In the wake of the recent release of Funerary Call's Fragments From The Aethyr on Crucial Blast, I've been locating several other, older FC titles for the shop, several of which come from the obscure French imprint Semen And Blood. The Unearthed cassette came out several years ago, a collection of vinyl tracks that includes the Damnations Journey 12" (released on Nuclear War Now) and two older 7" releases from the 90s, and it offers two different sides of Funerary Call's music, the bizarre, noisy black metal origins of the band, and the soundtrack-style horror-synth and ritualistic industrial sound it would pursue later in the 90s. Its all crucial music for fans of this long-running Vancouver artist.

Funerary Call was one the key forerunners of the black industrial sound in the 1990s, and was a major influence on much of the music that I've been obsessed with over the past couple of years. Harlow MacFarlane's mysterious project was one of the earliest proponents of experimenting with the boundaries between industrial and electronic music and black metal, and he produced some seriously twisted stuff back in the early years.

The Damnations Journey Ep is some of the heaviest material I've ever heard from the band, and is much more closely tied with the project roots in the Ross Bay black metal underground than the more ambient direction that much of MacFarlane's later work would take. Funerary Call was always aligned with the nail-studded maniacs in Conqueror and Blasphemy, and J. Reed from Conqueror/Revenge himself appears on Damnation's Journey, contributing a blasting drum performance and howling demonic vocals to several of the tracks. Beginning with "The Crown Has Fallen", the record creeps through abstract, ritualistic ambience littered with treated drum sounds, minimal synth drones and mangled guitar vomit, recitations from texts on devil-worship, eruptions of delirious chanting and feedback drift, doom-laden drums and bestial roaring. The sound of hell vomiting, a narcotic-laced descent into swirling graveyard chaos, leading up to the closing ambient piece that combines the sound of vomiting blood and lysergic chanting with lush kosmische drift.

The second half of the tape features the tracks from the long out-of-print self-titled 7" and Pronounced Unholy 7"s, both from around 1995-1996. Combining fearsome militant percussion and ominous synthesizers with lush electronic and symphonic sounds that resemble horror-movie soundtrack work, feverish black-mass hallucinations, and Cold Meat-esque industrial darkness, the heavy, doom-laden music of these 7" Eps foreshadows the demonic black industrial pursuits of more recent bands like Gnaw Their Tongues and Locrian.

The unmarked tape comes in a glossy cover, each one hand-numbered in an edition of 500 copies.