���With Krallice's Colin Marston now off handling bass duties with recently resurrected avant death metal legends Gorguts, two other members of Marston's New York avant-garde black metal outfit have followed suit, splintering off with their own brain-scrambling tech-death side-project Geryon. Made up of bassist/vocalist Nicholas McMaster (also of Bloody Panda / Castevet) and drummer Lev Weinstein (Bloody Panda / Woe), Geryon delivers roughly half an hour of droning, discordant death metal with a strong surrealistic streak, and the influence of Obscura-era Gorguts is obvious on the duo's unconventional structures and spiky, mangled riffing, even as the band dispenses with guitars for a more bottom-heavy attack. Yep, this is technical death metal played with a lineup of just bass guitar and drums, but you never even miss the six strings, as McMaster fills the space with a variety of frequencies and some serious cranial complexity.

��� As soon as the record erupts into the discordant blast of opener "De Profundis", you're reminded of the atonal violence of Gorguts's classic Obscura; McMaster's churning downtuned bass riffs sprout spiky dissonant notes and eerie choral textures, the relentlessly pummeling drumming shifting between a vicious blastothon and rampaging volleys of double bass, the tough, skronky riffing occasionally peeling back to reveal eerie ringing melodies and droning bass notes twisting around the band's pummeling sonic assault, those drones becoming increasingly suspended over the blasting aggression. This and the remaining three tracks are all long, sprawling blasts of dissonant, atmospheric chaos, separated by brief soundscapes of abrasive industrial noise, swarming electronics and bleak, desolate ambience that introduce each subsequent eruption. The deeper into this you get, I can't help but feel as if I'm hearing a more minimalist, stripped-down, scaled-back version of late-90s era Gorguts, but that's hardly a criticism. Even if the whole experience becomes a little samey through the constant complexity of the bass guitar parts and McMaster's gruff, monotone bellow, these songs are constantly shifting monstrosities, the prominent bass guitar giving Geryon's songs a unique texture, especially on tracks like "Birth" where the distortion gives the bass a slightly over-modulated sound, and the spiraling minor key arpeggios start to resemble some crazed 8-bit electronic soundtrack. You can pick up on some noise rock-like qualities to Geryon's music as well, especially on the closing track "To The Silenced", whose messed-up angular aggression reminds me a little of some of the later death metal-influenced stuff from Today Is The Day. Pretty cool.

��� Released in a limited edition of three hundred copies.