William Fowler Collins

Having a mental picture of the wide-open spaces in New Mexico helps concretize the mass of sounds that move through Perdition Hill Radio. William Fowler Collins' strategy of presenting these sounds, very few of them of musical origins, is to find a consistent decibel range within which to compress them. The longest piece, "Dark Country Road," feints with a delicate slide guitar intro that's swallowed by the sounds of air, engines and the static nothingness of empty radio noise. The gradual creep towards oblivion creates a narrative flow but elsewhere the dark grey density of noise is mostly stagnant. "Slow Motion Prayer Circle" is the distant sound of monks in a sand-clotted turbine. Where most albums that aspire to doom tend to plunk the listener into the turbulent eye of chaos, Fowler's focus is on entropy, or the after-effects of the storm.