When we picked up most of the available Frequency Thirteen catalog for the Crucial Blast shop, the one band who had the most discs issued on the label was an enigmatic project called Dukkha. Aside from the split with Black Vomit, this band also has three other full length discs on Frequency Thirteen, and all of this stuff fits right in with the label's aesthetic of "True Sheffield Black Psychedelia", while at the same time veering further away from anything resembling black metal than almost any other project on the label (aside from Torture Gnosis). Drawing more from free-improv guitar noise, classic early 70's krautrock/psychedelia and industrial drone, Dukkha's music is dense, heavy, shapeless, able to shapeshift between cloudy psychedelic guitar to ear-rupturing doomdrone, but at the same time, each of these discs that Dukkha has releases has it's own sound, from the caustic guitar buzz and ambient sludge of Mandala to the atavistic psych-doom of Anatta and the Ash Ra/robo-drone blender of Culture Is Not Your Friend. Each one crushing and trippy but quite different from the next.

This is the first disc from the enigmatic psych/kraut/doom/dronebeast known as Dukkha, another member of the "True Sheffield Black Psychedelia" cadre and one of the more mysterious denizens of that little UK avant-metal scene. Mysterious in that there is even less info on this project to be found than the other Frequency Thirteen bands, which is saying alot. Cloaked in shadow and obscurity, Dukkha doesn't include any information in its sleeves aside from an email address and a Myspace URL, no indication as to who is behind this or what was used to create their druggy, meandering doomjams. On Anatta, we get just one track, but it's a forty-four minute epic, and it's also the heaviest, most metallic of all of Dukkha's releases. Starting off with whorls of muted ambience and a gently plucked minor key arpeggio, the music is purely instrumental, and adds on additional layers of guitar that break off into warbling off-key countermelodies or blurs of fast-strummed black metal chords, all while revolving around that simple central melody. At the nine minute mark, it suddenly changes as a monster doom metal riff crashes in with simple metronomic drums, then lumbers forward monotonously, that crushing Sabbathoid riff bulldozing through a flurry of spacey FX and delayed guitar, sounding like an Electric Wizard riff stuck in an endless lock groove. The riff goes through a series of changes, moving from morose arpeggios repeated from the beginning of the track, to super-zonked psychedelic noodling to that droning Sab riff and back and forth, but the drums are constantly pulsating underneath it all, laying down a mechanical propulsive throb beneath the deep space psych doom jamming and clouds of buzzing feedback. Deeper into the track, the riff and drums disintegrate, leaving behind tracers of looped guitar distortion and meandering arpeggios that become more and more abstract, while swirling analogue synthesizers drift below. This spacey psych jamming goes on for more than ten minutes before the massive doom riffage drops back in, and the rest of the track grinds through more of that punishing, wandering doom before the instruments drop out yet again one last time, and reveal a strange open space filled with birdsong, a creepy female voice speaking in some strange tongue, distant flutes, and eerie fx. Wow! This is the heaviest and trippiest of all of the Dukkha titles, and it's quickly becoming one of my favorite Frequency Thirteen releases at that. Blasted psych and kosmiche drift fused to barbaric old school doom, can't go wrong with that...imagine Saturnine Temple or an instrumental Electric Wizard rehearsal tape spliced with Ash Ra. Killer!