Total desolation. Another of the myriad noise projects that come from ultra-prolific artist Anthony Shaw (Albert Fish Is My Hero, Burial Ground, Deadbeat, Cold Comfort, Haemorrhaging Fetus, etc. etc.), Broken Spirit is by far the most placid of all of his various forms, an exercise in aural rot that shares some of the qualities of the most "ambient" releases in the Slaughter Productions catalog. With its somewhat murky and washed-out recording quality, Falling Apart is a relentlessly grim piece of deathdrift, a slab of bleak isolationist ambient sound that stretches out for half an hour, shifting from distant tectonic rumblings to sinister low-fi industrial dronescapes that evoke visions of a blasted and blighted wasteland, an endless emptiness where the sounds of distant machinery, scraping metal and crumbling architecture echo over an equally distant horizon. Later on, this smoldering waste is disturbed by peals of shrieking feedback and squealing metal, and eventually evolves into something quite noisy, the last few minutes becoming a rumbling, rattling factory din. The influence of isolationist pioneers like Sleep Research Facility and Journey Through Underworlds-era Lull can be heard all throughout this tape, but Shaw works in some subtle grinding resonance and far-off heaviness into his bleary black drones that hints at the kind of amorphous ur-crush heard in the most abstract of drone-doom outfits. I really dug this entropic blackened soundscape, and fans of the kinds of bleak industrial sound found on the Cathartic Process imprint would probably love this.

Released in a limited edition of fifty copies.