A hefty slab of crushing improv-noise and bestial industrial horror from post-Man Is The Bastard outfit Amps For Christ and Midwestern collective Winters In Osaka; this full length split really smokes, with some of the heaviest stuff that I've heard from WIO so far.

I haven't stocked anything from Amps For Christ in the past, but their contribution to this split is pretty heavy stuff, definitely of interest to those of you with a taste for mangled, monstrous industrial music. Their side features three tracks from the Barnes/Snarb duo configuration of the band: "Spring Theory" starts things off with a murky dronescape of scraped strings and distant percussive thump, swirling ambient muck washing over the stretched out drones (created via something that the band refers to as "wheelbarrow/strings") and those cracked caveman electronics that are at the heart of AFC's sound. A nice enough blurt of damaged folk-drone that leads into the sputtering, sinister drift of "Ninetynine Time", a mass of seething low-end noise and fluttering electronics, monstrous distorted voices and ghostly metallic reverberations lurking way off on the background as abrasive oscillator tones and fractured metal slowly consume the room, transforming into a nightmarish din of lurching, broken-down percussion and squealing malfunctioning effects pedals. The last track, "Atar-core", veers off into something resembling Indian classical music being played on massively distorted guitars, the haunting melody wafting up like black smoke over the band's grimy buzz. But then it shifts into this killer sludgy riff, and all of a sudden it sounds vaguely like some 70's progressive rock guitarist wandering around in a fog of amplifier filth and broken speaker buzz. As wrecked and creepy as anything off that latest Hair Police album, for sure.

But it's the Winters In Osaka side that I picked this up for, and man does it deliver. For nearly twenty minutes, "Vorkuta" builds from a mass of whirling metallic drones and subterranean reverberations into a strange and hallucinatory industrial deathscape. One filled with creepy looped music, deep tectonic rumbling, strange psychedelic guitar melodies adrift in clouds of gaseous black fumes and the din of distant crashing metal, all underscored by the utterly monstrous cackling and bellowing of guest vocalist Eric Wood (of Man Is The Bastard / Bastard Noise infamy) and an undercurrent of shapeless rumbling heaviness that builds into a full-blown roar of oceanic power by the end of the side. There's always been a heavy Bastard Noise influence on Winters In Osaka's grim industrial dronecrush, and that really shines through here, for obvious reasons; with Wood's bestial utterances echoing across this vision of dystopian assembly-line horror and those weird spacey guitars, this has the feel of a Bastard Noise jam lost in a haze of damaged acid rock meanderings and disturbing, oppressive ambience. Very cool.

Limited to two hundred copies.