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BURNING CHURCH FOREST  Book IV  CASSETTE   (Infernal Kommando)   6.50


��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.

��Burning Church Forest's Book IV is a bit different from their previous offerings in that it serves up a single forty-six minute track, and for the most part it's even more experimental and abstract than their earlier works. As with the previous tapes, the music is a mix of raw, ultra-noisy black metal heavily influenced by the more feral strains of early 90's Norwegian necro. The recording is insanely distorted and blown-out, the instruments fused together in a brutal black swarm, the drums pounding away in a ferocious speed-fueled frenzy of collapsing beats and blasting snares, the vocals a echoing bestial shriek. But then the band will suddenly and un expectedly slip into one of their weird propulsive grooves layered with monstrous blackened drones and horrific vocal sounds, horn-like tones and bits of backwards sound smeared across the ghastly backdrop of the band's almost motorik pulse, a kind of necro hypno rock that takes over for long stretches before crumbling into another blast of diseased Abruptum-like chaos. There's some really hypnotic stuff going on in these passages, at times approaching an almost Aluk Todolo-like pulse of charred, blackened energy, but its infested with all kinds of warped noise and electronics. From there, the band will shift into a wall of ambient black metal guitar, soaring icy riffs sent flying over a vast expanse of black static and low-fi murk, the drums fractured into stumbling, almost free-jazz like anti-rhythms way down int eh mix, joined by bleary out-of-tune organs and blurts of warped orchestral sound that begin bleeding through. About halfway through the tape, the band shifts into yet another messed-up dirge; this time it's all lurching and angular, a vaguely industrialized slow-motion crush, like early Swans or something along those lines, slow repetitive percussive pounding beneath howling demonic vocals and that swirling storm of black noise. Elsewhere, the band experiments with even more abstract passages of metallic noise and formless percussion, with some almost AMM-like improvisations appearing amid gusts of guttural demonic growling, or shifts into a kind of weird dubbed-out black doom where everything is drenched in echo, a rattling trippy delay-drenched dirge. This is definitely the noisiest and most outre stuff that I've heard so far from Burning Church Forest, and is recommended to fans of the black metal/noise mutations as Nekrasov, Satanhartalt, Demonologists and Abruptum.


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