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 appears 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 is generally 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 rabbit hole 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 enforcement 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 almost reverential-sounding seriousness 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 synthesizer melody that turns the track into something almost akin to entirely electronic, blown-out doom. It's as if the album gradually coalesces from the amorphous 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 solely through clenched teeth and 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.

When you line up the entire Handmade Birds "Critical Fabric - Yellow Series" tape series, the letters on the bottom of each spine spell out "Handmade Birds", which at bare minimum makes the full collection of tapes a compulsive pick-up for those of us collectors / listeners with serious OCD issues. The letter "A" in the series is represented by a massive full-length album from France's harsh noise wall icon Vomir, and it's one of the "heaviest" pieces of sound in this entire series. Spread across the tape's two sides, the two-part epic "Future Dust" is an hour long, a gargantuan static wall swirling with frequency debris. It's another solid release of void-noise from Romain Perrot's long-running outfit, a potential key to unlock psyic terrain through churning massively distorted topography.

Harsh noise wall. The very definition of "acquired taste". Writing about it is always an interesting exercise, as most folks come away with the notion that it all sounds exactly the same if they happen to acquire it. But if you're delicately attuned to the form, each blast of black static swirls, churns, and courses through its own unique currents of movement and shifting texture. Vomir has been obsessively consistent with the HNW material he's produced over the years. Truly embracing the "boring noise" philosophy that older noise outfits like Zone Nord espoused. And man, I love boring noise. Recently, I've been making correlations between the art of electronic "wall noise" and the ambient / phase modulations found in material like the Monroe Institute's Gateway recordings. Totally different approaches, of course, but recordings like what Vomir produce have an almost identical meditative / mind-altering state as much of the consciousness-centric electronic tools that have come out of the Gateway system. Of course, this is just my own personal experience; Gateway protocol adherents would likely scoff at the idea. But listening to Future Dust exemplifies the uniquely immersive power of abstract distortion for me. Perrot drowns the listener in sensory overload, especially experienced at considerable volume. It's volcanic, endless roar of crushing static pouring from the earth, with a ebb and flow as the intensity of the sound subtly shifts over the course of the recording. It feels like an inferno of black fire, emitting a catastrophic storm of large, flickering red embers, torched dust particles, and sulfuric fumes. As usual, this black firestorm becomes hypnotic and all-consuming. Infinite. Pareidolia ensues - high-pitched wails echo in the distance, the hiss and sutter of acid rain falling across the glowing lavascape, a strange wind-tunnel effect drifting in and out over the latter half of Dust's incendiary blast.

Contemplative immolation.

As with the other "Yellow Series" cassettes , this comes in an O-card slip-sleeve that also contains a sticker, a piece of yellow cloth, a roll of delicate yellow paper, a clothing-style tag, and a cardstock tag on a string, keeping in concert with all of the other tapes in this line.

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.

An anomaly among the slabs of brutalist electronic noise that dominate Handmade Birds' "Yellow Series", Mineral Wicks diverges from the storms of crushing black static to a completely different sort of sonic terrain. As a guitarist myself, I'm fascinated with solo excursions like this that come from people with a punk rock or hardcore punk background. In my opinion, some of the most arresting avant-guitar exploration I’ve ever heard comes out of this exact cohort. And rarely can you predict in any way whyat the sounds of such a solo endeavor will be , based on the previous bands that a guitarist has played with. Don Devore's Mineral Wicks is a perfect demonstration of this. Well-known in hardcore and O.G. "emo" circles for his gutting, often wildly inventive guitar work in some of the most iconic Philly underground bands of all time; the early 90's freneticism of Frail helped lay down the template for what would later on get described as "screamo", following that with the powerhouse "youth crew" revivalism of Rain On The Parade. And the amazing vampyric hardcore of Ink & Dagger fuckin' dominated the Philly HC squat scene for the brief period they were around. I have vivid memories of seeing Devore on stage, corpse paint and slashing at his guitar like a feral animal. Ink & Dagger were astounding, lightning in a bottle. His subsequent work is notable as well, playing in the experimental synth-heavy duo Collapsing Scenery, time spent in the cult post-hardcore unit The Icarus Line...this guy has been at it for awhile. His solo work here, however, is strikingly distinct from anything else I've heard from him.

