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.

I'm a big fan of ZBT's damaged black metal slop, both the noisy industrial-laced blacknoise experiments and the more riff-centric retardo blackthrash stuff, but it's when Zarach'Baal'Tharagh launches into the noxious, gnarly blackened punk that this one-man black metal band really rages. This 2006 cassette

on Infernal Kommando is the most blackpunk-focused of all of the ZBT tapes that we just picked up from them, a six song collection ("Dark City", "Suck Your Bone", "Metal Bastard", "Hellmaster", "From Beyond", "Deadly Pale Face") that pays homage to Motorhead through raw, stumbling midpaced gruesomeness that combines simple three and four chord riffs with those distant trashcan drums and Luc Mertz's fucked up slobbering growls and swooping reptile screams, sounding alot like a totally drunk and wasted Venom recorded on a busted Tandy tape deck. Beneath the roiling tape hiss and the skummy sheen of the shitty production, this stuff is raging, definitely for fans of the really mangled end of the current wave of blackened noisepunk bands like Malveillance and Bone Awl and Ancestors. This being Zarach'Baal'Tharagh, there's alos lots of weirdness going on, swells of psychedelic fx, vocals warped into tea-kettle whistles, deep chanting that kinda sounds like Tuvan throat singing, weird dissonant chords, and lots of hideous blackened noise. It's the most "rocking" of all of the ZBT tapes we have though, that's for sure.