If we're talking about South American noisecore, we've gotta talk about Atrofia Cerebral. This Peruvian band has been scouring brainpans since 1989, part of the golden age of worldwide noisecore. And these guys delivered real noisecore. True caveman improvisation, delivered at the limits of human physical exertion. Fase Critica is the band's first-ever vinyl appearance, recorded in 2019, but this thing sounds like it could have easily been blasted out way back in the "golden era" of noisecore.

This colossal collection of fragmentary, apoplectic blastbursts assails the listener with fifty-four tracks, each one utterly catastrophic as it explodes in a hyperspeed frag-storm of freeform hardcore punk emitted at psychotic levels of speed, incoherence, and percussive chaos. The roaring vocals are blasted through a thick cloud of putrid reverb, which gives these guys a trippy, gonked-out vibe that stuck out a little in the O.G. noisecore scene. Add in some esoteric samples and bits of presumed Peruvian film dialogue, sudden detours into pure rumbling amplifier noise, improvisational clusterfuck hyper-violence, and dropping the not-that-uncommon hardcore punk riff into the mix, and you get some of the mangiest and most vicious blurrcore that's billowed like a sulfur cloud from down south in quite some time. There's a viciousness to Atrofia Cerebral's style of noisecore that gives much of this stuff a vibe that feels a little closer to the skull-blowing HC extremism of the late 80's UK / Euro underground (and even a faintest whiff of something that almost stinks like the crudest proto-black metal?) than the completely formless abstraction of contemporaries like New York Vs. The Belzebu, 7 Minutes Of Nausea, early Anal Cunt, Deche-Charge. etc.., although at the very end of this LP, when the duo is blowing out "Capataces Gubernamentales" (I think), they butcher the recording with some fast-moving post-production slice n' dice that slips ever-so-briefly into Pain Jerk / M.S.B.R. harsh-noise territory. It's pure rage, nihilistic form-splattering sound as roars from the primordial Id, reflecting the political instability of Peruvian society at the time.

These guys are a personal favorite of mine, the savagery is just so goddamned relentless even as the cyclone of splatterblast drumming and droning riffs and bestial, echoing snarls ascend to ever higher altitudes of psychedelic effects-doused carnage. But this recent album has also pushed me headfirst into the obscure world of Peruvian noisecore, and let me tell, you there is a shitload of amazing stuff under that rock, bands like Insensibilidad Enérgica, Pucta, Mierda Humana, Materia Organica, Autoflagelacion, and the mighty and influential old-schoolers Audición Irritable all uncorking my skull in weird and beautiful supernovas of no-fi obliteration. Amazingly, the band reunited as a duo in more recent years after breaking up in the mid-90s, and as this debut album proves, their sound is a direct, unadulterated continuation of the noisecore barbarism and mania of their legendary early recordings like the 1989 Matanza Extrema demo tape.

Limited to three hundred copies.