At an hour long, this is serious questing music. It's a constantly evolving kaleidoscope of sound, most of it zipping and zapping out of Don Devore's guitar. The music is heavily fragmented, but rarely aimless. There are these layered passages of strange, otherworldly psych-folk burbling with distant horns and heavy blots of tripped-out Moog-style synthesizer. Long sprawls of improvised guitar noodling, alive with a cornucopia of effects pedal and heavy on the use of loops and delay. There are so many moments on this tape where Technicolor shafts of light break through grey cloudbanks and illuminate some of the strangest and most playful electric guitar meandering I've ever heard. Then a wicked "Amen" style breakbeat will suddenly drop in, those horns bleating and squalling in the back while Devore's guitar explodes into shrapnel-blasts of violent noise. These shambling, ramshackle handmade Casio-like drum beats and no-fi programmed rhythms are disorienting for a moment after I've just had my brain baked by more than fifteen mintes of delightfully mutated neo-psychedelia. This tape is at once the "lightest" of all of Handmade Birds' Yellow tapes, so full of sun-dappled melody and infectiously upbeat drum-loop grooves, and also the most freaked-out. It's spectacular in his use of layering guitar sound, creating huge pulsating industrial-tinged breakbeats that drive the whole shebang straight off into the horizon, but can also strike out at you with those bursts of chaotic, abrasive skronk and disotrtion. Deeper in, things do take a left turn into brooding, crackling ambient drone, the guitar spiking the mix with brief anxiety. But it always come out of the tunnel into the light.

Devore enlists some pals to create this bleeping, alien jazz techno loopscapes: Matty McDermott (Nymph, Black Acid), Chris Colley (School of Seven Bells), and Jeremy Weiss (CI Records boss) all join into the weirdness. And when the second side starts up, that weirdness really racks up. The whole final third of the album slips into a killer krautrock-esque groove - we're talking deep into the freakiest regions of Can, Agitation Free, Guru Guru and Neu territory - but it's laced with gobs of Devore's lysergic guitar noise and fractalized FX fuckery and dark, droning strings that make everything sound like thr work of machine elves trying to fuse Tropicália with Teutonic psych/prog. And man,when that haunting flute-like bit drifts in towards the end, the effect is sublime. In the end, I don't kow what to make of it. And I love that. Singular and confusional, Devore's Mineral Wicks could possibly be compared to a mass of low-fi Frippery (at times reminiscent of the wild wall-of-psych-guitar that Darsombra does) with hints of Ichiro Agata's solo madness,but fed through an amoebic mass of free jazz and krautrock moving in and out of one another, while Bill Laswell mans the boards and Meat Beat Manifesto is bangin' around. But take that nonsense with a grain of salt. I promise that if you're chasing down these Handmade Birds cassettes, this will be the biggest surprise of 'em all.

Another of the more obscure artists featured in Handmade Bird's recent "Yellow Series - Critical Fabric" run of cassettes, Dagger follows suit alongside J S H, Vomir, and The Rita with an expansive blast of "harsh noise wall"-style black static. Following a plethora of super-limited tapes issued on reliable labels like Cruel Symphonies, Deathbed, and Putrescent Tapes, "Deadly Transmission” appears to be one epic-length piece of noise construction; I saw somewhere online that at least some of the source material behind this two-part distortion bomb comes from the even more obscure direct-to-video Jim Wynorski horror flick 976-EVIL Part 2 from 1992. Dunno if that's factual, but it's an interesting idea; there's a tradition of "HNW" artists mining horror and splatter films for core sound samples for harsh noise "tributes". This strain of gore-cult creativity was common among the likes of Cory Strand / Altar Of Waste, and the much-missed Worthless Recordings label, who all put out a ton of stuff in that vein. And me being a horror film fanatic, well, that kind of shit definitely scratches a weird itch.

