26000

With a scraggle of noise and feedback zone beginning 26000, Ilpo Väisänen and Dirk Dresselhaus continue their Angel duo with a work that inhabits its own zone of cryptic anger and contemplation. If anything, a sense of structure destroyed has been the hallmark of both Väisänen and Mika Vainio's work away from Pan Sonic, but 26000 in particular — with Angel added and abetted by performers such as Oren Ambarchi and B.J. Nilsen — introduces a sense of unspoken story to the proceedings, a soundtrack to a sci-fi film that emphasizes cosmic horror by implication. The slow roil that "Before the Rush" settles into, a combination throb and mechanistic growl, both parallels and contrasts the concluding "Paradigm Shift," the subtlest of bass rhythms anchoring overlaid drone murk and screeches of noise shaped and controlled like an event horizon reached and held. Central piece "Dark Matter Leak" sounds it, deep echoes and distant footsteps and other outer space haunted house noises interspersed with up-front bursts of percussion rattlings and glitches, a robot companion in space rapidly going on the fritz. The overlaid clatter of "In" and similarly frenetic mess of "Out" frame said dead center equally excellently.