It's been a long time coming for Dwight Ashley. The Ohio-based composer has been making music in his own studio for over 25 years; he has joined forced with Tim Story on a few releases, but Discrete Carbon is his solo musical debut. The album's dark avant-garde compositions reveal an artist who has struggled with sounds and textures, eventually emerging with a personal masterpiece of ambient moods, layered synths and swirling notes.

Most of Discrete Carbon's tracks were written in 2003, with a few dating back to 1999. Ashley has honed his compositional style since then, blending the separate tracks into a unified and inspiring body of work. The material is generally minimalist, with slowly changing drones and brittle atmospherics creating a heavy musical backdrop. Like most experimental music, it engages you, almost forcibly. Ashley challenges you to make particular listening decisions based on the mood changes and calculated injections of sparkling percussion and lazy guitar notes. Many of his tracks are open-ended, encouraging you to anticipate the next change. The stimulating sonic manipulations tease your senses, drawing you further into the album. Halfway through, you're thoroughly hooked by Ashley's electronic barb.

Ashley has certainly spent a considerable amount of time plotting his tunes' trajectories. Experimental drones require carefully timed changes, and that's what you'll find here: Ashley composes, performs and produces each track with the professionalism of a seasoned musician. Cold, somber "Denial" exemplifies Ashley's style: it begins with a pulsating drone that suggests the sensory deprivation of a pitch black cavern. The sounds seem to echo from speaker to speaker, and there's a sense of fascination and horror mixed in between the rising timbres. Ashley could crush you with a wall of unruly noise at any moment, but instead, he pushes you deeper into a mysterious world of ever-changing drones. "It Happened in November" displays similar traits; a rumbling low bass tone serves as its introduction. More looming, ominous sounds begin to emerge as the track progresses, poking and prodding at you like ghosts from your past. Ashley could easily incorporate "November" into a soundtrack, as it beautifully and brilliantly engages your mind with an assortment of delicate textures and rattling percussive elements.

"Eat Me, Drink Me" presumably takes its cue from the surrealistic world of Alice in Wonderland. The drone reverberates eerily, as if it was played through a steel tube. Like the magical potion, "Eat Me" taunts you with its moods and modal changes. Do you dare to get more intimate? Curiously sequenced loops haunt the icy low-end undercurrent, as Ashley toys with your perceptions. Did you drink too much NyQuil last night, or are the speakers really projecting ethereal images on your walls?

Discrete Carbon's most engrossing piece is the spacy "Katalepsis". Beginning with Morse code blips and inaudible vocal samples, "Katalepsis" morphs into a lush expanse of spatial changes. Distancing itself from the title's philosophical assumptions, this six-minute composition goes through a series of motions and modifications. While they're slow to change, the synths are noticeably warmer than those found in other tracks. "Katalepsis" is also harsher, with waves of distorted noise breaking in the distance. Ashley creates a hospitable listening environment from an indiscernible array of instruments; it's practically impossible to tell how the sounds on "Katalepsis" were created, but the resulting output is structured and sensible, and will leave you mesmerized.

Through a mixture of organic instruments, like piano and guitar, and inorganic synths, Ashley has created a wondrous collection of mind-altering compositions. Each of these drones will take you on a trip through space and time, gently purging your senses. You may approach Discrete Carbon with certain assumptions about experimental music, but after finishing "Carbon", you'll be a changed person. These drones are emotive, but retain a dark and sinister feel. It's thought-provoking, but the thoughts themselves are cloudy.