This disc documents an almost twenty-minute live piece that was performed in September of 2008 by an improvisational group made up of Chicago artists Bruce Lamont, Mark Solotroff, and Right-Eye Rita, which took place at the Chicago art space AV Aerie. Lamont, of course, is well known 'round here as the frontman and sax-blower for avant-metallists Yakuza, whose albums have long been faves of ours. Mark Solotroff is also a known quantity from his work in the Chi-town power electronic/industrial groups Bloodyminded, The Fortieth Day, Intrinsic Action, and for running the excellent Bloodlust! label which released this slab of strangeness. On the other hand, I had only heard the name Right-Eye Rita in passing before and wasn't familiar with any of her music. It's kind of a moot point though, as the sum result of this particular live set is so dense and layered that I can only occasionally pick out individual pieces that I can attribute to one of these folks. The performance consisted of the three musicians taking their voices and building a powerful wall of sound using both treated and natural vocal sounds, and they manage to construct a chilling soundscape that frequently sounds totally alien and unlike anything from the human throat. The piece starts off with a vocal sound loop turned into a clanking quasi-rhythm and Rita's eerie, speaking-in-tongues gibberish floating through a sea of reverb, and this is gradually joined by Lamont's deep chanting tones that are reminiscent of throat-singing and which I've heard him use before in Yakuza. As the performance continues, additional layers of vocals are piled on, some sounds manipulated into inhuman electronic textures and drones, while some of the voices are layered into haunting harmonies. The first half is pretty calm going, but by the halfway point, they begin to warp the sounds into strains of aggressive feedback and waves of blackened hiss, turning the sound from dreamy and surreal into something much more dark and nightmarish. The cavernous space of AV Aerie is used to create a huge billowing ocean of reverb that the vocalists ride on, looping their wailing, chanting vocals over an increasingly threatening atmosphere, until the last few minutes when the sound slowly begins to die down, leaving stray bits of reverb-soaked squeal and anguished wailing and infinite streaks of silvery feedback to rot away into silence. This performance is pretty cool, I don't get very many experimental vocal recordings around here since that sort of stuff generally doesn't fit in with the scope of Crucial Blast, but when the label cites Abruptum, Coil and Diamanda Galas as reference points for the strange nightmare chant-ritual that these folks have summoned here, I'm all over it. And those references do give you a fair idea of what's going on here - the sound, at it's most intense, does channel the washed-out, corroded vibe of early Industrial, while tracing creepy signatures with the wailing, increasingly deranged vocals that towards the end does indeed remind me of some of Abruptum's most abstract and atmospheric freakouts.