One of the primary MO's of the new Handmade Birds imprint appears to be releasing limited edition reissues of cult underground metal albums in highly attractive new packaging designs, such as the recent reish of Blut Aus Nord's Mort. This new Lp version of Desolate North from forest-doom shaman Celestiial is in the same vein, presenting the music from the original Bindrune Cd release with new artwork (by Faith Coloccia of Everlovely Lightningheart/Mamiffer) in a beautiful gatefold package that features black and white woodland photography for the album art, limited to only 250 copies. The Cd edition has been out of print for several years, so at the moment this is your only chance to get a physical edition of this album. Here's the original write-up that I did for the Bindrune release back when that version came out:

The one-man primordial deathdoom band Celestiial slooowly drifts through an ethereal woodland terrain that's alive with the sounds of rain and chirping birdsong, forming an ominous atmosphere that is very similiar to Skepticism in its stately lumbering, but Celestiial is more organic and mystical, more like a cross between those Finnish funeral masters and the fragile druidic doom-folk of Chet Scott's projects (Elemental Chrysalis, Ruhr Hunter, Svart Ugle, etc). Actually, as the album progresses, it loosens it's tethers to the doom form, mainly through the distant hiss of slowly pulsating cymbals and barely discernable drums and the buried drone of the almost non-existant guitar. The dreamy death growls blanketed in reverb are similiarly distant and blurred, while the woodland sounds are at the forefront, the grey haze of rainfall and wildlife sometimes obscuring the beautiful Windham Hill-style New Age string and flute arrangements and heavier passages. That's not to say that Celestiial isn't crushingly heavy, which it is...the heaviness here is a suffocating ambient dread, a witnessing of the impermanent self surrounded by nature. Desolate North contains 8 tracks that work together as a single 45 minute suite, and the album is definitely best absorbed in it's entirety. Highly recommended to followers of the funeral doom ambience of Nortt, the otherworldly ooze of Esoteric and Disembowelment, and the Glass Throat family of dark sylvan droneology.

The latest full length disc from The Rita continues to explore the more detailed and tactile soundscapes of deep crackling distortion and speaker-belch that Sam McKinlay dived into on the Skate / Snorkel LP and the The Voyage Of The Decima MAS disc. The Rack features two twenty-plus minute tracks of fetishistic noise made up of crackling, visceral gusts of electronic detritus and amplified crunch; where most HNW artists go for the oppressive wall-of-static approach, McKinlay makes use of silence and empty space that exists in the cracks between the blasts and blurts of hyper-distorted feedback and microphone abuse, here derived from the sounds of knives and nylon. The first piece is subtitled "Knifing And Slitting", focusing on the sound of the fabric of the universe being torn apart, an endless seam being violently ripped, the sound of tearing stretched and extended into infinity. The second (subtitled "Covering The Legs, The Feet", evoking a different sort of potential paraphilia) is only slightly less brutal, a vast smoldering sheet of black smoke and bubbling concrete that's underscored with a constant subliminal low end rumble, swarming with an infinite array of microscopic crackles and explosions. As with all of MacKinley's work, you hear strange aural hallucinations that become hyper-magnified when submerged into the extreme durations of his noisescapes, and it produces a unique effect on the listener that's very different from what anyone else is doing within the realm of HNW. Part of the Dark Icons series on Handmade Birds, this is another high quality release from The Rita that's highly recommended to enthusiasts of innovative harsh electronics. Packaged in a 5" x 5" sleeve, and limited to 300 copies.

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.

I'll get anything that Sissy Spacek puts out, but my favorite stuff of theirs will also be the nuclear-blast noisecore recordings found on releases like Dash, the self-titled debut and the Gore Jet 7". When operating in this mode, the quartet of bassist/tape mangler John Wiese (ex-Bastard Noise), drummer Charlie Mumma (also of experimental death/black metallers Knelt Rote and L'Acephale), guitar-wrecker Jesse Jackson and vocalist Corydon Ronnau unleash a hurricane of grind-filth and garbled blast violence that is relentlessly brutal. But caveat emptor: this Cd only has about five and a half minutes of music on it. Like some of the other Sissy Spacek CDs, you don't get a whole lot of bang for your buck, but this Ep does happen to be some of the best fucking noisecore I've heard in ages, and anyone into the short sharp shock violence of this kind of stuff will probably adore what the band has coughed up for Wastrel Projection.

