NEW RELEASES AND ITEMS FOR TUESDAY, MARCH 25TH 2008

7 MINUTES OF NAUSEA / PTAO split 3" CD $12.98
Merciless Core

I'm amazed I was able to get this in stock - this incredibly hard to find 3" CD was released as a joint venture between Bizarre Leprous Productions and Merciless Core Records, two labels from the Czech Republic whom I've never had any luck with getting stuff from in the past, let alone a 3" CD released back in the late 90's that features two of the sickest improv-grind outfits of all time! Yeah, this disc is a must-have for fans of extreme grind/noisecore/noise, with one long track each from the Czech freegrind band PTAO and legendary teutonic destroyers 7 Minutes Of Nausea. PTAO starts it off with their untitled ten-and-a-half minutes of total blasting carnage, a demonic grindscape of echo-chamber grindcore, freeform punk slop, samples of orchestral Mozart pieces, and blast after blast of ripping formless death metal set to puree. This stuff is fucking awesome, and any fan of weirdo grindcore or noisecore who hasn't heard PTAO is going to crap themselves once they hear these maniacs.
Anybody that's already a fan of "noisecore" is undoubtedly familiar with 7 Minutes Of Nausea (or 7MON, as they are frequently abbreviated). Along with Anal Cunt, Meatshits, and Fear Of God, these guys were not only one of the more well known noisecore bands, but also one of the weirdest. Their contribution to this split is "Feedbackselfdeath", and like the PTAO material, it's one long track made up of a bunch of microsecond outbursts, but their stuff is even less musical and more bizarre than the PTAO side...it's tough to get across how fucked this actually sounds, and how psychotic it sounds: the whole track is a series of rumbling subsonic noise that might be a group of bass drums being tossed down an elevator shaft, over which the band layers harsh, sudden blasts of distorted guitar riffing that is blurred into pure noise, and creepy Gregorian monk chants. Each "song" is over in a matter of seconds, with those creeped out monk chants filling the space in between blasts. The vocals that are splattered over this fucked-up soundscape totally take the cake, though...switching between brutal gutteral grunts, deranged muttering and Infest-esque roaring, Mick from 7 Minutes Of Nausea delivers some of the craziest vocal sounds I've ever heard. The guy sounds like he's literally schizophrenic. If you're looking for some really way-out grind or intensely heavy free-noise stuff, this disc is right up yer alley. Comes in a 3" fold-out sleeve.

ADP Grey CASSETTE $4.98

Here's a pretty fuckin' bonkers demo of (brain)damaged outsider metal from Australia that came my way as part of a big box of stuff that we picked up from Starlight Temple Society. Starlight Temple Society seems to be a beacon for some really whacked out, low fi death n' black metal, and this four song tape is certainly ranking pretty high on my weirdometer... ADP is also about as obscure as a band can get, with no website or any information about them at all to be found online, and the jacket for the tape is totally devoid of info save for the track titles. The four songs on this tape are super low fi, fairly muddy, but also kinda huge sounding, as if ADP used an 8-track tape recorder inside of an empty church to record their demo. The first song is called "Genocide Diver" and it's a twisted bit of murky doom, slow reverb soaked riffs churning repeatedly over sloppy, straightforward drumming, weird atonal melodies contorting in the background, sickening wordless screams and brain-damaged chanting oozing across their raw dirge. Somewhat like what I would expect a demo tape from Esoteric or Disembowelment to sound like if either of those bands ended up getting too fucking stoned and just started to let the tape roll. "Carcinogenic" is even more shapeless, and sounds like it might be mostly improvised: the drummer plays a minimal beat while the guitars melt into a gooey pile of primitive doom riffing that just up and stops every few measures, no vocals, nuthin', and then the end of the track become all clipped and phased as the music begins to run backward. Weird. "I Drunk Your Bones" barrels in with raw punky riffing, drooling pub chanting and a midtempo beat that sounds like some weird Oi! version of Venom or something. And as if this tape couldn't get any weirder, we get the last track "Darkest Grey", which returns to the raw doom of the first two songs, but goes completely off the deep end with a mix of bizarre vocal styles, one of which is ridiculously nasally and affected, the other one a deep gutteral snot-gurgling roar that goes way beyond being incomprehensible, and even breaking down into fits of coughing. The nasally vocals remind me a little of The Wizar'd, that wacky Australian doom metal band that put out a CD on Rusty Axe, and come to think of it, ADP sound exactly like the kind of damaged, weirdo metal I'd expect to hear from that label. This jam gets more fucked up as it progresses, with weird jazzy basslines, high pitched falsetto chanting, endlessly repeating dirge riffs, and other strangeness.

