Crucial Bliss Releases

The Crucial Bliss series features short-run and limited press cd-rs from a variety of underground and experimental artists. Special attention to design and uniqueness is being paid to this series, where we hope to offer some of the most challenging and creative new music that we have stumbled across.

FISTULA Inverted Black Star CD-R
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At some point last year, the members of Fistula met up with another Ohioan, Steve Makita from the midwest power-violence legends Apartment 213, midwest power-tool noise legends Lockweld, and current second throat for Agoraphobic Nosebleed. At some point, both of these parties decided that joining forces would be a good move and had Makita lug over his toolbox to the Fistula practice space and drag out some of his most lethal circuit-shredders, keyboards and power tools. The end result are two new discs, Lessons In Lamentation and Inverted Black Star, each one possessed by a single hour-plus track of Fistula with Steve Makita conjuring fucking HUGUNGOUS slabs of apocalyptic free-metal. And it's Fistula's most abstract, demonic music ever, a charred mess of harsh electronic skree and gut-rumbling noise and unholy doom metal.
The title itself points to the pure blackness of Inverted Black Star: a massive hour-plus wave of bleak, blackened improvised doom riffing, only one or two riffs tops, but each one repeated over and over into infinity as the band and Makita pile on layers and layers of corrosive feedback, pneumatic drill noises, slicing sinewave tones, long black tentacles of undulating drone. About halfway through the disc, a voice begins speaking underneath the crushing sludge and noise, and it creates an effect similiar to hearing a television news bradcast about something really bad from four rooms away, only to sink back into the lumbering, monotonous deathtrance. Utterly crushing.

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FISTULA Lessons In Lamentation CD-R
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At some point last year, the members of Fistula met up with another Ohioan, Steve Makita from the midwest power-violence legends Apartment 213, midwest power-tool noise legends Lockweld, and current second throat for Agoraphobic Nosebleed. At some point, both of these parties decided that joining forces would be a good move and had Makita lug over his toolbox to the Fistula practice space and drag out some of his most lethal circuit-shredders, keyboards and power tools. The end result are two new discs, Lessons In Lamentation and Inverted Black Star, each one possessed by a single hour-plus track of Fistula with Steve Makita conjuring fucking HUGUNGOUS slabs of apocalyptic free-metal. And it's Fistula's most abstract, demonic music ever, a charred mess of harsh electronic skree and gut-rumbling noise and unholy doom metal.
In contrast to it's companion disc Inverted Black Star, Lessons In Lamentation sounds like it's virtually "rocking". Where Inverted spews monoto-riffs and malevolent power tool noise across the jet-black waste of it's hour long length, this jam is more upbeat, opening with a massive chugging sludgy metal riff that cycles over and over, slowly joined by a swarm of sizzling feedback and high pitched sine-whine. Crazed shredding solos appear, the central riff changes shape throughout, the whole track seems to be split into three distinct sections. It's super hypnotic as Fistula grinds away endlessly surrounded by Makita's dense and textured noise. Deep monstrous vocals emerge from out of the filth, gutteral invocations that are impossible to decipher. A massive plodding industrial dirge, a meditation on repetitive metal riffing and the blackest feedback, recorded all the way in the red, a majestic crumbling obelisk of monstrous noise-doom.

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HEDORAH self-titled CD-R
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Taking it's name from the aerial pollution god that faced off against Godzilla in the Japanese psychedelic kaiju classic Godzilla vs. Hedorah (1971), Hedorah is fully documented on this sort-run disc that combines the track "From Beyond" from the split cassette with The Fortieth Day, "Planet Of Doom" from the Dr. Who Vs The Noise compilation, and five unreleased tracks. Hedorah proves to be a multi-tentacled beast: "Crystal Smoke" evokes a smog-ridden wasteland laced with acid-rock guitar soloing, pummeling industrial bass, and trance inducing beats, and ends up as some kind of grim krautrock jam. "Self Medicated" emits looping dialogue and whirring drones over monstrous throat chanting. "Hyperbolean" combines terrifying screams converted to echo-chamber hiss and overdriven, pummeling metal riffage thrust so far into the red that it sounds like there are flaps of speaker material smacking up against yer eardrums. The twenty-minute "Black Walls" is the apex of distortion though. That final track starts off as a sheet of obsidian ambience, a shimmering drone streaked by whirring noises, but then the riff appears, a massive three-chord doom dirge looming over the horizon, massively distorted and plodding, a hateful obelisk of fuzz lumbering through the increasingly violent blasts of feedback and distorted vocal noise that's shot across the soundfield. Ominous synth melodies and dank cave ambience appear later on, but become devoured by vicious feedback lashings a la Prurient and the return of that bottomless crushing doom dirge. Heavy is an understatement.
