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.

This is one of Fire Island, AK's darkest and dreamiest recordings, a cassette called Prakhurz dhak dushatar Uruk-hai-ob and subtitled "Shamanic Sex Rituals Of Orcs", featuring ten tracks of super minimal black ambience and abstract kosmiche drift. As with some of the other Fire Island AK releases, sole member Thomas Boettner uses a weird assortment of sound devices and percussive instruments to create these strange desiccated soundscapes. Music boxes, buddha machines, pieces of toy piano, alto sax reed, thunder tube and an "egg vibrator" appear alongside his normal setup of harmonium, guitar, percussion, tapes, effects and electronics. The tracks move through shadowy terrain, barren wastelands of spacious emptiness flecked with bits of piano and blown-out electronic keyboard tones, cavernous dark ambience that's invaded by moldy, decomposing melodies, and LONG stretches of almost total silence, with distant sonic events occurring far off on the edges of the periphery of hearing. As the tapes progresses, things do get more active, with murky orchestral strings and distorted vocals surfacing next to barely-there drones and delicate percussive chimes, choral voices howling deep beneath the ocean of tape hiss, strains of harmonica drifting across the desolate waste, the sound of metal clanking and echoing through deep subterranean chambers, hazy metallic whir and formless percussive throb, squealing free-jazz sax squirming through clouds of delay and murky sewer ambience. A warped combination of strange ritualistic ambience, nightmarish dronejazz, and decomposing industrial, similar to the spectral blacknoise weirdness of Aymrev Erkoz Prevre and Neuntoter Der Plage. Hand-numbered out of 100 copies.