� � If you're reading the rest of this particular week's new arrivals list, you'll notice me gushing over a bunch of low-fi CDR releases that we picked up from Occult Supremacy, the black noise/HNW/experimental black metal CDR label run by Dustin Redington (Crown of Bone / Demonologists). This isn't Redington's first DIY label, though. Before this, he ran the Ministries Of Blood imprint, a similarly themed imprint that put out all kinds of power electronics, harsh noise and blackened weirdness. Most of that stuff is out of print, but I've managed to pick up some of the remaining Ministries of Blood titles for your perusal...
� � A re-release of an obscure 2006 disc of bizarre, blackened low-fi noise-doom and gargling psychedelic chaos from this Canadian outfit. Breath Of Chaos's version of funereal doom on Decaying is heavily mutated, a dubby, delay-drenched delirium of echo-soaked drums and distant murky black metal riffs, hissing rat-like shrieks and demonic utterances drifting through stretches of chaotic, slow-moving dirge. The drums sort of fade in and out of view, sometimes slipping out of the mix for a minute before slowly drifting back in, the grinding industrial heaviness in the background occasionally surging forward and obliterating everything around it. When they do coalesce into a steady rhythm, it's this clanking shambling monstrosity, sloppy oil-tanker rhythms and metallic pounding and violently crashing cymbals all going at the same time. Some of the other songs center around disembodied black metal guitars that buzz aimlessly over more of those ramshackle rhythms and clouds of gnat-swarm distortion, sometimes breaking into a weird, stumbling gallop, or delve into murky black-noise rituals with snarling, ultra-distorted tremolo riffs spread out over simple, skeletal drumbeats. The band's extreme use of delay and other effects on this crawling, abject blackness ends up transforming a lot of this music into something that almost resembles a kind of abstracted electronica at times, but those murky mangled black metal riffs are always right around the corner, a symphony of diseased sonic murk joined by weird robotic chanting and tortured moaning. There's an unstructured, almost improvisational feel to Decaying that has more in common with the diseased dungeon hallucinations of Abruptum, Enbilulugugal and Havohej than pure doom metal, further fueling Breath Of Chaos's lumbering madness.
� � Comes in a black and white paper sleeve, limited to fifty copies.