These two experimental black metal outfits go together nicely on this split 10" Ep from Musicfearsatan, bringing together the twisted, ritual-folk flecked black metal of The Austrasian Goat with the filthy, abstract blackened doom/thrash of the newer band Neige Morte (who also happen to feature former members of Overmars and French chaos-blasters The Flying Worker). Each band coughs up one song, but they're pretty epic, each one running around twelve minutes long.
Up first is The Austrasian Goat's "The Gracious Fall Of The Morning Light", which starts off with the sound of lush acoustic guitar stings strummed slowly over chanting voices and glacial drums, a kind of narcotized doom-folk streaked with gorgeous slide guitar and nocturnal ambience. It's blackly beautiful, with that dark twangy majesty that the newer Earth material has, but even more ominous and threatening as the acoustic guitar burns off and out of the void comes a killer black metal assault, the blasting drums surging up over the wasp-swarm guitars and scathing shrieking vocals. This assault is formed around one central riff that repeats over and over for several minutes, whipping the song into a ferocious black hymn before dropping off once again back into the malevolent folk music, more apocalyptic here than before, lashed by vaguely Middle Eastern melodies and a chorus of voices singing as one as the song slowly fades away...
Neige Morte's "We Who Are The Worm" begins with the slippery down tuned growl of slackened guitar strings bending and scraping against the body of the instrument, forming an off-kilter dirge that seems to struggle to rise up out of the slime, but when it finally does (right when the drums start to creep in), the sound lurches forward into a putrid, messed-up shamble of black doom. These first few minutes are totally deformed, a much more damaged sounding sort of noise-infested blackened sludge than I expected (more like something you'd hear from a band like Alkerdeel), but it's not long before Neige Morte starts to pull together into a blasting black metal assault, suddenly taking off on a blazing rush of noisy tremolo riffing and shrieked vocals and awesome hyperfast drumming that sounds more "power violence" than black metal, ending the side in a cyclone of swarming black blast.