Aquarius Records: Pendro (aka Tim Jones, the second half of the Fflint dynamic duo) describe this record as 'psychedelic', but God knows what he must have taken to come up with this. Things start off with a cascade of blips and bleeps that seem quite menacing (that's quite a feat for blips and bleeps, mind you) and slowly evolve into a more psychotic Boards of Canada. The rest of the record is a crazy mix of chopped and mutilated classical samples, found sound, hyper-distorted melodies, malfunctioning cd-player rhythms and gurgling computer glitchery, all of which eventually coalesce into a droning, buzzing coda. Really great.

Cracked Machine: This is half an hour of quality derangement for 'Fugitives On Ice'. Pendro is the kind of music that might get played if Genesis P. Orridge married Matt Wand with Gibby Haynes as best Butt. There are almost three tits uncovered on the cover and two heads at the last count! Whatever they spike that Welsh water with, Tim Jones has been drinking plenty! Well she never dropped acid, never shot up but she did loop the loops and bloop the bloops that two headed beastie beat mama. There's a pleasing density to the drones of Pendro and a definite knowledge of the best tricks that made the industries tick in days of yore when Gristle Throbbed and junkies spooled maraccas. Koo chung Ka chung vwugga sings 'The Insect Remote' and who are you to argue? Will you dare ride the 'Telepathic Ferris Wheel'? A hijacked orchestra will make you hope it never stops spinning until the tapes reverse! It's a gloopy one. They will impregnate you.

Modern Dance: Broadcasting live straight from the nth dimension comes Pendro. Voice samples, synth loops and sound effects rock and shift your senses on this amazing album. In many respects, the term music here is probably stretched (with the exception of one or two 'samples'). A weird landscape unfolds as you trek across numbers such as Telepathic Ferris Wheel, where you're gently prodded with memories of Hellraiser (II) and awfully dark places where even Peter Cushing would shit his pants. Difficult at first hearing because this stuff is so different and, yes, brave. It's obviously one of those albums that will either work, or leave you wondering what's going on - a bit like an aural rape. An electronic landscape haunted by dying sodium lamps is painted via the track Tazoa Torture Temple, and a familiar cymbal riff kicks off Birds Love To Prey (although it doesn't say whether these are the feathered kind!) where your ears simply can't keep hold of the cutting and pasting of the sound samples. Stockhausen meets Charles Ives on Fugitives On Ice - staggeringly dark and inventive, and it will take a few spins afore the true colours begin to shine.

Dark Muse: You make rather good/freaky/experimental/Exploration music... I will have to tell my husband about you... he will probably enjoy it as well.

Modern Dance: This release of Pendro is a tad more accessible than the previous, if only for the fact that they’re smaller, more easily digestible. Call me a twat for titles, but feast your eyes on some of these: Phantom Pylons, Spires And Embers, The Black Light Discipline Room and Restless Crescent. Not all, but most of the titles are as enigmatic and mysterious as these. The album kicks off with Restless Crescent. Some mad Apollo astronaut seems to be trapped, sending solo messages back to Houston as an alien hammers through a variety of dimensions, outside the capsule. Apparition is as scary as hell, Hornets In The Head is no weak assed title either - it really sounds like there’s hornets in there! Spires And Embers, mmmmm! All in all this is a cracking album because, as I said earlier, the pieces are all in bite size digestible chunks - there’s nothing at all that will stick in the throat, and the aftertaste lasts a long time. Don’t play within three hours of bedtime.

Aquarius Records: Album number two from the one man Pendro. A demented odyssey of warped records, chiming atmospherics, and hiccupping robot armies. Squiggly atoms of sound careen wildly between waves of what sounds like groaning bowed metal. Nice.

DissolvedPaul ...it's great! It takes a lot to challenge me but your music has done it [Black Light Discipline Room]

Phrygia: A dedication of the most fitting order by Pendro to the late industrious magic maker, Bryn Jones. Pendro assimilates the sound spectrum, mutilates it most unmerciful like, and just keeps injecting unforeseen sound blotches in a mildewed material knapsack. Although this isn't really toward what Muslimgauze would put out, we can always fall back on The State, and Bourbonese Qualk. This is music that takes no apparent structural bounds imposed, because the bouncing griff synth is obliterated at will by Pendro, inducing the unsteady feeling of impending disaster. Crucial music for an enlightened listening audience, Pendro has now taken this weeks awarding of the most coveted and dearly cherised Land of Phrygia "Coolest Shit We Have Seen In A Week" prize, unofficial as it may be, it's definitely worth hanging on your rear view mirror. Matter of fact, I think I'm going to start actually creating a prize and trying to somehow get it to each of the winners. How's that for appreciation? [Restless Crescent]

