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Until recently, you would usually have a pretty good idea as to what to expect from a new Bastard Noise album whenever one would come out. Brutal distorted analogue noise ripped out of hand-made customized effects units would usually be the foundation for BN's unique brand of experimental noise, often evoking scenes of swarms of carnivorous interstellar insects devouring whole galaxies, or cataclysmic computerized warfare. But ever since the band released their incredible Rogue Astronaut album a few years ago, they've been mutating into something much more than just a "noise" group, bringing in new members, adding actual drums and vocals and bass guitar, forming into an actual band. And best of all to those of us who fucking love the band that BN sprouted from, Man Is The Bastard, we saw Eric Wood picking the bass guitar up again and delivering his utterly warped and crushing style of low-end battery that made the music of MITB so unique and punishing to listen to. Last year's A Culture Of Monsters blew my head apart with the way it channeled that classic Man Is The Bastard brutality into a new kind of proggy sludgecore while keeping and incorporating all of the flesh-rending electronic noise, and they head into even more metallic and crushing territory on their latest, the appropriately titled Skulldozer.
What a fuckin' monster this is. And the Skull continues to throw some surprises my way, like how the album opens up with a wash of gleaming, celestial synthesizer chords that sweep in like Tangerine Dream over the first couple of minutes, leading up to where the band caves in with a grinding, bass-heavy sludge riff. New singer Aimee Artz matches Wood's inhuman death metal-esque roars with her own assault of skin-crawling shrieks, and when they start trading off against each other, it sounds pretty goddamn vicious. While the band slogs through an angular, complicated sludge workout, the rhythm section twisting and turning through tricky fills and Wood's almost math-rock like bass lines, those space rock keys continue to drift overhead alongside other bleeping, spacey effects. This all stretches out for a while, and then trails off into a field of pure electronic hum as they drift out into a long passage of eerie deep-space ambience that begins to swarm with low buzzing tones and weird analogue oscillator noises. Warning signals pulse off in the blackness, heralding the return of the full band, but when they suddenly kick back in, it's with this quick, lurching noise rock assault that is insanely vicious sounding, with pounding double bass drumming and grinding bass riffing, surging in and out of crawling doom riffs and spastic progged-out un-grooves.
After that, the album jumps from shorter faster blasts of fucked up power violence to longer electronics-heavy wig-outs. Those shorter hardcore songs are the most ferocious tunes that Bastard Noise has ever produced, songs like "B.T.P" and “Seeing The Same Fate" blazing through rapid-fire thrash and slower sludgy breakdowns that are infested with all kinds of weird effects and stop-and-go arrangements. But they're interspersed with the terrifying, isolationist ambience of the instrumental noisescape "Fifty Million Light Years", a sprawling piece of blackened kosmiche drift with howling vocals and psychedelic noises swirling through the track, leading into more washes of corroded space rock synths and creepy creaking sounds, and the savage, jagged prog of "Earth On A Stretcher" and the labyrinthine, krautrock-infected hypnosludge of "The Final Days (Of Our Species)".
Then there is "Rachel", a shorter track of dark, gorgeous ambience, one of the most cinematic sounding pieces of music I’ve ever heard from Bastard Noise, and easily the most unexpected thing on this album. Soft fluttering drones drift out across a twilight horizon flecked with beautiful and eerie falsetto singing, the melody having this vague jazzy feel, but there's also some delicate slide guitar going on as well. It's just breathtaking. And it closes with another long ambient noise track, this one with those trademark oscillator sounds and chirping electronics slowly taking over a vast black expanse of nightmarish drift, creating a feeling of unease that's exacerbated by the air-raid like siren tones and distant wailing noises that slice through the darkness.
It's not that Skulldozer is all that different from the last album, all of the basic ingredients are the same. But the music is sleeker, the electronics and hardcore elements working together in closer harmony, never lapsing in sheer heaviness but laying out some of the most extensive electronic soundscapery I've heard from BN in a while. It's barbaric, progressive, and with the awesome misanthropic lyrics and attitude that seeps out of this record, Skulldozer has landed on my top ten list for this year. Anyone into the classic West Coast PV sound of bands like Infest, Crossed Out, Neanderthal, and especially Man Is The Bastard need to hear this, but Bastard Noise keeps mutating that sound into totally new forms. Highly recommended!
Track Samples:
Sample : 50 Million Light Years From...
Sample : Demise By Radiation
Sample : The Final Days...(Of Our **** Species)
Sample : Skulldozer

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While becoming one of the premier underground metal labels, Profound Lore has avoided becoming aligned with any one specific genre or sound, covering the realms of everything from metallic prog (Hammers Of Misfortune, The Atlas Moth) to adventurous black metal (The Howling Wind, Leviathan) to doom (Yob, Loss) to more experimental heaviness (Krallice, Subrosa, Grayceon) with their catalog of releases, but one sound in particular is obviously a favorite of the labels, that of murky, off-kilter subtearranean death metal. Some of the best albums/bands of this kind have appeared on Profound Lore in recent years like Disma, Portal, Mitochondrion, Vasaeleth and Impetuous Ritual. The latest addition to this corner of the Profound Lore roster is another Canadian band called Antediluvian, a three piece from Edmonton, Canada, but prior to releasing their new album Through The Cervix Of Hawaah, they put out this three song 12" on the Bird Of Ill Omen label earlier this year. The twisted, mutant death metal on the songs "Demon Spore", "At The Swirling Spouts Of Uncreation", and "Rapture Amongst The Phosphenes" is rank, cavernous, a strain of slippery, monstrous blackened death metal that shifts from highly angular, dissonant death metal to passages of warped deathdoom and flurries of bizarre riffage that consists of lots of sliding notes and convoluted alien chords. While not as avant-garde or outright bizarre as bands like Portal and Ehnahre, this is still some very messed-up stuff, blending together the doomed dissonance of Incantation with a highly chaotic and idiosyncratic blackened death attack. They've got a great visual style too, with the album art consisting of abstract, black and white drawings of grotesque Lovecraftian beings and vile mutant sexual organs, a look that fits nicely with Antediluvian's repulsive alien death metal.
Track Samples:
Sample : Demon Spore
Sample : Rapture Amongst the Phosphenes

