---

---

One of two terrific new albums of macabre black ambience from the Cyclic Law label (the other being the debut Havan disc from members of Funerary Call and Amber Asylum that's featured elsewhere on this weeks new arrivals list), Sigillum Diaboli is the utterly bewitching second album from Russian artist Alina Antonova's solo project Lamia Vox, crafted out of some of my favorite sounds: the blackest strains of ritualistic ambient music, the darkest kosmische synthscapes, and the long, malevolent shadow of the Cold Meat Industries label can all be heard threaded through Lamia Vox's music as she moves through these nine evocative tracks.
The disc opens up in a wash of gorgeous orchestral synths and vast choral voices on the track "Born Of The Abyss", ascending into a majestic flood of white hot light only to fall back into the depths amid waves of grainy distortion. But it's with the second track "Lapis Occultis" that things really get going, the beginning of the track unfolding into gorgeously grim drones and haunting female keening, a little reminiscent of Dead Can Dance at their most desolate; throughout the whole album, Antonova's understated vocals often appear as a hushed whisper lurking beneath the Walpurgisnacht drums and droning strings. And then the rumble of kettledrums-drums crashes in, thunderous percussion rising the waves of cinematic synthesizers and swells of heavy, distorted drone. As the drums are joined by more layered percussive sounds and skittering rhythms, the music grows more ominous and powerful as those booming ritualistic rhythms reverberate through the depths. Elsewhere, Lamia Vox drifts through deserted graveyards and catacombs lined with human bone on "At The Crossroads Of The Worlds", blending ominous horns and deep resonant strings with distant death-rattles and more of those hypnotic tribal rhythms echoing through underground burial chambers. There's the buzzing, trance-inducing darkness of "Witches Night" and the liturgical choral majesty of "Enemy Of Heaven", whose howling witch-choirs are joined with harsh martial rhythms, and the stentorian synths that take shape on the title track transform into blasting war-horns. Other tracks feature cosmic nightscapes of swirling proggy keyboards and glistening electronics, and you can easily imagine Lamia Vox's music used for some apocalyptic film soundtrack.
Lamia Vox's music might be a direct descendant of the ghostly witch-ambience of early 90s Cold Meat outfits like Aghast and the graveyard ululations of Zero Kama and Hexentanz, but Antonova updates that sound with a modern sound-design sensibility that gives this a huge, cinematic feel. I've been listening to this disc non-stop lately, and highly recommend it to anyone who's equally into the sounds of Elend, Tangerine Dream, Goblin's Suspiria and Aghast's Hexerei Im Zwielicht Der Finsternis.
Comes in digipack packaging.
Track Samples:
Sample : Sigillum Diaboli
Sample : Lapis Occultus
Sample : Enemy Of Heaven
Sample : At The Crossroads Of The Worlds

