The Future of Man

by Duff Egan

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I have been following this US drone aficionado based in Seattle for some time, but as a connoisseur of physical items, I was patiently waiting for the day when Duff Egan's soundscaping adventures will transmute into a glass mastered format. The first promising info reached my radar about one year ago, when album entitled "Sacra" was announced as the first part of upcoming three-pack of pressed CDs. Unfortunately, this promising project with stunningly looking artwork by kindred spirit Brian Bourassa didn't reach its fruitful pinnacle and "Sacra" remained only in its digital format, so I had to be again patient for some time. But fortunately the middle of summer 2016 led to the release of a 2CD entitled "The Future Of Man". And Brian Bourassa joins this spectacle again with his strikingly beautiful 2CD 4-panel digipak cover artwork. With a glass mastered format we have here a top-notch physical format. Not a very usual these days for an artist like Duff Egan, so you guys have my deep respect, well-done!!! And for this special purpose, although publishing digital releases for longer than two years, a new label Black Dingo Records was born. "The Future Of Man" 2CD is out since August 1st, 2016, and the credit list features also Brian Elgin of Sentient Sound Labs as the mastering engineer. 

A nearly 41 minutes long opus "Silent Thunder" fires up this magnificently mindscaping journey. Steady drone magma invades and insistently nuance through desolate territories, while humming undercurrents persistently arise from unfathomable depths. Quietly elevating, clandestinely metamorphosing, monolithically hissing, transcendentally climaxing, engrossingly relieving, contemplatively evanescing... an all-inclusive dronescaping scenario introducing its sole protagonist at the very top of his mind-blowing soundforging!!! Welcome to The Garden of Drone by Duff Egan!!! "Endangered Quiet Beauty" clocks to almost 19-minute mark and shifts into gracefully monochromatic, ultra deep domains, soothingly magnifying, sonorously awe-inspiring and multidimensionally immersing. Hissy curtains persistently hang, while majestically undulating expansions serenely sneak in and ride atop throughout the second half. As much balmily relieving as dissonantly challenging! "The Quiet Path", as displayed by its title, is more "lighter", although still strongly flatlined, when drifting into buoyantly enigmatic nothingness. A quite short piece, when clocking to 4 minutes only, but a powerfully enrapturing conclusion of the first disc! 

A 10-plus minutes long "Urban Wilderness", no surprisingly, delves deeply into rawer, richly layered terrains with monstrous intensifications reaching spellbinding meridians and then dissolving into encircling stillness. The inferno of magmatic hums awaits here! The next one, "Natures Symphony In Decline", keeps on the path of devastatingly monumental drone cascades. Staggering heavy-weight vertexes, which knock on the gates of The Drone Pantheon, continuously alternate with diminuendoing plateaus. Another ear-blower!!! 21-minute "Your Personal Quest For Quiet" straightly dives into jaw-dropping subterranean sceneries of terra incognita, where perpetually gurgling stratums painstakingly amalgamate with intriguingly nuanced gargantuan drone-walls and ear-tickling, otherworldly disruptive vistas. An oasis of splendiferously transcendental droneforging is fully unveiled! The closing track, nearly 19 and a half minutes long "Spirit Echoes", incorporates slowly expanding and inconspicuously sneaking, but rigid reverberations reinforced by harshly rumbling transitions, while solitary reflections are gracefully guarding above. An epic finale!!! 

120-minute "The Future Of Man" 2CD is without any doubt a superb release, both aurally and visually, and a must-have for all purveyors of profoundly complex, deliberately executed, massively immersing, subterrestrially nebulous, yet eargasmically chromatic dronecarving. Definitely stay tuned and keep an ear on fastly emerging discography of Duff Egan and his Black Dingo Records, where he features most recently also other cognate souls like Castleview, Bernard Reeb or Louigi Verona. It's quite evident, Duff Egan is a highly crafted and prolific soundsculptor, who is quickly becoming an US dronescaping powerhouse.