Anyways, "Deadly Transmission" is primo black static with a churning sub-layer of scraping, clanking activity and electro-acoustic violence; this definitely does not share the meditatative qualities of, say, Vomir, no dissolution of self in the high-volume, beyond-blinding white-hot supernova of extreme speaker overload. At least on "Deadly", the first half delivers a maelstrom of high-detail crackling carnage that puts it alongside the likes of Richard Ramirez and Black Leather Jesus, Macronympha, and Skin Crime. An ever-present roar of bass-heavy distortion sweeps across the world, but it's constantly strafed and scraped and slashed with abrupt clots of mangled signal-fuck and brutal waveform deformation. Real classic FX pedal-crusher vibe going on with this. I've been gravitating lately more and more to this kind of fried-out, super-dense harsh noise that drops a "wall" on your skull but keeps it evolving and mutating throughout the entire recording, and Dagger does just that. I've no idea if or when any sound elements of the aforementioned 976-EVIL Part 2 appear on this tape (there are some extremely buried samples and voices scattered through the recording, but these are just more smears of chaos amid the endless thunder), I'm just bathing in an endless avalanche of delectable ultra-distortion flecked with those blasts of skree, garble, and barely perceptible rhythmic form. This chaotic element dissipates across the second half, as Dagger's smoldering speaker-shred melts into something a bit more mesmeric, but there's always more happening here than just static. It's like what I imagine the sun might sound like once you're close enough to hear it, in that impossibly brief moment when all the devastating, roiling, incomprehensible solar fury can actually be heard, before the previously solid/liquid matter that had been your physical form would instantly become lower-density gas. One can dream.

Dagger certainly brings a sense of "flow" to this nearly hour-long experience.

As with the other tapes in Handmade Birds' beautifully designed "Critical Fabric - Yellow Series" (of which this tape is letter "I") , the tape comes in a regular case and j-card, but is housed in a larger slipcase along with rolled fabric material, craft paper, tags, and other physical detritus specific to this series / release.

Out of the entire "Yellow Series" of recent Handmade Birds tapes, the pair of Military Position cassettes appears 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 is generally 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 rabbit hole 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 enforcement 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 almost reverential-sounding seriousness 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 synthesizer melody that turns the track into something almost akin to entirely electronic, blown-out doom. It's as if the album gradually coalesces from the amorphous 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 solely through clenched teeth and 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.

One of two tapes from The Rita in Handmade Birds' Yellow - Critical Fabric Series, Nancy Weston (The Rack Sessions) is a lengthy two-track album that appears to feature material created tangentially to the artist's album The Rack, released by HB around a decade ago. It's another fetishistic expression from Sam McKinlay's harsh noise machine, but this time pursues the image and presence of the little-known actress Amy Farrell, specifically her role and performance in Herschell Gordon Lewis's sleazy proto-splatter camp-cult 1972 shclock horror classic The Gore Gore Girls. In the film, Farrell plays tabloid reporter "Nancy Weston", who finds herself immersed in a plot filled with sordid murders, strippers, and incredible levels of bad taste. It's a riot, if you're the sort of depraved ape that has a taste for H.G. Lewis's scum-cinema and tongue-in-cheek gore-gags (emphasis on the gag). Here, The Rita focuses on the titular actress on the first track, and then following that with another slab of black static titled after Weston's character "Amy Farrell" from Gore Gore Girls - real vintage splat worship. Old-school horror movie fanatics might have fond memories of the notorious big box tape of The Gore Gore Girls on Midnight Video that towered on video store shelves back in the 1980s; this was actually the last of Lewis's films until he resurfaced with new work in the early 2000s, spurred on by a new generation of fans discovering his pioneering exploitation cinema via DVD reissues on Something Weird Video (it's astoundingly still banned in Australia, for some bizarre reason).

Anyways, yeah, this is an act of concentrated fetishism from The Rita, though the details of this are left ambiguous beyond the reference to Weston. Are those her legs and feet on the slipcase for the first edition? Unknown. But the overall visual presentation is tethered to that of the original The Rack album. The two tracks are a blackout of atomizing electronic / mic annihilation. "Nancy Weston (The Rack)" is the first half, quick emissions of amplified cable/mic crackle, loud (if you're listening to this at the right volume, which should ideally be cranked all the fucking way to eleven) and chaotic, the bursts of buzz and sizzle coming in fast, intermittent jolts, brilliantly blown-the-fuck-out, almost resembling the sound of a human voice that has been overmodulated to the furthest possible extremes. "Westion"'s noise feels like code, like an alien language, like scrambled and incomprehensible transmissions from a future hell-world. As is the case with The Rita, this noisescape becomes hypnotic, drawing you in to its choppy, charred, sputtering cadence. Compared to other recordings from the project, this leans towards a more "minimalist" approach; of course, any civilians that happen to pass by while this is blasting out of your speakers will immediately think that your audio equipment is hopelessly damaged. But to the elite ear, to hardcore "harsh noise wall" fanatics, this long flow of stuttering electronic skuzz is real manna.

