Black metal psychonauts have been waiting eons for this: a fully authorized, impeccably assembled re-issue of the 1995 Evil Genius CD which compiled the earliest recordings from Swedish black metal group Abruptum. For the most part operated as a duo comprised of founding member It (a guy allegely so evil that he couldn't be given a human name) and Marduk member Evil, Abruptum hailed from Stockholm, Sweden, and worked to become "the essence of pure audio evil". Evil Genius was originally released in 1995 on Hellspawn Records, and the first edition received abit of notoriety when it was packaged with a razor blade and a sticker that instructed the listener to kill themselves. That shit, along with the persistent rumours over the years that It was a dwarf who tortured himself in the studio to achieve the anguished sounds found on their demos and albums, has formed some of the weirdest mythology around a black metal band that I've ever heard. Evil Genius includes the 1990 demo cassettes Hexum Galaem Zelog and The Satanist Tunes, as well as the Evil 7" EP from 1992, and the sounds on these early demos can barely be described as black metal, actually; the music is almost completely unstructered and improvised, barely ever picking up speed (although there are a couple of awesome blastbeat eruptions scattered around these tracks) and mostly lumbering along in a messy mid-tempo doom plod. It's all about atmosphere though, and Abruptum are masters of creating some of the blackest, most disturbing and diseased soundscapes you'll ever hear, a sludgy, murky pit of impossibly detuned proto-deathsludge riffs and stumbling blackdoom buzz, gothic synthesizers and tolling bells jumping in and out of the mix, insane anguished screams and monstrous grunts of Latin wordage appear at random, the drums plod along covered in black mud, totally drunken freeform guitar solo-noise splattered over all kinds of strange random creaks and noises, all drifting out of a subterranean basement-dungeon and drenched in reverb. A megalithic, mindbending descent into garbled psychedelic blackness. Listened to this for the first time in my living room with the lights out one night, and man, did it freak me the fuck out. This stateside remastered re-issue comes atcha from Southern Lord, and features all new artwork, brand new liner notes from It himself, and

the track "De Profundis Mors Vas Cousumet" from the Nordic Metal - A Tribute To Euronymous CD tacked on as a bonus track.