When Bruce Lamont released his first solo album, Feral Songs For The Epic Decline, seven years ago, he was best known as the leader of the psychedelic Chicago jazz-metal group Yakuza. Thus, that album’s morose, arty songs came as a radical departure, showing him to be just as comfortable constructing droning, Swans-like epics as exploding with industrial and black metal-inspired rage. In the six years since, his creative journey has taken him farther and farther afield. He’s part of electronic noise-dirge squad Corrections House, with Eyehategod’s Mike IX Williams, Neurosis’s Scott Kelly, and longtime creative partner Sanford Parker; the mind-melting jazz-prog-hardcore trio Brain Tentacles, with Keelhaul bassist Aaron Dallison and grind drummer par excellence Dave Witte; and dozens of other projects, large and small, collaborating with an ever-growing network of like minds. At its base, music is sound (noise, if you like) organized into patterns. And those sounds/noises don’t have to be pretty ones, as long as the patterns are compelling. Bruce Lamont understands this intuitively, and has demonstrated an ability to create hypnotic, ominous, emotionally resonant and even somehow transcendent arrangements of patterned sound. These aren’t “songs” like you hear on the radio. They’re literally sound art. This is an album you dunk your head in like a bucket of ice water, and when you pull it back out, you’re not the same person you were before. -Phil Freeman, 2018