---

---

The third album to come from Wolvserpent-offshoot Aelter, III moves beyond the fantastic ethereal heaviness and synth-drenched darkwave of main member Blake Green's previous albums into mucho heavier realms of blackened gloom. There's a lot of the same mysterious, midnight ambience that you hear in Wolvserpent. But where that band delivers slo-mo crushing riffage and mesmerizing nocturnal vibes, this stuff travels further into the ether, emerging out of gorgeous murky synthesizers and harmonized choral voices into a haunting doomgaze finale.
The first half of "Clarity" drifts in slowly on a wave of warm, glimmering synthesizers, the shimmery glacial drones spreading out into infinity, a kind of blissed-out kosmische crawl that feels like something from Tangerine Dream or Steve Roach softly billowing out of your speakers. This heavenly twilight synth-glow spreads across almost the entire side, sheets of wavering chordal shift and muted cosmic drone overlapping one another, the sound of pure electronic dreamblur. Asit progresses though, the sound slowly darkens, grows more ominous as it transforms into towering spires of gothic drone that rise over the last several minutes of the side, suddenly shifting into a looping mass of guttural, murky synth-groan at the very end that resembles the pitch-shifted moaning of sightless monks woven into an unsettling death-chant.
But when the second side starts back up, the music suddenly changes into slow, droning blackened metal, eerie minor key guitars creeping across howling distant choral voices and washed-out droning synths and the pulsating throb of the drums and bass, the sound tense and ominous, almost like something from Year Of No Light slowed to a funereal pace and draped in nightmarish choirs. When the lead vocals come in, they're a deep, ethereal croon drenched in reverb, hinting at that blackened darkwave sound of Aelter albums past, but here pushed deeper into the swirling twilight fog. When the last half of the song comes in, it transforms yet again into a final long stretch of ghostly, jangly gloom with high, keening tremolo riffs rising over catchy minor key strum and a crushing distorted bass-riff, the melodies almost like something out of a Badalamenti score, woven with the gorgeous doom-laden gloompop and gothic synthdrift that finally consumes the song. Pretty amazing, and quite different from anything that I've heard from Aelter.
We have some of the last copies available of the vinyl edition of Aelter's III that came out on Handmade Birds, as its now sold out from the label; for those cassette-junkies out there, we also have the new limited-edition tape of III that the band just released on their own Wolvserpent label, limited to one hundred copies and presented in a gorgeous silk-screened black cardstock cover.

---

The third album to come from Wolvserpent-offshoot Aelter, III moves beyond the fantastic ethereal heaviness and synth-drenched darkwave of main member Blake Green's previous albums into mucho heavier realms of blackened gloom. There's a lot of the same mysterious, midnight ambience that you hear in Wolvserpent. But where that band delivers slo-mo crushing riffage and mesmerizing nocturnal vibes, this stuff travels further into the ether, emerging out of gorgeous murky synthesizers and harmonized choral voices into a haunting doomgaze finale.
The first half of "Clarity" drifts in slowly on a wave of warm, glimmering synthesizers, the shimmery glacial drones spreading out into infinity, a kind of blissed-out kosmische crawl that feels like something from Tangerine Dream or Steve Roach softly billowing out of your speakers. This heavenly twilight synth-glow spreads across almost the entire side, sheets of wavering chordal shift and muted cosmic drone overlapping one another, the sound of pure electronic dreamblur. Asit progresses though, the sound slowly darkens, grows more ominous as it transforms into towering spires of gothic drone that rise over the last several minutes of the side, suddenly shifting into a looping mass of guttural, murky synth-groan at the very end that resembles the pitch-shifted moaning of sightless monks woven into an unsettling death-chant.
But when the second side starts back up, the music suddenly changes into slow, droning blackened metal, eerie minor key guitars creeping across howling distant choral voices and washed-out droning synths and the pulsating throb of the drums and bass, the sound tense and ominous, almost like something from Year Of No Light slowed to a funereal pace and draped in nightmarish choirs. When the lead vocals come in, they're a deep, ethereal croon drenched in reverb, hinting at that blackened darkwave sound of Aelter albums past, but here pushed deeper into the swirling twilight fog. When the last half of the song comes in, it transforms yet again into a final long stretch of ghostly, jangly gloom with high, keening tremolo riffs rising over catchy minor key strum and a crushing distorted bass-riff, the melodies almost like something out of a Badalamenti score, woven with the gorgeous doom-laden gloompop and gothic synthdrift that finally consumes the song. Pretty amazing, and quite different from anything that I've heard from Aelter.
We have some of the last copies available of the vinyl edition of Aelter's III that came out on Handmade Birds, as its now sold out from the label. Limited to three hundred copies.

