����� Just got this slab of decayed filth back from 2010 in stock along with those new Encoffination tapes. Ritual Ascension Beyond Flesh was the debut full-length from this ghastly American deathdoom duo, which features members Elektrokutioner (Decrepitaph, Father Befouled, Ghoulgotha, Howling, Wooden Stake) on drums and Ghoat (Father Befouled, Lilitu, Rituaal, Vomitchapel) on everything else. Released on the Polish label Selfmadegod, Ritual followed up a couple of 7"s on labels like Archasm Releasing and Blood Harvest; by the time this album rolled around like a glistening, mold-encrusted gravestone, these guys had already started to catch the ears of extreme death/doom fans with their putrescent panoply of sepulchral ambient murk, slimy slow-motion death metal, and torturously heavy drumming, all enshrouded in a fog of ritualistic, subterranean atmosphere. They really nailed that sound for the album though, piling on even more rumbling murk and slowing down to even more torturous tempos.

����� It's killer stuff, starting off with the funereal tribal ambience of "Processional" and its stinking black cloud of rolling toms, liturgical chanting and dismal reverb-drenched drift, then settles like a thick layer of rotted matter across the swarming riffs of "Nefarious Yet Elegant The Bowels Of Hell". This stuff is insanely heavy, at times reaching almost Disembowelment-like levels of slo-mo ultra-crush, but as the album continues to evolve, it becomes apparent that the band is more focused on layering their dank, suffocating atmosphere and creating an almost ambient feel, than just simply cranking out a mess of glacially-paced doomdeath riffs. Much of this album can slip into long passages of formless, churning murk, the instruments becoming blurred and bleary by the reverb-heavy recording. The songs stretch out into ghoulish rumbling deathscapes and decompose into foul gaseous muck, with eerie chanting vocals emerging alongside stretches of pitch-black ritual ambience recurring throughout the album along with bits of ghostly acoustic guitar and brief samples pulled from vintage British horror cinema. And when one of those titanic riffs suddenly emerge out of the roiling deathmurk of songs like "Miasma Of Rotten Serenity" and "Beyond The Grace Of Flesh Go I", it's as if you're hearing some classic Incantation riff being masticated and draped in thick layers of rotted burial shroud. They'd become even heavier and more deformed with subsequent releases, but Ritual remains a killer blast of mutated doomdeath from these guys, the swirling, monstrous murk that they summon up becoming as oppressive and claustrophobic as the likes of Grave Upheaval and Impetuous Ritual. Pure rot.