Drone project A-Sun Amissa have prepared a very special set for ArcTanGent festival next week. They have written a 30-minute piece, Drone Oracle, which they will give away at the festival and perform only once on Thursday 15 August. Tickets are available from here.
A-Sun Amissa will play London on 3 September, Nottingham on 4 September and Cambridge on 5 September, and are also working on a new album. Other upcoming dates and info, including associated projects, including recent releases by Richard Knox, and how to access Drone Oracle via Bandcamp/Linktr.ee can be found on Instagram.
Experimental industrial noise duo Warren Schoenbright will be playing with Torpor in London and Bristol later this year and have plans to tour in early 2025. They are currently working on new material including an exciting collaboration. Their album Sunless is out now on Human Worth. You can follow them on Instagram and Linktr.ee.
Sludge/noise-based quartet Wren are in the final stages of preparing the release of their next record. Black Rain Falls is due out on Church Road Records in early 2024. Follow them on Instagram for upcoming show dates in September and November and more.
By way of introduction to their music for any who don’t know it, here is my review of a gig they all did back at the end of March which was unfinished for a while and not published until now.
Warren Schoenbright – A-Sun Amissa – Wren Co-headliner
The Peer Hat, Manchester – 30 March 2024
In one small room underneath a pub on a side street tucked away on the edge of Manchester’s city centre, gathered three very distinct bands, co-headlining on the penultimate day of their four-date tour of Edinburgh and northern cities.
There was a good turnout and enthusiastic response for all three bands. Wren played last with all new material. The other two played tracks from latest records Sunless and Ruins Era, telling alternative or partial stories to those of the full albums.
There were collaborations between the bands also, with Wren’s drummer Seb Tull joining Warren Schoenbright for two tracks, and their singer/guitarist Owen Jones providing live vocals for A-Sun Amissa’s final track.
Warren Schoenbright
Two mortal ferrymen, drums and bass, a board and a mic distorter, drenched in blue monochrome, embarked upon the opening set in this small basement and ended up hurtling through infernal chasmic places far from the sun. The only tether to earthly life an irreverent heavily reverbed “thank-you!” after each song, they rowed into echoing stygian darkness with grim resolve. 
The sunlit world receded rapidly with opener These Drear Abodes, a tortured chthonic mechanism buried in the howling flesh of some vast biological structure, conveyance for transit between milling throngs of the damned. Ratcheting methodically through ominous and desolate industrial gloom, it gathered speed for descent into a cavernous and mephitic maw.
Winged banshees swooped down in welcome with barbed and stinging tales of loss and misery. Reverberating distortions of angels and shafts of sunlight seemed to filter through far overhead, becoming shrouded with chilly flares as hope scaled the walls alone in a strobed desperation, finally dimmed by crepuscular pulsations.
Joined by Wren’s drummer Seb with a single drum and cymbal for Boiling Vermillion, all souls were borne rapidly downwards into thickening gloom. There was evoked a feeling of racing at insane speed down echoing catacombs of unimaginable age, fell tenants rushing forward in greeting from their lairs as tunnel entrances flew past in baleful light,or when teetering over silent dizzying expanses before plunging onward.
After discarding an encumbering outer garment, the two drummers bent to their task, pounding on the very edge of physical possibility. Visibly almost consumed in the attempt, they reached the concluding moments with gasping relief as if narrowly avoiding a gaping, seething chasm below.
The pace slowed to a menacing padding of paw and predatory coil of sinew for Icarus and the Bruised Air, circling steady ground measured out by gravelly, charred bass and drums in tribal unison, upon which a mournful parade of earthly memories shuffled by. Growling with a subdued and bitter heat, the vocals evoked the flickering warmth of wan flame as it lit the final glimpse of a life lived in the world above. Turning and hastening towards the deepest descent, we bid farewell to Seb and continued down alone.
Bells echoed in this yawning realm as if a church rested far above the nethermost embarkation point of the journey; a last analogue of time and space. Giddying terror engulfed all with a terminal cataclysmically rapid plummet into flashing darkness accompanied by the fevered chant of a herald of demise welcoming incomers to the final gate. A warping of bells, the only remaining conscious thought, faded altogether and were engulfed by contorted noise as identity was extinguished with the farthest memory of the sun.