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Until recently, you would usually have a pretty good idea as to what to expect from a new Bastard Noise album whenever one would come out. Brutal distorted analogue noise ripped out of hand-made customized effects units would usually be the foundation for BN's unique brand of experimental noise, often evoking scenes of swarms of carnivorous interstellar insects devouring whole galaxies, or cataclysmic computerized warfare. But ever since the band released their incredible Rogue Astronaut album a few years ago, they've been mutating into something much more than just a "noise" group, bringing in new members, adding actual drums and vocals and bass guitar, forming into an actual band. And best of all to those of us who fucking love the band that BN sprouted from, Man Is The Bastard, we saw Eric Wood picking the bass guitar up again and delivering his utterly warped and crushing style of low-end battery that made the music of MITB so unique and punishing to listen to. Last year's A Culture Of Monsters blew my head apart with the way it channeled that classic Man Is The Bastard brutality into a new kind of proggy sludgecore while keeping and incorporating all of the flesh-rending electronic noise, and they head into even more metallic and crushing territory on their latest, the appropriately titled Skulldozer.
What a fuckin' monster this is. And the Skull continues to throw some surprises my way, like how the album opens up with a wash of gleaming, celestial synthesizer chords that sweep in like Tangerine Dream over the first couple of minutes, leading up to where the band caves in with a grinding, bass-heavy sludge riff. New singer Aimee Artz matches Wood's inhuman death metal-esque roars with her own assault of skin-crawling shrieks, and when they start trading off against each other, it sounds pretty goddamn vicious. While the band slogs through an angular, complicated sludge workout, the rhythm section twisting and turning through tricky fills and Wood's almost math-rock like bass lines, those space rock keys continue to drift overhead alongside other bleeping, spacey effects. This all stretches out for a while, and then trails off into a field of pure electronic hum as they drift out into a long passage of eerie deep-space ambience that begins to swarm with low buzzing tones and weird analogue oscillator noises. Warning signals pulse off in the blackness, heralding the return of the full band, but when they suddenly kick back in, it's with this quick, lurching noise rock assault that is insanely vicious sounding, with pounding double bass drumming and grinding bass riffing, surging in and out of crawling doom riffs and spastic progged-out un-grooves.
After that, the album jumps from shorter faster blasts of fucked up power violence to longer electronics-heavy wig-outs. Those shorter hardcore songs are the most ferocious tunes that Bastard Noise has ever produced, songs like "B.T.P" and “Seeing The Same Fate" blazing through rapid-fire thrash and slower sludgy breakdowns that are infested with all kinds of weird effects and stop-and-go arrangements. But they're interspersed with the terrifying, isolationist ambience of the instrumental noisescape "Fifty Million Light Years", a sprawling piece of blackened kosmiche drift with howling vocals and psychedelic noises swirling through the track, leading into more washes of corroded space rock synths and creepy creaking sounds, and the savage, jagged prog of "Earth On A Stretcher" and the labyrinthine, krautrock-infected hypnosludge of "The Final Days (Of Our Species)".
Then there is "Rachel", a shorter track of dark, gorgeous ambience, one of the most cinematic sounding pieces of music I’ve ever heard from Bastard Noise, and easily the most unexpected thing on this album. Soft fluttering drones drift out across a twilight horizon flecked with beautiful and eerie falsetto singing, the melody having this vague jazzy feel, but there's also some delicate slide guitar going on as well. It's just breathtaking. And it closes with another long ambient noise track, this one with those trademark oscillator sounds and chirping electronics slowly taking over a vast black expanse of nightmarish drift, creating a feeling of unease that's exacerbated by the air-raid like siren tones and distant wailing noises that slice through the darkness.
It's not that Skulldozer is all that different from the last album, all of the basic ingredients are the same. But the music is sleeker, the electronics and hardcore elements working together in closer harmony, never lapsing in sheer heaviness but laying out some of the most extensive electronic soundscapery I've heard from BN in a while. It's barbaric, progressive, and with the awesome misanthropic lyrics and attitude that seeps out of this record, Skulldozer has landed on my top ten list for this year. Anyone into the classic West Coast PV sound of bands like Infest, Crossed Out, Neanderthal, and especially Man Is The Bastard need to hear this, but Bastard Noise keeps mutating that sound into totally new forms. Highly recommended!
Track Samples:
Sample : 50 Million Light Years From...
Sample : Demise By Radiation
Sample : The Final Days...(Of Our **** Species)
Sample : Skulldozer

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Until recently, you would usually have a pretty good idea as to what to expect from a new Bastard Noise album whenever one would come out. Brutal distorted analogue noise ripped out of hand-made customized effects units would usually be the foundation for BN's unique brand of experimental noise, often evoking scenes of swarms of carnivorous interstellar insects devouring whole galaxies, or cataclysmic computerized warfare. But ever since the band released their incredible Rogue Astronaut album a few years ago, they've been mutating into something much more than just a "noise" group, bringing in new members, adding actual drums and vocals and bass guitar, forming into an actual band. And best of all to those of us who fucking love the band that BN sprouted from, Man Is The Bastard, we saw Eric Wood picking the bass guitar up again and delivering his utterly warped and crushing style of low-end battery that made the music of MITB so unique and punishing to listen to. Last year's A Culture Of Monsters blew my head apart with the way it channeled that classic Man Is The Bastard brutality into a new kind of proggy sludgecore while keeping and incorporating all of the flesh-rending electronic noise, and they head into even more metallic and crushing territory on their latest, the appropriately titled Skulldozer.
What a fuckin' monster this is. And the Skull continues to throw some surprises my way, like how the album opens up with a wash of gleaming, celestial synthesizer chords that sweep in like Tangerine Dream over the first couple of minutes, leading up to where the band caves in with a grinding, bass-heavy sludge riff. New singer Aimee Artz matches Wood's inhuman death metal-esque roars with her own assault of skin-crawling shrieks, and when they start trading off against each other, it sounds pretty goddamn vicious. While the band slogs through an angular, complicated sludge workout, the rhythm section twisting and turning through tricky fills and Wood's almost math-rock like bass lines, those space rock keys continue to drift overhead alongside other bleeping, spacey effects. This all stretches out for a while, and then trails off into a field of pure electronic hum as they drift out into a long passage of eerie deep-space ambience that begins to swarm with low buzzing tones and weird analogue oscillator noises. Warning signals pulse off in the blackness, heralding the return of the full band, but when they suddenly kick back in, it's with this quick, lurching noise rock assault that is insanely vicious sounding, with pounding double bass drumming and grinding bass riffing, surging in and out of crawling doom riffs and spastic progged-out un-grooves.
After that, the album jumps from shorter faster blasts of fucked up power violence to longer electronics-heavy wig-outs. Those shorter hardcore songs are the most ferocious tunes that Bastard Noise has ever produced, songs like "B.T.P" and “Seeing The Same Fate" blazing through rapid-fire thrash and slower sludgy breakdowns that are infested with all kinds of weird effects and stop-and-go arrangements. But they're interspersed with the terrifying, isolationist ambience of the instrumental noisescape "Fifty Million Light Years", a sprawling piece of blackened kosmiche drift with howling vocals and psychedelic noises swirling through the track, leading into more washes of corroded space rock synths and creepy creaking sounds, and the savage, jagged prog of "Earth On A Stretcher" and the labyrinthine, krautrock-infected hypnosludge of "The Final Days (Of Our Species)".
Then there is "Rachel", a shorter track of dark, gorgeous ambience, one of the most cinematic sounding pieces of music I’ve ever heard from Bastard Noise, and easily the most unexpected thing on this album. Soft fluttering drones drift out across a twilight horizon flecked with beautiful and eerie falsetto singing, the melody having this vague jazzy feel, but there's also some delicate slide guitar going on as well. It's just breathtaking. And it closes with another long ambient noise track, this one with those trademark oscillator sounds and chirping electronics slowly taking over a vast black expanse of nightmarish drift, creating a feeling of unease that's exacerbated by the air-raid like siren tones and distant wailing noises that slice through the darkness.
It's not that Skulldozer is all that different from the last album, all of the basic ingredients are the same. But the music is sleeker, the electronics and hardcore elements working together in closer harmony, never lapsing in sheer heaviness but laying out some of the most extensive electronic soundscapery I've heard from BN in a while. It's barbaric, progressive, and with the awesome misanthropic lyrics and attitude that seeps out of this record, Skulldozer has landed on my top ten list for this year. Anyone into the classic West Coast PV sound of bands like Infest, Crossed Out, Neanderthal, and especially Man Is The Bastard need to hear this, but Bastard Noise keeps mutating that sound into totally new forms. Highly recommended!
Track Samples:
Sample : 50 Million Light Years From...
Sample : Demise By Radiation
Sample : The Final Days...(Of Our **** Species)
Sample : Skulldozer

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Unfortunately only available in size extra-large, this limited edition t-shirt is the only official shirt design that I've ever seen from these legendary brute-improv titans. Printed on a black Gildan tee (100% cotton preshrunk), the design features a classic live photo of the three members of Borbetomagus in action, with the band name and legend "Changing Lives Since 1979" emblazoned across the bottom of the image. Only have a handful of these in stock, so move quick if you're a fan of the snuff-jazz masters and want to nab this shirt.

