CRUCIAL BLAST REVIEW

AUN Blackhorse CD Oral

Canadian electronic artist Martin Dumais has been active in the Montreal underground music scene throughout the past two decades, beginning with the industrial project Odds in 1990 and later moving on to techno with Les Jardiniers and Juicebox. AUN is his latest project, steeped in dark drones and loops that are primarily sourced from guitar. I found out about AUN after Martin sent me a copy of his Blackhorse album that he released on the Oral label earlier in 2007, and was really impressed by his evocative, mesmerizing dronescapes and hypnotic melodies. The sound of Blackhorse moves from deconstructed guitar melodies that are heavily processed and reshaped into abstract forms, to deep reverberating powerdrones and distorted feedback. Beautiful, eternally rumbling strings and crushing, smoothed out frequencies somewhere in between the blissful dream-drones of Troum, the classic industrial ambience of projects like Cranioclast and Lull, and, at his heaviest on tracks like "Inkblot", the subterranean ritual throb of Sunn O))). Seldon Hunt's abstract album art and the appearance of those aforementioned heavy guitar drones might at first lead you to belive that this is indeed something along the lines of the current wave of dronemetal projects in the vein of Sunn O))), Black Boned Angel and the like, but AUN's dronescapes are more synthetic sounding, and much more detailed, with slowly drifting waves of oscillating tones sweeping over crystalline loops that seem to shimmer with dark luminescence. On "Unta Eyeless", something like an orchestral Troum is achieved, and "Cyan Card Rejector" turns into one of the more rhythmic pieces on the disc, as black buzzing distortion soars over robotic whale calls and dubby percussive hits. Blackhorse is a constantly changing and evolving album, an excellent collection of shadowed, heavy, and frequently crushing droneworks that reveals glimpses of great abstract beauty as each piece unfolds. Highly recommended.