There are thirty-two "songs" on Wastrel Projection, and most of them do not break the eleven second mark. You get a mixture of hyperspeed blurr blasts and pure noise pieces, with some of the more coherent tracks throwing out chunks of punk guitar and reverby recording; in these moments, it sounds as if you are listening to some L.A. hardcore punk band from the early 80's being sped up and cut apart/re-assembled by Karlheinz Stockhausen. Complete insanity, with lots of hyperfast edits and garbled tape, the sound becoming so extreme at times that it seems as if the disc itself is decomposing beneath the assault of the ultra-distorted chopped-up thrashcore.

These guys have pretty much taken over as the current reigning kings of American noisecore. And as with their other noisecore releases, its absolutely crucial for anyone into the micro-blast blurr savagery of 7 Minutes Of Nausea, Nikudorei, Anal Cunt, Gerogerigegege, CSMD, Arsedestroyer, Nihilist Commando and New York Against The Belzebu. Released in jewel case packaging with an obi card in a limited edition of two hundred copies.

Norwegian one-man band Utarm has been creeping along the far fringes of black metal, psychedelia and industrial music since appearing with the 2004 Cd-r Goatheaded Rapist. The handful of albums that have come out since then have moved further into a unique, hallucinatory realm of broken-down horror-movie ambience, cracked haunted house organs, and a strangely beautiful form of ultra-distorted doom metal that hints at the molten incandescent sludge of both Goslings and The Angelic Process. It's been a couple of years since the last album (2009's Panic Chamber), but Apocryphal Stories sees Utarm returning with another majestic, monstrous collection of sidereal blackened doom and melodic noise.

The opener "Alt Etende Skaper" is a warped black mess of warblng electronic melodies, distant moans of anguish, eerie organ sounds and crackling distortion, a somewhat ghastly, rather gorgeous tangle of blackened guitar noise and fractured synth that to me sounds like Xasthur performing something from Maurice Jarre's haunting score to Franju's classic French horror film Les yeux sans visage (Eyes Without a Face). This nearly fourteen minute song is a masterful blend of delirious horror (wailing voices and Abruptum-esque screaming, dank reverb-heavy atmosphere, unsettling discordant touches) and withered, rotting beauty, but when suddenly erupts into a howling, massively blown-out dirge halfway through, it turns truly terrifying.

"Of Rape, Solitude and Bliss; the Triangle of Flesh" billows out into a creepy fogscape of feedback drone and mysterious whispers, rumbling ethereal amplifier-drift and melodious keyboards buried under crushing, deformed doom. The vocals that creep in are totally fucked, a heavily processed yowl that comes in alongside a classical string section, piano, bizarre backwards chanting and more of that slow-motion doom riffage, turning into this weird dreamlike wash of orchestral darkness and mutant blackened sludge and power electronics-like vocalizations that later erupts into noisy black metal tremolo riffs and crackling harsh noise. That's followed by the spacey, scorching wall of blackened shoegaze drift found on "Black Light Aeon Apocryphia", where waves of noisy, heavily overdriven guitar melodies circle around rumbling low-end tremolo drones and malfunctioning keyboards, demonic screams and a shitload of distortion and dissonance. That off- kilter, noisy 'gazer sound is also at the heart of "the Heaven of Men and a Left Hand Dagger", no percussion anywhere as the song slowly unfolds as a buzzing, blown melody and tortured wailing becomes enshrouded in increasingly extreme levels of distortion.

On the last song "Above Death", those waves of blown-out drone and clustered electronics are piled on to a murky almost industrial doom-dirge. A drum beat clanks and crawls far off in the distance, obscured by the sounds of whizzing synth noise and bleeping electronics, a slow trudging rhythm that disappears into another swarming black fog of howling psych-ward vocals, creepy whimpering noises, and almost Skullflower-like clouds of corrosive guitar.

One of the weirder offerings from Handmade Birds, Apocryphal Stories has become another instant fave for me, a demented and depraved black/noise/doom mutation that sings gloriously of Satanic ritual, self-realization, and expanding realities all set to a shambling soundtrack that sounds vaguely like Abruptum performing alongside Floridian sludge-gaze duo Goslings. Released by Handmade Birds in a limited edition of three hundred Cds.

Released just prior to our own 2012 Theologian album Chasms, the four song Finding Comfort continues to follow Theologian mastermind Leech into the vast yawning psycho-sexual abyss that he has been plunging into since 2009, exploring pitch-black realms of electronic horror and nihilistic emotional topography that are even more desolate than his noteworthy work with Navicon Torture Technologies. Starting off with the percussive loops and swells of orchestral blackness that take root at the onset of "Fighting For Nothing", this disc gets into a heavy rhythmic mode pretty quickly, unleashing massive, almost mechanical rumbling and looping distorted drum sounds that are incredibly heavy and pummeling. As that looping blown out rhythm cinches tighter around the billowing black synthdrift and hallucinatory electronic noise, it begins to fade out, slowly replaced by waves of crushing bass frequencies and industrial reverberations, transforming into something more tribal as the beat is stripped of its corrosive distortion before disappearing into clouds of pure drone.

