Vinyl version now in stock, packaged in a silkscreened jacket with insert booklet.

Constantly active with his amazing psych/noise/outsider metal label Skulls Of Heaven and assorted musical projects like psych-doom mutants Jex Thoth, Hintegedanken, Burial Hex, and freak folksters Davenport, Clay Ruby is a wellspring of underground weirdness. Up to now, the only band of his that I've carried here at C-Blast is Hintegedanken, the sludgy tribal free-psych/drone rock band that he plays in with Karen Eliot (Totem). The disc that they put out on Barbarian is a crushing drug-fueled slow-motion wipeout. Now we've got the newish disc from his goat-worshipping industrial project Burial Hex that came in from Aurora Borealis. "Oppressive Necro Electronics" is what he calls it, a perfect descriptor for the wasted black kosmos of Burial Hex, whose sound prowls somewhere around the edges of Throbbing Gristle, Abruptum and Klaus Schulze.

The disc is presented in a cool arigato case with multiple inserts, and they are all printed with creepy high contrast images that suggest clandestine demonic rituals, bog mummies, sex rites and other occultisms, but it's pure blissed out beauty that hits yer ears when this disc begins. The first song "Will To The Chapel" is 18+ minutes of gorgeous orchestral drift and dark moaning strings, rumbling tympani percussion in the background, like a horror movie score, dark and ominous, but really pretty too. Bit by bit, the music is joined by other strange sounds as weird growling vocals, sizzling cymbal crashes, juddering underground rumblings drift into view, the sound becoming increasingly eerie until suddenly it's swept over by a black cloud of filth that boils with tortured howls, shrieking orchestral strings, a chorus of agonized screams and bestial grunts, huge waves of blackened corrosive distortion and roaring amplifier buzz, noxious electronics and a hellish white-out of grating noise that then burns off, leaving a similiar haunting blur of strings and synthesizer drift that began the track. The remaining three tracks pursue a similiar trajectory, each one around 18 minutes long and moving from thick sheets of growling distorted murk and pulsating machine trances to subdued sheets of rusted drones and ghoulish torture-chamber ambience, warped buzzsaw drones wafting out of handmade oscillators and analogue synths, clanging metal percussion and soft tribal rhythms, evil pipe organs and ceremonial chanting, all wrapped into frightening ritualistic soundscapes that create an unnerving atmosphere not unlike that of Gnaw Their Tongues or the more ambient Abruptum stuff. Total kosmiche death worship!