Best known for his work as the front man for the Swedish death industrial group IRM, Martin Bladh here goes solo for a thirty-five minute industrial drone piece. The disc is divided into five tracks, but these are just chapters in the overall performance, which starts off as a low, rumbling organ-like drone that slowly builds in volume and intensity over the album's half hour running time, gradually building layers and layers of sound, rumbling overtones and distant dissonant strings and machine-like throb that turns this into a massive roaring furnace of apocalyptic drone. Almost the entire first half of Study For A Theatre Of Cruelty is placid, meditative, a sprawling field of minimal buzz and hum, but the second half consistently ratchets up the power and attack, getting more and more dissonant, more sinister in tone, more abrasive, until cracks begin to appear in the roiling cloud of electronic noise through which emerge mechanical clanging and other uneasy sounds, the piece overloads into a thunderous white-hot roar, then finally fades into silence at the end. It's substantially different from Bladh's crushing dark ambience and power electronics in IRM, but there's still that nightmarish feeling, that sense of unease that seems to go hand in hand with everything that he creates. If anything, Study is closer to the recent dronescapes of Kevin Drumm, and the stark dark ambience of Jarl, or the overdriven organ drones of Wander cranked to a skull-shredding level of intensity. Limited to 300 copies, and comes in full color packaging with creepy artwork.