Packaged in our signature 3-panel Crucial Bliss glossy sleeve, which has been designed by Lord Keeler himself. The disc is attached to the inside of the jacket on a plastic hub, and there is also a small insert card included in the package. Released in an edition of 250 copies.
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ENCOMIAST Bathed In Sunlight CD-R
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Bathed In Sunlight is the breatakingly beautiful new full length from the longrunning Denver drone ensemble Encomiast, featuring five lengthy tracks of instrumental bliss from Ross Hagen and company that bring together slowly drifting drones speckled with shifting layers of angelic female vocal harmonies, lilting Loveless-esque melodies, ominous ambience floating over simple hand drum rhythms, dramatic dark pop with strummed acoustic guitars and Ross' deep crooning vocals...and more of the ghostly flute playing that has always set Encomiast apart from the rest of the drone/ambient underground. Fans of Encomiast's previous releases are going to be surprised when they hear songs like "Laughter In The Storm" , whose droning psychedelic folk is unlike anything that Ross has done before, a thoroughly entracing combination of droning electronics and brooding acoustic strum. And then there's the stunning finale "Evergreen", opening with gently acoustic guitar swimming in delay before a gorgeous female voice enters under a slight veil of distortion, like she's singing from the other end of a long distance phone call, the distortion then lifting revealing her voice in perfect clarity. A simple but perfect effect. The melody in this song is likewise simple but perfect, a melancholy hook that is gradually joined by drums and electronic drones as the song evolves, turning into a amazing piece of dreamy ambient post-rock pop. Fans of Encomiast's previous droneworks and the kind of evocative ambient rock that Temporary Residence is known for will LOVE Bathed In Sunlight, which travels the luminescent ley lines between ambient dronescapes, folk music, and post-rock.
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LUASA RAELON EInto The Void CD-R
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Finally, after a pronounced delay, we're presenting the latest in grim, Cthulhian ambient death from David Reed, the man behind the Snip-Snip CD-R label and the ice-drones of Envenomist. With Luasa Raelon, Reed uses deep-frozen synthesizers and electronics to construct pitch-black sonic sculptures that evoke lost cities carved from obsidian whose masterless machines have been left to grind on into eternity, or descents into stygian pits whose bottoms cannot be gauged. Into The Void is the newest masterwork from Reed, recorded in 2006 and presented here as a five-chapter narrative that chronicles a doomed space exploration, where all that is left are the faint transmissions of apocalyptic dread drifting back at us through time. Beyond ominous, and gorgeously eerie, Reed continues to craft some of the blackest, heaviest drift this side of Gruntsplatter, Troum, Lull, Yen Pox, Melek-Tha, Lustmord, and Megaptera. Into The Void has been released in an edition of 200 copies, packaged in the signature Crucial Bliss foldover sleeve with the disc attached to the interior on a plastic hub, and featuring some of our best Bliss artwork yet, which David described as looking like 70's science-fiction art.
