The disturbingly titled Gas Chamber Music features the complete discography of the bizarre Dutch black metal band Bhaobahn Sidhe, a duo who featured members of Bestial Summoning that was active in the earlier part of the 1990s, even releasing their last Ep on infamous American death/black metal label Wild Rags. Like just about everything else that I've heard come out of the 90's Dutch black metal underground, this is some weird, weird shit, with the band's output split into two distinct "phases"; earlier on, members Conscicide Dominus Arcula (who would later commit suicide) and Lord Aliboron created short, noxious blasts of primitive black metal filth set to a pounding low-fi drum machine assault, but later they evolved into an even stranger electronic sound that seems like it was more influenced by the vintage synthesizer scores of John Carpenter and Fabio Frizzi than anything connected to black metal.

The earliest material on this Cd comes from the band's 1993 seven-inch EP The New Order, a four song selection of barbaric black vomit centered around basic, three-chord punk riffs delivered at buzzsaw velocity over the monotonous thud of the drum machine which is buried way down in the mix and set to non-stop blast, only occasionally slowing down to a halting breakdown. Adding to the 7"s overall grimy weirdness are the vocals, a series of near-wordless reptilian gasps and hissing that are mostly swallowed up in the band's low-fi murkiness. The excellent blog Grimmerthanthou described this stuff as sounding like "Ildjarn on Quaaludes", and I can think of neither a better comparison nor finer recommendation than that.

But then you come to Bhaobahn Sidhe's 1996 Corpse Crater Cd on Wild Rags and it's an all new ballpark. Surrounded by grim concentration camp imagery, these tracks delve into a kind of primitive industrial/electronic music driven by clanking drum machine rhythms and waves of ominous soundtracky synthesizer, with a spare compositional approach that gives this stuff the feel of some of the more poverty-stricken horror movie soundtracks of the late 1980s. Not that that's a bad thing in my book; I dig the weird mix of brain-damaged synth-creep and mechanical rhythms, especially when they add heavier elements to the sound, suddenly slowing into a lumbering doom metal-style tempo. There's some other stuff on here that sounds like someone dropped a death metal drummer into the middle of a demented Danny Elfman score, which will suddenly morph into a minimal Wax Trax-like industrial dance track or something resembling a late 80s industrial outfit trying to cover Goblin. That latter stuff is pretty goddamn sweet, as a matter of fact, and has a couple of moments of jawdropping weirdness when they make one of those stylistic shifts into action-move ready electro-rock.

The Jinx cassette from 1996 was one of their last releases, and mostly followed with the same bizarre, drum-machine-driven horror movie soundtrack sound, with weirder subject matter this time around ("Global Death-Knell / Orgasm At The Crack Of Doom", "Cockroach Combat", "Wolf Vs. Worm") and the addition of those disgusting gargling shrieks that just made this stuff sound even sicker and more psychotic. It's the final word from one of the weirdest Dutch black metal bands I've heard, who brought a cruel misanthropic vibe to their idiosyncratic soundscapes and blasts of filth. Anybody who digs that weird period of black metal/electronic experimentation that produced such albums as Beherit's H418ov21.C should check 'em out.