AGIT8 Recycled Music Series CASSETTE $4.98
RRRecords

This entry in the Recycled Music Series of tapes from RRR is from the Australian free-noise project Agit8. This is the first recording that I've picked up from this band, after seeing them described as 'ultra brutal Australianoise' that seem to frequently employ the use of hand made noise instruments. The material on this tape is certainly brutal at times, although it's far from the pure harsh noise assault that I had been expecting at first. Instead, the music is a rough montage of sounds, almost like a mixtape of weird anti-rock moves that are pasted together haphazardly. Each side of the tape is a collage of brutally distorted noise loops, distressed cassette noise, field recordings of the chatter of concert audiences, room ambience, and other, less recognizeable sounds, low-fi recordings of stumbling, disintegrating rock that almost sounds like a noisier, even more low-fi version of the Dead C, scalding blasts of feedback, and a section where it sounds like Agit8 took a dozen different bootleg tapes of old thrash metal shows and layered them on top of each other to create a dense blast of harsh noise with metallic riffs and rattling bass guitars jutting through the wall of crunch and hiss. This stuff stands out from the rest of the RRR catalog with its engrossing (if chaotic) mix of sinister ambient field recordings, violent Prurient/Masonna style feedback scultpure, low fi Babel drones of mumbling masses, and fucked up abstract free-metal, and the second side alone qualifies this as one of the heavier Recycled Music tapes next to that crusher that Josh Lay just released in the series (which is also listed in this week's update).

AGLAOMORPHA Perception CD $13.98
Wroth Emitter

The debut album from this obscure Russian experimental doom band is a strange, disconnected dreamworld, where crushing death doom dissipates suddenly into haunting, minimalist guitar instrumentals and vast expanses of black electronic ambience. Like much of the stuff that I've been picking up lately from the Wroth Emitter, Stygian Crypt and Solitude labels, the sound here is unmistakeably rooted in super slow, bleak doom metal, but it's like there's something getting lost in the translation that turns Aglaomorpha's version of doom into something weirder. The atmosphere in Perception is grim and sorrowful, pure melancholy that seeps from the odd existential lyrics into the crushing riffs and plodding tempo of these twelve jams, and it sounds like the epic funeral trudge of bands like My Dying Bride, Shape OF Despair, and prog doomsters Mar De Grises had a hand in influencing Aglaomorpha's sound. But the song structures are out of whack, massive crushing doom dirges suddenly just disappear, leaving only pitch black ambience and rumbling cavernous drones. Orchestral keyboards drift over murky recordings of urban life, and a series of beautiful piano pieces appear with tracks like "Revelation (epilogue)". Blasts of blazing black metal guitars scream out of the void only to disappear in a blink, replaced by a fragile guitar melody. Droning guitars swarm and wobble, bent into vaguely distorted tones and fucked up angular riffs that recall the mutant textures of Blut Aus Nord's recent albums. The vocals seem to be delivered by two different singers, though since the album is almost totally devoid of band information I'm only guessing; harsh hellish screams constantly trade off against deep monstrous gutteral roars. Aglaomorpha's surreal blackened doom is definitely something that fans of experimental, adventurous doom and black metal will want to check out. The mix of crushing, vaguely industrial sounding death-doom, dark chamber rock, even darker droning ambience, and fractured black metal is deeply warped, somewhere in between Shape Of Despair, Amber Asylum, Blut Aus Nord, and Aural Hypnox style driftscapes.

AHLZAGAILZEHGUH Recycled Music Series CASSETTE $4.98
RRRecords

Ahlzagailzehguh...quite the mouthful,huh? Sounds like the name of some ancient Elder God out of the Necronomicon, which is an apropos reference since Ahlzagailzehguh delivers some of the most evil, blackened noise thisn side of Richard Ramirez and The Rita. The NY harsh noise project has been dropping cluster bombs of charred wallnoise brutality for years, including a crushin' LP on Hospital Productions operated by Prurient's Dominick Fernow, which should give you an idea of the sort of attitude on display here. Ahlzagailzeguh's entry in RRRecords legendary Recycled Music Series is pure destructive noise, two untitled side-long tracks of brutal, fast-swirling black noise chopped up and slammed from speaker to speaker through the use of some really assaultive stereo panning. You need to really crank this tape, too; there's so much detail in these chaotic walls, blasts of whiplash feedback and mangled guitar noise, razor-sharp electronic glitches, monstrous roaring vocals ripping through a curtain of filth, awesome demonic noises that sound like cassette player heads having strips of human skin run through them at high speed, and it all melts together into a wall of thick, rumbling, hyperviolent blackened dronenoise straight from hell. With all of the feedback and amplifier abuse going on in these lengthy pieces, it actually gets pretty close to the murderous power-skree of Matt Bower's Total, so fans of that project might want to look into this and other Ahlzagailzeguh releases, which I'll be working on trying to track down as soon as I can. As with all of the Recycled Series tapes, these cassettes are recorded onto random prerecorded cassettes from the RRR record store, and both the tape and the jacket are covered in duct tape scrawled in black magic marker.

