Martin Dumais followed up the Multigone cdr from his dark industrial drone project AUN (released by Crucial Bliss) with this full length for Alien8, and it continues his quest for lush nocturnal ambience while scaling down on some of the heavier elements from his earlier work. The music of Motorsleep is actually a big change in direction from the often crushing machine-drones and eruptions of apocalyptic doom riffage of Multigone,at least at first, and instead sounds more like a dark industrial take on classic 70's space music. Which is fine by me - I can't get enough of that dark kosmiche sound, and AUN enters it fully with the opening title track, a dark swirling dronescape of deeps-space synth textures and minimal streaks of buzzing guitar and muted metallic noise. The rest of the album continues in a similiar vein, the sounds of Cluster and Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze beefed up with heavy orchestral drones and swirling feedback, the sound only occasionally becoming abrasive in the first few tracks with slight swells of distorted guitar. Motorsleep's seven tracks are all part of a larger whole and each flows unbroken into the next, and as the album moves deeper, the sound does slowly change, becoming more intense and evolving into a dense symphonic dronescape on "Erzot" that sounds like Growing crossed with Tangerine Dream, with gorgeous murky electronic melodies swirling just beneath the surface of the metallic ambience that stretches out in every direction. Things get heavier on "With Bows Bent" as thicker distorted synthesizer choirs rise in gorgeous melodic waves over black tides of distortion and digital debris, and leads into the most terrifying piece on the album, "Unworlds". It's here that we are faced again with the fearsome industrial ambience of his prior work as this track builds into a massive cloud of synthetic strings, roaring black drones, creepy metallic dissonance and lush angelic choirs stretched into endless infernal washes of sound. From there, the album drifts back out on clouds of dark kosmiche bliss, dark and creepy but sometimes revealing glimpses of gorgoeous incandescent melody, especially on "Neiges", a slab of super-distorted ambient heaviness that sounds like a Jesu song stripped of all vocals and percussion, drifting through deep space as it's pushed by thick gusts of sludgey riffage. While I loved the menacing sound of AUN's earlier releases, this newfound metallic spacedrift is pretty hard to beat with it's mix of soaring kosmiche ambience, distortion-washed drones a la Machinefabriek and Aunduin, and drifting sheets of dronemetal guitar. Beautiful! Comes in a full color four panel digipack.