Akrotiri Poacher — Seminary

Hot on the heels of his collaboration with Jane Barbe on last year's split (PF025), Kiran Leonard (Akrotiri Poacher) strikes back with a mammoth slab of mind-warping drone. “Seminary” delivers 30 minutes of absolutely wonderful tonal shifts and exquisitely stacked sounds, inspired by stories of abandoned tube stations. You can almost feel the dark, reverberating aura of those tunnels resonating between your ears as the drones lay themselves bare before you.

Opening track “Aldwych” begins with lo-fi droning guitars that are at once claustrophobic and intensely full of depth; a torrent of harmonics saturate the track almost to the breaking point, before breaking half-way through and dissolving splendidly into a cloud of levitating synth pads and halos of meandering, muted chords. We've gone from a subterranean vibe and dived deep into the murky water below, and it's an absolutely thrilling trip. The track closes with an almost sci-fi sounding coda, machines beeping softly while modulating high-pitched drones cascade into one another in a drunken haze.

On the flip side, we have “Inbound,” maybe one of the most spectacular dark ambient pieces to grace our ears this year. Tumultuous bass rumbles collide with shimmering piano stabs, like the aftershock of an earthquake resonating the ivories in slow motion. Almost betraying the sub-surface moans of “Aldwych,” here we are transported to incredible night-time canyons, and as the first movement fades away, the moon crests the horizon amidst the sound of distant bird calls. A voice in the distance is babbling in schizophrenic Russian as echo-chamber tones rise to the surface. And then the babbling stops, falling away to ethereal, Eastern-tinged chants that pair with soft synth textures to absolutely mesmerizing effect. You could almost imagine someone having a religious experience to sounds like this, that is until the final shift of the track comes in and buries everything that came before it beneath vibrating low-end chords, calling the tape's subterranean inception back for one more fateful ride down the tracks. Essential listening.