We've picked up a bunch of different cassettes from the French black metal label Infernal Kommand for Crucial Blast, all of 'em filled with weird and freaked out occult black metal mutations and queasy psychedelic ambience scraped from the underbelly of the French BM underground. Some of the tapes that we've been able to get are from familiar freakazoids (like the brilliantly fucked one man black metal of Zarach'Baal'Tharagh), while others are new discoveries, from the pitch-black void-ambience of Aymrev Erkroz Prevre and the ritual industrial murk of Stigma Diabolicum, to the sadistic satanic power electronic/crypt-drone rites of Silcharde, Malvoisie's bizarre didgeridoo-fueled black metal hallucinations and the perverted blackgrind overload of Kratornas. All of this stuff is brilliant and fucked, the sort of damaged outsider black metal weirdness that we lust for constantly, and fellow fans of all things blackened and noisy and abstract should definitely check all of these titles out.

The bulk of the cassettes that we got from Infernal Kommando are from that one man black metal project known as Zarach'Baal'Tharagh. I found out about Zarach'Baal'Tharagh after we picked up that collection of demos that At War With False Noise put out on cd a while back, and ever since then I've been looking for more of ZBT's utterly brain-damaged primitive black metal psychosis. The guy behind ZBT, Luc Mertz, has got to be one of the most prolific loner black metallers ever; according to Metal-archives.com, he's up to eighty demos as of this moment, with more surely on the way, and whats really wild is that so far everything that I've heard from this self-described " French master of bedroom black metal" has been amazing (and amazingly bizarre). This is exactly the sort of uber-fucked stumbling low-fi black metal mess that fans (like myself) of Furze, Striborg, Defuntos, Wormsblood, Alkerdeel, Raw Hatred and Tjolgtjar lust for.

Real Life Evil Dream is demo number forty-three from Zarach'Baal'Tharagh, and if you've heard anything else from this mutant, you know what to expect here. Twelve tracks that lean towards a more straightforward black metal sound at times, with simple buzzsaw riffing and junkyard drums clattering together in unholy blasts of noxious necro-punk. There's plenty of that trademark ZBT weirdness here though too, for sure. Songs are prefaced by long stretches of murky industrial noise and distant thunderous loops, and those insane swooping pterodactyl screams appear out of nowhere, sometimes showing up in the middle of a passage of almost total silence. There are loads of samples here too, strange field recordings and grunt-like vocal sounds, free-noise percussive meltdowns, recordings of breaking glass in some dark alleyway, weird unidentifiable noises, clusters of chaotic fx, abd lots of other strange aural hallucinations that swirl around these tracks. Another dose of demented outsider necro-psych genius!