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I was captivated by Minotaur's Obsession as soon as I set eyes on the cover. On it, a hallucinatory collage of disembodied eyes float around an attractive young woman clad only in a bra and thong, her back to the viewer, casting a beguiling, heavy-lidded glance over her shoulder. This vaguely nightmarish night-scene evolves into something much darker as you open the album and find the high contrast images of intricate rope bondage and fetishistic modeling, juxtaposed with an older glamour shot of an unknown woman. This all ties together with the thematic influence of Anais Nin's 1977 collection Delta Of Venus; this classic piece of literary erotica provides the raw material for the lyrics on Obsession, as well as the seething eroticized energy that oozes across the ten tracks. This is the first full length album from Minotaur, the duo of James Keeler (Wilt, Hedorah) and George Proctor (Mutant Ape, Sump), and it's nowhere near as excruciating as you might think it would be. What these guys have created here is one of the creepiest power electronics albums I've heard, taking scenes of debauched sex, virulent lust, and controlled violence and setting them to a backdrop of pounding metallic rhythms, tumescent black synthesizer drones that feel as if they are eating right through your stereo speakers, and muted noise walls. The electronics are thick, malevolent, oppressive, more musical than pure noise. It's the vocals that really add that extra dose of intoxicating nastiness to Obsessions pervasive haze of black lust, morphing from deep, pitch-shifted mutterings, to heavily-delayed whispers that crawl deep under your skin, to militant barking demanding submission. You could compare this to some of the newer Prurient material as well as the pitch-black electronics of Theologian, but Minotaur's own Philosophie dans le boudoir smolders with a dark carnal violence that is uniquely it's own. A fucking phenomenal album, highly recommended to anyone into forward-thinking power electronics. Limited to two hundred copies.
Track Samples:
Sample : Blurred By The Violence
Sample : The Hunger In Her Womb
Sample : Soldier

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I've only now become a fan of Bal-Sagoth after digging into the new re-issues of their last three albums came out on Metal Mind. I never paid much attention to these UK metallers in the past as I've never been a big fan of what you'd call "symphonic metal", but when Metal Mind dropped these gorgeous-looking re-issues, I went ahead and checked them out and ended up falling under the bombastic thrall of Bal Sagoth almost immediately. Presented in newly designed glossy digipacks in a machine-numbered edition of two thousand copies each, these albums look amazing, their bright full-color album art looking like something off some bizarre Japanese video game...
The fifth album of experimental sci-fi soundtrack black metal from Bal-Sagoth, Atlantis Ascendent is structured like an insane Lovecraftian rock opera, the narrative and dialogue that's included in the twenty-page booklet follows the story of a 19th British archeologist seeking to uncover the truth behind humankind's origins, which leads him to lost undersea civilizations, monstrous sleeping gods, and hidden technologies. The arcane Cthulhu-referencing song titles like "Star-Maps of the Ancient Cosmographers", "The Dreamer in the Catacombs of Ur" and the breathless “Cry Havoc for Glory, and the Annihilation of the Titans of Chaos (The Splendour of a Thousand Swords Gleaming Beneath the Blazon of the Hyperborean Empire: Part III)" probably give you a decent idea of what we're dealing with here. As with previous albums, this stuff is ridiculously over the top and theatrical, but I love it. Nobody combines the influence of classic pulp horror/adventure authors like Clark Ashton Smith, H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Rice Burroughs with this sort of blackened power metal the way that Bal-Sagoth does. And again, it's impossible not to notice how much big chunks of Atlantis Ascendant sound like some obscure 80's science fiction movie score. You get a big hit of that as soon as the long intro track "Epsilon Exordium" starts up, it's stirring cinematic strings, orchestral woodwinds, brass and booming kettledrums introducing the album with a majestic soundtrack feel akin to the works of Basil Pompadourous and James Horner.
But then the title track comes in and we're treated to the ferocious soundtracky black metal that takes over most of the rest of the album, the songs racing through tons of symphonic pomp, ferocious black metal riffs, high pitched snarling vocals, but with those wild synth-horns, pianos and strings backing all of it through the entire record. The vocals still shift between a deep voice narrating brief spoken word passages to vicious shrieks, and the songs veer from regal black blasting to crazy blackened power metal that sounds like metallic sea shantys, and lots of fast paced baroque metal that sort of resembles a prog-obsessed Cradle Of Filth. Bal-Sagoth also weaves a bit of electronic texture here and there, such as the soaring ambience of "The Ghosts Of Angkor Wat" that veers into total Tangerine Dream territory. Not for everyone, but fans of offbeat blackened metallers like Finntroll, Sigh, and The Meads Of ASphodel should definitely give this album a listen.
Track Samples:
Sample : BAL-SAGOTH-Atlantis Ascendant
Sample : BAL-SAGOTH-Atlantis Ascendant
Sample : BAL-SAGOTH-Atlantis Ascendant

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I've only now become a fan of Bal-Sagoth after digging into the new re-issues of their last three albums came out on Metal Mind. I never paid much attention to these UK metallers in the past as I've never been a big fan of what you'd call "symphonic metal", but when Metal Mind dropped these gorgeous-looking re-issues, I went ahead and checked them out and ended up falling under the bombastic thrall of Bal Sagoth almost immediately. Presented in newly designed glossy digipacks in a machine-numbered edition of two thousand copies each, these albums look amazing, their bright full-color album art looking like something off some bizarre Japanese video game...
For Bal-Sagoth's sixth (and most recent) album, 2006's The Chthonic Chronicles, the infamous blackened soundtrack metallers returned to the surface from the depths of Atlantis to document another Lovecraftian saga, this time involving evil oceanic leviathans and ancient star-gods, lost books of arcane knowledge and scenes of epic warfare. It's all outlined and narrated in the booklet that comes with the disc, thankfully, as the Bal-Sagoth just blasts your senses with the crushing black power metal of Chronicles. The story reads like a large scale updating of the Cthulhu mythos, and the music is majestic, complex, bringing together walls of proggy synthesizer and spacey electronic textures with the vicious scorched vocals and crushing riffs. This could be Bal-Sagoth's most "prog" album yet, the music and arrangements are more sprawling and elaborate than on the previous record Atlantis Ascendant, with forays into cosmic electronica and dark cinematic ambience ("The Fallen Kingdoms of the Abyssal Plain"), stirring symphonic pieces ("To Storm the Cyclopean Gates of Byzantium"), horns, chanting, whole string sections and plenty of crazed, hyper-complex shreddery appearing all over the album.
Track Samples:
Sample : BAL-SAGOTH-The Chthonic Chronicles
Sample : BAL-SAGOTH-The Chthonic Chronicles
Sample : BAL-SAGOTH-The Chthonic Chronicles

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I've only now become a fan of Bal-Sagoth after digging into the new re-issues of their last three albums came out on Metal Mind. I never paid much attention to these UK metallers in the past as I've never been a big fan of what you'd call "symphonic metal", but when Metal Mind dropped these gorgeous-looking re-issues, I went ahead and checked them out and ended up falling under the bombastic thrall of Bal Sagoth almost immediately. Presented in newly designed glossy digipacks in a machine-numbered edition of two thousand copies each, these albums look amazing, their bright full-color album art looking like something off some bizarre Japanese video game...
Here's where my addiction to Bal-Sagoth recently took root, the reissue of the fourth album from the British blackened battle metallers (and first for Nuclear Blast), The Power Cosmic. Released in 1999, the eight song saga of The Power Cosmic heads off into the outer cosmos while still keeping it's bombastic sound based in a wild combination of keyboard/tympani-heavy soundtrack power (a la Basil Poledouris's score for 1982's Conan The Barbarian) and blazing symphonic black metal that has some stylistic similarities to fellow Brits Cradle Of Filth. Bal-Sagoth's music and presentation are as weird as ever, based this time around another sprawling science fantasy narrative written by founding member Byron Roberts that deals with rogue cosmos-tripping demigods and ancient extra-terrestrial civilizations, continuing to explore the vast mythos of his "Multiverse". It's all laid out in the expansive twenty page booklet/libretto that comes with the disc, which also features more amazing album art from Games Workshop illutstaor Martin Hanford). The band's complex, prog-influenced assault of speedy and ornate black metal is wed to a battalion of synthesizers that take front and center position, with Roberts continuing to deliver his vocals in an idiosyncratic mix of vicious blackened shrieks, dramatic spoken word narration, and hushed menacing whispers, an offbeat delivery that has always been a big part of Bal-Sagoth's sound. Also key are those swirling cosmic keyboards, which dominate almost the entire record, joining the sounds of lush strings and blaring horns while the guitarists slash through the songs with razor-sharp riffing soaring guitar leads. Some of the highlights include the absurdly catchy "Callisto Rising" and the ripping sci-fi majesty of "The Thirteen Cryptical Prophecies Of Mu", but the whole album is a blast, evoking the bombastic soundtracks of the most over-the-top 80's sci-fi action films through majestic metallic power and a classic pulp adventure vibe. I've sure never heard anybody quite like these guys. Like the other new Bal-Sagoth reissues on Metal Mind, this comes in an eye-popping new full color digipack design and was released in a limited machine numbered edition of 2000 copies.
Track Samples:
Sample : The Empyreal Lexicon
Sample : The Scourge of the Fourth Celestial Host
Sample : The Thirteen Cryptical Prophecies of Mu

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The second album from Chet Scott's arcane woodland sludge project picks up where the 2006 eponymous debut left off, tracking the strange mixture of primal slow-motion metal and evocative tribal ambience across nine songs of consciousness expansion and Nature-worship, and the sound has become even stranger and more discorporeal than the debut. One of the things that sets Blood Of The Black Owl apart from almost every other "metal" band is the array of primitive instruments that Chet uses, from native American flutes to wood and clay ocarinas, hand percussion, long horns, hoof shakers, antler rattles, and other shamanic tools; none of these will surprise anyone that is familiar with Chet's other project, Ruhr Hunter, whose ritualistic forest drones have long employed organic instruments alongside heavily textured electronic ambience. And metal-minded fans of Ruhr Hunter will probably find a lot to like about Blood Of The Black Owl, especially the dark, atmospheric ambient sections that are juxtaposed with the heavier metallic parts. This is Chet's "metal" band, though, so even with all of the spooky, shuffling ambience and mystical flutes floating around, the mood here is seriously heavy.
The album opens with the moody shadowdrift and spoken word of "Spell Of The Elk", which has Chet intoning a kind of prayer to animal totems in his deep, gruff growl over coarse rumblings, slow pounding tribal drums and ethereal flutes playing a lonesome Native American style melody, stretching out for nearly ten minutes before kicking in to the second track "Crippling Of Age", and here is where Blood Of The Black Owl shows it's real might, unleashing a wave of crushing distorted guitar over plodding machine-like dirge, the guitars huge and growling but slightly out of tune, like a weird mix of Skepticism's funereal plod and the chaotic black murk of Abruptum melted down and poured over passages of moody clean guitars, dreamy melody and jazzy percussion, the cleaner dark-rock interludes contrasting sharply with fuzz-soaked atonal sludge. As the album goes on, the songs become even more abstract and atmospheric, moving from tribal percussion and sinister rattles hovering over fields of dark ambience and time-stretched throat singing to blasts of massive, droning riffage and swirling distorted filth, eerie keyboard lines drifting through circles of thumping hand-drums, guided by those deep, ogrish vocals that paint visions of the wolf, of the elk, of the end times and of black soil swallowing generations. The nine tracks flow together as one huge cinematic piece, much more epic and thickly woven than the first album (as killer as I think that disc still is - I'll be listing that here in the store shortly as well), equally beautiful and introspective and apocalyptic and fearsome, played out as a weird ceremony with Native American sounds haunting the spaces between the grinding slow-motion dirge, like hearing bits of Godspeed You Black Emperor and Mary Youngblood appearing throughout the blackened doomy plod, a Neurosis-meets-Skepticism-meets-Abruptum wave of grim buzzing sludge. A Feral Spirit evades easy classification, and adventurous metal/doom fans should check it out.
Track Samples:
Sample : Crippling of Age
Sample : Forest of Decrepitude
Sample : Void

