A new solo Dilloway LP is always cause for celebration round these parts: Infinite Lucifer, Chain Shot and Rotting Nepal are still regular spins and it’s hard to think of anyone with such a peculiarly personal approach to the accumulated strata of degraded loops. This one comes in an edition of 500 copies with a fold-out sleeve and takes as its ‘theme’ satanic biker gangs and associated culture. It opens with one of Dilloway’s more pastoral and eerily evocative pieces, with the sound of wind through grass and music box/wind chime sounds that come on like The New Blockaders running on empty, before a lonely female voice hymns a post-apocalyptic landscape completely denuded of people and Dilloway ramps up the metal percussion. Fantastic. The second side expands on the atmosphere of implied amplifier violence before dropping to a hypnotic twilight zone where cosmo-keys and arcs of classical tone flit past in what sounds like the initiation soundtrack of Satan’s Slaves. So file it next to Infinite Lucifer for maximal light. Recommended!

Major long-form statement from Aaron Dilloway of Wolf Eyes et al: over the past decade or so Dilloway has come into his own as one of the masters of tape composition and entropic loop hypnotism. Masterpiece albums like Chain Shot and – especially – Infinite Lucifer have somehow redirected the whole marching band for the end of the world feel of the Albert Ayler Orchestra into virtual, post-noise soundworlds where the noise of collapsing architecture is matched with headhunting horns, insane levels of cracked electricity and flat-lined dead-at-the-wheel drones. Modern Jester represents the absolute apex of this approach. Several years in the making (and with the exception of one track, a completely different release to the cassette of the same name) Modern Jester sees Dilloway using tape loops, percussion, synthesizer, metal, voice and tape F/X to conjure monolithic free form noise blats that combine the early brain-erasing style of Non with the Industrial strength freedom of Borbetomagus and Voice Crack. The by-line on the sleeve reads “Every second of this recording contains subliminal messages” and the jams have a sidereal, opaque appeal, with snatches of chattering vocals and other non-physically locatable sounds leaking like white light from beneath screaming horns and arcs of peaking feedback. But it’s not all about sheet metal memories. There are some truly sublime moments, with sad gasps of semi-erased melody rising and falling with all of the otherworldly beauty of William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops while some of the more, uh, ‘psychedelic’ moments mirror the black nightmare sound of Japanese underground legends Nord. Imagine an orchestra of Cosi Fanni Tutti’s playing Demo Moe’s Demolish NYC through The Grateful Dead’s speaker stack and then playing the whole deal back through a cracked 8-track while doing 90 through a sandstorm and you’re at least close to the kind of ecstatic, overloaded appeal of this remarkable record, one that makes as much sense filed next to John Coltrane’s Live In Japan as it does beside Xenakis’ Bohor or Keiji Haino’s Execration That Accept To Acknowledge. Edition of 500 copies in silkscreened gatefold sleeves. A modern masterpiece, highly recommended!