RED L.E.D. ELDER: textural [Phantom Pylons]

The Dark Breakfast station: A palate cleansing expiremental noise piece. Subtly calming yet with just a dash of dark uncertainty. [Spires and Embers]

Flux Magazine: Fflint Central is a very independent, consistently interesting label, issuing beautifully-produced and well-thought-through experimental recordings from a mysterious Welsh outpost. This album is a good place to start: Tim Jones' sound processing, although fiercely abstract, is always rooted in a clear idea, often derived from folk music, and is easy to follow even at its most wilffully hard to take. Available through www.fflintcentral.co.uk and well worth investigating. - Andi Chapple

The Brainwashed Brain:: Regular visitors to the Brainwashed message board might be familiar with the name of industrial prog fiend Tim Jones. Now his cover's blown because The Brain can reveal that not only is he the one and moanly Pendro, but also a collaborator in noise with Triclops and production assistant for the aural hauntings of Berkowitz, Lake & Dahmer. Like BLD, Pendro releases have so far been CD-R's on Fflint Central, the label that Tim founded with longtime friend from Fflint Barry Williams. "Peninsula" is particularly notable for including a good chunk of a head on collision of roaring analogue synth and minidisc loops during which Pendro almost blew the roof off at a Rotations night in Manchester. Pendro's mind crumbling thick drones and piercing whistles are bolstered to eye popping effect by some choice recordings of buddhist monks' guttural chanting and what sounds like black water swirling down the satanic plughole. This is my favourite noise from Fflint Central yet! The thick choking smog of this epic 'Masonic Incinerator' is preceded by what sounds like the looped distress call of an animated bagpipe beast called 'Flip' and followed by four more truncated chunks of looping and loping Pendroism which infiltrate the dark camouflaged corridors of Faculty X and leave a trail of dancing monkey droppings whilst the disembodied organ grinder grunts in ectoplasmic fury. Whilst there is much wrongness in the unsettled beats of Pendro, the closing 'Breizh Da Virviken' washes out the oddity in some eerie but calm cavernous ambient loop pools. - Graeme Rowland

Queasy Listening: Pretty stunning really, yeah experimental but actually pretty accessible - Definitely right brain noise music, which is pretty unusual. Highlights for me "Masonic Incinerator" - fantastic organic travelogue sounds amazingly tight for a live performance - and "Camouflage Router" / "Inside Faculty X" (easily up there with on a par with Non and Z'ev - circa Bust This.) - Jack Babylon

Aquarius Records: Most of you who read the list know how into Fflint recordings we are. And what do ya know, the almighty Fflint Central strikes again! Why aren't these guys huge? Especially when they are making some of the craziest, most original electronic music we've ever heard. Blows away most everything else we've heard. But how they do it? Do these guys ever sleep? Don't they have jobs or families? Or lives? But then, who cares, when we're treated to a new record this good every few months. And this one is GOOD. A quick trip through 'Peninsula' reveals: stuttering bagpipes and far away seal calls, as if Oval got a hold of some Amps For Christ cds, growling and scraping woodblocks timestretched into sinister growls, raw and ultra distorted high end melodies, player pianos reverbed to death until they become an ominous hum like a swarm of mechanical wasps pinned down by loping, stumbling Autechre-ish loops, rhythmic workouts: all stuttering thumps and slow motion handclaps, like Timbaland being held down in your bathtub, struggling for air, delicate and crystalline bubbles of ringing percussion and shimmering washes of dreamy spaciness. The record ends with a monstrous, upper register extended drone, warm and hypnotic, but still intense and ear piercing, like having an icepick made out of cotton driven into your skull. Very reminiscient of Pelt, Lamonte Young, or a very relaxed, very peaceful, very stoned Skullflower. Buy this. Seriously.

