On their first official collaboration, Japanese noise pioneer Masami Akita aka Merzbow and Australian sound sculptor Lawrence English present a harrowing, surrealist portrait of nocturnal industrial activity, spawned by field recordings made in a sprawling factory complex seven hours north of Englishs home in Brisbane. He characterizes the area as uneasy and unsettling, awash in the sickly glow of smelters and refinement machinery, somehow not of this world a liminal quality vividly captured in Andrei Tarkovskys sprawling purgatorial opus, Stalker, to which the title alludes. Akita, too, described early drafts of Eternal Stalker as feeling like the soundtrack to a dystopian science fiction opera. A mood of mechanical dread and ruined futures permeates each of the albums seven potent compositions.

<