It's been a while since I've heard anything new from him, but I recently reconnected and picked up a bunch of newer releases from Fire Island AK, the North Carolina based noise project from Thomas Boettner whose earlier tapes and Cd-rs were these cool handmade noise documents that ranged from ultra bleak black drone to ritualistic blackened industrial to strange, absurdist cut-up experiments. I haven't had a chance to dig in to everything that he's sent us, Roman Ghosts is the only newer title I've had a chance to sit down and explore in depth at the moment, but I'll have the rest of his new offerings listed here at Crucial Blast as soon as possible. Roman Ghosts is a set of two cassettes housed in an audio book-style plastic case with black and white Xeroxed inserts, and features five tracks total of dark, evil industrial music that starts with clanging, atonal guitar abuse and continues through an abstract audio wasteland littered with rumbling machine drones, drooling psychotic vocal blowouts, and lots of passages of evil creep that remind me of ancient Italian power electronics, with desiccated electronic throb accompanying choked microphone abuse and distorted, demonic screams. The second side of that first tape is like an old post-industrial piece, a slow deliberate machine throb, but then it's splattered with deafening levels of ultra-distorted guitar skree and those monstrous gibbering vocals. The second tape begins with a slurred voice slowed to a distorted crawl above a repetitive metallic throb; later, shrill feedback loops and abrasive noise takes over. The final side is my favorite, and one of the best pieces I've heard from Fire Island AK. It's a grim, thirteen minute synth/guitar trance made up of a heavy repeating synth loop that has massive distorted guitar drones and eerie minor key melodies streaking over top of it, sounding like a super murky Prurient song laced with black metal guitars and then re-recording the resulting music over and over on an ancient four-track tape deck. It's a powerful slab of low-fi deathdrone.

In fact, the recording quality throughout both of these tapes is completely filthy; these murky industrial deathscapes sound like the tapes themselves have been buried in grave-earth for months before being popped into your tape deck. A lot of Fire Island AK's stuff feels like a throwback to the sort of filthy, visceral noise-scum and primitive death industrial you would have heard on RRRecords back in the day, and this is no different. It's a garble of nightmarish sounds and depraved instrument abuse; fantastic stuff! Limited to fifty hand-numbered copies.