Author & Punisher

Author & Punisher is the dark, industrial drone project of Tristan Shone, who makes use of a bleak, blackened, drone-heavy palette that swings between organic, gritty fuzz and cold, mechanical violence. After the much-lauded release of Ursus Americanus last year, Shone has followed it up with another exceptional release with Women & Children, a viscerally uncomfortably and exquisitely menacing record. This album sounds as though unfeeling machines performed it and was composed by angry ghosts — a wrathful, impotent rage somehow filtered through chilly alienation. All of the machinery and electronics Shone utilizes he built himself, and there's a sense of eerie sentience to even the coldest and most removed passages. Shone brilliantly blends the mechanical and organic, heavily processing his voice to an inhuman rasp and warming up gelid feedback until it seems almost alive. Whether via the angry, industrial throb of "In Remorse" or the broken crawl of "Tame As A Lion," Women & Children is a record that wants to hurt you and never stops probing your psyche for a weak spot.