Only recently have I been exposed to the work of Conure, solo project of San Franciscan Mark Wilson who is also a member of the 3 man experimental/ambient/noise group 15 Degrees Below Zero, and Imperial Floral Assault. Wilson also has a split release with Thomas Dimuzio, a fringe music artist/producer with a Bill Laswell-sized discography and a name well-known to those "in the know" about ambient-industrial noise. If you like ambient noise, Mark is definitely your man. Of late with Edgetone Records, he also has releases on the Crunch Pod label. He’s an active artist often performing live with others in the genre.

Conure is uncompromising noisescapes of the first order. To the initiated, the noise genre might just seem like, well... just a lot of noise. Something akin to turning on all of your household appliances and letting them run wild. That ain’t necessarily so. There are shifts and subtleties to good noisescapes that go well beyond clatter, feedback and rumble. And the shifts and subtleties are what make "STREAM" such an engaging release.

Composed of only 5 tracks clocking in at a little over 52 minutes, STREAM begins with "Deep", the second longest track on the CD. Imagine being tossed into a huge washing machine, submerged between the socks, jeans, shirts, underwear, etc. Now imagine all the clothes speaking to you in their soggy, fabricated language. Now imagine the rhythm and turbulence of the machine. Also imagine the machine going through its cycles- wash, spin, rinse. Feel the slosh and slog of the water. Although there is more to it than that, you get the basic idea of "Deep".

"Hobart" howls with feedback over 60 cycle hum and static radio skip, and oscillators gone wild inside a cavernous environment. "Sycon" begins with a dense intensity of noise that morphs into a harmonically rich synth chord while a rich pastiche of other thick sonic elements are introduced while oscillator tones wind it up and down simultaneously, flowing right into the next track, "Gale". "Gale" introduces some clink and clatter into the mix with a deep LFO square wave as the underpinning and plenty of sonic effluvia. A muted, morphing pseudo-arpeggiation in the background, synth squeaks and squawks, and dense slabs of noise-sonics fill out the remainder of the track. You get the feeling toward the end that at any moment, this thing’s gonna blow!

The final and longest track, "Balch" (another seamless transition) is the nexus and culmination of everything that’s gone on so far. Everything comes apart at the seams here. If the machines seemed to be at least functional when STREAM began, they are in total entropy here. Chaos reigns and nothing is stable. So many diverse elements compete with each other for supremacy that it hurts; really hurts. This is noise that only real noise enthusiasts can appreciate. No placid dark ambient stuff here. Violent, brutal and intense. Like durian fruit, a strong cigar, or a raw habanero pepper, you really have to have the taste for this kind of stuff to appreciate it fully. For me, it’s a mood thing, but I know good ambient noise from bad ambient noise, and this is some of the best I’ve heard in a long time.