An excellent new Cd from the Scottish noise duo Fordell Research Unit, The Illusion Of Movement has revived my lust for high-quality heavy dronemusic after having to choke down one too many humdrum drone discs lately. Made up of members Fraser Burnett and Grant Smith, Fordell Research Unit creates richly detailed buzzscapes across the album's four long tracks, which stretch anywhere from eight to eighteen minutes in duration, and even on the shorter ones they unfold an entire world of gleaming metallic hum and crackling speaker hiss and mechanical rattling that are pretty damn intoxicating. It's heavy stuff, too; on tracks like the aptly-titled "Dumped Washing Machine Floating Up River" and the crushing infernal engine-roar of "Gateshead Black Room", there's an undercurrent of burly, low-end rumble and churning guitar that succeeds in injecting a hefty amount of crunch into the clanging industrial drones. It''s not pure rumble, though; these long dronefields are laced with all kinds of eerie minimal melody, distant majestic ambience and looping fragmented samples that become pretty complex and layered the deeper you get into the album, and it results in a really cinematic quality on the tracks that reveals more of itself with each subsequent listen. The final track is the most fearsome, a throbbing black bass-pulse throbbing at the heart of a cosmic storm of howling dead voices, grainy distorted drones and massive orchestral guitar buzz. These guys show a lot of promise with this album, crafting massive slabs of heavy-duty industrial drone built from crushing walls of guitar rumble and feedback that seem to follow a continuous theme throughout the disc, building into moments of monotonous heaviness that are able to reach some of the same hypnotic peaks of machinecrush as Culver, Haare, DMDN, Jazzfinger and some of the harsher, more abstract Skullflower work (circa Tribulation). Released by At War With False Noise in a limited edition of five hundred copies.