Of course, I'm also hopelessly obsessed with Sam McKinlay and The Rita and all of his other various endeavors, in any media. So my critical ear is pretty much turned off at the moment. Just so you know.

But you wouldn't even be here if you weren't at least starting to be drawn in to the field of "HNW", and if you're a fellow Rita devotee, you know that this entity is anything but inconsistent. This has all of the incredibly tactile, "crunchy" texture that McKinlay obsessively crafts, using a bare minimum of sound input. It's fascinating to me.

Anyways, the following track "Amy Farrell (The Rack)" is likewise around roughly twenty minutes in length, and flows right out of the same aktion as the A-side. Crushed, crackling, quasi-linguistic sputter and crackle, all moving in a steady, incessant stream of ultra-0distorted sound. In fact, the further I get into this b-side, the more it feels like a human voice, the cadence and patterns, pauses and spurts exuding an uncanny and very specific pareidolia beneath the crunch. Almost like listening in to a rotary phone call from another country, another dimension, a case report relayed from such an impossible distance that the sound is seared and scorched beyond any possibility of comprehension. I like the lack of any details given with this release, though. I like the effect that this particular noise experience has on my thought process. You may experience something similar.

Along with the other ephemera that comes with these "Yellow Fabric Series" cassettes, the tape also includes two small photographs of Weston tucked into the case.

Handmade Birds followed up the amazing Critical Fabric - Yellow cassette series with a smaller series simply called Blue: these tapes draw from the most bizarre edges of the underground noise/grind/black metal / necro-synth pit, all of it presenting a curious and compelling counterpoint to the mostly-harsh noise and power electronics skuzz of the first series. I'm listening to all of these Blue tapes out of order, but if you set all four tapes side by side, their slipcases spell out the word "BLUE". Any continuity between these infernal machines stops there though, as each one offers an entirely unique experience in extreme, left-field "metal". Really laying on the scare quotes on that "metal" label, though...all of this stuff comes from much weirder realms than anything most people would refer to as metal of any kind.

One of the best examples of the bunch is the Warlock Corpse tape. Man, I fucking LOVE this tape. I had actually just stumbled across this (apparently?) Kazakhstan-based one-man band via Bandcamp, and his bizarro blend of broken no-fi vampire synth music and utterly cracked outsider black metal buried its fangs in me instantly. Gotta be upfront, I'm really not into the whole "tanzelcore" and "keller synth" label, neither of which seem to represent anything in particular to me as far as aesthetics go. Not that Warlock Corpse gets plastered with that label in any kind of official way, but it's definitely been thrown in the direction of this project. The thing is, this kind of bonkers blend of low-fi sinister synth, casio beats, weird song structures, and a bizarre basement ambience has been around for a long, long time, in different forms. And, when I listen to Warlock Corpse, which I do with an almost obsessive and evangelical persistence, I hear something that's pretty different from anything else coming out of the weirder fringes of the "dungeon synth"-adjacent underground. This guy really does not sound (or look, for that matter) quite like anyone else. Which is naturally a big part of the appeal to me. But my obsession with Warlock Corpse's catalog of Casio-damaged weirdness is really about the sheer catchiness and demented vibe of the music, which in my opinion reaches new heights of infectious oddness with this Curse of Endless Sleep cassette. It's totally different from anything else in Rich / Handmade Birds "Blue Series", and it's a blessing. So what the fuck am I trying to describe here?