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If you're really hooked on HNW, you should already be familiar with Worthless Recordings. This small cassette label out of the Midwest has been producing a top-notch line of harsh noise cassettes over the past year, including titles from C-Blast faves like Crown Of Bone, Vomir, Marax, Cold Comfort and Burial Ground. Burial Ground is one of the noise acts that I first discovered through it's Worthless releases, specifically the Living Dead tape trilogy that married the projects infatuation with the landmark zombie series and a brutal static noise assault that turned my frontal lobe into a puddle of black goo. The whole M.O. of this project is the same - each Burial Ground release is inspired by a different cult horror film from the "golden era" (early 60s through the 80s) and tastefully bookends the immense wall of distorted crunch with key samples taken from the film. The editing is spot-on, and every tape I've gotten from Burial Ground has been a blast.
The latest Burial Ground offering is this colossal double tape set called Disembodied, each tape fueled by a different haunted house film. The first is The Haunting, inspired by Robert Wise's 1963 supernatural classic; the second is Burnt Offerings, based on the 1976 film of the same name. Each tape features two twenty-plus minute sides of crushing drone-noise, massive churning walls of low-to-mid range distorted rumble and hiss that reveals a world of seething activity when listened to at high volume or on a pair of headphones. Both tapes are pretty consistent in their attack, bathing you in a relentless avalanche of speaker-roar that creates a meditative, mesmerizing effect on the listener, as if you are surrounded by the deafening roar of a massive black waterfall, or are surrounded on all sides by an eternally crumbling cityscape. I'm a huge fan of this particular approach to harsh noise obliteration as well as the kind of older horror films that influence the imagery behind these tapes, making Burial Ground one of my current favorite static-sculptors alongside Vomir, Cherry Point and Vice Wears Black Hose. Each tape comes in a case with black and white artwork, and both are then housed inside of a black cardstock sleeve. Released in a limited edition of fifty copies.

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Possibly my favorite out of all of the killer new releases on Cold Spring this week, Book Of Delusions is a collection of re-mastered rare and out-of-print material from Clay Ruby's self-described "horror electronics" project Burial Hex, including the material from the original Delusions Lp that came out on Aurora Borealis plus the B-Hex tracks from the splits with Zola Jesus and Kinit Her.
The original Book Of Delusions tracks are a delirium of blackened industrial psychedelia. The opener "Final Litany" starts with the voice of Charlie Manson leading us into shadow as cymbals and drums shudder and rumble out of the depths, and a swirl of electronic drones and metallic thrum begins to circle round ghostly piano and distorted deformed guitars, while murderous whispers skulk at the edge of earshot. That trails right into the foul industrial urk of "Urlicht", where hideous mangled guitars coil around sputtering black synthesizer noise and insectile buzz, and massive pieces of metal rhythmically pound against concrete surfaces, hammering out a menacing ritualistic tempo. On "Crowned & Conquering Child", an assault of horrific death metal style vocal-vomit combines with throbbing synths that sound like they've been lifted from an early 80's post-apocalyptic film, brutal metallic percussion, piano and wailing tortured vocals for one of the strangest tracks on the album. It's a weird nightmarish cabaret, and reminds me a lot of Gnaw Their Tongues but far more "musical". Pretty brilliant, really. It's gets weirder with the nearly fifteen minute trance of the title track, where guest musicians from Kinit Her and Wormsblood join Clay for a propulsive krautrock-influenced psych-jam that spreads out across a pulsating almost techno-esque beat, stoned vocal exhalations and drugged out chanting drifting around the droning electronics and steady thump of the drums and sheets of reverb-heavy guitar. Very hypnotic and Circle-like.
The next two tracks both come from the Vedic Hymns collaboration with Kinit Her. On "God Of War And Battle", we're treated to more than ten minutes of abstract, minimal piano and nocturnal forest sounds, a din of chirping crickets singing in the darkness as this bleak melody slowly unfolds on the keys. Later on, it explodes into flurries of fast paced notes, transforming into this darkly beautiful modern composition piece at the same time that these hideous death metal style gurgling vocals appear. "Storm Clouds" is even more freaked out, the harsh anguished vocals have a real black metallish feel while the music is woven out of mournful violins that soar over dubby echoing drum hits and sorrowful piano, making this sound like a maniacal funeral march.
The last two tracks on the disc come from the split Lp with Zola Jesus. It's just as creepy and deranged sounding as the previous material. "Go Crystal Tears" again featuring Clay's hysterical howling vocals over another plodding, heavy industrial trance, the sound very "soundtracky", keyboards and pulsating synth and electronics mixing with doleful piano parts and bits of ugly noise, like some weird cross between black industrial and an 80's sci-film score. On "Temple Of The Flood", the band slowly tumbles into the abyss as ritual drums bang in the depths, a billowing haze of cymbal shimmer and deep synth drone swirls all around, and bizarre demonic vocalizations seep up out of the blackness over trippy fx, haunted pipe organs and narcotized Middle Eastern melodies.
This disc is a must-get for Burial Hex fans if you weren't able to pick up the original limited vinyl. Burial Hex's blackened post-industrial soundscapes and bizarre ritualistic electronics are pretty unique, possessed with a mysterious black glow that's unlike anything else out there...
Track Samples:
Sample : Final Litany
Sample : The Book of Delusions
Sample : Go Crystal Tears
Sample : Temple Of The Flood

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The follow-up to their debut Lp The Leprosy Of Unreality, Contagion brings us more of this Midwestern duo's murky frenzied barbarism, and it's even wilder this time around. When I wrote up their last album here at C-Blast, I described them as sounding a bit like a blackened doom version of Mazzy Star, but that's not quite as applicable here. The lineup is still the same, with singer Hellfire handling all of the vocals while Adam creates the music, but their sound is faster and more barbarous on Contagion, this woozy, deformed psychedelia that bears a vague resemblance to primitive black metal at the same time that the band buries themselves under a mountain of low-fi filth and abstracted heaviness.
A wave of black magma surges over the opening moments of "Prologue", as Hellfire coos and moans over the dissonant sludge, her soft tuneless singing drifting like wisps of ectoplasmic lunacy manifesting in the air above the slow motion trudge. Sounds a lot like Goslings, really, a messed-up dreamy wash of fractured sludgy heaviness and blackened noise. But then the band tears into the next song "Erosive", and everything changes substantially. Blastbeating drums race beneath murky sludgy black metal riffs, everything still extremely dissonant and buried under a heavy layer of sonic filth and rotting matter, Hellfire's washed-out voice lazily floating over the barbaric blackened thrash. It's incredibly messed-up but extremely intoxicating, a gluey mess of psychedelic black drone metal that is somehow really heavy and vicious sounding even with those cooing little girl vocals and the deliberate hazy, low-fi recording.
The whole album is just as abstract and atonal, the next song "Accipiter" beginning in a blur of minimal black metal riffing and slipshod blasting, but then it suddenly drops out as just a single slow pounding drum takes over and gauzy keyboard ambience drifts in alongside a haunting vocal melody, morphing the song into a strange lunar ritual, super minimal and eerie sounding as it stretches onward, till it finally explodes back into that barbaric noisy black metal. On "Statue", the duo slip into a stumbling doom-laden dirge that crawls along glacially, Hellfire's dreamy off-key vocals contrasting with the lurching diseased sludge that comes crumbling down around them. There's some weird industrial sounds that show up too, like the percussive clanking, abrasive noises and twisted guitar abuse on "Moonburnt" that becomes fused to the murky black blast. When the disc finishes with "Immolation II", it unleashes it's nosiest, most blown out song yet, a smeared mess of ethereal singing and thunderous thrashing drums, the guitars and other instruments rising and falling in massive waves of distortion and warped tremolo riffs, everything lost in a blizzard-blast delirium of volume and dissonance.
The disc comes in a hand-stamped Kraft gatefold jacket that includes a large full-color poster with the lyric sheet printed on the reverse. Issued in a limited edition of 250 copies.
Track Samples:
Sample : Erosive
Sample : Moonburnt
Sample : Statue

