A track taken from the duo’s surreal new album, Industrial Country, featuring Abul-Loul the Singer.
Ambulance Vs Ambulance is the strange brainchild of Bokeh Versions‘ shadowy mastermind Jeffrey Lee Hearse and one half of Giant Swan Robin Stewart, a match made in heaven or hell, depending on your perspective. As the title of their debut album Industrial Country might suggest, their sound reverberates between cursed shoegaze, post-apocalyptic bluegrass and acid-flecked industrial, seeing the duo drawing together synths, percussion, mandolin, harp, harmonica, slide guitar and anything else they had lying around. “Recorded somewhere between Avon, Amman, Brecon, Brean Down and the cloud,” this is Industrial Country, absolutely anything goes.
‘You Were Always On My Mind’ is a goosebump-inducing highlight from the album, featuring vocal contributions from Abul-Loul the Singer, who joins Tunnel Witches, Laughter of Saints and Missterspoon to round out the album’s supporting cast, all of whom were called up from the amorphous swirling mass that makes up the mighty Avon Terror Corps. Jeffrey Lee Hearse channels the ghost of Scott Walker in an eerie approximation of his doom-laden incantations, backed by ecstatic sax drones from Robin Stewart and autotuned vocal licks from Abul-Loul, who watches on as the track shuffles into a radioactive sun, setting over a mechanical desert.
The exquisitely lo-fi video arrives courtesy of Max Kelan, royalty of the Bristolian underground and core member of Salac and Bad Tracking. Distorting footage lifted from artist Skye Turner‘s performance project ‘I Can See You’re a Cowboy’, Kelan patches together a wild west fever dream, the kind of thing you might expect from David Lynch, the Coen Brothers and Maya Deren if you got them all in a room together and gave them an afternoon to make a music video.
Jordanian experimental imprint Drowned By Locals say of the release: “Ambulance vs Ambulance deny you the mythical thrill of a shootout but grant you an impending danger that stretches indefinitely over lonely lands; the lo-fi ramblings of a lonely man transmitted from an alternative dimension, the feverish hallucinations bordering on ecstasy of a cowboy infected with cattle plague in desolation; the weird and disgusting west; a wretched malodorous countryside, a scrapyard; an abandonment that draws you in.”
‘You Were Always On My Mind’ [Feat. Abul-Loul the Singer] is taken from Industrial Country, which is out now on Drowned By Locals. For more information about Avon Terror Corps, find them on Bandcamp and follow Bokeh Versions on Instagram.
Watch next: Franck Vigroux & Kurt d’Haeseleer reflect on deep human and geographic upheaval with The Island