ALASEHIR The Stone Sentinels CD $13.98
Archive

I've liked all of the records that I've heard from Bardo Pond, it's all great, smoke-wreathed psych rock jamming delivered from deep in the dopezone, but while listening to 'em, I always inevitable finding myself hoping that the Bardo guys are going to kick in with a truly crushing riff to shatter the languid torpor of their sprawling jams, and really go into the red, ya know? Thanks to this somewhat recent new disc from Slim and his consistently amazing Archive label, we've got a full length disc from the Bardo Pond side project Alasehire, and it totally meets my aforementioned needs. Alasehire features three of the members of Bardo Pond, and on Stone Sentinels, they create three sprawling tracks of riff-heavy sludgy psychedelia that sounds like Bardo Pond on 'roids, indeed; the Gibbons brothers are on dual guitars, dropping Sabbath strength slomo riffs alongside the meandering drumming from Bardo drummer Jason Kourkonis. The 1st track "Nazca" unfurls massive Western-tinged psychedelic improvisation, almost Earth-like guitar meditations and narcotic slide guitar twang laced with blasts of powerful feedback and noise, before moving into the free-floating Sabbathian psych of "Lost City". This starts off as a cloud of hazy and dreamy ambience that drifts from mellow acoustic guitars and woodsy psych-folk but evolves into a massive tangle of crushing sludge metal riffing, sweeping oscillators, and strafing wah-wah freakout, like Hawkwind, Acid Mothers, and Sunburned Hand Of The Man filtered through heavily drugged sludgecore. And "Shroud" follows a similiar route, a far-drifting dopehaze of exploratory stoner jamming, tweaked electronic noises, Kourkonis' powerful, busy drumming constantly divebombed by spacey, superphased electronic FX and swirling feedback. Towards the end of the track, guitars and drums disappear altogether as the band bottoms out into a field of sparse electronic textures and chirping Bastard Noise-esque noise. I loved this disc, it's an immenselt spaced out slab of free psychedelia with moments of chaotic heaviness that really blast off. The disc comes in a six panel glossy full color gatefold jacket much in the same style as Archive's other recent releases, with the disc attached to the jacket on a plastic hub. It's limited to 600 copies, too.

ALUK TODOLO Descension LP $20.98
Riot Season

This vinyl edition of Aluk Todolo's debut masterpiece of blackened hypno rock comes to us from UK label Riot Season, on black wax and in the expected limited edition.
First heard Aluk Todolo on that debut 7" that the band released on Implied Sound last year, which I thought was a real blast of fetid hypno rock inscribed with cryptic occult imagery and one hell of a pounding groove, major groove, a kind of satanic trance rock meltdown that felt like it was crawling right off of the edge of the vinyl. Great stuff that caught the attention of a lot of people that follow this sort of thing, and this past November saw the release of Aluk Todolo's first full length on Public Guilt, which has been building a heavy buzz ever since it came out. On Descension, Aluk Todolo have carved out a pitch-black krautrock masterpiece that ends up sounding akin to Circle performing the background music for a black mass while being mixed by Masami Akita armed with short-circuiting amplifiers in each hand, punctuating their nocturnal dronerock rituals with blasts of white-hot electronic skzzzz. Aluk Todolo features members of the black metal cult Diametragon, but the main thread that ties the two bands together is the musician's use of brutal white noise as a kind of lead instrument; in Diametragon, the band splatters their razorwire black metal asaults with ear shredding skree, but here the noise is draped in layers over skeletal rock instrumentation, a basic drums/guitar/bass lineup that forms minimalistic propulsive jams that swim in black feedback and atmospheric speaker buzz. Like This Heat and Einsutrzende Neubaten filtered through an endless blackdronenoise ritual, sinister melodic sigils forming out of the fuzz and forming a claustraphobic, creepy low fi psych epic, their rhythms relentless in movement. The opening "Obedience" starts off as swirling black ambience with a shuffling sheet metal rhythm banging away in the background, and then suddenly a wavering female chorale appears and the whole song suddenly explodes into a clamorous, propulsive krautrock jam, simplistic driving drumming slicing through a storm of overloaded demon howls and white noise. It's really low fi and garagey sounding, but powerful and totally in-the-red. On "Burial Ground", the band sets up a tense, claustrophobic vibe with a simple guitar arpeggio played over weird FX, rusted metal percussion, tinny evil drones and a plodding drumbeat. "Woodchurch" is another slow, plodding jam that almost seems to invert the guitar part from the previous track and crank the distortion way up while layers of machine noise and FX shift and warp above it; the last track, "Disease", has another shambling hypnotic drumbeat playing in an odd time signature accompanied by trippy distorted effects and blasts of overmodulated acid guitar clipping throughout the jam. Imagine an evil, hypnotic fusion of the super blown-out blackness of Wold and Akitsa, Harry Pussy's shambolic noise, and This Heat. Slow marches into unnerving noise frequencies and atmospheric clatter are served up as black magic meditations, and alternate with invocations of demonic krautrock. Highly recommended !