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Out of all of the industrial metal bands that emerged through the 90s, Dead World have always seemed to me to be one of the most fearsome. Though the band has slipped somewhat into obscurity since disbanding at the end of the 90s, they were responsible for some of the harshest mechanized heaviness to come out of this particular period in underground metal. The band was the brainchild of artist Jonathan Canady, also known for his work with Deathpile (which took it' s name from one of the tracks on Thanatos), Nightmares, Angel Of Decay, and Blunt Force Trauma, joined on this album by David Williams on synthesizers and electronics. Early on, Dead World released a couple of grinding monstrosities on Release, the experimental sub-label of Relapse Records, but it wasn't until the band's final album Thanatos Descends (released in 1996 on Bloodlust!/Malsonus) that it achieved full nuclear power, delivering one of the heaviest and most nightmarish offerings of dystopian machine-metal this side of Streetcleaner. Issued in a limited edition of 1,000 copies, Thanatos Descends like most albums of it's type owes a considerable debt to Godflesh's pioneering mecha-grind, but Dead World pushed this sound out into even more corrosive realms of industrial ambience and electronic violence, alternating the slow, skull-crushing dirges with extreme noise and an atmosphere that reeked with the stench of rotting corpses, the smoke of burning cities, and the acrid odor of gunpowder.
Dead World took the downtuned mechanical crush of Streetcleaner and dragged it into a filthy hole of death metal slime and corrosive power electronics in a way that I'd never heard previously. The vocals are deep, guttural, and heavily distorted, a distant roar beneath the grinding machine-death grooves and concrete riffs, while the programmed double bass drumming and the chunky, barbaric riffs come right out of early 90s death metal on songs like "Warhammer", "The Scourge", "Violator". These songs writhe with scenes of extreme sexual violence, blood-soaked killing fields, and dystopian horror, set to blasts of pneumatic power that range from droning, hypnotic heaviness crawling in slow motion to the faster mecha-death pummel of "Deathpile". But the multi-part "Thanatos" pieces that alternate between the industrial-death songs are pure industrial noise. Earlier on, these tracks appear as blasts of extreme feedback and high-end drone across volleys of tribal drumming, sometimes vaguely resembling the extreme cosmic noise destruction of CCCC. Later, they venture into weird dissonant ambience formed out of synthesizer strings and sparse percussion, these bizarre atonal soundtrack-like pieces occasionally turning into brief passages of Goblin-esque creep before they spread back out into long, abstract experimental noisescapes. These two sides of the album come together on the final two tracks, where the dying squelch of a mainframe computer is devoured by washes of doom-laden guitar noise and skittering rhythms, before turning into the propulsive industrial sludge of "Thanatos V", where huge orchestral blasts and spacey synths appearing over machine rhythms and crushing bass riffs.
This album holds a pretty high position on my own personal list of favorite industrial metal albums. It's up there with Optimum Wound Profile's Lowest Common Dominator, early Pitch Shifter, and Scorn's Vae Solis but is also vastly heavier than any of 'em, and has more in common with the more extreme, flesh-rending apocalypses of recent industrial doom mongers like Human Quena Orchestra, Wicked King Wicker and Vennt. Although Thanatos Descends was released in a limited edition over fifteen years ago, I've managed to obtain a small quantity of this original pressing for C-Blast, and it's highly recommended for anyone into the harshest realms of post-Streetcleaner heaviness.
Track Samples:
Sample : Deathpile
Sample : Thanatos V
Sample : Violator

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I love finding noise rock fossils like this, unearthed from the shale of some distant country. Forkboy were a Finnish band that was bashing skulls back during the tail end of noise rock's heyday in the 90s, but they only recorded three demos on a four track in their basement practice space before disbanding at thew end of the decade. I'd never heard of the band before as I'm sure most folks outside of Finland hadn't either, but this stuff is very much deserving of the re-issue treatment that Kaos Kontrol has given it here. 1993-1999 collects all three of those demos for the first time, presenting Forkboy's entire recorded output in chronological order. Taking their name from the Lard song, Forkboy wore most of their influences on their collective sleeve, namely the frantic hardcore of the Dead Kennedys and the feedback-soaked noise rock that Amphetamine Reptile trafficked in, but they forged an infectious sound out of it all that most importantly featured some really solid songwriting. The music does sound of it's time, a skronky noise rock assault that winds it's barbed-wire riffs and the singer's howling gravelly vocals around a bludgeoning rhythm section who swings back and forth between lopsided angular grooves and head-nodding, snare-driven tempos that often border on the motorik. The guitarists weave droning lines and traces of cowpunk twang around the chunkier riffs to give their songs an added dose of malevolence. and there's moments where they explode into storms of guitar noise that threaten to swamp the entire band. Forkboy's hardcore punk influences are more obvious than a lot of their peers from this period, songs like "Been There" racing along like a gnarlier version of West Coast punk, and the further into these demos you go, the more apparent their love of Dead Kennedys becomes. There are a couple of songs that are supremely catchy, like the burly stop-and-go grinder "Low Brow", which offers some of the disc's most memorable hooks. It's heavy stuff, though, and swings around a big bottom end that anyone into the ugly, skull-cracking end of the Am Rep/Touch And Go field would really dig. Despite the fairly primitive recording setup that Forkboy used for all of their demos, this stuff sounds pretty damn heavy here. Pretty massive, actually. It's unpolished, but we're talking about nose rock here, so that's a perk. It's one of the cooler noise rock obscurities I've heard lately, and I recommend that you check this band out if you're pining for the glory days of Amphetamine Reptile, early Helmet, Unsane, and like me is always looking for more chugging, super-heavy scum-rock in their life.
Released in a limited edition of three hundred copies, re-mastered and accompanied by original artwork, liner notes and band photos.
Track Samples:
Sample : Detent
Sample : Low Brows
Sample : Been There
Sample : Hormones (v2)

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I haven't listened to Heldentod's previous self-released discs yet, but apparently these earlier works were in more of a straightforward martial industrial/neo-folk vein. While Heldentod's fascination with European occultism, supernatural phenomena and paganism has been a consistent theme running through all of the project's releases, the music itself transformed into a darker and more ominous sound for The Ghost Machine, the first Heldentod album to be released on Cold Spring. This new disc features a kind of heavy, occult industrial sound that combines the ghastliness of Atrax Morgue and the darkest recesses of the Cold Meat Industries catalog with massive doses of ectoplasmic ambience and laced with eerie prose that gives this a really unique feel.
On the opening title track "The Ghost Machine", guest vocalist Jill Lovinitnun recites an eerie spoken word piece over the ghoulish electronic soundscape made up of droning mechanical whirr and layers of wavering distortion, short bursts of crackling noise and static and demonic distorto-growls. On "Incorruptible", a numb male voice appears repeating a series of mantras over grinding synths and swells of reverb and delay, slowly building a nightmarish, narcotized fug. Up to this point, The Ghost Machine isn't as assaultive as I thought it was going to be, more atmospheric, with lots of cinematic ominous synthesizers at the center of these songs, surrounded by pounding industrial throb and murky looped voices. That female voice returns, sighing and whispering throughout the pulsating black dirges, and there's a ghostly erotic quality that becomes apparent on certain tracks, like "Encystment Process", which vaguely reminds me of some of the newer Prurient material. There's the hellish electronics of "In The Company Of Pure Cold Wind" and the creepy, haunted mechanical ambience of "Revenant", which lead up to the monstrous abyssal black drone of "The Sentient Darkness", one of the album's highlights. This sprawling wasteland of subterranean rumblings is lit up with dissonant clanging piano, nightmare vocals and robotic utterances, flurries of delicate chiming sounds and smears of menacing backwards sound, the stuff of bad dreams spinning into shape out of the void. It's a slowly escalating wave of evil, unsettling industrial sound that reaches an apex of controlled violence with "Betrayal", where more pulsating black electronics growl and snarl around the looped percussive stomp of stacked rhythmic samples, a corrosive power electronics war-march. Closer "Kindermörderin" finishes the album with a recitation of occult knowledge that drifts down among wailing synth tones and distorted drone, through more of that percussive hammering, and an assortment of other spectral noises that trail out into blackness.
All throughout The Ghost Machine Heldenton twists and reshapes the death industrial aesthetic into something more spectral than usual, drawing it's arcane imagery from sources closer to numerology, the art of Aubrey Beardsley, Grail mythology and the early 20th century horror of Arthur Machen and MR James than the cancerous morgue visions of most death industrial artists. Regardless, fans of the blackest electronics found in the works of Atrax Morgue, Brighter Death Now and Megaptera will find much to like here.
Track Samples:
Sample : The Ghost Machine
Sample : Encystment Process
Sample : Revenant

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Inade's debut full-length Burning Flesh is one of the German black ambient outfit's most abrasive albums, an aural nightmare that slowly develops over it's hour long runtime. Originally released in 1993 and subsequently reissued on CD nearly a decade later, Burning Flesh has once again been resurrected for enthusiasts of abyssal drift in a new re-mastered edition from Loki Foundation. As soon as this album begins, you can hear the difference between it and later works like the black-hole space ambience of Aldebaran, the sound here much more distorted and rhythmically structured, but still intensely bleak and oppressive in that signature Inade style. The album moves through deep, sinister synthesizer drones layered with looped cathedral bells into lightless subterranean chasms where pounding slow-moving drums appear alongside heavy industrial clank and hypnotic bass dirges. The slurred growling of hooded monks chanting beneath a blanket of black tar appears all over Burning Flesh, lending the music a dark liturgical atmosphere. Loud humming machinery vibrates against a field of blackness, streaked with only the faintest traces of musical sound and the occasional exhalations of rank, fetid air from the maw of some unseen monstrosity, or the guttural drone of didgeridoos blasting in the depths.
These vast stygian dronescapes seem to stretch out forever, minimal and lifeless until they begin to slowly morph into a glitch-strewn mass of electronics and simple looped drumthump, later on joined by the sound of gongs that are transformed into the crashing of glacial black waves against an alien shoreline. In my opinion, this is one of the creepiest of the early 90s post-industrial albums, a document of a grey-washed world swirling with metallic thrum and whirr, the calm frequently shattered by swells of massive deep-earth rumble and distorted, doom-laden crush that wells up from bottomless chasms, like on the surprisingly heavy black ambient doom of "Through The Gates Of Death", which comes pretty close to the kind of ghastly metallic ambience of Funerary Call and Black Album-era Sunn O))).
Later on, over the course of the four-part "Genius Loci", Inade introduces more drum sounds, this time with a slow, almost tribal, tabla-like rhythms echoing through a dub-like haze over heavy bass notes and murky looped samples, a deep sinister throb lurking there beneath the jet-black synthesizer drones and dreamlike murmurings like a strange mutant hybrid of Scorn's dystopian dub and John Carpenter's tense electronic scores.
This fearsome, mesmerizing industrial ambience is still pretty unsettling twenty years later, and is recommended listening if you're into the early 90's isolationist scene. It's similar in many ways to what artists like Lull, Yen Pox and Lustmord were doing around this time, but Inade bring their own unique evil feel to these post-industrial black holes, and the influence of Inade's early black ambience is pretty undeniable on the chthonic horrors found on the Malignant label.
Track Samples:
Sample : The Coming of the Black Legions
Sample : Burning Flesh
Sample : Genius Loci Pt. I

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The German black ambient project Inade has continued to explore ever more expansive depths of sonic darkness and occult symbology for over two decades. Inade's albums have maintained a consistent level of skill in inducing dread in the listener going back to the early 90's; by the project's fifth album The Incarnation Of The Solar Architects (released in 2009, in stock here at C-Blast for the first time), this power is more focused than ever, resulting in one of the finer black ambient albums of the last decade. Much like Inade's crushing masterwork of empyrean drift Aldebaran, this collection seems to hover in between the dungeon and deep space, bringing together a cold, hostile palette of sounds that include vast cosmic synthesizers, murky industrial drones, metallic rumblings and distorted deep-space radio transmissions. If you're a fan of Sleep Research Facility's classic Nostromo album, you really need to check out Inade's stuff (especially the more recent material), as Incarnation and other newer releases tap into a similar style of pitch-black astral soundscape. These ten tracks drift through clouds of machine-whoosh and lush dark synths, billowing Tangerine Dream-style electronics ascending over muted tribal rhythms and ominous voices. Majestic otherworldly ambient music that often peels back to reveal traces of ancient evil, or scenes of heavenly beauty. One of these latter offerings comes in the form of "A Lefthanded Sign", a stirring dark electronica piece encoded with occult references that develops into a gloomy, gorgeously grey-washed panorama. It's probably my favorite track on the disc. Also notable are the nightmare odysseys of "Altar To The Unknown", "The World Behind The World" and "The Tellurian Vortex", each alive with a variety of demonic whisperings and washes of gleaming orchestral sound, deathchants and torture wheels, pounding trance-drums and malevolent horns. A dark ritualistic feel is threaded throughout the album from start to finish, inextricably woven with the sidereal concepts behind The Solar Architects. A must-hear for fans of Theologian, Hyios, Rasalhague and the like.
Track Samples:
Sample : Abandoned Inferno
Sample : Altar To The Unknown
Sample : Canon Of Proportion

