I've been increasingly infatuated with Disease Foundry's tiny catalog of tape releases that came in the door this month. There's nothing fancy about anything this label does; the packaging on this tape from Concrete Isolation Box and the S-21 tape are simple full color sleeves, minimal artwork and virtually no liner notes, and while the RU-486 tape is a nice chunky tape release with an even cooler looking special edition version available direct from the label, it's still based on a very old-school set of packaging aesthetics. The music on the tapes is straight harsh noise, nothing groundbreaking, but the guy behind this imprint clearly has a tuned ear for straight electronic savagery, because all of these tapes have caved my head in quite nicely via repeated listens, of which there have been quite a few. CIB is probably the most fucked-up of the lot, and the one that I�ve kept coming back to over and over again, a four track release that barely hits the half hour mark but does pack in a helluva blast of psychedelic power electronics in it's short running time. I'd never listened to this Finnish band before, but like most of their brethren from this corner of Europe, there's a killer tweaked/lysergic vibe to these brutal noise assaults, dousing the monstrous distorted screams and sampled voices in heaping gobs of reverb and echo, and frying out the bass frequencies so what is mostly left behind is a smoldering charred undercurrent that contributes to the tapes already low-fi filthy feel. Strange radar pings emanate like ghostly transmissions from far below the surface, and menacing voices that seem like they could be intercepted from military radio communication come ripping through the cascading static. What you really want to get this tape for, though, is the track "Defect Innocence" that takes up the whole second side. Starting off with strange muffled vocal noises and garbled bass-buzz that coalesce into something resembling the flanged drone of a mutated didgeridoo, the track is slowly overtaken by layers of rumbling engine noise, percussive rattling and rhythmic scraping that becomes this abstract, rather hypnotic piece of industrial skuzz infested with very creepy wordless vocals and tortured howling, breaking off at points into harrowing sections of pure vocal anguish. Nice. Fans of Strom.ec, Cloama and Bizarre Uproar should check this out.

Limited to one hundred copies, packaged in a plastic evidence bag with a 1" logo pin and black and white cardstock cover.