Bing Industries
by Tokoro Wohnen
Released on Flaming Pines
“Impassable moments lingering in the present,” utters Beth Robertson, the soft spoken voice cresting over a jostle of harmonics, creaks and knocks. “Existing just after us but before her. Everything lingers.” It’s inevitable that a record inspired by gigantic mounds of waste should be rich in the residue of the past, yet it’s striking to hear these atmospheres crackle with future-facing anticipation. Out of the sounds salvaged and recycled from previous performances at Tokoro Studio, we hear all-new energies shivering into life, from thickly echoed guitars pooling upward like timelapsed gathering ponds, to chimes rising like insects out of tall grass. Each of these four pieces loom into the air. The present doesn’t replace the past but settles on top of it, becoming ever taller, rising into the skies as a rich, vertiginous temporality.
Central to the record is the influence of the shale bings in West Lothian, which are huge masses of waste material reaching up to 95 metres tall, persisting as remnants of Scotland’s prolific shale oil industry during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Over time nature has come to claim them, furnishing the red gravelled surfaces with flourishes of green, drawing in the vibrant presences of skylarks and badgers and hawkmoths. The Bing Industries is a testament to this beautiful irony: that the presumed-dead byproduct of energy generation has quietly outlived those industrial structures that purport to keep the world turning. Aptly, the duo allow their textures – those incidental, peripheral offcuts of previous performances – to not only persist through the ravages of time, but to defy them. Drones stretch themselves across warbled reams of wilting tape, patiently summoning all manner of fresh vibrations into their resurrectionary ecology. Everything lingers. — Jack Chuter
credits
released July 31, 2026
All tracks by Martyn Riley and Beth Robertson
Photography by Martyn Riley
Mixed & Mastered by Freddy Lomas
Liner notes by Jack Chuter
Bing Industries zine made by Beth Robertson
Tokoro Wohnen is a collaborative duo between Martyn Riley and Beth Robertson that explores improvisational performance-based sound. Through various improvisation sessions at Tokoro Studios in London, Martyn (Tokoro) uses sampled and resampled field recordings and manipulated cello loops and drones to create layered points of associated time and experiences whilst Beth (wohnen) refracts with spoken word, guitar and dictaphone field notes and recordings. Together they explore improvisation as a re-encountering of site and through listening, deconstructing and reconstructing these sessions they perform their own dwelling.
Launch gig 5 September 2026