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One of the few Borbetomagus releases that I've picked up that's not on their own Agaric label, this limited live Lp from the NY blast-jazz noise beasts looks like a private press edition with it's stickered white sleeve and Xeroxed inserts. Wherever this rare disc came from, it's brutal. The two sides document a live assault that Borbetomagus perpetrated on an audience at the Destroy All Music Festival in Atlanta, GA in 2004, featuring the classic trio formation of saxophonists Jim Sauter and Don Dietrich, and guitarist Donald Miller. If you know Borbeto, you know not to expect anything resembling a "song"; the band unleashes two side-long powerblasts of "snuff jazz" made up of extreme blasts of saxophone shriek and lower register bellowing that is so abrasive and head-crushing that it completely leaves the realm of "free jazz". The dueling horns howl and roar and scream at levels of volume so great that you envision the walls of the performace space cracking and crumbling down in a crush of concrete and splintered wood on top of the crowd. The whole first side of the Lp captures Borbeto in full-force destructo mode, dishing out an assaultive wall of free-form cacophony that would blow back the hair on any fan of Hijokaidan, K2 and Cock ESP. Some of the deeper lowing sax tones heard here even start to resemble the deep buzzing drone of a didgeridoo in a couple of spots when the band drops into one of their less abusive passages of simmering improv noise. While the saxophones spit gasoline and blood across the stage, Miller jams his fist into his axe and pulls out great big gobfulls of squirming feedback and distorted stringscrape, the guitar seeming to choke on it's own steaming guts. Over on the second side, they move into a slightly less abusive stretch of groaning horns and screeching industrial guitar with lots of those aforementioned didgeridoo-like low-end drones emerging throughout the performance. But on the last five minutes or so, the band hurtles back into the closest that they approach "jazz" on this set, with a furious skronkfest that sounds like an Ayler performance on massive amounts of crystal meth with someone operating a malfunctioning shortwave radio transmitter and a concrete mixer off to the side. These guys have most definitely not calmed down with age. Released in a limited pressing of 500 copies.
Track Samples:
Sample : Archie Keens for a Moister Veronica
Sample : Jughead's Prayer Renders Betty Senseless

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Out at the forefront of the old-school death metal revival, Hells Headbangers has dropped a very cool, very heavy slab of subterranean death that showcases one new song each from the British crypt-crawlers Cruciamentum and American crushers Vasaeleth, both staunch disciples of the Incantation/Immolation school of murky, evil death metal. It's presented in a gorgeous glossy gatefold jacket and pressed on purple/black colored vinyl. Might be on the short side with just two songs in total, but it looks fucking fantastic.
I've really gotten into Vasaeleth after hearing their Crypt Born album from last year, but Cruciamentum actually ends up stealing the show for me on the 7". The band rides into "Rites To The Abduction Of Essence" on a wave of minimal black drift, then kicks into a killer cavernous death metal assault. Pummeling, reverb-soaked thrashing shifts into slower doomed heaviness throughout the song, the vocalist belting out the the sound laced with creepy melodies and tasteful (ie minimal) backing synths and soundtracky female choirs that add a regal black majesty to their shambling, rotting death metal. I love the way that Cruciamentum combines that majestic ambience with crushing death metal, and when they head into the soaring blackened deathdoom at the end and those choirs come in, it sounds killer.
Vasaeleth deliver another cacophonous, contorted death blast with their "Profane Ceremonial Exudation", and fans of their Profound Lore debut Crypt Born & Tethered To Ruin are no doubt drooling to hear it. It's in the same vein as the album, barbaric cavernous death metal with a strong undercurrent of doom that pops up when the band lurches into one of their many crawling glacial riffs and onslaughts of bulldozing double bass, with loads of weird dissonant chords and riffs that betray the Incantation influence. It's another killer dose of doom-laden occult death from these guys. Great stuff.
Track Samples:
Sample : Profane Ceremonial Exudation
Sample : Rites to the Abduction of Essence

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DMDN is a fairly obscure industrial project from the Netherlands that I was just turned onto. This full length disc is an older RRRecords title that just became available again, and when I looked into the band, I was surprised to discover that this was apparently a side project from the guitar player for Lewd. Lewd, for those who've never heard of them (which would be almost everyone), were a Dutch noise rock band who played a particularly brutal form of industrialized sludge that often got them compared to Zeni Geva, though they were way more metal. Lewd put out a crushing Cd on Charnel Music in the 90s and then disappeared, but I've remained a fan since then. With DMDN, it's a very different sound, a kind of low frequency industrial noise that uses lots of guitar noise and feedback to create these heavy, abrasive blasts of sound, and on this recording he teams up with Frans de Waard from Kapotte Muziek.
The disc begins with "Lent 1 & 2", a low fidelity mess of distant, heavily distorted and processed guitar noise, vague remnants of human voices trailing throughout the ether, a high-pitched, wheezy sine wave tone buzzing around up in the mix, and fractured percussive rhythms clattering around inside this thick fog of industrial murkiness. Really delirious and trippy. There's more of a Total/Skullflower-ish feel on the next one "Veinzer" in the way that the feedback is controlled into tight bursts of black hiss shot out over the churning loops of amplifier rumble; as this track progresses, the feedback sometimes twists into half-formed melody for a moment, but is continuously dragged back down into the heavy, rumbling undercurrent of rhythmic noise that eventually dissolves into a wall of pure static.
But you'd be hard pressed to make out the guitars on the fourteen minute "GWM 1 & 2". Featuring an even murkier sound recording than the previous material, this sprawling noise piece is both abrasive and psychedelic as it layers whooshing effects and phased amp noise over looped grinding rhythms and an ocean of grainy shortwave hiss. Over the length of the track, a bunch of different sounds start to emerge, like a deep repetitive bass throb, massively pitch-shifted vocal noises, and what sounds like howling winds rushing out of deep cracks in the earth, all of which slowly transform this into an increasingly unsettling noisescape.
The next two track are collaborations with Frans de Waard of Kapotte Muziek/Beequeen; while in the same vein as the other material, the sound on these two tracks is bleaker, more stripped down, from the sprawling machine symphony of mechanical juddering and rumbling low-end amp noise on the twenty-one minute long "DMDN / PDM 1", to the spumes of charred, spectral drone and speaker fog laced with ghostly melody and eerie chirping electronics on "DMDN / PDM 4 ".
The final track on Sling Trip is probably my favorite, a fifteen minute piece called "Hoskins 2" that ventures into dark ambient territory with it's massive subterranean drones and cavernous rumblings, and strangely washed-out organ-like clusters of creepy synth sounds and monstrous roars that rise up throughout the track.
I can easily imagine DMDN's murky, mechanical drones and electronic rumblings appealing fans of the sort of murky dark industrial sounds found on the Cathartic Process label (The Teratologist, Clew Of Theseus, etc), bleak mechanical noisescapes that seem to stretch on forever.
Track Samples:
Sample : DMDN / PDM 4
Sample : Hoskins 2
Sample : Veinzer

