�� Underneath the creepy high-contrast Xerox imagery that adorns the sleeve for the limited-edition LP Female (released by the upstart UK industrial label Peripheral), you'll find more of the fantastic sonic rot-scapes and skin-crawling industrial gurgle that Swedish artist Mattias Gustafsson has been perfecting over the past decade, having brought us some of the creepiest industrial music that I've been stocking here at C-Blast with his Altar Of Flies project. Primarily working from heaps of hot-wired effects processors, primitive sound generators and tape machines that are haphazardly scattered and piled across tables that Gustafsson hunches over like some mad alchemist, he summons up sinister, crackling noise-scapes that feel as if they are formed from some sort of nightmarish ectoplasm, strange shambling industrial dirges and disturbing drones that creep out of black charnel pits.

�� Opener "Boiling Blood" is a mix of hissing tape noise and slow, squelchy rhythms that gradually uncoil beneath ascendant bursts of brutal feedback and noise, blanketed by massive rumbling distorted drones, crafting a intensely bleak field of grinding death industrial murk. Massive rusted metal creaks and groans on warped hinges, while irradiated black winds sweep in from below, rushing through the eerie abstract noisescape that Gustafsson occasionally blasts with blasts of immense distorted heaviness. "When We Wake Up There Will Be Nothing Left" is another one of AOF's more minimal nightmarish visions, an expanse of minimal hum and pulse that slowly begins to vomit up weird moaning voices and inhuman cries, bursts of high-end squiggle and chirping electronics, various metallic sounds and noises teeming beneath the near-constant thrum of amp-feedback. Bits of malformed rhythm take shape within the weird ghastly blackness, and the title track is even more sinister, a black minor-key synth-groan stretched out across heaving, cadaverous exhalations and squealing hornet-drone, an increasingly noisy and nightmarish mass of mechanical horror that builds into something truly apocalyptic at the end, a screaming air-raid dirge that oozes dread across the final moments of the side.

�� On the other side, minimal looping drones swirl around the sounds of dragging chains and mechanical gears falling apart, the slow rhythmic burble of air bubbling to the surface of some corroded tank of viscous black liquid, a heavy morbid atmosphere hanging over the sounds. It evolves into another doom-laden soundscape of tearing, ripping, rending noises, anguished distorted voices appearing, more of those wordless cries, muffled and unintelligible, moaning desperately in the depths of the recording, gradually swallowed up by the monstrous wall of noise that comes crashing in over the end of "Nervous Loops". The final track "100511" closes the album with blasts of that swarming black electronics and crushing synth-drone amid some fairly disturbing vocal recordings that, by the end of the record, tie back in to the album's title in a strange, unsettling manner.

�� At times, Gustafsson's burbling, abstract electronics begin to resemble the morbid industrial throb of Atrax Morgue, but his work here is much more complex in its construction, evocative of a microscopic world of ghoulish mechanisms crafted from decomposing bits of animal carcass and salvaged metal, or the audio track of a snuff film overlaid with murky synthesizer drones and waves of blackened static. Limited to two hundred fifty copies.