The rhythmic elements are buried in "All I See Is You", which focuses its grinding black cosmic drones into a monstrous force, huge rumbling distorted synths hovering in space, surrounded by layers of crackling electronic noise and buzz and deep mechanical thrum, a kind of massive black industrial ambience that is at first intense and malevolent, but then softens into a shimmering nebulae of sound as it goes on. When the massive distorted rhythm suddenly drops in halfway through, it takes on a sort of dubstep-like feel, a crushing, sputtering robotic rhythm grinding and swinging beneath the sweeping black beauty of Leech's amassed synths and choral drones.

The title track appears out of a massive distorted throb, an inexorable synthetic pulse beaming its signal through the abyss; distant keening vocals begin to seep in the distance, forming into a dramatic, emotional vocal melody that slowly circles through this blackened, hypnotic, soundtracky buzzscape.

At first, the final track "In The Moral Leper Colony" seems like an exercise in harsh noise wall, a dense rumbling wall of static swirling and crashing across the first few minutes, but then strange metallic voices begin to appear and that wall of static dissolves into the background a bit, as new rumbling mechanical sounds begin to form, strange rattling engine noises and hypnotic juddering drones, streaks of metallic high end, sinister spectral singing and trails of ghostly feedback all transforming this into an fearsome hallucinatory noisescape.

Can't recommend this enough to fans of Theologian's black droning industrial. As usual for a Theologian release, Finding Comfort is accompanied by striking visuals, this time featuring photos of a nude model being pulled in opposing directions by metal hooks embedded in her flesh, her skin smeared in an oily black substance...

This follow-up to Servile Sect's Trvth Lp was actually released as a companion piece to that album, extending the same sort of alien black metal concepts developed there. The album begins in a haze of dark cosmic drift and murky electrical drones on "Merkaba", an amorphous black cloud of alien ambience that suddenly erupts in a blast of hyper speed drumming and simple, buzzing black metal riffage. As soon as the band screams out of that dark nebula, their blazing tremolo attack and thrashing tempos take on the shape of a droning black metal assault, but this quickly transforms into passages of eerie kosmische soundscapery with sinister synthesizer lines and deep-space effects drifting over fields of desolate lunar whir and interplanetary static. When the blasting black metal returns, it's total savagery, shredded stripped-down riffs slicing through the interstellar haze, super-hypnotic and majestic but also quite fucking brutal, sort of resembling what might happen if you took 90's Mayhem and dropped them into the middle of one of Phelios or Phaenon's sprawling dark electronic galaxies. It isn't just some mash up of electronic ambience and black metal riffing though; their electronic dronescapes are richly layered, evoking vast Lovecraftian voids that accentuate the primal black blast.

On the second side, the band drifts back in with the warped blackened doomdrift of "Cut The Root", brain-damaged chanting and spiking oscillator effects shooting through the shambling glacial ooze, a slow motion doomcrawl through this cloud of psychedelic electronic fuckery and keening drones and high pitched alien incantations. The vocals are processed into bizarre squealing cries and robotic howls, while the creeping riffs and plodding drums become caught in some sort of strange heat-haze, their slo-mo lurch wavering in space and drifting into the monstrous wormhole maw of "Mountains Lurk". Here the band bursts into a rumbling mid-tempo heaviness layered with those swirling, swarming black electronics and sheets of metallic hum, an almost Sabbathian bass riff undulating underneath it all. By the final track, the music fractures into a hallucinatory cacophony of voices and broken radio transmissions, dire Lustmordian ambience and sweeping majestic black metal guitars, becoming an almost symphonic wall of sound. Fans of Nekrasov's cold, desolate black metal constructs would love this...

The third album to come from Wolvserpent-offshoot Aelter, III moves beyond the fantastic ethereal heaviness and synth-drenched darkwave of main member Blake Green's previous albums into mucho heavier realms of blackened gloom. There's a lot of the same mysterious, midnight ambience that you hear in Wolvserpent. But where that band delivers slo-mo crushing riffage and mesmerizing nocturnal vibes, this stuff travels further into the ether, emerging out of gorgeous murky synthesizers and harmonized choral voices into a haunting doomgaze finale.

