Distant lights flare in the distance, as you walk dazed. No, that's fire. The buildings are on fire as shimmering organ notes float up from underneath you. An almost palpable feeling of dread, loneliness, and despair is all too present on this tape, which sports a 3-panel color J-Card and printed cassettes with song titles. This is dark industrial music that stands up with Lustmord, Ain Soph, and other marked practitioners of decayed synth swelling/decay...
Drowner leans more on pure, sustained notes than in the earlier releases marked by bass thuds and field recordings. What's interesting on this tape is the succinct and varied nature of the compositions, yet everything retains an air of looming menace, often accented by obscured, rhythmic elements that groan rather than drive things along. Overall, the mood and tones are bleak on this one. The shifts in between pieces almost gave me the feeling of being transported to different scenes in a series of loosely-connected short stories.
Later on side B, there is metal clatter that goes back to the early Drowner tapes. Heavy amounts of nausea slowly evaporating and odd harmonies emerging out of the ether that recall the space explorations of Tangerine Dream's Zeit. These brief moments of bliss are short-lived.
Jacob