Coming in at the turn of the decade of the new century, I fully exopected the shift from classic (if somewhat tweakky) death industroal / dark ambeitn into the more psychedelic and sprawling weirdness that founding member Stephen Petrus started taking this now nearly thirty year old project a while back, eschewing pure Cold Meat Industries-style cthonioc rumble and luciferian string sections for someting even more....out there. And man do you get it, almost three and a half hours of Murderous Vision botyh at its harshest and at its most blotto, while bridging a pretty wide span of Petrus's career with MV as a thoughtfully selected body of work sprawls across three full discs. Whoa!

released in tandem with the [rojects twentieth year,

the cover for the gatefold jacket looks like something from a Japanese ghost story

Breaking it all down disc by disc makes sense, since Volume Three is assembled in chronologic order. The first features the extreme tough-to-find Suffocate... The Final Breath CDR released on Twenty Sixth Circle in 1999 in a run of two hundred copies, a seventy-three minute meditation on plague death. Gone are the neo-classical flourishes, strange psychedelic visions, and darkwave-tinged moodiness of subsequent releases - this stuff is harsh. Some of the tracks here are a kind of overmodulated, intensely distorted dark ambient drone music, simple, sinister-sounding minor ley melodies repeating over and over, "Book Ov Fevers" starting it all with waves of repetitious synth chords joined by rumbling percussive sounds, the "riff" surging in and out of the sonic murk, a murderous and maddening mantra of corrosive electronics that eventually devolves into a sparser more minimal field of flickering pulses, momentarily reminiscent of Atrax Morgue or Mauthausen ORCHESRA. Things just gets creepier and more mutated from there. Lengthy tracks like "Cold, Dead Fingers" and "Deathwretch" all carry the fetid stink of that Slaughter Productions aesthetic, stretched out driftscapes of rotting kosmische synthesizers and clouds of polluted noise collage, cryptic field recordings, peals of sharpened metallic drone slicing through the mix, gargantuan seismic movements encrusted in murk, ghastly EVP-like noises diving through the sonic grtime. Some sort of rusted-out mechanical force grinds forward beneath "Yersinia Pestis"'s slow chaos and chorales of howling mutant insects. A shattered and flattened trip-hop rhythm is scattered beneath undulating waves of chrome thrum for the shuffling void-gaze of "The Pomes Ov Urine", sounding like Scorn in a k-hole. More prominent ceremonial percussion takes over "Anthropophagy (Regurgitation)". Nullity obsession, all the way down. Time-shifted trance music prepareed for an audience covered in open sores. Some iof the most straight-forward death industrial I've ever heard from Petrus, and it's killer stuff. Heavy and fucking menacing, no light breaking through into the depths.

But things are quite different for the second disc, which features the unexpectedly brutal Salvation On Sand Mountain, a cassette release on Danvers State from 2010. This one feels like Stephen Petrus had some major demons to wrestle with - he makes his presence known with waves of distortion and bleary electronic grime washing across the opening of "A Time To Die", but everything fast moves into suffocating power electronics joined by the commanding roar of Richard Pflueger ( a brief member of Clevo bands Integrity and Pale Creation); with sneering anti-natalist voice samples and wind-tunnel chaos, it's a much more violent side of Murderous Vision, for sure. "Sharpened Breath" is a similar collaboration, another grinding death industrial nightmare that has hideous screams couyrtesy of Andrew Grant, aka The Vomit Arsonist. Churning metal-grinding heaviness and hyper-modulated electronic malice. Daniel Potter contributes both lyrics and vocals to the volcanic "The Martyr In My Sight", which coalesces into an ungodly rhythmic force that blends elements of hardcore vocals, industrial metal heavisoity, and all-consuming noise obliteration - this is one of the sickest MV tracks ever. Absolutely bulldozing. Almost as punishing is the bestial electrtonic horrors of both"Response" and "Herbert" that have Petrus teaming up with Lasse Marhaug for a blast of ghost-haunted slow-motion demolition and percussive propulsive power, with some kind of actual metallic riffage oozing through the maelstrom. Ugh. On "I Will Help You Recover", Nyodene D's Aaron Vilk loses his mind amid judering low end bass-blast and spurts of could be automatic gunfire, while Petrus stacks his noise and samples into an impenetrable wall of concretized self-loathing. While pounding oil-drums and shrieks of feedback emanate from below, the enigmatic Clevo power electronics duo Cunting Daughters add their spiteful incantations to "Lies Of The Beast?", reciting writings from Aleister Crowley; another gargantuan mountain of distortion rises on "The Culling", this time with the hysterical, mental ranting of Darin M. Sullivan (the guy behind esoteric Northern Ohio noise outfits like 7 SE7EN 7 and Order Of Melchizedek). Petrus delivers a bizarre cover of Charles Manson's "Mechanical Man", rendering the raw folk of the original into an unidentifiable mass of blackened clatter. It's all capped off by the seventeen-minute long title track, ponderous ritualistic drums pounding away in slo-mo against quivering lines of acrid static, sampled dialogue, transistor transmissions of discorporeal utterances, an oxidized devotional. It's one of the most collaborative albums that I've heard from Murderous Vision, almost every single track featuring Petrus and friends engaged in total annihilation. It's still one of my favorite Murderous Vision releases.

The final disc pairs two Live Bait CDR releases, 2010's Echospore and the three tracks from the 2011 Corpse Abuse split with Skin Graft; their almost an atavistic throwback to the early days of Murderous Vision, a much noisier and abrasive beast. And man, that first album on the disk is one of my favorite Murderous Vision releases period, total lysergic obliteration. A chronological soundtrack to psychedelic mushroom use, Echospore is pure crushing death industrial, echoing the massiveness and churning channeled chaos of upper-tier artists like Genocide Organ, Berighter Death Now but also the crumbling, pulverized space-rock monoliths of late 80s Ramleh as well - it's obvious as soon as opener "Ingest" rolls over you that Petrus is drawing from that now-classic ambient / amp-destroying hostility, it's a massive wall of distorted murk peirced with thorny electronics, distant synth flutter, smears of warped orchestral sound, vortices of howling high-frequency feedback, a hint of so0me monstrous, keening vocal presence perhaps skulking in the deptyhs, just moving into each track like a whirlpool of punishing monochromatic low-fi crush. Ugh. The title track erupts into an even more frenzied mass of deformed rhythmic throb and weird technoid swells, waves of that vast black distortion crashing over everything, the wall of unlit static scraped and scouired with squalls of lacerating synth noise and flattened loops of vague noise and scraps of eerie (almost pretty) melody, howling vocals adrift with bizarre electronic squiggle forms. It goes cosmic on te twenty minute "Wandering In Psilocybe" though, which is where wew get blasted by that stunning overdriven noise-psych that evokes the aforementioned Ramleh (along with Skullflower, too). Pretty vicious / viscous stuff, showing that Petrus could easily move between the wild post-industrial psychedelia, weird noise-metal, frosted dark ambient and these kind of mega-blown power electronics / death industrial ecstasies with ease. Lastly, the three lengthy tracks from the Skin Graft split spew out a similarly raw and speaker-shredding ear assault, though the sound here is rooted in old-school power electronics, menacing sneering vocals pushing through a black caul of distortion while metal presses and converyor belts toil mindlessly over troubling samples and soured squeal and sputter, ultimately exiting in a haze of foul industrial techno minimalism. Wicked.

This has one of the nicest visual packaging presentaions of the series, the three discs housed in a six-panel gatefold digi-sleeve, each disc enclosed in a pocket printed with its own track listing and source credits - for both those that missed the original releases and MV completists, this set is super.