Somewhere in between the homemade industrial gristle of Wolf Eyes, damaged basement black metal ambience and the mysterious blackened textures of Prurient's recent output, you'll find the strange midnight noise rituals of Fire Island, AK, a project from South Carolina noise artist Thomas Boetnner. I just recently discovered his stuff after he got in touch with us to see if we'd be interested in carrying his music, which is released in tiny handmade runs on his own label, sometimes in editions of less than twenty copies. Once I started checking his stuff out, I found it to be pretty fascinating; using a variety of instruments, electronics and found objects, Boettner creates extremely eerie and abstract soundscapes of blackened old-school industrial, minimal drone and some grisly ambient skronk that reminds me of a murkier, evil sounding version of the Japanese improv-jazz-noise group Dislocation. It's really cool stuff that occasionally stumbles into passages of filthy black ambient brilliance. We picked up a bunch of the Fire Island, AK releases as well as a tape that Boettner released under his own name; all of this stuff is pretty rad, fans of disquieting graveyard drift and occult basement industro-buzz should check this guy out.

Here's another double cassette from Fire Island, AK: The World Of Flesh cassette has three tracks of lengthy psychedelic noise created primarily from electronics, reeds, and processed vocals. "No Love Only Blame" is a black hole of dense rumble and drone, with rhythmic pulses of distorted engine noise rippling beneath waves of hellish distorted chant, and bleating high-end skree and murky electronic tones that swirl around chaotic sci-fi effects. Heavy and psychedelic, with a massive overdriven bottom end throb that makes me think of Wolf Eyes blasting into deep space while spinning a bunch of Delia Derbyshire Lps in reverse. The following track "Punishment" is more minimal, with sporadic low-end electronic pulses and bursts of high end feedback forming a rhythmic loop, joined by more rhythmic industrial sounds, clanging metal, emanations of reverb. Later a moaning half-sung vocal comes in, joined by shrill sax-like bleating, again with a definite Wolf Eyes vibe, the vocals getting more strained and blackened and distressed as the track goes on, the buzzing distorted static forming into something resembling a plodding two-chord riff that repeats over and over, turning it into a seriously warped free-jazz/industrial/hardcore dirge. The b-side has a live performance titled "Rectal Fascism" taken from a show in South Carolina from 2008; at first it sounds like a ghostly noise-jazz jam, the acrid bleating of the reeds screaming across a desolate expanse of spacious black ambience, almost like Japanese industrial jazz noisescapers Dislocation drifting through a vast subterranean catacomb system. As the piece progresses, though, it gets thicker and heavier with sheets of droning feedback, gusts of metallurgic drone swirling in delay, high end sinewaves and sampled voices. Towards the end, the reeds are replaced by whirring oscillators and swooping sci-fi electronics, and a massive bass drone morphs into an actual bass riff, a looping low-end throb that joins with trebly, violin-like skree as it turns into a pounding krautdrone dirge, very Darsombra-like, heavy and mesmeric.

The World Of Bone tape is even darker, opening with bleak blackened psych-folk strum and harmonium buzz, simple sparse percussion off in the distance, a skeletal dronefolk jam that�s gradually joined by cello and other stringed instruments. But then "The Black Goat Of The Woods With One Thousand Young" kicks in with a single distorted guitar chord that�s immediately stretched out into a thunderous abyssal drone, streaked with bluesy psych guitar and bits of Western twang, surrounded by spacious black ambience and deep shadows, like Fushitsusha performing something from Neil Young's Dead Man score, a windswept slow-mo Western psychdrone surrounded by murky electronic keys and kosmiche ambience. The song becomes heavier as the guitars get distorted, wailing leads lash at the lugubrious riff, and thick swirling masses of blackened doomy drone form like thunderheads, a huge Sunn-like sludgy amp rumble that blossoms into a rumbling cosmic space-drone at the end, like Earth 2 crossed with Astro and Barn Owl. Pretty fucking great, I could go for an entire album of this stuff. Flipping over to the b-side, we get one long track called "The Uninitiated Novice", an epic industrial dirge with slow pounding looping drums, simple and mechanical, with minimal electronic pulses and streaks of amp noise over the top, sounding sort of like Sword Heaven. Things get pretty noisy after a couple of minutes, and while a plodding rhythmic throb continues to pound away underneath of everything, the sound gets increasingly distorted and abstract, the pounding rhythm overtaken by harsh feedback and grinding distorted blasts of treated reeds, monstrous wheezing roars, crushing distorted synths�and suddenly it�s as if Fire Island AK is is channeling a damaged audio track from some old Japanese monster movie VHS tape, a roaring, stomping nightmare free-noise dirge that finally erupts into a super blown out blackened sludge riff at the end, super heavy and metallic, joined by distorted screams and shrieking noise, everything shoved into the red and locked into a grinding blacknoise loop ( a la Vargr or Prurient's most blasted blackened PE assaults).

The tapes come in a cool looking (but extremely fragile) handmade wrapper that is taped around the plastic clamshell box that holds the tapes and inserts, with silver and black printing, the packaging slightly distressed with small tears and rips, super limited too, only twenty copies made!