One of the latest in Andrew Liles' extensive ongoing Monster series, Wanton Wives, Monstrous Maidens And Wicked Witches is another whacked-out conglomeration of experimental horror synth, murderous nocturnal jazz, and abstract dread-filled weirdness from surrealistic soundscaper and Nurse With Wound member Liles, who is accompanied by a spoken-word read of an original horror story that takes up the entire b-side of the album, backed by Quentin Rollet's creepy avant jazz score. Like much of the other stuff in this series, it's another weird faux-horror "soundtrack", released back to back with the similarly minded Maleficent Monster album that plunges into a bizarre sonic netherworld of alternate-dimension library music records, mutated Caedmon LPs and demonic exotica.

     The album wanders through a delirium of midnight movie soundtrack detritus. A woman's voice whispers in French amid swells of ominous gong-like shimmer and eerie, atonal folkiness, cellos and other strings winding around a broken harp melody that grows ever more disturbing as it progresses. Seek Carpenterian synthesizers glide over minimal percussive propulsion, like some obscure theme from a long-lost slasher from 1982. Tiki torches flicker at the edges of delirious black magic rituals taking place in the heart of some sweltering jungle, creating a kind of cannibal kitsch as tribal drums combine with monstrous chants, orgasmic cries and stock Amazonian animal noises, like something out of a cough-syrup fueled Deodato / Lenzi gut-munch hallucination. Experimental loopscapes are drenched in gothic organ, spinning into an almost Goblin-esque vibe that tumbles through the blackness. Spectral xylophones drift through haunted passageways and down cobwebbed stairwells, before everything erupts in a bizarre blast of frenetic, flute-streaked jazz-funk surrounded by the nightmarish squealing of a wild pig. Shrieking electronic hellscapes blast like malevolent transmissions out of the center of a black hole. Pieces of oddball noir jazziness meet blasts of nerve-shredding orchestral terror akin to a meth'd-riddled Bernard Herrmann score. It's an impressively loopy trip, playing out like some crazed, hyper-obscure record of library music from the late 70s/early 80s, but then the second side features that piece of spoken-word fiction for "La Sensation D'Engourdissement", where Isabelle Magnon reads a French translation of a short story from Liles, an eerie, understated piece of medical horror backed by Rollet's ghostly sax and washes of dark electronic ambience. Perfect for midnight turntable sessions.

     Once again, this gets another killer Graham Humphreys cover, and it also includes the original English-language text of Liles' story printed on the back of the jacket; the vinyl itself is pressed on candy-crazed, one hundred eighty gram splatter wax, and issued in a limited run of three hundred fifty copies.