A stifling heat descends around the listener as machines and creatures strive through a surreal landscape in Mick Rudry’s beautiful EP

Where exists the threshold between calm and chaos? When does something change from being a thing of tranquility to an abrasive assault? The answer isn’t as simple as the difference between calm and chaos would have you believe. There is peacefulness nestled within the loudest most and most offensive things, and also disarray and noise in things that instil a sense of undisturbed beauty.

Mick Rudry‘s Age Is an Endless Drone calls to the listener from a strange place. On the one hand we have this sprawling feeling of peace. Gigantic notes career past the listener, grains of them dripping and cracking off as they move slowly past. But on the other hand there is this sense of claustrophobia or suffocation. Melodies doppler wildly out of view, as if melting or succumbing to some great heat. Mechanical sounds hammer away endlessly, completing micro-sequences the listener will never understand. Age Is an Endless Drone Pt 2 feels as if you are looking out over a vast field of industrial activity. A calming red glow emitting from the horizon, but as you tilt your head slowly down your eyes find an innumerable array of mining or drilling machines. Pumping, eating, feeding, burning, endlessly doing something to the earth underneath.

A tranquil wreck may be an accurate way to describe the sound. A challenging hybridisation to achieve, but one that Mick Rudry succeeds in finding. Tracks are timed with perfect precision. At the start of a song, the listener will recognise where the melodic narrative may be heading, but then this heat-filled haze descends. Before you know it, four minutes have passed and an incredibly dense atmosphere is all around, choking and distorted with poignant waves of sound and aching melodies.

Age Is an Endless Drone Pt 4 is one of the most affecting parts of the EP. Slowly this amorphous mechanical seraph comes crawling out of desert sand, its form wavering wildly in the thick, oily air. This robotic process repeating again and again like some gigantic respirator or pressurised piston. After a while, we hear that in fact the being is alive, grunts and groans emanating from the holy entity; noises that are half-mechanical-half-organic. A moment that seems engineered to leave the listener in awe.

Age Is an Endless Drone does not wear its true colours on its sleeve. The cryptic artwork tells nothing of the densely layered experience that awaits the listener, no description included with its release. Despite this, the 5-part EP demands your attention. Herein lies an endless vista of sound, where euphoric melodies collude with heavy sonic viscera. The artist seems to grace that often-searched for spot, the evolution of each track not seeming drawn out or rushed. It is a hazy window into a half-vaporised utopia.

sunsetgrid.bandcamp.com/album/age-is-an-endless-drone