400 Lonely Things to release ‘Mother Moon’ album on Cold Spring

The dark ambient / drone / electronica project 400 Lonely Things returns with an all new album on the 24th March via Cold Spring. Produced by William Basinski it is a dark ambient, sample-based ‘séance to the Banning Mill’, which was basically a mansion and haven for artists in the backwoods of the American Deep South in the 1970s-1990s.
In the 90’s, 400 Lonely Things’s Craig Varian frequented the Mill in the years before it closed. It was here that he was exposed to the artwork of Richard Scott Hill, whose artwork “Minotauress” is on the album cover. This album, born out of that first visit to the Mill, is an imaginary soundtrack ‘to the many years of solitude the Minotauress spent hanging in the musty, secret winding halls of Banning Mill’.
Since the days of the Mill (and Varian’s subsequent purchase of “Minotauress” shortly before the Mill closed), Craig Varian, along with best friend and late musical partner Jonathan McCall, found a thread of music they’d been consistently making yet had previously failed to notice – melancholic instrumentals with weathered sampling at its core – going back to their earliest recordings in the late 1980’s. Eventually, this music was called 400 Lonely Things.
The release comes presented in a 6-panel spot-varnished digipak. Check below for the download too. Read the review of ‘Mother Moon’.
Support Side-Line
More people read Side-Line than ever, and there is still no paywall and no advertising. Readers pay for it instead - from $5 a month.
Why we ask
Advertising revenues across the media are falling fast. Unlike many news organisations we have not put up a paywall, and we refuse to add annoying advertising, so we need to ask for your help. Side-Line’s independent journalism takes time, money and hard work to produce, and we do it to push the artists we like, who are equally fighting to survive.
Handled by PayPal.
Chief editor of Side-Line – which basically means I spend my days wading through a relentless flood of press releases from labels, artists, DJs, and zealous correspondents. My job? Strip out the promo nonsense, verify what’s actually real, and decide which stories make the cut and which get tossed into the digital void. Outside the news filter bubble, I’m all in for quality sushi and helping raise funds for Ukraine’s ongoing fight against the modern-day axis of evil. Besides music I’m also an SEO and AI content flow specialist and have an interest in everything finance from stocks to crypto. There is music in everything!