A gorgeous and muck-splattered din of vampire-castle ambience and gonzo soundscapery, at least at first. "Bloody Sunset" opens this with a clamor of cathedral bells and strange growling, before settling into the beautiful, moody dark synth instrumental of "Forsaken Citadel". It's all ancient analog fantasy ambience, but then burbling beats, squirming synths and a ultra-primitive goth rock backbeat kicks in, and we're suddenly transported to some ghastly dance floor on "Descent Into Eternal Night" that sounds to me like a weirdly witchy take on early (and I mean early) Depeche Mode; like all of Warlock's tunes, it's over way too quick, with the hooks burrowing into your brain beforeyoueven realize it. And each song steps deeper into the album's odd, uncanny musical catacomb. Ghoulish choral textures unfurl over slow, funerary percussion and languid melodies on songs like "Cryptic Serenade of the Damned", "Forgotten Secrets of Dungeons", "Forest of Haunted Dreams" and the morose closer "Symphony of Desolation", which all do a fantastic job of evoking the best qualities of "Era 1" Mortiis, but with trace elements of a no-fi New Wave quality. The thirty-second "Warlock Advice" murmurs over grainy electronic skuzz, but it's back to the dance floor with "Curse of Endless Sleep"; that's the first song with full-on vocals, and they're a snarling black metal style shriek over rolling toms and a sort of mutated EBM feel. Freakin' awesome. Warlock Corpse's songs on this tape continue that sketchy, malformed structure that seems to be his calling card, leaving you wanting to immediately hit rewind (or replay, or whatever) as each song tumbles through the cob-webbed recesses of this uniquely warped world.

As with the other "Blue Series" tapes, this cassette (marked only with an iridescent sticker) comes in a lovely reverse j-card housed in a jet-black tape case, which fits into a professionally-printed O-card slipcase with the artist's name on the spine and the letter "B" on the front. Held inside a re-sealable plastic bag with blue fabric, a sticker, and other ephemera. Collect 'em all!

Another installment in Handmade Birds' "Blue Series", this one part of the "Critical Fabric" line, lettered "L". Collectors, take note!

One of the most baffling of the "Blue Series - Critical Fabric" line from Handmade Birds, Defiling The Putrefied Corpse Of Loli Odessa's Blightwater Lullabies album is firmly and completely fucked up, some of the weirdest and most challenging (on multiple levels) goregrind / gorenoise I've ever listened to. Where did this come from? Who moved the rock that this abomination crawled out from underneath? What in the hell? So, to the best of my research faculties, this tape is the only physical release from this Hamburg, Germany trio, and it is legitimately insane. The band actually describes their stuff as "ambient grind", and I can get behind that. This is not the hyper-blown-out Carcass worship you might expect from a band coming out of the goregrind underground; I mean, that's definitely a part of the churning core o0f ultra-brutal slop-blast that Odessa befouls this tape with, but this goes off in a number of much weirder and unexpected directions from there. Frankly, it's stuff like this that has been fueling my growing obsession with the whole "gorenoise" aesthetic - if you thought that extreme music couldn't get any more "extreme" and bizarre, this scene would like you to hold their beer.

There's the hentai obsession that fuels their imagery and subject matter, which for the most part goes right over my head. Musically though? Defiling The Putrefied Corpse Of Loli Odessa makes me feel like my internal organs are mutating while I'm listening to this tape. The trio (who only list themselves by their initials) smash together bass guitar, multiple synthesizers, drums, guitar, and vocals into a rancid soup of off-the-wall vomitblast. But what in other hands might be just pure emetic splatter, the Odessa trio sculpt this absurd bouquet of anime (and specifically the raunchier hentai sub-genre) references and samples, hypersonic blastbeat ping snare, weird brief interludes of musical ambience, spine-destroying detours into a kind of sputtering tech-death madness, repugnant bestial grunts and growls and squeals, and this strange gleam of assorted electronic textures that float freely beneath the vicious grindcore. It's hugely fucked up and insanely catchy, combining what feels like genetic material from the supersonic gorenoise-damaged goregrind of bands like Sulfuric Cautery, wafts of beautiful and moody drifting soundtrack ambience, crazed electronics, and song structures that touch on the craziest tech-death forms I get from the likes of Psycroptic or Malignancy.

But there's really nothing else like what Defiling The Putrefied Corpse Of Loli Odessa is doing here. Because on top of all of the blasting, shredding, meatgrinder madness that makes up this musical massacre, it's genuinely captivating, using the contrast between hyper-speed noisegrind gore splat and romantic instrumental sound to do a real number on your cranium. The three-part "Pine Tale" section is a prime example of this, juxtaposing melancholy beauty againts the most spastic, hideous anti-musical violence imaginable.

