��This Dismal World crushes. A split between two of the more intense artists within the industrial sub-terrain, the long running German dark ambient/industrial noise duo Anemone Tube and Japanese noise/dirge master Dissecting Table, here teaming up for an intensely dark concept album that seems to have been at least partly inspired by Buddhist teachings.

�� Continuing to explore some of the same sounds and atmospheres as their fantastic last album Death Over China, the Anemone Tube side (titled Threnody For The Dejected) features two long tracks of grim industrial rumble and drift. It begins with "In The Mausoleum", a rather ghastly sounding soundscape that utilizes field recordings taken from ancient Buddhist burial chambers at the Sun-Yat-sen-Mausoleum in Nanjing, China; the track takes shape as a violent churning storm of bellowing black winds rushing through vast underground chambers, recordings of eldritch rattling that crumble like handfuls of rot in slow-motion, a rumbling swirling cloud of black dust amplified to thunderous levels. That segues right into "From Anthropocentrism To Demonocentrism", a crushing malevolent mechanical loop that lurches beneath more of the Tube's harsh bursts of distorted noise and squealing feedback, super ominous, a lurching mechanical death-mantra looping into infinity, eventually fading out into a sea of choral drone.

�� Dissecting Table's side is labeled Guanyin, and has just one monolithic twenty minute piece, "1000 Tones"; the side starts off with the sound of Japanese Buddhist chants overlaid with rhythmic clanking metal and a pounding drumbeat, the clank and screech of metal sounding off constantly in ther background behind this strangely mesmeric, sinister dirge. The first half of the side is almost all heavy, clanking dread, splattered with bits of squelchy synthesizer, the sound intensely distorted, with almost death-metal like shrieks ringing out in the background. The latter half of the side detaches from that massive clanking rhythmic crush, and drifts out into a more abstract sprawl of distorted looped chanting, mangled electronics and howling metallic feedback that seems to take on the sound of warped flutes. The drums and rattling metal and blackened screams come back in at the end though, and transform the final minutes into a bizarre bit of demonic industrial delirium. That track is fucking amazing, and for me was worth the purchase of this Lp alone; whenever Dissecting Table finds its way into that sort of crushing, monstrous almost metallic industrial heaviness, the sound really isn't that far removed from the blackened industrial chaos of bands like Gnaw Their Tongues and Aphelion.

�� Released in a limited edition of two hundred copies, and includes a printed insert with a translation of the Buddhist text The Lotus Sutra Chapter Twenty Five: The Universal Gate of Bodhisattiva Kanzeon.