ALVARS ORKESTER Recycled Music Series CASSETTE $4.98
RRRecords

The European psych-noise group Alvars Orkester delivered their installment in the Recycled Music Series from RRR in 2005, and this was one of the first new releases from the legendary outfit to show up in quite awhile. The Swedish duo started out in 1987 with members Joachim Nordwall and Jan Svensson exploring the more psychedelic, drug-damaged side of experimental, analog post-industrial music, and they created an impressive body of work that stretched from highly creepy dronescapes to worlds of sweeping deep-space electronic weirdness. The music of Alvars Orkester has always had a dark, paranoid tint to it, and the tracks on this Recycled Series tape could easily pass for a lost expiermental horror movie score. It's a murky sonic realm squirming with warbling tape sludge, droning high pitched feedback, organic sounds that resemble alien creatures swarming inside a maze of human guts, deep buzzing tones that go through subtle shifts in pitch and speed, delicate little test-tone melodies, and murky, muddy waves of evil distortion sweeping out in oscillating concentric patterns. Really creepy, though sometimes quite pretty in a weird, kosmiche sort of way, a mixture of Throbbing Gristle, dismebodied Hawkwind fx, and Japanese psych blasters CCCC. This is one of the more transportational entries in the Recycled Music Series, for sure. And as with all entries in this infamous series, the tape and jacket are recycled random pop cassettes that RRR has covered in duct tape and scrawled on in black magic marker.

AMK Super Panoramic Stereo Sound 5000 CD $7.98
Troniks

Record/flexi-disc abuser A.M.K. returns with a new full length disc with 29 tracks designed for random play on your CD player, in the same manner as that recent Bizarre Uproar disc on Housepig that we just listed a few weeks ago. A.M.K. has always stood out in the American noise scene for his focus on using vinyl records and primarily flexi-discs to create confusing montages of sound, chopping up the records and flexis into sections and then recombining them into strange new forms and played back on regular turntables. RRR released a 10" titled Montage that is probably one of AMK's best known releases, but it's been awhile since I've heard something new from the longrunning project, who started out cutting apart flexi-discs way back in 1986.
Troniks has released AMK's latest album Super Panoramic Stereo Sound 5000 in a limited edition of 500, in a black and white sleeve that uses classic phonographic design imagery. When these 29 tracks are played back in random order, they create a tense collage of chopped up pop music, big band music, brutal low frequency feedback rumble and distorted noise, bits of vinyl hiss and crackle, looped voices, looped bits of unrecognizeable rock music that is morphed into blurts of hypnotic drone rock, vicious dronescapes built from white noise and tribal percussion loops, and more. Half of the tracks are untitled; the other half are named after famous slasher movie locations ('Haddonfield', 'Crystal Lake') or more random subjects. Obviously, this is meant to be listened to as a single piece of sound art, and it's a really cool patchwork of Dadaist-plunderphonic sonic fuckery that goes from surreal to sinister and back again.

ANAL CUNT Defenders Of The Hate CD $12.98
Menace To Sobriety

It's hard to believe that these maniacs are even still alive, let alone still performing as Anal Cunt after all of these years of substance abuse, overdoses, comas, brawls, and rampant assholism. But the nefarious AxCx has been pretty busy this past year, with a full US tour and performances at some of the bigger metal festivals here in the U.S....I actually caught them at a show right outside of Hagerstown last spring when they were on tour, and the fact that Anal Cunt were performing in our little 'burg was surreal enough, but there they were, ripping through a half hour set that had them berating the crowd of rioting kids over an ear shredding assault of ultraheavy punked-out grind noise. In betwixt all of this activity, AxCx dropped this disc called Defenders Of The Hate on Menace To Sobriety Records last summer ('07), which was touted as a new release from the band. It's not though, so AxCx collectors need to take note; Defenders Of The Hate is actually a twenty-minute mini-album that collects the remastered eleven tracks from the Defenders of the Hate EP from 2001, and ten bonus tracks from their split wih Flachenbrand, the 13 Bands Who Think You're Gay compilation LP, and the Thrash Of The Titans compilation LP. And the "music" is exactly what you'd expect, short minute-long blasts of impossibly fast, downtuned grindcore pushed to the limit, usually turning into a blurr of violent Merzbowian noise, although bits of fucked-up punk, deformed rock, and grooving sludge riffs show up here and there. Super pissed off and offensive, with song titles like "Obviously Adopted", "You Quit Doing Heroin, You Pussy", and more that I can't even print here. These cretins are still completely out of control.

