Blasted, infernal deathpsych billowing out in sulfurous gusts from cracked black earth. That's what seeps from this tape-only release, one of the last things that came out from the anonymous, shadowy black industrial outfit Cultus Sabbati, an anonymous group with an evasive online presence and a handful of immersive, acid-drenched blackened dronescapes. Hagiography was also one of the final releases on the terrific Land Of Decay imprint, run by the guys in Locrian, and fit right in with the label's droneological aesthetic.

It was also something of a deviation from the crushing weight of some of Cultus Sabbati's previous works, exploring a kind of murky, kosmische industrial realm, weaving together distorted, meandering guitar drones and languid LSD-soaked guitar drift, creeping miasmal electronics, slow percussive rhythms buried beneath several layers of sonic murk, and demonic vocals that swoop and soar through massive amounts of delay and reverb. They produce a ritualistic, drugged-out atmosphere for this stuff that spreads like an oily black cloud across the nearly fifty-minute duration of Hagiography. At times slipping into shambling mausoleum noisescapes, their use of rumbling, howling freeform guitar noise often ends up taking this in a different direction, a bit more rooted in zonked-out guitar-driven heaviness. Massive, molten chords tumble out of the blackness like errant chunks of Sunn O)))-esque amp-crush that have been cut loose from the main body, punctured with bursts of over-modulated, almost power electronics-style feedback and smeared with sinister atonal piano and other stray fragments of sonic creepiness. As a matter of fact, a lot of this stuff actually starts to resemble a kind of low-fi, monstrous Broken Flag-style blowout, on the latter half of the album sounding remarkably like a twisted, satanic version of Ramleh or Skullflower; as the sound erupts into squalls of demented guitar noise and screeching distorted amplifier howl, it's backed by the primitive pounding drumming that rumbles like the mindless rhythms of narco-blasted eyeless acolytes, the sound swept up in a hail of tape hiss and charred static. Pretty evil sounding stuff, especially towards the end, as tracks like "Arch-Crone Bone Mother" and "Koschei The Deathless" swell into thunderous blasts of stygian psychedelia.