��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.

�� Book II continues with more of Burning Church Forest's elliptical low-fi black metal and blackened noise, the opening track "Ashes of the Crucifix" blaring through a haze of tape-hiss and murky distortion, the stripped down riff swarming beneath those insane pterodactyl shrieks that reminded me so much of Norwegian black metal weirdoes Fleurety. The band's brand of repetitive, primitive Ildjarn-esque black metal is a little more prominent on this tape compared to the last one, but there's still plenty of those sudden detours into weird guttural vocal noise and monstrous bellowing that echoes over their fields of minimal dark drift, the band elsewhere dropping into wretched, discordant doom, or opening up into long passages of nothing but the roar of a bonfire, the flames lapping at the empty gunmetal expanse of a winter sky at nightfall.

�� On the second side, the band introduces eerie discordant guitar and electronic noises, waves of black static hiss and burps of horn-like sound that lead into the rocking fuzz-drenched weirdness of "Watching the Alter Burn". The song is another one of their off-kilter krautrocky black metal workouts that breaks off into synth-heavy passages, where it's just the drums plodding along under a black fog of crackling noise and ominous keyboard drift, minimal percussive rumbling against a black field of cinematic orchestral sound, at times sounding like Wendy Carlos's score for The Shining bleeding through field recordings of burning churches collapsing into the ground.