Anthony Baldino’s music seems to emerge from two adjoining rooms whose shared wall has become susceptible to the mold of determination. In one, he designs sound and programs synthesizers for Ludwig Göransson on projects including Venom, Tenet, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, and Transformers: Rise of the Beasts. In the other, he sits alone among modular systems and vintage machines, teaching private grief to speak through oscillators. Each practice contaminates the other productively. Blockbuster precision enters his independent work, while the freedoms of Los Angeles’ electronic underground haunt his commercial craft. Across his second solo album, CONVEYOR, sound becomes a substance caught between sculpture and combustion, carrying dread before language can domesticate it.

The album began with an image made unbearable by its clarity: Baldino’s mother standing on a conveyor belt traveling toward death while he remains powerless to stop it. The vision gathered force amid his grandfather’s passing, his dog’s death, anxiety surrounding his parents’ mortality, and the suspicion that the world had entered a terminal corridor. Anguish becomes the imperceptible mechanism beneath the day, moving everyone we love toward an absence the mind cannot inhabit. Baldino built these pieces around his Eurorack system and Deckard’s Dream, adding outmoded synthesizers while threading recordings of his grandfather and dog through music informed by IDM, industrial music, metal, and film scores. Released into the circuitry, their voices become unstable presences, fragments of affection wandering between frequencies, close enough to disturb the current yet too distant to hold.

Within the record’s implied world, a nameless protagonist wakes beneath the failing lights of a city abandoned by chronology. Streets advertise pleasures whose consumers have vanished. Towers burn with corporate insignia while elevators ascend without passengers. Screens sell eternity to the dead. “For Death To Come” opens the blinds on this exhausted metropolis, its rolling bass carrying the patience of a verdict already delivered. Fractured transmissions cross the horizon while raw tones scrape silence into finer forms of silence. Outside, a crimson glow divides the skyline. Time has frozen without becoming merciful: debris hangs above an avenue while an explosion waits inside its unfinished flower. Movement belongs only to the solitary figure walking through the galactic pause before some unseen hand restarts the catastrophe. Baldino’s synths turn escape into a spiritual problem. Survival promises only another conscious mile.

“Leave The Reminder” appears farther on as a district of radiant keys and nervous percussion, where memory stutters under the weight of being carried forward. The central figure enters a club beneath a ruined transit station. No bodies occupy the floor, although automated light and bass keep the room dancing. Chord swells preserve an era when listening required no public evidence and a song could live entirely within its recipient. Disembodied impulses gather into a hymn for the unborn, moving without witnesses or the tribunal of visibility. Inside the rhythm, a tender, damaged recording surfaces, then dissolves before identity fastens around it. Remembrance cannot retrieve the lost, the traveler realizes. It gives absence a nervous system, which Baldino crafts from gleaming abrasion.

Beyond the station lies the technological undertow of “Dark As Sleep,” a void generated by machines seeking release from matter. The city thins into scorched plains threaded with fiber-optic roots. Satellites drag broken halos through orbit; buried servers dream on behalf of a species that misplaced its future. As the traveler crosses, inner and outer life collapse. Angels rise with ash in their mouths, demons descend carrying instruments of impossible mercy, and their encounter opens a passage between rival eternities. To dream here is to live on one’s own terms, yet freedom exacts a toll. Each step requires surrendering a former self, leaving translucent skins behind. Metallic convulsions suggest that perseverance becomes another machine when pain is merely outrun. Baldino refuses easy deliverance. His traveler presses onward while facing every discarded version of the person they once believed they had to be.

That reckoning leads to “A Sudden Crumbling Into Ruin,” where gunfire and corroded broadcasts collapse history into simultaneous debris. The wanderer enters a battlefield whose causes have been erased. Symbol-less flags remain; orders crackle from speakers whose armies became dust generations earlier. Fragmentary memories mingle with interrupted signals until private regret and public failure share a frequency. Unlaid plans accumulate as phantom roads promising destinations that disappeared before departure. Every route converges upon “Holding, Waiting,” an immense terminal built for an answer that may never arrive. Departure boards cycle through extinct alphabets, and benches hold the impressions of bodies absent for centuries. Beneath an artificial moon, broken politics washes into white noise, letting the heart redraw its coordinates with each beat. At the edge of perception, a wing flutters behind a sealed gate, carrying the final tremor of a love that never entered history.

Baldino makes this middle passage especially potent by resisting narrative comfort. The record’s machinery convulses with pangs of sorrow, yet never impersonates a human mourner. Its compassion emerges through other means. Dissonance excavates chambers beneath feeling, revealing that dread can contain awe without ceasing to be dread. CONVEYOR understands cinematic scale as an instrument of intimacy: the horizon expands until one remembered voice becomes its gravitational center. What initially resembles apocalypse gradually reveals itself as consciousness stripped of distraction, a psychic wasteland where mortality cannot be outsourced to abstraction. The protagonist’s journey therefore bends inward even as it continues across physical terrain. Every ruined structure is also a failed defense against impermanence. Every transmission asks whether love survives as memory or whether memory is simply the shape love takes after losing its object.

Then “Lifted From Lifetimes Away” alters the album’s gravity. The terminal ceiling opens onto a realm outside inherited time, and the traveler rises through it without triumph. Death recedes to a whisper on the lips of figures stranded beyond distant access points, but immortality has not arrived. What changes is the central figure’s relation to motion. Until this point, the conveyor has represented helpless passage, the mechanism carrying beloved bodies toward disappearance. From above, its belts form a vast script written across the wasteland, each line composed of lives migrating beside one another for brief intervals. No single rider can halt the system, though every touch changes what the next person carries. The traveler has searched for a refuge beyond loss and instead discovers continuity within contact: a hand steadied and an animal’s devotion translated into current. Mercy becomes less a pardon than a method of transmission.

“Live Forever” rises from a cloud of dissonance as the traveler returns to the surface. Synthesizers push through the haze until accumulated pain breaks into an electrified physical release. The title sheds its boastful armor. Living forever no longer means securing a permanent place on the leaderboard of recall. It names the instant when a finite life passes something tender into another finite life, accepting alteration as the cost of endurance. The traveler walks back through the city while time resumes around them. Debris completes its fall. The waiting explosion spends its force against the horizon. Screens dim while elevators stop; the underground club releases its final pulse into empty streets. None of this resembles restoration. The wasteland remains wounded, yet its wounds cease demanding an impossible cure. They become openings through which the dead continue to modify the living.

This is where Baldino’s technical discipline and private mourning align most closely. His machines do not conquer mortality. They translate its terrible rhythm into a helpless luminosity that never pretends to save us. The protagonist finally reaches the conveyor seen at the journey’s beginning and steps onto it willingly. Ahead stands the mother figure, still traveling beyond reach. Behind gather the grandfather and the dog beside innumerable strangers whose losses fed the city’s electrical veins. The traveler cannot move closer to any of them because the distances remain fixed. Yet beneath everyone’s feet, the belt carries more than bodies toward an ending. It carries gestures forward, including those too small to recognize themselves as inheritance.

The unexpected refuge of CONVEYOR lies in this reversal. Mortality, the thief stalking love, also provides the limit that permits love to be given, because a gift without an ending would never have to leave its giver. The lone figure opens an empty hand and discovers that emptiness is not proof of failure. It is evidence that something has been passed on. In the final illumination, solace becomes neither destination nor escape but the courage to serve as a temporary passage for what no one can own. The conveyor continues beneath the stars, bearing each life into darkness, while through the traveler moves a warmth shared by the dead but owned by no one.