Dreamcrusher is Luwayne Glass’s prolific industrial noise project that originated in the early aughts and, for that duration of time, has blown minds and speakers alike. Glass, a non-binary, Black performance artist and musician, seldom allows the listener to enter their work passively, creating painstaking and thought provoking murals of sound. Another Country, their 39th project, starts with a mechanical CLANG and instantly throttles us into a world so uncompromisingly composed of noise, contradiction, and… feeling.

Another Country is immediately unsettling, introducing itself in cut up samples drenched in loud, scratchy noise. At times the very core of these samples are ethereal or even cheery in tone, but the surrounding filth challenges us to discern these emotional cues while essentially being aurally assaulted. It’s music in an unsteady world. Even the calmer flatlines of the mixtape remain in the yellow, only peak through the red with even the slightest keystroke.

Source materials on this mixtape range from twangy electric guitar to piano centric jazz, to KRS One and The Fall songs made unrelentingly sensual and depraved in the noisy haze. Glass exemplifies their mastery in incorporating these seemingly disparate inspirations into a cohesive whole. A beautiful example of this is when a barely audible monologue drenched in delay, feedback, and frenetic piano dashes bleeds into a version of Barmy by The Fall, only to dematerialize into a grainy million decibel wash of sound. It goes from slow and meditative to appetitive and earwormy – dancy, wanton, purely human.

Another Country is a challenging yet rewarding listen. Unlike so many other industrial noise artists, Glass’s work strives to be as much of this world as it succeeds in escaping it. You may crush the dream, but the dream came from a person– and can only come from a person.