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An excellent new Cd from the Scottish noise duo Fordell Research Unit, The Illusion Of Movement has revived my lust for high-quality heavy dronemusic after having to choke down one too many humdrum drone discs lately. Made up of members Fraser Burnett and Grant Smith, Fordell Research Unit creates richly detailed buzzscapes across the album's four long tracks, which stretch anywhere from eight to eighteen minutes in duration, and even on the shorter ones they unfold an entire world of gleaming metallic hum and crackling speaker hiss and mechanical rattling that are pretty damn intoxicating. It's heavy stuff, too; on tracks like the aptly-titled "Dumped Washing Machine Floating Up River" and the crushing infernal engine-roar of "Gateshead Black Room", there's an undercurrent of burly, low-end rumble and churning guitar that succeeds in injecting a hefty amount of crunch into the clanging industrial drones. It''s not pure rumble, though; these long dronefields are laced with all kinds of eerie minimal melody, distant majestic ambience and looping fragmented samples that become pretty complex and layered the deeper you get into the album, and it results in a really cinematic quality on the tracks that reveals more of itself with each subsequent listen. The final track is the most fearsome, a throbbing black bass-pulse throbbing at the heart of a cosmic storm of howling dead voices, grainy distorted drones and massive orchestral guitar buzz. These guys show a lot of promise with this album, crafting massive slabs of heavy-duty industrial drone built from crushing walls of guitar rumble and feedback that seem to follow a continuous theme throughout the disc, building into moments of monotonous heaviness that are able to reach some of the same hypnotic peaks of machinecrush as Culver, Haare, DMDN, Jazzfinger and some of the harsher, more abstract Skullflower work (circa Tribulation). Released by At War With False Noise in a limited edition of five hundred copies.
Track Samples:
Sample : Best New Friend
Sample : Gateshead Black Room

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Here's another side project from Dopi, the drummer from Spanish death grinders Machetazo, doom metallers Deadmask and crustbeasts Dishammer. As Generic Death, he ventures solo (handling all of the vocals, drumming and bass guitar) into the realm of total noisecore, paying homage to the likes of Sore Throat, 7 Minutes of Nausea, Nikudorei, and Fear Of God with this 39-"song" 7' on At War With False Noise. Each side begins with a different harsh noise intro, blasts of corrosive guitar noise and wah-wah abuse mixed with sampled spoken word parts, then blasts into a series of nonstop blurr bursts, each fifteen second "song" disappearing in a cyclone-blast of hyper speed blast beat drums, formless low-end bass rumble, and vomitous gorilla roars. Those grindcore style vocals set this apart from alot of early noisescore worship, and along with the extremely succinct form the tracks take and the lack of anything resembling a guitar riff, this starts to feel like a missing link between between Napalm Death's Scum and Seven Minutes Of Nausea's Chavo, only, you know, recorded this year. The label also points towards the early noisecore of Cripple Bastards as another comparison, which makes sense to me. One thing that this record really has going for it is the recording - don't worry, this sounds like a fucking concrete mixer, but it's recorded loud, and has a really heavy quality, something that is all too often missing with this sort of stuff, which tend to gravitate towards really high, tinny mixes. This fuckin' will cave your skull in, on the other hand. I think that you'll love Generic Death if you're into old school noisecore, as Dopi packs in a LOT of blast and ear-terror on this little Ep. Released in a limited edition of two hundred and fity copies.

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Another split tape from Prairie Fire, this one matching the dark drone-noise of Gremlynz with the crushing ambient sludge of Ajilsga; already out of print from the label, we only have a couple of this extremely limited release.
First is Gremlynz, another project from one of the guys behind Pink Priest. His track "Bad Omens & Shit" is a twelve minute sprawl of murky dark ambience, muffled chordal drift moving glacially through a vast void, the spacious darkness laced with distant electronic squeals and streaks of caustic feedback. These noisy elements never overwhelm the ominous, immersive black drift, even as what sound like French horns appear, as if leading an orchestra in time-stretched slow motion through the abyss. These are joined by gleaming subterranean synths that add deep rumbling tones alongside buried muffled percussive sounds, all thundering in the deep, everything muffled and murky, like hearing some kind of blackened doom music with piles of thick black cotton surrounding your head. It grows more beautiful at the end, when eerie choirs drift up through thousands of feet of limestone and granite to join with the fading blackness.
Ajilvsga's "Knee Prints Along The River Banks" is about the same length, but gets seriously heavy. This rumbling black ambient sludge rises up with sputtering sandblaster noise layered over a murky doom riff buried beneath layers of bass frequencies, juddering machine noise and extreme acid-burnt electronics. It gets more chaotic and intricately layered as it goes on, gradually introducing moaning processed vocals, crazed Theremin-like tendrils of sound, deep space whoosh and malfunctioning computer bleepery, transforming into something that resembles a remix of Sunn O))) by the Japanese cosmic noise group CCCC, a serious doom-laden head trip, a soundtrack to technological entropy that goes nowhere but down.
Released in a limited edition of 85 copies.

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Inner Light is the latest release of intensely dynamic harsh noise from Joshua Norton Cabal, the experimental electronics project headed up by Andrew Nolan, who has played in a bunch of cool bands like The Endless Blockade, Ebola, Humiliation, Nameless Dread, and Columns Of Heaven as well as running the excellent and erudite Survivalist blog. With this project, Nolan and company flex their pedal-muscles through high-energy blasts of harsh junknoise and sputtering sine wave abuse, crafting a series of five dark, apocalyptic industrial noise assaults that are both a throwback to the brutal noise abandon of the late 90s and an ongoing experiment with the physical properties of extreme electronics.
There's a variety of sounds and approaches used on Inner Light, though. Opener "Born Into A Rotten Time" is pure assault, an avalanche of scrap-metal tumbling over bursts of controlled feedback and pedal manipulation that's somewhere in the vicinity of K2 and MSBR, while "Useless Flesh" mixes together field recordings and rustling contact mic crackle with blasts of skull-boring feedback to create one of the disc's more unsettling noise pieces. At the beginning of another track, we hear the sound of a distant orchestra appearing for a moment, drifting through darkness, then suddenly being consumed by grinding looped machine-noise and violent high-pitched feedback waves, and a rumbling backdrop of low-end distorted factory noise. More of that brutal junknoise/pedal flux makes up "The Face Of God", where the din of metalscrape is laced with massive doses of rhythmic bass-heavy throb and rusted-out machine-loops.
All of this is a lead-up to the massive final track, though; the seventeen-minute "Shattered Hand" is a sprawling noise workout that moves through violent whipstrikes of manipulated distortion and crushing bass-heavy wall, layers of smoldering electronic buzz and masses of squirming chirping oscillator tones, recordings of trickling water and distant singing voices, tolling bells, and stretches of charred, ominous drone. Some of the electronic forms found on this track are reminiscent of the spacier blasts of artists like Government Alpha and CCCC but the Cabal will only linger within those cosmic fields for a few moments at a time, always surging back into the ever present waves of distorted low-end crush. It's the way that JNC injects these noise blasts with those moments of grim ambience that really enhance their noise assaults.
Track Samples:
Sample : Born Into A Rotten Time
Sample : Shattered Hand
Sample : Useless Flesh