The first half of "Clarity" drifts in slowly on a wave of warm, glimmering synthesizers, the shimmery glacial drones spreading out into infinity, a kind of blissed-out kosmische crawl that feels like something from Tangerine Dream or Steve Roach softly billowing out of your speakers. This heavenly twilight synth-glow spreads across almost the entire side, sheets of wavering chordal shift and muted cosmic drone overlapping one another, the sound of pure electronic dreamblur. Asit progresses though, the sound slowly darkens, grows more ominous as it transforms into towering spires of gothic drone that rise over the last several minutes of the side, suddenly shifting into a looping mass of guttural, murky synth-groan at the very end that resembles the pitch-shifted moaning of sightless monks woven into an unsettling death-chant.

But when the second side starts back up, the music suddenly changes into slow, droning blackened metal, eerie minor key guitars creeping across howling distant choral voices and washed-out droning synths and the pulsating throb of the drums and bass, the sound tense and ominous, almost like something from Year Of No Light slowed to a funereal pace and draped in nightmarish choirs. When the lead vocals come in, they're a deep, ethereal croon drenched in reverb, hinting at that blackened darkwave sound of Aelter albums past, but here pushed deeper into the swirling twilight fog. When the last half of the song comes in, it transforms yet again into a final long stretch of ghostly, jangly gloom with high, keening tremolo riffs rising over catchy minor key strum and a crushing distorted bass-riff, the melodies almost like something out of a Badalamenti score, woven with the gorgeous doom-laden gloompop and gothic synthdrift that finally consumes the song. Pretty amazing, and quite different from anything that I've heard from Aelter.

We have some of the last copies available of the vinyl edition of Aelter's III that came out on Handmade Birds, as its now sold out from the label. Limited to three hundred copies.

Out of the entire "Yellow Series" of recent Handmade Birds tapes, the pair of Military Position cassettes appear to have been the most anticipated, or at least the most sought-after. I had people ordering these two tapes before they were even on the shelf here at C-Blast. And I get it - the work of Australian death industrial / power electronics artist Harriet K Morgan under the Military Position banner isgenerally pretty hard to come by in physical format, with past titles being issued in extremely tiny runs on small, obscure labels; god help anyone outside of Melbourne that wanted to get their hands on her recordings before now. And both Nothing Lasts Forever and Prisoner are terrific pieces of black art, each one delivering a filthy jolt of burnt-out electronics, humid and harrowing atmosphere, and deeply uncomfortable confessionals of pain, debasement, and abuse that stand out against the current backdrop of contemporary death industrial. I was hooked when I finally heard the Black Noise release from Military Position prior to getting these, and each recording since then has roped me in deeper to Morgan's id. And it's frightening in here...

Nothing was initially available as a digital release from German electronics label Aufnahme + Wiedergabe, and the tape release features the exact same six-song track list. The album is partially dedicated to Sallie-Anne Huckstepp, a Sydney author, activist, and sex worker murdered in 1986 - that connection to the composition and creation of these bursts of nightmare electronics alone should lead you into a very dark and disturbing rabbithole that touches on themes of abuse, guilt, remorse, and abjection. Morgan's delivery is suitably intense, opening with the sound-collage of "I Can Enter Your Heart" that blends unsettling dialogue with an almost technoid bass-throb and gritty, grainy electronic noise; heavy Genocide Organ vibes on this right from the start, but with a very different mood and tone that sets Harriet's carcinogenic industrial pulse apart from whatever older artists and/or bands that might have influenced her. The throbbing,murky bass rhythm is relentless and hypnotic, a locked-in scum-groove pounding away incessantly under the increasing layers of metallic clang, piercing feedback, and discordant drones. The album pursues her disturbing spoken-word with brief bursts of chaotic skree ("I See You") and the intense seethe of "Gaslit", where her voice mingles with looped voice samples (from true crime media), guttural bass tones, and crackling, filthy distortion, producing one of Nothing's most demonic and apoplectic electronic death-dirges. It's ferociously angry. The material on this tape builds that indignation, her lyrics / prose hitting like a sledgehammer as she directly addresses on the blatant hypocrisies of Australian law enforecement surrounding the Huckstepp case; the last three tracks ("You Don't Define Me", "Nothing Lasts Forever", "I Have Sinned") boil over with hypnotic sequencer thud and cruel drone formations as the sounds and words plummet into the violent nightmare of the subject matter. It's subversively catchy, in spite of the horrid realities of the concept.

There's an almostn reverential-sounding seriosuness to Morgan's voice as she recites her words over these works - one of the hardest moments is the title track, where her monotone voice drifts over a distorted synthesier melody that turns the track into something almost akin to entirely electronic, blown-out doom. It's as if the album gradually coalesaces from the amorpohous skree and distortion of the first half into much more structured and melodic forms in the latter, and I found this growth riveting. Easy touchstones include both latter-day Prurient and the pernicious throb of artists like Con-Dom and the aforementioned Genocide Organ, but the quietly fuming tone of all of this, with her words spilling out sloely through clenched teeth amd suppressed rage, produce an powerful and gripping experience of its own.

