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B°TONG  Hostile Environments  CD   (Greytone)   12.98


Taking its name from the Norwegian word for "concrete", B-Tong is a current project from sound artist Chris Sigdell, who I had been previously familiar with from his work in the group NID. Back in 2007, NID put out an album called Plate Tectonics on the German experimental music label Auf Abwegen that was as heavy and light-devouring as any doom-drone outfit, unleashing waves of crushing, processed post-industrial power drone that spread out in vast obsidian fields of low-frequency sound. It's still my all-time favorite release from Auf Abwegen, so I was certainly interested in seeing if Sigdell's current project would be in a similarly heavy vein.

On his first release for Italian dark ambient label Greytone, Sigdell crafts a series of vast, grayscale dronescapes that do have a lot of the same weightiness and grim power as his work with NID. Drawing from an assortment of field recordings, environmental sounds and vintage synthesizers, he sculpts these six tracks on Hostile Environments into an intensely bleak brand of apocalyptic industrial drone, with sheets of howling subterranean drift flowing beneath peals of squealing metallic noise and distant sinister echoes, and crashing against swells of intensely dramatic, decomposing orchestral sound. Tracks like "Stasis Field" evoke images of abandoned cities standing beneath slate-grey skies and the cold black emptiness of eternal winter, the swirling monochrome ambience laced with some well-placed fragments of melancholy piano. And as the album progresses, waves of minimal metallic shimmer ripple across the vastness, while tectonic rumblings reverberate from below, snatches of half-glimpsed electronic melody quickly slip out of earshot, sounds appear and looping through the gloom before dissolving into the irradiated ether. This aural desolation quickly taking on a hypnotic feel, some of the looping percussive noises bringing a sort of Aube-like feel to certain tracks, while other passages on the album turn into something much more visceral and disturbing when Sigdell begins to employ a mixture of samples and field recordings and disgusting emetic noises that sound like something from Randy Yau, bizarre alien gurglings that lurk amid the surges of droning industrial wreckage and frost-encrusted whirr. "Thepsis" is one of the more surreal noisescapes in that vein, sounds of strained breathing and sampled pitch-shifted voices merging with arrhythmic throbbing bass-thuds, echoing metal clank, swells of backwards glitch and mysterious disembodied voices, further evoking those visions of thrumming power lines suspended beneath slate-grey skies and a world enshrouded in radiation poisoning. Dark, heavy stuff, moving deeper into ever more nightmarish territory as the album goes on, the ambient soundscapes perpetually hovering at the edge of the abyss, the sound akin to the darkest strains of environmental ambient dread found with Yen Pox, Inade and Lustmord, but fused to deformed, often surrealistic noisescapes. Comes in digipack packaging.


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