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Kama Kontra Kontrol came out on Regimental, a label much better know for putting out a bunch of notable black metal albums, but this is anything but metal. You can't really try to wrap a category around what Kama Rupa are doing on this, their debut disc for the label. It's a dreamlike haze of evil ambience, hellish heaviness and strange, haphazard sound collages, blending together aspects of older power electronics, seething hateful poetry, MZ.412-style black industrial, and a heavy dose of surreal strangeness. It turns out that some members of Kama Rupa are also aligned with Hoor-Paar-Kraat, another band that creates mysterious nocturnal soundscapes out of disparate sound sources. The disc begins with a blast of cinematic horror, menacing whispers and looped orgasmic moans rushing in over high-end synthdrone, processed staccato sampled strings, and layers of murky black drift. A sinister guitar and synth score emerges out of this nightmarish clot of sound at the beginning, becoming more and more tense and unsettling, those howling synth tones continuing to worm through the recording alongside the sibilant hissing and breathy bloodlust in that demonic female voice. And then it transforms into something much more evil as a slow, massive oil-drum rhythm begins steadily pounding in the background and those vocals morph into a vile, blood-gurgling snarl, and the other sounds are consumed by a tidal wave of black electronic buzz. After this comes another long stretch of ghostly sound, a chorus of voices singing Christmas carols, mutated into heavily delayed smears of choral sound way off somewhere behind the veil of static and fluttering bass tones, everything laced with effects and warped into a seriously trippy cloud of samples and electronic noise. It then ventures through more hallucinatory passages where deep analogue synth tones bubble up beneath sampled classical piano and more ominous, overwrought spoken word, then later heads into another crushing industrial dirge, this one quicker paced and more crazed, a looped pounding drumbeat behind distorted whispered vocals and grinding noise, almost like a Swans track being covered by a primitive power electronics group. By the end, the sound shifts once again into more haunting neo-folk blended with sputtering speaker buzz and samples from Orson Welles's 1938 radio broadcast of War Of The Worlds. Weird stuff that sometimes reminds me of the grueling black industrial of Sewer Goddess, at others the abstract ambience of Hoor-Paar-Kraat...
Comes in digipack packaging.
Track Samples:
Sample : Kama Kontra Kontrol
Sample : Kama Kontra Kontrol

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Neglect Forget Remember is the new Ep from the duo N.I.L. ("Nihilism Is Liberation"), featuring Lord Imperial (Krieg / Twilight) and J. Marcheski (March Into The Sea); I was a big fan of their 2007 disc on Battle Kommand and it's post-punk inflected black metal (which included a cover of the Big Black song "Bad Houses"), which flirted with some interesting influences without straying too far outside of the parameters of BM. With this follow up, the band take that sound and inject a big new dose of doom into it, producing their heaviest work yet.
The first song on Neglect is an eight-minute saga that starts off with N.I.L.'s trademark brand of anguished mid-paced doom, then takes off into a long stretch of swarming, suffocating black blast, the dense guitars wrapped into a regal minor key riff that finally downshifts into more rocking blackened heaviness at the end. Then comes "II", my favorite song on this Ep; it's got that driving, mid tempo power that N.I.L. is so skilled at, switching off between the rocking black metal and a swirling, slower breakdown with dissonant clean guitar throughout the song, the swirling chords and a hallucinatory backing melody taking over this part without crossing over into "shoegazy" territory. It just sounds spacey and murderous, the layered clean and metallic guitars mixing with subtle psychedelic effects and delay to create this really cool, textured heaviness, even when the song again blasts into a final stretch of droning thrash. And the last song drops off into pure doom, the duo proceeding to crawl through a wrecked dirge of booming drums, fractured blackened riffs slowed to an anguished dirge. It moves from that torturous crawl into a moodier midsection where the guitar coils into another eerie melody, and the final third of the track sees the guitars largely dropping away, leaving just a thin layer of spacey, post-punk-esque guitar drifting over the pounding drums, then slowly floating out in a hazy cloud of flanged distortion.
Digipack packaging.
Track Samples:
Sample : I
Sample : III

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Now back in stock, this new version of Om's hypno-sludge rock classic has been repressed by Holy Mountain in a full jacket with inner printed sleeve and now also includes a download code.
The 2005 debut album from Om now in stock on both CD and vinyl for anyone that hasn't yet dived into this masterwork of mantric sludge hypnosis. Formed by bassist/vocalist Al Cisneros and drummer Chris Hakius, both of whom made up the rhythm secion of legendary stoner doom gods Sleep along with guitarist Matt Pike, who went on to form High On Fire. Now, Om does sound a bit like Sleep, channeling those huge gluey Sabbathian riffs of the band's magnum opus Jerusalem, but here those grooves have been stripped of all guitars and reduced to a throbbing, more propulsive hypno-sludge beast, with Cisnero's simple, crushing fuzz baked basslines rumbling outta massive amplification (just check out the bass cabs pictured on the back of the case!) that lock in with Hakius' minimalist yet heavy drumming and create these enormous tranced out repetitive riff states. Variations is a perfect nod-out album, weaving it's circular riff forms and Cisnero's somnambulant chant vocals and consciousness-exploring lyrics around your lobes for epic durations- album opener "On The Mountain At Dawn" stretches out for over 21 minutes, while the other two tracks "Kapila's Theme" and "Annapurna" each clock in at 12 minutes in length. I've been carrying the disc around with me everywhere, I just can't get enough of Om's mesmerizing fuzzy, droning trance rock. They would follow up this album with the awesome Conference Of The Birds which is equally druggy and trance-inducing, and both albums are pretty essential.

