Martin Dumais was a stalwart of the Montreal electronic music scene before creating Aun, a solo project whose output is better classified as “doom ambient” than electronica. The sounds on VII are actually mostly pretty analog: Dumais plays guitar, bass, and electric violin, and a handful of guests help out on similarly old-school instruments. The resulting music tends toward the bombastically huge and relatively static. The album is divided into four primary tracks: “Drainbow” opens the proceedings with a bottomless, deathly clangor that never really goes anywhere or gets very interesting; “Broken Hill” features some slightly more conventional guitar noise and smatterings of arrhythmic percussion, before a regular beat kicks in about halfway through its ten-minute length; “Falcon” features something that feels a bit more like a groove, propelling something that sounds a bit more like a chord progression; and then “Blackhole” finishes off the formal program with a harmonically static but oddly involving, almost soothing sound — toward the end a buzzing two-chord drone gives way to a sort of heavy-rock triumphalism. A hidden and untitled fifth track ends things on a sort of industrial-ambient note. If you’re not sure you’d like it, you probably won’t, and you’re not part of the target audience anyway. – Rick Anderson