Though it looks like it might be awhile before we get another album of the sort of crushing, alien prog that Bastard Noise has been doing lately in full band mode, we can still count on BN mastermind Eric Wood to keep feeding us his more straightforward electronic assaults, which almost always blast my skull away. Even better is when we get some new Bastard Noise stuff where he's teamed up with legends of Japanese noise; this recent 7" threatens deafness with not only an a-side that has Wood teamed up with Hiroshi Hasegawa of cosmic noise gods C.C.C.C., but also a punishing blast of galactic horror from his collaboration with the mighty Government Alpha, delivering two sides of pro-Earth, anti-human technological devastation.

    BN's track with Hiroshi Hasegawa sweeps across the first side with a skull-melting blast of electronic noise, the squealing, violent frequencies cut-up amid snippets of absolutely desolate ambient drift and garbled circuitry. Crank this side up to maximum volume, and it's fucking terrifying, those stray motes of deep-space drift and half-glimpsed melody that surface throughout the track only serving to exacerbate the nightmarish vibe. When Wood eventually unleashes his inhuman screams later in the track, it's a choir of agonized shrieks and monstrous guttural rumblings that rise over waves of distorted feedback and whirring, insectile electronics. It's one of the most nightmarish sounding things I've heard from Bastard Noise lately, like some fragmented S.O.S. transmission beamed back to us from the bowels of Hell.

    The Government Alpha collaboration "A Diabolical Journey" offers a slightly more subdued dose of cosmic death. Wood continues to bellow and belch his misanthropic fumes, but those glottal, death metal-esque detonations are smeared over a more ambient expanse of sound, swells of minimal drift rising and falling between bits of almost orchestral drone and peals of distant metallic agony. It's like some strange cinematic version of a power electronics assault, the harsher sounds melted down and poured across distant gleaming vistas, the track only beginning to squirm out into more tortured forms towards the end as the artists finally unleash the full fury of their oscillators and effects units, bathing the final moments of the record in a horrific, irradiated glow.

    Comes in some really nice (if slightly labor-intensive) packaging, the olive-green vinyl packaged inside of a sealed, printed vellum envelope.