---

It would be hard to overstate just how influential the Japanese hardcore band Confuse has been in extreme music circles since the release of their Indignation demo in 1984. The sheer extremity of Confuse's ultra-raw, noise-drenched hardcore punk and buzzsaw riffing would become an admitted influence on Scum-era Napalm Death, and you can hear echoes of their mangled chaos all across the nascent grindcore underground of the mid to late 80s. Not to mention the legions of crust and raw punk bands that would pop up all over the world in the decades since, all trying to harness the barbaric mind-melting power that Confuse had in these early recordings, which still hold up today as some of the noisiest, most violently fucked-up hardcore songs I've ever heard. There's a whole cottage industry of bands right now that are heavily influenced by Confuse's sound and taking it into even more extreme and hallucinatory directions, but even up against C-Blast faves like Zyanose, Schizophasia and Death Dust Extractor, this nearly thirty-year old demo still sounds absolutely skull-shredding.
There have been numerous reissues of Confuse's classic Indignation demo over the years; this latest one comes from the Spanish label Noise Not Music and as far as I can tell is identical to the previous Lp releases. Right from the start, Confuse drill through your skull with the garbled feedback/amplifier vomit that opens "Absolute Power Of Armaments Old Man", a grinding mess of malfunctioning cable-signals that suddenly explodes into a ferocious hardcore punk assault, the blazing three-chord thrash enshrouded in a near-suffocating fog of extreme distortion and static, the guitar leads totally crazed and chaotic, everything on the verge of total and complete collapse. That blast of Merzbowian sonic filth and insanely raw hardcore sets the stage for the rest of the Indignation demo, as the band blasts through one squealing, hissing hardcore assault after another, the rumbling bass guitar basically leading the charge with its simple bouncy riffs, the guitar completely wrecked and deformed and not really sounding much like a guitar at all. The singer's guttural vocals sound totally maniacal, slobbering and gasping over the driving speedfreak punk, and the drumming is intensely raw, stripped down to just the most rudimentary thrash beat. The songs are splattered with insane guitar solos, slippery shredding leads that fly all over the place and are more noise than melody, and it only rarely slows down into the sort of brain-damaged dirge heard on tracks like "Nuclear Poisoning". Hearing the extreme distorted chaos that Confuse produced with these songs, you can hear them pushing the primitive hardcore sound to its furthest possible extreme, with levels of noise so intense that they sound more like something from the likes of Merzbow or Incapacitants; at the same time, this stuff is undeniably rooted in the early UK hardcore of bands like Discharge, Disorder and Chaos UK, and there's a killer thrash song buried in each of these squalls of sonic destruction. In some ways, Confuse seem to have been aiming for the same terminus point that other Japanese bands like Hanatarash and Hijokaidan were also aspiring towards around the same time.
Can't recommend this enough if you're into early Japanese HC and the newer wave of extreme noise-punk bands, as well as the most fucked-up, brain-scrambling extremes of early hardcore.
Track Samples:
Sample : Death To A God
Sample : Merciless Game
Sample : Absolute Power Of Armaments Old Man
Sample : Nuclear Poisoning

---

This full-length split cassette features ex-Demonologist Dustin Alan Redington and his new blackened noise/HNW project teaming up French harsh noise wall master Vomir for another slab of intense, oppressive distorto-horror and crushing electronic chaos.
Each artist presents a lengthy track of extreme noise that stretches out for more than twenty minutes. First is Crown of Bone's "Pungent Funeral Pits", a seething mass of rumbling low-end distortion and blasting metallic noise, grinding synth drones and monstrously over-modulated scrape that eventually explodes into total pandemonium. When the track really kicks in, Crown of Bone drowns the listener in a maelstrom of ultra-distorted noise and crumbling bass-heavy static, laced with the howls of distant machinery, far-off screams and death metal-like roars that are stretched out into smears of bestial black vomit, and endless streaks of foul, toxic feedback. A hideous blast of ultra-harsh blackened noise that does its best to channel the complete immolation one would endure at ground zero of a massive volcanic eruption, and ends up inducing the best sort of brain-death hypnosis you get with Crown Of Bone's stuff.
Vomir's "Skeptical With Regards To The Meaning" is another of his signature hypno-blasts of extreme distortion, sculpted in his unique style with layer upon layer of shifting static and deeper, murkier rumblings that all coalesce into a kind of black electronic inferno. It's the sound of dissolution, the deafening amplified roar of rot and decay after it has been speeded up a thousand times over, a raging inferno of black static stretched into infinity, where only the most attentive listener will begin to uncover the subtle complexities of Vomir's noisescapes.
Limited to fifty copies.
Track Samples:
Sample : CROWN OF BONE - Pungent Funeral Pits
Sample : VOMIR - Skeptical With Regards To The Meaning

