For a band that's been around for more than twenty years, Choronzon has managed to remain one of the most obscure of the American experimental black metal outfits. Early on, Choronzon was a crude black/death metal outfit headed by mastermind P. Emerson Williams (who has also worked with Norwegian black metal weirdoes Manes in the past), but over the years this morphed into something really bizarre and unique and not really black metal anymore at all, but something much more electronic and abstract. An album came out on Samoth's Nocturnal Art label (1998's Magog Agog), but from that point the band's music evolved fully into a strange blackened glitch-metal. I wasn't even aware of what Choronzon was doing until I picked up the new album Ziggurat Of Dead Shibboleths, which was released by Inner-X-Musick, the long running industrial label run by John Zewizz of Sleep Chamber. It's telling that this album came out on a label that's better known for releasing music from Psychic TV, Nurse With Wound, Hunting Lodge, Controlled Bleeding, and Sleep Chamber themselves. Indeed, Choronzon is now something much more industrial than black metal, with only vague traces of BM seeping through the nightmarish electronic detritus and crackling dystopian ambience, but when it does manifest itself, this becomes a truly alien sounding form of black industrial that fans of MZ.412, Reverorum ib Malacht, Deadwood and Melek-Tha will lust over.
Parts of Ziggurat sound vaguely like a blackened Ministry, a Wax Trax-like vibe creeping on a couple of tracks, but mixed into some classic industrial skuzziness and a bizarre production style that buries all of the metallic elements under several feet of noise and samples, warped vocals and distorted goblinoid snarling. Gleaming malformed thrash riffs are heavily processed, surrounded by the slow pounding of ritual drums, chunks of backwards sound, percussive noises, strange sampled noises, dense massed black metal guitars stacked into blocks of harsh buzz. Heavy industrial pulses and tribal rhythms drown in static while strains of dark classical music and dreamlike carnival melodies echo over cavernous break beats, and shamanic chanting floats within equally spectral field recordings.
Each song on Ziggurat is this long stretch of surreal, hallucinatory ambience and misshapen metal, like "The Dead", a ten minute glitched out soundscape of hissing demonic vocals, fragmented piano melody, over modulated vocal noise, and phased drones, or "Spacedust To Spacedust" where Teutonic thrash riffs collide with strange quasi-drum n' bass rhythms and electronic effects. The metallic elements here are infrequent, but when they do appear, they shock the black industrial dirges and evil ambience with blasts of sonic violence. It's one of the more hallucinatory industrial "black metal" albums to come through the shop lately, falling somewhere between the primitive occult industrial creep of SPK/Throbbing Gristle, the black ritual horror of MZ.412, and the electro-BM of Dodheimsgard, Manes, Blacklodge, Aborym.