More occult Dutch madness from New Era! This is the strange, near unclassifiable debut from Dutch one-man band The Being, released back in 2010 but finally in stock here at C-Blast for the first time. From what I've been able to learn, this project initially started up years ago as a black metal influenced ambient effort, but at some point along the way, The Being morphed into something much more grotesque and fantastical. Surrounded by a bizarre dark carnival atmosphere, The Being starts off by crafting a bizarre sort of freak show folk music on Through Madness To Mercury, with creaking, clanking songs that sound like ghostly folk melodies played on broken instruments by withered, skeletal hands, weird wheezing kazoo melodies buzzing over the sinister bass lines and guttural, half-moaned singing. The Being employs a junkyard orchestra of chains and pots and pans, clanking pipes and strange-looking instruments partially constructed from bones like the "tabouswine", "bone-bass", "swineskull-guiro" and "bone-rattle" that help to create the sound of the album's eerie graveyard cabaret, but then shifts from that morbid jug band sound into passages of creepy, Cold Meat-style ritualistic ambience with slow pounding death-cult drums, whispered lyrics and gothic chanting, and a kind of jagged death rock that shows up on songs like "The Mixing Separation". At times, this album has a feel similar to that of hearing latter-day Tom Waits performing for a witch's Sabbat, or a Danny Elfman score infected with bits of lurching, surrealistic death punk. The album art and lyrics all point towards the heavy influence of occult and alchemical concepts on The Being's weird theatrical blend of cracked graveyard blues, demonic circus music, neo-folk and fevered dark ambience, but it all comes together in a unique manner that leaves this album sounding like little else. The disc comes in a gatefold digisleeve package, and comes with a twenty page booklet of lyrics and artwork.