This is the archive of The Xero Music Hour, a weekly ambient(ish) music program featuring the artists of Xero Music (aka Zac Bentz). It ran from May 20th, 2020 to August 29th, 2021.
Track list is in each track’s info. All music can be found elsewhere on this page.
Pressure. Uncertainty. Paranoia. Amplified by an overcrowded, remorseless city. A perviously unseen but always suspected malevolent existence begins to seep through the darkest cracks in the concrete, and Edith D. begins to lose her mind. Voices, rot, and a leering figure pursue her. What she sees in blinding, disorienting flashes sends her careening out of the city, into the countryside, where she is far from alone. Exhausted, consumed, Edith D. abandons her fear, emerging on the other side of
One song.
Twenty-four hours.
Forty-eight segments, each thirty minutes long.
Originally released exclusively to subscribers once a week across eleven months. Each original release has unique artwork.
(30,000 days is roughly eighty-two years, or one lifetime.)
Known around the world for delivering up massive (and massively long) slabs of dark atmospheres like Field Recordings from the Edge of Hell (8 hours), The Hermit Seeks the Stillness (12 hours), and 30,000 Days (24 hours), Dirty Knobs returns from the other end of the spectrum with Do Not Let Your Kindness Be Weaponized Against You, 5 songs clocking a relatively demure 30 minutes. From the robotic whispered warning of the title track set over a family’s shared laughter, to the reverential echoes of “We Sing the Sun,” and the almost-not-even-there of “Endure,” these songs take a much more delicate, almost hesitant approach than the smothering walls of sound that Dirty Knobs is known for. But the analog pulses and wails in “Closed Horizons” and “Welcome to Ghostbridge” do remind listeners of the dread just around the corner.
I sometimes have a difficult time remembering how I’ve made music. When I listen back to final mixes, it’s a mystery. I could never recreate what I’ve done. Not exactly. That doesn’t mean it was created in some sort of fugue-state. Quite the opposite. But a major component is experimentation and a sense of discovery. If you know exactly what you want to discover, then that’s not discovery. The journey is sometimes indistinct and difficult to recall.
I often have a quote from Warren Ellis’ Morning Computer in mind while working, a mental image of “places that were only ever designed to be passed through.” Maybe that’s what this music is. Music for places that were only ever designed to be passed through. Infinite anechoic chambers absorbing all vibration. Massive underground neutrino detectors catching a glimpse of the universe as it passes through their clear waters. Galaxies of dark matter and voids. Mental spaces where time stutters and anxiety flexes.
Music to be lost and forgotten. Music from a vantablack heart.