As soon as I heard Satans Beauty Obscenity from Funereal Moon last year, they turned into one of my favorite new black metal bands, a stumbling,

tweaked-out black mutation that I described as "Mexico's answer to Abruptum" back when I wrote up that Funereal Moon reissue that Autopsy Kitchen put out.

The duo of Darvula and Impure Ehiyeh (whose corpsepaint is some of the raddest that I've ever seen) delivered an extremely weird, chaotic brand of seemingly

improvised black metal that's very similiar to the legendary Swedish improv-black metal freakoids, melding shambling doomy riffs and crude buzzing black

thrash with gloriously cheesy 80's horror movie keyboards, weird accidental electronic noises, some theatrical spoken word, all wrapped up in Funereal Moon's

bizarre atonal ambience. Heavy and delirious and Very, very weird, it din't take long before the sounds of these Mexican ghouls totally infested the Crucial

Blast offices. I've been looking forward to hearing some new stuff from them, and here are are with a new split cd that just came out on the Mexican label

Self Mutilation Services that the guys from F-Moon are involved with, which has them sharing the split with another, equally fucked-up black metal band

called Circle Of Ghosts from Canada, each band delivering at least four new songs.

The disc comes in an unorthodox package, an oversized 7" style sleeve that folds out into a six-panel gatefold, with a plastic disc tray glued to the inside

of the center panel, the whole sleeve plastered in a chaotic array of heavily pixelated satanic imagery and bondage pics, and it's limited to 500 copies.

Funereal Moon are up first, and they sure haven;t gotten any less bizarre sounding since I last heard 'em...the first track "From Darkness" opens with

plodding gloomy basslines and meandering, phased keyboard melody, a kind of slurred post-punk groove over murky drum machine beats, the keyboards sometimes

wandering off into a weird woozy carnivalesque melody, and electronic roto-toms showing up like derelict sounds from an old school rap record. Then there are

the vocals, quite different from the other Funereal Moon stuff I own; from the start, the vocals shift back and forth between a deep gothy croon that reminds

me of Peter Murphy and their trademark vocal style of blackened whispers, gutteral growling, and wordless hissing. It's like an old goth-punk song dunked in

molasses and layered in messy Abruptum filth and bizarre sound effects. Shit just gets weirder as we get into the other songs: theres more of that slurred

post-punk crawl and abstract guitar noise, and on two of the songs, the singer croaks his way through a bunch of of the lyrics to the Rolling Stones songs

"Sympathy For The Devil" and "Paint it Black" over simple, goofy rhythm tracks that sound like they found on an old casio keyboard, clanging oil-drum

percussion, thick swells of murky drone, stretched-out doom metal riffs slathered in some sort of weird electronic processing, churning buzzing ambience,

epic synth melodies buried under mountains of aural filth and slime, dramatic ranting in Spanish, ultra-dissonant black metal riffs stumbling and plodding

over ridiculously minimal beats, and mangled tape noise...total Abruptum-style necroslime filtered through their unique brand of what-the-fuck black metal

weirdness. Killer!

Not just any band can try to follow up that freakout, but the Canadian one-man band Circle Of Ghosts manages to do so admirably, with five songs of their

doomy, depressive, severely damaged blackdirge. A guy named Witchlord plays all of the music here, a mix of oddly melodic doominess and chaotic, fractured blackmetal that starts off with "A Moment Of Tranquil Darkness", where a melancholy riff staggers through super-chaotic drumming, croaking vokills drenched in delay and spacey fx, and accidental creaks and strange blurts of digital crud. There's a trippy quality to this song that kinda makes it sound like a cross between Black Mayonnaise and depressive black metal. The rest of this is equally bleak and fractured, messy guitars layered into jagged dirges, the music often falling out of rhythm, digital distortion and caustic fuzz way up in the mix, awesome melodic blackdoom swallowed in storms of distorted noise, hellish Xasthur-like blur crumbling in on itself. Very doomy, and this does sometimes remind me of some of Xasthur's newer stuff mixed in with the suicidal slow-motion BM of Nortt, but far sloppier and messed up, the riffs and drums getting pretty tangled up at times, giving this a really wrecked vibe.