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ARKHE  For Everything That Lives Is Holy  CASSETTE   (Nil By Mouth)   8.98


��This psychedelic death industrial project formed from the ruins of Pestdemon, a similarly styled project that released a number of excellent cassettes on labels like Unrest Productions and Sprachlos Verlag between 2008 and 2011; that sinister Swedish one-man outfit managed to stay pretty well hidden even among fans of murky, malevolent industrial music during its short run, but the stuff I managed to get my hands on (like the Hidden Temple tape) sounded terrific, filled with grimy blurts of occult-influenced machine-drone and rumbling menace that wormed their way right into my grey matter. With Arkhe, the guy behind Pestdemon looks like he's continuing to explore the same sort of dank, black sound; as a matter of fact, these recordings were originally intended for a Pestdemon release before that project dissolved. Anyone who happened to dig Pestdemon will surely want to explore this stuff as well.

�� For Everything That Lives Is Holy is one of the latest releases from Arkhe, a super-limited cassette packaged in an o-card style sleeve that folds out into a longer printed sheet, and which also includes a set of five full color insert cards that feature strange 18th century illustrations of creepy, tarot-like artwork. The tape features two long tracks of noisy low-fi soundscapery compiled from blasts of black hiss, mysterious subterranean clattering, and eerie distant drones that come together into a kind of murky and evocative ambience. These noisy recordings seem to be decomposing as you're listening to them, the broken rhythms buried underneath an ocean of tape hiss and reverb, obscured and muffled by layers of audio rot and decay. The a-side is a muffled, murky slab of sepulchral drift with strange clinking sounds echoing through the depths, like the percussive sounds of wind chimes made from broken bone fragments being blown by foul subterranean winds, joined by smears of hazy synthesizer melody, dissonant drone, sampled voices and looping feedback-like shrieking appearing from beneath the waves of mechanical rumble and hiss. Snatches of broken radio transmissions bleed through the murk, growing more nightmarish as the piece continues to unfold.

��The other side is more intense, more violent, a pandemonium of machinery screeching in the depths and massive percussive echoes thundering through the gloom, the sound dense and suffocating, pitch black, a rumbling screeching blast pf infernal machinery grinding and groaning within a thick fog of sonic corruption. The effect is intense and hypnotic, burying the listener beneath what almost feels like the roar of tank treads grinding over mountains of human bone, the screaming feedback destruction and thick rumbling drones all melting together into a macabre atmosphere of entropic filth. Love the song titles, too; "Raptor's Talon Tear The Infants Flesh" and "Flowers Roam The Carrion Of Silent City-centre Massgraves" evoke all sorts of wonderfully surreal and macabre imagery that is mirrored in the artwork, all contributing to a pervasive atmosphere of decay and derangement that I'm betting will appeal to anyone infatuated with the similarly blackened occult industrial of bands like Trepaneringsritualen and Alfarmania.