���There's kind of a convoluted history behind the cult Japanese industrial outfit Nord, who started out in the late 70s as a minimal electronic duo, made up of members Katayama Satoshi and Hiroshi Oikawa. The pair only record a single album together, a self-titled debut that was released in 1981 on the Pinakotheca label, after which the members split apart, each carrying on a different project that still retained the Nord name. And this is where things start to really get confusing. Satoshi's version of Nord was primarily a live outfit active through the rest of the 1980s, while Oikawa would record a handful of records under the Nord name, before eventually disappearing later in the decade, apparently never to be heard from again. It's those now ultra-rare LPs from Oikawa's version of Nord that have become highly sought-after documents of primitive nihilism by hardcore devotees of dark early industrial music, released through his L?S?D? Records imprint that existed up till around 1985 or so. Two of those albums, NG Tapes and L?S?D? (both originally released in 1984) have remained out of print in the decades since, but a label called P?C?P? Records emerged in recent years, apparently with the sole aim of reissuing these albums for contemporary audiences, though they've all been painfully limited editions that have themselves gone out of print by now. We've managed to grab a few copies of both, though, and both are highly recommended slabs of classically morbid industrial that sit at a fascinating nexus between the earlier psychedelic sounds of the Japanese underground, and the more extreme directions it would take as the noise scene began to rise to prominence.

���Even better than its predecessor LSD, 1984's NG Tapes is about as black and nihilistic as Oikawa got with Nord, delivering a goddamn stunning piece of long-lost Japanese synth-creep that had previously only been available on an extremely limited cassette tape that has been going for hundreds of dollars when it shows up on sites like Discogs. With this tape, Nord moved from the sometimes scattershot noise experimentalism of the earlier work into a more focused and devastating strain of post-industrial psychedelia; I'm not the first to make the comparison, but this really does feel like some strange fusion of Fushitsusha-esque psychnoise and the pulsating carcinogenic industrial of Bianchi, unfurling a vast deadzone of repetitious synth and damaged guitar across these eight untitled tracks. Long pieces of churning synthesizer noise and burbling black-acid drone loop and worm their way through your brainmeat like a wave of vermiform horror, strange disembodied voices drifting aimlessly through the pulsating electronic fog, bits of keening high-end feedback and menacing malformed melodies looming out of the blackness like fragments of a particularly grim horror movie score. There's blurts of primitive Derbyshire/Radiophonic style electronics and icy, discordant guitar chords, bursts of eerie psych-guitar howl that ripple and echo across the expanses of seething black electronics.

���These almost Haino-like shards of ghostly guitar noise and feedback find themselves shifting into slabs of grinding distorted noise, blasts of garbled guitarscrape and screeching metallic violence, surrounded by spectral whirr and distant computerized chirps flitting through the abyss like swarms of flying insects caught in the wavering heat-haze of a fever dream. Drum machines heave monotonously beneath gales of piercing amplifier-skree, sometimes turning into an odd mesmeric rhythm, before collapsing into utterly mangled free-noise pile-ups like the ear-wrecking assault that opens the second side. Moments like those transform Nord's squirming black synthnoise into something much heavier and more violent, suddenly shifting into a crushing industrial noise-dirge that are as hellish as anything from K2 or Incapacitants, before giving way to spooky electronic dronescapes that unfold into gorgeously warped symphonies of ectoplasmic squelch and eerie melody, while splinters of No Wave-esque guitar wreckage are strewn over whirling spaceship noises and blurts of random Japanese pop radio transmission.

��� The packaging is minimal but perfect, essentially replicating the design and feel of the original cassette, housing the record in a heavy black casewrapped jacket with minimal printing, and wrapped in a pink obi strip machine-stamped on the back.