DESCRIPTION FROM CRUCIAL BLAST:
Wouldn't know it from Stephen Landau's gorgeous hazy photography of eerie, sunset-bathed forests that stretch across 1's minimal four-panel digipack, but this album contains some seriously ominous dronescapes that really gave my stereo speakers a workout when I blasted it while writing up this review. This Pittsburgh-based project comes from C. Ackley, who has also released a couple of crushing harsh noise 7"s under the name Hogra that I've picked up in the past for the shop; with Blinding, however, Ackley plunges into much more subdued, sinister frequencies than his other projects, crafting seven sprawling fields of subterranean echo-muck on this album that he fills up with desolate rumbling drones and a thick carcinogenic atmosphere, giving these recordings a similar bleak feel as some of the earliest, blackest works from influential Italian industrialist Maurizio Bianchi.
If that sounds like high praise, it is - tracks like opener "The Light Will Release Us" rumble with massive black streams of fungoid ambience and monstrous glacial drift, slowly oozing out of your speakers on waves of subsonic rumble. It wasn't until I started to read through the album notes that I realized that this music is apparently all created solely from recordings of massively distorted electric guitar, but this sounds nothing like the ultra-heavy doomdrone of bands like Earth and Sunn O))). Blinding's blighted noisescapes are most definitely ultra-heavy, but this music is so much more industrial in feel, the source instrument processed and mutated and rendered totally unrecognizable as the sounds are transformed into monstrous metallic reverberations awash in oceanic waves of echo and reverb effects, the rumbling drones and blasts of noise sculpted into a processed sound that much more closely resembles a massively distorted synthesizer. Over the remainder of the album, Ackley moves the tracks through ominous soundscapes of monstrous subterranean roar and murky mechanical whirr, rumblings of washed-out low-end drone and strange snarling distortion, with vague smears of blown-out cetacean melody suddenly surfacing through the churning black fog. Several of these tracks reveal structured movements of vast, looping amplifier-throb that on occasion will drift into brief passages of stunning kosmische beauty and dread, or drop over the edge into an abyss of Lull-esque drone, with that particular leaning towards minimal monochrome deathscapes and haunting isolationist ambience really taking over towards the latter half of the disc. It's all some supremely bleak drone-music, and fans of the more malignant edges of the industrial/ambient realm (ie., Lull, Troum / Maeror Tri, Final, Sleep Research Facility) are advised to check this out. © CRUCIAL BLAST
order:
http://peacockwindowrecordings.bandcamp.com/album/blinding-1-pw03
