What makes Aidan Baker's massive catalog of releases so consistently great is his ability to explore new corners of his guitar-based drone style in a variety of ways, from the popular fuzzsoaked dreamsludge of Nadja to the tribal dronerock workouts of Arc, but even in his prolific solo output, his sound is constantly evolving, each new release investigating new aspects of minimal ambience and dark guitar drones, abstract glacial sludge and even industrialized rhythmic realms like those captured on Oneiromancer.

Released a while ago on Die Stadt but only now getting stocked here at C-Blast, Oneiromancer is one of Aidan's heavier solo works, wrangling a palette of bass, piano, electric guitar, tape loops, drum machine, and vocals into a series of subterranean industrial dirges, still primarily woven from his trademark brand of dreamy ambient guitar drift, but here the soft swirls of guitar and feedback are wrapped around clanking, grinding percussive elements, making this quite different from many of his other solo albums. The sound of Oneiromancer is filled with whooshes of shadowy ambience and creaking stumbling rhythms, like on the fourteen minute opener "Wake Up", a mysterious environ of noisy industrial clank, smears of gorgeous melodic drift, pounding distant drum machine rhythms that have a buried, decayed trip-hop quality to them, surrounded by all kinds of strange noises and sonic events. On "Death Too Wrapped In Dream", the shades of trip-hop heard in the opening track are explored even more as a skittery reverb-soaked drumloop clatters in the background behind clouds of mottled feedback whir and a female voice speaking behind a veil of grit and echo. The rest of the album travels through a similiar terrain of strange insectile sounds, aural shadows, fractured mechanical rhythms, industrial clatter, chittering locust drones, infinitely stretched screams, the album becoming darker and creepier as it progresses, like descending deeper into a nightmarish dreamscape, but always enveloped by those dreamy, soft washes of bleary guitar drone and feedback. Intoxicating and unnerving, this ranks as one of Aidan's darker, more dramatic albums.

Packaged in a full color gatefold jacket, limited to 300 copies.