First heard Aluk Todolo on that debut 7" that the band released on Implied Sound last year, which I thought was a real blast of fetid hypno rock inscribed with cryptic occult imagery and one hell of a pounding groove, major groove, a kind of satanic trance rock meltdown that felt like it was crawling right off of the edge of the vinyl. Great stuff that caught the attention of a lot of people that follow this sort of thing, and this past November saw the release of Aluk Todolo's first full length on Public Guilt, which has been building a heavy buzz ever since it came out. On Descension, Aluk Todolo have carved out a pitch-black krautrock masterpiece that ends up sounding akin to Circle performing the background music for a black mass while being mixed by Masami Akita armed with short-circuiting amplifiers in each hand, punctuating their nocturnal dronerock rituals with blasts of white-hot electronic skzzzz.

Aluk Todolo features members of the black metal cult Diametragon, but the main thread that ties the two bands together is the musician's use of brutal white noise as a kind of lead instrument; in Diametragon, the band splatters their razorwire black metal asaults with ear shredding skree, but here the noise is draped in layers over skeletal rock instrumentation, a basic drums/guitar/bass lineup that forms minimalistic propulsive jams that swim in black feedback and atmospheric speaker buzz. Like This Heat and Einsutrzende Neubaten filtered through an endless blackdronenoise ritual, sinister melodic sigils forming out of the fuzz and forming a claustraphobic, creepy low fi psych epic, their rhythms relentless in movement. The opening "Obedience" starts off as swirling black ambience with a shuffling sheet metal rhythm banging away in the background, and then suddenly a wavering female chorale appears and the whole song suddenly explodes into a clamorous, propulsive krautrock

jam, simplistic driving drumming slicing through a storm of overloaded demon howls and white noise. It's really low fi and garagey sounding, but powerful and totally in-the-red. On "Burial Ground", the band sets up a tense, claustrophobic vibe with a simple guitar arpeggio played over weird FX, rusted metal percussion, tinny evil drones and a plodding drumbeat. "Woodchurch" is another slow, plodding jam that almost seems to invert the guitar part from the previous track and crank the distortion way up while layers of machine noise and FX shift and warp above it; the last track, "Disease", has another shambling hypnotic drumbeat playing in an odd time signature accompanied by trippy distorted effects and blasts of overmodulated acid guitar clipping throughout the jam.

Imagine an evil, hypnotic fusion of the super blown-out blackness of Wold and Akitsa, Harry Pussy's shambolic noise, and This Heat. Slow marches into unnerving noise frequencies and atmospheric clatter are served up as black magic meditations, and alternate with invocations of demonic krautrock. Highly recommended !