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BAKER, AIDAN Exoskeleton Heart CD-R
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Following up his amazing Periodic disc that was issued through Crucial Bliss two years ago, acclaimed Toronto drone-guitarist Aidan Baker is back with Exoskeleton Heart, his newest entry into our ongoing Crucial Bliss series. And this 2-track, hour long excursion into deep feedback bliss is stunningly beautiful. Split into two halves, "Interior" and "Anterior", Baker once again taps into his visions of the bodycage using only his electric guitar, performed and recorded live; the result is an evocative feedback-heavy dronescape drifting with the gritty hum of the amplifier, layers of shimmering, chiming feedback, crushing distorted ambient dirge that borders on Sunn O)))-levels of sonic weight, and shafts of elegiac melody breaking through the stormclouds of Baker's cavernous rumbling like rays of sunlight. Aidan Baker is without question the North American counterpart to the Tuetonic guitar drones of Troum, and Exoskeleton Heart delivers some of his most massive, meditative, crushing, and beautiful subterranean drift yet. Hell, the final 10 minutes of "Anterior" is without questions one of the most beautiful things we have ever presented through this label, an angelic glacial melody that builds inexorably into a wall of blissed out fuzz a la something you'd expect from Aidan's dronesludge band Nadja. Essential. The disc comes in a full-color signature Crucial Bliss foldover sleeve with the disc affixed to a plastic hub on the interior of the sleeve, and has been pressed in a limited edition of 300 copies.
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LIGHT OF SHIPWRECK From The Idle Cylinders CD-R
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Light Of Shipwreck is a one-man band operated by Ben Fleury-Steiner, a Deleware-based drone artist and owner of the excellent Gears of Sand Recordings imprint, which has released discs from some of our favorite ambient/drone/drift artists including Encomiast, Cordell Klier, and Aidan Baker. It was actually through Aidan Baker that we found out about Ben's Light Of Shipwreck project; knowing that we're fanatics for "heavy ambient" sound, Light Of Shipwreck was recommended as something we should check out. At first expecting something more along the lines of the kind of floating ambient rumble that marks so much of my favorite Baker solo stuff, I was pleasantly surprised by how percussive the tracks I heard online from LOS were, the dense, ominous feedback drones and heavy rumbling ur-riffs floating freely over a mechanistic tribal-rhythm freakout. We ended up getting in touch with Ben from Light Of Shipwreck and it turned out that he had a nearly hour-long disc that he wanted to have released through our Crucial Bliss imprint, and here we are: a three-track full length of rich, crushing power-ambient, titled From The Idle Cylinders, a reference to the American Objectivist poet George Oppen whose work is a consistent influence on Light Of Shipwreck's imagery, with huge slabs of resonant sheet metal shimmering in an ocean of heavenly feedback and reverberating guitar drone, and surges of droning tribal Krautrock percussion floating along with distorted ambient doom powerchords and washed out vocal cord bliss, each track running upwards of 20 minutes in length. A totally breathtaking piece of music, like Steve Reich, Brian Eno, Can, and Earth swirled together into an austere, hypnotizing heavy-trance masterpiece. This limited edition CD-R of From The Idle Cylinders comes packaged in the signature Crucial Bliss foldover card sleeve with the disc itself attached to the sleeve on a plastic hub and featuring striking photo design, in a print run of 200 copies.
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KORPERSCHWACHE Ritual Of The Ouroboros CD-R
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Korperschwache returns! The Texan black-industrial drone-sludge project of RKF, who is also the mastermind behind the longrunning out-music webzine Dead Angel and the sadly defunct avant-rock label Monotremata, is back with not one, but two new discs of damaged black-metal infected drone rock, hot on the heels of that 3" CD-R that Public Guilt released at the beginning of the summer . Since the mid-90's, Korperschwache has been issuing fairly obscure but solidly heavy doses of blackened noise rock, or noisy abstract black metal, depending on your point of view, mostly through small-run cassettes and cd-rs on a myriad of labels. More recently, RKF and his trusty pile of smoking amplifiers and damaged drum machines have been constructing a trilogy of cd-rs entitled Ouroboros for our Crucial Bliss imprint, which began with the Voice Of The Ouroboros disc which came out on Crucial Bliss over a year and a half ago. It's taken me awhile for a multitide of reasons - well, mainly just because we're perpetually swamped here at Crucial Blast - but we've finally issued these last two chapters in this trilogy, the Sacrifice... and Ritual... discs, and each one emits a bleak, suffocating fog of stuttering drum machines, Skullflowery feedback dirge, weird cackling goblin vocals, layers of fuzz and grit, distortion and buzzing speakers, all offered up in tribute to the great serpent.
