Despite having been around since the late 80s and heralded by Rodger Stella as a direct influence on his work with Macronympha, French noise group Entre Vifs has remained somewhat obscure in industrial noise circles. Even I wasn't really familiar with 'em until recently. An offshoot of the well-regarded French industrial outfit Le Syndicat, this outfit pursues a much more violent and psychedelic brand of harsh noise, using homemade instruments and gear to create dense, fluctuating maelstroms of noise that can spread out to epic lengths. On this disc, the duo of Zor�n and Shirubee unleash six long blasts of frenzied, chaotic sound using such monstrous instruments as the "Throbbler", the "Sturmophon" and the "Rikroko�d", all Frankensteined objects cobbled together from guitar pickups, disassembled toy instruments, ring modulators, amplified lamps and grotesque-looking stringed objects.

     The din that they whip up with these tools is brutal and brain-scrambling, evoking classic 80's era Merzbow, the dystopian junkscapes of Macronympha and K2, and even the trippy robotic carnage of early Bastard Noise, all while assembling these noisescapes according to their own demented brand of improvisational logic; it's not entirely devoid of structure, as the duo sometimes drifts into strange, mesmeric passages of fractured rhythmic sound. But it's pretty violent throughout. Blasts of buzzing electricity and clanking metallic noise becomes fused to swarms of suffocating static and weird resonances, clusters of maniacal tape-garble seethe beneath harsh, steely drones and washes of cold mechanical drift-noise, all scattered with nightmarish samples and primitive synth noise, roaring out of your speakers like an avalanche of deranged machinery run riot. Pretty extreme, with only the occasional aside into quieter passages.

     Comes in a hinged metal box with a sixteen page booklet that includes photos of the bizarre instruments that the duo utilized, issued in a limited edition of two hundred copies.