IUGA :: Meldrop (Unexplained Sounds Group)

Emotional despair collides with surreal, unearthly motifs

Unexplained Sounds Group, Eighth Tower and ZeroK represent a small community of labels headed by Raffaele Pezzella (alias Sonologyst) and which participate actively in the promotion of spaced-out/experimental and post-industrial ambient music. Each label has its own field of specialization. Unexplained Sounds Group easily represents the most abstract and conceptually inclined sonic soundscapes of the three mentioned above, delivering a body of work from confirmed projects to promising acts coming from a vast array of cultural and geographical cradles.

IUGA is a totally new project; few informations are available online, but the least we can say is that it is a welcoming addition to the label’s usual sound signature. As illustrated by the cover artwork, the listener is invited to be immersed in a profound, deep, then isolated and menacing, harrowing, brainy musical bath where emotional despair collides with surreal, unearthly motifs.

The atmospheres are partly soothing, darkly meditative, but also uncanny, foreboding, ghoulish. Massive hypnotic drone textures interact with broken electronic signals, technological derelicts, echoing concrete sounds and cyber-like flowing movements. The album also plays with various pitches, filters and sonic sound-expanding techniques. A track such as “Aspis” develops impeccable and transportive otherworldly tones. The whole thing will lead you to a dystopian futuristic world or to some long-forgotten eras.

Some parts admit more soothing sequences, such as the repetitive and nebulous “Porcupine Quills.” The closing theme is a dynamic, eroded, meandering, then progressively corrosive, distorted ambient epilogue for looping textures and processing chains of micro-sounds: slow movements evolve through an infinitely static structure.

Somewhere between Bad Sector, Kristoff Oustad, Vestigial, Reutoff, The Haxan Cloak—with a fancy for cryptic, strange and molecular sound explorations that won’t deny pioneering figures in bleak industrial/power electronics. A really enjoyable eerie, isolationist and wistful electronic ambient release with enough ideas and well-designed textures to enthrall the listener.