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Been looking forward to this since discovering the band last summer. This Russian trio formed back in 2009 but is appearing here with their first widely available release Erset La Tari, which the band dedicates to two of their primary influences in their liner notes: Abruptum and Mz412. These of course are two of my favorite bands, so it's not surprising that this album would quickly find it's way to my stereo system, filling my air with it's demonic desert ambience and industrial death-worship. As you'd guess from their stated influences, Goatpsalm deal in a kind of black industrial that leans more towards bleak ambience than anything overtly heavy, but they use abtract black metal guitar sounds and passages of mechanzied doom within their soundscapes that do get pretty crushing. The album is made up of just three songs, but two of 'em are twenty minutes apiece, enshrouded in a strange Mesopotamian atmosphere that conjures images of crumbling desert cities and ancient gods stirring beneath the sands.
Opener "Utuk-Xul" enters in a rush of desert wind and shifting sands, as Baal Utukku's guttural vocalizations drift in atop the ominous electric guitar and whirring metallic drones that slowly unwind across the first several minutes of the track. The ritualistic ambience is fleshed out with the addition of electronic noises, chimes and other sounds, as the guitar becomes more warped and abstract, shape shifting from solemn minor key drift to weird chugging riffs, slithering detuned chords and acid-laced leads; this mixture of electronic ambience, monstrous vocal sounds and increasingly deranged black metal guitar increasingly starts to resemble some strange film soundtrack, a feel that really kicks in when the softer delay-soaked guitar melodies and washes of muted orchestral drift start to flow in later in the track, and a slow grinding drumbeat finally starts to materialize, slowly rising up from below, creeping doom-laden drums joined by tabla-esque hand percussion. This shambling death-ritual carries on like this throughout the whole track, lacing the crazed, howling black acid metal with smatterings of toxic dub, additional layers of carefully placed noise, and increasingly deranged vocals.
When the middle track "Bab-Illu" appears, it's as a sort of interlude between the two longer pieces; here, the industrial elements are played down in favor of some intoxicating psychedelic guitar that weaves evocative windswept melodies out of Middle eastern scales, the ghostly melody drifting high above a black fog billowing out of cracks in the floor of desert temples and from out of the mouths of evil Mesopotamian idols.
Lastly, "Under The Trident Of Ramanu" enshrouds you in several more minutes of minimal wind-hiss and shifting sands, before the band erupts into some killer doom-laden black metal, the majestic riffing backed by symphonic synths and carried on heavy, distant drums, but all of it is somewhat obscured by a dust storm veil, the instruments slightly buried in the mix giving this a washed-out, somewhat murky atmosphere. The soaring guitar leads that fly throughout the song sometimes take on a David Gilmour-like feel, soaring spacey solos ascending over the elegiac metal. Later though, it crumbles apart into a much more abstract noisescape of buzzing electrical cables and detuned guitar grind, wailing feedback and ghostly effects, becoming blasted by brutal electronic noise and screaming whammy bar abuse, mutating into this grinding black industrial dirge that transforms the song's majestic feel into an utterly hellish sonic nightmare. Pneumatic presses grind bones to dust, withered voices conjure ancient Persian demons in the distance, and dry winds whip violently around the Arabic guitar figures that return towards the end, filling eye sockets and throats with choking dust and sand as a lone flute appears, drifting off into a charred expanse of keening drones and serpentine rattling.
Recommended to fans of everything from Goatvargr's blackened power electronics to the improvised dungeon madness of Abruptum, the blackest corners of the Cold Meat Industries stable (Archon Satani, Megaptera) to the most amorphous mutations of industrial black metal...
Track Samples:
Sample : Utuk-Xul
Sample : Bab-Illu
Sample : Under The Trident Of Ramanu

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If you asked me to make a list of the most adventurous (and strangest sounding) doom metal bands around right now, both Aarni and Persistence In Mourning would be somewhere at the top of it. The two bands make a good pairing on this new split album that just came out from Witch Sermon, which features five new songs from each outfit, joined by Alessandro Falca's colorful, arcane album art. Both Persistence In Mourning and Aarni infuse their crawling metal with strange occult-tinged imagery and concepts, but they diverge from there into very different directions of slo-mo weirdness.
The first half of the disc features the unique and utterly strange prog-doom of Finland's Aarni, and it's as mystical and convoluted as their previous offerings. The band lurches from heavy, lop-sided doom to bizarre psychedelic soundscapes, where utterly stoned flute solos and gorgeous dark guitar meanders through hazy twilight shadows and field recordings of wild birds and honking geese. Aarni have always been prone to venturing into borderline "pop" sounds within their lysergic doom, and that appears here with the catchy "Land Beyond The Night", with it's part classic doom metal crunch, part gloomy alt rock jangle. But then they follow that bit of quirky doom-pop with the growling deformed sludge of "Lemminkainens Temple", an acid-damaged hallucination that sounds like Saint Vitus playing on broken instruments as they're slowly descending into a severe psilocybin-fueled breakdown. Their last song "Goetia" is the creepiest, the songs of wolves leading into strange verbal invocations and another warped heavy doom-metal freak-out, their heaviest riff dropping in among deep death metal style growls and eerie melodic guitar interludes, someone muttering in Finnish while weird cackling voices emerge in the background, and a church organ plays wildly over a crushing Frost-like dirge and the drummer's wild mix of tribal rhythms and break-beats.
A much uglier sound rears its head when Persistence In Mourning takes over. Creeping through their experimental doom metal shot through with moments of haunted beauty, this is oppressive, isolated heaviness that's based in raw, creeping funereal doom influenced by the likes of Skepticism and Thergothon, but from there Persistence In Mourning drapes it's morose crawling sludge with all kinds of squealing electronic noises and effects. The turgid riffs and minimal drums slowly drift through clouds of amp-squeal and Theremin-like effects, a thick layer of hiss and speaker-crackle covering the music, while the harsh, blackened shrieks drift up from below. The noise elements and simple, pounding drums give this a cold industrial feel, an interesting contrast with the fuzz-soaked primitive doom riffs and eerie chorus-drenched guitar melodies that float over the grungy doom, but then it'll drop off into passages of squelchy prog synth ooze and waves of phased distortion, or stretches of howling feedback and manipulated noise that transform the sound into a pure power electronic-style assault. One of the more interesting PiM tracks featured here is "Purification", whose haunting bass and piano melody, hellish vocals and putrid noise come together like a weird cross between a blackened power electronics assault and an Angelo Badalamenti piece. Just like all of PiM's other recordings, this is recommended stuff if you're a fan of both extreme funeral doom in the Skepticism vein and the electronic sludge mayhem of Bastard Noise.
Track Samples:
Sample : AARNI - Land Beyond The Night
Sample : AARNI - Lemminkainens Tempel
Sample : PERSISTENCE IN MOURNING - A Tangled Mess Of Veins
Sample : PERSISTENCE IN MOURNING - Purification

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Here's another punishing cassette for you insatiable HNW junkies, brought over from one of my new favorite power electronics/industrial noise labels Nil By Mouth. Fans of extreme harsh noise should be familiar with this long-running project, a duo featuring Texan noise artist Richard Ramirez (also of Werewolf Jerusalem/Black Leather Jesus) and Italian artist Cristiano Renzoni (from the HNW project Alo Girl) that has been producing hardcore noise walls on and off for almost two decades. Their love of obscure Euro-horror is the primary inspiration behind the project, and here they pay homage to the cult film Eyes Without A Face; not to be confused with George Franju's haunting 1960 French horror film of the same name, this is a 1994 giallo from legendary Italian sleazemaster Bruno Mattei that was also released as Madness. The film's stylized fedora-sporting murdered, scenes of graphic ocular disfigurement, and suspenseful stalking sequences fuel Gliocchi Dentro's sprawling, obsessive expanses of brutal static crush, filled with lots of textural detail across the tape's thirty-minute length. Each side features half of "Eyes Without A Face", the first primarily made up of a constant churning maelstrom of static, throbbing bass and metallic reverberations, with a patina of shortwave static clinging to the surface. After a while, though, the duo begins to introduce fragments of horrific distorted screaming and shrieking high-end feedback which add a fearful element to their raging noisewall. A few sparse samples from the film appear later as well, primarily as an intro to the b-side, but this track remains consistent in it's crushing, hypnotic HNW approach as well. As the second side approaches the end, the duo steadily increase the deep, low-end rumbling until it grows and builds into a vast oceanic roar, giving the final moments of the piece a dire atmosphere of inexorable doom. Fans of Ramirez's other harsh noise releases (and HNW work in particular) will love it, obviously, as will anyone into the more brutal end of the harsh wall spectrum.
Released in a limited edition of 120 copies, in a bright yellow package design that compliments the aesthetics of the giallo genre that these guys are so obsessed with.

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These two experimental black metal outfits go together nicely on this split 10" Ep from Musicfearsatan, bringing together the twisted, ritual-folk flecked black metal of The Austrasian Goat with the filthy, abstract blackened doom/thrash of the newer band Neige Morte (who also happen to feature former members of Overmars and French chaos-blasters The Flying Worker). Each band coughs up one song, but they're pretty epic, each one running around twelve minutes long.
Up first is The Austrasian Goat's "The Gracious Fall Of The Morning Light", which starts off with the sound of lush acoustic guitar stings strummed slowly over chanting voices and glacial drums, a kind of narcotized doom-folk streaked with gorgeous slide guitar and nocturnal ambience. It's blackly beautiful, with that dark twangy majesty that the newer Earth material has, but even more ominous and threatening as the acoustic guitar burns off and out of the void comes a killer black metal assault, the blasting drums surging up over the wasp-swarm guitars and scathing shrieking vocals. This assault is formed around one central riff that repeats over and over for several minutes, whipping the song into a ferocious black hymn before dropping off once again back into the malevolent folk music, more apocalyptic here than before, lashed by vaguely Middle Eastern melodies and a chorus of voices singing as one as the song slowly fades away...
Neige Morte's "We Who Are The Worm" begins with the slippery down tuned growl of slackened guitar strings bending and scraping against the body of the instrument, forming an off-kilter dirge that seems to struggle to rise up out of the slime, but when it finally does (right when the drums start to creep in), the sound lurches forward into a putrid, messed-up shamble of black doom. These first few minutes are totally deformed, a much more damaged sounding sort of noise-infested blackened sludge than I expected (more like something you'd hear from a band like Alkerdeel), but it's not long before Neige Morte starts to pull together into a blasting black metal assault, suddenly taking off on a blazing rush of noisy tremolo riffing and shrieked vocals and awesome hyperfast drumming that sounds more "power violence" than black metal, ending the side in a cyclone of swarming black blast.

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I'm now stocking a selection of high-quality embroidered patches that have been designed and produced by the Polish industrial imprint Beast Of Prey, which range from shield-shaped designs that feature various occult/esoteric symbols, to logo patches for power electronics and black industrial artists.
This design features the iconic Symbol Of Chaos set against a silver garland and black background. The patch measures 8 x 6 centimeters, and is embroidered in black, silver and grey thread. As with all of Beast Of Prey's patch designs, this is a high quality piece that's durably constructed.

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I'm now stocking a selection of high-quality embroidered patches that have been designed and produced by the Polish industrial imprint Beast Of Prey, which range from shield-shaped designs that feature various occult/esoteric symbols, to logo patches for power electronics and black industrial artists.
This design features the "Leviathan Cross", the alchemical symbol for Sulphur (or Brimstone); adopted by Lavey in the 1960's as one of his Satanic emblems (and prominently featured in his Satanic Bible, this image combines an adversarial symbol with the infinity of the Ouroboros, set against a silver garland and black background. The patch measures 8 x 6 centimeters, and is embroidered in black, silver and grey thread. As with all of Beast Of Prey's patch designs, this is a high quality piece that's durably constructed.

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I'm now stocking a selection of high-quality embroidered patches that have been designed and produced by the Polish industrial imprint Beast Of Prey, which range from shield-shaped designs that feature various occult/esoteric symbols, to logo patches for power electronics and black industrial artists.
This design features the image of the Iron Cross, a symbol of strength set against a silver garland and black background. The patch measures 8 x 6 centimeters, and is embroidered in black, silver and grey thread. As with all of Beast Of Prey's patch designs, this is a high quality piece that's durably constructed.

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I'm now stocking a selection of high-quality embroidered patches that have been designed and produced by the Polish industrial imprint Beast Of Prey, which range from shield-shaped designs that feature various occult/esoteric symbols, to logo patches for power electronics and black industrial artists.
This design features the classic inverted Pentagram, one of the oldest occult images in human history, heralded by the influential French occultist Eliphas Levi as "...a symbol of evil...it overturns the proper order of things and demonstrates the triumph of matter over spirit. It is the goat of lust attacking the heavens with its horns." With this design, the inverted Pentagram appears against a silver garland and black background. The patch measures 8 x 6 centimeters, and is embroidered in black, silver and grey thread. As with all of Beast Of Prey's patch designs, this is a high quality piece that's durably constructed.

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I'm now stocking a selection of high-quality embroidered patches that have been designed and produced by the Polish industrial imprint Beast Of Prey, which range from shield-shaped designs that feature various occult/esoteric symbols, to logo patches for power electronics and black industrial artists.
This design features the symbol of the Black Sun, an image that represents power, knowledge, universal consciousness that's found in various sectors of neo-paganism, Indo-European esotericism, fascist iconography, and modern occultism, as well as appearing in the works of such artists as Coil, Death In June, Von Thronstahl, Dead Can Dance and Scottish sludge band Black Sun (obviously). This design features the Black Sun embroidered in white thread against a black background, and measures 8 cm across. As with all of Beast Of Prey's patch designs, this is a high quality piece that's durably constructed.

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I'm now stocking a selection of high-quality embroidered patches that have been designed and produced by the Polish industrial imprint Beast Of Prey, which range from shield-shaped designs that feature various occult/esoteric symbols, to logo patches for power electronics and black industrial artists.
This patch features the "B" logo in a black triangle from the Polush power electronics/harsh industrial band Brandkommando. This outfit has been growing in popularity over the past few years among the PE/extreme noise crowd, thanks to their confrontational imagery and sonic attack, vicious anti-political outlook, and virulent misanthropy. If you're already a fan of Brandkommando's hateful apocalyptic power electronics, you'll instantly recognize this image. This design features the Brandkommando logo embroidered in white thread against a black background, and measures 8 cm on each side. As with all of Beast Of Prey's patch designs, this is a high quality piece that's durably constructed.

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When I started listening to Anthony Shaw's harsh noise work, it was from his Cold Comfort project, which produced an excellent videocassette release last year that combined his minimal static harsh noise walls with eye-melting video/cathode tube distortions. That led me to dig into his other projects (of which there are many), my favorite being the zombie-obsessed conceptual harsh noise of Burial Ground. Specifically, Burial Ground draws it's inspiration from Romero's iconic trilogy of hardcore zombie-gore films, and has released three cassettes that deal with each of the films. By the time that I discovered these, the Day Of The Dead cassette was already sold out, but I was able to get some of the other two Burial Ground titles for the shop. This stuff is pure wall, with very little dynamic movement; pretty much for hardcore HNW aficionados only...
Night Of The Living Dead contains two twelve minute long tracks of brutal electronic overload, each one starting off with an instantly recognizable, iconic sound bite from Romero's 1968 hardcore indie-horror classic, Night Of The Living Dead explodes into a black maelstrom of extreme distortion and feedback, massive rumbling frequencies blasted with an ocean of squelchy amp-mulch that constantly rises and falls over the duration of the track. This huge roaring wall of noise seethes will all sorts of fluctuating noise and concrete-mixer crunch, the track moving constantly through varying levels of intensity into fast-moving, near junk-metal levels of sonic avalanche that come crashing down in an infinite loop of immolating, city-disintegrating power. It's enhanced by a massive low-end heaviness that situates this closer to the electronic chaos-storms of Japan's most savage noise artists and the more destructive crunch-trances of Vomir, Indch Libertine and The Cherry Point; fans of the latter artist in particular will want to check out Burial Ground's similarly horror/splatter-obsessed harsh noise sculptures. It's much more "active" and chaotic compared to the other Burial Ground tape that I picked up.
Limited to 30 copies, the tape label smeared in black ink and streaks of blood-red paint, packaged in a nicely designed black and white sleeve.

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When I started listening to Anthony Shaw's harsh noise work, it was from his Cold Comfort project, which produced an excellent videocassette release last year that combined his minimal static harsh noise walls with eye-melting video/cathode tube distortions. That led me to dig into his other projects (of which there are many), my favorite being the zombie-obsessed conceptual harsh noise of Burial Ground. Specifically, Burial Ground draws it's inspiration from Romero's iconic trilogy of hardcore zombie-gore films, and has released three cassettes that deal with each of the films. By the time that I discovered these, the Day Of The Dead cassette was already sold out, but I was able to get some of the other two Burial Ground titles for the shop. This stuff is pure wall, with very little dynamic movement; pretty much for hardcore HNW aficionados only...
The second of Burial Ground's harsh noise-wall homage series to Romero's canonical trilogy of hardcore zombie splatter films, Dawn Of The Dead is a sixteen minute construction of extreme distorto-roar that begins with a classic piece of dialogue from Richard France taken from the beginning of the film, and then proceeds into the massive rumbling inferno of low-end noise and distortion that continues throughout the entire track. It's a violent, roiling mass of bass-crackle and tectonic roar that barely changes over the duration of the piece, and what changes do occur tend to be very subtle, appearing as barely perceptible shifts in volume, tone and texture and faint mechanical sounds and vibrations that reveal themselves only upon deeper listening. Of course, I'm happy enough just to crank this motherfucker to eleven and allow Burial Ground's crushing distortion-trance to roll over me like one hundred tons of debris, ash, and concrete from a collapsing building. Pure flattening distortion.
Limited to thirty copies.