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The original Red Stream release of Herman Kopp's Nekronology has been out of print for several years, and is now re-issued in a new re-designed (and much improved) package that features new artwork and comes in a sleek digipack designed by Malsonus.
For anyone that immersed themselves in the grey-market underground cult video scene in the late 80s and early 90's, you'll remember that Jorg Buttgereit's infamous Nekromantik and Der Todesking films were some of the most whispered-about, feared movies of the time. I remember hearing about them for years before I was finally able to procure my own copies, and they certainly lived up to their reputation. Buttgeriet's extreme visions had the power to knock the wind out of you with his scenes of extreme graphic violence and far-fringe transgressive subject matter that unflinchingly depicted cannibalism, necrophilia, decapitation, suicide and murder. His films bridged the realms between nihilistic art house cinema and extreme splatter, and were deeply enhanced by the haunting scores of composer Hermann Kopp, which were crucial to the creation of the dreamlike ambience of Buttgeriet's films.
Working alongside Aesthetic Records, extreme metal label Red Stream has issued this collection of musical selections from Buttgeriet's three key films, spanning the scores for Nekromantik (1987), Der Todesking (1989), and Nekromantik 2 (1990) as well as a smattering of bonus tracks. These selections all have a dreary, mournful vibe, heavy with quivering violins and lush Moog synths, frequently merging together into something resembling a slow motion funeral march. Sounds of bubbling liquids and crazed muttering are combined with primitive doom-laden keyboards and wistful music box melodies, and the atonal weeping of violin strings give way to the sound of body parts being sawn off and the thud as they hit the floor. This leads into such eerie, surprisingly pretty, folk-tinged chamber music pieces like "Poison", where deep chanting vocals appear alongside the woozy hypnotic strings and off-kilter keyboard melody, and the short shuffling death-folk march of "Supper" could easily pass for a Dead Raven Choir track. Tracks like "Fish In A Bowl" are abstract electronic experiments, though the electronic elements also often come together with the traditional instruments, as on the chilling "Betty's Return" where the meandering maudlin melody of a flute merges with a steady buzzing drone that seems to be coming from some malfunctioning piece of kitchen equipment just out of view. Kopp's music is a strange macabre chamber music, sometimes painfully beautiful, more often deeply unsettling even when you hear these pieces outside of the context of Buttgeriet's films. As nightmarish and grotesque as the images in those films are, it's the oftentimes beautiful and nostalgic quality to the music that gave them their haunting power that lingers with you for days after seeing them.
Track Samples:
Sample : Man Drowning Himself in Bathtub
Sample : Poison
Sample : Unholy
Sample : Vanish
Sample : Zwi Sabbatai

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This is the first new stuff I've picked up from Bill Laswell since the last Praxis album, and it's a return to the kind of high-power, aggro improv fusion that he championed while heading up the legendary Last Exit ensemble. Blixt is the closest I've heard Laswell get to Last Exit in years, in fact, banging out titanic improvised rock and crushing free jazz in a power trio lineup that gives each player equal space. The band includes Finnish guitarist Raoul Björkenheim (also known for the free-rock band Krakatau and Scorch Trio) and Grammy-nominated Swedish drummer Morgan Ågren, and of course Bill Laswell is no stranger to the heavier side of avant / prog / improv, having spearheaded both the atomic punk-jazz supergroup Last Exit and the experimental grindcore / dub trio Painkiller with John Zorn and Mick Harris.
With this particular power trio, the group emphasizes the power aspect as they often head into full-on metallic territory, veering from blistering jazz-rock workouts into massive Sabbathian heaviness and back into complex fusion workouts. It's tough stuff from the start - "Black Whole" kicks the disc off with a bludgeoning free-rock assault where Björkenheim drops all kinds of blazing Hendrix-style shred amid the super-heavy, sludgy riffing, followed by "Moon Tune"'s awkward anti-groove that slips seamlessly into a wild rhythmic workout with more seriously heavy, muscular riffage. And listen to that huge metallic chug that rises up on "Cinque Roulettes", in the same mode of improv-crush as Casper Brotzmann's heaviest stuff. Blixt has some shorter, more atmospheric pieces like "Shifting Sands Closing Hour"(where the band conjures the sound of a clock factory coming to life and performing a strange mechanical symphony) and the dark moody psychedelia of "Ghost Strokes", both offering a break from the power-crunch in the middle of the record, but then the eleven minute-plus "Invisible One" comes in, a total showstopper as the band moves over peaks and valleys of furious freeform hard rock and expressive jazzy playing.
"Drill Beats" is another crusher, with a militant rhythmic groove and stop/start dynamics, but it's the following track "Storm" that's hands down the heaviest jam on Blixt. It's Sabbathian riffage and turgid tempo turns this track into a slab of psychedelic acid-doom that's as smoke-wreathed and groovy as anything you'd hear on a Rise Above record. It closes with the ferocious hyper-funk of "4-4-4-4-2-2-2-5-2" where Björkenheim really lets loose, splattering the rhythm section's fast paced grooves with a searing wah-soaked shred assault. This disc is a fucking behemoth, fans of Painkiller, Praxis and Last Exit obviously want to hear this, but it's also highly recommended to fans of bands like Ascend, Iceburn, Zu, and other heavier, darker improv/prog/jazz rock units...
Track Samples:
Sample : Black Whole
Sample : Cinque Roulettes
Sample : Drill Beats
Sample : Storm

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This Is A Tourniquet... showcases two of Crucial Blast's favorite current artists from the "black noise" realm, who demonstrate how useless that term tends to be when trying to describe the breadth of aural horror on this disc. Both artists go in very different directions with their sound, but both end up in the same sulfurous pit.
Josh Lay's low-fidelity blackpsych nightmare "A Shroud Of Ice & Bird Feathers" begins with nocturnal forest chatter and the steady whine of some sort of engine, then slowly spirals out into deep midnight weirdness as strange vocal sounds and circular drones start to stack up, the distant chitter of crickets and other woodland life begins to sing in earnest, and something monstrous struggles to gain control over an increasingly disobedient oscillator tone. For more than twenty minutes, Lay drags you through this hallucinogenic soundscape, his gnarled witch-grunts leading the way through tangles of lysergic computer slime, creepy music box melodies, lengthy pulsating drones, and fetid pools of filthy black ambience. Most of it sounds like an extremely disturbed/drug-addled soundtrack, like this weird cross between an old power electronics tape and an experimental score for an early 70s French horror film. I had to play this one twice before I even got to the Crown Of Bone side of the disc.
When you do get to the Crown Of Bone track (the twenty five minute pain-saga "Tormented In A Gouge Of Razors"), the haunted, black forest ambience of Josh Lay's music is swallowed up by a horrific wall of noise that only grows more savage and destructive the further in you get. The sound is recognizable if you've been listening to Demonologists, as Crown of Bone is the new band from former Demonologist Dustin R. At first it takes the shape of a roiling wall of distortion, a rushing avalanche roar of harsh noise, but then all of a sudden the bestial, death metal style vocals come raging out of the skuzz, and it suddenly kicks into a monstrous assault of extreme distorted HNW with those fearsome vocals plunging and diving through the roaring noise. Brutal blackened noise that works hard to try to achieve the sound of Hell itself. The piece isn't pure roar, though. It occasionally fades into calmer stretches of rumbling ambience and factory noise, bursts of percussive chaos thundering over sheets of metallic thrum, strange wailing noises in the distance, but these always lead back to the the black blasting distortion, a maelstrom of bone-crushing formless distortion that sucks everything into it's gaping maw.
It's a small-run CDR released in a pressing of a mere one hundred copies, but it's pro-manufactured and looks top notch. A real brain-mangler of a black noise album...
Track Samples:
Sample : JOSH LAY - Shroud Of Ice and Bird Feathers
Sample : CROWN OF BONE - Tormented In A Gouge Of Razors

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The dark ambient project Lull from former Napalm Death/Painkiller drummer Mick Harris has been pretty quiet these past few years, with most of his attention apparently being directed towards the bleak dubstep / industrial nightmarescapes of Scorn. The last flurry of activity from Lull was back in 2008 in fact, which produced both the last Lull album Like A Slow River and a limited-edition 3" CD called Circadian Rhythm Disturbance. This latter release was a collaboration between Lull and the ambient drone project Beta Cloud, and explored the psychological terrain found between sleep and wakefulness. This track has been reissued here along with what you could sort of call a "remix" of the same piece by Nurse With Wound collaborator Andrew Liles...
The original track is up first. At first, "Circadian Rhythm Disturbance" is really minimal, just a faint wash of street sounds and distant bass rumblings that feel like you're hearing a set of muted field recordings captured at the edges of a major city around 3am in the morning. But as a high pitched whine cuts through the cloudy ambient sound and everything begins to move forward in the mix, the track starts to coalesce into a mysterious dronescape filled with far-off ghostly hammering, billowing de-saturated feedback-drift, and textured metallic drones that fade in and out. And from there on, that's pretty much what the main track consists of, a twenty minute sprawl of muted, darkened drone and slowly shifting environmental sounds that come together as a rather intoxicating piece of ghost-drone. Much creepier sounding than most of the recent Lull stuff I've heard, in fact. Almost seems counter-productive to do anything other than listen to Circadian late at night with every light turned off. Towards the end of the track, some heavier rhythmic elements appear, steady mechanical grinding and whirring engine sounds, but these never take the sound out of the deep deep creep that dominates the music.
The "Another Toothpick" mix that Andrew Liles provides is something else entirely, though. You can see the fingerprints of this Nurse With Wound collaborator all over this bizarre borg collage as it goes from haunted metallic clanking and weird vocal noises to fluttering drones and malfunctioning computer/digital noises that are treated to some neat stereo panning effects, and harsh noises that suddenly leap out at you from the shadows. As Liles is wont to do, this track frequently jars the listener with his abrupt cuts and edits, leaping from the rhythmic click of a pair of scissors to a jet plane achieving liftoff to crushing oil-drum percussion to eerie xylophone melodies, and on and on, an unpredictable journey to say the least. Fans of Hoor-Paar-Kraat will love this.
Presented in a digipack package with all new artwork.
Track Samples:
Sample : Circadian Rhythm Disturbance
Sample : Circadian Rhythm Disturbance [Another Toothpick]

