If you listen to all of other side-projects that Gnaw Their Tongues mastermind Mories has recorded with (Aderlating, Seirom, Cloak Of Altering, De Magia Veterum), you'll hear his signature sound coursing through each one's black veins, with his trademark swirling chaos and infernal industrial undertones infesting each outfit in a different way, allowing each band's music to offer a different approach to grueling avant-garde blackness that is still always recognizable as his. Out of all of these projects, his De Magia Veterum outfit is probably the closest thing that resembles 'death metal' as most people would recognize it; more than any of those other entities, DMV relies heavily on crazed blackened riffing and blasting drums and similar DM tropes to create the raw chaos at the heart of these recordings, but it doesn't take long for this music to mutate into something exponentially more fucked and alien.

The latest album of De Magia's disharmonic, inter-dimensional black chaos is The Deification, the fourth missive from the band, and it plays out like a series of audio-encoded reptilian texts from Alpha Draconis. The very first song is a chilling instrumental opener called "Eradication" that combines super-creepy soundtrack-like music (clanking percussion, howling spectral voices, atonal symphonics), but after a minute or so, Mories blasts it all apart with a fucking savage assault of mangled blackened death metal, a churning mechanized blast of buried screams and hyper-complex drum patterns, murky (almost Portal-esque) riffing and an absolutely nutzoid lead guitar attack that sends swarms of wheedly high-end shred and upper-register melodies splattering and uncoiling across the mathematical black blast. As a matter of fact, those lead guitars sound remarkably like the super-fast cyclical shred of Mick Barr, leading the songs into abrupt descents into crawling atonal doom or brutal math-metal eruptions. It's like a super-abstract mixture of Orthrelm and Portal laid out over swirling orchestral synths and computerized drum programming that has been designed to vomit out an endless stream of bizarre time signatures and frenzied blastbeats.

You can definitely hear that horrific Gnaw Their Tongues sound lurking in here, especially when the passages of dank subterranean ambience, deformed violins and that grinding blower bass creep in, but whenever the sound starts to pick up speed, it hurtles into a unique realm of hyper-speed black prog that doesn't sound like anyone else. I speak in extremes because this is truly extreme, as impenetrable as anything Mories has done, a bizarre mash up of Aussie vortex-riders Portal and blackgrind beasts Anaal Nathrakh and Penderecki's Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima turned upside down. Utterly terrifying.