Although Jovian Black Opera is a completely different beast than the noisy guitar drones, harsh noise wall experiments and blackened psychedelia that I usually get from Prairie Fire Tapes, this cassette has quickly turned into my all-time favorite release from the label. This full-length tape comes from a fairly new project called Crabskull, the product of a Winnipeg-based Dub DJ named Chrys Fournier who also plays drums in a stoner rock band called Scab Smoker. As Crabskull, Fournier produces one of my favorite sounds on the planet: skittering industrial dubscapes built out of slow, hypnotic break beats, echoing snares, grimy dark ambient sounds, and copious amounts of dystopian paranoia and urban unease. Of course, we're talking about a sound that is directly descended from the Scorn school of darkhop/industrial dub, but while most newer artists who approach this sound tend to end up working within the realm of dubstep and/or extreme drum n' bass, Crabskull's music remains rooted in the slower creeping break beats of mid-90s Scorn, and it would no doubt have ended up with at least one disc on Economised Records if that label was still in action. It's not a purely retro exercise in 90s break beat darkness though, as Fournier crafts some terrific pitch-black soundscapes and bizarre, vaguely Lovecraftian imagery on Jovian Black Opera that bring this style of nightmarish slow-motion trip-hop into a realm of murky distorted doom-laden bass drones, lush, dreamy female vocals and opera singing, terrifying samples looped into swooping hellish shrieks, smatterings of dissonant jazz piano, creepy backwards chanting, whirling shortwave static, bits of menacing funk guitar and orchestral strings warped into hallucinatory smears of abstracted sound, horror-movie synthesizers, some massive low-end metallic heaviness, and killer trumpet sounds on one track that are used to wonderfully creepy effect. This tape totally blew me away - anyone missing the malevolent gritty beats and asphalt ambience of Scorn, Ocosi and Techno Animal, you need to check this out asap...