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Though it's now out of print from the source, we've obtained a small quantity of this 2004 digipack reissue of Lustmord's Heresy for C-Blast. Depending on who you ask, this might be the seminal dark ambient album, the one that influenced countless imitators but which still stands as one of the blackest pieces of electronic music ever released. Without a doubt, any dark ambient album that has come in the wake of Lustmord's 1990 album Heresy owes something to what Brian Williams created here, and more than twenty years later this album still holds the power to freeze blood. The six long tracks of stygian drift bring together the doleful wail of horns drifting across a distant horizon limned in midnight black, deep metallic bass tones surging slowly across vast expanses of charred wasteland, while strange and monstrous howls echo throughout the depths. These sounds were largely (and infamously) sourced from acoustic recordings that Williams made of specific physical sites, caves, sewers, catacombs and other lightless subterranean spaces, taking the natural reverberant ambience of these locations and then manipulating them and layering them with other sounds in the studio to create a vast cavernous realm populated with dark hypnotic drones and the eerie keening tones of a Tibetan horn. The result is seriously unnerving, especially when you listen to this album on headphones or on a high quality audio system, the gusts of metallic rumble and shimmer that billow out across the surface of Heresy like a dank black fog, surrounding you in smears of murky orchestral sound, blurred bits of strings and horns bleeding into one another as they seep into the grimy catacomb walls, and bizarre vocal sounds that barely sound human, demonic cackling, and weird wordless chanting. It approximates the massive glacial roar of mountains crumbling in slow motion, and builds a thick layer of tension and unease as it moves through crashing walls of scrap metal obscured by the slow swelling sounds of sinister woodwinds, and ominous orchestral pulsations. One of the album's strangest moments comes on "Part IV", where Lustmord's amorphous blackness ventures into a strange horn-laced fogscape that almost begins to sound like a ghostly, ethereal free-jazz set drifting out of a huge underground chamber miles beneath the surface of the earth. The hour-long album is a descent into pure dread and horror that also reveals some breathtaking moments of nocturnal beauty, and it's one of those records where the iconic cover art (taken from The Great Day Of His Wrath by English painter John Martin) is a perfect visual representation of the horrific sounds trapped inside. A masterpiece of nightmare music, and an essential dark ambient album that any fan of black drones and lightless atmosphere should have in their collection.
Track Samples:
Sample : Part I
Sample : Part V

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This 2001 album from dark ambient master Lustmord is one of his more hard-to-find releases, having been re-issued on the small Czech imprint Nextera. In my opinion, this is one of Lustmord's more notable post Y2K works in that it features collaborations with both longtime compatriot Steve Roach and Tangerine Dream's Paul Haslinger, and at the same time offers some of Lustmord's blackest audio descents since the classic Heresy album. Just listen to the opener "The Ambivalent Abyss" for some of the finest blood-freezing black electronics on the album, a swirling Stygian mass of muted, detuned strings and putrescent vocals, huge swells of orchestral dread and black fly-swarms of nightmarish subliminal buzz. It's a fantastic piece of ambient terror that spreads out for more than twelve minutes, setting the bleak abysmal tone for the rest of the record.
The rest of the album is equally devoid of light. The second track "Blood Deep In Dread" is the one with modern ambient legend Steve Roach, who contributes the sounds of a bullroarer to the dark electronica laden with moody strings and shuffling murky rhythms, bits of dub-like rhythm surfacing throughout the track reminiscent of Scorn. "The Eliminating Angel" is a piece written by Paul Haslinger and combines the traditional symphonic sounds and grim electronic elements this his work is known for; filtered through the black lens of Lustmord, this track is as apocalyptic as any of Haslinger's classic late 80s scores with Tangerine Dream. Haslinger also contributes additional keyboards to "The Outer Shadow", a bleak death-march carried on booming kettledrums and mournful strings through an ashen waste, infiltrated with blasts of crushing noise, bestial roars and wobbly dubstep-like bass.
The desolate wastes of "Oblivion" is one of the album's more minimal tracks, with long stretches of sinister silence appearing between blasts of percussive noise, distant thunder, nightmarish chanting and eerie flute sounds. Same goes for the next two tracks, "Infinite Domain" and "A Light That Is Darkness", the former combining a minimalist percussive loop that winds through a creepy soundscape of howling beasts, shuffling break beats, guttural brass and slasher movie ambience, the latter a shorter pounding soundtrack style number. "Insignificance" closes Metavoid by returning to the abyss, choral synths drifting over waves of cymbal hiss before it falls into the pitch dark, harrowing violin sounds rising up out of the pit, mortar-like drums booming way down below.
Some fans have dismissed Metavoid for it's heavy soundtrack elements, a direction that much of Lustmord's newer material has definitely gone in due to Brian William's ongoing work in the Hollywood movie soundtrack industry, but I've always dug this album's combination of orchestral might and black-hole ambience.
Track Samples:
Sample : LUSTMORD-Metavoid
Sample : LUSTMORD-Metavoid
Sample : LUSTMORD-Metavoid

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It is the night of the Demon. This mantra repeats over and over as Lustmord's 1992 album The Monstrous Soul begins, luring the listener into a sinister soundtrack-like fog of ominous droning keyboards, howling wind, and distant tympani drums. As the follow-up to Lustmord's defining album Heresy this feels much more "composed", with moody synthesizers, drums and looped samples contributing to the subterranean black-mass atmosphere as much as the underground dronescapes and catacomb recordings that Brian Lustmord uses as the source material for his pitch-black ambience. These more musical elements forecast the film-score style approach that Lustmord would take with later albums, but it's still very much rooted here in the cavernous ambience of the tomb, and laced with looped chants and ritual invocations drawn from the works of Aleister Crowley. The album also has some heavier moments that come as a surprise after the largely shapeless horrors of Heresy; on the massive twenty-five minute "Primordial Atom", the blasting guttural hell-horns bellow out over slow-motion crashes of monstrous percussion, resembling a denuded funeral doom track. Later, ritualistic chanting appears over the strike of a hammer on anvil as you wander through the occult factory ambience of "Protoplasmic Reversion", and "The Daathian Doorway" is a glimmering nebula of crystalline electronics and minimal ambient tones. The closing piece "The Fourth And Final Key" returns to the massive abysmal drone-dirge of the first half of the album, introducing Gregorian chants and distant shimmering metal to the wide spaces between the constant mortar-like percussive blasts that echo through the track, but then the second half morphs into a monolithic industrial drone with infinite stretched chanting and the sounds of savage whippings and prayer-gongs. As with his other early 90s works, this is absolute nightmare music, the sound of dread made flesh, enhanced by the electronic textures of Adi Newton from Clock DVA/The Anti Group. Overall, The Monstrous Soul doesn't exclusively inhabit the pure pitch blackness of Heresy or The Place Where The Black Stars Hang, but it's still a classic dark ambient album.
Track Samples:
Sample : THE DAATHIAN DOORWAY
Sample : The Fourth And Final Key
Sample : Protoplasmic Reversion

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The limited-edition double Lp that recently came out on Burning World features this crucial dark ambient album in it's entirety (but with the track listing juggled around a little to accommodate some of the longer tracks, and "Primordial Atom" split into two halves across two sides), along with a bonus track "Xaxa/Primordial Live In Krakow" that does not appear on the original Cd release. Comes in a heavy gatefold jacket.
It is the night of the Demon. This mantra repeats over and over as Lustmord's 1992 album The Monstrous Soul begins, luring the listener into a sinister soundtrack-like fog of ominous droning keyboards, howling wind, and distant tympani drums. As the follow-up to Lustmord's defining album Heresy this feels much more "composed", with moody synthesizers, drums and looped samples contributing to the subterranean black-mass atmosphere as much as the underground dronescapes and catacomb recordings that Brian Lustmord uses as the source material for his pitch-black ambience. These more musical elements forecast the film-score style approach that Lustmord would take with later albums, but it's still very much rooted here in the cavernous ambience of the tomb, and laced with looped chants and ritual invocations drawn from the works of Aleister Crowley. The album also has some heavier moments that come as a surprise after the largely shapeless horrors of Heresy; on the massive twenty-five minute "Primordial Atom", the blasting guttural hell-horns bellow out over slow-motion crashes of monstrous percussion, resembling a denuded funeral doom track. Later, ritualistic chanting appears over the strike of a hammer on anvil as you wander through the occult factory ambience of "Protoplasmic Reversion", and "The Daathian Doorway" is a glimmering nebula of crystalline electronics and minimal ambient tones. The closing piece "The Fourth And Final Key" returns to the massive abysmal drone-dirge of the first half of the album, introducing Gregorian chants and distant shimmering metal to the wide spaces between the constant mortar-like percussive blasts that echo through the track, but then the second half morphs into a monolithic industrial drone with infinite stretched chanting and the sounds of savage whippings and prayer-gongs. As with his other early 90s works, this is absolute nightmare music, the sound of dread made flesh, enhanced by the electronic textures of Adi Newton from Clock DVA/The Anti Group. Overall, The Monstrous Soul doesn't exclusively inhabit the pure pitch blackness of Heresy or The Place Where The Black Stars Hang, but it's still a classic dark ambient album.
Track Samples:
Sample : THE DAATHIAN DOORWAY
Sample : The Fourth And Final Key
Sample : Protoplasmic Reversion

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Lustmord's latest disc is actually a collection of assorted unreleased material that was originally recorded between 1994 and 2007, appearing here for the first time ever. Being that these tracks come from such a wide stretch of time, it's not surprising that the sounds featured on Songs Of Gods And Demons end up being an eclectic mix that range from pure black driftscapes to more structured and composed works that draw heavily from the world of electronic film scores. The material featured here isn't at the same level of stygian horror as Lustmord's classic early trilogy of albums (Heresy, The Place Where The Black Stars Hang, Monstrous Soul), but fans will still dig these unsettling ambience pieces.
The leader track "Corvus Mysterium" is almost the exception, though. The epic sixteen minute piece is pure blackness; very much in the vein of other early 90's Lustmord output circa The Place Where the Black Stars Hang. Dark shadowy blurs of sound made up of pulsating electronics, choral elements, distant crashing, backwards voices, jet-black drones, all woven together into a dreamlike soundscape that drips with palpable dread. This material was later developed for the score for The Crow which Brian Lustmord worked on with Graeme Revell, but there's little here that anyone would recognize from that final soundtrack work.
Both "The Blasted Plain" and "Neural Ether" are even longer, creeping closer to the twenty minute mark as Lustmord maps out a barren waste of faint rumblings and ghastly black drift. Those signature horn blasts make an appearance, ringing out from leagues away while strange electronic growling and rhythmic scuttling noises occur much closer at hand. The eerie ethereal ambience at the beginning of "Haze" is more akin to the Tangerine Dream-esque synthdrift found on later albums like Metavoid, forged from empyreal angelic chorals, but later it breaks down into gusts of black subterranean air and dungeon atmospherics. That ultra-dark cinematic feel is amplified further on the final track "Vault", which blends choral synths, horn sounds, and disturbing electronic sounds into something that strongly resembles an ominous main theme that would run beneath the opening credits of a futuristic crime film. In fact, the whole last half is really reminiscent of John Carpenter's later film score stuff.
Despite much of this material being connected to his more visible film score and game score work, this is by and large Lustmord at his most reptilian. Shut the lights off and turn this up for maximum skincreep. Comes in a digipack.
Track Samples:
Sample : Corvus Mysterium
Sample : Haze
Sample : Neural Ether

