I love the look and feel of these more relatively recent Annihilvs CDRs, with their A5-size sleeves and full-color inserts. Discs like Theologian's Dregs give me a similar feel as the late 90s Slaughter Productions releases. Very cool. This material is from 2015, a verdant period for Theologian's brand of geodesic death industrial / dark ambient electronics, and while it doesn't seem to have gotten as much attention in the online space as other Theologian releases from the past decade, this disc is a collaborative marvel from the project's discography. One of my favorites, in fact.

One of Theologian's more epic albums released during the Lee Bartow / Daniel Suffering / Dave Brenner trio period, Dregs experiments with long passages of grim orchestral music paired with whirring electronics, clattering chains, and swathes of coal-black electronic drift; the title track itself opens the album with this neo-classical style darkness before the group eventually erupt into one of Theologian's patented polyrhythmic percussive workouts surrounded by dissonant droning synths, ghastly whispered tones, and ominous vocal samples buried way down in the mix. It's creepy, corroded post-industrial ambience driven by those strange looped beats that Bartow has placed at the heart of the Theologian sound from the beginning, harshly abrasive while also glowing with this luminous, washed-out halogen glow that brings these moments of mesmeric, almost ritualistic beauty to the dire dystopian soundscapes and rust-caked technoid beats rattling hypnotically in the depths. And so it proceeds, through sprawls of inky drifting murk, to passages of cracked electronics that have the feel of a gravely ill Autechre; manipulated and amplified strings reverberating while chilling feminine wails soar through the background; mindless, grinding mechanical loops disappearing into warm baths of luminous orchestral ambience.

Have you ever sat outside late at night and stared into the sky, seeing the faint glimmer of stars and wisps of the visible Milky Way galaxy? Have you ever suddenly been overcome with the sensation that you are in actuality not looking up, but that you are staring down, into an impossibly vast and endless void? I get a similar feeling while listening to Dregs. A blackness, an emptiness, an endlessness. The rumbling, almost tribal-like quality of the title track with its looping percussion and surges of daemonic hiss streaking over a distant vanishing point. Shrieks of evangelical mania echoing over complex latticeworks of rhythmic noise and black static and melancholic, fragmentary melody. Hypnotic, of course. But instead of entering a trance-state, it generates a much more harrowing experience. That feeling of being bathed and baptized in polluted waters, of being submerged in infinite streams of incandescent energy stretching into the cosmos. It's intense, like all Theologian works. The titles are evocative of things both otherworldly ("Dunes Of Ash") and intimate ("Obstetric Violence", "Oviparous"), singing of pain and persistence of frustration. For seventy-minutes, these pieces emerge , written in the ink of terminal anxiety, often amorphous and vaporous, but in several instances (like "Embracing Slavehood Through Apathy"), coalescing into a brutalist heaviness that feels more in line with the urban desolation and abject repetitious fury of early Swans or Missing Foundation. Theologian's music is always "heavy", but it's albums like this that bring it to another level, and almost industrial-metal level dirge plowing through star-clusters and astral bodies and storms of sparks from a hundred acetylene torches raised to the firmament.

Perhaps the incessant, distorted heaviness of Dregs is amplified by the presence of Daniel Suffing (Slavernij, Whorid) and Brenner (Heidnik, Gridfailure), who both share a background in extreme metal. It's hard to say - I can affirm that this particular lineup produced some of my favorite Theologian material, though. On his own, Bartow plunges into the depths of electronic distortion as far or further than anyone else in the field, and his strained, melodic vocals that appear on tracks like "There Can Be No Coexistence" on Dregs add this anguished humanity to the churning noise that hints at a kind of radiation-blasted darkwave quality. But there's no denying that having some extra hands on deck allows him to push harder and deeper into new folds of fleshy, corporeal experience. Aside from the two aforementioned dudes, the music on this disc also benefits from contributions from Gretchen Heinel (who brings cello, vocals, and synthesizers), Bernard Allen (beats), and Faith Ciavarella (vocals), their precense on various tracks creating new and sumptuous cloudbanks of texture, grit, and melancholy. The most curious thing about Dregs is how it manages to reveal moments of such blinding beauty in the midst of the album's slavering misanthropy. It's a dichotomy to be experienced firsthand. Fucking amazing electronic ennui, here, chilled and blackened.