Somewhat modeled after the legendary French black metal collective LLN, the small n' obscure Les Ap�tres De l'Ignominie (or "Apostles of Ignominy") circle is made up of a triad of strange Satanic black metal bands that include Darvulia and Malhkebre as well as a shadowy "doom metal" band called Sektarism. I'm a big fan of all of these bands, but out of all of them, Sektarism is easily the most fucked-up sounding. A couple of years ago, I listed a Cd release from Sektarism called L'Offrande which featured one long song of stumbling, shambling doom that was swept up in a murky basement atmosphere of drunken Satanic ritual and hateful ravings, with a really low-fi and noisy recording that was maybe a step or two above 4-track quality, and with so much rumbling feedback and dissonant guitar noise that I was compelled to describe that recording as a weird combination of blackened ritualistic doom in the vein of Trees and Bloody Panda, and the most destroyed, distorted moments of Fushitsusha's Path�tique as filtered through the rotting skull-meat of a French opium addict. Sounds pretty great, right?

I've been steadily picking up whatever I can from this bizarre-sounding band, and the latest Sektarism offense is this new Cd Le Son Des Stigmates which includes both the Hosanna Sathana and Le Testament recordings (previously only available on cassette) as well as a new intro piece. They all follow the same route as the first Ep: long, sprawling blackened garage-doom jams that wanders drunkenly through an extremely low-fi haze of extreme misanthropic hatred, narcotics, noisy primitive doom, and shrieking Satanic flesh-lust. If you are one of the few that have already fallen under the black spell of Sektarism's shambling, seemingly improvised sludge, these more recent recordings are essential.

The new intro track sets the foul mood: waves of approaching feedback-filth and the stumbling rhythms of the drummer lead into a warped vocal chant and nearly formless guitar noise that spreads out like a plume of black smoke for more than five minutes.

Hosanna Sathana is the second Sektarism tape, and again, it's one long, nearly half-hour track that grabs huge fistfuls of blasphemous imagery and Satanic vomit and smears it all against a backdrop of stumbling, low-fi doom metal. And again, it's raw as hell, the meandering and formless drug-damaged Satanic garage doom shrouded in room hiss and ambient murk. The song starts off with chugging Frostian riffs and droning murky chords rumbling amid buzzing spacious ambient room sounds as the drummer plows ahead, seemingly improvising at times as the band chugs through spacious droning sludge and primitive doom metal. Eklezjas'Tik Berzerk's unintelligible mewling shrieks and moans rise out of the background, reciting strange French lyrics that celebrating death-worship, disease and Satanism, constantly shift from ecstatic chanting to bizarre possessed mewling to guttural, orgasmic barking as the rest of the band wanders in and out of strange psychedelic jamming. The riffs collapsing into billowing clouds of effects and feedback, the bass droning incessantly and often circling endlessly on simple hypnotic grooves while the drummer drifts into lots of jazzy fills and improvised rhythm changes. To me, "Hosanna Sathana" seems more abstract and droning than the other Sektraism tapes, with more forays into long stretches of rumbling amp-drone and feedback hum, and at times taps into a similar exploratory vibe as Spanish avant-doom metallers Orthodox, albeit one that is far more wretched and diseased sounding...

The third of the Sektarism tapes, Le Testament meanders through it's black-lit delirium for almost twenty minutes, the music loose and probably mostly improvised, the sound filthy and covered in cobwebs, carrying on with more of their gnarled, raw doom metal that wanders off into noisy jamming, shapeless dirges and bizarre behavior throughout the whole song. The drooling vocals of front man Eklezjas'Tik Berzerk offer up endless Satanic devotion in an incoherent stream of profanities and vileness delivered in French, and the performance is cloaked in a drugged, occult atmosphere with such a garage-level production that it feels as if you are listening to something much older than this actually is. Sektarism stumbles through sparsely arranged dirges and heavy spacious riffs that crawl over Shamaanik B.'s messy drumming, the band frequently staggering to a sudden halt and abruptly shifting into another riff, or collapsing into a long stretch of feedback and amp noise. Wiry blackened guitar leads appear over the chugging doom riffs, and the winding bass slithers across pounding tribal rhythms and sheets of polluted feedback, and by the end of "Le Testament", the band wanders off into a din of scraped guitar strings blanketed in effects, gargling vocal noises, and droning feedback. There's a few precedents for the kind of low-fi black doom that Sektarism practices - it has kind of the same garagey, ramshackle feel as old Upsidedown Cross, Finnish improv-doom metallers Night Must Fall, Persistence In Mourning�s noisy sludge, and the murky black mess of Alkerdeel - but the stain of demented French black metal clings to this foul music, becoming a form of blighted metal all its own...

Comes in a six-panel digipack with a twenty-page booklet, and limited to 999 copies.