John Mingay and Adam Sykes - Shattered

John Mingay & Adam Sykes – Shattered – CDr/Download – Iris Light – 2024

https://irislight.bandcamp.com/album/shattered

1.     An Infinity Not Once Absent.

2.     Stillness Sculpts A Roar.

3.     Tempo Cast Beyond Tone.

4.     A Waiting Torrent.

5.     Confusion Befalls Change.

6.     Unspoken Shadow.

7.     Every Being Slashes and Blinds.

8.     We Imagine Merely What We Miss.

9.     Shrouded Fallow Gone. Tattered Remains Fall.

10. Among the Voodoo of Symbols.

11. Mortality Breathes Hard.

John Mingay and Adam Sykes are no strangers to this site, both artists have had their work reviewed on here, before.

Shattered is made from a whole lot of Mingay and Sykes adjusting each others work on the tracks and titles. It presents as one, long dark, hostile and threatening album from the inset. The work puts me into a variety of altered sonic landscapes and strange dreams, in fact this could serve as a soundtrack to the odd dreams that have occupied my sleep of late. Areas of the work feel like bad weather, feeling like storms brewing, rain falling and winter soon arriving. At other times it feels like a tunnel of nocturnal consciousness taking the listener on a dark journey. This also has many moments of beauty that appear within the work such as tracks like Stillness Sculpts a Roar or Unspoken Shadow. The mix is loud and clear, projecting the work well, emphasising shifts within tracks to highlight individual noises and passages of different tracks – Stillness Sculpts a Roar is a perfect example of this. The language of the work can shift dramatically from sparse with a few noises and instruments and it can progress to become busy with more sounds and metal being hit to resonate for long periods of time. Sometimes the clanging feels like nightmarish church bells singing their song over the endless nightmare of drones particularly on Confusion Befalls Change. These parts can also feel like sounds from decades ago, nightmarish and strange, dragging us across different times.

This is a long, very effective (and in parts beautiful) Industrial, Dark Ambient album that delivers good, clear work through impressive, gradual creation and excellent production. Shattered is well worth buying, the link to the work is above.

ZG 2026

IrisLight and Dave Kirby – au​ð​n

 

IrisLight and Dave Kirby – au​ð​n – CDR/Download - 2023

https://irislightmusic.bandcamp.com/album/au-n?from=hp

https://satori-industrial.bandcamp.com/

https://irislight.bandcamp.com/

1.       Made For Crawling.

2.       Primordi.

3.       Tertia.

4.       Rift.

5.       Neogenesis.

6.       Absym.

7.       Floe.

8.       Margin.

9.       Sodium.

10.   Beneath It All.

                                                            Image from IrisLight Music Bandcamp.

Auðn is the second collaborative album between IrisLight and Dave Kirby. Malor in 2022 was the last one. Adam Sykes is IrisLight, this is his main project that came from his original work as Generic and this work goes back to around 2008. Sykes also runs IrisLight records. Dave Kirby is best known for his work as Satori, he was originally in Satori with Robert Maycock, prior to that they were both in Psychopath and all of this goes back to 1984. In between all that Kirby has also made ambient music that started in the 80s that led to projects like Mail Rain and his Contrails solo release in 2016.

Deep, dystopian drones blast from my speakers as I play auðn, the futuristic quality to the sound is immediately apparent. It feels like the soundtrack to a Sci-Fi film, that isn’t a criticism, just noting the professional quality/high standards of the sounds. The work emanates dreamlike qualities as it gets murky and the listener can’t make sounds out clearly, giving a sense of semi consciousness. Moments of keyboard clarity sprinkle beauty across the work through the fogginess. It has moments of being slightly sinister, but in the element of exploration and surprise. In contrast to the violent darkness of Satori, this work truly dives into different emotional territory.  On Neogenesis, keyboards are used to sound like choir voices as they sing across drones and keys. There seems to be journeys through bleakness that emerge in shimmering clarity throughout the album.

When I was contacted about this album and told it would include Kirby, I expected nothing less that excellent, I wasn’t disappointed. IrisLight and Dave Kirby work very well together and have made an excellent album. Good work, links to both artists Bandcamp’s are above.

Army of One 2023.

IrisLight - Aeturnum

Album: Aeturnum

Artist: IrisLight

Available at:

https://irislight.bandcamp.com/album/aeternum?fbclid=IwAR012ypTgZgsVp7IKMD1TWV0ToaolBGnB-Qc9kf_FmoWt0YXUL4mfSvMMqs

Tracks:

1. Novus

2. Infernum

3. Spatium

4. Aeturnum.

5. Damnum

6. Transitum

7. Cecidimus

Deep, cold, isolationist drone ambient from the artist formerly known as Generic, broadcast from somewhere between the lightless abyssal depths of a vast ocean and the deserted streets of some cyclopean Lovecraftian ruin. And in that enormous space betwixt lies a complete geography of loneliness and madness, spiced with the utter meaninglessness of existence. It’s all coloured in the deepest hues of emptiness and desolation, and yet, its shimmering coruscation and scintillation holds the purest of frosty beauty, and that beauty is a wonder to behold.

In the context of these seven tracks, darkness is a relative concept. Ever visited an old building that even on the brightest of days appears to be hiding something malignant within its walls? This is the nearest description that comes anywhere near distilling the essence of the compositions here. Resonant bells and gongs, stretched out into timelessness, cutting banshee winds that penetrate deep into the marrow, and frigidity that not only steals warmth but also all thought. There’s nothing here but unbroken and unchanging landscapes, a place where a second lasts as long as a millennium, and simultaneously where a millennium lasts as long as a second.

A couple of examples will suffice. The album opener ‘Novus’ sets the tone being painted here, assailing our ears with ringing tones and wails the sources of which are obscured by a thick veil of mist. ‘Spatium’ is the slow subterranean heartbeat of this frozen realm, and album closer ‘Cecidimus’ (Latin for shrivel) is the logical endpoint – dissolution and disintegration of self and existence, the scattering of everything we were and have known to the cold reaches of the ends of the universe.

From a personal perspective, I connected on so many levels. That suspicion that there’s far more to reality than what we’re able to perceive with our senses, that perhaps there are forces of which we’re unaware shaping everything around us, and that furthermore we have no control over those forces. We’re reduced to tiny insignificant specks smaller than the atoms which compose us. Salvation and redemption are beyond us and impossible to grasp: we live in an entirely neutral universe that neither cares if we live or die. If we destroy ourselves as a species there will be no one to mark our passing, nor anyone to remember us.

Closest thing to an exposition on the beauty within futility I’ve heard in a long time. Excellent! 

Psymon Marshall Jones 2019