The Zone - Prion CS

Losing no steam from his Basic Channel driven tape Dredge, released on AST in 2021, Newcastle's Oscar Parkes quickly follows up with the recordings that form Prion. Where Dredge forged it's heavy moods from the beat-driven tropes of dub techno, here it is the relative absence of rhythms that allows Parkes space to populate his cavernous void with flickering crackle and dreading bass. 



Prion is a gently heaving entity, like metal made flesh made metal. There are elements of the static uneasiness of Burial and Space Afrika here, without any of the allusions made to their UK garage lineage. In this sense, The Zone is fittingly an alienated/alienating space to inhabit, but not without its intrigues. There is definitely the feeling that Parkes has spent ample time trawling through constructed video game environs and this soundtrack has crept from behind the doors such involvement has left ajar in his head.

Parkes doesn't see The Zone as a project that is significantly technology focused, as much contempo electronic music regularly fixates. At least not any more so than the usual amount exercised by someone living within what, according to Parkes, is the same dystopia proffered by CCRU in the 90s, only severely more banal in its realisation. Although made using software, there is still a visceral sense of the bodily in Prion’s heaving, subterran lurches and its vertigo-inducing high-end. - Altered States Tapes