Here is some more crushing skull-shred from Actuary, who has been taking over my stereo lately after a bunch of their releases landed on my desk all at once. I've got their new split with Bacteria Cult elsewhere on this week�s list of new arrivals, and here we have another split, this one with Black Scorpio Underground, another Californian noise group that has been around awhile from what I can tell, but up till now I haven't come across any of their stuff. Each band takes over a side of this cassette and dish out a mix of abstract sounds both hallucinatory and violent.

Up first is Actuary with "Stricken Host Lies Down", a gleaming abyssal dronescape of flanged metallic pulses receding into darkness, surrounded by glitchy electronic noises and heavy use of delay, which seems to be a signature part of their sound. The side starts off quietly with an eerie, minimal field of dark drift, but it soon erupts into a chaos of modulated squelch and glitch and thick buzzing drones; the chanting of demonic monks appears, their low hymn buried under layers of increasingly violent noise. By the end of the track, Actuary whips up a raging storm of sonic skullshred that is on par with the junknoise orgies of K2.

On the other side, The Black Scorpio Underground go for a weirder, more ritualistic din with their two tracks. The first, "Genital Minotaur", is an unnerving cut-up of singing voices and the blathering of TV evangelists over a simple hypnotic drumbeat, joined by clanking chains and squealing guitar noise. On the second, "Immolation/Revelation", the band sets off a harrowing descent into the grinding machinery of an infernal steelworks surrounded by vague voices muttering almost out of earshot as titanic slabs of metal grind together in harmony. I really dug this, and will be keeping an eye out for more from this obscure outfit.