Review: Conducive – Vanterwood Industries, Inc.
Slow-dawning dark ambient horror. The strange factory on the edge of town.
Released on Veinte33 Records
After dark, an unnamed citizen sneaks into Vanterwood Industries: a gigantic industrial factory complex on the edge of town. They capture what they see and return home the next morning. “They think they've figured out what's going on within the factory walls,” remarks the album’s accompanying text, “and it’s too horrifying for words”. Within this narrative, one imagines that the curious trespasser tells no one. Perhaps they’re too traumatised to articulate it. Perhaps they’re fearful of repercussion. And so the album’s menacing contradiction is perpetuated: this gigantic industrial structure, which looms over the neighbourhood and doubtless employs many of its residents, manages to maintain secrecy regarding its primary function. Structurally, the album centres on this inside/outside dynamic: two long tracks forefront the grim cacophony within the factory walls, while a two-minute field recording captures the external sounds of passing cars and conversation in the daytime, during which one imagines the unnamed citizen to be taking speculative photographs of the structure’s exterior.
Sonically, the album channels this exact combination of conspicuousness and mystery. Strange loops are concealed with an emission smog, and while it’s possible to detect a harmonic energy to these repeating patterns, they never adopt a discernible shape, crouched instead within airs that thicken, through imperceptibly slow evolutions, from dark ambient wisps into sputtering harsh noise. The mental imagery is vivid and dreadful: it’s pitch-black, save for the ghoulish-green “ON” lights of machinery modules and the pale infiltration of moonlight. Shadows depict the toothed edges of cogs and the quiver of rotating engine belts. No one else is around. The gradual ascent in volume could resemble the machine’s accelerating productivity, or the slow-dawning inside the mind of the unnamed citizen: the intensifying speculations regarding the factory’s raison d’être, through which strands of disparate thoughts are bound together into a horrifying conclusion. They will never tell, and we will never know.
