Everyday Dust: Landscape X and The Valley Of Foghorns
Sparkwood Records
A concept album in cassette form, Everyday Dust's third full-length release presents an hour-long excursion into dark ambient realms of a particularly harrowing and malevolent kind. The narrative alluded to by the five track titles is fleshed out in a textual account by Martin Drust and Everyday Dust included with the release. The story itself recounts the sage Nevermore's journey into Landscape X, his eventual advance into the Clavis Aurea located beneath the original city of Dalrulzian, and deciphering machines that reveal the cipher he carries to be the words “Chains Will Shatter.” Within the thirty-two-page booklet, diagrams of machine entities appear alongside the text to clarify the precise nature of the equipment Nevermore confronts during the final stage of the mission. Reading through the story, which is marred but not undone by a modest number of writing errors (tense inconsistencies, ‘principle' where it should be ‘principal,' etc.), don't be surprised if you're reminded of esteemed practitioners of sci-fi and horror such as Philip K. Dick, Jeff Vandermeer (specifically Area X and the first part of its trilogy, Annihilation), and, of course, H. P. Lovecraft.
To mirror the story's trajectory, Everyday Dust deploys analogue synthesizers and electronics to generate a diseased amalgam of industrial, dark ambient, horror film soundtracks, and prog (he also appears within the textual narrative as an organist and musicologist). The opening “Landscape X” effectively conjures the image of Nevermore entering a barren, burned-out industrial wasteland, the visitor bracing himself for unseen threats of indeterminate kind as he scans the horizon and absorbs the sight of decaying factory buildings and, inexplicably, still-grinding machinery. As the musical material advances through its five parts, an occasional foghorn blast shatters the stillness, deepening the feeling of imminent threat, and when the colossal X Temple comes into view, the image of this geometric structure towering over the ruined Dalrulzian cityscape proves awe-inspiring and a little terrifying to behold.
The prog dimension advances steadily to the fore during “Oblivione X” when softly whistling flute tones bring some semblance of stability to the otherwise disturbing proceedings, after which “Temple X,” with its grandiose synthesizer-voiced themes, announces an even deeper prog plunge. The zenith is reached in the work's climactic fourth part, the towering “Chains Will Shatter,” which pushes the presentation to its nightmarish limit for twenty-one discombobulating minutes. Sirens wail and bells toll alongside sombre synth melodies and chugging industrial rhythms, the cacophonous mass of sound cloaked in corrosion and battered by blasts. Hymnal in tone, “Clavis Aurea” brings relief in the form of a comparatively becalmed ambient resolution, though one still with its fair share of disturbing emanations. Kudos to Sparkwood for supplementing the musical material with the booklet and story, the combination of which helps make Landscape X and The Valley Of Foghorns all the more memorable.August 2018