Modern Dance:: Pendro, the dark and sinister relation of Fflint, has brought out Peninsula (BLAS011). This has six tracks, each one an incredibly intense rendition of some alien emotion. Purposely written to concentrate more on longer pieces, and if listened to via headphones gives the listener a virtual reality trip through the workings of several viruses destroying their host in unison. Flip kicks off the album with the gigantic lungs of some deranged highlands demon, blowing the winds of hell as space noises and electronic sheets flap wildly. The headless sporran wreaks havoc through the distilleries! Masonic Incinerator reminds me at times of Fripp And Eno's Swastika Girls (although with a lot more menace), a seemingly endless loop of feedback and electronic chicanery. This track was actually recorded live! Sepiaville kicks off with an old honky tonk piano echoing as though through some old, disused and dusty inn from the Interzone. The pearly king and queen are holding a seance. As far as reality goes, that's it, as the track breaks down into sonic attacks with a frenzied vacuum cleaner and a nineteen foot dentist's drill - the horror, the horror. The Camouflage Router, mmm! Years ago, British Telecom used mechanical routers to route out numbers when you dialled. These routers used to click and clank throughout the day, but took on a somewhat more sinister aspect during the night. This track reminds me of one of those routers, only this is huge, and it's struggling to make the connection, often slipping, trying to climb it's way to the last number. The smell of ozone and hot metal permeates the air. This track is what should have inspired HR Giger. Inside Faculty X is a long piece made up of percussive sounds repeated and looped through an almost infinite echo with the devil's own orchestra coming in near the end. Simple, yet rather effective. Briezh Da Virviken concludes the album. This again reminds me of that Fripp and Eno sound: a steady drone builds up with an eventual backdrop of a three or four note counter-drone, which adds a strange kind of anti-harmony. A very heavy yet ultimately satisfying (and scary) album.

Aquarius Records: We're running out of superlatives ffor those ffuckers at Fflint. Just to be decent, you think they'd drop a stinker here and there. Give us a breather. But no, every single release has to be ffantastic. And this new one from Pendro is no different. Still ffucking weird, and still ffucking brilliant. Pendro is seemingly becoming less and less concerned with beats and ffocusing more on atmosphere which is just ffine with us. The sounds of children playing and staticky radio broadcasts are transmitted sporadically through a dense haze of reverb into the Twilight Zone, steel string guitars are bombarded by swoops and bleeps and other assorted sonic detritus purchased from Acid Mothers Temple at a London swap meet, dreamy kraut-prog ambience is rhythmically enhanced by lasers and phaser fire, electronic crickets are stuffed into trumpets and fflugel horns and dropped down a well, a malfuctioning player piano is lowered into a cave ffull of locusts and barbed wire. And so it goes. One indescribable sonic adventure after another. Beautiful sounds. Perplexing sounds. Ugly sounds. All masterfully woven into dense, dark swaths of confounding ambience. Once again the boys at Fflint give the old middle ffinger to the established electronica community by making yet another record that is so good, nobody knows what to do with it. Except us. And of course you.

Modern Dance: There is a lot of music out there that purports to be electronica, but here is the true variety. Whilst playing the disc for the first time the opening track sounds like a lo-fi American commercial, but soon transforms into weird sounds with lots of reverb and little recognised musical notation. So Apertures remains a curiosity. Anglesey Night Shapes seams as though you have placed your head almost inside an acoustic guitar whilst its being played and by using an early synth to cascade up and down the scale a very warm feel is generated that is difficult to dislike. Did I detect an ELP influence here or is it just my imagination. Tim Jones has given us ten slices of aural sculptures that at times test our resolve and yet he still retains the capacity to spellbind us with beautiful melodies as on the second track. From the cleverly titled Cross Your Psalm With Silver your attention is held by the utilisation of a looped rhythm which provides the mainstay for the slow moving reverential melodies to shine. It has a beguiling nature until the loud cascading notes appear towards the end. Mariner’s Time Lapse sounds a little reminiscent of the stuff that Colleen does on the leaf label but Pendro certainly hasn’t resorted to theft in this instance, as the material is a little darker and much more complex. Whilst listening to Belladonna Rodeo, images of a rodeo are created by the textures and you could begin wondering if those sounds are really steers making their noises and then something akin to a dobro guitar is played in a totally appropriate style. The distant sound of monks singing on an at times noisy cacophony of excess is perhaps one of the more challenging pieces on this disc and yet it is well titled as Sanctus Reverbium. Headphone use is recommended according to the sleeve notes and it certainly is an amazing experience. (Brooky)

Japanese Businessman: Nocturne Convolute.....is quite the bleak journey...and a very cohesive outing...every track seems to bleed into the next one seamlessly...

