Aphelion's first album came out on the same label that did that Aderlating album, and that might give you a general idea of where this band is coming from as well. Aphelion's music comes from the industrial tradition, building it's monstrous electronic dirges and menacing atmospheres out of thick slabs of distortion, field recordings, samples, feedback and programmed rhythms, but there's a HUGE industrial metal and Digital Hardcore influence at work here too, heard in the heavy distorted basslines, distorted screams and tinny programmed thrash beats that weave their way through almost every track on the album. At the same time, there's a lot of variety to Lay, and it's a thoroughly mutant vision of hardcore industrial that D-Trash fanatics will lose their fucking minds over...
The first track is a mass of raging Ministry beats, grating distorted noise and roaring buzzsaw bass, like what the theme music for Pole Position might have sounded like if Al Jourgensen had been hired to score it. "Hell" is another crushing slab of blackened Wax Trax industro-insanity, with crushing fast-paced drum programming galloping over a hellish surface of screaming, tortured voices, blistering white noise and sickening power electronics...samples and bits of epic melody sprout up at the end, but it's mostly a relentless blast of spastic mecha-thrash, like a DHR speed metal remix. "Circumlocution" blends wailing bomb-raid sirens and hammering distorted gabba throb into a terrifying blast of apocalyptic speedcore, and "Frozen Birds" is a slower chaotic dirge of looped sounds, pounding percussion, super blown-out vocals, lush spacey synths, all smashed up into a violent noise-doom eruption.
"Be Still" is another creeping industrial dirge, clanging Swans-like percussive pound beneath nauseous piano melodies, uncontrollable weeping, agonized screams, and it almost sounds like a DHR remix of Gnaw Their Tongues...then an old school hip-hop sample starts off "Chest Cavity", before the track explodes into a short minute-long blast of hyperfast electronic speedcore ripping through a thick curtain of black noise and samples. A brutal distorted breakbeat powers the orchestral drones and acidic sample-laden noisescapes of "5%", and "Car Bus Plane Or Coffin" starts off like some psychedelic black metal version of Psalm 69 era Ministry before drifting off into lush jazzy ambience towards the end. And the last listed track, "Purge", closes the album with a short, ominous dronescape littered with more corrosive noise and random samples.
If your're looking for an ultra-chaotic skullfuck that mashes together old school Wax Trax electr-thrash, Dissecting Table's ultra-distorted industrial sludge, Navicon Torture technologies nihilistic power electronics, the hellish abstract soundscapes of Gnaw Their Tongues and the most fucked-up, distorted, violent ends of the DHR/D-Trash digital hardcore spectrum, then this is the album for you. When I decided to pick up some copies of this disc for C-Blast it was on the basis of hearing just two of the slower tracks on the album, which led me to believe that the whole thing was going to be a sort of industrial doom, but it turned out to be way crazier and more intense than I ever expected. Awesome.
Packaged in a four panel digipack.