Drone Machines

San Diego’s Author & Punisher is Tristan Shone, a one-man industrial doom band. In addition to singing and playing bass, he designs and fabricates a number of huge sound generators. The ones he plays here in Drone Machines include a motorized and handheld bass generator, a giant 300-pound metal spinning disc, a cumbersome chain-driven drum machine, and a mask with different microphones that turn vocals into myriad sounds and textures. The opening composition, “Sand, Wind and Carcass,” sounds like a black metal orchestra recorded inside a jet engine. It’s difficult not to think about robots in corpse paint when “Burrow Below” picks up steam; it starts with analog keyboards sounding strangely human in a way that resembles John Carpenter’s 1981 score for Halloween II. That’s before a massive metallic rhythm section booms in with detonating beats and speaker-blowing bass.