It didn't even dawn on me that I was already somewhat familiar with the work of improv/noise artist Antoine Chessex before I picked this tape up from Blossoming Noise. I grabbed it initially based on the recommendation of BN and the accompanying sound samples, which hooked me with the suggestion of sax-laced industrial murk. That's something I perpetually have an appetite for, but some subsequent research made me realize that Chessex is no stranger to harsh experimental heaviness, having been a member of the experimental sludge metal band Monno as well as the jazz/improv/black doom duo Calcination, who put out an awesome disc on Utech several years ago, as well as having performed with the Metal Music Machine line-up of Jazkamer and the Burial Chamber Trio (Greg Anderson, Oren Ambarchi & Attila Csihar).

The ascetic look of the cover totally belies the brutal, malevolent power found on this album, a cassette re-issue of a limited Lp release; it's not the Borbeto-worshop that I initially expected, but it's still pretty damn extreme. Chessex runs his tenor saxophone through a Marshall amplifier stack alongside electronic noise to create these sprawling drone/noise pieces, and it's amazing stuff, bleak realms of scrape and buzz and subterranean hum, more of a grim industrial album than anything resembling free-improv. Each side of the tape is a single epic track of destructive skree, the first side fading in with an oceanic surge of low rumbling noise and wailing sax tones that's incredibly unsettling, and even resembles something you'd hear on one of the more abstract black noise albums that we carry...but then it suddenly drops out, and we move into a sparser sonic terrain of minimal rumbling tones and electrical buzz, moving through various sections of extended amplified drone looped and layered into blocks of sinister, shadowy thrum and tense chordal drift. After a couple minutes of this activity, the sound suddenly bursts into a louder, more clarified wall of sound, the murkiness suddenly dropping away as it rises into this monolithic power-drone exercise. The sound thick and distorted, becoming something more akin to the crushing amp-drone workouts of early Sunn, Earth, Black Boned Angel, etc, and then the screaming vocal-like sax noise comes in and it becomes even more brutal and confrontational , the sound of the horn bent into choked, snarling, howling sounds , totally tortured, resembling some kind of power electronics/blackened drone hybrid that later shifts into more subdued industrial grindscapes filled with churning metallic rhythms and avalanches of sheet-metal rumble.

The second side starts with high, almost air-raid siren like tones that stretch out for several minutes, then the sax tones begin to fray into softly undulating drones. From there, the sound heads into the coolest passage of the album, where Chessex begins to pile layer upon layer of an evil, minor key sax figure until it coalesces into something resembling a black metal riff being looped incessantly around jets of grinding noise and thunderous amp rumble. This queasy, black-jazz workout takes up a huge portion of the b-side, before ending up becoming subsumed into an even more vicious free-noise blowout and pneumatic loop-orgy that shows up to devour almost the entire second half of the side. In fact, these apocalyptic dronescapes remind me of Japanese sax/noise ensemble Disclocation whenever the horn materializes, crossed with some kind of abstracted blackened industrial. Hopefully Chessex will be back with more of this sort of stuff...

Highly recommended.