Blue Sabbath Black Fiji? That's got to have something to do with Blue Sabbath Black Cheer, right? That's what I thought each time I spotted one of the few reviews for this UK duo, who I previously assumed was some sort of spinoff of the Seattle-based black-industrial duo. But in fact, Blue Sabbath Black Fiji is totally unrelated to their PDX namesake, their name some kind of weird inside joke nobody seems to have an inside track on. Their music, though heavy and noisy, is definitely nothing like BSBC, either, making things even more confusing. This is the first release that I've heard from them, a split with the US drone/dirge duo Ailvsgam and it's a very cool (if a bit short) cassette that in spite of the name weirdness, has me wanting to hear more from 'em pronto.

The Blue Sabbath Black Fiji side opens with the shuddering percussive jam "Everyday Is Brainday" before moving onto the next four tracks, each one a short, shapeless mass of percussive rattling, fragments of tribal drumming, hypnotic looping sound, trippy electronic noises and chunks of distorted guitar looped around each other into loud, crushing circular forms that sound like some weird blown-out dance music, like one of the old Manchester dance rock bands fed through a mangler, noisy and fractured and seriously distorted, but weirdly groovy and really, really catchy. There's also noisy Hanatarash-like freakouts, massively heavy and distorted blissed-out drones, kinda like Growing but way, way heavier, and mangled collages of guitar splooge and pop songs. It's all over the place, a kind of freaked-out, surreal noise rock, and I'm really looking forward to hearing more from these cats.

The other side features a single track from Ajilvsga, "Tales Of Ready-To-Give". This is the first release that I've picked up from this project, but I'll definitely be tracking down more, as this is great stuff. This new project is a duo that features Brad Rose from Digitalis as one of its members, but Ajilvsga is far from the sort of noisy drone and far-out freak folk that his label is known for. This is seriously heavy, plunging deep into a dark sonic realm of massive grinding feedback/amp atmosphere and rumbling guitar distortion, and very much in the same territory as newer Skullflower, Barn Owl, Half Makeshift, Vulture Club, Robedoor, Sunn, that sort of lumbering subsonic drift, a dark, dirgey undertow, with lonesome, melancholy electric guitar being played over top. The guitar melody sounds almost Western, bleak and windswept, but it's almost entirely subsumed by the heavy rumbling drone as it struggles to stay adrift throughout the entire track, the snatches of meandering, sun-baked acid guitar floating just above the surface of an immensely thick, roaring ocean of buzz and grind and crumbling distortion, while huge doomed chords and the raspy hitch of a phonograph needle stuck in an endgroove emerge from the murk.

There's only 85 copies of this tape, packaged in handstamped covers with metallic silver and black ink on a blue cover.