��� The most recent spate of Annihilvs releases has been pretty fantastic, none more so than the new collaborative album Ruby from dark Swedish visionary Martin Bladh and Portuguese industrial pummelers Sektor 304. I've been getting increasingly hooked on Sektor 304's unique combination of clanking industrial noise and apocalyptic Swans-esque power-dirge, and it was just on the last new arrivals list here at C-Blast that I raved about both their recent new live album and the latest full-length from Bladh's avant death industrial outfit IRM, so this disc landed here at the perfect time, complimenting the constant spins both of those albums have been getting here.

��� Made up of a single hour-long piece, Ruby slowly emerges out of a field of mesmeric black throb, deep bass pulses radiating out of slowly swirling electronic loops. It doesn't take long though before the group begins to unleash their full fury, leading the album through a number of distinct passages of crushing synth-drone and doom-laden death industrial, filled with sprawls of evil electronic ambience, glacial percussive movements shifting tectonically beneath the group's array of creepy field recordings and desolate drone. Bladh delivers his unsettling prose as a spoken monologue over the rumbling noisescape, his voice twisted and pitched into layers of helium-sucking squeak and deeper mutterings, the layering of voices adding to what becomes an increasingly surreal atmosphere that develops over the course of the album. Rhythmic loops are also recurring element, rattling percussive noises that resemble rain sticks and distant prayer-bells that are woven into rhythmically hypnotic forms as they tumble into a black abyss, and dread-filled synthesizers cruise that blackness with a minimal menace that verges on Carpenterian. Swells of rumbling improvised cacophony surge out of the depths, and there are moments (like when guest musician Ang�lica Salvi appears around halfway through with her ghostly harp) where Ruby veers into a kind of phantasmal, Lynchian strangeness that reminded more than once of Nurse With Wound. While this is much more focused on atmosphere than aggression, Sektor 304 fans do get some of the group's slow-motion industrial dirge in the latter half of the album, where that drifting dreamlike strangeness suddenly gives way to grueling mechanical heaviness and clanking, bass-draped crush, with some seriously heavy distorted bass guitar coiling around a particularly doomed passage. Those moments are for the most part brief punctuations of power scattered throughout the mostly formless nightmare of Ruby, however, eventually cresting with an unexpected final stretch of mesmeric noise-drenched rock that gets almost Skullflowery.

��� Comes in a four-panel digipack with artwork from Bladh and designed by Sektor 304's Andr� Coelho.