---

When The Absolute came out in 2010, it had been something like ten years since I'd heard anything new from the American death industrial outfit En Nihil. Since then, Adam Fritz's project has produced a bunch of new releases that have been pretty impressive, but this seven-song disc is still the heaviest thing that this guy has done. Much like Midwestern death industrialist Gnawed, there is this massive percussive power to the tracks on The Absolute that give this an almost industrial-metal like feel, with massive robotic rhythms, grinding ultra-distorted synths, brutal, bestial vocals carved into hypnotic vomitous mantras, and some seriously punishing bass. The opening title track comes right in and stomps a hole through your head with its ridiculously crushing industrial dirge; with zero warning, En Nihil unleashes this bulldozing mechanical doomblast across distorted machine-noise loops, distorted voices, distorted bass, resembling some mutant industrial doom outfit where the drums have been replaced with pneumatic death-machines, the bass a slithering Godfleshian throb beneath the snarling black power electronics, the sound of tribal drumming buried in the background, drowning in electronic filth. Jesus, does this rule. Other tracks sound like symphonies of oil-drum percussionists hammering away on rusted metal, massive rumbling walls of pounding metallic power that reverberate behind layer upon layer of searing droning feedback, while others like "Crown of Nothing" bathe massive distorted mecha-loops in waves of black distortion and sinister minor-key doomriffs, or drift into vast chasms of abyssal, orchestral ambience found in "Nonlight". It all culminates with the twelve-minute closer "Everything Ends (In Decay)", an awesome roiling mass of ghastly ambient noise that layers demonic gasps and distant machine noises with rumbling black drones, doom-laden bass and some beautifully eerie piano that materializes towards the end, infecting this morbid ambience with a single faint ray of mournful light.
The Absolute is easily the heaviest thing I've heard from En Nihil, a crushing, grinding industrial deathscape that almost feels as if you're listening to something like Streetcleaner or Wound chopped n' screwed into a mangled, murky mass of jet-black factory crush and choking static, doused in a horrific, inescapable atmosphere of total dissolution. If you dug that recent full-length that En Nihil did for Eibon, you'll definitely want to get this as well. Highly recommended.
Track Samples:
Sample : Cold March
Sample : Nonlight
Sample : Souldust

---

Its been something like five years since the last Hair Police album, and apparently the downtime did nothing to improve their attitude. Mercurial Rites is some of the heaviest music I've heard from the trio of Mike Connelly, Robert Beatty, and Trevor Tremaine, with an opening track that pounds and heaves like a garbled version of Cop-era Swans set loose in a clock shop. I don't think I was expecting anything like this at all - Hair Police have always been one of the more sinister-sounding outfits to come out of the Midwestern noise/rock scene, but they've picked up quite a bit of additional weight since the last time I heard 'em come out with a new record. The abuse keeps going right into the clanking, clanging gong crashes, sputtering electronics and evil squeals that emerge over the pounding oil-drum rhythms of "We Prepare", while other tracks slither and squirm through tangles of distorted bass-buzz, carcinogenic tape manipulations, and swarms of noxious oscillator abuse, or slip into hallucinatory noisescapes riddled with distorted pulses and morbid, droning electronics. The vocals are intense distorted screams that wouldn't be out of place on a black metal album; here, they lend the clanking malformed dirges a scathing PE-like quality. That early Swans-like dirginess pops up a few other times throughout Rites as the band lumbers and lurches through these eight tracks of thunderous industrial pummel and abstract industrial scrape, but it's mixed with their weird broken-down mechanical loops and malfunctioning electronics, weird tape-saturated melodies and swells of static, and all of these elements help create an atmosphere of dread that seeps through the entire record as the band takes the primitive death-throb of early SPK and Ramleh and transforms it into this hulking, murderous beast. Punishing.

