plays like a long farewell, it passes no judgement on the dreams fading away and the nightmares, the exploitation of the poor, the tragedies of those who failed to achieve success, the violence and the waste of human life that supported these dreams and which themselves were the consequences of these dreams.

The LP and digital versions of “Concrete Desert” include three bonus tracks, two of which are middle tracks “Snakes Vs Rats” and “Broke” ripped from the main album and featuring vocals by Martin’s long-time partner-in-crime Justin Broadrick as JK Flesh. The second bonus track is the better of the two in the sheer desperation and hopelessness expressed in Broadrick’s guttural screams. The third bonus track “Another Planet” brings the whole epic work and its concept to a nihilistic close with quiet yet pitiless droning ambience.

While the music tends towards repetition and occasional monotony on the longer tracks, it is highly immersive thanks in part to a strong and unforgettable concept in which we can experience the decline and long, slow fall of Western civilisation, revealing a real world that has always existed and which will continue to exist long after humans have become extinct. For this reason, though individual tracks by themselves can be a bit boring, taken as a whole they conjure up a huge sound universe of strong contrasts in light and dark, colour and monochrome, apparent simplicity in guitar sound and melody, and dark sinister complexity in beats and rhythms.

Oneirika was created using an unusual method, whereby Sharp’s compositions (written as musical manuscript) were processed in the computer application Photoshop in some way. Since this is image manipulation software, I assume this means that what has been handed down to the musicians was something resembling a graphic score (as used to be deployed in certain 1960s avant-compositions), which the players have to interpret according to their skill and judgement. We have noted quite a few instances of electronic musicians who have attempted to recast the data of a digital image (such as a JPEG file) into audio data, and “play” it through a computer, but this usually results in irritating process noise. Oneirika is quite evidently of a different order, and what greets your ears is a hand-crafted, performed work of art of great complexity, detail, depth, and weight. Who better to supply that interpretation than the crack squad Zeitkratzer. And I have no doubt that the hyper-intelligent Sharp knows exactly how much “chaos” he will allow into a situation like this, while likewise allowing the music to thrive on the ingenious and creative responses of the players to their graphically-indicated tasks. We’re also told this method is “inspired by the Cagean tradition”. I’m not entirely sure what this means, but I suppose one aspect of John Cage’s work that might be relevant is his use of wholly non-musical external sources (such as star charts) as a framework to determine musical composition.

I’m more attracted to the word Oneirika. The Greek term derives from a root word which has given our language the word “oneiric”, referring to dreams. The press notes here use the term “waking dream”, which is even more intriguing. Perhaps Sharp, through this complex and ever-changing work, is attempting to convey something of the nature of the dream state, with its fleeting images and rapid-eye movements. Or perhaps he posits an alternative reality, much as the Surrealists trusted to their dreams as an escape from the drear reality of everyday life. Both interpretations seem valid when the music is heard, music which inspires and encourages the listener towards imagination, hopefulness, action. While it defies common sense if you’re seeking a linear, logical argument, this music makes perfect sense on some deeper, more intuitive level (as indeed most great music does, and must). Impressively, the piece avoids any clichéd interpretations of the dream theme, and the music remains hard-edged, tangible, packed with events.

If any of this is so, then the process used for its creation has been wholly transcended; although Zeitrkratzer perform with their characteristic precision and attention to detail, the epic sweep of the music pushes everything into some new, hyper-real realm of dream-like art. If you’ve ever managed to track down the music of Sam Pluta or The Wet Ink Ensemble and liked what you heard, you will certainly enjoy this release. From 12th June 2017.

We are sent a lot of “soundscaping” records where the atmosphere is grim and oppressive…evidently the artistes in question prefer it that way, being of a melancholic temperament or of a pessimistic bent. Or perhaps it’s just that much easier to create depressing, gloomy, drone music. It’s therefore quite a relief to hear and enjoy a sound-scape which is uplifting and optimistic all the way through, without once sinking into vapidity, New Age posturing, nor empty kitsch. Temple of the Swine also manages to preserve an aura of mystique, a mysterious atmosphere which obtains for the full length of its playing…we never quite find out where we are or what we’re doing here. If we could take the opening moments of the first episode of The Prisoner, where Number Six’s bewilderment and astonishment are at their peak, then put these moments on repeat play, we might end up with an experience like this album.

