The title of Bianchi's 2012 disc almost feels like he's playing a riff on Lou Reed's notorious guitar-feedback opus, but this is actually some of the most subdued work that I've heard lately from the renowned Italian industrial artist. Mental Machination Musing is definitely one of Bianchi's better recent albums, offering a full-length work of fantastic death-ambient that has been dedicated to his friend and fellow Italian industrial pioneer Pierpaolo Zoppo Ronzero, aka Mathuasen Orchestra. The colorful jacket artwork depicts a series of incandescent rainbow-like color bands rippling through the void, and might lead you to think that the sounds on MMM are going to be closer to the New Agey sounds of some of his post-Y2K work, but this is in fact some seriously jet-black sonic drift. The first track alone invokes a vast abyssal ocean churning deep below the earth's surface, a rumbling, deafening tumult strafed with swells of heavy metallic drone, later joined by the steady mechanical clank of massive tank treads crushing bone and concrete, a terrifying washed-out dronescape laced with distant death-choirs and horn-like drones drifting across the black and charred horizon. The second track features more soundtrack-like synthesizer ambience, eerie and threatening, muted and washed-out and drowning in black Rita-like distorted textures that suddenly warp into strange noisy dissonance and ghostly minor key creepiness. Track three feels like a sweeping, beautifully ominous cinematic score buried under layers of smoldering black distortion and malfunctioning synth, while the closer is the darkest track on the disc, a gleaming orchestral score with sinister strings and horns writhing in clouds of fluttering electronic debris and glazed in a murderous black sheen. Bianchi hasn't released anything this evil sounding in ages, crafting an apocalyptic soundscape where rumbling industrial tremors evoke time-lapsed sound recordings of buildings disintegrating over eons, waves of kosmische terror, eerie bathysphere drones and lush crepuscular ambience that all forms into a crushing subterranean deathdrone that fans of Lustmord would certainly dig.

Released in a limited edition of two hundred copies in a full-color wallet sleeve.