��Here's some primo fucked-up blackened insanity...if you're the sort that requires at least some modicum of structure and harmony in your black metal, then avoid this like the plague. So far the only release from this bizarre one-man black metal band that I've been able to track down for the C-Blast catalog, Alternative Funeral is the latest (circa 2013) full-length from Cryostasium, another project from Strep Cunt, aka Boston based artist Cody Maillet, a member of mutant black metallers Bone Ritual and Witch Tomb. This disc follows a long string of super-limited EPs (including a split with Xasthur) and a number of full lengths that have all come out in just the past two of years. Prolific, to say the least.

�� Funeral is as good a place to start as any, featuring more than an hour of Maillet's bizarre outsider black metal delirium. It's a strange and hallucinatory mix of atonal bass guitar, warbling ambient feedback, simple off-kilter drumbeats, sort of akin to an even more fucked-up and discordant take on Xasthur's bleary low-fi black metal. The vocals are a distant, horrific howl buried beneath layers of that sickly dissonant feedback drone and shimmering, queasy minor-key guitar. The drums lock into monotonous, almost industrial rhythms that slowly lurch through the diseased soundscape of opener track "Winter". Right from the beginning, this is disturbing, uneasy listening, and things continue to get more fucked from there: the wailing schizoid atmosphere that surges through "Blood Memories", the wailing anguished vocals echoing wildly through space, guitars clanking like steel pipes smashing against each other, the blackened melody warped into a sloppy, utterly deformed dirge. On songs like that, the plodding bass and tuneless honking guitar and general brain-damaged vibe of Cryostasium's music actually starts to resemble some sort of cross between Xasthur and the damaged sludge punk of bands like Flipper or Kilslug. But of course, this is way more mentally ill, a churning layered mess of dissonant dirge and psychotic voices drifting out of some derelict asylum, which often simply dissolves into a haze of swirling synth noise and cosmic FX chaos.

�� Other tracks are strange propulsive pieces of mutated black psychedelia, their quasi-motorik rhythms throbbing beneath those looping dissonant guitars, turning into an almost space rock-like sprawl of repetitive percussive pulse, howling alien effects, insectoid buzz and black cosmic ambience. Others drift through vast fields of dismal orchestral discordance and eerie analogue electronics, like some strange film score to an obscure early 80's-era alien-gore grindhouse abomination. And on some of the album's spaciest moments, like the sprawling and genuinely eerie black-hole psychedelia of "Dissociator", the music billows out in a hypnotic fog of cosmic darkness that sort of reminds me of some of the more abstract moments on Oranssi Pazuzu's latest.

�� Like I mentioned at the outset, this is pretty out there, but fans of of the more damaged and demented strains of outr� blackness found among the likes of Striborg, Gonkulator, Abruptum, Ride For Revenge and Dead Reptile Shrine may want to explore this one at length, possibly supplemented by a large supply of DXM...