Know you fear, it's often said. A record as menacing as Bleaklow does pique one's curiosity. In The Stranger's case, there are three places to look to better confront the distressed atmospherics wafting through these eleven tracks.

If you want to place The Stranger's intentions, begin with James Kirby himself, a British noise artist now living in Berlin whose label, V/Vm Test Records, distributes most of the music he conjures under countless heteronyms. In the hundreds of hours of audio Kirby has released since beginning V/Vm in the late 1990s (including V/Vmt365, which offered a new free download for each day of 2006), his approach has ranged from uproariously farciscal (Janksy Noise, Rank Sinatra, Animal) to poignant (The Caretaker). On this spectrum, The Stranger cheats towards The Caretaker, though Bleaklow is not quite as dark nor beautiful as that project's truly landmark Theoretically Pure Anterograde Amnesia. The upshot: at a little over an hour, Bleaklow isn't as challenging as The Caretaker's four-hour masterpiece either.

If you want to place Bleaklow in a genre, begin with the second side of Evening Star, the second recorded collaboration of Brian Eno and Robert Fripp, released in 1975. This is the point where foreboding entered into Eno's ambient music. More than halfway through the side-long "An Index of Metals," Fripp's dissonant guitar loops take the enitre album down a sonic mineshaft. Before goth was a full-fledged pop genre, others would journey to this dingy place, notably Throbbing Gristle on 2nd Annual Report and Joy Division on Closer. This is Bleaklow's lineage, the malevolent intent most apparent in the pitched squeal opening "solemn dedication;" the warped synths heard on "indefinite ridge."

If you want to know how Bleaklow will reverberate in your imagination days after listening, begin by considering the recently discovered audio — the earliest known sound recording — of "Au Clair de la Lune,'' the French folk song inventor Leon Scott recorded in 1860 with his phonautograph. Scott's recording, which physically consists of lines inscribed onto a carbon black cylinder, was not intended for playback. Scott, who had a hobbyist's interest in linguistics, merely wanted to analyze the lines representing speech. What surprised about the audio when it was resurrected by a team of phonautograph enthusiasts last March was not its ghostly resonance. Anyone who's listened to Thomas Edison's experiments is familiar with the inherent errieness of 19th Century audio. "Au Clair de la Lune" thrills because it is also — and improbably — intimate. Bleaklow shares this quality — the feeling that the album is a collection of sounds captured on an obsolete audio format. Now, liberating these sounds is our job.