ANODYNE Salo 10" $6.98
Insolito

Just in! The original vinyl version of this metallic noise-rock/avant-dirge crusher from Brooklyn's heaviest, Anodyne. Pressed on clear vinyl, in a three color sleeve with glossy insert. This 10" version features the four songs "Black.Sun.Rise", "Consumer", "Valley Of The Worm", and "Mask Behind The Face".
One of the most lethal of the post-hardcore bands that fully embraced the caustic nihilism of 90's noise rock, Anodyne for some reason never caught on with the metal/hardcore crowd in a big way, despite releasing some of the most abrasive and ferocious NYC noise since Unsane. Actually, I don't understand how Anodyne failed to become the favorite band of every hardcore kid that ever worshipped Deadguy and Kiss It Goodbye. I only had the opportunity to see Anodyne play live once, in the basement of the cafe attached to CBGB's in the early part of this decade, and their set was chilling; pure, hateful force conveyed through brutal, jagged riffs and Mike Hill's gnarly howls. Vicious neo-noise rock rendered metallic and pulverizing through ample levels of distortion and dirge. Beyond recommended for fans of metallic Am Rep worship, dissonant and experimental metalcore, and gunmetal endtime visions. Recommended.

ANTIGAMA / OPENWOUND Blastasfuck CD $12.98
Antiself Productions

An older but crucial split disc featuring Australian grinders Openwound and C-Blast futurist grinders Antigama, both of which deliver the quirky grindcore goods. Openwound open the split with 17 tracks of their awesome hyper-meth'd grind, most of which were recorded in 1999 but appear here for the first time. Heard of The Kill? They were a shortlived Aussie grind band that the entire grind scene blew a collective load over about six years ago after releasing an EP that attained total blastbeat nirvana and had some of the most ferocious riffs in, well, forever. Well, members of Openwound went on to form The Kill, so that should give you an idea of how good these guys are. Awesome, fierce as fuck grindcore somewhere in between early Napalm Death, Terrorizer and Swedish bands like Sayyadina, but with weird little passages of clean jangly guitars, over the top mock-operatic vocals, funky almost-breakbeat breaks, awesome thrash metal parts, chaotic blasts of mathy shredding, and other distinctive little flourishes that set these guys apart from everyone else. Most of all though, are the hooks...Open Wound busted out some of the catchiest grind ever, seriously hooky and catchy riffs that will stick in your head. Open Wound were awesome, one of the best post-Earache grind bands I've ever heard, and essential listening for any grind fan.
The Antigama side features a bunch of early recordings from the Polish prog-grind band, which were recorded at practice spaces and studios and live shows from 2001-2003. The sound is a little more raw and unpolished than their later albums obviously (though totally listenable), but even at this early stage Antigama had already defined their unique, intellectual style of 21st century grindcore that combines 90's era Napalm Death influences (think Diatribes era Napalm) with industrial music, gravity-defying percussion overloads, sinister sci-fi samples, electronic noise, and massive Meshuggah-esque grooves. There's no doubt that Antigama are one of the key bands at the moment that are pushing the grindcore aesthetic into new territory. Awesome stuff. They also include a live cover of Repulsion's 'Radiation Sickness' as a nod to the original trailblazers of grind.
Definitely a killer split album for anyone into quirky, forward-thinking grindcore!

