Brighton-based musician Karl MV Waugh presents four drone explorations on Winter In A Void: A Choice Of Delirium, a series of long-form sustains which atmospherically armature, fizz with an over-arching physicality.
The sitar-like churn of “My Dreams Of Stairwells” effervescently dipping your ear, its starry chloroform knifing your consciousness in oscillatory illusion and tumouring texturals, with a blurred provenance of displaced footfall and swirling discolouration jewelling your minds sunken terraces. A contemplative push that the Mark Rothko-esque gradients of the cover hint at as the soundscape’s tonal differences attentively pierce, reshape your appreciation of the space it inhabits. A solidly immersive experience that all valued drone requires and something that is in plentiful supply throughout this release’s quartet of tracks.
The bassy plunge of “Gravity Disengaged” releases in a rotisserie of curling hue and ceramic rub, its meditative rebus stabling a Zoviet France-like sense of elsewhere, full of mirrored chinks and ritualistic mummer. A stereophonic production that beams across the hemispheres on headphones as much as it does through the speakers, it introspectively digs around in the faint clangs of submerged metal and bubbling exhales. The window-rattling rumble of “Glacial Phonics” is probably less exploratory than the others, but as its displacing density impressively fills the room, it’s clearly about losing yourself to the sensation. Those shifts of monochromed focus that slowly rub like Sisyphus’s boulder or describe the curving mass of some planetary giant. A sci-fi taste that the last track (“Unified Dusk Evolve”) enhances in a feng shui of sine-sharded frequencies of a Louis and Bebe Barron-like expedition that sculpturally scrapes your mind’s eye in accelerating transits and abrasive weathers. Pan-fried pitch whirls and marbling dramatics are tensively toyed with, extended on the cusp of some perpetual oblivion, doubling silhouettes elusively slipping their own echoed aftermath.Winter In A Void is a release that pulls at the fabric, holds the marvel of a new dawn’s sun in the slow labyrinths of a diamond’s scattered panorama. If you like your drone deep and meaningful, you’re gonna love this.
-Michael Rodham-Heaps-