Honestly, I think this stuff is genius. I can't stop listening to it. When those lilting, almost childlike vocals appear on "Leper Crest" towards the end, the effect is totally unique. Same for the haunting, almost funerary melodies gleaming beneath the stuttering blast of "Little Lady Lifeless". And then you get the relatively epic closing title track, which weaves elements of melodic death metal into the gurgling, pinging chaos, ascending into something majestic, monumental, crushingly heavy but wrought with melodramatic intensity and grandeur, while the music warps into mesmeric complexity and saccharine electronics. It's amazing. The only other artists that are even remotely on the same planet as these guys might be Serotonin Leakage, or maybe 16-武装翼の女神 [16-Armed Winged Goddess], another anime-obsessed avant-grind squad. But these comparisons are tenous at best.

Comes in the O-card packaging that defines the series, with a sticker, a fragment of blue cloth, and a wooden bird.

Quebec just keeps cookin’ with the weirdness', this time with an EP of the kind of nascent "avant slam death" vibe that I've been absolutely obsessed with lately. I certainly did not expect some of the weirdest death metal in recent memory to come out of the "slam" field, but by god, there is a lot of deliciously ultra-violent batshit-crazy sewage leaking out of this fringe wing of underground metal. This particular tape is the latest blast of bizarro brutality from Quebec's Alice Simard and her solo operation Crasse Intraveineuse, spewing five tracks of maniacal and hyper-violent tech-gore that clearly operates on its own specific wavelength. Simard is active in a horde of other fucked-up death/ gore / black metal bands, including Onchocerciasis Esophagogastroduodenoscopy, Vitrified Entity, Quantum Oscillations, Coffret de Bijoux, Filesharemaiden, Perihelion Gnosis....the list is colossal , and is doing some real damage to my already-overflowing "to check out" list. It's fucking nuts. With Crasse Intraveineuse, though, it's vomit-slam city, as the five songs spill out into a vortex of ridiculously complex and fueled on abstraction; there's a quote in the j-card, "...the tome of corrosion pulsates, with each step of the liminal ascent... described by the one song title. One of the very few peices of text in the ultra-minimal tape layout, it's a strange, cryptic statement that befits the EP's bizarre vision.

It opens with spectral dissonant piano, like a fragment of a Penderecki or Arnold Schoenberg piece, slow and haunting as the notes drift languidly through black space; but double-bass blasts roar beneath that piano when it suddenly erupts into faster, more manic flurries of atonality. The other tracks are likewise fucked up, " chainedarteryusurpedbylight" combining wild guitar shred and freeform death riffs with spastic, clotted percussion ruptures and sudden drops into knuckle-dragging slam breakdowns. The super-brief " liminalascent" slobbers all over the joint, a grisly mess of improvised tech-death absurdity, while the lengthier " blinded " returns with moody piano moments thrown into the continual slam seizures and bonkers shred / riff chaos., breaking away into long scenes of moody, almost Badalamenti-esque minimalism - this stuff is fantastic. Even when the improvised percussion starts rattling and creeping beneath that ambience, it keeps it solemn and somber .The last song then wraps it around to the ultimate vomit-vortex, sickening guttural belches and evil-sounding snarling swept up in a final wave of gonzo free drumming, totally malformed riffs, and anti-intuitive breakdowns.

It's a surreal gore-splat hyperblast, the contrast between the modern classical piano arrangements and utterly churning death metal creating a truly unique experience. Like a meeting between Eddie Prévost (AMM), Schoenberg's "Drei Klavierstücke", and the brutal madness found with "weirdo slam" bands like Cytoplasm, Dripping, Wormed, 7h.target, and Jenovavirus. I mean, what the fuck.

As part of Handmade Birds' Blue Series, the tape comes in a standard j-card/case with artwork, which is then housed in a printed cardstock slip-sleeve and accompanied by stickers, pieces of fabric, small wooden figures, each one unique and different in its presentation, and extremely limited.

And an addendum: whatever the reason, Quebec is the place producing the coolest extreme music right now. I swear to Christ, almost every band and project that I've gotten obsessed with since the start of 2024 has come outta this province. Quebec rules.