ARALLU The Demon From The Ancient World CD $13.98
Epidemie

Epidemie bring us another warped individualistic metal album that reminds me why this is fast becoming one of my favorite labels. The Demon From The Ancient World is the fourth album from Arallu, an Israeli black metal band that calls themselves "barbaric Mesopotamian black metal", but this isn't a mere clone of the more well known Middle Eastern black metal band Melechesh like you might expect. While both bands draw from Middle Eastern mythology and traditional Arabic sounds that they incorporate into their music, Arallu are actually substantially more fucked up sounding than Melechesh have ever been. Whether that's due to Arallu suffering from genuine ineptitude or a refusal to play by the book when it comes to things like "rhythm" or "tightness" is still up in the air; it doesn't even matter, because this album fucking SHREDS. It's a mutant blackthrash attack that sounds like a mix of classic thrash like Slayer, Kreator and Sodom mixed with hyperspeed black metal and bona fide Arabic instruments and musical scales, but played so off-the-cuff and raggedly and with bizarre changes in speed, song structure and key that this comes close to the mutant BM realm inhabited by the likes of Furze and Benighted Leams. Arallu is fronted by vocalist and bassist Butchered, who for a very short while actually played in Melechesh, and his choked, froglike vocals spin all kinds of visions of desert-roaming demons, genii, gateways to hell opening right in downtown Jerusalem, and more earthbound matters like the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The music, as I mentioned, totally shreds; thrash metal riffs and buzzsaw blackened tremelo blurr alternate over an awesome stumbling drummer that barely stays in time with the riffs, but the way that the members of Arallu pull it off, the sloppiness and chaotic playing elevates their Arabic blackthrash onto a new level of weirdness. And then every couple of measures or so, the metal instrumentation will be suddenly joined by a host of Arabic desert instruments like darbuka and shofar, sometimes taking over completely as a song turns into a Middle Eastern tribal jam. Yeah, this album is heavy on the what-the-fuck factor, but it also rocks, and heavily at that. Songs like 'The Seven Chosen Genii' veer into ripping black n' roll, singer Butchered busts out a couple of hair-raising Tom Araya style screams, and album closer 'Tzvaot ARALLU' sounds, bizarrely enough, like a Stiff Little Fingers song as played by a diseased black metal outfit. And it rules. Hands down the best freakoid blackthrash album on Epidemie, totally recommended.

ARC Arkhangelsk CD $13.98
Epidemie

Anyone that is into the sounds of drifting drones of the guitar-based sort and/or the more blissed out, textural strains of doom metal is going to at least be aware of Canadian avant-guitarist Aidan Baker, either from his excellent solo recordings or from his prolific and increasingly popular dronemetal band Nadja. There's another band that Aidan is a member of, however, that isn't nearly as well known, but which is just as great as any of his other projects. That band is Arc, a Toronto based trio that crafts what I'd call a sort of improvised ambient rock. If you're familiar with Aidan Baker's solo work and the kind of drifting, layered drones that he creates using guitar and effects, that's a large part of Arc's sound, and he's joined by Christopher Kukiel on percussion and electronics and Richard Baker on drums and other percussion. Aidan also contributes drums and other percussion to Arc's music, and what we get is heavily rhythmic dronerock, with cascading tribal rhythms amd dreamy guitar drones swirling together into a wash of hypnotic ambience.This newest album, the band's fourth, is a bit surprising as it has been released by the Czech avant-metal label Epidemie Records, whose catalog includes albums from avant-death metallers Azure Emote, experimental electro-doom duo Dusk, and funeral doomsters Mistress Of The Dead. Which leads me to believe that this Arc album might be heading in a heavier direction than previous recordings. That's partially the case, through most of Arkhangelsk stays in a subdued state of hazy drones and swirling percussion. The disc features four lengthy tracks, all of them created initially with improvisational performances on drums and guitar and then layered with additional percussion, electronics and woodwinds, with each of these two sessions recorded in a single sitting, using only minimal post-production on the recordings. The disc begins with the glistening sheets of guitar and dense polyrhythms of'Relicary', then moves through the spacious dronescapes of 'Angel Sightings' and "ossuary', but it's on the second track "The Valley Of Dry Bones" that Aidan lashes out with crushing distorted riffs and improvised blues licks, and even comes within range of Nadja-levels of metallic overdrive towards the end of that track. Even at it's heaviest, though, Arc's music is constantly underscored by the surging and receding waves of krautrocky percussion, an eternally moving mass of rhythm riding out on Aidan's ethereal guitars. These tracks flow together like an epic fusion of Troum, Can, Nadja, and the trippy drum-trance music of the Boredoms. Limited to a mere 600 copies, the disc comes in a sleek 6-panel digisleeve illustrated with abstract, Shroud Of Turin-esque artwork. Highly recommended!

