DYLAN CARLSON

Original drone lord journeys through a mythic America.

Dylan Carlson is one of music’s great unsung visionaries. With his former band Earth, he drew up the template for the kind of drawn-out, hypnotic doom metal that the likes of Sunn 0))) would later weaponise. Where Carlson’s 2014 album, Gold, found him exploring gothic European folk music, here he turns his attention to the vast open spaces of the southern uSA. Expansive and desert-dry, the instrumental Conquistador could be the soundtrack to an imaginary western scored by La Monte Young. It’s a concept album of sorts, charting a journey made by a real-life conquistador across what would become Nevada, Texas and New Mexico. The 14-minute title track moves at a glacial pace, a heat haze rising from its every drawn-out chord. When

The Horses Were Shorn Of Their Hooves and Scorpions In Their Mouths ramp up the volume as they trudge hypnotically forward, a sparse cymbal crash occasionally shattering the latter’s repetitive grind. Like all great works of minimalist art, a weird kind of beauty begins to take shape within the noise. Like the conquistador of the title, you’ve got to take time to find it, even if you don’t know exactly what it is you’re supposed to be looking for.