It’s time, once again, to dive into the wonderful and frightening world of Gridfailure guiding light David Brenner. Prepare to spend another three quarters of an hour squirming uncomfortably in your chair, clawing at your headphones in an attempt to effect some sort of escape from the nightmare visions he’s painting on the canvas of your mind… This is When The Lights Go Out Vol IV…

Shadows Manifest opens with six minutes and ten seconds of Brenner-induced unease. Muted jazz tones put the listener somewhere between the arms of Morpheus and death, but the palpable sense of unpleasantness never allows rest to wash over one’s ears.

Unfathomable Decomposition follows a similar path, minus the jazz. The sort of noises that used to crop up on HM government’s insanely scary Protect and Survive series flick across the consciousness; meanwhile, a generator, probably fuelled by the souls of children, pulses quietly in the background. WHY THE HELL AM I LISTENING TO THIS AT TWO IN THE MORNING? ON MY OWN!

Deaden is a classic Gridfailure track: the treatment of noises that are almost certainly crushingly mundane in real life, manipulated into things that send jolts of apprehension deep into the earholes of anybody close enough to register what’s going on. These noises coagulate, building from their innocent origins until, fused together and augmented by Brenner’s arsenal of weirded-out electronics, they form something that actually seems to pose a tangible threat to the listener.

Meanwhile, Parasomnia sees ominous cello accompanying sounds that alternate between playground frivolity and something much more menacing—like a knife-wielding clown running amok at a fairground, maybe. Or, perhaps, Brenner has somehow tapped into the brain of somebody suffering from parasomnia itself and has delivered the results to us for our listening pleasure. Yes, that’ll be it…

Next up is Clock Of Bones, which starts with the sort of metronomic wood block tap that launched a thousand nightmarish music-and-movement classes at infant school (“be a snake, Michael, be a Snake!”). Clock Of Bones ramps up the paranoiac twitching to unprecedented levels, the tic-tok rhythm boring into the skull while sundry other noises set to work on the nerves. If any one track on When The Lights Go Out Vol IV symbolises Gridfailure’s mission, it’s this one.

After all this, The Husking offers a bit of respite as this track is merely unsettling as opposed to downright terrifying. However abnormal service returns with Passe-Muraille, which possibly links to Marcel Aymé‘s short story about a man who gets trapped inside a wall. Gridfailure’s music forms a perfect soundtrack to this scenario. If you know the tale, you’ll find yourself listening as you do all sorts of Marceauesque movements trying to free yourself from the captivity imposed by your brain and Brenner’s noises. It’s the perfect conceit for a Gridfailure soundscape, and Brenner doesn’t waste the chance, using some genuinely effective techniques to completely remove any last vestige of hope the song’s trapped protagonist might have.

It’s Only A Matter of Time Now is next, and, if the ‘field recordings’ featured here are anything to go by, it’s only a matter of time until those dogs catch up with me and make mincemeat of my innards, apparently…  I shouldn’t joke of course, because this is serious stuff, and as if to underline this next track First Eyewitness Accounts of This Grisly Development is another ‘classic’ Gridfailure proposition. The nighttime noise of cicadas lulls you into a complacent reverie, almost unaware of the other sounds—harbingers of a grizzly end, no doubt—that build up and percolate through the brain, making you realise that it’s not the scent of magnolia on the eventide breeze but something much more unpleasant…

Final Transition closes in sombre, torpid fashion like the incidental music of a Get Carter-styled psych thriller. This is as close to normal as Gridfailure gets this time around. But it’s not a normal that many people would recognise, let’s be honest…

As ever, there are no real peaks and troughs here—Gridfailure is as Gridfailure does—but equally, the quality of the release that David Brenner and his cast of many have hatched is of the usual high standard. If your mind can process what’s going on here, then Brenner has come up with another winning collection of dystopic dirges.