AMN Reviews: Conducive – Vanterwood Industries, Inc. (2023; Bandcamp)

Vanterwood Industries, Inc. is an album-length fictional story told in the form of instrumental ambient, drone, and noise. An individual explores a mysterious industrial complex at night, but something is encountered along the journey and returns home to haunt them.

Musically, the album consists of one short track sandwiched between two much longer offerings. These pieces provide hazy atmospherics with hints of mechanical repetition in the background. But the dominating sound is that of sculpted static with a touch of synth droning. Conducive’s efforts go well beyond mere white noise and instead control the utilization of frequencies in a manner that evolves to tell the story.

The lengthy first and third tracks ramp up their intensity at an almost indiscernible pace. Dark melodies dance around the edges of your consciousness, obscured by the thick sustained industrial noise. The second track takes a different direction and seems to be based on field recordings of cars passing in a mid-sized town (a brief interlude before the haunting begins in earnest?). But at less than 3 minutes, it does not significantly alter the trajectory of the album.