The devilish noise project Allegory Chapel Ltd. is one of the older members of the American noise scene, with releases that date all of the way back to the mid 1980's. Elden M. is the guy behind ACL, and later in the 90's he would go on to become a central figure in the excellent black metal label and mailorder Blackmetal.com, but during the heyday of Allegory Chapel Ltd, he was producing some of the most evil sounding noisescapes that were drifting around the American post-Industrial underground. After releasing a number of limited edition cassettes and contributing tracks to compilations, ACL released it's first full length in the early 1990's with When Angels Fall, released by Mason Jones of Subarachnoid Space/Trance on his Charnel Music label. This was one creepy album, from the silver-on-black album artwork and artwork depicting a lone Seraphim tumbling into some kind of maelstrom and through to the grim fusion of orchestral Classical music, dark ambient, strange samples, and grinding, pulverizing distorted noise textures. The album moves from the somber faux-strings and creepy ambience of the opening track "Introduction (Allegory of the Frozen Heart)" to the shredding blacknoise cut-up of the monstrous "Trajectory Calculations", which is rife with sudden bursts of white noise, a constant deep rumbling presence, horrific screams run through a malfunctioning tape machine, and barely perceptible rhythms seething underneath the surface. That track is barely six minutes long, but it's one of the most crushing and unsettling on the album. The rest of the album continues to descend into dynamic white-noise mantras with terrifying vocal loops of a woman screaming in abject terror ("Predatory Instincts"), almost tactile washes of drone-noise interlaced with minimalist piano and muffled voice samples("Self Destructive Jealousy..."), swooping test-tones launching into columns of brutal, demonic distortion ("Escalate the Violence!"), evil sound collage ("P x Q"), and deformed piano dirges ("Recital 587"). The album's most powerful piece has got to be the closing track " Requiem for Thee Possessed" , a nearly ten-minute dark drone piece that layers together a chopped-up and looped female voice that sings bits and pieces of the old English folk song "I Wish, I Wish" with corrosive crunching distortion and haunting female chorales...very dark and haunting and beautiful.

Allegory Chapel Ltd.'s dark noise falls somewhere in between the death industrial of Brighter Death Now and Atrax Morgue, neo-classical sound collage and the evil dungeon ambience of MZ.412 - in other words, highly recommended if yer into the darker side of noise/industrial. This is the original Charnel Music pressing of the CD which has been a tough one to find for years, but we just scraped up some of the last copies anywhere.