ARMY OF FLYING ROBOTS Life Is Cheap CD $12.98
Super-Fi

A debut full length at long last from the UK blastcore band Army OF Flying Robots, which follows a slew of EPs and compilation appearances. Alot of people have tagged Army Of Flying Robots as a kind of UK version of Converge, and while I'm not doubting that Converge have been an influence on AOFR's frantic metallic hardcore (I mean, c'mon, what metallic hardcore band formed after 1998 hasn't been influenced by Converge?), there is definitely more to their sound than that. Life Is Cheap spins 11 songs of chaotic but controlled vitriol, and the core of their sound revolves around fast, thrashy hardcore and powerful, dynamic time changes, murderous screamed vocals, harsh dissonant riffs and fucking huge apocalyptic riffs, definitely tapping into what Converge were doing on Jane Doe, but also throwing in big meaty helpings of powerviolence, math rock, and majestic post-rock, with mathy chugging slow parts and hyperspeed grinding opening up into panoramic instrumental rock passages that remind me of Mogwai or Envy. Dark ambient interludes build tension in between the metallic attacks, and the twin guitars scrape and claw at their instruments, creating some interesting textures that further set Army apart from the rest of the blasting metalcore flock. And the riffs...a band's gotta have killer riffs, and Army delivers, with every song on this disc serving up awesome, frenetic riffs that rage like clarion calls for the apocalypse. Awesomely intense and supercharged grind metal meets epic atmosphere. Recommended. Fucking killer artwork across the board for the album too, all skulls, suits, and dollar bills serving up a scathing dismissal of profit-driven culture.

ASTRO JAZKAMER HAIR STYLISTICS Motorcycle Fuck With The Ghost Rider CD $13.98
Archive

That tonguetwisting moniker is gonna be instantly recognizeable to followers of the international noise scene, a three headed flamethrowing feedback beast, a collaboration between Japan's master of space-blast Astro (aka Hiroshi Hasegawa), Norway's Jazkamer (the duo of John Hegre and Lasse Marhaug), and Hair Stylistics (another Japanese noise artist, Masaya Nakahara of Violent Onsen geisha). A single 45 minute track recorded live at Earthdom in Tokyo, Japan in March of 2007, Motorcycle Fuck With The Ghost Rider is a crushing hellish psych-noise epic, brutally dense sheets of galactic EMS synthesizers drfting through infernal clouds of vocal noise, feedback laden doom guitar, and noxious electronic squirm and skree. Spin this disc at full volume and it'll liquify yer innards by the ten minute mark. Ultra distorted cosmic synth annihilation and high power harsh noise, shot through with fleeting bits of grinding doom metal guitar and overdriven amplifiers vomiting out black feedback tentacles. Think CCCC meets Merzbow meets Jazkamer's Metal Machine Music. A thousand electronic devices screaming in terror, dense layers of noise and distortion and trippy synth tones and screeching feedback all melting together.
It's an Archive release, and the disc comes in another one of Archive's rad gatefold sleeve packages, this one designed by Lasse Marhaug himself, it has a diecut circle on one side that reveals the flaming skull artwork on the disc face, and the sleeve is covered in illustrations of the Ghost Rider and pics of Mr. T surrounded by wingding style icons of narcotic paraphernalia and various symbols. The disc itself is attached to the inside of the gatefold sleeve by a plastic hub. And limited to only 600 copies!!

AUTODIDACT Ass Of Fire, Tits Of Splendor CD-R $7.98
Apop

The final disc from Autodidact, and probably the finest set of tunes that this Korperschwache alter-ego has ever produced. Yep, Autodidact is/was another one of the solo projects to sprout from the skull of Roy K. Felps, the Texan mastermind behind Korperschwache, writer for avant-noise/metal ezine Dead Angel and Skullflower archivist. Even though Autodidact moved at super slow speeds, the music stands in stark contrast to the blackened, charred electro dirge of the mighty Korper. Instead of dark and malevolent, Autodidact was always a weirder, more "airy" beast, still massive and ponderous and crushing with hammering drum machine beats and and distorted atonal guitars, but with weird melodies and raspy half-spoken, half-sung vocals that turn the music into a glacial slowcore. Hypnotic indie dirge formed from a simple palette of guitar, those detached raspy vocals, the metronomic drum machine beats and electronic noise, like Codeine and Earth's Hex turned angular and mathy, played over super slow, hypnotic but odd-metered rhythms, like Godlesh's drum machine pounding away on dying batteries. Ass Of Fire is the last release from Autodidact, five really really long tracks, and mostly instrumental. It has the weird song titles and surreal BDSM imagery that runs through so much of RKF's music, and the song title for the nine-part fifth track might be the longest, most ridiculous song title ever: 'rhys chatham, defender of eroica, armed with the metaphysical hammer made of gold and rendered unto the trinity of the ghost union, joins in battle across the northern skies against the pitiless might of sun ra, the atomic black jesus, armed with the cosmo-myth supersonic groove pusher (new! improved!), as the evil penguin of eternal crippling doom watches with morbid fascination while drawing bad pictures of leni riefenstahl on a leaking etch-a-sketch (aka the evil penguin song)... a) declaration of war: no man shall utter blasphemy against the evil penguin and live... b) first skirmish: irradiated guitars bake in the hot tejas sun... c) first counterattack: invasion of the fifty-foot women in sinister fetishwear (lucifer's cheerleaders)... d) retreat: the ghosts of nanking watch in silence as night falls and the evil penguin brings forth his terrible vengeance against those who have betrayed him... e) second skirmish: at dawn, the defender of eroica carries out an assault against the unprotected flank of the astro-infinity defenders of the space monorail ... f) third skirmish: fucking hell, my ass is on fire!... g) second counterattack: the black cosmo-myth tone scientists, wielding the funk hammer of saturn, baffle the soldiers of eroica with unyielding streams of pure inexplicable bullshit, as commanded by the (new! improved!) voice of ra... h) the final war: the evil penguin draws down the power of the great serpent and claims dominion over all souls living and dead before wasting everybody... i) doom out.' Seriously. The disc comes in a slimline case with a full color insert.

