There are albums you listen to, and then there are albums that seem to crawl up behind your consciousness, flip a few internal switches, and whisper, “Shh… let me drive for a while”. "Mesmerine" is very much the latter - a record that doesn’t so much play as "operate", as though composed by a pair of benevolent technomancers moonlighting as neuroscientists.

Illustrious - the long-running spatial-audio venture of Martyn Ware and Charles Stooke - here delivers its most unapologetically pharmacological experiment yet: two 50-minute doses of sound calibrated around the fabled 111 Hz frequency. Not the faux-mystic spa-pampering version you find on YouTube thumbnails with glowing chakras, but the unsettling, MRI-verified zone where the prefrontal cortex politely steps aside and the right hemisphere says, “Alright, I’ll take it from here.”

Ware’s involvement shapes the whole endeavour like an invisible architecture. This is one of the few figures in UK pop history who can move from "The Human League" to designing sonic cathedrals for the V&A without blinking, and here he leans fully into the “sound as engineered environment” ethos. Stooke’s presence adds something quieter but equally important - a sense of dramaturgy, of pacing, of human breath at the edges of the machine.

Together they build a space that feels halfway between a therapeutic ritual and a sci-fi diagnostic chamber. “Dose 1” is pure immersion: a hovering field of harmonics and low-frequency mass that expands like a fogbank illuminated from the inside. It doesn’t ask for attention; it simply replaces the air. After ten minutes you stop wondering what’s happening - the record has slipped its fingers into the neural wiring and begun humming to the parts of you that don’t speak in words.

“Dose 2”, with Stooke’s processed vocals, gently nudges the experience into a more ambiguous territory. The voice is soothing, yes, but also faintly uncanny - the kind of presence you might trust implicitly, only to wonder later if you were meant to. HAL 9000 has been mentioned elsewhere, but here the touch is less homicidal and more therapeutically omnipotent, like an AI that can’t harm you but absolutely can turn your introspection levels up to eleven.

The album’s pseudo-medical framing - dosage recommendations, possible side effects - would feel gimmicky if the music didn’t fully earn it. But it does. The trance isn’t theatrical; it’s physiological. Listen long enough, at the right volume, and you may find your sense of time dissolving into something embarrassingly primordial. It’s ritual music for a society that misplaced its rituals and hired an audio technician to invent new ones.

Is it music in the conventional sense? Barely. Does that matter? Not in the slightest. "Mesmerine" works more like a temporary reboot of the self - a recalibration, a quiet neurological coup. Ware and Stooke aren’t offering melodies so much as corridors; not emotions, but carefully tuned air.

Treat it like a drug, as suggested, but a noble one: the sort that doesn’t ask for devotion, only an hour of your life and a willingness to let go of the steering wheel. After all, surrender is sometimes the most lucid state of all.