What a watery, languid, multi-faceted drone…there’s not much substance to the gossamer sound that I can usefully pass on, and to do so might even threaten to break the spell, but there are looping elements, traces of field recordings, and a patina of distortion that is used to distance the listener to just the right degree. That effect, if overused or carelessly deployed, can simply seem awkward or contrived; but Samways uses it with just the right degree of nuance. The result is like viewing pictures of an enchanted land beamed back to us in uncertain, flickering images; but then I hesitate to liken it to a faded cine-film, which is another overdone effect these days, in both TV and cinema.

My sense is that Samways is onto something quite personal and profound, that is worth exploring; it’s certainly beautiful to listen to. Last time I proposed a collaboration with Xela, and today I bring Ashtray Navigations into the frame; albeit an incarnation of Ashtray long since passed, when he used to record his music on decaying cassette tapes to produce effects not unlike this. Many thanks to Nigel for sending this.

I’m tempted to pronounce this fellow’s surname as “Anarchy” but I bet that’s not correct. A literal translation of the title is Catch The Only Road. Intriguing. At first sight, this disc could be explained away as hi fidelity institutional composition masquerading as free improvisation. However, appearances can be deceiving; appearances here are simply mystifying as the music is backed up by an A3 sheet of text in Spanish explaining the work along with a visual element although not an actual score, from which I do immediately learn that piano, glockenspiel, guitar and percussion are the key elements. The accompanying press release uses such banal descriptors as “…a relaxed tour of abstract scapes…” and “…a beautiful object for passive contemplation”. Does anyone actually buy music specifically to enable them to “contemplate”? I don’t. This nonsense clearly intends to position the work (which also exists as an audio-visual version) as an artwork; something to be listened to, or experienced as one would a painting or sculpture. I think that’s what they’re getting at. It should come as no surprise then, to learn that the music is the result of a piece of bespoke software manipulating recordings of acoustic instruments, vocal sounds (all by Anache) synthesis and recordings of water. Although the watery stuff doesn’t make itself known until the fourth track, ‘Paisaje Natural’. Paisaje translates as landscape or scenery, and all tracks are about scenery of one kind or another; ‘Paisaje Primero’, ‘Paisaje Propio’, ‘Paisaje Artificial’, ‘Paisaje Natural’.

There is almost an hour of material on this disc divided into four pieces. Interestingly, the first three are of identical length. The mood is restrained; nothing screams out for your attention. I have the feeling that these pieces are composed with an eye on the concert hall – there’s certainly a vast feeling of space contained within. I like the casual interjections of electronics, for me they serve to push the music along. Varying levels of intensity throughout the four pieces generate a kind of topographic map of the music. Nice to visit, but I’m still undecided whether I really want to stay for very long.

As Kurai Keshiki, Lago has a foray into a quite different territory. This side-project is only two years old but already has two releases to its credit, the second of which Mozaiku (PSYCHOTIC RELEASE PRCD16) we now have before us. The aim here is to train the camera on landscapes far less sunlit and much more industrialised in nature; urban field recordings are permitted to join the droning and echoing electronics, and after only a few moments of listening it becomes clear that the benign world of the fairies is many miles away. Even so, Lago exhibits the same lightness of touch in assembling his elements, and while the tenor and demeanour of Mozaiku is no doubt threatening and strange, these threats are not delivered in the pompous and moralistic manner we have come to expect from many dabblers in the dark-industrial-ambient genres, who seem to think we’re not paying attention to their messages of doom unless we are forcibly clubbed around the face and head with an iron bar of grinding sound. Again, “understated” is the key word, and it feels like Kurai Keshiki is not only able to imagine an entire world in sound, he’s also intent on exploring it in some detail, doing so methodically and rigorously. The long track ‘Katachi’ is especially mesmerising, gently moving the listener around many labyrinthine aspects of this dark and unknown land, sometimes through tunnels and catacombs, or overground through bleak ruined parklands and near-deserted cities. All is enveloped in a grey crepuscular mist that makes everything seem unreal. What’s encouraging is that he is able to do this without coming across as overly solemn or pretentious. From 28 August 2015.

Wollscheid & Schreiner’s Calibrated Contingency is a variation on the traditional stereo presentation of live performance; here is an event defined as two stereo performances, or a “four-channel concert”. The musicians were apparently separated by a wall of some kind, so there could be no visual communication between the pair during their performance. Despite this, and impressively, they both manage to come to a full stop briefly at around the 18 and a half minute point. Calibrated Contingency is 45 minutes long in total.

I like that they’ve left some of the audience chatting before the performance begins at the beginning, which really sets the scene that you are about to witness a live event.

