This invocation of rot and minimalist charnel ambience from Italy's Aseptic Void first surfaced as a digital release a while back, but has finally been reissued in physical form for collectors, presented in digipack packaging with cool, almost Beardsley-esque cover art, in an edition of five hundred copies. A nice accompaniment for Aseptic Void's morbid post-industrial music, which unfurls across these nine tracks as eerie echoing tones and half-formed minor key melodies drifting glacially through vast expanses of lightless emptiness. Creepy stuff.

     Cardiac pulses reverberate through the depths of sprawling black ambience, a muted murky throb that drifts in and out beneath slowly-shifting layers of sonic mire. Soft bursts of writhing, malevolent electronics materialize in the midst of tense, unsettling drones that are suspended across immense near-silent voids. The first several tracks are all steeped in this sparse, desolate atmosphere, but when it gets to "Beyond The Suffocation", the sound turns more threatening, leading into even darker and more sinister regions as swells of almost orchestral murmur are stretched and smeared through the blackness, with waves of heavy distorted synthdrone washing through the field of sound, a doomed, oppressive atmosphere taking hold as the rest of the album continues this downward descent into pure abyssal ambience. Strange rattling noises and subterranean sounds lurk on tracks like "Circumspection", suggestive of traversing immense unlit underground passageways while the sounds of a mass transit system rumble overhead; elsewhere, crackling blackened static is layered over those glacially drifting drones to create an unnerving, entropic effect.

     And it takes an unexpected turn into ghostly trip-hop with "Black Toy Box", weaving chilling, cinematic music with horrific screams, sounds of sudden violence, and dubby echo around a languid breakbeat; it comes out of nowhere, but makes for an interesting diversion from the immersive and mesmerizing stygian driftscapes that comprise most of Carnal. Another standout is "Suspended In The Void" with its soundtracky feel, lone footsteps moving through some dank subterranean chamber while Carpenterian synthesizers growl in the shadows. And the last track "Violate", which is exclusive to this reissue, sounds like field recordings of poltergeists discovered beneath the ambient sounds of a particularly busy morgue. Definitely one to check out if you're hooked on bleak, Slaughter Productions-style death industrial aesthetics.