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The latest album from Dapnom presents some of the most terrifying and contemplative blackened electronic music ever from this French outfit. Over the past half decade that I've been listening to Dapnom, the music has evolved from a minimal dark ambient approach into something much more complex and detailed, and with Paralipomènes, this project is exploring unique new territory in infernal electronics.
The surreal black underworld of Paralipomènes À La Divine Comédie is almost completely unlike anything else I've heard from other practitioners of black ambience in the French underground. The album is filled with phantasmagoric soundscapes seething with activity, a totally different approach than that of Silcharde's minimal monochromatic rumblings or the sampler-driven hellscapes of Melek-Tha. If anything, Dapnom's music on this disc is closer to certain sectors of minimal electronica, with all of the delicate bleeping and metallic filigree hovering in between the terrifying blasts of orchestral power, and the glitchy fragments of rhythm and pulse that are threaded throughout the passages of dreadful dungeon ambience. This music is definitely not assembled in any random fashion. The soft clanging sounds of hammers slowly striking sheets of dull metal echo in the background, offering a steady ritualistic pace for the low, thrumming drones and high-frequency sonic granules that rush across the vast black plains of the opening track, leading the way as screams of agony suddenly swell from below, riding on a wave of squealing, carefully manipulated feedback and the thunderous roar of dissonant orchestral sound. Those orchestral sounds continue to appear throughout Paralipomènes..., a cacophonic din of de-tuned strings, warped horns, cymbals and other percussion that erupt into shocking blasts of malevolent atonality,. Shocking enough to almost make me leap out of my chair. When Dapnom's music is in a calmer, it can resemble the more minimal improv experiments of AMM, very abstract and exploratory, bits of metallic scrape and rattling percussion twisting around field recordings of ambient room noise and street life, garbled glitchery worming through oceanic waves of cymbal hiss and aged music-box melodies shattered into broken pieces. But these eerie, subdued passages are always a segue way for the explosions of black-mass horror that are at the center of Dapnom's sound, fearsome blasts of symphonic Ligeti-esque string sections, shrieking sax-like reeds and processed electronic drones swarming together into plumes of carnivorous energy, chorales of psychotic voices rising skyward as they sing in inhuman tongues, and children's choirs buried beneath layers of monstrous chanting and ominous chimes and blood-stained violins. This is chilling music, somewhere in between dark abstract electronica and the most diabolical strains of black industrial, and definitely a new level of terror from this long running project. The album looks fantastic, too; the digpack and four-page booklet are beautifully designed with metallic gold ink lettering, and include more of that great Art Nouveau-influenced artwork from Metastazis. Limited to five hundred copies...
Track Samples:
Sample : Contemplation
Sample : Repentance
Sample : Supplication

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Along with the Owlscry cassette, I've also picked up another interesting experimental black metal tape this week from Dead Medium, this one from a band called Depths that play desolate backwoods black metal that mixes together catchy, crude BM, traces of violent atavistic hardcore and infernal noise.
The opener "Flesh Into Scars" is a din of deafening drones and distant drums smashing away furiously way off in the background, almost totally obscured by a loud whirring layer of amp-hum that makes this sound more like some old UK industrial drone rock tape than a black metal release, at first. But then it turns in to more of a black metal sound after a few minutes, the song moving between a furiously noisy wall of thrash colored by a deeply sorrowful minor key guitar part, and the howling, echoing screams of the singer, with this slower, jangly sound worked in that makes me think of a much more ramshackle-sounding Lifelover. The violence increases quite a bit on "Primera Alma", a faster, more frenzied black metal song that still ends up dropping off into more of that wonderful gloomy doom-tinged heaviness, the bass guitar taking over with a creeping doom riff as clouds of feedback, scraped strings and other guitar noises rise like trails of opium smoke off of the track. Then the tape starts heading down into deeper, more abstract levels of improvised black ambience, the drummer wildly improvising while monstrous screams and huge, brain-blotting clouds of amp-drone fill the air; the last several minutes of the side finds itself squarely in the realm of the free-form black filth of Abruptum and Pentemple, and it sounds fucking killer.
The b-side unleashes a cyclone in "Black Dog Nights", which comes screaming off this tape in a blast of necro-hardcore that is totally unexpected, but completely awesome, a super-murky blackened punk assault that's as furious and catchy as anything by Malveillance or Ives, with a huge bone-rattling breakdown, gaseous shrieks and a throbbing bass-line leading the song into the maw of oblivion, finally exploding into a hectic HC blast at the end that sounds like Void filtered through the slime of early BM. Very nice. The last song "To Be Nothing" finishes the tape with a slower, moody dirge that has an almost folkish feel, waltzing drums and a melancholy main riff madly circling around the final minutes of the cassette.
I've really dug all of the tapes that I've grabbed from Dead Medium thus far, and fans of the raw, low-fi horrors found on Legion Blotan/Turgid Animal should really check this label out…

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Just discovered this set of postcards from the Japanese death/gore metal artist Toshihiro Egawa, and I couldn't pass 'em up. Released in a limited run by the Tokyo-based extreme art gallery Galeria De Muerte, the Invitation Of Death Metal postcard set was a commemorative item printed in conjunction with Egawa's solo art exhibition of the same name that was hosted by the Galeria in 2007. I've always thought of Egawa as sort of a Japanese answer to legendary British illustrator Dan Seagrave, who was responsible for some of the greatest death/grind album covers ever; Egawa's richly detailed and nightmarish paintings have a similar feel as Seagraves when he works with color, and his black and white work is comparable to the spiky monstrosities of the Riddick Brothers. Egawa has ultimately created his own unique style though, and is one of the most highly skilled illustrators working within the death metal field right now; I'd kill to see a book of his collected work, if one were ever to be published.
The six postcards that are included in this set feature his album art taken from releases by Purulent Infection, Devourment, Partisan Turbine, Vomit Remnants, Impure, and Pyrexia; some are small-scale reproductions, others fill up the entire card. All look fantastic, though, with high quality paintings of pestilent, slavering corpse-beasts, demonic maggots, apocalyptic landscapes, triptychs of nightmarish skulls puking rivers of semen-like ooze over clusters of defleshed skulls, inter-dimensional tomb-cities, and fantastic Boschian scenes of hellish industry. Perfect for scrawling out a death threat, apocalyptic prophecy, or a note to your girlfriend while travelling in Thailand.

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Eibon's self-titled debut is now available as a vinyl re-issue by Iconoclast...
Here's release number deux from the Parisian doom band Eibon, which we've had floating around here in the Crucial Blast shop for a while but never got around to actually putting together a review for it. I pulled this disc out recently and remembered how bitching this short but pulverizing collection of songs is, so here we go...this is the first full release from the band, following a split that they did back in 2007 with Hangman's Chair (also from France, and also stupidly crushing - you doomsters need to check them out too!), and here unleash their black tar heaviness across two epic songs, each one spreading out for more than ten minutes, each a pummeling, bass-heavy wall of lumbering doom with moments of creepy atmosphere. the band has a couple of former members of the band Horrors Of The Black Museum, yet another French doom band who I'm a huge fan of, and while Eibon doesn't incorporate the crazy Goblin-esque progginess and horror movie soundtrack elements that made Horrors Of The Black Museum so unique, there are some subtler atmospheric sounds that seep into these songs.
At their heaviest, this is pure molten death-infected doom, with massive detuned guitars grinding across lumbering ultra heavy drumming, the vocalist spewing horrific snarling screams, some Eyehategod, old school doomdeath, and classic European doom metal all worked into their sound, with streaks of hellish feedback and droning low-end buzz crawling over the chugging dirge, never getting too slow, instead lumbering forward in a massive pounding groove, sometimes slipping into eerie acoustic passages, or drifting into fields of backwards tape noise, sampled opera vocals, bleak psychedelic guitar or atmospheric ambience, but always returning to that incredibly crushing dirge.
The second track "Staring At The Abyss" is a bit more varied, opening up unexpectedly with the desolate strummed melody of an acoustic guitar, but that is quickly devoured by a black wave of distorted doom, a crushing metallic version of the same acoustic riff that started the song off, only now it's insanely heavy and blown-out and crawling. Some triumphant guitar melodies begin to emerge, along with bits of dissonant detuned guitar and those scathing vocals, and after a couple of minutes the song quiets into a weird shuffling psych dirge, clean meandering psychedelic guitar and spacey Hawkwind-ish electronic effects emerge for a few minutes before the band crashes back into that crushing central riff, delving even deeper into the slow trudging heaviness before the song begins to gradually dissolve in a fog of minimal drone...
Track Samples:
Sample : Asleep and Threateing
Sample : Staring at the Abyss

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The second album from French doom metal outfit Fatum Elisum, Homo Nihilis again delivers an often harrowing combination of regal, classical doom and psychotic blackness that these guys have staked out since their 2009 debut. This time the look and feel of Fatum Elisum's dismal heaviness is even more disturbing, with singer EndE illustrating the album with his unsettling expressionistic paintings, and the band casting a grim, hateful gaze across the whole of the album…
Opener "Pulvis et Umbra Sumus" begins with the eerie sound of male voices joined together in Latin chant, their singing layered into a liturgical hymn that leads into the crushing doom metal of the song proper. Once the band kicks in, it's bone-rattling heaviness from the start, a classic European death/doom sound that touches on the epic misery of early Cathedral, Paradise Lost and My Dying Bride with slow, solemn guitar leads woven around the down tuned riffs, the band moving at a steady saurian pace and fronted by the almost operatic vocals of lead singer EndE. As with their last album, those vocals are intensely emotional and overwrought, delivered with dramatic vocal melodies and they fit this music perfectly with a feeling of funereal majesty. When they switch over to the deeper, more guttural death metal growling, the transformation is seamless, shifting the sound into a more monstrous massiveness. There are also parts where the band drops off into long stretches of somber guitar joined only by EndE's hushed growling, which in these moments vaguely reminds me of Carl McCoy from Fields Of The Nephilim. They pull off these shifts in intensity well, injecting a ton of emotion into their blackened doom without getting all weepy like so many bands do who try to tap into that early 90's Brit-doom sound. If anything, Fatum Elisum sound like a band at the moment of toppling over into monstrous darkness, their sorrowful, often gorgeous melodies and impassioned vocals often morphing into the crazed passages of death metal style riffage and blasting drums that appear on "The Twilight Prophet" and the title track. It's EndE's vocals that really give this it's insane feel, though, as he moves from Latin vocals, passages of intense crooning and guttural roars, shifting between English, Latin, French, and psychotic garble sometimes all in the same song, lending the music a distinctly schizophrenic quality. It hits a fever pitch on the last song "East Of Eden", the band suddenly blasts off into a jangling swarm of black metal as EndE's vocals rise up in a hysteric shriek reminiscent of Silencer, delivering the album's most fearsome performance.
Crushing, idiosyncratic death/doom, recommended for those with a taste for the sonic torment found with the likes of Ataraxie, Mourning Beloveth, Evoken, Paradise Lost, and early My Dying Bride...
Track Samples:
Sample : The Twilight Prophet
Sample : Homo Nihilis

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I've been trying to get this record in stock for years, but until now it had remained somewhat elusive. Not to be confused with the more well known metallic crust band from California that released stuff on Relapse, this Final Conflict came from Minneapolis and only managed to leave this one four-song 7" behind before disappearing in the early 80s. But what an Ep this is. Released in 1983 on Reflex Records, In The Family boasts a hideously crude cover that depicts a gang of red-eyed demons, short songs fueled on familial dysfunction and anti-social aggression, and a heavy nihilistic streak running through it. This is one ugly fuckin' hardcore record, dark and violent and rendered in a noisy low-fi assault of Midwestern thrash that was captured to tape by a young Bob Mould of Husker Du fame. It's the kind of early 80s psycho-core that I'm chronically obsessed with, a three-chord bash 'em up with a crazed front man whose guttural screaming is quite a bit harsher than yer typical suburban HC yowler, tinny buzzsaw guitars, trashcan drums flying at high speed. Ugly, but catchy; just check out the song "Your" for a primo example of catchy, skuzzy skull-damage. One of the more obscure 7"s to come out of the early 80s American hardcore underground, but one that fans of the weirder, more dissonant 80's hardcore of bands like Void, Die Kreuzen, Mecht Mensch and United Mutation will definitely dig. Recommended.
Track Samples:
Sample : In The Family
Sample : The Lines Have Faded
Sample : Self-Defeated

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Corephallism are a perfect match for Gnaw Their TOngues as they both share the same predilection for sexualized horror and pitch-black atmospherics, while utilizing distinctly different approaches to their extreme blackened industrial. This new split 10" Ep brings the two bands together, one on each side, presented in a striking black and white sleeve with lurid images of severe rope bondage and bruised flesh.
Corephallism (aka Shane Broderick of nudist power electronics squad Twodeadsluts Onegoodfuck) offers two tracks on the a-side, beginning with the solemn drones of "Abandonment" that spread out on clouds of gleaming synth, soft funereal notes turning within the hum of the keyboards. Huge rumbling waves of low-end noise and extremely distorted vocals slowly flow in, hellish, monstrous utterances obscured by crushing feedback and amp-filth, but low in the mix so that these violent sounds never overwhelm the ominous droning synths. The second track "Rapes Of Convenience" is similarly constructed, flowing right out of the first song on more drifting sheets of keyboard hum and extended feedback, appearing at first as some massive dark ambient soundscape, but then overtaken by those vicious ultra-distorted vocals and stentorian bass throb. It evolves into a nightmare of slowly pulsating blackened power electronics, dipping off into brief stretches of minimal buzzing before rising up again in a massive burst of infernal electronic drone. Great stuff that finishes far too soon; fans of the jet-black PE/death ambient of Theologian and Prurient need to listen to this pronto.
On the other side Gnaw Their Tongues presents one long track called "A Moral Guide To Self-Castration And Necrophilia", which begins with the sounds of rumbling percussion, ominous reverberations from beneath the earth's surface, mechanical rattling, all of which slowly comes together, congealing into the hissing, grinding throb of some malevolent engine. As it builds, the track erupts with bursts of distorted doom-laden bass and gibbering demonic vocals, blasts of orchestral terror and pounding metallic percussion, horrific gasping sounds and howls of severe agony echoing across the background, and strains of eerie feedback trailing through the lightless murk. A bit more abstract than GTT's recent Per Flagellum album, but as nightmarish and evil as you'd expect from this Dutch black industrial project.

