The Demos 1992-1996 tape from the Dutch band Christs Nails is the strangest pieces of music that's come in this week. I discovered this obscure curiosity while hunting for more Funerary Call releases for the shop; never heard of 'em before it turned up in the catalog of the French label Semen And Blood, but the label's description compelled me to check it out. According to the liner notes, members Betwixt and Stupid experimented in the early 90's with a kind of improvised neo-classical music that combined loosely structured (to the point of sounding improvised), dissonant piano music with hoarse, harsh grunts and whispers reciting an array of Satanic stream-of-consciousness blasphemies. Much of the earliest material (off of the Christs Nails demo from 1992) sounds like Gollum from Lord Of The Rings reading from a Satanic grimoire as someone tries to play a Schoenberg piece while reading the sheet music upside-down. Obviously, this is for more esoteric-leaning tastes. It's surprisingly eerie and pretty at times, though most of the earliest material does sound pretty disturbed and unnerving. The second demo Gospel (1995) is more structured, and switches over to electric piano with layered sounds and more active "melodies" appearing throughout the songs. Almost jazzy Rhodes-like tones meet with rambling harpsichords and clusters of rumbling keys, and it all sounds considerably more demented than the more minimal music at the beginning of the tape. The music on the last demo, Personae Non Grata (1996) resembles some of the more brain-damaged film scores found in the gutters of late 80s direct-to-video horrordom, centering around atmospheric electronic ambience, but those weird raspy whispers are still there, lurking. As I was listening to this tape, it kept conjuring images of a completely wasted Mortiis pounding away at a piano while delivering the lyrics in a guttural whisper into a handheld dictaphone. An interesting obscurity from the depths of the 90's "dungeon ambient" pit that would probably be of much interest to both fans of the blackened, fucked-up synth weirdness of the Hekaloth label, and the more deranged ambient sounds that came out of the Les Legions Noires. Released in a hand-numbered edition with a set of lyric sheets.