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Through a fusion of brutal power electronics, harsh noise influences and the blackest, filthiest strains of death industrial, Project: Void offers a litany of human failure and squalor with The Anthropogenic Process, a full length album released through our cassette/digital imprint Infernal Machines. There's nothing subtle about Project: Void's worldview - this is utter contempt for other human beings, a deep seated misanthropic outlook steeped in disgust that borders on the physical. That attitude by itself is enough to endear this project to the hard hearts here at Crucial Blast, but the excoriating humanhate is delivered via an incredibly nasty noise assault that kicks some serious ass. The album features ten tracks of bestial electronics that incorporates elements of extreme junk-noise and blackened industrial into an extremely heavy power electronics attack; I can hear traces of that classic Slaughter Productions sound seething under all of the feedback scrape and monstrous cackling, but The Anthropogenic Process has other ingredients that also set this apart. On a couple of tracks, heavy pounding drums appear, providing a thunderous backing rhythm to the flesh-rending electronic chaos, and elsewhere on the album, the sound of maniacal carnival organs appear, writhing over brutal blasting feedback. Controlled bursts of immolating harsh noise are cut with minimal black synth throb, and crushing and massively distorted bass riffs materialize alongside primitive keyboard soundtrack pieces that give birth to crushing bass frequencies and ultra-distorted percussive noise. It's Project: Void's vocals that really make this monstrous, though; the violent electronics are fronted by a mix of processed gurgling throat-slime and a scathing, almost black metal-style vocal style that adds a definite black industrial vibe. This full-length cassette from Project:Void presents one of the first official collections of their bestial black electronics; it's limited to 100 copies, and also includes a unique download code to obtain a digital copy of the album. If you're one of the few hardcore enthusiasts of the heavier strains of modern power electronics and black industrial found in the works of such hell-bent outfits as Demonologists, Iron Fist Of The Sun, The Vomit Arsonist, Fecalove, Deathkey, Black Post Society-era Prurient, and Deadwood, is a recommended addition to your "to-get" list.
Track Samples:
Sample : Anthropogenesis
Sample : Filth
Sample : Nihil

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I picked up Reverorum ib Malacht's The Old God We Called Him Judas cassette from Starlight Temple years ago and found myself arrested by that album's lightless, incredibly murky black metal. The sound was similar to the more messed-up end of the BM spectrum, bands like Abruptum and Emit, with long stretches of nothing but damp dungeon ambience and strange Latin chanting disturbed by sudden blasts of distant, washed out blast beats and waves of echoing tremolo riffing. Reverorum in Malacht (which includes a member of black metallers Dödfödd and Ofermod and C-Blast fave Emit) seemed to take as much influence from the sacred music of the Catholic mass as the howling terror of second wave black metal, resulting in some intensely creepy and mysterious music. After a long period of silence, Reverorum ib Malacht has resurfaced, and this new album (released as a double LP set with CD copy by Ajna Offensive) further explores this unique sound. Presented in a rather non-descript white gatefold jacket with minimal black artwork and text, the double-Lp set includes a cd copy of the album and a thick stapled booklet of theological writing from RIM that expounds on their concepts, which makes for some heavy reading. The music is more of that strange and otherworldly operatic liturgical black metal madness, again with a really murky production that uses TONS of reverb, and a spacious, dimly lit atmosphere that gives this the feel of a black mass; this feel is expanded with the use of all kinds of interesting instrumentation that includes zither, cellos, acoustic guitar, harpsichord, accordion, bells, flute. At times, Urkaos resembles older Deathspell Omega with the choir voices from Jerry Goldsmith's score for The Omen, and parts of this are also comparable to Mayhem, albeit with a twisted mutant streak unique to RIB's abstract, woozy sound.
The introduction "Credamus" begins with the blurred voices of chanting monks wafting through some massive cavernous cathedral, the voices drifting and rising as chimes and bells ring in the background, and gusts of reverb-drenched sound begin to swirl around this eerie processional hymn. Then "In Blando Xpi Sibilo" bursts out of the solemn atmosphere, a blasting murky mass of abstract black metal that is at first recognizable, a blazing distorted riff and blasting drums careening through the grimy layers of ambient drift, but after a minute it splinters into something much more warped, exploding into a mess of glitchy guitar noise, the drums collapsing into a pile of processed noise, completely disintegrating almost as quickly as it appeared. But this only lasts a moment, before the band suddenly reforms itself, and charges forward with an awesome mid-paced galloping black metal dissonance that sounds like a more straightforward Deathspell Omega riff, drowning in reverb and fronted by the appearance of some very dramatic-sounding vocals, a grandiose almost operatic singing style reminiscent of Attila Csihar over the jagged, nauseous subterranean black metal, stretching out for almost ten minutes. The following track is delirious shadow-bathed ritual thrum and shimmering gongs, strains of metallic reverberation echoing beneath orchestral drones, the sound of tolling bells slowed down to a muted metallic warble, and waves of black liturgical ambience, the sound slipping in and out of pitch, creating this weird, wavering, hallucinatory feel...
More of that reverb-soaked murky black metal appears on "Ecclesia's Call", shifting from dissonant Deathspell-esque riffing and clouds of black cave air to lurching seasick dirge and eerie funhouse ambience, followed by more slippery, delirious blackened doom-laden heaviness, moaning hymns, chthonic ambience, and the strange almost carnival-like slippery melodic weirdness of the black blasting "Omen" that layers droning guitar and buzzing tremolo melodies over chanting vocals drifting vaporously over a relentless blast beat trance.
On the third side, the first two tracks share the same title, "The Lord Is..."; the first part is mysterious shambling ambience with what sounds like voices speaking in Latin in the background while a slow, steady drumbeat and minimal bass plays in the distance and eerie clean atonal guitar billows out through the murky blackness, an almost jazzy ambience that vaguely resembles a blacker version of Bohren & Der Club Of Gore stumbling through some perverse inebriated occult ritual. But the second track ascends into a magisterial black metal dirge, swarming guitars, chanting, slow pounding drums erupting into volleys of double bass, shifting constantly in tempo, the guitars subtly changing shape from one simple evil chord progression to the next, the sound super dramatic and miserable. The title track that follows resumes with another chaotic black-mass blastscape, bells ringing in the background as the liturgical chanting and hazy, discordant riffs and demonic snarling twirls around the frenzied reverberant blast beats, but over the course of the song, it becomes more fractured and chaotic, the drums halting and spasming, weird dubby effects being applied to the recording, the music melting into a mass of droning ambience.
The entire final side is a nearly twenty minute outro of Lustmordian blackness and noisy weirdness that starts off with distant subterranean rumblings and deep metallic reverberations. Slowly, bits of murky, washed out orchestral sound drift up out of the depths alongside ghostly moans, low murmurings and murky chant-like sounds, but then around the midway point, a series of louder banging noises, deep buzzing and unintelligible voices appear, joined by clattering drum sounds and creepy buried melodies, garbled voices and folk guitar, this strange phantasmagoric free-improv soundscape stretching all the way to the end.
It's a challenging album that obscures much of it's black metal in a haze of low-fi production and noise, but keeps that murky black metal sound as the foundation of the songs throughout the entire record and never totally tips over into "noise". That said, I suspect that fans of bands like Emit, Abruptum, Law Of The Rope, Aderlating, Naragul, Moevot and likeminded BM abstractionists will best appreciate Urkaos's sacred hellmusic.
Track Samples:
Sample : Ecclesia's Call
Sample : In Blando Xpi Sibilo
Sample : The Lord Is...
Sample : Untitled