This is the repress edition (as the first edition sold out pretty quickly through most sources), which just comes in a printed O-card, without the "Yellow Fabric ephemera".

��One of the more recent new releases from Dominick Fernow's power-electronics/death synth outfit Prurient, Washed Against The Rocks offers a pair of tracks that follow in the vein of the jet-black electronica featured on his Bermuda Drain and Through The Window albums.

�� First is "Doors Closed In Secrecy", a haunted dronescape laced with the moans of distant disembodied spirits, a low, almost subliminal bass drone fluttering at the center of the track, thin veins of gleaming high-end feedback threaded through the piece, forming a web of spectral light that shimmers as metallic reverberations echo in the distance. As an infectious rhythm slowly begins to rise to the surface, it slowly transforms this into a kind of abstract, industrial noise-techno similar to his work with Vatican Shadow, but more muted and hypnotic as it pulses within the vast penumbra of low-frequency thrum that enfolds it.

�� The b-side "Washed Against The Rocks", on the other hand, is an absolutely gorgeous wash of dreamy synthesizer blur, vaguely orchestral waves of sound that slowly rise and fall above the peals of funerary feedback and swells of cavernous fog that billow out across the depths of Prurient's mournful ambience. Total Tangerine Dream worship of the best sort, spare and simply arranged, but absolutely permeated in an atmosphere of heartache and longing that most funeral doom wannabes would kill to access.

�� Comes in a high quality printed jacket with printed inner sleeve, pressed on heavyweight colored vinyl in an edition of five hundred copies.

Now available on CD once again courtesy of Handmade Birds...

Released just as this anarchist-leaning one-man black metal-influenced band was beginning to gain a wider audience beyond the American black metal/experimental metal underground on the heels of his impressive Social Disservices album, the original vinyl release of Panopticon's Kentucky quikcly went out of print. People have been clamoring for it though, and this interesting fusion of mountain music and American blackened metal is finally back in print on CD via Handmade Birds.

It's the same blast of imaginative, Appalachian-flavored black metal as before, though. Kentucky carries on in the tradition of leftist, nature-loving, anarcho-leaning metal that main member Austin Lunn has been creating over the course of four albums and numerous splits with the likes of Wheels Within Wheels, Lake Of Blood and Skagos. On this album, Lunn creates a chronicle of the history and plight of the Kentucky coal mining communities of Appalachia, their story written in tears and sweat and black phlegm, the lyrics dealing with over a century of worker struggles that are rarely recognized outside of the region. Lunn brings this all to life with his sprawling black metal arrangements, crushing guitars and awesome soaring melodies turning these songs into dramatic stories of suffering and struggle, but they are also fleshed out with other instruments, with violins and tin whistles and banjos all appearing throughout these songs. Especially banjo. It's that instrument that has gained this album a lot of its notoriety, as Lun slips from those crushing black metal epics into folky protest songs, and from there into some gorgeously haunting tracks of genuine bluegrass music that suddenly transport Panopticon's music to somewhere else entirely.

Opening with cascading waves of banjo picking and acoustic guitar, the instrumental intro "Bernheim Forest In Spring" kicks right with a traditional folk jig, a dark mournful melody riding on the violins and fast-paced bluegrass picking, that banjo right up in the mix, beginning the album with the lush Appalachian vibe that becomes it's signature sound. From there, the music launches into the blasting hyperspeed black metal of "Bodies Under The Falls", but that folky feel is still there, threading through the ripping black metal riffs, haunting flutes drifting over the buzzsaw guitars and blasting drums and sweeping solos, the guitar suddenly erupting into weirdly discordant leads, everything woven together into a strange and frenzied sound. There are dark Maiden-esque harmonies that rise over the band's blazing tempos, but then around halfway through, it suddenly shifts into something unexpected, a super-distorted sort of rock, almost like some old Mineral or Texas Is The Reason song filtered through a storm of blast-beats and blackened shrieks, finally drifting off once more at the end into that lush haunting Appalachian folk music.

