Everybody went nuts over those Buddha Machines that came out two years ago, those small handheld transistor soundboxes that featured nine sound loops from the electronic duo FM3 that could play infinitely if one chose to do so. The sounds on the Buddha Machine ranged from deep rumbling drones and swells of electronic noise to dessicated fragments of melody and resonant metallic buzz; any of these loops would become a dizzying, woozy blur of meditative sound once you left them to cycle over and over. Pretty genius, and it was no wonder that people snatched 'em up quick.

Now we've got Flingco Sound moving in on the Buddha Machine template, putting their own dark spin on the concept with their Black Box. The idea is very similiar to the original Buddha box, a small transistor type sound device with nine loops that can be played endlessly, but if you've heard any of the warped abstract sounds that Flingco specializes in, it's no surprise that things are much creepier with this one... To begin with, the box itself is black (obviously), and shaped like a tombstone with the Flingco logo printed in gold at the top edge. There's a switch that doubles as the on/off and the volume control, a headphone jack and an input for an external power source (it also runs on two AAA batteries, not included) and a button that switches between tracks, and the device comes packaged in a nice black cardboard box. Where the Black Box differs from the Buddha Machine is with the sounds, which are all new recordings made specifically for this project by several of the artists on the label, including Wrnlrd, Cristal and Haptic, along with two spoken word pieces. It's the darkside counterpart to the Buddha Machine, a collection of eerie and disturbing downer-drones and blacknoise loops that are far from soothing, and most of these pieces are actually pretty creepy. This thing is totally irresistable if yer into the gnarlier, darker side of droning bliss and dread-soaked atmospherics...

The first loop found in the Black Box is a brief snippet of spoken word from Chicago artist Annie Feldmeier Adams, who simply repeats the phrase "...today, I will not kill myself..." over and over, the phrase slightly changing in intonation once or twice, but when caught in the infinite moebius loop of the Black Box, becomes an eternal mantra chanted over and over...

There are three loops from Haptic: the first is a churning, blown-out blur of pulsating feedback and oscillating metallic whir that becomes a massive sheet of drone-noise; the second, a black cloud of deep, crushing low-end rumble flowing through layers of shortwave static, strange percussive sounds and streaks of brittle high-end skree; and the third Haptic loop is an almost static feedback pulse sustained over what sounds like a super-minimal plodding drumbeat that goes on forever...

The mysterious drone project Cristal contributes two loops, the first a simple but utterly hypnotic loop of pulsating, almost musical high-end feedback drone and warbling heartbeat-thump that sounds like some sort of extreme minimal techno...but the second loop is a much more sinister chunk of sound, made up of an ominous deep riff that almost sounds like a snippet of a droning downtuned bass guitar riff cycling infinitely while electronic pulses and noise swirls around it - this is one of the heaviest and most trance-inducing loops on the Box, an endless industrial-sludge mantra that had me zoning out after only a minute of listening to it.

Then there's two loops from the twisted outsider black metal project Wrnlrd, both of which are titled "Hoax"...the first loop is a blast of total sonic chaos that sounds like haunting harmonized voices and garbled television transmissions and distorted noise chopped up and melted together in a brutal ten-second aural hallucination, and the second seems to use the same source material for an even more crazed and chaotic chunk of sound. Wrnlrd's contribution to the Box is anything but meditative, and sounds more like one of the violent noise cut-ups you'd hear on one of those locked groove compilation LPs on RRRecords. This doesn't sound anything like the same band that did the Oneiromantical War LP, but it's pretty damn brain melting.

And in the middle of the sequence is another spoken word bit from Adams, who repeats the phrase "I don't feel anything", her voice pitchshifted down an octave and distorted, the loop turning into another mantra of pure negative energy...

Limited to 2,000 units.