Seemed like Mike Page (also of (Irukandji/Sky Burial) was going to be retiring his power electronics project Fire In The Head a while back, but it looks like he's back in full force with FITH, releasing this new disc last year on UK noise/black industrial label Turgid Animal and coming out with a brand new album on Cold Spring that we should have in stock soon. Carrion Wind suggests that he's retooled the sound of FITH though, and it's a killer new direction, moving away from the brutal, hyper-aggressive power electronics of his earlier work and exploring a new mixture of black ambient and drone/doom elements.

Carrion Wind is a single sixty-three minute track of sprawling black nightmare drone, infested with swarming, buzzing voices and thunderous low-end synths. The beginning of the disc is somber dark ambience, drifting slabs of sepulchral synthesizer drone, strange vocalizations, bestial shrieks, childlike screams, chirping birds, a mix of disturbed environmental ambience and blackened kosimiche drift that slowly intensifies into a fearsome wash of black industrial ambience haunted by distant chanting and choral voices. After a while, this abruptly blasts into a cacophony of crashing sheet metal percussion and distorted low end, droning synths and what sounds like far-off throat singing, and grinding guitar noise that evolves into massive slabs of roaring Sunn-esque heaviness that drifts in slo-mo beneath the abrasive black industrial noise and warped orchestral loops. From there, the oppressive blackened atmosphere becomes a backdrop against which metal percussion and objects are struck and smashed, and it starts to sound like old school industrial, some real Neubauten style clank going on, but infused with the heavier qualities of the distant doom metal riffs that float bloated and distended through the nightmarish aural wasteland. In the last ten minutes, Page dials up this heaviness by introducing a crushing Sunn-like dirge riff that grinds on hypnotically, wreathed in ominous drones and rumbing metal reverberations. It's an intense ambient dronescape that builds upon certain aspects of Page's earlier releases, but focuses them into a much more detailed and atmospheric realm of sound, a mixture of bleak space ambience and doom-laden industrial crawl, but rendered into a richly detailed soundscape full of detail and layers of sonic events, designed for immersive listening. Recommended!