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.

Mandala features five lengthy tracks, beginning with the half-hour track "Lunglord"; starting as a swirling descent into cavernous echoes and deep subterranean rumbling, a vast underearth black ambient dronescape populated with moaning strings and distant, almost metallic horn-like blasts reverberating way off in the blackness. There's a serious Lustmordian darkness here, with the muted drones and textural ambience creating a thick aura of dread and fear in the first eight minutes or so. But then the sound begins to shift and change as the blackness is slowly broken apart by the appearance of droning guitars and feedback and melancholy little melodies surfacing in the gloom. Thick swells of backwards guitar drone surge beneath the heavily reverbed guitar, which starts to play simple, almost bluesy figures that make me think of a doomy Loren Mazzacane Connors, little bluesy fragments of melody floating through a haze of low-end heaviness and subterranean gloom. But then this is decimated as a wave of megadistorted black DOOM suddenly rises up from the depths around seventeen minutes in and crashes down over the music like a mountain of molten sludge, massive and crushing and black as pitch, a menacing slow-motion riff drifting through space. The effect is pretty dramatic as the fragile psychedelic ambience of the first half is devoured by a monstrous slab of dronedoom on par with anything from Black Boned Angel or Sunn O))). Then, in the last few minutes, the sound changes once again, pulling back from the black doom riffage and leaving a stripped down version of the riff, still heavy and crumbling, but now accompanied by some really wild psychedelic pipe organ playing, until the track finally fades away on a single buzzing organ chord.

The rest of the disc explores a similiarly strange soundworld of dark ambience and ultraheavy psych. The next track, "Bliss" begins with almost total silence as a field recording of birds and wildlife sounds and strange rustling noises come into view, eventually joined by a couple of acoustic guitars a few minutes in. The guitars weave a dark, doomy, almost folky melody over the backdrop of nature sounds and quiet rustling, and it's really beautiful as the song unfolds slowly for almost twelve minutes. But then "Nethercreep" appears and destroys the tranquility of the previous piece with another monstrous wave of blackened ultra-distorted ambient sludge, a storm of grinding corrosive guitar heaviness booming like thunderheads across an expanse of blackened ambience. In the middle of the crumbling distortion and buzz is an almost elegiac melody, but it's almost obliterated by the crushing riffage and white-hot noise. Seriously heavy! That's followed by "Rotations", an abstract expanse of metallic shimmer and crushing bass-heavy riffage, echoing metal percussion ringing out across a vast black void, thick clouds of reverb and delay, swirled into an almost ritualistic soundscape. By now the album has revealed itself to be a kind of dark, doomy ambience, equal parts Lustmord and guitar drone and dark minimal psych and abyssal doom, but when you get to the last track "Tor", that's pretty much out the window as the track opens with a simple accordian-like melody that feels more wistful and warm, the folky tune slowly unfolding over an undercurrent of distorted guitar buzz that slowly drifts in and turns into an accompanying riff, becoming even louder as the accordian drops away and it becomes a kind of distorted indie folk tune. Then the guitar itself fades off, heavily processed sing-song vocals appear for a moment, and the music crashes back in, that same sunny melody again but now it's being played by guitars and accordian and surrounded by other layers of bass and guitar, super heavy and distorted but incredibly catchy, like a sludgy, way more distorted Dinosaur Jr song being played at half speed, or Pelican playing psych-folk through blown amplifiers. It's definitely a very different sound than the previous tracks, but somehow all of this comes together, the super-heavy sludge, the psychedelic strum, the massive layers of dark ambience and feedback drift, all forming into something dreamy and deeply heavy and obscured by shadows, a kind of slow motion blackened drone rock/indie sludge cast through a fractured prism.

Comes packaged in a simple foldout sleeve.