In the right hands, a mere tape delay machine can transform into an abyssal gate, unleashing immense oceans of dark sonic fog from a minimum of source sounds. That's all Italian noise artist Maurizio Bianchi needed back in the early 80s when he decided to craft the spectral dronescapes of s.f.a.g. 81, a re-working of recordings off of his seminal album Symphony For A Genocide, which he remixed using an Akai echo machine, warping and smearing the original sounds into an all new world of stygian sonic shadow. The result sounded virtually nothing like the source material, two epic-length tracks of ghostly black murk and fungal ambience that stretched across two full sides of the original cassette release that came out on Broken Flag back in 1983. Out of print for decades, this terrific slab of creepy post-industrial darkness is finally reissued on vinyl, ready to infest the subconscious of a new generation of industrial pit-crawlers.

The first side features "Surgical Flagellation", a phantasmagoria of weird chirping electronics and wobbly pulses, juddering mechanical noises and eerie Theremin-like tones all streaking across the subterranean soundspace of Bianchi's recording. These elements from Symphony are drowned in so much echo and reverb that they become ghostlike tracers of sound, flitting moth-like through the blackness, a whirling fog of incredibly murky and muffled electronics that begin to take on the semblance of voices from beyond the grave. Like the cries of factory ghosts captured on a century-old wax cylinder, this creepy dronescape takes on an increasingly mesmeric feel as it goes on, slipping into strange unearthly knockings and spectral loops, encountering luminous gothic pipe organ-like melodies that appear out of the murk, transforming the latter half of the track into something resembling an obscure European horror movie soundtrack that has been decomposing on reel-to-reel tape underneath the rotting floorboards of an abandoned house for the past three decades. The other track "Allopathic Glimmer" is more harrowing at first, an increasingly uneasy expanse of distant sirens and dim minor key drift lost in that expanding fog of echo and low-fi murkiness, but it eventually leads into gloomy fields of wavering melodious tones and languidly warping keyboard sounds that transform into an otherworldly ambience that seems to melt right out of the speakers.

Like most of Bianchi's earliest recordings, this album teems with an intense mix of beautifully corroded electronics and ominous ambient murk, and ranks as one of my own personal favorite records from this pioneer of eerie post-industrial creep. Newly re-mastered for this new reissue, the record comes in a heavyweight tip-on style jacket with color artwork from Siegmar Fricke, and is limited to five hundred twenty-seven copies.