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Been looking forward to this since discovering the band last summer. This Russian trio formed back in 2009 but is appearing here with their first widely available release Erset La Tari, which the band dedicates to two of their primary influences in their liner notes: Abruptum and Mz412. These of course are two of my favorite bands, so it's not surprising that this album would quickly find it's way to my stereo system, filling my air with it's demonic desert ambience and industrial death-worship. As you'd guess from their stated influences, Goatpsalm deal in a kind of black industrial that leans more towards bleak ambience than anything overtly heavy, but they use abtract black metal guitar sounds and passages of mechanzied doom within their soundscapes that do get pretty crushing. The album is made up of just three songs, but two of 'em are twenty minutes apiece, enshrouded in a strange Mesopotamian atmosphere that conjures images of crumbling desert cities and ancient gods stirring beneath the sands.
Opener "Utuk-Xul" enters in a rush of desert wind and shifting sands, as Baal Utukku's guttural vocalizations drift in atop the ominous electric guitar and whirring metallic drones that slowly unwind across the first several minutes of the track. The ritualistic ambience is fleshed out with the addition of electronic noises, chimes and other sounds, as the guitar becomes more warped and abstract, shape shifting from solemn minor key drift to weird chugging riffs, slithering detuned chords and acid-laced leads; this mixture of electronic ambience, monstrous vocal sounds and increasingly deranged black metal guitar increasingly starts to resemble some strange film soundtrack, a feel that really kicks in when the softer delay-soaked guitar melodies and washes of muted orchestral drift start to flow in later in the track, and a slow grinding drumbeat finally starts to materialize, slowly rising up from below, creeping doom-laden drums joined by tabla-esque hand percussion. This shambling death-ritual carries on like this throughout the whole track, lacing the crazed, howling black acid metal with smatterings of toxic dub, additional layers of carefully placed noise, and increasingly deranged vocals.
When the middle track "Bab-Illu" appears, it's as a sort of interlude between the two longer pieces; here, the industrial elements are played down in favor of some intoxicating psychedelic guitar that weaves evocative windswept melodies out of Middle eastern scales, the ghostly melody drifting high above a black fog billowing out of cracks in the floor of desert temples and from out of the mouths of evil Mesopotamian idols.
Lastly, "Under The Trident Of Ramanu" enshrouds you in several more minutes of minimal wind-hiss and shifting sands, before the band erupts into some killer doom-laden black metal, the majestic riffing backed by symphonic synths and carried on heavy, distant drums, but all of it is somewhat obscured by a dust storm veil, the instruments slightly buried in the mix giving this a washed-out, somewhat murky atmosphere. The soaring guitar leads that fly throughout the song sometimes take on a David Gilmour-like feel, soaring spacey solos ascending over the elegiac metal. Later though, it crumbles apart into a much more abstract noisescape of buzzing electrical cables and detuned guitar grind, wailing feedback and ghostly effects, becoming blasted by brutal electronic noise and screaming whammy bar abuse, mutating into this grinding black industrial dirge that transforms the song's majestic feel into an utterly hellish sonic nightmare. Pneumatic presses grind bones to dust, withered voices conjure ancient Persian demons in the distance, and dry winds whip violently around the Arabic guitar figures that return towards the end, filling eye sockets and throats with choking dust and sand as a lone flute appears, drifting off into a charred expanse of keening drones and serpentine rattling.
Recommended to fans of everything from Goatvargr's blackened power electronics to the improvised dungeon madness of Abruptum, the blackest corners of the Cold Meat Industries stable (Archon Satani, Megaptera) to the most amorphous mutations of industrial black metal...
Track Samples:
Sample : Utuk-Xul
Sample : Bab-Illu
Sample : Under The Trident Of Ramanu

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Esthaetique is the second album from French one-man black metal band Grisatre, operated by a guy who goes by the name Rokkr. I haven't heard Grisatre's last album on Dusktone, but this new disc is pretty fantastic, blending together Rokkr's bleak existential musings with furious blackened heaviness, swathes of gloomy twilight ambience, and a knack for dramatic songwriting and melody. The album begins with a beautiful piano intro that blends in with synth-strings and woodwind sounds, setting the somber, introspective mood for the rest of the songs to follow. Then it's on to "L'Abstrait", where Grisatre balances furious blasting and chiming majestic riffs with slower passages that have all of the downbeat gorgeousness of the best gloom-filled post punk; like any good band in this particular realm of black metal, the ghost of Faith/Pornography-era Cure lurks beneath the surface of the regal tremolo riffs and blasting double-bass drumming (just listen to the slower sections of "L'Impression" for a perfect example). The riffs and melodies are fairly simple in form, but are intense and emotional, constantly moving from one part to the next as this epic song travels through varying passages of gloomy, driving black metal, occasionally laced with passages of black ambience and ethereal minor key guitar drifting all alone through the dimness. There's hordes of bands doing a similar style of sorrowful, utterly melancholic black metal, but Grisatre stand out simply by writing fantastic, extremely catchy songs (as long and involved as they might be), crafting a winding narrative with each of these sprawling tracks that connect with the ideas of introspection, self-discovery and the sub-conscious mind that Rokkr explores in the lyrics and sounds on Esthaetique.
This album definitely fits in with the sort of moody, gloom-rock tinged black metal that Dusktone seems to be specializing in lately, and it's turned in to a new favorite of mine that's been getting as much play as other recent offerings in the field from Trist, Lost Inside, and Cold Body Radiation. Recommended. Comes in a digipack with an eight page booklet.
Track Samples:
Sample : L'Abstrait
Sample : Opus Demens

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According to the label, this is the final release from Griz+zlor after six years of activity, signing off with two hour long cassettes filled with the sort of murky, tectonic HNW that this project has primarily worked with. Black Summer Each side of the spray painted tapes features a different track (titled, in order: "A Coffin Full Of Hope", "Paint It Black", "Always Wear A Smile", "Last Gasp") that evokes the general macabre atmosphere that tends to cling to Griz+zlor's recordings. I haven't listened to a whole lot of this project's recordings, but what I have heard has been very consistent in how impenetrably bleak these noise-walls sound, and the material on this set is no different. For over a half-hour, you are enveloped in a distant washed-out rumble of corroded low-end drone, similar to the sound of an airliner roaring through a storm in the middle of the night, or the colossal reverberations of whole cities collapsing into the earth as heard from ten miles away. Compared to a lot of the harsh noise wall material that I listen to, this is borderline ambient. In fact, I can't think of anyone else in the "HNW" field right now that sounds as subdued and as minimalist as Griz+zlor does on this set, although as with any quality HNW, immersive listening at high volume and/or with the use of headphones will reveal some ominous-sounding activity obscured by the vast murky avalanche-drone, mainly in the form of eerie foghorn-like tones and minor key chordal movement that occurs way, way out on the periphery of the sound. All in all, though, the sprawling pitch-black rumblescape offered here is meditative, even relaxing, if you're the sort that finds your self zoning out to the sound of black locomotives rumbling through the twilight and the distant roar of an all-devouring maelstrom. These tapes are perfect for late-night mind-blot, capturing nothing else than the pure sound of dissolution and collapse, the minute roar of decomposition magnified a thousand times, the writhing of maggots on a corpse rotting in the July sun amplified into a hypnotic hum of absolute disintegration.
The package design for this tape set fits these minimal black noisescapes perfectly, housing the cassettes in an oversized jewel case with a large j-card cover screen printed with murky black and green ink on both sides, the ink layered in such a way that some of the black print almost seems to have a varnish-like quality to it. Very cool. Limited to ninety copies.

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This Southern Cali outfit debuts here with a ten song 7" of ultra-heavy blastcore, and it's one of the better debut records I've heard this year. Mashing together a bunch of sounds that include old-school metallic grindcore, pure hardcore, and Nawlins-style sludge with blasts of industrial noise, soaring end-time atmospherics and a guitarist who's prone to spitting out all kinds of killer Greg Ginn-style skronk and demented riffing, these guys have offered up a very cool conglom of freaked-out crustmetal with this Ep . The songs are all anti-social screeds with a really deep misanthropic bent, hurtling pell-mell through explosions of super-heavy grind and whirlwind blast violence into deranged hardcore and locomotive D-beat assaults that'll detonate in under twenty seconds, then suddenly slip into a bruising Sabbathy dirge that comes from out of nowhere, or a short passage of lung-scraping amp noise. The production on this is top-notch, too; thick, heavy, massive, their bludgeoning power unleashed at full force. Terminally vicious doom/grind of the highest order...
Limited to 310 copies on black vinyl.
Track Samples:
Sample : Anvil
Sample : Servile
Sample : Numen

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More classic early Integrity being unearthed here, specifically from the period of time when the band featured drummer Dave Araca who died of a brain aneurysm in 1991. Kingdom Of Heaven collects three songs, two from the Les 120 Journees De Sodome split 7" with Virginia devilcore band Mayday. It's here that the band was evolving from the heavy, Judge-influenced hardcore of their earliest material into a vicious fusion of crossover thrash, echoing GISM-inspired weirdness, vague treaces of primitive black/death, and some of the most fearsome lyrical visions to ever waft off of a "hardcore" record, made up of hallucinations of Gnostic wisdom and sodomatic angels and dying man-gods. The split with Mayday was one of the first Integrity records that I bought back when I was first getting into the band, and these songs still emanate a cold, demonic power. There's the weird, blackened terror of "Kingdom Of Heaven" with it's saturated distorted riffs and that squealing drill-tone noise, the crushing hardcore laced with metallic guitar leads that builds to a crescendo of infernal majesty at the end, Dwid howling skyward in that devilish reverb-soaked scream, "...let me be / salivating demons crawling through me / I.N.R.I., the stake of the unsavory martyr / sphincter taken down from the cedar...". Followed by the chugging, Frostian massiveness of "Rebirth", where their syrupy thrash metal riffage stomps through a dank cavern limned in blasphemous cruelty, nearly lost in a haze of extreme treble and scummy distortion. The song "Eighteen" is one of Integrity's weirder early songs, starting off as this off-kilter sort of Joy Division-like gloom rock, but then quickly erupting into this slow, massively chunky metal riff, Dwid's vocals switching back and forth between that eerie, slightly off-key crooning and that gnarled roar. These songs still haunt me, twenty years later. This (along with all of the other Integrity reissues that have sprung up over the past few years) should be required listening for anyone into blackened, evil hardcore. The record features all new artwork from Dwid, and has a very cool-looking use of spot-varnish printing which has been appearing on many of the newer Integrity records. Includes a digital download code.

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A new vinyl version of the Abandon cassette that came out on Primal Vomit, released on a single-sided 12" by Prison Tatt in a silk-screened sleeve. Abandon is the first release from Ives, a scorching crusty blackened punk duo from Florida headed by the guy behind the Primal Vomit tape label. Fans of all of that skuzzoid necro punk stuff that I'm obsessed with (Malveillance, Akitsa, Noia, etc) will LOVE these guys, as Ives delivers that sort of filth with aplomb. Abandon alternates between brutal D-beat driven thrash and primitive, violent punk riffs and furious chaotic blasting, with an adept use of tempo changes and sudden buildups into rocking mid-tempo sections that fucking SLAY. The vocals switch off between hoarse, harsh howls of aggression and higher pitched screams, and altogether this reminds me a lot of both the newer punk-heavy Darkthrone work and the messy, cavernous savagery of Akitsa.
Opener "The Taste Of Severity" kicks into fast feral crust, while "Burning The Incense, Amanita Virosa" initially takes shape as a lumbering slab of blackened doom for the first few minutes with a slow punishing riff, then rips into a mix of fast violent hardcore and blasting black metal. "Lost In The Pleasures Of Moonlight" also switches back and forth between that total black blast with a killer tremolo riff , and rocking mid tempo punk. The epic last track "Abandon" is quite different, though, the first few minutes has a blackened doom riff undulating in the shadows while bits of eerie violin, acoustic guitar and mandolin drift overhead, and then the music suddenly surges upward in a black eruption of galloping thrashy black metal. It later drops into a halting dirge for a moment then returns to the blast as the string instruments come back in and the song becomes a stirring folk-flecked blackthrash trance, that mandolin way out in front, the black metal finally dropping away leaving just the mandolin and acoustic guitar playing a creepy atonal folk tune for another couple of minutes, then comes back into the folky black metal again that finally fades out at the end.
Released in a limited edition of two hundred copies.
Track Samples:
Sample : Burning The Incense, Amanita Virosa
Sample : The Taste Of Severity

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Just dug up TWO of the last copies ever of this rare tape...
After all of the sickening black industrial depravity that I've been bombaring my skull with this week, I had to take a couple of minutes to adjust to the extreme minimalism of Iw's Death Patterns. One of the neat-looking limited edition tapes that I recently picked up from the Auris Apothecary imprint, Death Patterns at first seemed like it was going to venture into the sort of dimly lit, claustrophobic sound environments explored by the likes of Lustmord and Lull. The first track "Shimmering In The Presence" will certainly appeal to fans of that sort of lightless cthonic drone with the early passages of billowing metallic whir and shimmer and hints of time-stretched orchestral strings thrumming in some black Stygian abyss. It's not long, however, before Iw starts to introduce other sounds into the mix that take this in a slightly different direction. A soft looped melody appears, slipping in and out of focus while pieces of metal are slowly hammered and left to echo in the gloom, and various figures begin to repeat themselves, revealing a strange kind of order to these extremely slow-moving fields of isolatinist darkness. As we get deeper into the recording, this starts to remind me more and more of the ritualistic black ambience of the Aural Hypnox label and artists like Halo Manash, Aeoga, and Zoät-Aon. The second track "Prepared Patterns In Death" is also very mysterious, a murky haze of distant tremors and glacial tones that make me think that I'm hearing the fading blur of an experimental chamber piece being performed from across a great distance in an immense underground chamber with bits of echoing harmonium, low horn-like drones, and swells of metallic shimmer fusing together. More of these faded orchestral murmurs appear on the b-side of the cassette, with "Should We Become Too Powerful" resembling a passage from a Ligeti piece being played back at quarter-speed across a vast mountain range in the middle of the night, and "A Cancer To Spare Us" blending immense stretched oboe-like tones, mysterious far-off howls and organ drones into a tenebrous haze. I was pretty impressed with this dose of vaporous, starless drone music from Iw; fans of the abyssal psych-drones of Robe, Warmth and Halo Manash should check this out. The tape comes in a soft plastic case with black and white numerical images wrapped around the case.

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Thank Christ for Handmade Birds. If it wasn't for this label, I doubt I would have ever found out about Key, at least not until well after their all-too-limited releases would have slipped far from my grasping fingers. I'd somehow remained totally clueless as to the existence of this project even though I've really been getting into the Finnish experimental black metal band Circle Of Ouroborus lately, which is the other band from Key member Rauta. If you've been listening to Circle Of Ouroborus's recent releases like The Lost Entrance Of The Just and Eleven Fingers, the music of Key will feel somewhat familiar. It's shares a similar low-fi post-punk sound, but with Key the black metal influences are nowhere to be found, and instead the duo (which also features Kaarna from the industrial/ambient project Somnivore) combines murky acoustic strings and a ramshackle sort of cemetery folk with their catchy post-punk. The feel is much more whimsical than that of Circle Of Ouroborus's, but there's still a creepy, ghostly streak running through this band...
Birch Skeletons is a beautifully assembled foil-stamped boxset that features three 10" records (all on colored vinyl and housed in their own printed sleeves) and printed booklet, re-issuing the out-of-print demos from this strange Finnish graveyard folk / gloompop band that had been released as a triple-cassette set on Cocainacopia a few years ago. The first, Birch Skeletons, moves through the strange galloping forest-folk of "Slaves Of The Monument" and it's impassioned howling vocals, quickly strummed acoustic guitars, ghostlike flutes, xylophone and driving bass lines, buried industrial clanking and heaps of murky atmosphere, an odd mixture of cavernous post-punk and spectral folk music. It's pretty and creepy and mysterious all at once, songs like the title track and "They Knew None" filled with shambling, jangly melodies that are part Joy Division-style gloompop and part grim neo-folk (a la Death In June), so infectious that the songs linger in your ears long after the record has stopped spinning. On the Skin Lanterns and Lake Of Stars discs, the recordings are a little less murky, the music a little more upbeat, but still dark and supremely catchy. The singer sounds more like a drunken version of Psychedelic Furs front man Richard Butler on these tracks, but the sound is otherwise the same gloomy, melancholy folk-pop formed from driving bass guitar and energetically strummed acoustic guitars, chimes and xylophones and flutes gleaming in the background while those quirky moaned vocals weave scenes of buried teeth and human-shaped lanterns, demonic children and wax sigils. This actually fits right in with a lot of the grimy, gravesoil-stained post-punk that I've been listening to lately from bands like Inkubator, Marching Church, A Black People, Lower, and Looks Of Love. Can't recommend this band and these records enough - the box-set is very limited though, only two hundred and fifty copies produced.
Track Samples:
Sample : We Are Bound
Sample : Reveal the Grave
Sample : The Quiet Skulls
Sample : Birch Skeletons

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Brain-melting, intergalactic extreme electronics from Zeni Geva mastermind KK Null and newer Spanish noise outfit Scumearth, courtesy of the fine noise-curators at Phage Tapes...
KK Null's twenty-minute "Plutonium 2011" is first, opening the disc with his patented brand of extreme cosmic electronic chaos. Starbursts of swarming high-frequency glitch and distorted feedback waves shower over the first few minutes of the track, but then a pulsating rhythmic beat appears, sputtering and throbbing beneath an increasingly frenzied tapestry of manipulated vocal noises, brutal blown-out glitch-noise, and laserblast effects. As it progresses, the rhythm evolves into something slightly more akin to a super-distorted drum n' bass loop, but buried under a ton of noise and effects. It breaks off into sparser sections where the rhythmic loop disappears and you're assaulted with harsh, psychedelic electronics, but it keeps finding it's way back to the more violent rhythms over the entire track. Not unlike some of his other recent works (there are definitely similarities between this and his Neurot album Oxygen Flash), this comes off like an exercise in brutal, noise-irradiated jungle mutated almost beyond recognition.
Like KK Null, the Spanish project Scumearth also uses electronic gliitch as one the key building blocks to their apocalyptic soundscapes, but the three tracks that are presented here have little to no rhythmic drive, instead focusing on contrasting controlled blasts of ferocious extreme digital filth with stretches of abyssal black ambience. The track titles all evoke visions of modernized warfare ("Search & Destroy", "Obsolete Signal Technology", "Kevlar Armoured") and intersperse sampled military transmissions with the eruptions of electronic violence and walls of black static to create an unsettling, extremely hostile atmosphere.
When the two artists finally come together for the collaborative track "Time-Quake" at the end of the disc, you can't really pick their sounds apart. Each musician pummels the track with an assortment of throbbing synth noise, jittery machine rhythms, and crazed atonal melodies for the first half, but then it transforms into a series of hyper-abstract drones and crackling granular glitch that finishes the track.
This blast of brutal electronics comes in a screen-printed arigato case, limited to 250 copies.

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Portland's Lord Dying debut here with a two-song 7" of supremely heavy doom-laden thrash that is so successful at refracting the classic crush of pre-Pandemonium Celtic Frost through a prism of mathy, somewhat sludgy contempo heaviness on the first side, I'm still wallowing in the afterglow. I knew this was going to be good before going in to it, seeing as how Lord Dying has members from the mighty Black Elk in it's ranks as well as members of several other Northwest underground outfits with a bit of tenure under their belts, but I wasn't expecting it to be this heavy, this... Frosty on that first song ("In A Frightful State Of Gnawed Dismemberment"). The b-side takes a different approach though; while still heavy as hell with serious low-end crunch, this is more along the lines of the newer High On fire stuff - pounding, vaguely thrash-tinged battle-metal carved out of massive barbaric grooves, with just a touch of Sabbathian swing, and a bone-rattling buildup halfway in that blooms into another devastating riff at the end. Fans of the kind of rumbling war-sludge and steel-plated riffage that you get from Black Cobra, Zoroaster, High On Fire, and Sourvein should give these guys a listen...

