Walter Campbell began as a vocalist for a number of goth industrial, alternative, and punk bands starting in the mid '90s. Although he says that he didn't fully take to ambient and experimental music until 2014, his musical projects always ended up becoming more and more unhinged due to personal traumas and an inherently performative nature. Although it is difficult to navigate the concept of Outsider Music in this period of time, and there are definitely influences from artists like Coil, William Basinski, and Nurse With Wound, Walter brings an undeniably childlike enthusiasm and naïveté to his work, especially, he says, after he took a course in experimental music taught by Jamie Stewart of Xiu Xiu.

The above paragraph is lifted directly from the artist's Bandcamp website and the the rear of the CD cover. There isn't really much more info abou this artist around, and if you do a Google search, you're likely to come up with the wrong Walter Campbell (not an unusual name). 'Walter Ego' is an experimental electronic album consisting of 9 tracks in 45 minutes. Gotta love the title of the first track - "Valiant Death Flies Circling the Kenmore" which is 1:28 of droney open resonance sustained chordal synths. "It follows you, followed by the moments before it catches you" is nearly six minutes of some of the quietest ambient drone I've ever heard, until about a minute and a half before the end when it rises a bit in volume then sizzles at the end and suddenly stops. "Edward Scissorman" employs a repetitive triplet sequence accented by bass thumps on the beat and morphs into something rather different when Walter filters the hell out of it.

It sounds like a trip through space with subtle engine drone on "Your Suffering Is Our Inconvenience" (China, Russia, anyone?) with a smooth but rumbling atmosphere that's sure to rattle your speakers if you pump up the volume. I liked the echoey electronics of "In Deep With The Deep Ones" swathed in drone atmospherics; very trippy. "Gazpacho Dream Police" sounds like a Frank Zappa title if I ever heard one, and is the longest track at 10 minutes. Although not my favorite on the album, there was something eerily intriguing and other worldly about it. "Abandon Ship" is a combination of foley-type looped sounds, and here we're blatantly heading into Nurse With Wound territory. It's quite active, mechanical and industrial. "My Friends Are Gonna Be There Too" has all the makings of great horror movie ambience, including the pseudo-operatic vocality. Weird, strange, creepy and delicious! "Samus Eats Mother Brain" is an attempt at something melodic, perhaps like Devo filtered through The Residents. Not sure it really works, even though it was modified to something much more noisy at the end.

Even though I didn't like everything on the album, there was much more that I did like than I didn't, and Walter does most of his influences justice, in his own way, which is really the best way to go.