Autophobia is one of Blue Sabbath Black Cheer's recent cassette offerings, but be warned - this has been sold out from the band and label for a while and the handful of copies that I was able to get for the C-Blast shop are the last ones that I'll have. Fans of this prolific black industrial sludge group will want to get their talons on this tape immediately, it's one of the more punishing and abstract recordings that they've produced in the past year and fills up your skull-holes like a mass of malevolent, amoebic black horror. Autophobia is a single long piece that is split across the two sides of the cassette, a nearly twenty minute black industrial dirge that starts with a steady, massive rhythmic blasting of extremely distorted noise that sort of resemble the sound of mortar explosions occurring off in the distance, and other layers of droning sound gradually form around the crashing waves of lumbering, saurian heaviness. Slowly drifting clouds of amplifier rumble and reverb appear around the grinding noise, and as it goes on, you can hear these fragments of musical sound that drift in and out off in the background, indistinct shards of melody that threaten to coalesce into something more, but are always consumed back into the churning noise. After awhile, the vocals start to sweep in, monstrous and massively distorted roaring and screaming that rises and falls over the surging oceanic distortion and metallic noise, and it seriously heavy towards the end of the side, almost approaching a wall of noise at times but always centering itself around that crushing glacial chug.

The second half picks up from that point, stripping away much of the distortion at first and slowing the massive tectonic grinding into a more abstract dronescape of reverberating sheet-metal and smoldering, crackling static. As the latter half of the piece continues to develop, though, it ends up growing into similar levels of immense volume and power, becoming a slow-motion maelstrom of metallic roar and scrap-metal crush, those chunks and fragments of orchestral sound again seeping through into the monolithic black ocean of distortion alongside those demonic vocalizations.

Limited to one hundred copies.