1. These Drear Abodes
2. Christquake
3. Minos the Judge
4. Boiling Vermillion (with Seb Tull)
5. Icarus and the Bruised Air (with Seb Tull)
6. Sunless
A-Sun Amissa
The trio played the first four tracks of most recent album Ruins Era in simple blue light. The interface with the audience, some of whom who stood almost amongst them, seemed almost non-existent.
From a delicate almost imperceptible opening murmur burst a heraldic blare of foreboding, fading slowly like a gigantic breathing. Reverberating soundscapes of deep sorrow, disquiet, warning, ethereal beauty, and redemption were woven by the three musicians as if in deep meditation. They filled the small space with a largeness of sound whichseemed to expand out beyond the basement and the building which contained it into the street, the city and beyond, extending to the wispy boundaries of the atmosphere.
Undulating and weaving drones grew and subsided, grew and multiplied with the effect of enveloping, gathering and conveying upwards upon a sonic cumulus of layer upon layer of air, traversing through sky and over land far below. There was no clear boundary between tracks which bled one into the next, and themes and refrains returned like orbits which wheeled and intersected within, around and between them.
Other sounds populated land and sky like stories told or natural and atmospheric phenomena: haunting rivulets of clarinet unsettled like lightening agitating amongst thunderheads. A sample of Pauline Oliveros part way in, not present on the recorded album, gathered and sharpened focus on what is here and now; what we do with our lives; the things humanity must face.
A simple guitar refrain returning throughout evoked slowly boiling clouds parting over landscapes upon which events were unfolding over great periods of time, perhaps the formation, ascent and demise of some great civilisation far below. Iron grey mistakes rising far beyond their merit wrought havoc and destruction all about them, then slowly became still and silent, crumbling away grain by grain until they all but disappeared, blown away to form beaches.
The Diamond Lodge passed through the middle of this unfolding story like the transit overhead of some seemingly unending metallic entity. Jets and exhausts blasting and heat warping around it, the massy reverberations of its processes and activities passed bluntly through flesh and organs, whilst below sprawled a landscape marred by mile after mile of urban blight. Eventually, this state of capture between two malfunctioning manifestations of progress ended as the entity passed and moved away, and simultaneously, steel and concrete gave way to green and expanse of air.
Seraphic vocals like shafts of light through tree canopies and clouds, called onwards in a lamentation with the possibility of redemption, a healing balm. Within nested cloud vistas, all the potential permutations of ineffable beauty in the universe shimmered like a nested multiverse of gossamer membranes.
Final track, nearly 22 minutes long A New Precipice, saw an intersection of orbits, and eons passing upon the landscape. A great tempest passed though, a heartbeat giving way to a gravid hush before a tremor erupted into an unstoppable storm-quake marching through land and sky. Wren’s Owen Jones, kneeling away from the audience at the side of the stage area so that his voice was disembodied, unleashed desolate howls of stark and tormented beauty which rent open an abyss of despair like a wound. Closing over behind the snaking tail of the retreating storm as it passed away with slow heavy tread, green and colour returning slowly made a mossy shroud for undulant urban remnants far below.
Having been carried aloft for the duration, we were laid gently back down on solid ground in the small basement as the three musicians bent over their boards, undoing one sonic thread after another until the sound dissipated as gradually as it had arrived. Silence washed into the small basement room followed by a long wave of applause.
1. A Sad, Pathetic End to A Long Downhill Slide
2. The Diamond Lodge
3. You Never Knew It but I Really Was Your Friend
4. A New Precipice
Wren
This was all new material for the band, due to be released later in the year. For previous material, themes included the seasons, most recently the sublime light and stormy shade of 2020 album Groundswells.
In a cave backlit with polar light, four musicians turned inwards toward each other in a companionable circle of smoky chiaroscuro and silhouettes, their drummer laying down the concisely intricate melodic framework of the stories they wove as his shadow played on the low ceiling. 
Layer upon layer of these tales built up a rich tapestry of sound, eons of time made matter by accretion of life into a landscape miles high, over which raged slow storms of bleak beauty, ebbing into enveloping tranquillity and warm solace before kindling once more.
From this high place, vocals drove these tempests onwards with incendiary force, the absence following the honed onslaught of each reverberating howl a drawing back and gathering until the next one burst forth, so that the whole of the music breathed in a circular respiration. It travelled forward without wastage of notes or beats, measured and heavy at times and at others urgent with hypnotic drums.
The musicians focused inwards in a physical sense and in so doing contained the sound in such a way that the cave became a receptacle of condensed raw emotion.
