Derelict and debauched, as only the French can do. This 2012 album from French one-man band Echancrure is one of the few things to surface from the band to date, aside from a split with Atrabilis, and offers a dark, paranoid descent through autumnal madness and urban delirium, revealed through a broken narrative composed of drug-damaged jazziness, low-fi industrial metal and even murkier black metal-esque aesthetics, all captured through a dirty, dingy bedroom production quality that just makes this stuff sound that much more disturbed and demented. Certainly one of the stranger forays into "industrial" black metal I've come across lately, though Paysage. Octobre. is as difficult to describe within the context of industrial music as it's connection to black metal is tenuous, though it is clear that this bizarre French outfit draws equally from these two forms.

On this mysterious band's debut, they merge a cybernetic noir-jazz atmosphere with traces of hallucinatory trip-hop and the jet-black cabaret of Bohren And Der Club of Gore, the sound streaked with screaming metallic guitar and traces of blackened riffery, swells of droning doom-laden heaviness and spurts of sonic lunacy. The songs shift between slow jazz-flecked rhythms shuffling through a nocturnal haze of synth and strange whispered voice-overs, the moody bass leading the songs through this starlit darkness as peals of distorted blackened guitar ring out overhead. They drift into swirling tendrils of fog, coiling around hideous discordant violins and cellos, and swells of baroque, dreamlike piano, then suddenly cutting to distorted drum loops, warped electronics and sinister choral ambiance that hint at a kind of nightmarish electro-industrial. Those damaged electronic rhythms lurk beneath tortured strings that drift in and out of view, then dropping into vast squalls of howling amplifier feedback and dark, dolorous drift that birth massive industrialized doom-dirges, a distant, deranged Godfleshian heaviness that suddenly looms out of the whirling electronic murk, that mutated boom-bap flecked with the sounds of mournful funerary violin and an equally distant disaffected croon.

Truly delirious stuff; one could point towards the jazzier moments of latter-day Manes or Ulver as one reference point, perhaps, and even more so the narcotics-fueled evil of fellow Frenchmen Diapsiquir. Ultimately, though, Echancrure disappear into much more nightmarish recesses, crawling into bizarre passages of environmental ambiance and random room noise littered with what sounds like improvised percussion and someone huddled in a corner, moaning. Creepy, surrealistic stuff that got under my skin, their sound lit by flickering halogen lamps reflecting off of rain-drenched Parisian streets, revealing malformed figures lurking at the periphery of your vision.