Last Industrial Estate – Last Industrial Estates

	3.5
Release data: Last Industrial Estate – Last Industrial Estates CD, Gterma, 2012

Extensive and sinister drone ambient is the game at play on the concept album “Last Industrial Estates”, an ode to the remnants of the industrial era. It’s one of the ambient projects by A.P., aka Anders Peterson (who’s doing all the excellent mastering-jobs for the Gterma label until now) who regards it as his personal goal to “create music ambience rather than ambient music”.

This hard-copy album expands upon of the self-titled album released in the summer of 2012 on the UK Kalpamantra netlabel. The first two tracks of long form textural music evaporate a gloomy and overall desolate atmosphere, but without getting too foreboding. On “Black Fields”, things smoothly start to resonate, although staying minimal, shifting to a soft glowing and slow morphing sound design on “Sunrise over abandoned meadows and industrial decay”.

Things turn out menacing, profoundly dark and alarming on the 22-minute “Restricted Area”, where the ghostly realm is emphasized by explosive, in-your-face sound effects. Here it seems as if the soft pulsating flow of drifting isolationism visualizes a breathing organism living in the core of a vast, empty industrial building. A smooth, more positive-oriented soundscape is found on “Garden Therapy II”, the final track of the album.

Although rather heavy as a whole, “Last Industrial Estates” expands on cinematic sound worlds in an intriguing way, sometimes to melancholic effect. Mind though the longest piece is not for the faint of heart.

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