The Vancouver-based experimental sludge duo Ahna has eluded me till now, but their latest 12" Empire turned out to be a ferocious introduction to their brand of blackened caveman crust. Just from listening to this, I would never have guessed that this band features the guy behind the excellent dark drone project Worker, who released a killer tape of minimal amp-crush on Prairie Fire a while back. You'll find no trace of anything remotely "ambient" in Ahna's primitive stomping sludge, that's for sure. The five songs featured on Empire visualize an anarchic future-is-now scenario of authoritarian rule and pandemic violence in the streets, played out across the maniacal blasts of bludgeoning, bass-heavy hardcore riffs, gobs of filthy, tar-thick sludge, and tempos that shift between creeping tree-sap heaviness and weird hypnotic blastbeat workouts. The drumming is tied in to some twisted, brain-damaged arrangements for the songs that give this a very strange vibe; by the time that I got to the song "Mental Corrosion" on the second side, it struck me that a lot of this stuff comes off as a weird cross between Man Is The Bastard trying to play super-primitive black metal, and the feedback-infested tectonic crawl of Trees, the simple, punk-like riffs and stripped down arrangements definitely revealing the band's love of Hellhammer's proto-black metal just as the band will suddenly veer into some massive rumbling doomscape of abstracted riffing and droning amp-noise, delivered in this odd, off-kilter mess of barbaric droning sludge and fractured blackened grind and jagged noise. And the vocals are fucking nuts, constantly shifting between a monstrous, gaseous bellow that sounds utterly inhuman and the high-pitched electrocuted goblin shriek of drummer/singer Anju Singh (also a skilled noise musician with a number of violin-based solo works under her belt), whose paint-peeling yowl is anything but feminine; all of this adds to the bizarre rabid feel of Ahna's music. This is some wonderfully violent shit, a mutated blast of Filth-era SWANS-esque bludgeon, off-kilter grindcore, and brain-damaged amp-vomit. Love it!
Released in a limited edition of five hundred copies.