Conjuring images of blizzards and howling winds, Kevin Richard Martin’s Sub Zero is called that for a reason. It’s monolithic and unforgiving, even by the Bug’s standards, representing his most suffocating take on ambient dub yet. It’s not just a matter of making already heavy music heavier: Here, Martin hollows out his materials, leaving just the bass and high frequencies. The only real midrange comes from what sounds like inclement weather or the occasional distant, lumbering percussion. It’s a new wrinkle in Martin’s sound, making yet another record of bleak electronic dirges feel unexpectedly novel. Sub Zero is a black hole of sound that sucks the color out of everything around it and makes a universe out of what feels like nothingness.
Martin has traditionally reserved his own name for projects outside the dub-dancehall continuum of the Bug, like the conceptual Sirens, a journal of childbirth as baptism by fire, and the abyssal Black, a tribute to Amy Winehouse. There’s no specific story behind Sub Zero, just an oppressive, almost featureless soundscape that makes it difficult to hear any details beyond the ominous, droning roar. Originally released in 2022 on Bandcamp and finally pressed to vinyl, Sub Zero is as powerful as anything released under the Bug alias. Only the feeling of emptiness and despair, rather than Martin’s usual righteous fury, separate it from his better-known project.
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Sub Zero operates in two modes: a stillness that calls into question the presence of life itself, and a loud banging coming from somewhere underneath you, as if to remind you that you’re not alone after all. On tracks like “Destroyed,” or its spiritual cousin “Screwed,” the plodding rhythm is more anxiety-inducing than head-nodding. It reminds me of the time I experienced an earthquake that lasted longer than 30 seconds, where the sheer sound of it was scarier than the things falling off my bookshelf. (A more universal comparison might be Akira Yamaoka’s score for the Japanese video game Silent Hill.) There’s something unnerving about the mundane thwack of the rhythms. A track like “Screwed” sounds like it’s buckling in a gale-force wind, the soundscape getting louder and fuzzier as the clanking gets closer.
The other, quieter mode, though, is where the album is most fetching. Melodies move across the divide like the slow drag of a bow across a string. Sounds range from a blanketing rumble pockmarked by grit and gravel (“I Am Nothing”) to a lilting melody playing to no one in particular, as on “Take Me Home,” which sounds like the national anthem to some long-dissolved country, spun at the wrong speed from a crackly 78.
The most enveloping moments are where the visibility drops to zero and everything is subsumed by fuzz, washing out even the pseudo-techno drums on “The Beast.” In these walls of white noise, Martin channels Paysage d’Hiver, a Swiss black-metal artist who has made a whole career—and a lot of lore—out of approximating winter storms through blindingly white guitar fuzz and overwhelming dark-ambient atmospheres. All that desolation might get old if Sub Zero didn’t get so much mileage out of its somber remit. The album is colored 10 shades of black with the occasional shock of white, but majesty, anger, fear, and a sort of awe surface again and again. The fog finally clears on the closing track, “When I’m Gone”: The album’s rough textures fall away to reveal a beautiful but still desolate hum, with all the sturm and drang of the preceding 49 minutes replaced by an eerie calm. It’s like surveying a wasteland after a cataclysm, and realizing you’re still standing.