The second disc likewise starts off with old mountain music, more of those strains of eerie dark bluegrass, but this time "Come All Ye Coal Miners" ends up being all bluegrass, the song taking up half of the entire side. It's actually a protest ballad that has lyrics originally written by 60's folk singer Sarah Ogan Gunning, and later in the track Lunn layers the sound with some spoken word audio from some old documentary on the coal miners, which turns into a segueway into the intense catchy blackened metal of "Black Soot And Red Blood". With soaring vocal harmonies smeared across the background, this heavier song drops off into a strange sample-laden spaciousness later on, a kind of folk-flecked slowcore interspersed with slow, swarming blackness. After that, the music keeps alternating between that blazing black metal and those moments of super catchy Mineral-esque rock, and those stomping bluegrass songs and coal town laments, the heaviness often drifting out into eerie atmospheric jangle, lots of pensive guitar melodies circling over mysterious voices and sample-laden sound collages that layer recordings of rural social activists and folk singers like Florence Reece with recordings of violins tearing through the droning black metal. Later on, there's a blistering cover of an old folk song written by Appalachian folk singer Jean Ritchie that Lunn transforms into something fierce and blackened, and the album closes with the pure bluegrass of the title track, finishing this off with a final rush of stunning stark beauty and pine-scented ambience.

As much as I've dug the older Panopticon albums I've picked up, Kentucky shows a whole new level of depth and progression for the band, blending together Lunn's various influences and musical obsessions into something that ends up being quite unique, especially within the realm of black metal. Highly recommended.

   Subtle Cruelties is the alluring debut from gothic folk duo Barren Harvest, featuring music that is pretty far removed from the sort of harrowing, blackened heaviness I'm accustomed to hearing from member Lenny Smith. With his often terrifying, emotionally abject vocal work for the extreme doom outfit Trees and the blackened, death-rock influenced sludge of Atriarch, Smith's voice serves as a conduit to violent, soul-charring forces, navigating the extremes of human experience. With Barren Harvest, though, Smith joins with Worm Ouroboros member Jessica Way to craft a much more fragile and introspective sound, drawing from dark neo-folk traditions and classic ambient music to evoke a beautifully gloomy atmosphere that moves like slow-drifting storm clouds across the whole of Cruelties.

    Over a somber backdrop of droning synthesizers and gently plucked acoustic strings, the duo trade off their plaintive voices, Way's light, delicate singing winding around Smith's deep drawling baritone, and this vocal interplay is more than a little reminiscent of some of the bleaker late-era Swans material; in those moments when the two singers come together (such as the eerie, heartbreaking "Heavens Age"), this album can be positively bewitching. But while the slow, brooding strum of acoustic guitars are ingrained throughout the album, giving this that vaguely neo-folky feel, it's their use of gleaming synthesizers that's really at the heart of Barren Harvest's gorgeously grim sound. Those folkier elements are mostly infused into the background, obscured by sweeping blacklit synths, bits of acoustic guitar here, some delicate minor key piano there, streaking some songs with the echoing lilt of an autoharp and an Indian stringed instrument called the bulbul tarang, whose metallic buzz drones through some of the album's more solemn moments. Everything is wrapped in a soft crepuscular haze of reverb that definitely contributes to the album's "gothy" vibe, and the songs sometimes drift into a kind of shadowed chamber-pop beauty that can definitely evoke Way's work with Worm Ouroboros, as well as the spectral strains of Amber Asylum. All good reference points for Barren Harvest's orphic ambience, and it's also somewhat like a somnambulant and stoned channeling of White Light From the Mouth of Infinity-era Swans, but draped in sheets of velvety, slowly shifting kosmische keyboards. A beautifully bleak song-suite, richly evocative of an autumnal atmosphere limned in the burnt amber glow of dying sunlight, each note weighted with a deep weariness.

    Available on both limited edition CD and limited vinyl from Handmade Birds, though vinyl enthusiasts should note that the Lp version is a shorter version of the album, missing five tracks featured on the CD.

   Subtle Cruelties is the alluring debut from gothic folk duo Barren Harvest, featuring music that is pretty far removed from the sort of harrowing, blackened heaviness I'm accustomed to hearing from member Lenny Smith. With his often terrifying, emotionally abject vocal work for the extreme doom outfit Trees and the blackened, death-rock influenced sludge of Atriarch, Smith's voice serves as a conduit to violent, soul-charring forces, navigating the extremes of human experience. With Barren Harvest, though, Smith joins with Worm Ouroboros member Jessica Way to craft a much more fragile and introspective sound, drawing from dark neo-folk traditions and classic ambient music to evoke a beautifully gloomy atmosphere that moves like slow-drifting storm clouds across the whole of Cruelties.

