Civilisation has a peculiar way of measuring success: build something enormous, extract whatever can be sold, leave behind a mountain of unwanted material, and then move on before anybody asks what to do with it. The shale bings of West Lothian, formed by Scotland’s nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century shale-oil industry, are rather inconvenient reminders of this arrangement. Some rise to nearly a hundred metres, and what was once classified as industrial waste has gradually become a habitat for plants, birds and other wildlife. Tokoro Wohnen’s "Bing Industries" takes this landscape as its point of departure, finding an unexpectedly fertile correspondence between those artificial hills and the discarded fragments of earlier musical performances. Across four long compositions, Martyn Riley and Beth Robertson assemble a world of unstable tones, manipulated recordings, guitar, cello, drones and spoken word, where the past is not tidied away but allowed to continue behaving unpredictably.

The duo’s working method is central to the result. Riley samples and resamples field recordings, works with manipulated cello loops and builds slowly shifting structures; Robertson brings guitar, spoken word and recordings made with a dictaphone. Their source material comes partly from previous improvisation sessions at Tokoro Studio in London, which they subsequently revisit, dismantle and reorganise. This gives the music an unusual relationship with its own history. Rather than treating an improvisation as a finished event, the duo regard it as something that can be entered again, from another angle, with the benefit of time and a slightly different set of intentions. The process resembles archaeology conducted by people who are not entirely convinced that the objects they have uncovered should remain where they found them. Fortunately, they have the good sense not to label every fragment and put it behind glass.

“Skrepana”, the opening piece, establishes a distinctly uneasy atmosphere. Creaks, rough harmonics and long, strained tones emerge without settling into a conventional musical hierarchy. Robertson’s voice appears amid the sounds, speaking with a measured intimacy that makes the surrounding textures feel even less predictable. There is no attempt to provide a reassuring distinction between foreground and background; a scrape can suddenly become as compelling as a sustained tone, while a seemingly incidental sound acquires an almost architectural presence. As the nearly twenty-minute composition develops, its harsher elements begin to accommodate more delicate melodic gestures. The change is not a triumphant arrival at beauty after a prescribed period of suffering. It is more like discovering that a place you had considered inhospitable contains forms of life that have been there all along.

The twelve-minute “a600w” extends this uneasy coexistence of roughness and tenderness. Distortion and softened tones occupy the same space without cancelling one another out. The effect is especially persuasive because the duo avoid turning contrast into a simplistic battle between darkness and light. A distorted sound does not automatically signify danger, just as a gentle one is not obliged to offer consolation. Instead, each texture alters the way the others are perceived. The music seems to fluctuate between different degrees of focus, occasionally allowing a melodic line to emerge before surrounding it with enough interference to prevent easy sentimentality. The cryptic title offers no interpretative assistance, which is probably sensible: even music deserves the occasional privacy of an unhelpful label.

“Frosty” introduces a grainier, more radio-like character, with fuzzy interference and wavering tones suggesting signals whose origins remain uncertain. Yet the composition is not simply an exercise in sonic decay. Its rough surfaces are balanced by passages of unexpected delicacy, and the movement between the two creates a tension that remains compelling across its thirteen minutes. Sounds appear to lose their stability, then acquire a different kind of coherence through their relationship with neighbouring elements. Riley and Robertson understand that distortion becomes less interesting when it is used as a universal seasoning. Here, it has a specific role: it changes the apparent distance, temperature and weight of the material around it. Even the more delicate passages retain a slight uncertainty, as though they might dissolve if approached too confidently.

“Rogue” closes the album without attempting to settle the questions raised by the preceding pieces. Its darker textures and gradual shifts in intensity suggest a landscape after an event whose details are no longer available. Softer tones occasionally emerge from the denser material, but they do not offer a definitive release from it. The composition’s strength lies in allowing these different qualities to coexist without forcing them into a narrative of damage followed by recovery. Nature does not necessarily repair what industry has left behind; sometimes it adapts, grows around the damage and produces something that would not otherwise have existed. There is a difference between healing and continuing, and "Bing Industries" is sensitive to it.

Beth Robertson’s spoken contributions add another dimension to this relationship between place, memory and duration. Her voice is neither a conventional narrator explaining the music nor an ornamental presence added to make an otherwise abstract recording more accessible. It introduces human thought into a setting that resists human control, and its relative intimacy makes the surrounding sounds feel even larger. Robertson’s wider practice as a sound and radio artist, with an interest in local ecologies and collective listening, finds a natural counterpart in Riley’s work with sampled material and manipulated recordings. Their collaboration is effective because neither element has to dominate. The voice does not translate the sounds into a single meaning, and the sounds do not reduce the voice to another anonymous texture.

There is a risk, with a project so closely tied to an ecological and industrial metaphor, that the music might become an illustration of its own accompanying text. "Bing Industries" largely avoids this trap. Its compositions are compelling even without knowing the history of the shale heaps, although that history gives the listening experience a sharper edge. The music does not attempt to recreate an industrial site through literal sound effects, nor does it romanticise the abandoned landscape as though pollution were simply an attractive filter applied to nature. Instead, its method of recycling earlier performances offers a more subtle parallel: the unwanted, the accidental and the incomplete can acquire new significance through sustained attention and a change of context.

Flaming Pines has long made room for work that approaches listening through field recording, sound art and experimental ambient music, and this release sits comfortably within that territory without feeling like an exercise in genre compliance. Its four compositions demand patience, but not the solemn, self-congratulatory patience sometimes associated with very long drone music. They reward attention because their internal relationships continue to change, not because the listener must endure a prescribed duration before receiving a certificate of spiritual achievement. There are no grand climaxes to congratulate us for staying put, and no convenient final revelation explaining what all the noise was supposed to mean.

The real achievement of "Bing Industries" is its understanding that the remains of one process can become the starting point for another without losing all evidence of their previous existence. Its sounds carry the marks of their origins, yet those origins no longer determine what they can become. The shale heaps have outlasted the industry that produced them; the musical fragments have survived the performances from which they were taken. Neither is pristine, and neither needs to be. Tokoro Wohnen make a persuasive case for forms of beauty that emerge not from perfect materials but from prolonged contact, altered circumstances and the stubborn persistence of things that were supposed to be finished. In a culture devoted to replacement, this is a quietly radical proposition. Even waste, it turns out, can have an afterlife more interesting than its original career.