Mr. Ayers seems to have engaged in some particularly fruitful collaborations of late, and here's another one. This time he's trading drones, clangs and scraping sounds with Philip B. Klingler who has been recording as PBK for over three decades and is himself renowned for works executed in collaboration with other purveyors of unsettling noise. I'm not sure what I've heard of PBK, although I know I've heard a few things here and there, and although I'm entirely familiar with the work of Nocturnal Emissions, it's difficult to guess at who did what for Erosion of the Monolith. That said, it doesn't really matter, the important thing being what comes out of the speakers. What comes out of the speakers is, in this case, fairly difficult to describe. Drones are involved, and a distant atmospheric howl invokes a near physical space suggesting environmental recordings made on a planet which probably wasn't Earth. Foreground ripples, squeaks and rumbles drift in and out of the mix without resolving into anything found in nature, or at least terrestrial nature; and the whole is emotionally powerful, despite that we're driven to depths of feeling - something almost like nostalgia, funnily enough - for a place which exists only on this record, so far as anyone can tell; and somehow it doesn't sound quite like any other album of its kind, possibly aside from distantly reminding me of the late, great Andrew Cox's Methods.
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