Stripping almost all of the "rock" elements (drums, heavy guitars, linear songs) and leaving just the vast, sprawling Western ambience found in the music of Souvenirs Young America, Anduin is the new solo project from SYA's Jonathan Lee that sees him engaging in an altogether darker and more textured sound than the proggy instrumental rock of his main band. I've been hooked on this album for months ever since Jonathan hooked me up with an advance copy of it, and fans of SYA are definitely going to dig these spacey soundscapes...that same dustbowl ambience is here, except Anduin creates it out of rumbling basslines and surges of growling synthesizers, swarms of noisy minutiae swirling and roiling in the depths of the drifting ambience, and fractured hypnotic rhythms formed from percussive loops and skittering electronica instead of the chugging riffage and lonely, desolate melodies of his main band. One of the things that ties together the two musical projects is the harmonica, whose Western wheeze resonates all over Forever Waiting...just like in SYA, the harmonica gives this a unique, heartsick beauty that sounds really amazing. The disc opens up with "For Francis Bacon Part 1", a tribute to the master painter by way of huge swathes of churning keyboard drone mottled with ghostly strains of feedback, sweeping cosmic fx and that lonesome harmonica played in the background...a deep, heavy spaced-out slab of dark ambience that sounds like staring at the night sky from the middle of the Mojave and drinking in an ocean of stars. On "Makepiece In Pieces", the sound becomes more abstracted and tense as an eerie looped melody plays over slices of field recordings and strange electronic burbling...later joined by huge swells of distorted synth and low-end drone. Dubby breakbeats and skittering electronica serve as the backbone for the layered dark ambience of "The Black Line (Forever Waiting), where the harmonica appears again over ringing guitar notes and somber drones, the beat transforming from tribal beats into more abstract rhythms and clomping loops that sound like the sound of horse hooves on stones being reshaped into a percussive loop. One of the albums' heaviest moments arrives with "Rain Cloud, Storm Cloud", which begins with a massive growling drone that sounds like a distorted riff rumbling in perpetual amp-roar while thunderous gongs ring out, then in the second half turns into a cosmic blast of languid tribal drums and roaring synths.

The end of the disc features appearances from Jaspar TX and Xela on reworkings of two of the previous tracks...on ""Reason In Exile Part 2" Jaspar TX takes some of the basic drones of the first part and creates a gorgeous slowcore epic that wraps a slide guitar melody in cloaks of murky sound and deep ambience, and it sounds like the glacial country music of newer Earth being played back underwater. The Xela mix takes particles of "For Francis Bacon" and crafts a heavily distorted hymn, whorls of radio static swirling through an utterly beautiful chorus of piano and angelic voices cascading in syrupy overtones over blissed out organ drones, building to a crescendo of noise that resembles Sigur Ros being flooded by Merzbowian skree.

So beautiful and ethereal, but with some moments of massive heaviness in the subsonic dark drones and grinding guitar textures, Anduin's music is not quite dark ambient or space rock, not exactly instrumental post rock or experimental electronica, but an atmospheric, cinematic combination of all of that, with some of the most gorgeous melodic drone music of recent memory to be found in it's grooves. Highly recommended, and another addition for one of my favorite albums of 2008.