Robe — Remains Of A Burning World

Like many noise activists within the experimental doom/dark ambient/sludge scenes, Indiana’s Kyle Willey and Adam Cooley have been hyperactive, producing around fifty releases over the past five years under various guises on CDr, cassette or MP3. Most of these are available to download free-of-charge with torrents seeded by the artists themselves.

Released on cassette in an edition of 100, these six lo-fi, industrial movements position the listener outside, in bad weather, struggling to discern the sounds within a nearby warehouse. For the most part of side one, the ominous billowing of a coastal wind dominates the mid-range creating a churning fog of white noise that obscures a dirty, encrusted bass playing atonal chords. Side two is a little less oppressive giving greater potential for narratives to emerge: Second blood’s low end atmospherics sway like a pendulum as a church organ plaintively intones weakly like a threatened candle flame while distortion builds an avalanche. Next, machines march on the debris in the appropriately titled Decay, while an occasional click, like firing a cigarette lighter, gets unsettlingly nearer and nearer. Finally, Visions of a Dead Future combines whistling tones to form a rusted, resonating clarion call as an old orchestral recording begins to play from a drowned gramophone bringing to mind the work of William Basinski.

The persistent and occasionally majestic decay of ‘…Burning World’ suits the cassette format whose limited dynamic range and hiss blends seamlessly with the bleak, incessant churning. It demonstrates how effective Robe.’s improvisations are at creating scenes of decline and degeneration. Conversely, Robe.’s  abundant release schedule, seemingly unshackled of commercial and editorial concerns, makes ‘Remains Of A Burning World’ just one drop in an expanding dark ocean.