There are some beautiful harmonising electronic tones from around six minutes (whether this is deliberate, rehearsed or simply a happy accident is impossible to tell, but it works great), and mostly I’m guessing that the sounds are variously software generated, electronic, synth-derived, pitch fx and so forth. But without the extreme dynamics and brutality of, say, Russell Haswell or Thomas Korber, perhaps. The pair are unafraid of crunchy distorted noises here and there. These are occasionally treated with software delay effects or pitch manipulation which are often audibly over-processed, you could say; at least for my tastes, but overall the sound images are strong. Industrial machinery powers up and down in a kind of hi-fidelity, super-polished version of what the UK’s Ben Gwilliam is doing live currently. At a concert of his I attended recently, armed with only rudimentary tools, Gwilliam’s mastery of frequency manipulation made me fear, not only for my hearing, but for my sanity as well. Wollscheid & Schreiner are a little more polite.

A modulated vocal sample is introduced at 16 minutes, but I am regrettably unable to discern what is being said. After a brief halt at 18:30, things proceed in a more restrained manner. Hiss and crackle seem to be keeping something infernal just below the surface. Steroided-up miner bees? Around 26 minutes it gets a bit more violent; it sounds like they are running tape over multiple heads manually and passing the results through several broken distortion boxes at once. The mains hum alone makes me fear for the venue’s PA. Then, just as its about to get all too much for me, it is back to polite scratching noises with what sounds like a cracked kids’ keyboard running superfast arpeggios in the background.

An enthusiastic response at the end from what sounds like a small crowd – a reality arguably all too predictable for this kind of music as anyone who has attempted to promote concerts of a similar ilk will know only too well – is nonetheless a little disappointing to hear, given the quality of the sounds on offer and the cohesion of the interplay between the two musicians.

If you are yet to discover the delights of this prolific one-man electro-industrial BM act and you find his discography rather formidable, what with all the Renaissance-era artwork covers, not to mention hearing all those layers of see-sawing guitars, you are best advised to start with short cassette releases Adam Krambach / Jute Gyte has done, like this “The Night Door under Lock and Key / Laocoon” release. The cassette is styled like a single with each side dedicated to one track – the catch being that each track is at least 20 minutes in length. Although the two pieces “The Night Door …” and “Laocoon” are very different from each other, they are representative of Jute Gyte’s work in being very dense, mostly unstructured and highly immersive microtonal guitar soundscapes with an overwhelmingly hellish and nauseating ambience.

For the most part “The Night Door …” is a hard chunky piece of drunken discordant guitars, two of them at loggerheads with each other when going on extended solos, and two duelling vocals, one shouty death-metal grunt and the other more grisly black-metal rasp. Quieter sections are interspersed with the more delirious and demented racket, and these reveal a very dark and uneasy world on the edge of chaos. Late in the piece there is an all-ambient pause through which field recordings, special effects, buzz and drone zing through, and an underwater zombie voice mumbles through the thick fluid of murk. According to the cassette sleeve notes, the lyrics are derived from a poem by Egyptian-French surrealist poet Joyce Mansour (1925 – 1986).

“Laocoon” recalls the Greek legend of the Trojan priest who tried to warn his fellow citizens not to accept the wooden horse provided by their Greek enemy as a gift and bring it into their city, and who ended up being punished by the gods for his bravery. It is a very downbeat mournful mood piece of long drones and desolate space, and the guitar microtones bring a bleak desert-blues fatalism. Loss, emptiness, despair and regret (at having lost an opportunity to do the right thing perhaps) seem to be the dominant themes and that is pretty much all that can be said for the track as it is heavily repetitive and ends up spiralling around in circles of darker sorrow.

I find this a very uneven recording, the first track keeping this listener on edge and throwing out a surprise experimental climax, the second track a monotonous dirge retreading the same riffs and emotions over and over. (I appreciate the point being made, that sometimes all that people can do when they lose everything through their own mistakes, is to wring their hands and replay the fateful incident over and over in their hands – because there really is nothing else they can do to rectify it or change things.) The cassette format being what it is, with both sides of the tape being equal in length of course, I think the way to go should have been to edit “Laocoon” for length and let it dissolve into a continuous blur of white demented static to drive its lessons home. At least though, listeners get to hear another, more highly expressive and even bleaker side of Jute Gyte.

Ferial Confine started out in the mid-1980s as the junk metal noise project of Andrew Chalk and this CD is a reissue of an album originally released as a cassette by the UK noise label Black Flag in 1985. “Meiosis” certainly is a noisy scrapy affair, very unlike the kind of extreme squealy power electronics noise of fellow Brits Whitehouse or the more socially conscious metal bashers Test Department: it actually sounds like the kind of recording Merzbow might have put out once upon a time when that Japanese powerhouse was issuing albums at the rate of one every couple of days or so and if he missed a week, that was a major headline in itself.