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Since I've been fleshing out the Lustmord selection at Crucial Blast (which has gotten to be a little difficult as a bunch of titles have recently gone out of print), I decided to pick up this near-classic collaboration from 1995 between Lustmord and noted ambient musician Robert Rich, released on the Fathom/Hearts Of Space imprint. With Lustmord on board, this is obviously one of the darkest releases in that label's catalog, but the abyssal darkness of Lustmord's legendary early albums (Heresy, The Place Where The Black Stars Hang, The Monstrous Soul) is slightly tempered here by Rich's textural moves. But only slightly. This is still an incredibly dark album, inspired by Andrei Tarkovsky's classic 1979 metaphysical science fiction film of the same name, Stalker sticks closer to the more cavernous, abysmal ambiance of Lustmord's early 90s works than the more soundtrack influenced stuff that would appear later in the 90s. In other words, these seven tracks explore dark psychological depths through vast subterranean rumblings and stretched out bass tones, strange howling voices far off in the distance, streaks of insectile electronics and washes of ominous electronic drift, with smatterings of moody processed piano and wind chimes appearing on "Hidden Refuge" and odd percussive noises and wobbly effects bringing a delirious feel to "Delusion Fields". Elsewhere on Stalker, the two musicians lace their shadowy soundscapes with the deep guttural drone of throat singing, shamanistic flutes, distant industrial pounding, gorgeous washes of dark cosmic ambiance, and eerie wilderness sounds (the sort of stuff that people used to call "ethno-ambient" back in the 90s), drifting slowly across epic tracks like "Omnipresent Boundary" and the harrowing climax found on "A Point Of No Return". I think it's one of Lustmord's best collaborations, and anyone who's a fan of his crepuscular sound design and abyssal ambiance really needs to hear it.
Track Samples:
Sample : Elemental Trigger
Sample : Delusion Fields
Sample : Undulating Terrain

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MINOTAUR   Obsession   CD   (Phage Tapes)    11.98

I was captivated by Minotaur's Obsession as soon as I set eyes on the cover. On it, a hallucinatory collage of disembodied eyes float around an attractive young woman clad only in a bra and thong, her back to the viewer, casting a beguiling, heavy-lidded glance over her shoulder. This vaguely nightmarish night-scene evolves into something much darker as you open the album and find the high contrast images of intricate rope bondage and fetishistic modeling, juxtaposed with an older glamour shot of an unknown woman. This all ties together with the thematic influence of Anais Nin's 1977 collection Delta Of Venus; this classic piece of literary erotica provides the raw material for the lyrics on Obsession, as well as the seething eroticized energy that oozes across the ten tracks. This is the first full length album from Minotaur, the duo of James Keeler (Wilt, Hedorah) and George Proctor (Mutant Ape, Sump), and it's nowhere near as excruciating as you might think it would be. What these guys have created here is one of the creepiest power electronics albums I've heard, taking scenes of debauched sex, virulent lust, and controlled violence and setting them to a backdrop of pounding metallic rhythms, tumescent black synthesizer drones that feel as if they are eating right through your stereo speakers, and muted noise walls. The electronics are thick, malevolent, oppressive, more musical than pure noise. It's the vocals that really add that extra dose of intoxicating nastiness to Obsessions pervasive haze of black lust, morphing from deep, pitch-shifted mutterings, to heavily-delayed whispers that crawl deep under your skin, to militant barking demanding submission. You could compare this to some of the newer Prurient material as well as the pitch-black electronics of Theologian, but Minotaur's own Philosophie dans le boudoir smolders with a dark carnal violence that is uniquely it's own. A fucking phenomenal album, highly recommended to anyone into forward-thinking power electronics. Limited to two hundred copies.
Track Samples:
Sample : Blurred By The Violence
Sample : The Hunger In Her Womb
Sample : Soldier

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PAVILLON ROUGE   Solmeth Pervitine   CD   (Post Apocalyptic Music)    11.98

The first album from French electronic black metallers Pavillon Rouge, Solmeth Pervitine almost comes across as a hardcore techno/industrial album first, with the black metal aspect bleeding through from below. So right off the bat a lot of black metal fans are going to spurn this band because of the dreaded "t" word, but for those of you who dig the decadent electronic-infested violence of such bands as Aborym, Mysticum, Blacklodge, latter-day Dodheimsgard, Alien Deviant Circus, Diapsiquir and the like, this is a ferocious album seething with hypnotic, pounding rhythms, mangled electronic noises, feral black metal riffs and a subtle but noticeable darkwave influence.
Opener "Solmeth Ascension" injects the droning minimal buzzsaw-crush of second wave black metal into a blasting backdrop of hardcore techno, the glitched, skittering rhythms draped with icy riffs and layered screams, adding in a bit of that baroque, carnivalesque melody that you often hear in certain French black metal circles. Tracks like "Sept Siècles Et Le Feu" bring more violent menace to the sound, with traces of distorted rave synth and Goblin-like soundtrack elements blending with the blasting black techno metal, even as it delivers one of the catchiest and most anthemic hooks/choruses on the album. Same goes for "Sadist Sagitarius" (which is actually a cover of the American deathrock band Cinema Strange) and "Jad XTC", both extremely catchy techno-BM anthems with these monster choruses that'll rattle around in your head for awhile. There's a lot of infectious hooks like these on Solmeth Pervitine, more than most bands in this style, and the black metal side of their sound isn't half-baked at all, it's really well structured, with tight, ferocious riffing executed at a high level of aggression. Some of the other songs go in more of an industrial metal direction, "Exubérance/Exaltation" and "Le Cercle Du Silence" have more of a Wax Trax feel with their pounding machine-metal crunch and flourishes of darkwave influenced moodiness, while "Evangile Du Serpent" combines crushing blackened riffs with piano lines and bursts of frenetic drum n bass, one of the few points on the album where the band incorporates junglist moves. "Des Cimes, Des Abîmes" offers a surrealistic soundscape of abstract electronic noise, ancient phonograph records cut up into sorrowful requiems, and deep-space static, leading into the skull-pounding trance of "Le Grand Tout S'Effondre" at the end of the disc.
One of the better industrial/electro black metal albums I've been listening to lately (and I've been listening to this a lot), it's decadent, debauched, and oozing with cruelty, and especially recommended to Aborym fans...
Track Samples:
Sample :
Sample : Evangile du Serpent
Sample : Les Membranes Vertes de l'Espace

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SHAIDAR LOGOTH   Chapter I: The Peddler   CD   (Mordgrimm)    11.98

This two-piece black metal band from Minneapolis emerges here with their first widely available release, a four song saga that skillfully blurs the lines between hypnotic Weakling-influenced black metal, the stentorian dread of funeral doom, and abstract nocturnal ambience. An impressive debut album from these guys, which also features guest vocal appearances by members of black metallers Wolvhammer and Mourner. One of the striking things about Chapter I is that the subject matter and imagery is all based on Robert Jordan's sprawling The Wheel Of Time series of fantasy novels, but the album doesn't slip into swashbuckling narrative, instead drawing from the more arcane elements and language of the books to craft an otherworldly ambience.
The disc begins with a rush of murky dissonant guitar, but then explodes into fearsome black metal, shredded, icy guitars becoming a blur of buzzing sound over the drummer's furious onslaught of blast beats and thrashing speed. The songs are simply constructed but epic in length, seemingly minimal riffs droning through the swarming buzzblast, but as you listen to this, the layering of the chords and tremolo riffs reveal a baroque complexity to Shaidar Logoth's sound. You can draw comparisons between this and other American bands influenced by black metal like Wolves In The Throne Room, Velnias and Agalloch; there's a similar approach to long, drawn out riffscapes that drip with widescreen majesty, and softer passages of gloomy, doom-laden melodiousness. But Shaidar Logoth also go off into much more ambient, abstract passages that actually make up a great deal of this album. The blazing black metal will drift off halfway through a song into an eerie arrangement of cascading minor key guitar notes and ghastly black ambience, the sounds of distant thunder becoming blurred with horrified screams that echo off even further in the distance. The guitars drift and crawl through these long passages, disappearing into a haze of midnight creep that sometimes reminds me of Emit's more guitar-heavy moments. And then it'll surge back up again, erupting into funereal blackened doom, the sorrowful riffing and distant, buried drums reflecting against black storm clouds. It all peaks with the fourth song "Thahan'dar", which really knocked me out when the band finally crashes into the panoramic orchestral majesty that appears about halfway in, sounding like a more black-metal infected funeral doom band backed with a wall of gorgeous Slowdive-like guitars. And then the final song comes screaming out of that funeral dirge, the blasting winter fury of "Mashiara Shai'tan" whipping into a violent blizzard of apocalyptic black metal with some of the most murderous riffs (and vocals) on the disc, and it's up dissolving into a gorgeous synth-heavy wash of sound at the end that sounds more Tangerine Dream than anything.
Comes in a gatefold jacket.
Track Samples:
Sample : Mashadar
Sample : Thakan'dar
Sample : Mashiara Shai'tan

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SIGH   In Somniphobia   CD   (Candlelight)    12.98

