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 disc from Dukkha features three epic tracks, two of em around fourteen minutes but the one in the middle stretching out for more than thirty-four minutes, and it's mostly Dukkha in ambient-sludge mode, creating massive fields of grinding ultra-heavy drift. "Part One" begins in a haze of tidal feedback and swells of low-end rumble, then slowly builds into a roiling mass of thick distorted chords drifting through space, heavy and ponderous, massive and crumbling, not so much a riff as a single cluster of distorted guitar notes stretched out to infinity and swirling in slow motion over an ocean of rumble and shimmer and electrical hum, totally devoid of momentum. Every once in a while, a menacing minor key doom riff will appear and descend through the swirl of guitar ooze and clanking amplifier noise, only to disappear back into the fog. Towards the end, the guitars fade away entirely, leaving behind traces of synth tones and lightly shimmering ambience.

The minimal synths flow straight into "Part Two" (the whole disc is essentially one single piece of music), processed guitar notes stretched into silvery filigree, wavering feedback tones hovering and dissipating in midair, the sound all soft and reserved, soft fluttering reverberations settling in a vast empty space. The tones are eventually joined by other sounds, like looped guitars, fragments of blues licks, pulsating feedback, crackling electronic textures, ripples of distortion, and the track begins to lead into heavier territory after awhile. Blasts of distorted rumble and feedback appear and build into a wall of sound, chaotic electronic squalls surging through space, splatters of digital detritus appearing across the roaring machine-like drone, until the track morphs into a weird sort of industrial dark ambience, fluctuating robot chirps and electrical drill sounds mixing with ominous synth riffs and thick drones and TONS of fx. The last few minutes unleash a grim, processed doom riff that plods alongside a warbly church organ swaddled in reverb, the riff played on a guitar so distorted and processed that it almost sounds like a synthesizer, but the riff is pure doom, like hearing a riff lifted from a Vitus album and dunked in 8-bit circuitry.

As we head into the third and final track, Dukkha strips away the guitars and distortion and all of the gritty noise that came before and leaves us with layers of dark, shimmering synthesizers, turning the last chapter into an amazing piece of kosmiche drift, all low-fi keyboard drones and spacey Teutonic pulses a la early Ash Ra Tempel or Klaus Schulze spreading out in expanding clouds of nebulous white and red light across space, the sound dark and intoxicating.

Comes packaged in a simple foldout sleeve.