CD – Ant-Zen
Dark ambient sounds, subtle and powerful in their krautrock influences, modulated in highly experimental passages, make Scott Sturgis’ comeback particularly fascinating. Sturgis is a producer from Seattle better known as Converter, an important power noise project and the forefather of a certain kind of Ant-Zen sound. The music now, moving on from his period of industrial and rhythmic sequences, evolves through subdued environmental sequences that are syncopated, psychedelic and distorted (but not too much) at the root of the envelopes, which still retain a strong space-cyber matrix. The layout of “Undertow”, edited by Salt, also injects some mutant contamination, which “chromatizes” what was “organic”, so to speak. We hear the influences of bands like Neu!, Amon Duul and Faust, in a journey through the space and time which is not immune from the disappointments that such “hybrids” may cause in the listeners who loved his old style. Browsing through the rather substantial eleven tracks in the album, we find new insights, in scattered sophisticated, powerful and “machinically” elegiac passages.