condition (record/cover): NM / NM

Ferial Confine was Andrew Chalk's first serious publication under his own name, an 1985 cassette of massively reverberant drone works derived from sheets of metal excited with various implements in a shed at the edge of Yorkshire. Fusetron's 1999 vinyl reissue, in an edition of 550 copies, remastered the material at Colin Potter's I.C. Studio Preston in 1998 and gave the recordings a proper sonic presentation for the first time.

One long track per side. The method is brutally simple: metal sheets, primitive multi-tracking, no overdubs in the later sense, just accumulation and decay. Chalk had come out of the same early-Eighties Yorkshire underground as The New Blockaders (who would subsequently cannibalise his sound sculptures into their own work), and the occasional collaborator on Ferial Confine was Darren Tate, later of Monos and half of Ora.

Compared to what Chalk would later become, across his subsequent work as half of Mirror with Christoph Heemann, across Ora, and across the long series of painterly CDs on his own Faraway Press, The Full Use Of Nothing is raw, primitive, and spiritually closer to the first Organum LPs than to anything that came after. The genesis stone of a catalogue that has kept growing for four decades. An essential artifact of the UK drone underground at its most unreconstructed.