��The first installment of Darrin Verhagen's multi-project Black | Mass trilogy that would eventually become the final release from his lauded Dorobo label, Black Ice is, aside from a super-limited split with Des Esseintes, the only release to surface from Verhagen's E.P.A. project. With E.P.A.. the Shinjuku Thief mastermind explored much more violent and destructive sonic terrain than he had done previously with his acclaimed dark ambient outfit, exploring the more skull-shredding extremes of electronic noise; nothing else in his Black Mass trilogy came close to the extreme hellish electronic chaos that he unleashes here. Black Ice was the first, a seven-track full length disc that centers around long, sprawling noisescapes filled with swarms of brutally abrasive junk-noise and crushing manipulated distortion, combining a glitchy, spastic cut-up style of assembly with all-out torrents of vicious electronic carnage that are right up there with the likes of Macronympha and Skin Crime in terms of sheer sonic abuse. The themes behind this particular release are vague; tracks bear titles like "With Brake Fluid", "With Metal And Paint", "With The Smell Of Sulphur", etc., evoking scenes of industrial by-products, rampant toxins, black clouds of suffocating smoke, images that further come to life within the churning maelstroms of black static and mechanical collapse that take form at the center of this album. Ultimately though, this is a cathartic assault of utterly brutal noise, with none of the dark cinematic atmosphere that lurks throughout the Shinjuku Thief material, pure harsh noise filled with snarls of ear=shredding glitchery, controlled blasts of bone-rattling distortion and speaker-rumble, crumbling mechanical rhythms and violent whipstrikes of blown-out synth, broken down engine throb and delay-drenched loops, clusters of tangled tape noise, quick bursts of frenzied screaming. The track "Rubber" offers the most rhythmic noise-assault on the disc, a storm of howling feedback that rages over a shuddering mechanical loop that takes on a hypnotic, panicky quality as it spreads out for more than thirteen minutes, slowly building into a ferocious mecha-trance that eventually begins to disintegrate over the final minutes of the track. In addition, there are moments on Black Ice that have a similar hyper-amplified feel as some of Dave Phillips's pure electronic noise works, and in those moments the album takes on the form of a whirlwind of broken glass and asphalt and shredded metal, sweeping violently upward into the sky, singing of total and absolute destruction. Hands down the harshest material I've ever heard from Verhagen.

�� Limited to five hundred copies.