Conure: Strings, Locations

Strings, Locations is the work of electronics ace Mark Wilson's fiendish mind. He uses field recordings, keys and other implements to design a doomsday scenario that is most assuredly not classified in the ambient-electronica or New Age categories.

Wilson's head-banging approach constitutes a source of interest. It's all in good fun, however, as he summons notions of oscillating jet engines and mechanized disasters. Not for the feeble or faint-of-heart, the artist generates an overpowering soundscape, partially entrenched in the noise music genre, with a lot of clairvoyant-like intricacies taking place in the background.

Built on static, feedback and outrageous electronics maneuvers, Wilson depicts a world gone awry, where hope does not exist. With grinding feedback, buzzing and sweeping sounds, his art is founded on catastrophic implications. For instance, on "Implementation Steel, Nylon, and Foil," he renders a framework that signals the Apocalypse or an event that the gods above do not appreciate. Here and throughout, Wilson implies that a day of reckoning is on the horizon. Concocted with streaming high-pitch synth noises, electrical groans and massive social breakdowns, he projects lucid imagery that poses more than just a few thought-provoking suggestions.

Wilson's gushing and gloomy designs may not translate into music as we know it. And that's part of the beauty, because he tenders many persuasive checkpoints on Strings, Locations. It's an album that teeters on the macabre and could possibly surface as the scariest movie soundtrack of all time. Similes are in abundance on this curiously interesting endeavor, constructed with a distinct edge via Wilson's high-spirited inventiveness and brazen guerrilla tactics.

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