Table of the Elements continues to celebrate its 15th anniversary with the fifth installment in its Guitar Series Vols. 3 & 4. It’s a 12xLP romp of deviant fretnoise by some of experimental music’s most prominent players, including Christian Fennesz, Thurston Moore, and Sunn O)))’s Stephen O’Malley.

Wafting, vaporously, from the suffocating heat of New Orleans, Belong shimmers like a mirage: vaguely discernable, yet always at the edge of an unobtainable horizon. Collaborators Mike Jones and Turk Dietrich employ a singular and remarkably inscrutable studio technique (Dietrich’s remix skills extend to Nine Inch Nails’ “The Frail”) to wholly liquefy source material – here electric guitars – into wave upon breaking wave of sound. Comparisons are frequently made to William Basinski’s notorious “Disintegration Loops,” and both efforts speak to intimate loss experienced on an epic, collective, and horrific scale: 9/11 and Katrina, respectively. But while Basinski’s self-destructing loops articulate a one-way road to oblivion, Belong’s music is not only degenerative, it’s regenerative.

With “Same Places (Slow Version),” Belong evinces a slow-motion transformation – plate tectonics, wired for sound. Aural mountains melt into seas; yet icy barrens yield to breathing jungles of detail. The single, sprawling track may evoke decay, dissolution and destruction, but underfoot are tendrils of inexplicable joy. Belong sings a lullaby of obliteration, and the paradox it embodies would make both Kevin Shields and Tony Conrad proud: crushing melancholia and shuddering euphoria, inexorably intertwined.

1. Same Places (Slow Version) (14:16)