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Where most of the stuff that Dusktone brings us is along the lines of post-punk/shoegaze influenced black metal, their new album from Lotus Circle is something entirely different. After a couple of splits and a 2007 album on Nykta, the Greek band Lotus Circle returns with their second full length of circular blackened hypno-sludge. The easiest way to describe the sound of these five tracks is to compare Lotus Circle's sound to a black metal influenced version of Phase III-era Earth, with hypnotic doom riffs repeating endlessly within a lightless cavernous space, surrounded by demonic vocalizations, strange chanting sounds, industrial synthesizers, and washes of minimal black ambience. Sounds like an odd comparison looking at it on the page, but the specter of mid-90's Earth kept reappearing as I listened to this disc.
The opener "To Witness Under The Stars" goes from an eerie minor key chord progression hovering in black space, sounding like a black metal outfit applying those aforementioned minimal metal trance-states of early Earth, then drifts off into a long stretch of murky liturgical chanting that sounds like black-magic invocations drifting out of the mouths of dead, rotting monks buried beneath an ancient crumbling Greek monastery, then onto a seriously psychedelic wash of spacey synthesizer drones and cosmic electronics. They return to that lumbering ambient-riff style at the beginning of "Dawn Of A Dead Sun" too; a crushing, intensely fuzzed-out doom-dirge guitar circles round and round while high-pitched pterodactyl screeches (insanely high, like the screams on the old Fleurety demos) swoop across the background, and thick streaks of black feedback hum through the droning, repetitious dirge. The distorted murmur of a congregation of voices in prayer starts off "Secret Entities", and then it introduces another blackened, doom-laden riff that repeats over and over, a circular black mantra moving elliptically for several minutes before changing into a different, simpler riff as more gurgling, cackling voices echo in the distance.
The song "From The Depths" changes things up a little. Again, it's centered around a single grim guitar riff, but this time it's severely processed and twisted by some sort of extreme effect at the beginning, a juddering, squelchy synthetic sound that turns into something a lot trippier, and even when another massive grinding guitar joins in, it's still much more warped sounding than the previous tracks. The song crawls along, halting at brief parts where the guitars drop out and we just hear those maniacal inhuman shrieks high overhead, then lurching back into that weird, electronically-deformed dirge, gradually overtaken by increasing amounts of mutated synth sounds.
The final track "Plutonian Funeral" also expands into more electronically-twisted territory, and is the album's most cinematic piece of music. Here, bits of delayed guitar twang and swells of ominous keyboard drift above a smoldering blasted surface of rumbling machine noise and blackened industrial ambience. Vague smears of hellish screaming and gasping fade in and out, and for the most part the grinding guitar drone is soaked into the background enough that it's not much more than a vague smear of distorted drone itself...
Comes in digipack packaging.
Track Samples:
Sample : Dawn Of A Dead Sun
Sample : From The Depths
Sample : Plutonian Funeral

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One of the harshest sounding black metal records in recent memory, Darkened Apocalyptic Goat Ritual is the first record from this Danish "black noise metal" trio (which features members of Nastran, Blodfest and Offerkult), and man is it ugly. As soon as this record kicked in to opener "Mass Flames Of Enlighted Blood Ritual", I was instantaneously converted, awash in their primitive buzzsaw black metal assault and waves of extreme treble-overloaded distortion. This is about three steps from tumbling over fully into the abyss of black noise; the guitars are smudged and blurred to the point of near total chaos, the riffs melting into smears of corrosive minor-key murk, the bass little more than a vague rumbling prescence lurking in the background, the drummer spastically pounding out supersonic blastbeats and warped, inchoate rhythms, the band locking into ferocious walls of blackened violence and then coming apart in a mess of limbs and smashed cymbals, bizarre vocal sounds mutated by overloaded effects, and endless searing noise. It's quite fucking awesome, almost tipping over into a kind of blackened ultra-violent noisecore at times, but never fully losing control - this is chaos right at the bursting point, barely controlled by the band, and all the more savage for it. The other three songs ("Black Goat Of Apocalyptic Ceremony", "Rigorplasmic Forms Of Lucifer", "Third Satanic Gate Of Baphomet") are equally flesh-ripping, sometimes veering into these brief bits of extreme noise that almost sound like they could have been lifted off of an old power electronics tape, but always rooted to the thrashing black metal at the heart of this piece of vinyl filth.
Limited to 333 copies.

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Underneath the tray of this Cd package are the words "hypeless black punk" printed vertically along the spine, proudly proclaiming their combined obscurity. This disc sees the return of one of my favorite French Canadian blackened hardcore/metal bands Malveillance, that hateful, exhibitionist purveyor of demonic D-beat, hooking up with another offbeat black metal influenced band called Male Misandria. The two bands connect here through a haze of bizarre artwork and illegible scrawled ravings, on one side displaying photos of Malveillance's sole member F flashing gang signs and his uncut cock while wearing a black bag wrapped around his head, on the other the members of Male Misandria behaving strangely in some barren gravel-covered back lot. The arrangement of the album is a little odd, too.
Italian blackgrind rippers Male Misandria appear both at the beginning and the end of the disc, opening with seven tracks of their punishing blast-laced blackened death metal, and reappearing after the Malveillance tracks with another six songs. I was mighty impressed with this band, having never heard them before picking this disc up. Their brand of black/death is rife with frenetic riffing that blends together dissonant BM-style chords and crushing death metal chuggery, blasts of D-beat hardcore and chain-gun blastbeats, and a dual-singer assault that pairs together a vocalist who screams as if his face is being peeled off while his partner roars gutturally underneath the chaos, a pairing that I've heard a million times before but these guys deliver it with so much ferociousness that it sounds truly crazed. Strange patterns and hallucinatory touches are found as you plummet deeper into their blasting violence, and there's an occult fascination that inhabits Male Misandria's blackgrind just beneath the surface, strange folk melodies and chanting voices and repetition of certain images bubbling up from behind the tremolo riffs and blast beats and grinding guitars, finally leading to the otherworldly black industrial of "Mastrob" where the band channels the clanking electronic evil of MZ.412. At the end of the disc, they've tacked on a couple of older demo-style tracks that reveal the band's rougher, more death metal rooted origins (although there's still a good amount of weird electronic melodies and chiptune-like synths that infect some of these older songs) as well as a vicious cover of "Nazi Go Home" by Crude SS. Imagine a grindcore band like Phobia suddenly coming under the thrall of classic second-wave black metal, and you'll get an idea of what these guys are doing...
The eight songs from Malveillance are exactly the kind of violent, blown-out blackened hardcore that I crave from this French Canadian outfit. For years I've been banging my head against the wall to the sound of Malveillance's evil, barbaric crust and this stuff carries on the tradition in fine form, blasting from one primitive, ultra-distorted punk thrasher to the next, each song referencing a French Canadian either notable or otherwise ("Latullipe Gilles", "Maurice Lancellette", "Aimè St. Pierre"), the monstrous cackling vocals smeared across the noisy Discharge-esque filth, and the drums possessed by this weird clanking quality that gives this stuff more of an industrial type feel than usual. Vicious and infectiously catchy, as always.
Track Samples:
Sample : MALE MISANDRIA - Magister Makeup
Sample : MALE MISANDRIA - Martyr
Sample : MALVEILLANCE - Maurice Lancellette
Sample : ÿþMALVEILLANCE - Clémentine Théberge

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This 7" from British black metal weirdos The Meads Of Asphodel actually came out several years ago (2007 to be exact), but I'll pick up anything and everything from this band when I come across it. These proud purveyors of English BM have brought us some supremely baffling black metal mutations over the years, from the heretical concept album The Excommunication of Christ to their latest Bungle-esque epic The Murder Of Jesus The Jew, but this Ep sees the band scaling their ambitious, experimental black metal down to a driving punk attack as they proceed to cover a handful of their favorite underground classics from the late 70s and early 80s. Life Is Shit has covers of Stiff Little Fingers, The Ruts and proto-synthpunks The Stranglers. And they all rule, filtered through the gruff, heavy power of the Meads. First is the cover of "Straw Dogs" from Irish punks Stiff Little Fingers, a ripping version that sticks pretty close to the original but with an added dose of grit and gruffness, the guitars cranked louder and slightly heavier, Meads bassist (and former Hawkwind member!) Alan Davey taking over the vocals while Metatron growls blackly in the background. Then the flipside follows up with a cover of "Babylons Burning" by The Ruts, a late 70's UK reggae-punk outfit that I was never too familiar with. This rendition is fucking wild, though. The Meads enlisted original Ruts guitarist Paul Fox for the recording, and with Metatron spitting out the apocalyptic lyrics in his monstrous blackened shriek, they've turned this into a vicious blast of blackened punk. The last song is my favorite though, a whacked-out version of "Tank" by The Stranglers that mutates the song into a gloriously manic new-wave metalpunk masterpiece, with chugging thrash guitars and backing female pop vocals, Mirai from Japanese psychedelic metallers Sigh contributing crazed prog-rock synthesizers, and Metatron howling at the moon. Killer!
Limited to five hundred copies, each one hand numbered and with the center label signed by all of the members of Meads...

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Self-described "scum noise for deviants", this tape (another scorching offering from the Dead Medium label) promised brutal noise and drooling hardcore slime in equal doses, and delivers.
Side "Scum" smashes your head into a long track of extremely low-fidelity noise titled "The Cruel And Final Cum". Sounding like something off of one of my old RRRecords cassette compilations, it's a violent, incredibly murky clusterfuck of grinding low-end distortion, percussive rumbling buried under a mile or two of wrecked feedback, monstrous death-metal-esque screams and deformed guitar, and a shitload of squealing amplifier noise. It's an ugly, head cleaning sort of along the lines of listening to an Incapacitants set found on a decomposing old Maxwell cassette that's been buried under a rotting matress for the past five years.
Flipping over, we get side "Fuck" and its five tracks of putrid noisecore smeared with a fistful of sexual depravity. This stuff is as murky and ratty sounding as the first side, but here the band drag out the drum kit and guitar amps and proceeds to blast through a mix of ridiculously noisy hardcore punk, howling feedback abuse, and blasts of micro-shock grindnoise. It's ultra-violent and noisy enough that fans of Sissy Spacek's blurr-mode material and classic noisecore outfits like Deche-Charge, 7 Minutes Of Nausea and Sore Throat will dig it, but the pure harsh noise side keeps rearing it's head all over the side as the songs disintegrate into obnoxious feedback-screech.
The tape comes in a black vinyl bag with a full-color label affixed to the front of it; inside, the tape is accompanied by a black and white Xeroxed insert with assorted images of vile pornography, serial murderers and news clippings, and a set of black vinyl gloves...

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Up till now, I really haven't heard much from the French power electronics underground, including the group Mourmansk 150. This duo apparently has been active since the late 90s, but I'm only now discovering them by way of this album that came out a while back on Nil By Mouth. The band are proponents of a militant PE aesthetic that utilizes surreal misanthropic lyrics and imagery, militaristic design, and a crazed electronic assault on the senses that borders on the psychedelic. When I first heard this album and dug the violent squelch abuse that they were dishing out, I checked out Mourmansk 150's website and came across this mission statement:
Stance: The complete annihilation, extermination, destruction, ruination, violent collapse & permanent extinction of ALL oppressive forces & political tyranny through VIOLENT ACTION-DIRECT FATAL CONFRONTATION-LETHAL COLLISION.
I can dig that. I can especially dig their call for total chaos, a mindset that seeps all the way down into the pulsating fungal electronics found on La Guerre, the monstrous blood-gargling vocals and blackened shrieks, the walls of crushing distorted bass frequencies, junk-noise blasts and massive growling synths, all buried beneath this skeezy, filthy production that gives the album a murky, moldering ambience. Ugly, confrontational PE warfare that takes wide aim at humanity, blasting their hate through noxious bass dirges, carcinogenic black drones, deformed synthesizer melodies, grinding noise loops and looped industrial rhythms, and texts appropriated from Antonin Artaud and references made to French anarchist/chanson singer Leo Ferré. Seriously heavy at times, this album has a huge low-end presence that threatens to flatten you when they really get going. Quality stuff, recommended to anyone into heavy hateful power electronics in the vein of Bizarre Uproar, Genocide Organ, Azoikum, and Brandkommando; I'll definitely be looking for more of their stuff...
Track Samples:
Sample : The Vermin Womb
Sample : Genocide Cravings
Sample : L'Anarchie Et Le Chaos

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The classic Swedish death industrial band Megaptera will forever and always be my favorite of Peter Nystrom's industrial projects, but I was really impressed when I finally heard his post-Megaptera outfit Negru Voda for the first time in this extensive discography set. Active from the mid 90s through the early part of the last decade, Negru Voda was a more stripped down, old-school approach to industrial music compared to the often pitch-black horror and oppressive heaviness that marked his work with Megaptera. While the music featured on this comprehensive three-disc set certainly isn't as evil-sounding as Megaptera, it's plenty crushing in it's own right, offering up a thick metallic din influenced by the music of Test Dept, Neubauten, Severed Heads, and even the darkest spacescapes of early Tangerine Dream. This set collects all of Negru Voda's recordings in a large eight-panel digipack package, and includes rare photos and liner notes from Nystrom on the background of the project.
The Våld De Luxe begins with one of the longest tracks in the entire set, but this twenty six minute industrial epic transects every aspect of Peter Nystrom's palette, blasting the listener with massive growling synth-drones and pounding metallic percussion at first, and then proceeding into ever bleaker regions of howling post-apocalyptic ambience, radiation-streaked noise, and echoing snare drums that give parts of this an almost "martial" feel. When the analogue synthesizers really kick in, Nystrom carves them into these menacing phased riffs that never hang around for too long, but which sound murderous whenever they appear. Rattling percussive loops rumble and pound in the background, slightly buried underneath louder drum sounds and those droning black synths, and later in the track the music starts to erupt into a cacophonic wall of warning sirens and multiple tracks of pounding drumming, distorted malevolent drones and sampled voices, crushing clanking metal rhythms and disturbing radio transmissions, all layered together and piled on top of each other creating a hallucinatory wall of sound. But then the second track comes in ("The Fourth Coffin") and it's a punishing, super-heavy drum/bass rhythm hammering away behind a garbled mass of screams, demonic muttering, distorted voices and blackened synth throb, sounding like some early Wax Trax-like machine-dirge. The remaining four tracks on this disc are also remixes of one sort or another, with a number of guest artists warping Negru Voda's recordings into either vaguely danceable industrial workouts or more abstract soundtrack-esque soundscapes. The results can be amazingly catchy - "The Sound Of Islay (Laggan Mhoullin Version)", for example, is a pummeling, dub-infected industrial assault with a killer bass hook slithering through it, and "Infected By Remix" is actually a reworking of a track from Swedish black industrial/metal outfit V:28, and it's one of the heaviest tracks on here, a crushing ultra-distorted assault of blackened industrial doom almost on par with the likes of Wicked King Wicker or Sewer Goddess.
Beginning with a looped sample of vinyl-crackle, the Dark Territory disc goes on to explore a combination of shorter, more minimal noise pieces, creepy voice/drone collages, blasts of brutal electronics and grinding malevolent machine-drift. Slowly pounding tribal drums thunder at the bottom of vast subterranean chasms, and smoldering black electronics erupt like volatile gases from cracks in the earth. The tracks featured on this disc don't reach the same levels of bone-crushing heaviness as what was found on the first, but this is still heavy and hypnotic and abrasive listening, with a lot of distorted sampled voices that give the material a creepy, transmissions-from-the-beyond feel.
Some of the projects best work is found on the last disc Whispers From The Silent Shaft. With an apparent underlying theme concerning life in an isolated Swedish industrial town, tracks like "The Mine Shaft" and "The Drill" bring together more of Negru Voda's eerie sampled voices and slow, heavy percussive pounding with looped string sections and menacing chants, producing the project's most composed and atmospheric material. Much of the music found on this disc has a lot in common with Nystrom's more demonic industrial leanings in Megaptera, with those sampled strings winding around black electronic pulsations and slow grinding death-machine rhythms, and frenetic clanking beats pounding urgently against swells of vast cinematic ambience. But when the music gets really percussive and starts piling on the weird vocals and wall of thundering metal-on-metal beats, it starts to resemble a slightly darker take on the early works of Test Dept. and Front 242, both of whom are cited by Nystrom as influences on his music.
Fans of Tribes Of Neurot should check this out, as this project offers a similar type of heavy, percussion-driven industrial overlaid with bleak, apocalyptic overtones, and it's also recommended to the heaver, darker sounds of classic outfits like Controlled Bleeding...
Track Samples:
Sample : Dark Territory
Sample : The Dobruja Virus
Sample : THe Drill
Sample : The Fourth Coffin
Sample : Silent Force Entry
Sample : Television State

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With their We All Die in the End 12" that was released on Prank last year (and which I finally got around to stocking/reviewing on the last C-Blast list), this gang of skilled hardcore vets (whose members have played in notable 90s HC outfits Scrotum Grinder, Destroy, Scholastic Death, What Happens Next?, Artimus Pyle, and End Of The Century Party) delivered one of my favorite recent HC records, blending together brutal, hectic thrashcore and an experimental side that was an instant hit over here. Now they've followed that up with the No Hospice 7", a two-song Ep that's also out on Prank; it's nowhere as quirky and surprising as their awesome 12" was, but this Bay Area band still kills even when they're keeping it simple, as they do here.
It's a short dose of feedback-strewn hardcore that starts with the almost militaristic intro of "No Hospice" that launches into a pummeling attack that takes the anthemic power of classic "youth crew" HC and uglies it up substantially, pounding out this driving, mid-tempo aggression with dark, apocalyptic undertones lurking in the lyrics to the song. The other track "Clean Swift Sunshine" is more in line with the crazed, chaotic hardcore found on their 12", galloping wall-of-distortion thrash bursting at the seams with wild noisy solos and Ruby's seriously pissed-off vocals.
Comes in a felt weave pocket sleeve with insert.

