��Finally got around to picking up all four of the Burning Church cassettes that came out on French black metal/industrial label Infernal Kommando. Instead of the ultra low-fi brain-damaged blackthrash that we usually get from this label, this Australian band delivers a more experimental (but certainly still very low-fi) strain of black metal weirdness. While the band would obviously progress in certain ways with each subsequent recording, all of the Burning Church Forest releases that I've picked up so far are filled with grim, noisy strangeness that points towards the influence of both classic second-wave European black metal and the drug-induced psychosis and Satanic hallucinations invoked by Sweden's Abruptum. Hateful, sonically demented stuff that borders on chaos much of the time, I've been lovin' all of these tapes. Originally released as a digital download only, these albums were later reissued on cassette in tiny runs of sixty-six copies each, in xeroxed packaging that features a different photo of a burning church on each cover.

�� The Book I tape features four tracks of swirling hypnotic black metal, the first song revving up with what seems like an endless buildup, militant snare drums rolling beneath the bizarre animalistic screeches of the singer. The guitars are woven into sweeping circular riffing, the band poised to explode into something incredibly fast, but instead lock into this seething, almost industrial-tinged elliptical black metal assault that quickly slips into a weird, fuzz-drenched space rock dirge, infested with some of the weirdest vocals I've heard lately on a black metal tape. Those high swooping shrieks and bursts of brain-damaged satanic gibberish sort of remind me of demo-era Fleurety with their unhinged, hysterical quality. Later tracks offer up more blasting black metal awash in murky distortion and tape-hiss, the blastbeats blown-out into a frenzy of cymbal noise and machine gun hammering, a single riff repeated ad infinitum, rendered into a muffled buzzsaw roar under all of that chaos that just spins out, endlessly, through the storm of black noise until it finally drifts into fields of abstract electronic soundscapery and dreamy droning synth. On "Chapter 3", the band locks into another one of those killer mid-paced blackened groove, another pulsing motorik black metal jam that cruises into infinity, looping endlessly, stretching out for more than ten minutes before eventually disintegrating into murky black noise.

�� The other side has just one song, but it's a goddamn epic. The track stretches out for nearly twenty minutes of repetitive black metal buzz and rumbling electronic drone, the drums so blown-out on this track that they become a blur of pounding kicks and white-noise hiss, almost electronic sounding. Again, the music focuses on a single evil riff that endlessly repeats, circling around and around before shifting into another one of their weird blackened space rock jams, followed by a bizarre passage that almost sounds like some super-noisy breakcore buried beneath gothic organs and those horrific piercing screams. There's more weird ambient stuff, sections made up of those monstrous vocals drenched in effects, overlaid with droning soundtracky synthesizers and caliginous black ambience. While not as noisy as the likes of Nekrasov, Wold or Ensepulchered, this is definitely within that realm of fractured, experimental blackness.