Clint Listing knows how to modulate noise into something truly terrifying. He's the guy behind the Slumbering, and he creates pieces that probably best qualify as "ambient industrial." That is, sounds that emanate from our industrial society as imagined by layers of electronics and actual instruments.

The Slumbering When We Forget It Repeats (Trepanation Recordings)

There is a drone quality to this. These pieces pulse and vibrate as they see fit, but they're alive. And what's just behind the scrim never quite reveals itself. Chalk this up as the sound of unchecked paranoia.

Listing is more varied than earlier practitioners of this sound (I'm looking at you, Namanax), and each piece tells a slightly different, and differently frightening, tale. Like many abstract industrial projects, the overall effect of this album is to grind a listener to a stump. The slow, scraping pain never abates. It simply advances until the inevitable.

The only physical release of this set is on 20 cassettes (get yours while they're hot). The additional hiss and warping from the cassette head would probably make this stuff that much more intense and soul-sucking. The digital files are more than enough to send me to a closet. Definitely not everyone's cup of tea (again, a print run of 20), but this is a real tonic for those who crave brain liquefication.

Jon Worley