��Formed in 2000, Norwegian black metal band Disiplin started off with a straightforward, rocking black metal sound that led to them releasing two albums on Moonfog; from there though, the band eventually mutated into something much more influenced by industrial music, trip-hop and harsh noise, and with their latest full-length Radikale Randgruppe, almost all resemblance to their pure black metal origins have long since rotted away. Beautifully packaged in a hardcover digibook with a full color booklet bound into the cover, Radikale Randgruppe ("Radical Fringe Group") proudly flaunts its controversial, confrontational philosophies, rooted in Pagan Front ideologies and the sort of vague Nordic nationalism that gets bands like this pegged as "NS black metal". The booklet features a number of quotes on the subject of self-discipline and man's relationship with nature from the likes of Chilean mystic Miguel Serrano, Adolph Hitler and Savitri Devi, so there's no mistaking where this band is coming from ideologically; those of you sensitive to right-wing philosophies in black metal are definitely going to want to steer clear of this. Which makes it all the more interesting to me that Disiplin would choose to experiment with sounds that seem to be in almost total opposition to their Pagan Front sloganeering: traces of industrial hip-hop, dub and tribal music can all be found in the manic, skittering industrial metal sounds on Randgruppe...

�� The album kicks off with the terrifying, jarring blast of "Nuclear Catharsis", a pounding, quickstepping breakbeat skittering beneath the band's violent black metal riffs, the sound swirling with those gaseous, ghoulish howls spreading out like a black fog across Disiplin's mechanical onslaught, and a thick haze of in-the-red electronic noise and blown-out bass frequencies. Right from the start, this is unlike anything that Disiplin has done before, almost like some brutal combination of Scorn's dystopian industrial dub and the grungy, corroded industrial black metal of Mysticum. From there, the album slips further into their vision of a near-future hellscape, the pounding bass drum of "Me Ne Frego" dragging the band's surreal black metal guitars through more oppressive noise, shifting from melting, dissonant riffs into skull-pounding industrial metal, the production noisy and low-fi but intensely loud and harsh. On "Triarii" , those warped blackened guitars drop out completely after awhile, transforming the track into a crazed industrial rhythmic workout, the machinelike double-bass drumming moving like tank treads over the billowing blackened ambience and spacey psychedelic effects. And then it shifts into a kind of noisy, monstrous drum n' bass mutation, those icy black metal guitars sharing space with dense layered samples, a harsh rhythmic track that hypnotizes the listener with it's bizarrely funky groove and abrasive car-crash of sampled sounds and rhythmic loops. Indeed, this ends up turning into a kind of infernal dance music halfway through, as the vocals shift into a kind of raspy croon, and chant-like singing emerges in the background, almost like some blackened early 90s Madchester outfit. Spare, sinister piano reverberates over the fields of black murky static that begin "Oath Of Blood", spreading out across the track as a grimy noisescape filled with swirling grainy clouds of black wind and crackling distortion, the piano eventually transforming into a grim classical figure, gradually overtaken by gusts of coruscating kosmiche drift. It then drops right into the brutal boom-bap of the title track, another low-fi, filthy combination of industrial black metal and Scorn-like breakbeats, the sound seriously groovy and infectious, the riffs all fucked up and discordant, buried under a thick layer of hiss and rumble, vocals returning to that drawn out, delay-drenched monstrous howl. That's followed by the equally deep, crushing syncopation and fluid chest-rattling bass of "Soldier Of The Black Sun", the mesmeric breakbeat groove cutting a course straight through an inferno of apocalyptic noise, before closing with the surreal industrial dub of "The Golden Age". The layered samples here are even denser and more oppressive than before, an ominous din of voices and looped fragments of melody, metallic clank and WWII-era samples, droning minor key black metal riffs buried way down in the mix, the beat slow and sludgy as it shuffles through this hallucinatory noisescape, closing this in a suffocating atmosphere of ash and smoke and sonic debris. And as it fades off into blackness, we're again left to muse on the weird, contradictions with this album, employing stuff like drum n' bass and hip-hop beats and other electronic dance music forms into it's self-described "NS" music, sometimes reminiscent of the mutated sound of latter day Blut Aus Nord combined with trace elements of crushing industrial hip-hop rhythms, at others garnering comparisons to some twisted fusion of Ildjarn's blown out black metal primitivism and the pulsating mechanical dub of Scorn...

�� Limited to one thousand copies.