A project that has been releasing works for twenty-three years, Craig Varian’s 400 Lonely Things (co-member Jonathan McCall passed away in 2020) should be a haunted household name when it comes to the “pagantronic” and “ghost ambient” genres of electronic music. 400 Lonely Things is self described “Rustic Ambient Psychedelia” and “Analogue Folk Dronescape,” an amalgam of decayed samples, ethereal electronics, and detourned field recordings that conjure up a visionary, eldritch place that exists at the crossroads of hauntology and folk horror. Varian creates a sonic cosmos that fuses past, present, and future sonorities, a cinematic effect that plunges the listener into an uncanny atmosphere. While 400 Lonely Things’ recordings are indeed “hypnotic,” the music is actually quite complex and evocative, a diffuse layering of sounds, ambiances, moods, and effects. 

She Thinks She The State Department is a wonderful, unbalancing, and disconcerting collaboration between Chicago’s PBK, and Massachusetts prime cassette tape-scaper Howard Stelzer. It’s a five-track CD album, which blends disorienting textural fumblings, stuck avant-jazz bayings, off-kilter droning’s, and a general feeling of disqueting-to-unhinged sound-scaping.

Wilt is an Illinois-based project that blurs the boundaries between dark ambience, uneasy field records, and low-key/ brooding noise texturing. The projects been active since the late 90’s, with over one hundred and twenty releases to date. Mold The Earth is a CD album release from 2024, taking ten tracks.

The Fourth State is a long-form, evolving drone work from Sweden’s Andreas Rönnquist. It runs at just over the fifty-two-minute mark and features some rewarding shifts/ sonic developments.

Vampire Zombies…from Space is a cult 2024 retro sci-fi/horror/comedy film from writer/ director Michael Stasko (Boys Vs. Girls, Things to Do and The Bird Men). The film stars Troma legend Lloyd Kaufman (The Toxic Avenger, Troma’s War and Class of Nuke ‘Em High), Judith O’Dea (Night of the Living Dead, The Pirate and October Moon), Jessica Antovski (The Unbelievable with Dan Ackroyd, The Dread and Dreamcrusher), Craig Gloster (Depraved Mind and The Eternal Present) and Oliver Georgiou (Helltown, Cam_Girlfriend and The Haunted Museum).

Here’s a recent release from this highly prolific Tampa, Florida based walled noise project. The single thirty-five-minute track has a decidedly unsettling looping quality about it, which really does burn deep into ones head/ psyche.