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Another cassette of murky, mysterious American black metal from Dead Medium Tapes. The ghostly cover artwork on Owlscry's Le Demon Est Venu Du Nord is what initially caught my eye, depicting two strange hooded figures taken from what seems like an early 20th century photograph, suggesting something vague and mysterious on the tape itself. Indeed, this Milwaukee band delivers a tenebrous, disturbing blur of black metal on this two-song cassette, totaling roughly fifteen minutes of anguished sound. Their music is meandering but simply constructed, using repetitive riffs and crude, pounding rhythms to create their low-fi night terrors and phantasmagoric instrumental passages. The songs are cloaked in an impenetrable nocturnal gloom, moving through a barely-lit haze of doom-laden dread and weird ritualistic black metal stained with faint traces of hardcore punk. The first song "Fruitful Wounds" is a grim blackened dirge where the murky guitars are blanketed with tape hiss and a grungy washed-out recording, the drums pounding slowly beneath the simple, creepy minor key riffing and melodies. After a stretch of eerie atmospheric guitar, "These Trees Are Alive With The Souls of The Dead" wanders off into stranger regions, where the vocalist switches from his tortured gargling shrieks to an off-key crooning chant as the swirling noisy guitars begin circling around a slower, chunkier riff, still very dirge-like, becoming even more wrecked and chaotic, taking off into fierce tremolo riffs and blast beats, and dropping into odd, jagged breakdowns. Wretched, violent music flecked with brief moments of despondent beauty, occasionally hinting at a vastly rawer take on the tortured sound of Silencer or Bethlehem.

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A ghostly Onryo-like figure wanders through the dimly lit hallways of a cursed house. The wavering voices of trapped souls bleed through the walls like fragmented radio transmissions. These are the visions that form around Evil Angel, an impressive album of arcane black ambience that comes from the Polish project Paranoia Inducta. Paranoia Inducta's body of work goes back to around 2004, but this is the projects latest album, and offers a highly developed strain of malevolent ambience that is capable of really putting you on edge when listened to with the volume cranked (amplify that substantially if you listen to this nightmare with all of the lights off). Travelling through eleven hallucinatory vignettes that generally stick within the four to five minute range, Paranoia Inducta's A.A. Destroyer crafts detailed dreamworlds that feature swathes of Lustmordian darkness spreading out across withered forests and crumbling monasteries, the sound shifting from fields of minimal whirr and hum flecked with metallic clanks and bell tones, to rumbling black synths and chanting monks, and vast reverberant underworlds infested with monstrous growling and the sound of talons scraping against the sides of stone passageways. Throughout this disc, I hear parallels to the haunted black soundscapes of the French necro-ambient scene (Dapnom, Silcharde), it's got the same sort of ever-evolving tapestry of sounds rather than merely hovering on a couple of static drones, lacing the washes of pitch-black drift with a constantly changing array of sonic elements that range from industrial scrapings and sputtering machinery to the sound of howling infants lost in the blackness and vile demonic utterances, to soft liturgical singing and nightmarish groans drifting out from cracks in the ground. We hear strangely warped melodies and bits of darkened classical drift coil out of cracks in the walls, giving the album a cinematic, soundtrack-like feel, and there are parts of this that vaguely remind me of Christopher Young's Hellraiser scores. A harrowing listening experience, full of black visions that are comparable to the works of Cold Meat Industry artists like Morthound, Atrium Carceri, Archon Satani, and Megaptera...
Released in a digipack, and limited to 500 copies.
Track Samples:
Sample : Land Of The Damned
Sample : Already Dead
Sample : Not By It Is Cover

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Two idiosyncratic one-man bands team up for this 7" Ep that gets all chummy when each artist makes an appearance on one of the other's songs. That's not the whole point of this record; Persistence In Mourning starts off initially with a cover of the Hank Williams song "Alone And Forsaken" that's turned into a noise-infected country dirge with some of the strangest slide-guitar sounds ever (at least, I think I'm hearing slide guitar in here...) amid the pulsating robotic synth and acoustic twang. But the other PIM track brings in Moloch for a grimmer bit of blasted folk, the doleful strum of the guitar backed by mysterious radio transmissions and whirling effects, slowly growing into a much heavier doom metal dirge over the course of the song while more synth effects and symphonic keyboard sounds (these, I presume, are Moloch's contribution) and noise are poured over it.
The first of the Moloch tracks "Stille" is a very short piece of atmospheric blackened ambience that has PIM adding in assorted noisy textures and fragments of acoustic guitar over a backdrop of looping tremolo riffing, followed by the main Moloch track "Philosophie der Depression". This is Moloch at his best, unleashing a swarm of layered mosquito guitars over a low-fi dirge of distant booming drums, droning diminished chords and swirling amp-grit that achieves this wonderfully hypnotic effect akin to what I imagine the early music of Burzum would sound like as covered by Skullflower. After a couple minutes, though, that wash of swarming black metal buzz suddenly drops out and is replaced by the sound of Moloch speaking in Ukrainian over an outro of simple, reverby drums and droning synthesizers.
Limited to three hundred copies.
Track Samples:
Sample : 1.Persistence in Mourning - Alone and forsaken (Hank Williams cover).mp3
Sample : 4.Moloch - Philosophie der Depression (Re-mastered).mp3

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Never heard Vacuums before now, but I can't imagine that the one-man hardcore band could possibly sound any more brutal than it does here, transmogrified into the earth-smashing thrash/noise destruction found on this 7" at the hands of Pig Heart Transplant. On their own, the Pig Heart ensemble is capable of urking out some of the heaviest Swans-influenced dirge punk you'll ever hear; their recent splits with Juhyo and The Endless Blockade are positively pulverizing. As a remix unit, the Transplant is capable of transforming buzzsaw punk into the radioactive horror found here, like some kind of post-nuclear alchemist. The PHTV recordings takes the entire Vacuum 7" on Lengua Armada, all five songs, and mutates 'em into a series of sonic outrages that range from ultra-distorted punk so slathered in noise and treble that it rises to a level of ear-hate on par with the likes of Disclose or Schizophasia; brutal, down-beat industro-punk dirgery; short bursts of harsh noise; and feedback-strewn soundscapes littered with massive pneumatic doom-crush and scrap-metal abuse. These slower, industrial style tracks are some of the heaviest fuckin' things I've heard all year, and are as crushing as anything that you would hear on a regular Pig Heart Transplant record. As usual, the artwork and sleeve design are all handled by Pig Heart Transplant's in-house design firm Feeding, giving this record the same stylized look as the rest of the Pig Heart catalog.

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As much as I dig all of Hal Hutchinson's assorted projects and pseudonyms (Execution Support Act, Meatgrinder, Controlled Property, even sometime collaborator with The New Blockaders), it's his straight-up harsh noise project Pollutive Static that I've been listening to most. Maybe it's just because I've been coming across more PS releases lately, but regardless, the brutal throwback noise that he works with here has been solidly cathartic to my ears.
Fuck Soundtrack offers nothing for those looking for nuance and subtlety; these seven tracks are purely brutal exercises in electronic skull-fuck. Recorded hot and low-fi, the untitled noise tracks crumbling beneath their own weight and excess, this tape subjects the listener to an evolving tapestry of extreme feedback, effects and distortion with no apparent intellectual thought. Hutchison sculpts massive sweat-soaked orgies of amp/metal abuse, bludgeoning the air and flesh with swooping flanged sine waves, over-modulated noise collages, and suffocating walls of distorted roar that are suddenly erected, then come crashing back down just as quickly. The abuse that Hutchison unleashes on his synthesizers is merciless; the electronic instruments vomit out endless torrents of distorted low-end judder, long stretched-out drones caked in black static, spewing blown-out burbling chaos from end to end. Sputtering, spasmodic pedal squeal collides with searing metallic synth-hum, and huge stacks of metal are dragged across vast concrete surfaces, and then hurled into an abyss. Massive rusted-out engines are force-fed human flesh, and then are left to break apart and belch black smoke into the heavens as snippets of country music flash in and out of view from behind a wall of caustic amp-scrape. The amplified roar of blood from the tumescent meat held fast in the grip of a black leather glove. It's violent, psychedelic, recommended only to fans of the most brutal practitioners of noise a la Custodian and Sickness.
Limited edition of 120 copies. The tapes comes in a wild-looking package that has a black cardstock slipcase with artwork and some metal mesh attached to the front, and a full-color tape cover that has some extremely graphic vintage S&M visuals. Please note: Due to the explicit nature of the artwork on this cassette, it is only available to customers 18 and older. Please include an age statement in the "message" section at checkout, if ordering this item.

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I started listening to these Portland sludge-rockers back when they releasing records on Eolian, every single one of which is a crusher (and we still have some of 'em in stock), but it wasn't until the band was picked up by Relapse and released their first real album Lower Forms last year that people really seemed to take notice of what these guys are doing. The noisy, bottom-heavy sludge punk that Rabbits play is obviously influenced by the Melvins, old Floor, and Karp, but they bring a dinginess and blunt hardcore aggression to these lumbering slabs of slugfuck. This 7" is their first new offering in the wake of their Relapse debut, and it features one new song and a trio of covers that includes "Hard Times" from legendary New York hardcore band Cro-Mags, Rudimentary Peni's "One And All", and "Think Twice" from Poison Idea. The new song "Riff Fuck Reap" is a dark, groovy sludge-punk dirge in the same vein of their older stuff, a combination of the tarpit pummel of Nirvana's Bleach, large doses of Am Rep squeal, a bit of lop-sided hardcore, and snarling lead vocals all mashed into this ugly anthem of despair. The cover songs don't tweak the source material, but sound like the band working through some of their favorite jams, pushing 'em all through a wall of mud, and all three covers sound surprisingly cool rendered through Rabbits' molasses-covered purview...

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Checked this record out at first because I thought that it was the same band that released that smokin' 12" on Youth Attack a while back, but then i figured out that I was forgetting about the 's" and that this is a totally different band that hails from somewhere up around Portland, Oregon. But I ended up really digging Raw Nerves'Burnt Skin in spite of my initial confusion. Released recently by Inimical, the same label that put out that latest Lp from Book Of Black Earth and the Aldebaran / Sod Hauler split way back when, the record features three songs of burly, bottom-heavy hardcore with a feral, snarling vibe, kind of along the lines of Deathreat mixed with the barbaric stripped-down power of Negative Approach, with quasi-politicized subject matter than ranges from anti-religious and anti-misogynistic sentiments all the way to referencing quantum physics. The latter topic comes up on the crushing b-side song "S=K Log W", a battering-ram crust dirge that stomps over their scornful dismissal of Abrahamic religions with all of the force of an early Neurosis jam. The 7" gets thumbs up for the disturbing pig-head cover art, too.

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Before they turned into the weird gothic psych-rock outfit they are now, Robedoor dwelled in much darker, filthier depths of amophous heaviness, as demonstrated on Rancor Keeper. Released by Release The Bats earlier this past decade, this disc went out of print a couple of years ago but we just stumbled across a stash of the some of the last new copies available - once these are gone, that'll be it...
After a putting out a boatload of limited-edition cassettes, CD-Rs, and vinyl releases since 2005, Robedoor are finally dropping their first definitive CD release, a four track monstrosity of abstract floating doomsludge called Rancor Keeper that is the heaviest thing that Release The Bats has ever sent my way. Robedoor is the duo of Alex (keyboard, drum, cello) and Britt (guitar, vocals, cymbals), Britt is also one of the main people behind the Not Not Fun label, that Los Angeles based imprint for all things handmade and noisy and psychedelic. The Robedoor sound comes from that world, formed from nightmarish black walls of drug drone, the guys hovering over effects pedals and coalescing massive ur-riffs out of smoke and amp feedback and crushing slabs of distortion. Monstrous visions of squid-headed wizards (squizzards?) and Lovecraftian oceans rise up from the stormy murk. They've taken the epic dirge of old Skullflower and mashed it through the trippy, shamanistic vocal sludge of The Skaters and Sunn O)))'s earthshaking ambient doom, making this the heaviest FX drugsludge I've ever heard, a way WAY heavier and doomier version of stuff like Double Leopards and Hototogisu and Zaimph. On "Abyss Whisperer", distant oil-drum rhythms and an undercurrent of dark rumbling frequencies shudder beneath the floating wordless vocal chants and vaguely celestial electronic melodies. A gorgeous tidal flow of industrial pounding and crushing amplifier rumble swirls into the haunting ghost incantations of "Penitent Runes". Alex brings out the cello for the first half of the 15-minute "Wendigo Psychosis" and weaves a series of ominous drones around a cloud of low end keyboard electronics and minimal, heavy guitar notes plucked out and hung on the song's wintery deathscape. But at the midway point, the track lurches into a crushing wave of metallic sludge, the guitars suddenly cranked to in-the-red levels of distortion, a detuned rumbling presence that is monstrously heavy but which reveals itself as an amazingly catchy melodic riff that is being repeated over and over. Drums begin to enter the fray, a slowed down splatter dirge, every part of the kit being pounded on simultaneously and sucked down into the increasing turmoil of the sound, howling vocals streak across the void like falling comets, and at the same time that everything is becoming more and more crushing and blown out and sludgy and overdriven, that melody is becoming more and more apparent, until finally the track fully takes shape as some kind of ultraheavy behemoth pop song that rises up from Robedoor's murk. It's the best jam that I have yet to hear from these guys, it actually sounds like The Goslings a little bit, but exponentially more heavy and devestating, The Goslings gone total doom, sweet emotive melody avalanched under cascading sheets of Broken Flag style noise and ancient megadistorted amplifiers and shambling industrial percussion. Fucking top notch, and highly recommended. The disc is released in a limited editon of 500 copies in a Dual Plover style gatefold sleeve that has a sheet of black felt inside of the interior pocket where the disc goes.

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First released for their 2009 tour together, this scummy little split cassette was later reissued and finally made it into my mitts here at C-Blast. I've already been worshipping at the scorched altar of Sump before getting this, but Sex Wound knocked my head off with their side of the tape. Too bad that they disintegrated after this came out. We get one song from Sex Wound, "Prison Train", but it's a fuckin beast. To call it low-fi is an understatement. The recording has all of the clarity of an old wax phonograph cylinder, and once the intense harsh screams of the singer come in over the deformed, out of tune dirge that the band is lurching through beneath all the sonic murk and speaker rumble, it just spikes into an all new level of grodiness. The whole first part of the song reminds me more of the damaged, drug-addled sludge punk that you'd get from Kilslug or Upsidedown Cross, that kind of brain-damaged sub-Sabbath horror, but jammed through a total sewer-quality recording and doused with a vatload of hysterical evil.
On Sump's side, the blackened British scumpunk duo hammers you with three songs, "Bodies Fall", "Not All Dead" and "Unanswered", all in the same vein as their other scrungy cassettes and 7"s that I carry here at C-Blast; that being, of course, a seriously low-fi brand of black metal influenced hardcore punk, primitive minimalist drum stomp, jangly Oi! punk riffs that erupt into three-chord thrash, the singer howling like a skinned ape through an ultra-murky four-track style recording, all gloriously ugly and catchy and barbaric.
This one ain't for wimps, that’s for sure.

