b°tong is the work of Chris Sigdell, who was previously in German experimental industrial group NÍÐ. I was unfamiliar with this artist but he describes his music thus: “The sound of B°TONG feels a lot like an agonizingly slow crawl through a dark tunnel where the dim light at the other end never gets closer.... His music is a choice of dark, brooding layers of sound, high-pitched tones and weird electronic sounds that give birth to images of darkness and tranquility, the solitude of an icy polar night or the equivalent of an underwater journey in a bottomless pit.” The label describes this particular album as: “Music made using the sound from slow-motion videos made with a smartphone. Lyrics dealing with the loss of identity, ego, isolation and despair… hostile soundscapes, wicked humor, serious issues… business as usual from the house of B°TONG.” Sounds good, so let’s dive in.

The best way to describe this album is dreamlike. But this is not the soothing kind of dream where you have kind of a peaceful ambient sensation. Rather, this is the kind of dream where you wake up unsettled and wonder “what the hell was that?” Snippets of heavily distorted and processed vocals over heavily processed field recordings make for a hallucinatory listening experience. This would be right at home in a soundtrack with uncomfortable flashbacks. Overall, this is pretty interesting stuff and the closest comparisons I can come up with are Hafler Trio and Coil.

Overall if you like experimental it has a cinematic quality to it this is well worth checking out. Well done and an interesting ride.