Just as likely to offer a new live recording as they are something put together in a formal studio setting, the British drugdoom band Bong is all about improvisation, and all about unleashing their sprawling, long-form sludge rituals in front of a crowd stoned/drunk/out of their minds enough to be fully and wholly sucked into the monstrous black holes of seismic psychedelia that this band is so adept at summoning. This three-disc set from Bong offers this in spades with a collection of epic live performances that finds their drugged jams occurring in a variety of settings over the course of a two year period; the recordings are of course somewhat rough in quality, but all sound sufficiently heavy and zoned-out, and do an excellent job of conveying the immediacy of Bong's sprawling mazelike improvisations.

Disc one begins billowing out great clouds of opiate chug from the word go, a stern voice introducing the piece as the room is filled with the steely buzz of some sitar-like instrument bending and uncoiling, and a black tide of distorted, metallic riffage. This churning cloud of drugsludge spreads out for a couple of minutes before the drummer finally drops in, hammering away at a busy, driving backbeat, guiding this massive doom-laden raga jam on a winding route through the nearly forty-minute long performance. It's strewn with screaming acid guitar solos streaking upwards and exploding in bursts of wah-wah ecstasy, the deep chant like vocals drifting wordlessly over the pounding drums and sticky narco-haze, that sitar coming to the fore every few minutes and emitting more rich metallic buzz, the whole band locked into this massive ur-drone groove that circles around and around, a blackswarm ouroboros doomgroove that feels like it could continue into eternity. The second track continues in the same vein, heavier and darker though, a huge droning Sabbathian riff lumbering into oblivion, bell-like reverberations echoing through the space, the drummer laying on the ride cymbal like a motherfucker, the band whipping themselves into a rumbling, effects-drenched din, a squalling acid-dirge with some seriously freaked guitar wig-out action that sounds like Earthless trudging laboriously through La Brea, then morphs into a demented caveman krautstomp the rest of the track.

The two performances on the second disc see the band getting into an even heavier mode, the first centering around a roaring, grinding mono-chord droneriff bulldozing over the saurian stomp of the drums, bits of sitar buzz sneaking through, the vocals way out in front now with wordless chants rising over the lumbering drugtrance. The other is much mellower, a lugubrious hypnodirge that starts off delicate and deeply brooding, slow solemn melodies crawling across plumes of black amp fog, the band plugged into a stoned ur-groove that's way more laid back than the previous sets, the sound still really heavy and rumbling, but wreathed in moaning voices, opium smoke and sinister intent.

The last disc features a single track, almost forty minutes long, that at first takes shape as another blurry psychedelic haze, the notes from the sitar cascading down in sheets of metallic shimmer, long black tendrils of amp-fog curling through the air, the band simply emitting a dense druggy dronehaze for the first few minutes. But then it begins to shift into something much heavier as the drums creep in, and those rumbling guitar drones coalesce into a massive oozing riff, turning into the heaviest jam on the whole set as Bong lumbers through this creepy, mesmeric doom-raga laced with high end guitar buzz and syrupy bass drift. Squalls of wild feedback soaked psychshred scream out of the swirling dopecloud, the sound sometimes threatening to collapse into total amp/drum destruction, or trailing off into stretches of near-formless narco-ambience, but always returning to that plodding, trance inducing heaviness, like a noise-soaked, low-fi fusion of Sleep and the scorched psychedelia of Burnt Hills.

For fans of the narcotized psychdoom and mantra metal of bands like Queen Elephantine, Sleep, Electric Wizard, and Om. Limited to three hundred copies, packaged in a triple-disc dvd case with printed inserts.