SLOT MACHINE MUSIC is an LP of casino field recordings made by one ADRIAN REW, released by Aaron Dilloway’s Hanson Records. It collects the richest of Rew’s earlier CD-R releases, stealth recorded on a dinky Olympus LS-11 as he wandered casinos, picking up snippets of speech against an uninterrupted backdrop of carnivalesque slot machine noises, occasionally loose with cash himself.

The project began as an outgrowth of Rew’s college thesis on Georges Bataille, a deceased French writer interested in mystical states achieved through excess and indulgence, temporarily leaving behind the physical limitations of our fragile and fragmented existence as mortals. in this interview with The Quietus and in other places, Rew describes how the recording project grew out of his fascination with gambling as “a liberation from these worldly concerns where you’re getting into this rejection of time, of money,” – the hardcore gambler enters a “trancelike state.”

Slot Machine Music doesn’t convey one discernible scene or moment in the casino, but seems to collapse innumerable, isolated moments into a single, unified duration. This helps to induce in the listener the sort of trance-like state Rew describes. It transposes the casino-bound sensation of rocking back and forth in the simulated womb of capital into the contained space of a recording. You’re not risking financial devastation by listening to it, which probably diminishes the intensity of this mystic state, but as a stand-alone piece of sound art, it’s some fine listening.