V/A: Music For Abandoned Cold War Places: AmbientBlog Review

Released on Zero K, a sublabel of the Unexplained Sounds Group, and curated by Raffaelle ‘Sonologyst’ Pezzella, this compilation presents twelve “sound descriptions of abandoned Cold War places, as part of a wider project focused on abandoned, decommissioned, or even
vanishing places”.

The nature of these places may vary, but all of their associations are as cold, deserted, and desolate as the cover image (Soviet space shuttles in a huge abandoned hanger in Baikonur, Kazakhstan) promises. Some of the locations are widely known (Checkpoint Charlie, Pripyat, Three Mile Island), others aren’t. This is also true for the performers: only a few are vaguely familiar names to me.

But the compilation definitely delivers what it promised: 65 minutes of dark industrial sounds describing places that “will become icons of past ages, existing somewhere between history and modern myth, [which] currently occupy a Ballardian mental space where reality cannot be distinguished from ghostly parallel dimensions”.