Now that Atrax Morgue/Slaughter Productions leader Marco Corbelli is gone, I'm betting that it's going to be increasingly difficult to get one's hands on his body of work outside of shitty MP3 rips, so I've been working on getting as much of the Atrax Morgue back catalog in stock as possible, both to augment my own collection and to make these works of morbid electronics available to newcomers. Over the course of his fifteen year run with Atrax Morgue, Corbelli produced some of the best extreme electronic music to emanate from the Italian underground, and even now you'd be hard pressed to find an artist who evokes a bleaker worldview than Atrax Morgue. His strange, minimal electronic music took Bianchi's pulsating blackened synth-tones and melded them with a kind of slasher-movie atmosphere, and surrounded this sound with a strange delirium of Italian fashion culture, Mod graphic design, psychosexual nightmares and jet-black electronic dread.

The 2000 album Paranoia is a prime example of Corbelli's disturbed vision, from the strange album art that includes a photo of Corbelli in drag, to the noxious low-fi drones and crackling UHF ambience, pulsating black synth and blown-out, snarling vocals that skulk through the shadows of these fourteen tracks. The music on this disc is pretty minimal, often focusing on a simple, seemingly innocent spoken phrase that gets looped over and over obsessively, transforming it into a strangely evil mantra while metal objects scrape across the floor, juxtaposed with bursts of piercing feedback and his ravenous verbal murder-fantasies set to a sparse electronic pulse. There's an intimacy in Atrax Morgue's music that you usually don't hear in power electronics, with stretches of quiet pause where you only hear the amplified sound of Corbelli's labored breathing or his lips smacking or the rustling of the mic. His squealing, mewling vocals sometimes seem to transform into high pitched rat-like shrieks, and when Corbellio suddenly syncs those squealing vocals with the high-pitched synthesizer drones, it can sound seriously evil. There's a genuinely disturbed feel to this album, the lyrics drenched in sweat and cum and blood, the violent images like something that could have been lifted from a Brainbombs song, but here they sound ten times more sinister. The spartan electronic sounds are beyond primitive, but Corbelli somehow manages to imbue these simple tones and hums and drones with a palpable sense of dread; no blasting noise, just simple murderous meditations. In fact, a lot of the electronics on Paranoia resemble an Atari 2600 that has been taken over by some vast demoniac intelligence, throbbing 8-bit glitches turning feral on tracks like "Is It Enough?", where Corbelli's hellish feline shriek is processed into an electronic howl that whipcracks across the murderous rhythmic synth-throb.

Disturbing stuff, and pretty essential if you're a fan of Atrax Morgue's death-obsessed visions.