More intense Japanese hard-drive carnage from Neus-318! I discovered this Japanese CDR label a few months ago, and while much of their catalog is made up of kooky abstract computer noise and glitch collages, some of their stuff is straight up skullripping digital noise that leans towards the psychedelic ends of the Japanese noise scene. I scoured their catalog and picked up their most aggro, brain wasting releases for Crucial Blast, which Japanese noise fans should definitely check out.

Drain sees the laptop glitch-drone artist Daruin teaming up with another Japanese noise project called Grkzgl that's new to me. Each artist has an epic twenty-minute track, and both use heavy ambient sounds and manipulated computer noise to create an ominous buzzscape that together make for the heaviest release out of all of the Neus-318 discs that we've picked up. Daruin opens the disc with mastermind Kazuya Ishigama sculpting a dark cloud of deep, rumbling drone, distorted and super heavy and somewhat Sunn O)))-esque that drifts in tectonic time as microscopic chiming tones move backwards in time around it. As ritual bells and subliminal rumblings join in, the piece slowly builds in volume until the underlying drone that appeared at first becomes warped by overmodulated fx. The sound is stretched out, pulled apart, streaked with looping metallic scrapes and draped with gossamer layers of black ambience, then evolves again into a blast of crystalline chimes before softening out into a field of dark abstract ambience that closes the track. I hear little bits of KK NUll and Sunn O))) and dark ambient and tactile electro-acoustic sound sculpture all swirling together here, and it's a fantastic piece of grim, creepy abstract drift. I'd definitely like to hear more of this type of sound from Daruin!

On the second track, Grkzgl strips the ambience down even further, taking away almost any extraneous sound at first and leaving only a massive slow-moving, slithering sinewave drone. This drone is all low end, a glacial reverberating buzz like the sound of a piece of large electronic equipment humming in the middle of the night, that electrical hum then distorted and shaped into a buzzing and hypnotic rumble, super minimal and spare but rib-rattling when heard at high volume. As Grkzgl's blackened hum uncoils, it's joined by tiny flashes of dark shimmer and chirping feedback tones that circle the drone and recede back into the void, but on the second half of the piece it changes shape and turns into a flattened field of muted pulses and fluttering feedback tones. Super abstract and minimal, the first half reminds me of the minimal amp-buzz scultpures of Not.

Packaged in a full color paper sleeve that comes in a plastic wallet.