oyd Rice is a ghoul, a vampire -- he stalks the night, under cover of darkness, doing all sorts of unspeakable evil. Or at least, that’s what he’d have you think. The reality is probably a bit more prosaic than that, but in any case, as NON he’s made some pretty damn creepy music. Rice’s connections to the British industrial underworld have often marked him as yet another goth-noise cretin, and indeed his oeuvre does mirror the minor-key machine music of Coil and Nurse With Wound to a certain extent. But Rice has always been both more abstract and more stridently inaccessible than either of those groups, operating on the absolute fringes of listenability with his clamoring, abrasive noise collages.


His latest album as NON, Children of the Black Sun, at long last tones down his warped sensibilities, with no less terrifying results. The album sounds like the soundtrack to a particularly nightmare-inducing slasher flick, one continuous flow of ambient noise that steadily builds dread. Most of the pieces are barely distinguishable except for the fact that each consecutive one is more harrowing than the one before it. It’s an album made to be listened to alone in the dark on headphones, completely isolating yourself so as to experience the paranoia that Rice creates.


The album starts with a pair of drone pieces, keeping the tension subsumed below the surface. Over the course of the two pieces, the drones slowly become more and more forbidding, drawing you in and wrapping around you until you’re enclosed in a warm sea of pulsating tones. At this point -- and on the later “The Underground Stream” -- NON sounds a lot like Coil’s similarly-minded project Time Machines or Nurse With Wound’s Soliloquy For Lilith.


The album’s middle section is more caustic, bringing to mind earlier NON projects, except this time the clattering industrial rhythms and creepy sound effects are buried under the ever-present drone. Paradoxically, mixing the clatter down actually increases the terror; there’s a sense throughout the record of something sinister lurking just below the surface, and if you strained just a little harder you might be able to hear it laughing. By the time of the spiritual climax “The Fountain of Fortune,” which features a ghostly choir in an endless loop behind ocean sounds and the crackle of fire, this tension has dissipated into the ether, replaced by a sense of calm and resolution.


The album ends on this slightly more upbeat note, but it leaves behind a lingering fear and uncertainty. There’s some pseudo-mystical story told in the liner notes, a predictably pretentious mix of Greek and Catholic mythologies, but the music really speaks for itself without any theme to back it up. The album is a bit short at only 30 minutes, but most copies include a second disc featuring the DVD Audio mix of the album -- which sounds fantastic, and probably even better if you have a nice system hooked up to your DVD player, but really doesn’t give you that much of a different experience.


Regardless, Rice’s latest statement is a sufficiently creepy late-night gore-fest. Sync it up to Nightmare on Elm Street or the creature feature of your choice, or freak yourself out by listening to it alone in a darkened house. Either way, Children of the Black Sun is great at what it does, capturing a mood early on and intensifying it throughout the rest of the album.