Much-anticipated second full-length vinyl from Brighton’s Ian Murphy aka Hobo Sonn. Hobo Sonn’s glorious self-released debut floored pretty much everyone who heard it, drawing comparison to everyone from Nurse With Wound and Aaron Dilloway through Total and Heemann/Chalk. This new album, released by the Canadian Amen Absen label, is just as consummately out, with a sound that’s as deep as a thunderstorm and as exactingly detailed as Steven Stapleton’s obsessive studio work circa Spiral Insana. The palette is fairly minimal, with thin feedback tones, bells and Morse code tattoos suspended above a gulf of black electronics populated by slow tectonic shifts that sound like a more planetary scale Whitehouse complete with phantom/hallucinated melodies that come across like phantom snatches of processed choirs with a single guitar dissolving simple repeating folk motifs in reverb somewhere just beyond the horizon and hypnotically reductive two-tone pulses gradually fading to silence. The sound is as empty and oppressive as a wall of overheated amplifiers singing softly to themselves but it’s the surreal feel for detail, for odd sonic topography, that makes this a deeply psychedelic trip and a must for in-depth headphone investigation. File alongside classics like Heemann/Akita’s Sleeper Awakes On Edge Of Abyss, the Nord LPs, Alan Lamb’s Night Passage, Bernhard Gunter’s Un Peu de Neige Salie et al. Edition of 330 copies but all VT copies come from the special 120 copy sub-edition that features a bonus 3”. Highly recommended.