���Here's a real vintage slab of mutant guitar skronk that might just be the most obnoxious record I've included on this week's new arrivals list. Alongside the recent spate of new material and excavated 80's recordings that have emerged from UK industrial noise/rock luminary Stefan Jaworzyn since the end of last year, this old EP that came out on Fourth Dimension back in 1996 also recently resurfaced from one of our suppliers, featuring Jaworzyn totally destroying his electric guitar in a live setting. Few noisemakers in the 90's mistreated the electric guitar quite as ruthlessly as Jaworzyn, and his work as a founding member of Skullflower helped to spur on a deluge of brain-flattening guitar noise from the mid 80s onward. By the time that this EP surfaced though, he had abandoned the riff completely for pure improvisation, and this recording was captured around the same time that Jaworzyn was active with the power-improv duo Ascension, at the peak of his form-fucking fury.

��� Lick focuses on a bunch of sickening out-guitar experiments, the satirical album notes pointing towards something more "academic", but what you really get is a roughly twenty minute assault of crazed avant-guitar skree. Here he moves out of the power-duo mode of his then current improv noise project Ascension, just him and his guitar, and it's one of his nastiest recordings. "Eat Shit" and "Jazz Snob" tumble across the a-side in a blare of atonal solo guitar skronk, like some horribly deformed Sonny Sharrock jam, or some particularly putrid Derek Bailey exercise, lots of meandering atonal scrape and squonk without a melodic bone in it's spindly wretched form. On those rare moments when he really starts to strangle his axe, the resultant din is so goddamn obnoxious it'll scrape the meat from inside your skullcase. The b-side "Loud Is Best" is the best of 'em though, a deranged guitar noise dirge that ends up turning into a grand eruption of tortured guitar shred and distorted chaos that sounds like some brain-damaged heavy metal solo ripped free of it's moorings and turned inside out.