Ritual Of The Ourobros only has four tracks compared to the thirteen of Sacrifice..., but each of these runs from 7 to 20 minutes in length, huge spawling epics of swirling black guitar drone and IIIrd Gatekeeper style riffage, with pulsating drum machines throbbing and clattering away like machines ticking underneath layers of grime and factory noise and beautiful feedback....(MORE)
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KORPERSCHWACHE Sacrifice Of The Ouroboros CD-R
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A brand new seventy-three minute disc from Korperschwache, the Texan black-industrial drone-sludge project of RKF who is the mastermind behind the longrunning out-music webzine Dead Angel and the sadly defunct avant-rock label Monotremata. Since the mid-90's, Korperschwache has been issuing fairly obscure but solidly heavy doses of blackened noise rock, or noisy abstract black metal, depending on your point of view, mostly through small-run cassettes and cd-rs on a myriad of labels. More recently, RKF and his trusty pile of smoking amplifiers and damaged drum machines have been constructing a trilogy of cd-rs entitled Ouroboros for our Crucial Bliss imprint, which began with the Voice Of The Ouroboros disc which came out on Crucial Bliss over a year and a half ago. It's taken me awhile for a multitide of reasons - well, mainly just because we're perpetually swamped here at Crucial Blast - but we've finally issued these last two chapters in this trilogy, the Sacrifice... and Ritual... discs, and each one emits a bleak, suffocating fog of stuttering drum machines, Skullflowery feedback dirge, weird cackling goblin vocals, layers of fuzz and grit, distortion and buzzing speakers, all offered up in tribute to the great serpent. Sacrifice Of The Ourobros contains 13 tracks of this grim and grisly blackened hypno drone rock that resides somewhere at the stygian intersection between Skullflower, Burzum, Abruptum, and Godflesh. It's pretty frightening stuff, heavy and trancey and very noisy, and strangely catchy at times...on this particular disc, Korperschwache's decision to name each one of these tracks after a different girl's name ("Jessica", "Lori", "Julie", "Sabrina") adds an additional creepout quality to his skulking, psychotic buzz rituals. Packaged in an oversized sleeve with the disc attached on a plastic hub, in a limited edition of 150 copies.
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GENGHIS TRON Triple Black Diamond CDR
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Like last year's Cape Of Hate disc that we released from Genghis Tron through the Crucial Bliss shortrun imprint, Triple Black Diamond is a new compilation of assorted new jams and remixes from GT that was created as a special limited item for their July tour with Ed Gein that just wrapped up a few weeks ago. This disc was issued in a one-time only edition of 444 copies, most of which the band took with them on tour. We've got the rest here at C-Blast though and it's finally available to anyone that wasn't able to catch any of Tron's tour dates, but be warned, we've only got 148 copies on hand and once they are gone, they are gone for good. Triple Black Diamond features blistering live versions of "Ride The Steambolt" off of Cloak Of Love and "Chapels" and "The Folding Road" from Dead Mountain Mouth, a Rick Allen mix by Vytear, "The Folding Road (Carwash Climax Remix)", "Greek Beds (1993 Industrial Dance Version)", the ten-minute plus dronebliss of "Dead Mountain Mouth (Epeirogenesis)" which turns Trons original track into a Growing-style cascade of shimmering ambient riffage, and to top it all off, the disc closes with an untitled demo track of a never before heard song that gives us a taste of what to expect from Tron's upcoming album on Relapse Records next year. The disc comes in a full color sleeve designed by Dylan Reece. Again, this is super limited!
