Having taken delivery of another care package from the very wonderful AUT label, I find amongst the latest selection of Sweden's finest, this full cassette album from Zones of Industrial Wasteland whom I recall from the label's Att Förstå Ensamhet compilation a while back, so that was the first one out of the box and into the tape deck - and yes, tapes in 2020 still strikes me as all sorts of weird, but I'm sure there will be those who say the same of any physical media, so there doesn't seem much point in getting too hung up on any of it.
Zones of Industrial Wasteland is one Janolof Enberg, author of a virtual album called One Mountain back in 2015 and which was a more overtly dance orientated thing from what I can tell. Sectors is techno in so much as that pretty much everything you hear seems to have been generated within a metal box of some description, or at least processed therein; and while it mostly adheres to one time signature or another, as marked by certain muted percussive sounds, it's more in the way of soundtrack music than anything to which you might necessarily bust a move. For sake of lazy reference, think some of the less thumping moments in the career of Front 242, but geared towards the sort of movies where darkly militaristic craft cruise through smoke-choked apocalyptic skies; so there's a touch of maybe Vangelis, or whoever it was who scored Blade Runner. This sort of thing seems to be fairly easy to do, but is hard to do well, and Enberg does it very, very well - dark, moody and deliciously expansive without ever quite tipping over into pulling scary faces or pretending to be a robot. There's a strong suggestion of craft, sounds which have been worked at, nothing you'd spot as an obvious preset, and with plenty of interesting stuff kept bubbling along in the mix beneath the main theme, suggesting something along the lines of Chris & Cosey scoring the sort of moody techno thrillers already invoked.
Also, Maintenance Drone - which I recall from Att Förstå Ensamhet - opens with a sample which I'd swear was taken from some early Devo home movie, so obviously that gets extra points from me.
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