Byla's debut album was a collection of gorgeous, delicate post rock ambience filled with fragile acoustic guitar melodies and washes of dense chordal guitar drift, a kind of somnolent and beautiful instrumental dronerock that would have fit in right at home on the Kranky label alongside similiar artists like Labradford and Windy & Carl. It was surprising at first to hear such dreamy driftscapes coming from the duo of Colin Marston (also of Behold...The Arctopus, Infidel?/Castro!, and Dysrhythmia) and Kevin Hufnagel (Dysrhythmia), since these guys are normally blitzing us with heavy, metallic prog through their other bands. That debut was a killer slab of guitar-drone though, and I had been looking forward to their next one, doubly so when it was announced that their follow up was going to be a collaboration with Jarboe from Swans. Viscera has been out for a while through Translation Loss but it took forever for us me to get around to listing it, and it's both a stunning followup to Byla's first disc and a totally surprising change in sound for the duo that will probably shock anyone expecting more of the first album's gleaming ambience. Jarboe's presence as a shapeshifting muse in recent collaborations with avant metallers like Cobalt, Neurosis, and Justin Broadrick and Jesu has produced some ferociously emotional music, and with Byla, they create a brutally dense ambient hellstorm that for most of the album feels closer to the crushing blackened distortoblasts of Skullflower's recent releases and the more noise-centric, abstract corners of experimental black metal. The album is divided between these epic stretches of blown-out, multitracked tremelo riffing and feedback and a few tracks of gorgeous acoustic strum and shimmering folky ambience that echoes both Byla's first album as well as later Swans and Jarboe's solo material. On the longer, heavier tracks, Byla creates intensely dense drone-oceans of hyperfast blackened guitar strum and churning low-end rumble, no drums or percussion, just a massive wall of orchestral black blast and endless layers of buzz that sounds like Rhys Chatham conducting a guitar army made up exclusively of black metal guitarists. Over this, Jarboe rends her voice into an endless, wordless stream of breathing sounds, harmonized chorals, and possessed howling, timestretched into infinite streaks of sound racing across the surface of Byla's blackdrone symphony. The two acoustic tracks on the other hand are like short interludes in between the epic 20+ minute buzzdrone guitar maelstroms, beautiful minimalist melodies fingerpicked on processed acoustics that back Jarboe's ethereal singing. Also of interest is the guest appearance from Mick Barr of Krallice/Orthrelm/Octis who plays lead guitar on the final track, and the combination of his hyperspeed single note runs and the buzzing black droneriffs make it sound like an ambient, minimalist version of Krallice. Total hypnotic. The disc is packaged in a digipack with mandala-like artwork from Cedric Victor-Desouza.