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On the last new arrivals list, I wrote up a bunch of recent Cds from Sissy Spacek that came out on Gilgongo late last year, documenting a big chunk of the band's out of print discography across four separate discs and covering everything from their blazing noisecore material to the abstract improvisation / experimental tape-music / sound collage of their more recent releases. The last of these reissue Cds is Grisp, and it's the one disc in their series of re-issue/collection Cds that really ventures away from the band's more violent, noisecore-infested sound. As with those other discs, this is now sold out from the label and will be out of print once we run out of the copies that I was able to order for C-Blast; it's also the one most recommended to those that prefer the more abstract and improvisational side to John Wiese and Corydon Ronnau's prolific project. Collected from rare cassette releases on Chondritic Sound and 777 Was 666, the eight tracks that are featured on Grisp tend towards longer, more experimental soundscapes that range from glitch-infested dark ambience to free-improv sets of creepy clatter n' moan. The sinister edge that seems to be found on all of the other Sissy Spacek discs I have is found here as well, but these pieces are more concerned with exploring strange realms of musique-concrete and manipulated electronics than caving your head in with brutal noise. Pulsating bass-loops lurk within the depths of ominous metallic ambience, and scattershot improvised no-wave squonk comes lurching out of long stretches of black drone. There are bizarre lock-groove workouts that use unique hand-cut acetate records, and slow clanging sheet-metal dirges, ghostly murmurings and squealing tape experiments, bouts of brutal K2-style junknoise that's further mangled by tape-splicing and various cut-up techniques, bouts of creaking rusted machines and tribal drumming. The material here is longer, more expansive, as the band explores their random noisescapes at length, and it's also notable for having contributions from outside parties like The Haters, Smegma, and members of Gasp, Liars, Open City, Los Angeles Free Music Society.
Track Samples:
Sample : Real Trash
Sample : Jerk Loose
Sample : Tribulation

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This is the harshest record from Sloth in ages, and has the Ohio sludge/industrial/pop weirdos teamed up with the crushing noise of Hogra.
You'd think that by this point, I wouldn't be surprised by anything that I'd hear on a Sloth record, but they've thrown me for a loop yet again with their side of this 7". I went in expecting another one of their weirdo industrial nursery rhyme dirges that have made up most of their recent releases, but instead got a face full of violent freeform jazz/noise that just about squashed me flat. It's one long untitled piece of skullfucking cacophony, a morass of improvised murky guitar noise and feedback, rumbling bass frequencies, percussive rumblings and heavy reverberations that sound as if they could be coming from a stack of oil drums being thrown down a staircase or from huge pieces of sheet metal being pounded on by sledgehammers, harsh ear-scraping assaults of feedback and amplifier noise, crazed guitar solos noodling all over the place, bursts of weird snarling noises that might be vocals, and a blistering saxophone attack that comes in over the last several minutes that really elevates this to a new level of extremity. It's along the lines of something you'd hear from Borbetomagus, or Japanese industrial jazz/noise wreckers Dislocated, but way more low-fi and sludgy. I love it.
The two tracks from Hogra compliment the Sloth stuff well, unleashing a brutal wall of blast-furnace noise and rhythmic metalscrape, massive tectonic rumbling and monstrous guttural vocals. I wasn't familiar with this new-ish project before these 7"s came in, but this stuff is pretty goddamn great, a mix of extreme harsh industrial noise that has tinges of the sort of scrap-metal chaos you get from Knurl discs, massive grimy death industrial rhythms, and a vile vocal assault that has much more in common with blackened industrial or even death metal than your typical PE/industrial offering. In other words, this is right up my alley. Definitely of interest if you dig the brutal, monstrous PE deformities of Gnawed or Frailty Of Angels.
Limited to one hundred hand-numbered copies.

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A short (way too short) cassette Ep from Finland's Solar Horn, which appears to be their first official release following an appearance on a compilation Lp on Blind Date Records. The tape is only three songs long, but man, it' pretty flattening with its pounding, monotonous bass dirge and sadistic feedback attack. The band comes out of that same kind of Swans-influenced industrial sludge-punk that I've been hearing lately from bands like Bodycop, No Balls, Pig Heart Transplant, and Pop. 1280, and if any/all of those names make you break a sweat, you should be checking this tape out.
Rebirth Ritual begins with the gnarly growling bass and slow pounding drums grinding through the psychedelic electronic mist of "Skin Restraint", a guitar screeching out a two-note lead over the heavy industrial sludge. It's like an early instrumental Swans song that's been slathered with an extra helping of acid-damaged psych-guitar wail. "Feedback Lazarus" has more of a palpable groove to it, a slight tinge of "funk" (if I can call it that) in the drummer's rolling caveman rhythms, but the feedback drone and amplifier-vomit remains merciless as it pours out in thick, stringy tendrils over Solar Horn's pounding machine-sludge trance.
The other side has just one song "Ejaculation Of Ugliness", but it's the main show here. The first couple of minutes are a mangled mess of shapeless black guitar slime, oozing and crawling over a field of crackling cable noise and static amp-drone, but then the drummer finally drops in, pounding out another of his simple, primitive dirge-like beats and clanking junk-metal percussion while the guitars rise up into a wailing, twang-flecked lead and the singer starts bellowing through a huge cloud of echoplex effects. It sounds like this weird doom-laden garage-rock dirge laced with air raid siren guitars and covered in a thick layer of mold. I'll be damned if it didn't remind me of a Pussy Galore song slowed down to around 30 bpm.
Limited to one hundred copies.

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Spazz's 1997 debut Lp on Sound Pollution was one of those defining albums in the late 90s, coming at the peak of the thrashcore/powerviolence scene (at least in popularity among the hardcore crowd). Now re-issued on Lp in a silk-screened sleeve with a black and white glossy lyric insert on 625 Records (the label run by Spazz drummer Max Ward), La Revancha still sounds as brutal and freaked-out and bizarre as it did back then, taking extreme hardcore into several unpredictable directions in the space of just twenty-some minutes.
La Revancha is a tightly focused blastcore assault that mashed together the bass-heavy chaos of classic Infest, Crossed Out and Man Is The Bastard with an often bizarre brand of inside humor and heavy use of samples throughout their music. Spazz were always known for their often goofy song titles and lyrics, but musically they were all business, each one of these short (often minute long) songs blasted at nuclear strength, an all out assault of Max's crazed blast beats and thrashing drums, the chunky low-end punch of Chris Dodge's manic bass, the buzzsaw punk riffs and weird skronky chords that guitarist Dan spews all over these twenty-six songs, which shift between hyper-fast grinding to slower, lurching dirges and bursts of noisy hardcore. Spazz's brand of power violence was also prone to throwing out all kinds of weird curveballs in their songs, from the blaring zonked-out sax that shows up on "Dewey Decimal Stitchcore" and "Sweet Home Alabama", to the brain-damaged hip hop segueways and breakbeat intros, sudden downshifts into lumbering doom, loads of old skateboarding samples and lyrical references, tongue-in-cheek smatterings of crude death metal, the unexpected appearance of banjos, slide whistles, and harmonicas in the middle of their burly blastcore attack; the song "Don't Quit Your Day Job" has this killer part where the band builds up to this super heavy dirge, and just as they drop into it, they're joined by the metallic plunk of a banjo, and it works perfectly. I've always thought that these guys owed as much to the goofy, cut-and-paste thrash of Spazztic Blurr as they did to the early West Coast powerviolence crowd, and all these years later my opinion hasn't changed -if you're a fan of S. Blurr's Befo Da Awbum and the classic early 7"s from the likes of Capitalist Casualties, Infest and Crossed Out, then La Revancha should probably already be sitting on your shelf or turntable.
Track Samples:
Sample : Daljeet's Detonation
Sample : Don't Quit Your Day Job
Sample : MAD

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Already sold out from the source, and no surprise - this debut 7" from Kansas City's Sucked Dry is a fucking monstrous first offering from this young hardcore trio. Their music is bone-crushing heavy, with a massive recording that makes these five songs roll off the record with all of the pulverizing force of a Panzer IV, combining the most violent aspects of early American hardcore and West Coast powerviolence into a streamlined new monstrosity. I've seen the likes of Crossed Out, Infest and Neanderthal cited as some of the raw genetic material behind Sucked Dry's bulldozer blastcore, and that's unmistakable. But I can also hear loud and clear the manic jangle of the most blitzed-out carriers of Midwestern thrash in these songs, with traces of Die Kreuzen appearing in their frantic riffs, wailing atonal solos and the bursts of unhinged speed and chaos that are wedged in between the crushing bass-heavy breakdowns and whirlwind blastbeats that Sucked Dry dole out in jarring stop/start arrangements. These guys seem to have gone from zero to crush in no time. A great Ep you're advised to grab immediately if you're into The Endless Blockade, Sex Prisoner, Iron Lung, Vile Intent, Dead Language and other high-quality purveyors of contempo "PV". Looks nice, too, with a two-color silkscreened sleeve. Limited to five hundred copies on black vinyl.

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For years its only been available as an extremely expensive Japanese import, but Southern Lord finally reissued Sunn O)))'s 2000 album 00 Void this year, complete with the new artwork from Stephen Kasner that accompanied the Daymare version, and available as both a deluxe double disc set that also features the band's collaboration with Nurse With Wound as well as a posh double Lp collectors edition in heavyweight tip-on gatefold packaging.
00 Void was the second release from Sunn O))) following their extremely limited Grimmrobe Demos disc that Hydra Head issued the year before, but for most people (myself included), this was where we were first introduced to Sunn O)))'s massive glacial hypno-riffage and black hole ambience. Much has been made of Sunn O)))'s obvious debt to the "power drone" pioneered on Earth's legendary Earth 2 album, and these vast rumbling sludgescapes and circular trance-riffs are do owe a lot to Earth's ambient drone metal, but the guys in Sunn O))) (which includes, for those who have been living under a rock for the past decade, key members Stephen O'Malley of Burning Witch/Thorr's Hammer/Khanate and Greg Anderson of Engine Kind/Thorr's Hammer/Goatsnake) had by this point already begun to carve out their own language of slow-motion heaviness, introducing new levels of tectonic weight and density to their drone-metal experiments and playing with the use of electronics, processed vocals, stringed instruments and musique concrete concepts. The four tracks on 00 Void are simply constructed, but incredibly heavy, a high point in the realm of orchestral metallic drone that's still one of my favorite albums of it's kind.
The murky opening riff at the very beginning of "Richard" still flattens my skull to this day. With help from Stuart Dahlquist (Burning Witch, Asva), the band uncoils a monstrous bass-riff in glacial slow motion, the gluey low-end chug of the guitars rumbling like a semi-frozen wave of molasses over a near constant buzzing drone that is threaded through the whole track. The riff undergoes a couple of subtle mutations, and the backing sounds of whirring metallic hum and ominous swarming feedback shifts and warps ever so slightly over the fifteen minutes as they pile on processed violins and other sounds, but the sheer leaden heaviness remains a constant throughout. The second track "NN O)))" feels more propulsive, the pace more bulldozing as the crushing doom-riff plows through vast cosmic nebulae and abyssal ether formed from distant war-horns, wordless chant and almost Hawkwindian synth transmissions, but it's still agonizingly slow, the slo-mo doomchug drifting like some saurian behemoth through the void. "Rabbits' Revenge" is a re-working of the song "Hung Bunny" off of the Melvins album Lysol, deconstructed here by Sunn O))) into a sprawling disembodied dirge, only vaguely recognizable from the source material, and the final track "Ra At Dusk (Invokation 274 SPDR)" is a monstrous space-doom ritual cloaked in howling demonic noise, time-stretched horns blasting through the blackness, black-hole heaviness chugging aimlessly though space above waves of rumbling amplifier hum...
After this, Sunn O))) would delve into much more experimental territory and often moving pretty far from the pure glacial crush of this album, but this disc will always own a particular spot in my collection as an essential piece of ambient sludge...
Presented in a deluxe gatefold jacket with printed inner sleeves, pressed on 180 gram vinyl.
Track Samples:
Sample : Ra At Dusk
Sample : Rabbit's Revenge
Sample : Richard

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For years its only been available as an extremely expensive Japanese import, but Southern Lord finally reissued Sunn O)))'s 2000 album 00 Void this year, complete with the new artwork from Stephen Kasner that accompanied the Daymare version, and available as both a deluxe double disc set that also features the band's collaboration with Nurse With Wound as well as a posh double Lp collectors edition in heavyweight tip-on gatefold packaging.
00 Void was the second release from Sunn O))) following their extremely limited Grimmrobe Demos disc that Hydra Head issued the year before, but for most people (myself included), this was where we were first introduced to Sunn O)))'s massive glacial hypno-riffage and black hole ambience. Much has been made of Sunn O)))'s obvious debt to the "power drone" pioneered on Earth's legendary Earth 2 album, and these vast rumbling sludgescapes and circular trance-riffs are do owe a lot to Earth's ambient drone metal, but the guys in Sunn O))) (which includes, for those who have been living under a rock for the past decade, key members Stephen O'Malley of Burning Witch/Thorr's Hammer/Khanate and Greg Anderson of Engine Kind/Thorr's Hammer/Goatsnake) had by this point already begun to carve out their own language of slow-motion heaviness, introducing new levels of tectonic weight and density to their drone-metal experiments and playing with the use of electronics, processed vocals, stringed instruments and musique concrete concepts. The four tracks on 00 Void are simply constructed, but incredibly heavy, a high point in the realm of orchestral metallic drone that's still one of my favorite albums of it's kind.
The murky opening riff at the very beginning of "Richard" still flattens my skull to this day. With help from Stuart Dahlquist (Burning Witch, Asva), the band uncoils a monstrous bass-riff in glacial slow motion, the gluey low-end chug of the guitars rumbling like a semi-frozen wave of molasses over a near constant buzzing drone that is threaded through the whole track. The riff undergoes a couple of subtle mutations, and the backing sounds of whirring metallic hum and ominous swarming feedback shifts and warps ever so slightly over the fifteen minutes as they pile on processed violins and other sounds, but the sheer leaden heaviness remains a constant throughout. The second track "NN O)))" feels more propulsive, the pace more bulldozing as the crushing doom-riff plows through vast cosmic nebulae and abyssal ether formed from distant war-horns, wordless chant and almost Hawkwindian synth transmissions, but it's still agonizingly slow, the slo-mo doomchug drifting like some saurian behemoth through the void. "Rabbits' Revenge" is a re-working of the song "Hung Bunny" off of the Melvins album Lysol, deconstructed here by Sunn O))) into a sprawling disembodied dirge, only vaguely recognizable from the source material, and the final track "Ra At Dusk (Invokation 274 SPDR)" is a monstrous space-doom ritual cloaked in howling demonic noise, time-stretched horns blasting through the blackness, black-hole heaviness chugging aimlessly though space above waves of rumbling amplifier hum...
After this, Sunn O))) would delve into much more experimental territory and often moving pretty far from the pure glacial crush of this album, but this disc will always own a particular spot in my collection as an essential piece of ambient sludge.
Then on to the bonus disc for this limited edition 2xCD: Inspired by the dark electrical drones of Nurse With Wound's 1988 album Soliloquy For Lilith, Sunn O)))'s Stephen O'Malley sought out the legendary British noise project to commission them for a re-imagining of the monstrous tectonic drones of Sunn O)))'s own 00 Void several years ago, and this collaboration ended up becoming this collection of quasi-remixes. NWW's Stephen Stapleton took the massive rumblings of Sunn O))) and sculpted them into completely new soundscapes that bear very little resemblance to the source material, forming gleaming ambience and spectral hum from out of the raw down tuned sludge. This fascinating set of three epic tracks that were originally released as a bonus disc on a Japanese release of 00 Void that quickly went out of print, but these recordings have recently been revived as both a deluxe double Lp set on O/Malley's own Ideologic Organ imprint, and as a second disc included in the new limited edition re-issue of 00 Void on Southern Lord.
On sid A, "Dysnystaxis" slowly billows out in a soft cloud of swirling drone, deep wavering bass tones hovering in space surrounded by faint metallic hum and slowly undulating chordal shift. It's a gorgeous piece of twilight drone music, punctuated by soft bass notes and a constant metallic prayer-bowl whirr that inhabits the entire track, sounding very much like something you'd hear from Troum. This dronescape slowly evolves over the course of the track, with more sinister violin-like sounds appearing after a while, spinning a delicate, sorrowful melody against the soporific, nocturnal pulse, and more layers of strings and whirling shadowdrift building this into an eerie orchestral drone.
The B and D sides make up two halves of "Ra At Dawn"; the first part of this epic piece starts like murky chamber music, strings and keys slowed down to half speed, melted into darker, more ominous smears of orchestral drift and subterranean hum. The first several minutes resemble a Ligeti piece chopped and screwed, and ejected into deep space, becoming more abstract as it goes on. The melodic aspects become reduced to a massive jet-engine drone, hovering in space while gaseous exhortations and gusts of static are slowly emitted into the blackness, and the crushing guitar riffs from the original recording begin to appear in fragments, short eruptions of metallic roar that briefly break the surface. The second part picks up from there, with heavy, buzzing guitar drones suspended across an abyss swarming with streaks of metallic whirr, intercepted radio signals and exhalations of gaseous hiss.
The C-side has "Ash On The Trees", where Pete Stahl's nasally croon that was originally buried and obscured on the source material is excavated and situated above the sound of treated percussive guitar clang and wisps of gauzy ambience, intermittently dropping out as his voice rises skyward in a wordless moan. More noisy elements, extreme high-pitched tones and distorted percussion begin to flow in, and this grows more threatening bit by bit, the sound spare and skeletal but very ominous, the vocals twisted and warped into a monstrous throaty chant, joined by weird bird-like screeching, bits of blackened buzz, the sound of breaking glass, harsh crackling static, all of this woven with the grinding guitars into a surprisingly frightening soundscape; in terms of sheer doom-ridden terror, this track is a standout.
This double-disc version of 00 Void / The Iron Soul Of Nothing is limited to just 1,000 machine-numbered copies.
Track Samples:
Sample : Ra At Dusk
Sample : Rabbit's Revenge
Sample : Richard
Sample : Dysnystaxis (Nurse with Wound Remix)
Sample : Ra at Dawn (Nurse with Wound Remix)