---

Two of my favorite outfits from the American black noise/industrial underground team up on this highly-limited tape from the Side Of The Sun cassette label, now sold out from the source. It's a killer combination, with Glass Coffin mastermind Josh Lay offering up some of his fantastic phantasmagoric deathdrift that contrasts nicely against the flesh-rending black noise armaggedon of Demonologist's material.
Lay's "Bad Mirror II" billows out like a thick, damp fog across the first side, a churning murky mass of eerie melodies and spooky pipe organ sounds buried under layers of rumbling feedback and amplifier drone, the creepy music vaguely resembling something off of Gene Moore's haunting score for Carnival Of Souls, but distant and muted, as if heard from under miles of rumbling synth noise and swells of metallic drift, strange looping pulses and rhythmic flutters spinning through the twilight haze, the sound sprawling out into an endless wash of mesmeric, cloudy necro-drone.
When the other side starts up, it sounds as if some of that murky washed-out ambience has carried over from Lay's track, as Demonologist emerge into a dim nocturnal glow of muted synthesizers and metallic drone. This softly swirling cloud of ghostly drift stretches out for a few minutes, but then "Tranquil Mutilation" suddenly erupts into Demonologist's crushing harsh noise, waves of massively distorted sound crashing over vague distant melodies, the recording suddenly spiking into savage bursts of volume and intensity, howling anguished voices echoing through their churning black maelstrom, pounding oil-tanker percussion thundering through the din. At various points, the band peels back their Merzbowian roar to allow brief passages of pulsating electronics, looped rhythms and ghostly melody to emerge, but these are always quickly sucked back in to the monstrous yawning maw of their planet-devouring black electronic noise.
Track Samples:
Sample : JOSH LAY - Bad Mirror Part 2
Sample : DEMONOLOGISTS - Tranquil Mutilation

---

The latest in 625's reissue campaign for the Spazz catalog, Dwarf Jester Rising is once again available on vinyl more than twenty years after its release on Clearview Records. This long out-of-print platter of Bay Area powerviolence was the band's debut, a twenty four track blast of grinding hardcore and spastic blast that is a bit more straightforward than their progressively goofier and more off-beat later albums. Taking their cues from the jagged, stop/start brutality and blast-furnace aggression of Infest, Neanderthal and Crossed Out, Spazz brought a looser, more punk-influenced approach even as they were paying homage to 80s crossover/speed metal legends like Hirax (whose Katon DePena guests here), with lots of thrashy three-chord rippers appearing among the more violent, angular tracks. Chris Dodge's bass riffs are seriously heavy here, even with the rawer recording, and his lurching sludgy riffs on tracks like "Indentured" and the noisy, discordant intro to "Doormat " help give Dwarf Jester Rising some of its heaviest, most off-kilter moments, with some bludgeoning noise rock crush appearing on a couple of these songs. Definitely not as crazed as their later 7"s and Lps; there aren't any of the banjos, hip-hop parts, saxophones or absurd samples that made those record so nuts (well, there is one brief go-go sample that shows up on the second side...), but even here Spazz sounded totally unique, and were already busy injecting their skronky powerviolence and freaked-out, bass-heavy hardcore with their weird sense of humor and sometimes cryptic in-jokes, from satirical jabs at black metal kvltists to the anti-raver anthem "Droppin' Many Ravers".
Essential listening for anyone into the original West Coast powerviolence scene and bands like Man Is The Bastard, Infest, Crossed Out, No Comment and Capitalist Casualties. Limited to one thousand five hundred copies, on colored vinyl, in a newly designed sleeve that includes a printed lyric insert with artwork by Dennis Tyfus of Ultra Eczema.

---

---

---

---