Hail the return of the Japanese blackened prog metal gods, Sigh! It's been two years since their last record Scenes From Hell, and as killer as that album's heavier and darker feel was, this new one is in many ways a return to the lysergic frenzy of their earlier work. As always, the music of Sigh tends towards the weird and dramatic and eclectic, and this won't win any new fans among the hardcore black metal purists. If anything, In Somniphobia ends up in some really Zorn/Bungle style territory as the album races through a breathless array of stylistic shifts and sonic fuckery.
The baroque black metal of the lead off song "Purgatorium" ignites In Somniphobia with it's soaring guitar harmonies, stadium-ready hooks and Mirai's dizzying Hammond organ wizardry. Romantic violins and piano make an appearance in the song as well as some supremely crushing thrash riffing, and it really reminds me of the aggressive psych metal on their 2001 masterwork Imaginary Sonicscape (which is still one of my favorite albums of the past decade). Some slick saxophone work and psychedelic synthesizer freak-outs add to the epic galloping thrash of ""The Transfiguration Fear Lucid Nightmares", which gets even wilder when the choral voices come in later on alongside some Spaghetti Western style whistling and weird chirping electronic noises.
The title track is an amazing jazz-flecked prog metal epic, Dr Mikannibal laying down her expressive lines over a crushing Sabbathy dirge infested with all kinds of weird electronic effects and glitchery, before turning into a strange haunted house trip-hop mashup. Then there's the jazzy vamp of "Amnesia", which sort of sounds like a metallized, blackened Tom Waits, if you can imagine that. In Somniphobia is loaded with this type of stuff. Operatic vocals soaring over lumbering doom metal and electronic soundscapery, weird cut-up sound collages that sound like someone is spinning the dial through the entire radio band being beamed out of the Interzone, the crazed psychedelic funk-metal of "L’excommunication a Minuit", ghostly music-box melodies, grinding industrial noise, traces of Italian horror-prog a la Goblin, evil carnival funhouse tunes, European and Japanese folk melodies all appear throughout the album, though just about every single song manages to stay rooted to a foundation of ferocious old school black thrash. Oh, and the ghost of Ennio Morricone lurks all over Sigh's music on In Somniphobia. The more I listen to this, the more I realize that it really does pick up where Imaginary Sonicscape left off, it's almost as delirious and psychedelic as that album, and if you thought that was Sigh's crowning achievement, you'll definitely want to check this album out too. The album is also spotted with a handful of shorter soundtrack-style interludes like "Lucid Nightmare" which combine evil spoken word passages with Danny Elfman-style orchestral creep, and the whole thing is spotted with guest appearances from a a variety of musicians both metal and otherwise, including clarinetist Adam Matlock, trumpeter Jon Fisher, Kam Lee from legendary death metallers Massacre, and Metatron from The Meads Of Asphodel.
Best new Sigh album in a long time, highly recommended for all fans of their wild carnivalesque blackened prog metal...
Track Samples:
Sample : Purgatorium
Sample : Somniphobia
Sample : Amnesia

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SLAVE AUCTION   self-titled   CDR   (Joy De Vivre)    8.50

Italian experimental musician Eugenio Maggi previously made a name for himself among fans of avant garde electronic ambience with his recordings under the Cria Cuervos project, but here he detours into an uglier sonic realm that's more in the vein of filthy UK noise rock a la the HeadDirt label, pitiless blackened drones, and crude industrial scum-dirges. As Slave Auction, Maggi tips right over into the abyss, craving out huge steaming slabs of blackened death-drone that sweep over your carcass like a cloud of buzzing black botflies. This music is grim to the core, without a ray of light piercing it's leathery dried-out hide. The opener "Raised On A Wire Mother" knocked me into a glassy-eyed trance mere moments into it, with that aforementioned swarming buzzstorm sinking deep into your neurons while a heavier undercurrent of grumbling machinery and scraping engine parts hover just beneath the surface of the monotonous drone. The other two tracks use differing source material to puke up their own hypno-crud mantras; the delightfully titled "Black Feces" grinds away on a single distorted bass guitar chord over and over while various whining frequencies and dissonant strings buzz around it, giving it a brain-damaged Skullflower feel, and the last track is this wheezing, sputtering dirge that combines the sound of huge pieces of metal being moved around with the bleeping of a mainframe computer and other electronic noises, and the rumbling dissonance of a piano being disemboweled.
Slave Auction's churning machine filth puts off a gasoline-soaked stink that makes much of this disc feel like a far more malevolent and industrialized take on the sort of deep droneological experiments that you'd hear off something from the Utech label, heavy and ominous but belching toxic smoke and grinding the earth between huge metal jaws. Don't let the regal, ivy-covered manse on the cover fool you - this is the sound of decay, of matter crumbling around you in slow motion as everything irrevocably falls apart. Jazzfinger fans should give this guys a spin.
Comes in a plastic snapcase.
Track Samples:
Sample : Raised On A Wire Mother
Sample : Black feces

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SLEEP RESEARCH FACILITY   Stealth   2 x CD   (Cold Spring)    18.98

Brit dronemaker Sleep Research Facility has always stood out from the rest of the dark ambient scene for it's more conceptual based work, such as the now classic Nostromo album which re-created the isolated oppressiveness of the first few minutes of Ridley Scott's Alien across an entire album , and the malfunctioning mechanical ambience of Dead Weather Machine. With the first new album from Sleep Research Facility in five years, the project here takes the rather mundane sounds of a Northrop Grumman B-2 reconnaissance bomber as it moves about an air base in Cambridgeshire, England, and transforms these recordings of killing technology into the chilling minimalist dronescape on Stealth. The album is comprised of five tracks that become longer and longer as the album goes on, each mutating and sculpting the source material (which is made up of a mixture of radio transmissions, metallic reverberations, environmental and mechanical sounds, etc) into expanses of minimal, seriously ominous dark ambience. Stealth explores the same sort of dimly lit regions of somnolent sound as previous releases, the dronescapes drift along languidly through a twilight blur of soft, metallic whirr, high frequency sine waves and distant hum that fade in and out for more than ten minutes at a time, the sounds floating in for a few moments before being swept back out into the ether.
Sometimes the sound can get pretty busy, as those fractured radio signals and distorted voices from air control appear in flurries of static, and indistinct radar pings send melodic tracers burning against the blackness, or it all erupts into a swirling cloud of electronic glitch and delicate bleeping tones. For the most part, though, this album is one long glacial expanse of sound that billows out endlessly across the abyss, which finally culminates in the intense dread of the final track, the sound of this warfare machinery melted down into a slow motion black requiem. As with any Sleep Research Facility album, it's pretty essential to anyone into isolationist/dark ambient, and especially if you're into the minimal dark drone of Lull, one of the few other artists in this field capable of evoking the same level of disquiet and unease through deep listening.
The limited edition release also includes the bonus disc Source that contains the original recordings of the B-2 bomber that were used to create the album. I was expecting this to just be a collection of straight field recordings or something along those lines, but the material on this second disc is almost as enveloping (and is just as eerie) as the album itself. These recordings are somewhat skeletal dronescapes and sound collages that were heavily fleshed out for the album, but here in a more rudimentary state they have a weird alien presence that makes for a very different listening experience.
Track Samples:
Sample : Stealth I
Sample : Stealth V

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TECUMSEH   Return To Everything   CD   (Beta-lactam Ring)    7.98

Portland hypno-sludge trio Tecumseh are one of the better bands out there using the tectonic drone-metal of Sunn O))'s 00 Void and Earth's 2 as the springboard for their long, rumbling ambient dirges. Featuring members of the extreme skumdrone/blackened doom band Trees, Tecumseh have carved out several albums of psychedelic earthquake meditations since 2007, and Return To Everything brings us three more songs of their slow motion rumble, inching along like frozen molasses through an electronically-enhanced smog of distorted bass drones, oozing circular riffs and cosmic keys.
The opener "When We Loved" slowly drifts in on a sheet of granular hiss and low-end feedback, swirling languidly around like a Tangerine Dream track at 1/10th speed, streaked with all kinds of dusty noise and glitchy crackle. It feels al dreamy and blissed out at first, but gradually the tone grows darker, a feeling of hidden menace slowly creeping to the surface, and as it flows directly into "Apophis", the mood becomes singularly grim. This longer piece combines a rumbling minimal bass line with clouds of howling feedback, and here's where the early Sunn O))) really becomes apparent as the huge distorted guitars ooze in. It's a lot more minimal than Sunn O))), though; the band keeps this much more minimal, hovering on a single monstrous chord for long stretches of time where the sound evolves not so much through the riff but through the assorted additional layers of feedback and amp hum that they pile on. If you're a total addict for the saurian drone-metal of early Sunn O))) and Earth, though, this is obviously your drug of choice. This song uncoils it's metallic plated heaviness for more than eight minutes, drifting into static clouds of keening industrial synth-howl, haunting operatic female vocals, and lots of electronic textures - this is where Tecumseh places their own stamp on this sound, dragging the glacial hypno-sludge into a more machine-driven, quasi-kosmische realm that offers it's own skull-rattling pleasures. The last track is a nearly fourteen minute epic, another wave of molten ambient doom that again creeps through black space surrounded by thick amp-fog and droning feedback; it's not until almost ten minutes into the song that the drums finally appear, fading in slowly with a fractured slow-motion backbeat that sounds like a pneumatic press slowly dying beneath the waves of elegiac drone-sludge.
Released in a limited edition of five hundred copies, presented in a deluxe tip-on gatefold jacket.
Track Samples:
Sample : Apophis
Sample : Oakca

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TIME MOTH EYE   Undeath   CDR + CHAPBOOK   (Crucial Blaze)    8.99

If you've been following the Crucial Blast stock lists for awhile, you've probably noticed my love of the Pennsylvania based folk group Stone Breath. Folk music isn't something that you see all that often here at C-Blast, but Timothy Renner's group (and assorted other projects) travel along darker roads than most, evoking ancient, crumbling cemeteries and dark hollows covered over with undergrowth and moss. These places exist outside of the omnipresent buzz of the modern world, and I never tire of visiting their shadowed corners. Undeath is a new full length disc from Renner's latest offshoot, Time Moth Eye, and it follows some of the same spectral trails as Stone Breath but also possesses a noticeably creepier feel, a kind of graveyard drone-folk that echoes over overturned headstones and partially exposed bones in long forgotten burial plots along the back roads of rural Pennsylvania, possessed of an ancient, cobwebbed ambience. Along with the music, this release also includes a thick artist's chapbook that contains forty-four pages of eerie illustrations and scratchboard drawings that are deeply connected to the moldering sounds captured on the disc.
The disc begins with the eldritch ambience of "Stonepusher", where tolling church bells and monstrous growling electronics melt into the sounds of warbling harmonica and backwards singing, the nine songs on Undeath travel through a spectral realm of broken graveyard folk songs, ancient cobwebbed drones, and grimly beautiful night-ballads. On the song "Wake", the band calls out to stargazers through the slow-motion harmonium-like wheeze and processed plunk of the instruments, which flows around the song's layered voices and spacey electronic textures. The songs drift in and out of each other, the deep tones of "Wake" floating right into the primeval free-folk of "Sheetwinder", which slowly takes shape as a kind of ghastly raga, the scraping acoustic strings snaking around Timothy's deep ghostly vocals, layered over swirling synthesizer sounds as the music drifts through graveyard visions and unquiet coffins.
"Witchwalker" is one of Undeath's most captivating songs, a half-remembered night-terror cast against the delicate chiming of a xylophone and the sorrowful moan of an accordion-like instrument and withered strings, with an eerie melody that may haunt the listener for days. It leads into the soft narcoleptic hymn of "Sleep", followed by "Ossa Ossa"s Biblical texts sung in Latin to a backdrop of dark, unsettling industrial ambience. "Footsteps Fall" is another spectral folk tune drawn from the twilight ether, and it trails off into the nightmarish howl of the cellos that open "Chrysalishroud" before the song materializes into a vaporous, otherworldly wash of nocturnal cemetery psychedelia. The album's closing song " Sleepwalker / Dreamwalker" is one of the most dramatic pieces of music found on the disc, a nearly eleven minute flight through tenebrous realms beyond the threshold of sleep that features some of Undeath's most vivid imagery, the music swirling around in wraithlike wisps of black effluvium...
The grim graveyard drone-folk of Time Moth Eye's Undeath is some of the creepiest music that I've released through the Crucial Blaze series so far, and seems to exist in a strange sonic realm between the darkest folk music and the cavernous black drift of artists like Yen Pox and Lustmord. Truly chilling music that's recommended to anyone into the blackened folk sounds of Wolfmangler/Dead Raven Choir, Current 93, Aelter, Steve Von Till's Harvestman, Silvester Anfang, Hellvete, Elm, Kiss the Anus of a Black Cat, Hexvessel and similar artists....
The other half of Undeath is a thick black and white artists book that contains forty-four pages of original artwork from Renner, including pen and ink drawings, scratchboard works, and themed series. These drawings of otherworldly beings, graveyard revenants, tree and water spirits, river corpses, and skeletal balladeers are rendered in beautiful detail, recalling the black and white illustrations that you'd find in old ghost story collections from the 60s and 70s. This chapbook is bound in a black obi-band, and is packaged inside of a clear library case.
The Undeath art zine / disc set is limited to two hundred hand-numbered copies.
Track Samples:
Sample : Wake
Sample : Sheetwinder
Sample : Witchwalker
Sample : Chrysalishroud

