Particularly Dangerous Situation by Ian Wellman

For fans of Tim Hecker, Saba Alizadeh, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Adam Curtis documentaries, and the helpless, horrifying calm of witnessing a distant natural disaster, Particularly Dangerous Situation by Ian Wellman builds a brooding ambient epic founded upon field recordings taken during the 2025 Los Angeles County wildfires. These fires inflicted historic destruction in large part due to extreme high winds which form the foundation of this album’s haunting sound, the rustling trees, warbling metal, and whistling alleys firmly planting us in this foreboding scene. This wind and all its toxic, smoke-filled fumes provided a backdrop to a city waiting anxiously by their phones for new evacuation notices, the howling chaos outside carrying the promise of disaster arriving at any moment. Winds always intend to equalize temperature across the planet, a sisyphean task which began with the formation of the atmosphere and will continue until the sun swallows the earth. This balance descends into chaos at the hands of human emissions, leaving us shaking in fear at the implications of such raw, uncontrollable power constantly howling past our walls.