    Over a somber backdrop of droning synthesizers and gently plucked acoustic strings, the duo trade off their plaintive voices, Way's light, delicate singing winding around Smith's deep drawling baritone, and this vocal interplay is more than a little reminiscent of some of the bleaker late-era Swans material; in those moments when the two singers come together (such as the eerie, heartbreaking "Heavens Age"), this album can be positively bewitching. But while the slow, brooding strum of acoustic guitars are ingrained throughout the album, giving this that vaguely neo-folky feel, it's their use of gleaming synthesizers that's really at the heart of Barren Harvest's gorgeously grim sound. Those folkier elements are mostly infused into the background, obscured by sweeping blacklit synths, bits of acoustic guitar here, some delicate minor key piano there, streaking some songs with the echoing lilt of an autoharp and an Indian stringed instrument called the bulbul tarang, whose metallic buzz drones through some of the album's more solemn moments. Everything is wrapped in a soft crepuscular haze of reverb that definitely contributes to the album's "gothy" vibe, and the songs sometimes drift into a kind of shadowed chamber-pop beauty that can definitely evoke Way's work with Worm Ouroboros, as well as the spectral strains of Amber Asylum. All good reference points for Barren Harvest's orphic ambience, and it's also somewhat like a somnambulant and stoned channeling of White Light From the Mouth of Infinity-era Swans, but draped in sheets of velvety, slowly shifting kosmische keyboards. A beautifully bleak song-suite, richly evocative of an autumnal atmosphere limned in the burnt amber glow of dying sunlight, each note weighted with a deep weariness.

    Available on both limited edition CD and limited vinyl from Handmade Birds, though vinyl enthusiasts should note that the Lp version is a shorter version of the album, missing five tracks featured on the CD.

The letter "M" in the exquisite new Handmade Birds "Critical Fabric - Yellow Series" of hand-assembled cassette tapes comes to us from the obscure Denton, Texas electronics project, which is one of the biggest surprises and discoveries I made while diving into this wild series. The sounds that Haultaine craft are not easy to pin down, though it feels like the title to their 2023 CD Powerless Electronics may be a key towards unlocking the energies behind these sounds. The project has been slowly releasing work in a somewhat understated fashion going back to 2016, but this two-track album is the both the most visible (relatively speaking, of course) and emblematic of their work to date. Just looking at the tape and track titles for each side of this cassette suggest a specific spectrum of ideas: the A-side "Vast Active Unlearning Intelligence System (Erathication) " directly refers to the work of Philip K. Dick, while the title itself evokes elements of arcane geo-physics. And the b-side "B61-13 (Monstrosities Beget Monstrosities)" carries as much apocalyptic weight as anything from a "war metal" band, with its name check of the thermonuclear gravity bomb in use as part of the U.S. nuclear warhead arsenal. These inferences of ultra-destructive warfare, national aggression and the military-industrial complex, esoteric science and even Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials weave together a unique and uniquely unsettling vision on the part of Princess Haultaine III, which coupled with the hyper-mutation collage art that Kenji Siratori produce for the tape cover, subjects you to a seriously nightmarish vision and voice that reaches a fever pitch with this strange album.

It's a nerve-wracking racket. The first track combines multiple sound sources into a flowing cacophony: junk-noise and percussive metallic clatter are interspersed with blasts of overdriven distorted buzz, hum, and roar, with what sounds like an actual drum-kit being used to unleash a parade of free-form percussive attacks. The electronics are pushed all the way into the red, producing a mass of squiggling swirling skree, blown-out glitch, thunderous droning tones, and delicate threads of high-end feedback and sine wave manipulation. The music on "Vast Active Unlearning Intelligence System (Erathication) " ebbs and flows, drawing you through an unraveling system of harsh electronic skree, passages of almost AMM-esque drum work, hyper-gnarly waveform fuckery, and an array of changing sounds that at some points resemble a muffled treated piano, or a series of chimes, or alien bird-chirps arranged into binary transmission. The free-improv element on this is really strong, and is one of Princess Haultaine III's distinguishing features here; that dissonant, at times brutally violent piano assault and the continuous bursts of intense, expressive drumming create a really interesting contrast with the stream of squealing noise and pedal-assault. It's harsh as hell, though, that's for sure, evoking the disassembly of the human psyche in the face of some unknowable destructive force. Though, there are these moments, like around the 24:00 mark in "Vast”, that it peels back to unveil a very weird, and very haunting kind of ambient atmosphere. The other side "B61-13 (Monstrosities Beget Monstrosities)" is more subtle, laying a scathing spoken sample from antiwat activist Vincent Emanuele regarding the subjects of homophobic and misogynistic violence within military organizations, and the horrors of mass-scale bombing, underscored by minimalist rumbling drone. The subject matter itself is disconcerting in its matter-of-factness, but then it gives over to a new improv-noise assault that is even more explosive and violent than the previous side, with a much more vicious "cut-up" approach that feels like the abrupt and unexpected blast of an IED.