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This hard-to-find disc from the Teutonic masters of guitar-based post-industrial dark ambience combines two out-of-print vinyl releases (the 2005 album Nahtscato on Paranoise, and the 2004 Autopoiesis picture disc on Small Voices) on a single disc, re-mastered, along with some bonus unreleased material.
The four tracks from the Autopoiesis Lp are stunning pieces of crepuscular drift, blending together eerie androgynous singing and massive amounts of reverb into billowing grey clouds of dream-ether, while jazzy drumming skitters and shuffles way down in the depths. Strange processed horn-like bleating echoes out of the abyss, only to be suddenly consumed by the waves of reverb-drenched thrum. When the second song comes in, though, it's as a heavy, driving bass-line weaving aggressively between swells of textured guitar feedback and orchestral drone, like some ambient hypno-rock jam that's been totally unmoored from the rhythm section, a menacing riff circling endlessly through the celestial fog, draped with layer after layer of sparkling guitar drone and minor key tremolo riffs that ascend skyward, above mysterious groans and mutterings and the menacing crackle and hiss of some distant black fire. From there, the album drifts out into vast reams of black drift, hypnotic strobing static against looped tribal rhythms that lock into some surprisingly heavy drone-rock grooves, at times reminding me of the massive breakbeat-driven crush of the first Scorn album, later washing out across cosmic fields streaked with processed guitar sounds that begin to resemble the honking of some mutated saxophone. The final track is easily one of the heaviest and darkest pieces of music that I've heard from Troum, an abyssal symphony of massive bowed drones, ethereal strings and monstrous liturgical chant slowed down to a glacial crawl, like a doom-laden Popul Vuh piece tumbling in slow motion into the mouth of a black hole.
The Nahtscato 12" material is more industrial in it's approach, stacking more of those looped tribal beats and pounding oil-drum rhythms on top of whirling drone-clouds and stretched-out metallic reverberations, synth strings and thick squelchy bass chords, moving out into ghostly dronescapes full of buzzing strings and whirring metal and subterranean rumblings, and cavernous, dimly-lit depths of tectonic drift.
The end of the disc features two previously unreleased tracks, the first an alternate version of one of the pieces from the Autopoiesis Lp, the second a track called "Bale Caps" an epic industrialized kosmiche drone piece that sounds like what Tangerine Dream might had come up with if they had been commissioned to score The Terminator. These recordings showcase several different sides of Troums sound from the minimal to the surprisingly heavy, but all share that common trance-like quality and lush darkness that keeps bringing me back to their music over and over...
Released in a six-panel digipack, limited to 500 copies.
Track Samples:
Sample : Autopoiesis pt.3
Sample : O Choros Ton Epithymion
Sample : Nahtscato

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Available on both Lp (from At War With False Noise, which I'll have in stock soon) and limited edition cassette.
This new band from Boise, Idaho has been getting some buzz lately, being compared to bands like Jex Thoth, Wounded Kings, and Witch Mountain due to the presence of charismatic singer/guitarist Darcy Nutt and their mix of her spooky singing, their classic doom metal sounds and the inclusion of more blackened elements in their music. Their debut album (produced by Blake from Wolvserpent/Aelter) actually manages to stand out a bit from all of those other femme-fronted old-school doom bands that are making the rounds because of those hideous blackened Hellhammer-esque passages that show up occasionally throughout the album.
"Batholith" opens the album with a heavy hook-laden dose of doom metal that goes from galloping, rocking power to a slower, more ethereal heaviness, all fronted by Darcy Nutt's likewise ethereal vocals that are softly sung from behind a dense cloud of reverb. The slight black metal influence on Uzala's music is heard here in the sinister tremolo riffs that race beneath the thundering riffage, surrounding the heavier guitar parts with an additional sheen of metallic menace. But when that suddenly goes into "The Reaping", they go into a straight-up Sabbath-worship sludgefest. Nutt's singing comes out from behind the nebulous reverb and echo, her now rather sultry voice crooning over the murky slo-mo trudge and wah-wah soaked leads. Heavy, fuzz-soaked classic doom here. On "Ice Castle", the band continue to slow down the music even further, creating one of the more atmospheric songs on the album, full of eerie dissonant chords, more of those soaring somber leads, and a general ghostly vibe that sticks to the whole track. The songs "Fracture" and "Wardrums", on the other hand, are fierce, raw chunks of ragged sludge that pick up speed and have guitarist Chad Remains taking over the vocals with his harsh, scowling scream that shifts these songs into more of a pummeling, abrasive attack than the previous material.
There's a bonus track titled "Cataract" on this tape that does not appear on the Lp release; it's back to the slower, moodier sound of the earlier songs, Nutt once again taking the lead with her dramatic singing, the music blending a droning, vaguely psychedelic sensibility (backwards sounds, blackened vocal utterances, long meandering solos) with the saurian heaviness of the chorus. It's one of the catchier songs on Uzala's debut. That's followed by the old school plod of "Plague", another Sabbath-on-ludes dirge that meshes that ethereal, gauzy prettiness and cathedral ambience with massive slow-motion metal, and then the closer, a rendition of the oft-covered song "Gloomy Sunday" from Hungarian composer Rezso Seress. Pallbearer already beat these guys to it with their own version of the song on their 2010 demo, but Uzala perform it with all of the solemnity and grey-black hues that the song embodies, and Nutt's powerful performance on the track give their version it's own haunting power.
It's something to check out if you're a fan of Reino Ermitano, Electric Wizard, Saturnalia Temple, and other narcotized doom metal outfits, though fans of classic doom have plenty to dig into here, too. Each cassette is hand-numbered in an edition of 111 copies; the first ten copies that we have in stock each include a silk-screened Uzala patch; once these are sold out, all subsequent tapes will not include the patch.

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From 2006 to 2010, underground filmmaker Lucifer Valentine produced a series of films that comprised what he called his "Vomit Gore" trilogy, Slaughtered Vomit Dolls, ReGOREgitated Sacrifice, and Slow Torture Puke Chamber. The film titles alone provide ample warning that this is extreme, fringe underground filmmaking that we're dealing with here, but while the original releases on Unearthed found a small but enthusiastic audience within certain hardcore sectors of the extreme horror community (and all ended up going out of print fairly quickly), calling these "horror" films would be a little disingenuous. Valentine's crude yet frequently eye-popping (in more ways than one) visuals and his jet-black worldview is delivered via a demented combination of vile cinéma vérité style footage, hyper-splattery violence, bizarre non-linear plotting, and a cavalcade of repulsive sequences that seriously put my own iron will to the test.
The vague plot of these films concerns a bulimic nineteen year old girl named Angela Aberdeen with a long history of sexual abuse and drug dependency. Finding herself caught in a hopeless downward spiral that leads from working as a stripper into actual prostitution, she begins a long and nightmarish slide into an abyss of self-destruction and debasement. And it just gets worse, spinning further out into increasingly hallucinatory visions of extreme mutilation, "Roman Showers", demonic delirium, sexual torture and other perversions that Valentine and crew gleefully present in an almost documentary style fashion even as the visuals become more and more insane. To paraphrase Russ Kick, these films rate a solid 10 on the extreme-o-meter. Valentine's trilogy is one of the most repulsive, confrontational underground film series that I've ever seen, and exists in a strange nightmare region in between the punk-fueled experimental film works of Cinema Of Transgression director Richard Kern, the influence of Polanski's Repulsion, hardcore scatological fetish porn, the ultra-hardcore August Underground indie gore films, and the brutal bondage visions of Insex. Just as these films can't be pigeonholed as mere "extreme horror", they also cannot be labeled as mere pornography, either, despite the extremely graphic material. Though their detractors ravenously deny it, Valentine's films combine the scenes of extreme debasement and violence with a pitch-black surrealism and weird metaphysical undertones that' much closer to underground art cinema than pure exploitation. And all of this is backed by Valentine's pounding, horrific industrial noise soundtrack, which on it's own is pretty fantastic and perfectly fits these hellish films. In the end though, you're not going to want to go anywhere near these films if you're not already a rabid enthusiast of the most extreme fringes of "black surrealism" and art-splatter cinema.
This extensive box-set collects all three of the original films on seperate discs, with all of the extensive extras that were included on the original releases, audio commentaries, deleted scenes and outtakes, lots of extended interviews with the cast and filmmakers, artwork and production sketches, sound/art collages, and featurettes on the background and philosophy behind the series. In addition, the set also has a fourth disc that has the previously unreleased short film A Perfect Child Of Satan with additional featurettes and interviews.
Absolutely not for sale to anyone under the age of 18. All orders require a signed age statement.

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No, I'm not really sure what the fuck that title is supposed to mean, either. Just let the gooey, filthy metal that's collected on this disc wash over you like a wave of rotten black molasses, and all will become clear. Bound together by their collective Finnish-ness, Frogskin, Semtex and the awesomely named Demonic Death Judge come together on this full length album that showcases what has got to be some of the ugliest, grooviest sludge metal going on in Finland at this moment. I still dig these kinds of regional music documents, like those Global Assault Cds that Relapse released around ten years ago, which By The Malice reminds me of. You're especially going to want to pick this up if you are a hopeless junkie for sludgy, fetid scum-metal, which is what openers Demonic Death Judge dish out on their three songs; a noxious blooze-addled blend of Sabbathy riffs, distorted pukoid snarling, murky looped voices and some cool looped-voice trippiness and slide guitar textures that allow these guys to put their own gnarled stamp on this sound. The second song "Beneath The Monument" is a real standout - there's an obvious love of old Eyehategod and Buzzoven behind what these guys do, but when that soaring melodic part and the chorus of sung vocals rises up midway into the song, it becomes this striking, atmospheric new sound. Their song "Feast" is another striking mix of swoonsome psychedelia and blasted Sab-sludge, starting off with lilting female singing that suddenly bursts like rotten black fruit into the sleazy central groove, all infested with various nihilistic movie samples and apocalyptic portent.
Semtex go for more of a straight ahead New Orleans vibe on their four tracks, with plenty of that swingin' Sabbath influence found in their bilious, slimy riffs. Kicking off with a brief instrumental dirge called "Two Minutes Of Rehab" that introduces their brand of crushing downtuned deathsludge, the band slinks into the bloated tarpit metal of "Outcome" which goes from grinding bluesy heaviness to quieter build-ups where the singer drools all over the mic while the rhythm section snakes through the huge laid-back groove, the guitarist dropping in some wah-drenched soloing later on. These guys do sound a lot like Weedeater, no doubt about that, but the amount of putrid psychedelia that they inject into this blood-encrusted sludge makes this highly palatable.
Out of all of these Finnish sludge-metal bands, Frogskin was the only one that I was already familiar with. This band has been around for a while, and released just one Lp back in 2008 that fucking kills - it's one of my favorite sludgy metal records of the past decade, and still gets a big recommendation from me. So I was stoked to see these guys had some new material to show off on this disc, with three songs of groovy demonic sludge that splatter harsh blackened vocals and Hawkwindian synth bloop over the Nawlin's-influenced heaviness. Frogskin always sounded a bit more blown-out, a bit more diseased, more of a frantic edge to their Sab-stained sludge, the band sounding like they're right on the verge of having a breakdown , which is probably due mostly to the singer's deformed, high pitched yowl. They also thrown in some wrecked acoustic guitar into the mix on one song, flanger pedals set to 'skullfuck' on another and all of this stuff has a thick blackened crust on it.
Recommended to all fans of syrupy scum-metal and the likes of Bongzilla, Eyehategod, newer Cable, Weedeater, Cavity; if you love that sound, you'll love what's going on in this corner of Finland....
Track Samples:
Sample : DEMONIC DEATH JUDGE - Beneath The Monument
Sample : SEMTEX - Outcome
Sample : FROGSKIN - Locked/Loaded Acting Dead

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Long out of print, this 1991 compilation from RRRecords has recently been re-issued on Cd-r by the label, although it unfortunately does not include a reprint of the RRReport Japan magazine that came with the original release. I'd kill to get my hands on a copy of that zine. On it's own, though, this disc still offers a cool mix of extreme Japanese sonic warfare from the early 90's, with material from some legendary artists like The Gerogerigegege, Incapacitants, and Dissecting Table, wrapped up and presented in that signature style of Xeroxed collage-sleeve that RRRecords does.
The disc starts with a super short track of free improv squeal from the duo of Junji Hirose and Yoshihide Otomo that sounds like a extreme free jazz outfit jamming on some Japanese folk melodies for a minute, then goes into "The Ritual Mask" from Vasilisk, a creepy, shadowy bit of freak-folk twang and drone that has a Sun City Girls/Pearls Before Swine feel to it. There's a killer song from Dissecting Table called "Transfer The Object By The Spirit" that mixes together monstrous vocals, weird cybernetic electronics, pounding drums and clanking piano into a very strange and disturbing noise rock jam that is very different from what I'm used to hearing from this project, especially towards the end when the horror-movie string sections come in and the song transforms into this nightmarish future-prog workout, almost sounding like a blackened. industrialized Univers Zero. Another short interlude of murky samples and noise abuse comes via the Emil Beaulieau side-project Needles and their track "Including Eye Injection", a re-working of some Hanatarash material.
That's followed by a nearly seven-minute blast of repulsive masturbatory groaning and extreme noisecore/junk noise violence from the mighty Gerogerigegege titled "Violence Onanie" - while Gero frontman Juntaro Yamanouchi faps away mercilessly, avalanches of rusted metal crash down from above while bugle calls and terrifying air raid sirens howl across the horizon.
Violent Onsen Geisha's "Hey Bo Didley!" is a feedback-damaged rockabilly loop repeated ad nauseum beneath ultra-distorted vocal noises and screaming, and Keiich Inoue (one of the more obscure artists featured here) presents a ear-wrecking piece of extreme feedback and noise called "Your Mothers Cunt". "Ecologist" from Takell-Kizimecca is another extreme noise track, a swarming mass of squealing feedback and harsh glitch that splices in distressed chunks of traditional Japanese folk singing, and Japanese noise gods Incapacitants unleash one of the compilations most bruising noise assaults on "Live At 20,000", another long (seven-plus) minutes exercise in brutal feedback/junk noise/amplified chaos that sounds like it was recorded live in a machine shop where every object in the room is beaten and bashed simultaneously.
Solmania's "Drive Time" is one of my favorite tracks on Omnibus, with its squalls of ultra-distorted guitar howl erupting in cloudbursts across the pounding tribal drumming and murky feedback. It's really low fi, with a sound like it was recorded in a basement on an overdriven 4-track, but it’s crushing and skull-scraping all at once.
KK Null's "Infinity" is a hypnotic cluster of phased distortion and melodious droning guitar notes swirling together in a nebulous cloud of warped sound, and Hideaki Shimada's Agencement project contributes a track of his amplified violin-based noise sculpture called "Maceration" that will appeal to fans of the more ambient-type stuff that you might hear from Aube or The Haters, a chiming, clinking waterfall of tiny metal pieces crashing and swirling over each other endlessly.
The disc finishes with the return of the Hirose-Otomo Duo, who end the album with a longer improvisation that blends together creepy bass pulsations, Japanese folk singing, fragments of ancient dust-covered swingtime 78 records, field recordings, and swathes of ghostly ambience.
There's an hour of extreme skull-abuse here, much of which isn't found anywhere else.
Track Samples:
Sample : DISSECTING TABLE - Transfer The Object By The Spirit
Sample : GEROGERIGEGEGE - Violence Onanie
Sample : INCAPACITANTS - Live At 20,000
Sample : SOLMANIA - Drive Time

