Norman Westberg of Swans MRI

Room40 present a trio of newly mastered recordings by Swans guitarist Norman Westberg, including a pair made and self-released in 2012, plus a new piece Lost Mine, to continue a fine relationship begun in 2015 with their issue of Westberg’s expansive 13 album.

So titled after undergoing an MRI scan due to hearing loss caused by “aural misadventure”, the three pieces render coruscating scapes of a particularly scorched, strung-out and American ilk, that pay testament to 30 years experience playing with the one of the world’s loudest, noisiest rock groups.

They are rolling, long-form, solo meditations on electric guitar and amplifier; rounding up the 15 minutes of ferric, almost ecclesiastically-charged air in MRI, whilst the 20 minutes of chinning top lines in 410 Stairs reveals a rich harmonic spectrum from a variety of delays and incidental room recordings, and Lost Mine sweeps us into the ether with a most sanguine 18 and half minutes of low-lying drones and thizzing, astringent and bittersweet timbre, apparently “recorded as an echo of the processes that led to the original recordings.”