At times, I'll be remdinded of stuff like Tourette's Jardin du sommeil. Chant d'amour sur la nuit grandissante. But then a drum kit and bucket of scrap metal is hurled straight into my face at four hundred miles per hour, and it turns into something else. At nearly an hour, this is an extensive experience. And it's a really intriguing exploration of what one can do with harsh electronics and other disciplines in the use of conveying some pretty bleak, outre ideas and war-machine critique. In any event, I can't wait to hear what Princess Haultaine III brings next.

The tape comes in a standard plastic tape case with j-card (featuring artwork by Kenji Siratori), but is then housed in a hand-assembled printed slipcase, a custom tag, and a roll of yellow art paper. As with all of the other "Yellow Series" cassettes, the slipcase is lettered (this one as "M"), so that if you collect the entire series, they all line up together on a shelf to spell out "Handmde Birds". Very cool.

Out of the entire "Yellow Series" of recent Handmade Birds tapes, the pair of Military Position cassettes appear to have been the most anticipated, or at least the most sought-after. I had people ordering these two tapes before they were even on the shelf here at C-Blast. And I get it - the work of Australian death industrial / power electronics artist Harriet K Morgan under the Military Position banner isgenerally pretty hard to come by in physical format, with past titles being issued in extremely tiny runs on small, obscure labels; god help anyone outside of Melbourne that wanted to get their hands on her recordings before now. And both Nothing Lasts Forever and Prisoner are terrific pieces of black art, each one delivering a filthy jolt of burnt-out electronics, humid and harrowing atmosphere, and deeply uncomfortable confessionals of pain, debasement, and abuse that stand out against the current backdrop of contemporary death industrial. I was hooked when I finally heard the Black Noise release from Military Position prior to getting these, and each recording since then has roped me in deeper to Morgan's id. And it's frightening in here...

Nothing was initially available as a digital release from German electronics label Aufnahme + Wiedergabe, and the tape release features the exact same six-song track list. The album is partially dedicated to Sallie-Anne Huckstepp, a Sydney author, activist, and sex worker murdered in 1986 - that connection to the composition and creation of these bursts of nightmare electronics alone should lead you into a very dark and disturbing rabbithole that touches on themes of abuse, guilt, remorse, and abjection. Morgan's delivery is suitably intense, opening with the sound-collage of "I Can Enter Your Heart" that blends unsettling dialogue with an almost technoid bass-throb and gritty, grainy electronic noise; heavy Genocide Organ vibes on this right from the start, but with a very different mood and tone that sets Harriet's carcinogenic industrial pulse apart from whatever older artists and/or bands that might have influenced her. The throbbing,murky bass rhythm is relentless and hypnotic, a locked-in scum-groove pounding away incessantly under the increasing layers of metallic clang, piercing feedback, and discordant drones. The album pursues her disturbing spoken-word with brief bursts of chaotic skree ("I See You") and the intense seethe of "Gaslit", where her voice mingles with looped voice samples (from true crime media), guttural bass tones, and crackling, filthy distortion, producing one of Nothing's most demonic and apoplectic electronic death-dirges. It's ferociously angry. The material on this tape builds that indignation, her lyrics / prose hitting like a sledgehammer as she directly addresses on the blatant hypocrisies of Australian law enforecement surrounding the Huckstepp case; the last three tracks ("You Don't Define Me", "Nothing Lasts Forever", "I Have Sinned") boil over with hypnotic sequencer thud and cruel drone formations as the sounds and words plummet into the violent nightmare of the subject matter. It's subversively catchy, in spite of the horrid realities of the concept.

There's an almostn reverential-sounding seriosuness to Morgan's voice as she recites her words over these works - one of the hardest moments is the title track, where her monotone voice drifts over a distorted synthesier melody that turns the track into something almost akin to entirely electronic, blown-out doom. It's as if the album gradually coalesaces from the amorpohous skree and distortion of the first half into much more structured and melodic forms in the latter, and I found this growth riveting. Easy touchstones include both latter-day Prurient and the pernicious throb of artists like Con-Dom and the aforementioned Genocide Organ, but the quietly fuming tone of all of this, with her words spilling out sloely through clenched teeth amd suppressed rage, produce an powerful and gripping experience of its own.

As with the other tapes in the "Yellow Series", this tape comes in a standard j-card and case (signed by Handmade Birds on the interior) that is further housed inside of a large printed O-sleeve with a sticker, yellow cloth and a roll of yellow paper, a threaded tag, and a clothing tag.