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Since the dissolution of his long running power electronics/harsh noise project Fire In The Head, New England noise artist Mike Page has gone on to focus on his other project Sky Burial, which had long existed as a "softer", less violent side of Page's musical work. The first time that I heard Sky Burial was on the self-titled disc that he released on Housepig sometime around 2006, and was impressed by the vaguely menacing drone rock experiments and dark ambience that was featured on it's six tracks. In the last couple of years, though, Sky Burial has evolved into a much more distinct sound that while definitely less confrontational and abrasive as his work with FITH and Irukandji, is still plenty dark and malevolent, a kind of sinister cosmic bliss-out that brings together his obvious love of classic 70's space music and krautrock (Tangerine Dream, Popul Vuh, Vangelis, Klaus Schulze, Cluster, etc) with an undercurrent of grimy, apocalyptic industrial dread. Being a huge fan of both dark industrial and old-school kosmische music myself, I've been getting more and more into Sky Burial's music with each new release, and when C-Blast received a copy of the new Sky Burial album Transmission From The Void to check out earlier this year, I was sucked in to it's glazed black-nebula ambience instantly. Consisting of a single album-length track, Transmissions is one of the darkest pieces of cosmic drift that I've heard from this project so far, it's nearly forty-five minute runtime constantly moving through clouds of intercepted radio signals and distant rhythmic grinding into clusters of gorgeous synthesizer drift that ascend into the stratosphere, then crashing back down into blood-freezing stretches of infernal machine-drone and swirling abyssal ambience. Shutting the lights off and cranking this thing up on a good stereo transports you deep into an unearthly realm where beautifully blissed-out cosmic drift is laced with moments of mechanical horror, strains of symphonic sound, murky piano and distant strings are threaded through black swarms of distressed electronics, and mysterious vocal incantations and metallic reverberations rise like smoke-trails out of bottomless lightless chasms in the earth. It's like a strange mixture of seething industrial music muted by an all-encompassing Lustmordian darkness, strafed with glorious cinematic synths in the vein of Jean Michel Jarre or Vangelis. It's my favorite release from Sky Burial so far.
In collaboration with Mike Page, we've released this new Sky Burial album through the Crucial Blaze series as a limited art edition limited to two-hundred hand numbered copies. The disc is packaged in a clear library case that also includes a set of ten full-color art cards that features the Void series of abstract abyssal visions specifically created for this release (all bound together in a black-on-black obi band), another insert card with album credits, and a 1" Sky Burial badge.
Track Samples:
Sample : Transmissions From The Void

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This latest offshoot of the Black Goat family of black industrial artists really flattened me with this new disc of extreme death ambience. Stemcell Research Project comes to us from John Whetzel and Darea Plantin, who also play in several other bands that I'm a fan of such as Deathstench, Slaughtered Lamb, Welter In Thy Blood and Pro-Death (which is more or less the entire Black Goat roster, now that I'm looking at it). The album is made up of five long tracks of pitch-black ambience, laying a foundation of stark, monochrome driftscapes and submerged noisy textures upon which they proceed to unleash all manner of extremely distorted demonic vocals, glacial organ drones, thin layers of industrial corrosion, faint traces of dead choir voices, and murky orchestral murmurings, with some of the sounds apparently coming from recordings of actual autopsies taking place, according to the label. As you listen to Charnel Houses, you can see the thread leading from the desiccated corpse of SRP's blackened graveyard ambience back to classic death/black industrial (the sounds of Megaptera and MZ.412 especially seem to be part of SRP's genetic material), but this takes that sound into harsher realms, lacing the morbid atmosphere with grinding distorted loops and bass-heavy distorted synthesizer rumblings, mysterious clattering percussion, electronic pulses, and nauseating contact mic abuse that manages to evoke the sounds of moving dead flesh and dried corpsemeat. The vocals that sporadically show up over the course of the album tend towards extremely distorted, bestial screams and roars that would fit right in on an old black metal record, but they appear infrequently; occasionally, other stray voices appear over the monotonous drones and distressed electronics in the form of snippets of overheard conversation and vague dialogue. Minimal clanking industrial rhythms will appear from out of a cloud of billowing black smoke and ash while nightmarish whispered vocals and sustained, drawn-out violin-like tones drift lugubriously through the thick, choking darkness. And some of the grimy distorted synth sounds that creep up throughout the disc remind me of early 80's horror and sci-fi film soundtracks, which adds an interesting element to these decaying industrial soundscapes. Their blackened industrial ambience is hypnotic and unsettling, and has a similar clandestine feel as the recent T.O.M.B. material with the same sort of washed-out recording style; you can really this similarity on the final track "Blackened Skeletal Remains", a monstrous black maelstrom of swirling electronic debris and distorted noise and foul raspy black metal-style gargling overlaid with eerie distant guitar. I'm a big fan of death industrial, so Stemcell Research is right up my alley, but their version of death industrial is more droning and ambient than the Slaughter Prod. style sounds that I usually hear. Very cool.
Limited edition of three hundred copies, in a four-panel digipack.
Track Samples:
Sample : Blackened Skeletal Remains
Sample : The Rite Of Ossilegium
Sample : Shroud Of Scars

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I'm a big fan of Total Abuse's previous records. The Austin, TX band delivered a mixture of noisy, primitive hardcore, a Broken Flag/UK power electronics influence, and an obsession with the written work of Peter Sotos (Pure/Parasite) wasn't for everyone, but I thought every one of their records raged, and the ugly, misanthropic writing and lyrics made it even better. They hit the same notes as a bunch of my favorite older weirdo-hardcore bands; the influence of bands like Void, Black Flag, and Flipper can be heard all over their stuff. But the noxious noise jams that Total Abuse would smear across their albums really cranked up the negativity. On their third album (and apparently their last), Total Abuse offer another slab of feedback-drenched violence, one part Ramleh/Harry Pussy-style noise brutality, three parts demented, drooling hardcore punk.
Total Abuse begin the album with the scraping industrial assault "Final Passage", where the din of roaring guitar noise and hysterical ultra-distorted vocals evokes something much closer to early Broken Flag style power electronics than American hardcore. This battery of feedback, verbal abuse and metallic howl continues to beat against your skull for almost the entire first side of the record, before ending with a strange stretch of drill sounds, random banging and other percussive noises. And then the band tears into "Early Morning", their first blast of hardcore where blazing three-chord riffs and thrashing drums are whipped into a tornado of primitive hardcore violence. Ugly, clanging chords and yowling, breathless screams take over when the song shifts into one of their off-kilter breakdowns, but then it's on to more thrash with the following songs, "Rotting Foil" and "Masked Killer", these pounding hardcore jams coming off like a cross between early Keith Morris era Black Flag and the damaged, skronky HC of Void.
The second side starts with a blast, the self-disgust anthem "Hogg" racing at breakneck speed before they shift suddenly into a neck breaking mid tempo breakdown, followed by the noisy, dissonant mess "Hidden Blood"; this last one is one of those sludgy, rocking numbers that Total Abuse includes on each of their albums, breaking up the speedier violent punk with a chunk of ugly, pockmarked skuzz that reminds me a little of Flipper or Kilslug. And that vibe carries right over onto the last song "Prison Sweat", which ends the album with the most grueling assault of noise and deformed punk on the album, starting with a really disgusted dirgepunk jam, but then transforming into a long, drawn-out collapse as the drummer keeps slowing down into a crashing plod, the guitar ejecting the riff and erupting into flurries of shred that go absolutely nowhere, the sound of running water appearing over the noisy mess, which just keeps banging away over and over until it all finally falls apart at the end into a mass of harsh, grating noise.
Comes in a full color jacket featuring artwork by William Boone with printed inserts that include a written piece titled Weak from M. Kitchell, issued in a limited run of 500 copies.
Track Samples:
Sample : Final Passage
Sample : Hidden Blood
Sample : Prison Sweat
Sample : Rotting Foil