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U.S. CHRISTMAS   Salt The Wound CD (Re-issue)   CD   (Heart & Crossbone)    11.98

Salt The Wound was the very first album from North Carolina space rock heavies U.S. Christmas, released back in 2006 on the Russian prog label R.A.I.G. We carried that album here for a couple of years before it went out of print, and it was one of the biggest selling titles that I've ever stocked here at Crucial Blast. Not surprising, really; the music on this disc is fantastic, a masterful combination of Hawkwindian excess, sludgy riffage, and a distinct Appalachian twang that came together to make something really unique sounding at the time. Made an impression on the guys in Neurosis, obviously, as they went and picked the band up for their Neurot label, releasing three excellent albums of heavy Southern psych crush from the band in the years since. It's been a while since their debut has been available, but it's just been re-issued by the Israeli label Heart And Crossbones, re-mastered, with new artwork, and includes two studio tracks that did not appear on the R.A.I.G edition.
Taking their name from an obscure Sam Peckinpah film reference, this quintet hails from Marion, a small town nestled in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in western North Carolina, where they have concocted a ragged, burly brand of modern psychedelia over the course of two self-released CD-Rs; for their first ""real"" album, the band has taken material from their previous discs and reworked/rearranged/re-recorded them into Salt The Wound, with a sound that combines classic 70's psych rock, Caustic Resin, Neurosis like dirge, gooey sludge metal, blues and early country music, Hawkwind style space rock explorations, and the expansive fire rock of late 70's Neil Young & Crazy Horse. Quite a heady mix, but Salt The Wound ties these influences and stylings together with a righteously loose energy as the band works out extended riff feasts littered with spacey Theremin strains and some of the coolest molten synthesizer woosh this side of Comets On Fire, resulting in 10 jams of awesome life affirming heaviness. At just over an hour long, the band keeps it dynamic and ever changing as they move from the moving, distortion-caked country/space rock sludge of 'Lazarus' to 'Death By Horses' awesome motorik rush, the doomed cosmic boogie of 'Devil's Flower' and 'Thin The Herd"'s instrumental Southern rock. Trippy, rocking, crushing, this is a stellar first album from U.S. Christmas...
Track Samples:
Sample : DEVIL'S FLOWER
Sample : LAZARUS
Sample : NEW WAR

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UNHOLY GRAVE   Revoltage   CD   (Agromosh)    10.98

Back in stock...
More Unholy Grave! I can never get enough of these Japanese grind weirdo's, and Agromosh has been serving up a healthy amount of Grave on vinyl over the past year, but now they've got this new full length album available on CD (and LP, too!) and it's as scorching and vicious and damaged as ever! Beginning with a lush synth intro played by a member of Japanese sludgelords .Dot that sounds like it might have been lifted from either a third-tier black metal demo or some forgotten 80's action movie soundtrack, Revoltage kicks into high gear with 21 tracks of Unholy Grave's unique style of goofy-but-lethal, ultranoisy grindcore. Shredding, punk-inspired riffing, maniacal blastbeats, lotsa detours into savage midtempo circle pit breaks and sludgy grooves, all recorded on the shittiest recording equipment possible for an AWESOME blown out sound that continues to put Unholy Grave in the same ultradistorted realm as Bone Awl and Brainbombs. And those vocals...if yer not familiar with Unholy Grave, the thing that really sets these guys apart is their singer Takaho, a diminutive maniac who spews an endless array of bestial growls, weird melodic crooning and chanting, high pitched screams, and bizarre gibbering vocal noise and whooping/giggling verbal nonsense that reaches ecstatic levels of nuttiness and which I still think sounds like Eye Yamatsuka from the Boredoms fronting a Scum-era Napalm Death. Crucial. Actually, there is alot of weird clean singing on here that sounds alot different than anything I've heard Takaho do on previous Unholy Grave releases, where he belts out this weird monotone croon that kinda sounds like a narcoleptic Jello Biafra. And of course, UG are also masters of writing amazingly catchy riffs, which on more than a couple of occasions on Revoltage actually head into straight up pop punk, but of course it's all eventually obliterated by sheer grinding violence and the Grave's omnipresent wall of low-fi murkiness. It all finally ends with another synth-sooundtrack outro. Hard to believe that these freaks have been around for almost two decades, and are still delivering the fucked-up grindnoisepunk strangeness better than anyone. CRUCIAL!
Track Samples:
Sample : Track 9
Sample : Track 3
Sample : Track 11
Sample : Track 16
Sample : Track 21

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WALTER, WEASEL   Ominous Telepathic Mayhem   CD   (ugEXPLODE)    11.98

I get stoked when I see Weasel pulling out the haunted-house fonts and sinister track titles. I pretty much love everything on his ugExplode imprint, even when it's improv of a more clinical sort, but my favorite Weasel-work will always be the stuff that comes out when he pulls on the Krisiun t-shirt and heads off into blasthead mode, the sort of aggro frenzy that made The Flying Luttenbachers so lethal. This is where we find him on Ominous Telepathic Mayhem, a collection of duo improvisations where Weasel hooks up with four of his favorite collaborators, trumpeter Peter Evans, guitarist Mary Halvorson, saxophonist Darius Jones, and guitarist/clarinetist Alex Ward.
The first couple of tracks has Evans bleating furiously over Weasel's vicious blast beat/fill attack, a near non-stop percussive frenzy that swerves and lunges around the fast paced horn lines, sometimes veering into what sounds like a PCP-fueled drum solo, and at others launching into grindcore speeds. There's lots of calmer exploratory moments interspersed among all of the blasting/honking, but the violence level remains pretty high throughout, especially on the grinding cacophony that erupts on the second track.
The three tracks with Halvorson joining Weasel are along the same lines as the Opulence album they recorded together; her sheets of spaced-out Sharrock-esque guitar shred are blasted through clouds of delay over the percussive splatter of Weasel's chaotic drumming. When the two of them really get going, it heads into some really ferocious axe-scrape/blastcore chaos that offers similar thrills as Last Exit.
It gets more aggressive when Darius Jones appears, blasting his sax at nuclear strength levels of squeal and skronk while Walter goes fuckin' supersonic on the drums. Their halting, stop-start interplay and ascensions into ear-splattering blastnoise makes for gripping stuff, especially when Jones starts blowing his way into the dark lyricism of "Oracle".
The album's most brutal material, though, is hands down the last couple of tracks with Weasel playing alongside Alex Ward are SICK. Lots of hyper-shred guitar screaming over thunderous war-drums, hardcore tempos, and blasting; Ward's axe work switches off between a Sharrock-style improv skronk and savage hardcore thrash riffs that propel these three tracks into the kind of assault jazzthrash attributable to Painkiller, Zu and Last Exit.
Track Samples:
Sample : Free Sometimes Rules
Sample : Clarity
Sample : Non-Alignment Pact

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WASTELANDERS   II: Cosmic Despair   CD   (Basses Frequences)    8.99

Dean Costello gets around. Till now, I've heard this guy work with the industrial noise crush of Winters In Osaka, the blasting proggy heaviness of Harpoon, even a short-lived but punishing grindcore band called Gun Kata. As Wastelanders, though, Costello has gone of on his own to explore the world of dark kosmische drift, and the second album from the project II: Cosmic Despair is a gorgeous collection of twilight dronemusic that isn't quite as bleak as the title might lead you to believe. It's dark stuff though, no question, but because so much of this album is based around the sound of an organ, it's got a much warmer feel than the often icy drones you'll find from other modern proponents of tenebrous ambient music. Yep, along with voice and guitar Costello heavily relies on an organ as he crafts these winding streams of gloomy hum and lush nebulous drift, but compared to the similarly organ-based drones of Wander, this is much denser, heavier stuff.
Early on, Cosmic Despair is filled with those deep growling organ drones and rumbling distorted bass notes, the slow drifting chordal rumble glowing with a melancholy incandescence. That first track (titled "The Beginning") does feel somewhat funereal, like a requiem hymn slowed down to a warm glacial blur, and that mournful quality bleeds over into the slightly more abstract "Abstraction", where Costello layers more gleaming keyboards and melted organ tones on top of each other to create a stunning celestial scene. "Cosmic Despair" goes even further into the darkness, reminiscent of early Tangerine Dream with it's murky synthesizers and eerie flute-like melodies, and ends up conjuring similar feelings and visuals as Vinterriket by the end of it.
The heaviest moment on the disc comes with the fifteen minute "Expanding Mental Universe", which resembles an early 70s electronic piece with its clusters of bleeping synth notes tumbling through deep space, surrounded by thick clouds of distorted guitar buzz and swells of rumbling down tuned heaviness that slowly creep in later in the track, turning it into something resembling a Tim Hecker piece laced with veins of molten dronemetal heaviness. And then the twenty minute closer "The Crossing" comes in, a dark, epic blissout of soft chiming guitar and billowing feedback-drone curling through the air, finishing the album in a gorgeous golden dawn-haze of cascading psychedelic guitar and glistening electronic drift.
I loved this disc, it put Wastelanders right at the top of my list of current favorite dark cosmic electronics artists alongside Vinterriket and Paysage D'Hiver's pure synthesizer material. Recommended!
Comes in a handsome gatefold jacket.
Track Samples:
Sample : The Beginning
Sample : Abstraction
Sample : Cosmic Despair

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