The first three tracks, of which two are the title track in two parts, are absolutely pissing down with full-on metal junk shrapnel precipitation: mechanical drilling and wood-planing noises rain down in steady torrents and steamy lava-frying grind is sluicing into gutters and stormwater pipes. A high-pitched drone keens away in the background while scratchy, wonky noise worries its way into the space between your ears.

After that early start which would have winnowed out the children from the adults, the album enters a quieter, more contemplative phase with birdsong field recordings and a strong emphasis on dark deep-space ambience and drone. The sub-bass aspect of FC’s style comes to the fore and a very forbidding and potentially powerful and menacing creature it threatens to be. The junk metal noise, when it raises its head, is a more subdued, caged beast. A number of tracks are quite short and static, content to present their full range of sound and mood at the outset and continuing to blare merrily that way with no further development. The recording finishes with a solo droning bass rumble in “Gothic Window”.

The album does not come across as very unified but it was made in the days when concept albums had a bad reputation and the emphasis was on experimenting with sound, texture and atmosphere. Not that this matters: the album presents a range of soundscape scenarios and lets them sink into the listener’s mind at their own pace; some will be noisier than others and some are very quiet but all have their distinct style and sound. For a recording made nearly 30 years ago, “Meiosis” sounds quite fresh, in part thanks to a clean production, and for new explorers about to rummage in the annals of the UK noise scene of the 1980s, you’ll be surprised to discover a solo project that doesn’t aim to shock people out of their complacency or despair about Thatcher’s Britain but instead bores holes in their brains and fills them with mind-bending sonic wonders.

As its title suggests, this album is both a double CD set – so there’s twice as music for the price of one! – and the second release for the improvising ensemble led by British multi-instrumentalist Martin Archer, a very welcome frequent flyer to these parts, and Chris Bywater, less familiar to me but no less adept at playing several instruments. All tracks on the two discs are based on live improvised performances made in late 2013 with some additions made later in the year and in 2014. The result is an album that straddles a balance between wandering improvisation and more structured and shaped work with a definite focus and theme.

Everything on this album comes across as very smooth, clean and flowing; perhaps it’s all a little too smooth and tight, given that the performances were originally live and over 150+ minutes of music the odd clunky moment or two might be expected. The general impression is of a work rejoicing in its brief existence, testing its boundaries and expanding wherever it can to many places and levels of an uplifting if not always beneficent nature. There may be moments where going Full Steam Ahead isn’t always possible because large nebulas are throwing up dense gases in our path and avoiding them risks throwing us into the pull of a large black hole; but there appears to be nothing of an actively hostile and malevolent bent in this particular universe where OUA inhabit and cruise about.

Disc 1 offers quite a range of jazzy space soundscapes from the warm soothing radiance of “Paratacamite” to tracks happy to wander down detours that take us back in time (the 1970s-sounding “Modus”) or merely to walk a tight-rope between funk and Morricone horror film soundtracks (“Noctilucent”) among others. “Space Smells of Strawberries” for the most part is as light and joyful as its title suggests. Most tracks here are very accessible if a little bit repetitive even to those not usually fond of improvised music because of its tendency to wander up hill and down dale; the one exception is the meandering 20-minute marathon “Across the Atmospheric Eddies” which as it hints goes about vacuuming up little fragments of sound and shining a spotlight on each and every one of them.

The tracks on Disc 2 are fewer and longer but are no less distinctive for that. “The Braking of Bonds & The Rearrangement of Atoms” is my favourite piece of the entire set: it’s a work of beauty and wonder, of fine and subtle craft, of mystery and mischief, and it’s something curious besides. In its later moments the track morphs into an awkward ugly-duckling creature, leaving behind scraps of its previous incarnation. From here on we move into a more remote and otherworldly realm with few reminders of the world we left behind. “RMMV Asturias” is as close to creepy and spooky as it’s possible for the album to come with phantom choirs that seem more clumsy and gauche than ghostly or chilling.

While there are occasions where I think the music falters and doesn’t quite achieve everything it sets out to do – I don’t think Archer has the necessary misanthropic outlook on life needed to create really sinister and genuinely frightening music but if he did, then the world would be a poorer and sadder place without the likes of Combat Astronomy, Masayo Asahara and OUA! – and maybe there’s been a little too much editing to deliver a smooth and professional-sounding opus, “O2” is still a marvel to behold. When all said and done, the journey is more important than its destination.