Witches Of Malibu are one of my biggest blind spots with this Handmade Birds "Yellow Series" of cassettes. They've been around forever, and are aligned with the constellation of Man Is The Bastard-related projects, but for one reason or another I just haven't come across much of their music in the past. This tape is very cool, though, and does a pretty good job of spurring my interest in crawling into their back catalog. The intimate, personal, essentially hand-made aspect of their experimental electronics definitely meshes with the rest of the artists that make up this series. It follows a string of splits with Amps For Christ, Bastard Noise, Tube Tentacles, and KPG, with whom it shares some common sonic DNA via fractured electronics and dark shading. Featuring Richard Skott of the pioneering early-80s American industrial group Hunting Lodge (as well as a member of the acclaimed Los Angeles space-rock group Farflung at one point), Witches Of Malibu present a different but similarly distinct voice in underground post-industrial ritualism.

Side A drops you into a cavern of malignant industrial-scale activity with "A Stabbing Rejection" and "Degrees Of Sacrifice". The first is a thoroughly psychedelic soundscape of chirping electronics, pulsating distorted rhythm, eerie choral-like swirls of background sound, and what feels like a stomping drum beat slowed down to a monstrous slow-motion trudge. It's unsettling for sure, ghostly and vaporous as these various sounds melt together along with spectral singing voices, tumbling metallic clatter, and scraping junk-scrap percussion. There's a ritualistic feel to this mass of noises, the distant voices taking on an almost liturgical bent while everything else churns and collapses around you, the result being a dreamlike wash of scrape and rumble cloaked in immense cavernous reverb. That first track recalls various early 80s industrial abstractions (including the likes of Hunting Lodge, naturally), but with a smoldering undercurrent of earth-rattling thrum, free-form scrap-heap pummel, streams of odd cinematic drone, and massive tectonic rumble that keeps everything on edge through the entire piece. That amorphous creepiness continues through the second song, where the drum-like sounds and clatter are even more prominent; that percussive metallic crash and clang persists through the surreal smear of sounds, sometimes bringing an unexpected heaviness to the propulsive rhythmic elements even as electric noise and pedal-sorcery sweeps overhead. For the entire twenty-minute set, it's almost krautrocky in a way, or reminiscent of the primitive improv clang of CroMagnon, joined by jets of ominous granular electronics and deep, bass-like throb (the latter elements definitely evoking the over-modulated spaced-out insect noise of Bastard Noise). "Witchy", indeed.

The second part of the tape , "Marching Into 1982 (Bel-Air To Cologne Mix)", is even heavier on the demonic drum-circle / oil-drum trance, opening with a mesmeric, motorik pulse that pushes forward into a expanding cloud of locust-like chatter, gnarled drones, and menacing squeals. "Marching" starts to exude this weird, almost "exotica"-like vibe as it carries on, layering the alien-sounding electronics and synth squiggles over this deepening percussive groove, making for a very strange and very hypnotic effect. It's actually rather unique, maintaining that creepiness even as the drumming and percussive elements lock into a looping, entrancing throb that feels as if it's stretching out into the infinite. There are these bizarre moments on "Marching" where I almost feel as if I'm listening to a sound-collage formed by stray fragments of Cave Rock, drum tracks from Riz Ortolani's Cannibal Holocaust score, and the occult ceremonies of Sleep Chamber circa Dream Distillate. An odd and intoxicating experience, for sure. And one of the biggest surprises of the whole "Yellow Series", for me.

As with the other entries in the "Yellow Series" of cassettes, Marching houses the cassette in a printed O-card slip-sleeve also containing a pro-physical media sticker, a fragment of yellow fabric, a roll of yellow craft paper, a clothing-style tag, and another circular tag attached to string.

This entry in Handmade Birds' new "Critical Fabric - Yellow Series" is actually a physical reissue of an album that Mater Suspiria Vision released on their Bandcamp page in digital and CDR form only, and thank goodness for that - the entropic "witch house" of Mater Suspiria Vision always sounds superior on analog format, particularly cassette. The glacial degradation of magnetic tape is an integral piece of "witch house" DNA in my own opinion, so its killer to have this 2020 full-length finally summoned into physical, analog form. That whole witch-house thing seems to have petered out somewhat, at least from what I can tell, with some of the various artists that were part of the initial zeitgeist moving into other esoteric fields of dance and electronic music, dragging their ghoulish, chopped n' screwed aesthetics behind them. Mater Suspiria Vision and its main figurehead Cosmotropia de Xam have been pretty consistent on their end, though, with a flow of releases ove the past decade and a half that for the most part remain rooted in Vision's unique blend of occult imagery and subject matter, 1970s Euro-horror motifs, melting ambient creepiness, sweeping cinematic scope, alluring visual design, and of course, those irresistible, FX-drenched beats and vocal mutations that send you tumbling down a mine shaft of eerie, spectral dub and mesmeric breakbeat trance.