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YES COLLAPSE Final Diagnosis CD-R
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One of the new batch of Crucial Bliss discs that we've got percolating is Final Diagnosis, the final release from the Dayton industrial scum-dirge trio of Dan Rizer, Josh Fink, and Matthew Reis, together known as Yes, Collapse. These guys were pretty much the house band for the noise/core/drone label Epicene Sound System, releasing a host of ridiculously limited-edition cassettes and CD-Rs, oftentimes doing splits with likeminded heavy noise bands. I've been grooving on Yes, Collapse's blasted electronics and factory deathcrush since their Smeared White Sickness disc from a couple years ago, and ended up talking back and forth with Matt from YC for awhile about releasing something with them. Alas, at the end of last year, members of Yes, Collapse moved away and the band more or less ended, but not before recording this brutal full length which they gave to me to release as part of the Crucial Bliss CD-R series. And it is one of the heaviest, most corroded slabs of industro-violence to lurk in the Crucial Bliss catalog to date. Yes, Collapse has that distinctly midwestern brand of improvised noise-rock that you'll recognize immediately, but then they go and drop in caustic crawls through rust-coated computer doom, brutal factory scrape, tribal junk-metal percussion trances, guitars with the distortion pushed all the way into the red and beyond, deranged verbal rantings, and pure free-noise fuckery, all combined into a crushingly heavy noise-dirge epic that will strip the paint from your walls.
Final Diagnosis is packaged in a full-color foldout sleeve with the disc attached to the inner sleeve on a plastic hub, and pressed in a limited edition of 150 copies.

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VILLA VALLEY Massive Amounts Of Deadness CD-R
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New private-press CD-R on our Crucial Bliss imprint. We've joined up with the Michigan feedback-violence duo VILLA VALLEY to vomit up Massive Amounts Of Deadness, a near hour-long, 8 track infestation of extremely gnarly/fucking awesome free-feedback/noise rock covered in gobs of meat, amp squeal, and deadness. This is heavy corpse-rumble and hideous death improv for fans of primo Michigan damage (UNIVERSAL INDIANS, WOLF EYES), dissasembled noise rock, and Prurient's tube blowing horror. We assembled a single hand-numbered edition of 100 copies, with jewel cases blasted in black enamel, and original art from the band.
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SCISSOR SHOCK We're In The Trashbag CD-R
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An impossibly fast and noisy blur of technical tape carnage from the midwestern plunderer SCISSOR SHOCK. Just over ten minutes of insane dayglo digi-grind-splatter, like a battalion of attacking cassette players operated by cartoon mice advancing on your burg. Spastic drumming and hi-speed cassette catastrophe and razor-thin techno bleats are encoded in puzzle melodies and transmitted direct to your nervous system. Pretty shoegazer drones and electrocuted cut n' paste sweeten the cataclysm like Evil Dead on sugar overdose. Packaged in a hand-assembled, full-color cardsleeve in a resealable plastic sleeve. Presented in an edition of 250 copies.
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FULCI Dead Lights Red Sky CD-R
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The first recorded offering from twilight-psyche dronerock duo FULCI. Deep, rumbling, and eternal speaker-buzz worship, wrapped around lumbering riffs drunk on cough syrup and shimmering distortion overload. Howling feedback mantras repeated ad infinitum. Major key rustic lullabies are reduced to primal string scraping drones that climb over mountains of echoing hum. Intensely melodic and repetitious, like SKULLFLOWER covering EARTH's 2 in an old, empty farmhouse. FULCI is Eric Crowe (formerly of Social Infestation, currently of Marax) and Adam Wright. Former members of Leviathan A.D. and The Bodybag Romance assisted on bass and drums, respectively. Mastered by Scott Hull at Visceral Sound.
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SHADOWS INFINITUM compilation CD-R
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A companion piece to the RECORD OF SHADOWS INFINITE compilation CD on Crucial Blast. The wrangling of top-notch drone/psych/drift artists continues with this full length, extremely polished CD-r release, limited to 250 copies. Exclusive tracks from DEAD RAVEN CHOIR, ENCOMIAST, KORPERSSCHWACHE, EXISTENTIAL DILEMMA, BURNING STAR CORE, FEVERDREAMS, NADJA, MARAX, and UNHOLYDEATHMACHINE run the gamut: these further explorations of the drone touch on blackened folk creep, glacial hum and gorgeous ambient bliss, buzzsaw feedback rituals, imploding-sun droneblast, improvised clatter and drift, epic driftmetal, vampiric dronenoise, and schizophrenic kool-aid burble riots. Another exercise in intelligent, outsider droneworks from CRUCIAL BLAST.
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