Aquarius Records: The Fflint Central factories have slowed down a bit lately, having churned out right around 20 releases in the last 5 or 6 years. But even kicking out 3 or 4 releases a year, that's practically nothing compared to the 50 releases a month we get from all the billions of other cd-r labels we deal with, which is maybe part of why we love these guys so much. Fflint more than any other cd-r label, have definitely focused on quality over quantity. Instead of releasing every single jam, every practice, every get-together-fuck-around, these guys actually spend weeks and months working on music, on SONGS. Every single Fflint disc is totally unique, but still immediately recognizably Fflinty, but more importantly, each disc is good. Really good. Fucking great actually. In fact, we can't think of a single Fflint release that didn't immediately and totally kick our asses. And Nocturne Convolute is no different.
Pendro is the work of Tim Jones, one half of the TimJonesBarryWilliams core that IS Fflint Central, and Nocturne Convolute is Pendro number 5 by our count and carries on in Pendro's quest to reach some strange electronic Nirvana. The beats were almost entirely jettisoned a few records back, but resurface now and then here, less as beats per se, as much as muted pulses, or stuttering throbs, but more often the beats are just rhythmic smears in a larger overall soundfield. Ambient is definitely one word that comes to mind, but not cheesy or new age, more a malevolent, very active sort of ambience, sounds churn and roil, multilayered soundscapes of organic electronic minimalism. Drone is another obvious descriptor, but drones are just a small part of the whole. Almost every track here drones in some way, but all in dramatically different ways. Nocturne Convolute is a dizzying journey through some otherworld of sound...
A huge chaotic din, like Sunroof! vs. the Dead C, immediately chopped into bits, so each blast of skree is separated by murky electronic pulses, and thick waves of freight train rumble, blissed out Muslimgauze like jams, all raga like buzz and throbbing Eastern percussion, peppered with all sorts of little glitches and electronic twinkles, cavernous industrial soundscapes, dark ambient whirs beneath chaotic bits of clatter and crunch, all morphed into a swirling smear of sound, wild blasts of outerspace sonic freakout, swooshes and bleeps and bloops, whipped into an absolute frenzy that eventually blurs into a high end drone, slow burning gongs ring and reverberate like ripples in some huge black sea, some damaged jazz squeaks and skronks in a vast expanse of haunting late night murk, buried within a sweetly melancholic melody, beats and loops chopped and sliced and diced and haphazardly reassembled into blasts of digital splatter, and some almost drill and bass, but as with most tracks the beats sort of implode and become bits and pieces of a swirling electronic glitchscape, gorgeous thick whirring drones are assembled from stuttering tones and blurry notes, creepy but so lovely, building in intensity until the drone becomes a crackling lightning storm of clicks and glitches and bzzt and grrt. Harsh and harrowing, but somehow still totally mesmerizing and beautiful.
By the time Nocturne Convolute comes to an end, you feel exhausted, like you've just BEEN somewhere, experienced SOMETHING. This is not easy listening at all, most Fflint stuff requires some work on the listener's part, some deep listening, every play reveals more sounds and more secrets, each listen builds on the one before, and prepares you for the one after. Which is precisely Pendro's (and Fflint Central in general) blessing AND curse. The sounds here are amazing, the music intense and hypnotic, sounds that make your ears hum, the inside of your head ring like a struck bell, but the sounds are are also abstract, difficult, challenging, and maybe too much for the casual listener. But you know what? Fuck the casual listener, this is not casual music, this is music to luxuriate in, to dunk your head in until you run out of breath and start seeing all sorts of strange colors, this is music that gets inside of you, and suffuses all your senses with it's strange glow. This is not background music, this is music that makes everything around it fade into the background. As with all things Fflint, totally and wholeheartedly recommended!

Modern Dance: ....and from behind the old, dark panels, there came a scratching and chittering. Outside, on a clear moonless night, flew things without wings, soundlessly searching, endlessly questing. My only comfort in this land of the dead, came from the unplugged, yet still working radio, and through the white noise, the sounds of Pendro were heard...
An album of shorter Pendro pieces, ten in all, each and every one leaves you wanting more. I've always said that a lot of the titles of individual pieces on the Fflint albums add so much to the atmosphere and expectancy of the music contain therein. So, tracks like Uncertain Flight Cycle, A Cellar Full Of Nightjars, Under The Pier, Last Arcade, and Telache Canyon do not disappoint. The Tammus Tree can be found (and heard) on several Myspace sites, and it's not surprising really, it's a belter. As with many Pendro albums, all the pieces, whilst having distinct personalities of their own, do form a kind of 'family' atmosphere and continuity, but I especially like the fact that there are ten in this family. I've said before that I'd always wanted to hear Pendro doing smaller and more concise pieces, so somebody somewhere must have listened!!! And, as usual, the soundscapes, atmospherics, colours and general moods are unsurpassable. All hail fflint.... (Dw)