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I always wanted to carry this compilation of doom metal bands paying homage to the Finnish deathdoom masters Thergothon, but never had a chance to stock it as it ended up going out of print not too long after it's release. It's not surprising that it did, based on the lineup of bands that are featured on this two-disc set: Solitude brought together some of the biggest and best names in funeral/death doom, including Asunder, Evoken, Umbra Nihil, Worship, Mournful Congregation and Officium Triste, and there's also a bunch of stranger doom metal bands that appear here that I'm a fan of such as Persistence In Mourning, Aarni, and Astral Sleep.
Asunder's version of "Who Rides The Astral Wings" opens this album with their trademark mega-heaviness, injecting the song with the Bay Area' band's own strain of lumbering, saurian crush while bringing in Jackie Perez-Gratz (Amber Asylum, Giant Squid, Grayceon) to contribute her achingly beautiful cello to the already quite miserable atmosphere, which they stretch out for more than eleven minutes. Dutch funeral doom metallers Officium Triste do a fairly straightforward, solemn rendition of "Crying Blood And Crimson Snow", and Evoken smear a load of growling distorted space-synth across "Yet The Watchers Guard" and transform it into their own monstrous, vaguely psychedelic deathdoom image; these guys are one of the few doom metal outfits that successfully use keyboards without losing an iota of their bone-crushing heaviness, and even when the synths really start to kick in towards the end of the song, this remains relentlessly crushing. There's Imindain's liturgical doom, and the epic heartache of Colosseum's gloompop-soaked version of the Lovecraftian "The Unknown Kadath In The Cold Waste". The mighty Mournful Congregation offer up a gnarled take on "Elemental", that seethes with ghastly vocal exhortations and mangy, murky riffage, and Worship's version of "Evoken" is as fucked-up and hellish as one would hope, flaying even more of the flesh from the already skeletal song structure and twisting it into even more of a putrid funeral march, so abjectly miserable and deformed that it takes on a wretchedness that is unparalleled on this album; when the violin-like sounds rise up towards the end, it sounds fuckin' amazing. Then Finnish prog-doom weirdoes Umbra Nihil turn "The Twilight Fade" into something that more resembles a warped Sabbath jam laced with some killer psychedelic guitar freak-out, and Persistence In Mourning's version of "Dancing In The Realm Of Shades" is a caveman dirge shocked with squealing electronic noise and effects, sounding more like a doomdeath version of the newer Bastard Noise stuff at times.
The strangest interpretations of Therogothon's music are found on the second disc. One of my favorites is the first track of grim space-rock laced heaviness from Nojda, who blend the sound of jaw harp, ceremonial drums and cosmic synths in with the funereal dirge, crafting something that sounds strangely like a cross between the majestic folk of later era Swans and a Hammond-organ wielding Skepticism on a major LSD trip. Otzepenevshiye's take on "The Unknown Kadath In The Cold Waste" is a trippy mix of post-industrial darkness and psychedelia, the programmed rhythms skittering across the desolate frost-covered soundscape of strings, bizarre vocal sounds, electronics and swirling distorted guitar that ends up bearing a striking resemblance to a spacier version of Korperschwache, especially when the icy, buzzing black metal guitars start to swarm in later in the song.
One-man funeral doom band Krohm offer a haunting version of "Everlasting" that uses a blackened-up version of the classic Peaceville death/doom sound, but then Inter Arbores follow with a deconstructed interpretation of "Who Rides The Astral Wings" that reduces the original music down to not much more than the basic bass line of the song for the first few minutes, weaving that bass guitar through a crumbling soundscape of low-end noise. Eventually the band comes together, lurching into a spare, skeletal dirge that's mainly carried by the drums and bass while wheezing harmonica and fragile guitar notes spin out overhead, slowly evolving into a gloomy piece of crunch-laced post-punk. Finnish doom-weirdos Aarni deliver one of the strangest re-envisioning of Thergothon with "Verivaikerrus - Hurmehanki", a mix of dreamy folky flute melodies, atonal guitar chords and bizarre drawled vocals, and Astral Sleep slow down "Yet The Watchers Guard" by at least half, using a contrabass for deep resonant cello-like rumble as their washed-out ambient deathdoom surges forward on a cloud of black fog and spacey electronic textures.
The cover of "Elemental" from Canadian death metallers Axis Of Advance (which also featured members of Revenge, Weapon, Blood Revolt, and Kerasphorous) was one of the last appearances from the band before their breakup late in the last decade; it's actually one of the more faithful cover versions on the compilation, sticking pretty close to the sound and feel of the original, though these guys do inject a bit of their signature blackened heaviness as well as Vermin's chant-like vocals into the mix. And the final track comes from bleak solo black metaller Singultus, who offers up a brief, intensely anguished version of "The Twilight Fade".
Includes a twelve-page booklet.
Track Samples:
Sample : Who Rides the Astral Winds
Sample : The Unkown Kadath in the Cold Waste
Sample : Elemental
Sample :
Sample : Elemental
Sample : Dancing in the Realm of Shades

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Hell is for children, indeed.
You've never seen anything like Where The Dead Go To Die. Hell, I've never seen anything quite like Where The Dead Go To Die, and I've been obsessively chasing after the most extreme offerings in underground filmmaking for more than twenty years. The first full length film from underground animator and industrial speedcore artist Screamerclauz, Where The Dead Go To Die is an anthology of sorts, compiling three shorter animated works with intertwining plotlines and characters, all revolving around the damned children trapped in a damned neighborhood where the sun has disappeared forever from the sky, it rains perpetually, and a demonic talking black Labrador Retriever compels them to engage in wholesale slaughter, castration, infanticide, and Satanic worship. The first story, Tainted Milk, tells of a slow-witted young boy named Tommy who falls under the influence of that demonic black lab, which leads to a screaming nightmare of foetal slaughter, castration, demonic hallucinations, bestiality, and ends on a pitch-black note. In Liquid Memories, a murderous junkie finds that he is able to juice up on the memories of his victims by extracting them from a gland in the back of their skull, but this spirals down into a fever-dream of extreme brain-melting violence, black-acid hallucinations, and disgusting sex with all linear logic falling away as the junkie becomes utterly lost in a kaleidoscope of psychedelic horror. The last story is The Masks That The Monsters Wear, and it's the films most disturbing tale; it follows two children, one a horribly deformed boy with a conjoined twin growing out of the side of his skull, the other a little girl trapped in a depraved family of child pornographers, who seek solace together from the horrors surrounding them. Nothing ends well for them or anyone else in Where The Dead Go To Die, though.
This film is one of the bleakest, most nightmarish pieces of psychedelic animation that I have ever seen, filled with the grotesque whisperings of cycloptic shadow-demons, mutant children, extreme torture, LSD-soaked horrors, and other endless disturbing visions scraped from the screaming maw of the worst bad trip you can imagine. Sure, some of the voice acting is sub-par, and the computer generated animation is admittedly crude, resembling the look of the computer games Second Life or The Sims, but after getting used to it, I found that this primitive CGI animation actually works within the batshit-crazy hellscape that Screamerclauz has constructed; in fact, as the stories progress, you can also see a noticeable evolution in the quality of the animation, so that by the third segment Masks it begins to have a creepy, jittery look that sometimes reminds me of Fred Stuhr's stop-motion animations. But even when the animation is at it's most primitive, you are still treated to scenes and images that are so imaginatively bizarre and hallucinatory they will be etched into your brain as if by black acid. Backed by an oppressive and deeply unsettling soundtrack that uses dark ambient textures, extreme electronic noise and terrifying industrial sounds, Where The Dead Go To Die is another primo example of the sort of "black surrealism" that I've been following lately on labels like Unearthed Films and Holy Mountain; the closest comparison that I can come up with is what an animated adaptation of James Havoc's notorious collection of extreme black fantasy Satanskin would feel like if made by the people behind the Adult Swim series Xavier: Renegade Angel. Available on both Dvd and Blur-ray, the disc also includes various extras like behind the scenes footage (including the voiceover recordings with scream queen Linnea Quigly who appears briefly in the film), short making-of featurettes, a montage of deleted footage with commentary by the director, the live-action short film Ice Cream Sunday that is almost as bizarre as Where The Dead..., and assorted other promo reels, audio commentary.
Those looking for sophisticated horror animation can keep moving along, but if you have a taste for the pitch-black depths of transgressive surrealism and ultra-evil low budget weirdness, you may well want to visit Where The Dead Go To Die...

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Hell is for children, indeed.
You've never seen anything like Where The Dead Go To Die. Hell, I've never seen anything quite like Where The Dead Go To Die, and I've been obsessively chasing after the most extreme offerings in underground filmmaking for more than twenty years. The first full length film from underground animator and industrial speedcore artist Screamerclauz, Where The Dead Go To Die is an anthology of sorts, compiling three shorter animated works with intertwining plotlines and characters, all revolving around the damned children trapped in a damned neighborhood where the sun has disappeared forever from the sky, it rains perpetually, and a demonic talking black Labrador Retriever compels them to engage in wholesale slaughter, castration, infanticide, and Satanic worship. The first story, Tainted Milk, tells of a slow-witted young boy named Tommy who falls under the influence of that demonic black lab, which leads to a screaming nightmare of foetal slaughter, castration, demonic hallucinations, bestiality, and ends on a pitch-black note. In Liquid Memories, a murderous junkie finds that he is able to juice up on the memories of his victims by extracting them from a gland in the back of their skull, but this spirals down into a fever-dream of extreme brain-melting violence, black-acid hallucinations, and disgusting sex with all linear logic falling away as the junkie becomes utterly lost in a kaleidoscope of psychedelic horror. The last story is The Masks That The Monsters Wear, and it's the films most disturbing tale; it follows two children, one a horribly deformed boy with a conjoined twin growing out of the side of his skull, the other a little girl trapped in a depraved family of child pornographers, who seek solace together from the horrors surrounding them. Nothing ends well for them or anyone else in Where The Dead Go To Die, though.
This film is one of the bleakest, most nightmarish pieces of psychedelic animation that I have ever seen, filled with the grotesque whisperings of cycloptic shadow-demons, mutant children, extreme torture, LSD-soaked horrors, and other endless disturbing visions scraped from the screaming maw of the worst bad trip you can imagine. Sure, some of the voice acting is sub-par, and the computer generated animation is admittedly crude, resembling the look of the computer games Second Life or The Sims, but after getting used to it, I found that this primitive CGI animation actually works within the batshit-crazy hellscape that Screamerclauz has constructed; in fact, as the stories progress, you can also see a noticeable evolution in the quality of the animation, so that by the third segment Masks it begins to have a creepy, jittery look that sometimes reminds me of Fred Stuhr's stop-motion animations. But even when the animation is at it's most primitive, you are still treated to scenes and images that are so imaginatively bizarre and hallucinatory they will be etched into your brain as if by black acid. Backed by an oppressive and deeply unsettling soundtrack that uses dark ambient textures, extreme electronic noise and terrifying industrial sounds, Where The Dead Go To Die is another primo example of the sort of "black surrealism" that I've been following lately on labels like Unearthed Films and Holy Mountain; the closest comparison that I can come up with is what an animated adaptation of James Havoc's notorious collection of extreme black fantasy Satanskin would feel like if made by the people behind the Adult Swim series Xavier: Renegade Angel. Available on both Dvd and Blur-ray, the disc also includes various extras like behind the scenes footage (including the voiceover recordings with scream queen Linnea Quigly who appears briefly in the film), short making-of featurettes, a montage of deleted footage with commentary by the director, the live-action short film Ice Cream Sunday that is almost as bizarre as Where The Dead..., and assorted other promo reels, audio commentary.
Those looking for sophisticated horror animation can keep moving along, but if you have a taste for the pitch-black depths of transgressive surrealism and ultra-evil low budget weirdness, you may well want to visit Where The Dead Go To Die...

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Mike Williams is far more well known for fronting the legendary sludge metal band Eyehategod along with his other projects (Arson Anthem, Outlaw Order, The Guilt Of), but he's been actively writing for just as long as he's been belting out anti-social screeds against a backdrop of mutant drug-addled metalpunk; some of you may remember when he was the associate editor at Metal Maniacs back in the early 90s and contributed heavily to the magazine, a period of time that many thought (myself included) was the magazine's heyday. But it's in William's intensely dark and nihilistic verse that his talents truly reveal themselves.
Cancer As A Social Acitivty is his first book, and was originally published in 2005. Containing 126 pages of writing interspersed with select pieces of Mike's grim black and white collage art, Cancer showcased a unique style of writing that drew comparisons to the surreal, experimental poetry of William Burroughs and the street-level realism of Bukowski, but Williams treads down darker avenues than either of those writers ever did. Fans of Eyehategod and Mike's other projects will immediately recognize his voice when reading these poems, as they are structured very much like the lyrics for EHG (and in fact served as the source material for some of the band's songs), thrumming with intense negativity and hallucinatory visions, richly evocative of American small-town shit-holes infested with drug abuse and abject hopelessness, ferocious anti-social behaviors, the total failure of humanity as a species. These pieces are written in a tightly-wound version of free-verse that feels like each line of writing lashes off the page like a length of barbed-wire, often delivered with all of the grace of a blunt-edged weapon, like "The Age Of Boot Camp": "The age of boot camp is here / Like having a vulture on your arm / And a patch on your eye / Or a blindfold over both eyes / And a poisonous hyena tied to your ankle / Or asphyxiation by carbon monoxide / While being burned at the stake / Like going to work on Monday / Thinking about going berserk with a nine millimeter". The book also includes a handful of short prose-poems like "Previously Unknown Religious Information" and "Masters Of Legalized Confusion" that swim with delirious visions of violence, grief, and loss. Since I picked up my copy of the book a few years ago at an Eyehategod show, I've read through it countless times; I have yet to come across anyone else currently writing poetry at this level of ferociousness.
After that first printing sold out, copies of Cancer As A Social Activity started to go for outrageous sums on Amazon and other bookseller sites; I've seen it hawked for more than $100 in some instances. Finally, the book is available again at a reasonable price, and hopefully we'll be seeing further volumes of Williams's writing coming out in the near future.

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The latest offering from Wilt is this new collaboration with the solo digital drone/noise artist Michael Palace, who records under the name Horchata. I haven't heard anything from Palace's project in years; the last thing of his I remember picking up was a tape on Truculent, which would have been earlier this past decade. I definitely don't remember his work sounding anywhere near as ominous and unsettling as this, though. Working together on Geomancy, the two artists produce a series of virtually lightless soundscapes that combine bleak, blasted expanses of aural desolation, distant rumbling tremors, and slow-moving clouds of metallic whir and hum that swirl around the simple drifting synth-shapes that hover within the blackness like glowing black sigils. And it's all blackness. Wilt always produces nightmarish sounding stuff, but this is the closest that I think I've ever heard the duo venture into this kind of cosmic black ambience that sits somewhere in between the darkest Tangerine Dream/Klaus Schulze works and the deep-earth horror of Lustmord and Yen Pox. Of course, they add in the sort of monstrous black electronics and hellish textures that their work is known for; throughout long tracks of abyssal ambience like "Procession Of The Equinoxes" and "Patterns In The Soil", Wilt infests the slowly drifting black fog with an array of far-off croaks and howls, snatches of garbled chanting, swells of deep metallic Sunn O)))-like drone, distant horns melting across a jet-black horizon, and on "Etheric Winds", the artists create a black kosmische ambience where faint pulsating signals and whirring machinelike sounds combine with waves of pitch-black space drift and amorphous metallic buzz, sounds that later return in a more hushed manner on some of the album's later forays into fuzz-draped nocturnal driftscapes that resemble a more malevolent version of Tim Hecker's granular electronic ambience. The further you get into Geomancy's arcane formations, the stranger they get, even as the music becomes more cinematic in scope; on ""Stone Alignment", the cavernous drones transform into this strange electronic dirge where distorted synth chords plod over massive reverberant tympani-like drums, processed samples of orchestral strings and softly wavering electronic textures, becoming one of the album's most arresting tracks, and the closer "Amplifying The Geometry" is a mesmerizing piece of widescreen midnight ambience stained with looped horns and lysergic darkness that resurrects some of the obsidian metallic heaviness that appears earlier on the disc. Fans of Wilt are obviously going to love this, but anyone not familiar with this project who dig abstract, blackened ambient electronics and formless doom-laden dread should check this out as well...
Comes in a digipack package.
Track Samples:
Sample : Patterns In The Soil
Sample : WILT + HORCHATA-Geomancy
Sample : Stone Alignment

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Scowl documents another quality session of hardcore blast-improv spearheaded by Weasel Walter for the ugEXLODE imprint. This nearly hour long set took place back in 2008 in Oakland, California, and features Weasel on drums teaming up with pianist Scott R. Looney, trumpeter Nate Wooley, and bassist Damon Smith. The last time that I heard Smith and Weasel together was on the ferocious 2009 album Plane Crash; while the group doesn't get quite as heavy here, it's still furious music that the quartet engage in, hyper-abstract and hyper-articulated, the musicians weaving their bleating skronk, manic piano-gut clusters and gritty textured bass sounds around Weasel's expressive drumming, which often erupts into speedy, grind/thrash-influenced percussive aggression and power, lacing his manic blast beats all through the long form improv workouts. On the opener "Anglewise Blind", for instance, the band veers wildly through fields of pointillist abstraction and scuttling skronk to long stretches of sinister scrape and drone, and terrifying volleys of blastbeat mayhem and high speed atonal freak-out. Throughout the track, the musicians build up an atmosphere of menace that continues through the entire performance, as well as throughout the album. Some other standout moments on Scowl include the passages of aural dread that emerge on "Scan Meltdown", which wouldn't sound out of place on the soundtrack to some weird 70's psychedelic horror film, thanks to Stephen Scott's expressive manipulations of the innards of his piano. The band picks up speed after that, culminating in the blast-chaos and squealing / clanking fury of "Canard Poems", and through all of the different pieces, the group never back down from raging at full force whenever the fire consumes them. There are plenty of moments of subdued exploration on here as well, moments of strange beauty that take shape within the storm of disorder. Definitely on the more abrasive end of free-jazz/improv, of course, and as thrilling as the other group ensemble albums that Weasel has been issuing on ugEXPLODE over the past few years. Recommended.
Released in a limited edition of three hundred copies.
Track Samples:
Sample : Carps Daemon
Sample : Scan Meltdown
Sample : Tomb Trisects

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Picked up a handful of copies of this 7" right before it sold out from the label, after discovering the band on one of the obscure black metal blogs that I've been frequenting. I was entranced by Wulkanaz's damaged loner-metal as soon as I checked it out; coming out of the rigidly isolationist aesthetics of bedroom black metal (and comprised of one of the members of the strange Swedish black metal duo Tomhet), Wulkanaz's sound is birthed bloody and deformed, a spectacularly fucked-up low-fi mess of out-of-tune minor-key folk arpeggios and fetid black metal riffs drenched in cheap reverb, the drums banging away furiously beneath the twisted shambles as the first song on the 7" shifts from blazing blackened filth to total collapse and back again. The second side ("Wulkana 2") is even more ferocious, a thrashing punk-infested blast of killer off-kilter riffage and pummeling hardcore tempos that sort of makes me think of a more cogent Zarach'Baal'Tharagh, but the riffs are a whole other kind of vicious, leading up to a noise-drenched, static-splattered feedback meltdown at the end. I was blown away by the impassioned barbarity of Wulkanaz's music, it's one of the best 7"s of vicious, messed-up black metal to come into the shop this year - too bad I didn't g wise to this back when the record first came out...
Limited to five hundred copies, issued on black vinyl and presented in a black sleeve printed with metallic silver ink...and again, these are the last copies we'll have available.

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