More nihilistic noise from Diazepam, this split tape features two Italian outfits teaming up to deliver some sinister psychedelic skree and charred industrial filth. It's my first time hearing A Happy Death, and their ultra-heavy industrial blackness is good stuff, but I'd already been a fan of Shiver, a solo project from Mauro Sciaccaluga of Italian occult industrial/psych band Ur that delivers a strain of nightmarish, bestial industrial noise that's definitely worth checking out if you're into the more evil-sounding fringes of power electronics.

Latin prayers and cathedral bells pave the way for A Happy Death's putrid low-fi noise assault on the a-side, a battery of extreme blown-out distorted synth rumble and crackling burnt-out drones that quickly seep from your speakers into a haze of hateful noise. That first track "Laudamus Nihil" is intensely heavy and malevolent, and sort of resembles some low-fi doom metal recording being remixed by Dead Body Love, huge evil sounding riffs surfacing out of the smoldering static and crackling speakershred, oppressive and suffocating and crushing as it devolves into a more atmospheric mass of sound. Waves of fearsome feedback are layered over random environmental sounds, turning this into a murky locust-swarm of corroded noise. The other track is more straightforward, abrasive feedback and distorted crackle sweeping across clusters of tangled tape noise and ghostly percussive murmurs, but it's equally as atmospheric and effective.

The four tracks on Shiver's side are the first I've heard from the project since his The Taste Of Repent tape on Prairie Fire from a few years ago. The vibe is certainly the same, building up each long track into a seething psychedelic fog of frenzied guttural screams, brain-melting synthesizer drone, and putrescent electronic noise that is possessed by a pervasive threatening atmosphere. At times, this stuff can begin to sound like some particularly nightmarish score to an early 80s British sci-fi gore flick being played back on a decomposing cassette tape. Pretty grim, especially when those hazy, gloomy synthesizer melodies start to peer through all of that rumbling black muck, and the vocals transform into a terrifying, almost black metal-like shriek that rips through the whirling scrap-metal squeal and grating feedback abuse. Slow, pulsating rhythms emerge on later tracks, shifting the sound into a kind of static death-meditation as mysterious voices echo in the depths and swells of sinister metallic guitar melody and dark atmospheric sound rise to the surface. Definitely my favorite stuff from this project so far.

Like the other tapes I recently picked up from Diazepam, this has a similarly distressed look and feel, lettering hand-scratched onto the surface of the black cassette, the tape housed in an oversized cardstock sleeve, and it's limited to just one hundred copies.