Location: North Texas
Country: USA
Genre: Ambient, experimental
Single: I Spoke of You in the Past Tense
Format: Digital
Label: Undignified Sound
Release date: July 24, 2026
Recorded in a single eighteen-minute take, “I Spoke of You in the Past Tense” is a many-sided eruption of drone, ambience, distortion, noise, effects, and post-rock. It fills the dark spaces that emerge when you believe experimental soundscapes can’t go any further. This is the debut single from Lane Oliver of the post-industrial project Diminishing, created in collaboration with Dave Brenner of Gridfailure. Diminishing is described as semi-improvisational, immersive, tense, and devastating, with mechanized cadence to carry their songs into the most personal corners of your conscious and subconscious mind.
Without the evocative, spooky spoken word diatribes typical of Diminishing, Oliver’s single aims not to diminish your awareness of reality but to multiply the obscured places within it, to amplify the dread of facing something truly known, either outside or within. The key to achieving this heightened awareness is patience.
Distant, mechanized industrial sounds blend with ambient layers, gradually approaching as somber guitars emerge to mesmerize and engross you. Slowly, very slowly, very deliberately, the distortion broadens and intensifies, accompanied by bell-like (?) tones and faint rumbles that build in momentum. Throughout this process, the guitar lines adopt hypnotic rhythms, remaining steady yet growing in tension. Inspired by the plodding, melancholic tempo of slowcore and the expressive emotional restraint of Red House Painters, Oliver crafted the guitar parts to stand out against the ambient sounds as a warning of what’s to come.
Then, seemingly out of nowhere, a massive explosion comes, a kind of big bang that reverberates across the universe, signaling the birth of a new cosmos destined to replace the old. It’s as if all the sounds up to that point were drawn together before bursting outward, pushing into every corner of the universe.
This explosion morphs into minimalistic, heavily distorted guitar effects that shriek, bellow and assume dissonant, echoing characteristics that likely hadn’t been achieved in a professional or private studio, at least not in this way. I’ve made similar comparisons before, but the resulting shockwaves of guitars ringing with industrialized sounds are like a bedlamite exhibition of David Bowman’s journey in Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
Whether you relate it to passing through the star gate to unknown dimensions or experience the birth of an alien universe which you were never meant to witness, “I Spoke of You in the Past Tense” is rich and mirthlessly orotund, surpassing his older work with Diminishing and promising deeper, more profound reflections of his thoughts with anything he deems fit to compose in the days ahead. –Dave Wolff
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