Schuster is Tim Bayes, a veteran of the early UK industrial/noise scene who now records and operates the Adeptsound label out of the city of Perth, on the distant western coast of Australia. Despite the heat and swelter of the area in which he lives, Schuster's new release sounds and feels like ice--ancient, glacial, patient, and indifferent.

Things get chilly right away with opener "BD's Lament"--a minimal synth drone hangs in the air for much of the track, augmented by subtle bass tones, and bitter, winding pulses. A distant, spoken interjection arrives and changes the mood briefly, before the grim drift of "I Am Living In My Own Corpse" arrives. This twenty-minute monster is the disc's centerpiece, skillfully mixing minimal synth drone with various bits of found sound. As the track progresses, chirping birds give way to the muted shouts of a panicked crowd; both are so deep in the mix as to be whispering out of the listener's unconscious mind.

"Your House Is Marked" allows a beat to break through the gloom. Unintelligible distorted vocals make sure that paranoia levels remain high, while "Manasarovar" uses synth and treated gongs to create a spectral topography. "Burdened" is the noisiest track here, interrupting a tranquil drone with a blast of harsh noise, then pulling back into a spacious, buzzing hive of sound. Bayles then adds an excerpt of a speech which details a mother's state of mind after she killed her child. Totally sensationalistic, perhaps, but the confession fits in neatly with the unsettling nature of this release.

There is real, insidious menace contained within Schuster's atmospherics; it is the sound of pure, epic dread left to roam under wide-open skies. "Breaking Down Into His Own Oblivion" is a worthy excursion into the darker crevices of the psyche. 8/10 -- Mike Griffin (10 March, 2010)