
Dirk Serries - Zonal Disturbances II [Zoharum - 2025]Zonal Disturbances II finds long-term experimental mood setter and improviser offering up four slices of brooding to raw ambient guitar scaping. The CD release appears on Poland’s Zoharum, whom have been a long-term supporter/releasers of Mr Serries' work. The CD come presented in a gloss monochrome six-panel gatefold. This features a selection of dusk/ shadowy pictures of industrial sites, with minimal silver texts over the top. So, a minimal, simple, but moodily effective bit of packaging.
The four tracks here have runtimes between fourteen and twenty-two minutes. We open with “594ZEY8P” which features a central locked & bounding guitar tone, which hums of doomed country music. Think a more fuzzed-up, ground-down, and looping into itself take on Earth, and you get an idea of what's on offer here.
As we move on, we come to the tolling ambient glow meets raw rolling flow of “XDY8756C”, which is the longest track here at just over twenty-two and a half minutes. The track manages to keep in that hypnotic sweet spot, between wavering bright shimmer and crudely purring brood.
The album plays out with “AHOFS58Z”, here we find a blend of on-the-edge of all-out feed fuzz and graceful hovering harmonics. You keep thinking the whole thing is going to collapse into a crude feedback pile-up, but it never fully does- remaining somewhere between grace and sear.
Zonal Disturbances II feels like something a little different from Mr Serries, so it’s great to see an experimental sound maker who is nearing his 4th decade of operation trying something new. If you enjoy where the raw meets the atmospheric, then this is something you’ll want to check out.      Roger Batty
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