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Videl is another member of the Section XIII: COMA roster of black ambient artists alongside Gate To Void, Daina Dieva, Ignis Divine, and offers a similar sort of morbid serenity with their icy death ambience. This hour-long death-ritual journeys through a number of different realms of black ambience, beginning with a minimal soundscape of sparse, massive percussive blasts that thunder through the depths like war-drums echoing out of vast rifts in the earth, or a group of tympani players pounding away inside a deeply buried bunker. After a few minutes of these percussive reverberations, the track transforms into minimal black drift, hushed drones hovering in an immense yawning expanse of pure darkness, these drones seemingly formed out of orchestral sounds that have been stretched and diffused into smears of abyssal thrum. This slowly evolves and grows as it goes on while remaining very spare and subdued, the recording becoming murkier and more obscured by the gloom, and even as it slowly (very slowly) builds in volume, it becomes less defined, like hearing a Lustmord track from beneath a mountain of mattresses, the cavernous black sound muffled to the point where it's this vast ocean of washed-out subterranean rumbling. But then other sounds finally begin to manifest, a low, ghostly moan rising out of the deep, buried beneath the vast tectonic dronescape, joined by another distant slow-motion percussive blast. An eerie malformed melody also begins to appear behind the wall of murk, shifting from abstract abyssal drift into something much more disturbing in tone. Waves of metallic noise start to sweep in, and distant clanking sounds ring through the void, bringing a subtle industrial feel to the second portion of D'Monique. The heads out through more fields of lightless glacial drift that's sparsely populated with vague chanting utterances, slipping into stretches of murky electronic tones and distant roaring maelstroms of gaseous matter, monstrous mutterings wafting up from black charnel pits, ghastly whispers drifting among sulfurous vapors. A clarity comes upon the final third of the album, the sounds becoming less murky, coming into sharper relief as strange flute-like notes appear against far-off foghorn blasts of synth, the sound slowly winding back down into one final expanse of minimal blackened murk.
Highly recommended to enthusiasts of graveyard isolationism and the blackest of black ambient sound; fans of anything else on Section XIII: COMA will definitely want to pick this up as well. Released in a hand-numbered edition of 1100 copies in slim dvd style packaging with full color artwork.
Track Samples:
Sample : D'Monique Velsmord

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Already out of print, this extremely limited art-object from Eyehategod front man Mike IX Williams is in stock here at C-Blast, but I only have seven copies on the shelf - once those are gone, that's going be it.
I've seen a couple of anti-cassettes before, formidable looking art objects that usually involve encasing a cassette in some kind of potentially dangerous material that feels more like a physical threat than a piece of recorded music. Some of you might remember a tape that came out a couple of years ago from the UK doom metal band Moss, who welded a nail-studded mass of metal around the cassette. That was the wildest of these art-pieces that I'd ever seen, up till this new tape-weapon from Mike IX Williams, front man for legendary sludge metallers Eyehategod, that just came out on Auris Apothecary. The Apothecary are no strangers to complicated hand-made cassette packages, but with Glass Torn, they're released the most dangerously crafted piece yet, a clear cassette coated with a layer of broken glass that's packaged inside of an oversized clear case with a padded foam interior and clear labels on the box. It looks badass. But while alot of similar "anti-cassettes" are created in such a way as to make the tape almost impossible to play, this is definitely meant to be listened to. The thing is, is that one has to scrape away enough of the glass to allow you to be able to fit into a cassette deck. It's a rare thing in this age of digital distribution and the immediacy of the internet to actually have to work towards hearing a piece of music, but this thing threatens to make you bleed for it. As the label states on the exterior of the heavy plastic case, "anti-cassetttes are designed with the intention of physical involvement in order to play back the audio recording."
Visually, it's an impressively constructed piece of anti-music art, but if you manage to dig beneath the shattered glass and spilled blood, there is some fantastic music hidden within the cassette. Williams crafts a punishing mix of power electronics and pure harsh noise terror that's way more violent than his industrial work with The Guilt Of. His putrid howling vocals rant over the crushing bass-heavy distorted static like a post-apocalyptic preacher, spilling blood-soaked misanthropy and evoking visions of a crumbling Western society coming apart in double-time, tapping into the more brutal end of the contempo PE sound that's shared by the likes of Control and Slogun. Elsewhere, the sound decomposes into walls of brutal crackling distortion that stretch out in the spaces between the readings of his texts, but then Williams will also suddenly drop into a passage of beautifully dark piano music or solemn dark ambience, and this compositional style really elevates this above your typical power electronics assault.
Limited to 199 hand numbered copies. Please include an age statement when ordering this, to avoid any potential headaches on my end.

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With La Sposa Dello Stagno, the Crucial Blaze series is proud to introduce the incredibly creepy and disturbed music of Yami Kurae. Hailing from Italy but enshrouding themselves heavily in a mix of Japanese graveyard folklore and musique concrete techniques, this sounds like nothing that I've ever released before. The group feature members of the experimental Italian rock group Slumberwood (A Silent Place/Tannen Records), but this is not 'rock', nor any other easily identifiable musical form. Yami Kurae is the sound of Japanese demons slowly plucking away at ancient Tsugaru-jamisen songs on broken shamisen taut with cat-skin and spun silk beneath a blood-red moon. It is the nonsensical utterances of insane ghosts lurking between tombstones. It is a bizarre kind of low-fi dessicated deathfolk drenched in dissonance, dementia and disease.
Across the twelve songs on La Sposa Dello Stagno, the band weaves together nightmare visions of dead spirits, harshly dissonant improvisations, fractured nocturnal folk, haunted chiming melodies, strange demonic gurglings and brain-damaged caterwauling vocals, the sounds rendered through a murky low-fi recording that is then twisted up and damged by sudden bursts of malfunctioning tape noise and other electronic fuckery, the recording sometimes dropping in and out, or warbling as if we're hearing this music being played back on old decomposing tape reels. At times, this descends into horrific noise, such as the bloodcurdling screams and noise on "Yugami Shita" that flow into a howling cacophony of random banging, dissonant zylophone notes and ghastly moaning, or the filthy crypt-rattling cacophony on "Yugami Yami". At others, the band can be deliciously creepy and mesmerizing, like the goblin-folk of ""Il Ballo delle Teste" and the funereal "Qualcosa Sul Freddo". It is far from easy listening, but for those with a taste for weird, creepy improvisational music, the strangest experimental horror movie scores and the most deranged fringes of outsider ghostfolk, this is intoxicating stuff that has a way of crawling in nice and deep beneath your skin. After listening to La Sposa several times in a row, the image that kept creeping into my head in an effort to describe this strange din was that of a strange meeting of Jandek, AMM and Abruptum gathered together to perform a set of ancient Japanese folk songs while gradually becoming more and more ruined on low-grade opium.
Released as part of our ongoing Crucial Blaze series, La Sposa Dello Stagno is presented in a clear library case with full color artwork, and also includes a twenty-eight page saddle-stitched art book filled with strange esoteric symbols and ghoulish artwork of vulvic abysses, stretched withered talons and other bad dreams, and a set of seven full color cards with additional phantasmagoric art. Released in a limited edition of two hundred hand-numbered copies.
Track Samples:
Sample : Bisha Ga Tsuku
Sample : Ekon Mekon
Sample : Il Ballo delle Teste
Sample : Mukade Matsuge

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