Despite coming out of the darkest depths of the Finnish black metal underground, there's plenty of stuff that's come from the infamously weird Dead Reptile Shrine that doesn't come anywhere close to sounding like metal. There's no better example than the one-man band's debut album Isth Narai Ja, which originally came out on CDR back in 2002. This demented album of stumbling, droning ritualistic necro-drift ended up getting reissued on cassette years later by the now-defunct Belgian label Antihumanism, some copies of which we recently unearthed in the C-Blast stockroom. As with all of the other Dead Reptile Shrine tapes that we picked up from Antihumanism, this early stuff follows the Shrine as it tumbles into black voids of murky midnight ambience and fumbling feral chaos, this one showcases the earliest convulsions of damaged blackpsych that would later head into slightly more metallic territory.

In fact, it's tough to recommended Isth Narai Ja to anyone but the most adventurous black metal fans; musically, any connection to actual black metal is tenuous at best, mainly only apparent in the bestial vocals that pop up later on. More than anything, this sort of reminds me of some of the more ritual-minded post-industrial outfits like Zos-Kia and Coil, but even then, this stuff is far weirder.

The tape features two massive half-hour tracks, "My Ancient Underworld Throne" and "The Spirit Catcher (Aaveen Pyydystys Kellarissa) ", followed by the relatively shorter "Deathstar Antenna". It's all a kind of low-fi experimental ambient, starting off with that first epic crawl through swirling nocturnal drift lead by meandering, seemingly random bass guitar that stumbles blindly through the gloom, as bits of primitive, ramshackle guitar slip in and out of view, joined by distant ululating howls and sinister, distorted voices. Depth-charge reverberations of low-end bass reverberate up from the murk far down below, and that swirling, miasmic synth-murk eventually begins to coalesce into looping wave patterns that grow more hypnotic over the course of the track. Smears of soundtracky synthesizer appear, leaving fragmented traces of ominous electronic melody to slowly dissolve. Strange echoing synth noises form into atonal patterns, seemingly improvised but adding to the drifting, delirious creepiness. Later, weird whale-song cries emerge alongside unsettling high-pitched animalistic squeals and fluttering electronics, shards of Jandekian guitar becoming swallowed up in violent frenzies of garbled, guttural death metal-like vocalizations, a monstrous bass pulse arising that suddenly shifts the recording into some sublimely disturbing ambience. That second track in particular is pretty nightmarish, a dreamlike sound-collage that sprawls out into something resembling a malevolent alien wilderness, wherein the listener is stumbling upon a coven of mutant shaman embroiled in some bizarre black rite. As the album approaches the end, though, it slowly morphs into something prettier, a haze of scintillating synth-drones and glimmering electronic glitch that spreads out into washes of kosmische drift, culminating with the enthralling jet-black Lynchian ambience of the final track.

It's another thoroughly weird offering from this Finnish necro-freak, laced with bizarre samples and unnerving sounds that continually push this into a fevered dreamzone, but there's also enough slow-motion obsidian drift that this could very well appeal to fans of the stranger, blacker fringes of psychedelic drone and brain-damaged blackened industrial. Limited to four hundred copies.