A Bird’s-Eye View Into A Machiavellian World of Secrecy

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Very special boxed edition from Hospital Productions featuring four specially commissioned new albums from Regis vs Prurient, Alessandro Cortini, Kevin Drumm and Lussuria – each on a separate individual tape, clocking in at over 3 hours of music. The set has been made in a very limited run of 469 copies and is not available on download formats. There are two different versions of this box set – one housed in a vintage clamshell case, the other in a clear quadruple tape shell – orders will be despatched at random from one of these two versions

Hospital Productions parade a rogues gallery of extreme souls commissioned to compose original, durational ambient pieces in opposition to contemporary definitions of that sound. The term ‘ambient’ is thrown around without much care these days, a catch-all for anything pertaining to quiet – silence- and space. This project attempts to create a cascading layer of what ambient can be: a negative-space composition that’s a little harder to define, offering a parallax view that shifts with perception and perspective.

On the first tape Alessandro Cortini pursues the electro-acoustic spectres of his Forse volumes and the Sonno / Risveglio couplet with an hour of new music spiralling down foggy alleys of primitivist, viscous drone and collapsing banks of curdling, atonal synth noise. It’s the most unsettling work yet from Cortini, tentatively stepping through those comforting analogue recordings into a world gradually consumed by noise and dissonance. If it offers us any clues as to where he might head next – it’s a tantalising prospect.

Kevin Drumm’s “Middle Of Nothing” album on the second tape returns to the hugely influential tone set by his landmark Imperial Distortion album, a record often compared to Aphex Twin’s “Selected Ambient Works Vol.II”. Here he makes a glacial transition from a glowing orb drone fed through unsettling subharmonics that slowly consume their surroundings, whilst the other side flirts with a more tranquil variant that ebbs and undulates with a barely perceptible pulse – that thing that Drumm does like no other.

Lussuria takes the 3rd tape with “Indigo Window Along Those Steps”, committing his first new music since his brilliant Industriale Illuminato album from 2014. Spread across 6 tracks he tackles a shimmering, cinematic variant designed as a suite rather than single, unbroken tracks. The result is the most evocative and optimistic of the contributions here, gently sloping topographies intersecting noirish giallo themes, 4th world tones and layered organ drones. We’re huge fans of Lussuria’s work – if you have never heard any of his music before – this is a really good place to start.

The last tape is the most tantalising prospect of all – a proper full-length collaboration between Regis and Prurient, and, for our 2p, the best of the lot. Tantamount to a staring match between two singular producers, side A’s Family Configuration is perhaps best defined by what they left out, working at lip-biting levels of tension pregnant with a dread that never fully reveals itself, whilst the B-side’s The Eternal Laws assuages that anticipation with a slowly breathtaking scene of arcing, silvery harmonics underpinned by oily subs and serrated guitar jabs with an aching sense of restraint…