Some more fantastic dark ambience from Anduin, the solo project from Jonathan Lee who's also a member of Souvenir's Young America. This second Anduin album follows up a couple of great collaborative releases, the Bending Of Light disc with Jasper Tx and the live 7" Black River with Svarte Greiner (which is actually included here as a single unbroken track as a bonus track not on the Lp version), and travels into darker, deeper regions of eerie ambience than before.
There's an element of dark electronica that's apparent on Abandoned In Sleep that wasn't on the previous releases, at least not to this extent. The tracks are still heavy on the swirling, dreamy drift and melodious shadowdrone, but Lee introduces massive low-end bass and collages of rhythmic clicks and scraping sounds that add a rhythmic throb to much of the sound here. The sound is ever-changing, too, thanks to the presence of several guest contributors that include Xela, Stephen Vitiello, Jasper TX, and Gareth Davis who offer either source material or actual studio collabs, and Lee takes these recordings and samples and materials and crafts them into fields of dark lugubrious, gorgeous and lushly layered but wrapped in a dreamy kosmich heaviness. Earth-shaking bass throb reverberates through mysterious abstract clatter and sheets of obsidian synth, swells of distorted horns and metal scrape, the sound of harmonica, such an integral part of Souvenir's Young America's sound, appearing here on certain tracks, haunting and ghostly as it floats across rumbling depth-charge bass, eerie keening vocals, the sound so heavy and creepy, flecked with little fragments of sound like breaking glass, saxophones, electronic glitch and whir, clanging metal and pops and clicks. Found sounds and field recordings also figure heavily into Abandoned's dreamlike shadow-world, overlaying incidental sounds of creaking doors and footsteps and hard-drive hum on clouds of warm melted drone and shuffling industrial rhythms and distant grinding gears, often sounding like Scorn scoring an avant-garde Western. In fact, it feels like some dubstep influence has found it's way into Anduin's dark kosmiche music, as in the doom-laden liquid bass tremors on tracks like �Content of a Black Box�, and the sputtering low-end rhythm of �Octagonal Forms�, bringing a killer new edge to Anduin's sound.
The cd version also includes three bonus tracks: an untitled piece, the track "Filed Away" which was created for an installation piece, and the complete live collab with Svarte Greiner "Black River" - The first half of "Black River" is a churning fog of murky low-end rumble and nocturnal whirr with muted swells of murky orchestral strings and heavy feedback, deep subterranean throb, and metallic high-end feedback leaving streaks of melodic glare across a vast black cloudbank, immense and ominous. The second side picks up from there and descends deeper into the black pulsating mist, that deep, heavy electrical pulse still humming away in the background and oscillating back and forth, while strands of feedback and flecks of haunting melody waft through the darkness.