Tokoro Wohnen :: Bing Industries (Flaming Pines)

This is an experience more than it is an enjoyment. Listeners drawn to the more experimental end of ambient and drone will find this a strong, solid four-track selection—patient, deliberate, and unconcerned with easy resolution. Bing Industries understands something the shale bings themselves prove: that what’s left behind doesn’t disappear.

What lingers after everything else has gone quiet

 

Ambient and drone are often spoken about in the same breath, but they’re built on different intentions. Ambient music, in the lineage Brian Eno established, tends to create atmosphere, something that can exist in the background, coloring a room without demanding focus. Drone strips that further down, often built from a single sustained tone or harmonic cluster that evolves so gradually you stop noticing where it began. It asks something closer to surrender than attention. Drone’s rise over the past two decades, through artists like Tim Hecker, William Basinski, and Stars of the Lid, has positioned it as a genre obsessed with time itself, with decay, with what lingers after everything else has gone quiet. Bing Industries sits exactly inside that obsession.

Tokoro Wohnen is the collaborative duo of Martyn Riley and Beth Robertson, working out of Tokoro Studio in London. Riley, a sound artist and experimental musician working with sampled and resampled field recordings, manipulated cello loops, and drones, builds the layered, associative foundation of their work. Robertson—who also performs and releases independently as wohnen, refracts that material through spoken word, guitar, and dictaphone field notes. Together they treat improvisation as a way of re-encountering a site, then deconstruct and reconstruct those sessions into something they describe as performing their own dwelling. Bing Industries arrives on Flaming Pines, the London-based label that’s spent over a decade building one of the most consistent catalogs in field recording and experimental ambient music. The release draws its core concept from the shale bings of West Lothian—massive waste heaps from Scotland’s 19th and early 20th century shale oil industry, some reaching 95 meters tall, now reclaimed by nature and home to skylarks, badgers, and hawkmoths. The album treats its own source material the same way, recycled fragments from previous performances at Tokoro Studio, repurposed into something new that doesn’t erase what came before it but builds on top of it.

“Skrepana” opens the record, and it’s eerie. What sounds like scratching strings or rubber against rubber sits alongside long, piercing horn-like tones, a fusion of field recordings where nothing musical is really happening yet, just texture accumulating. A woman’s voice, Scottish accent, speaking what sounds like poetry, narrates over the opening and returns again midway through the track, as if guiding the listener through what they’re hearing. It makes the experience feel closer to a dramatized audiobook fused with unsettling sound design than a conventional ambient listen. Around the 13-minute mark, something hopeful emerges from the darkness, the strings turn beautiful, with backwards string stabs forming distortions as the piece continues. At nearly 20 minutes, “Skrepana” knows exactly what it’s doing. It’s something to indulge patiently, not rush through.

“a600w” carries the same kind of distortion forward, paired with pads and strings. What’s fascinating here and this is true of drone more broadly, is hearing distortion and softness sit together without canceling each other out. On paper those qualities shouldn’t coexist comfortably. Distortion implies aggression, breakdown, something pushed past its limit. Softness implies the opposite. But in experimental drone, that contradiction becomes the point. The friction between the two is what generates emotional weight rather than undermining it. “a600w” proves that, the distortion, strings, and guitar-backed pads all work together, and the result is genuinely peaceful despite the tension running underneath it.

A synth that sounds like it’s dying, running low on battery ::

“Frosty” opens with fuzzy radio interference, which sits somewhere between creepy and peaceful at the same time, Riley and Robertson‘s process of “re-encountering” their own studio sessions is audible here, almost like being given a glimpse behind the scenes. It’s unapologetic field recording from the first second. At the 7-minute mark, the track turns, a heavenly string line peaks through, and what they do exceptionally well throughout this release is control exactly how much distortion comes through without letting it overwhelm the listener. Radio static and field recordings continue, sounding like a walkie-talkie or old radio feed, until the 10:35 mark, where the entire track shifts into a synth that sounds like it’s dying, running low on battery. It’s a genuinely effective touch.

“Rogue” closes the album, and it ends eerie and dark. The fusion of dark and heavy elements is misleading at times, by the 4-minute mark, soft eerie pads fuse with distortion that’s never overbearing, painting an image rather than overwhelming the senses. It’s the sonic equivalent of describing something pleasant in a way that isn’t pleasant at all. That’s exactly how this ends. By the 7-minute mark, the track becomes subtly peaceful, almost as if a nightmare has passed and you’re left hearing its remnants … a shadow of what came before.

This is an experience more than it is an enjoyment. Listeners drawn to the more experimental end of ambient and drone will find this a strong, solid four-track selection—patient, deliberate, and unconcerned with easy resolution. Bing Industries understands something the shale bings themselves prove: that what’s left behind doesn’t disappear. It settles, it gets reclaimed, and eventually it becomes its own kind of landscape. Everything lingers. Tokoro Wohnen aren’t interested in giving you a takeaway. Bing Industries just wants you in the room while something old quietly becomes something else.

Bing Industries is available on Flaming Pines. [Bandcamp]