And if you love what this band does, Crack Witch 3 delivers it in magnificent form. From the massive delay and echo overload of opener "Trip 2021", this gets very trippy, very quickly. Strange voices muttering beneath slow surges of distorted noise, sound soaking everything while leaving tracer movements fleeting across your field of vision. Deep, dark psychedelic noise soaring in every direction. And then as the synth sounds and chopped-up rhythmic elements dive into the mix, it flows forward through bizarre technoid beatscapes, sounding increasingly alien as you move into the slow-motion doom-laden industrial crunch of "Dystopia In Utopia " and "Caterpillar". Both these and a few other songs feature the distinctly "witchy" sounding vocals of one Æchidna Morgan Kamen, her whispers and velvet croon smeared over the album's lysergic EBM and skittering beats, and reach up to moments of incredibly blissed-out crumbling carnage, at times like hearing an 80's synth-pop outfit performing as they are being sucked into a peat bog. There's little in the way of "structure" here, Mater Suspiria Vision obviously being more attuned to creating an utterly surreal and warping experience, even when the music coalesces into something akin to the hardest moments of Twitch-era Ministry passing through a malfunctioning stargate. It's fuckin' terrific. The song titles match the patchwork occult cyberpunk vibe, samples running through "Uncontrollable Flesh", "The Desire Of Catherine Ballard" (a nod to Cronenberg's masterful 1996 film Crash) and "Ectoplasma" that verge on the incoherent, but which add a vague dark drama to the relentless, slamming dance music and mutated dronefields. It feels exactly like what my character would have been listening to in an old Shadowrun campaign. The old-school EBM influence is pretty consistent, parts of the album harnessing the most infectious qualities of classic Nitzer Ebb and Front 242, but there's always this bizarre ritual aktion or unseen horror lurking in the shadows that sets Mater Suspiria Vision apart, that crackling current electronic body music perturbed by blurred incantations, bits of industrial dub dissolving into pure Euro-horror film-score atonality, dissonant piano ringing over screaming women. The pair of songs that close this out are again accompanied by Æchidna Morgan Kamen's wordless ululations, "Lullaby For Angels" and "How Angels Kill In Ecstasy " emerging into surprisingly heavy punch-press machine rhythm, seared by sickly electronics and huge swells of distorted drone. It's crushing, slow-motion power-dirge growing heavier and more distorted and deformed as those hushed , lingering angelic vocals loop into infinity, before dissipating into lush dark ambient drone and soft sussurant vocal drift...

Released in Handmade Birds' signature handmade packaging that consists of an O-card sleeve, pieces of yellow cloth and rolled yellow tissue, a clothing-style tag, and more. Limited to one hundred copies.

Another one of the lesser-known-to-me installments in Handmade Birds' recent "Yellow Series" of limited-edition cassette tapes / art objects, JSH's Heretic comes from a Swedish harsh noise artist that has previously toured here in the States alongside Vomir, Black Leather Jesus, and The Rita as well as releasing splits with Richard Ramirez's BLJ outfit. So that might give you at least a basic idea of what to expect here, as well as some small insight into the fetishistic nature of this artist's work. It's a full-length tape with minimal, sigil-like cover art, just shy of half an hour, but delivers this distortion attack via two massive tracks that average around fifteen minutes in length. The first, "The Manifest Of Dissent", is high-order "wall noise", the avalanche of crumbling, decomposing, churning static and feedback and distortion washing over you in a violent oceanic surge. Top-shelf "HNW", as it were, but set apart from the Rita / Vomir clones with an obvious attention to space and speed and saturation, with the hypnotic crackling maelstrom streaked with these almost anguished-sounding peals of feedback, and specked with sudden, jarring edits and dropouts that make this much more assaultive and demanding than the mesmeric stream-of-crunch meditation that you get with a lot of other harsh noise wall sculptors. Regardless, fanatics of the mega-overmodulated textures found in this field will get their belly full, and then some. The power of that a-side is on par with some of my favorite examples of the genre like The Rita's Thousands of Dead Gods and Vomir's Renonce.