BEAULIEAU, EMIL Dedicated To Charlie Ward CD $9.98
RRRecords

Another one of Emil Beaulieau's "remix" albums, where the greatest living American noise artist takes his formidible four-armed turntable the Minutoli and wreaks havoc on assorted records. All of his remix discs are crazy, hyperactive blasts of noise/rock cut-up, brutal and noisy. This time, Beaulieu takes on the early catalog of Stomach Ache Records, the cult 90's noise label run by Charlie Ward who was a both a buddie of and frequent collaborator with RRRecords. The early Stomach Ache catalog included 7"s from Gerogerigegege, Stargazers, weirdo death metallers Faxed Head and 7000 Dying Rats, Japan's AUbe, black electronics project Omit, G.G. Allin, Pork Queen, Bananafish compilations, and Evil Moisture, and all of those records are assaulted by Beaulieau on this disc, the Minutoli arms slammed into vinyl grooves and raising brutal blasts of skree and mangled noise rock, walls of chopped up death metal riffery and fucked up sound collages. Brutally noisy turntable damage that turns downright hypnotic as you're blasted with chunk after chunk of mutilated riffing and skree that sometimes gives me the impression of hearing Violent Onsen Geisha ripping apart a stack of hardcore and metal records. Comes in a jewel cases with abstract xerox-art inserts.

BEHOLD...THE ARCTOPUS Nano-Nucleonic Cyborg Summoning CD $9.98
Troubleman Unlimited

Just turned up some of the original, cheaper Troubleman Unlimited version of the debut EP from Behold...The Arctopus. This one is essentially out of print, and when these are gone, they're gone.
The follow up to the NYC shredmasters debut 3" on Epicene, their Nano-Nucleonic EP on Troubleman serves up three dizzying explosions of tech-metal shredtasticness highlighted by the presence of shredmaster Colin Marston, who is also a member of the Dadaist ambient-metal-clatter duo Infidel?/Castro! as well as Dysrhythmia and Byla. Colin's virtuoso Warr tap-guitar skills is shit that must to be heard/seen to be believed...hyper-speed prog runs and lightspeed guitar tapping are shot out faster than your ears can follow, with jazz-informed composition and complexity getting down with straight thrash metal insanity, further bolstered by a display of insane octopoidal drumming that tumbles out of jams like "Estrogen/Pathogen Exchange Program", "Sensory Amusia", and an ambient jazzy bliss out that surfaces in the middle of "Exospacial Psionic Aura" that'll flip your wig. All instrumental and all epic, swarming over your eardrums like the nexus of progressive Atheist/Meshuggah/Cynic tech and the kind of underground, hyperactive avant-shred that you get from ADD-addled nuts like Orthrelm (who shared that split CD single with Behold...The Arctopus on Crucial Blast), Naked City, and Melt Banana.

BIG BUSINESS Head For The Shallow LP $12.98 Wantage USA

Finally got the limited vinyl version of Big Business' crushing debut in stock, on black vinyl.
Hard rocking, bass-thug thrash from this duo of Jared from KARP / THE WHIP and TIGHT BROS, and Coady from the MURDER CITY DEVILS. You can definitely hear the KARP lineage here, but KARP if they were doing HIGH ON FIRE covers with sort-of 80's metal type vocals. That idea might sound weird, but on CD it rocks harder than fuck. This album is seriously badass. Head For The Shallow kicks you in the face with a stomping mix of massive growling bass guitar and hyperkinetic drumming with those vocals, powerful and clean but slightly gruff, sort of like a higher-pitch Lemmy, but with a couple of AWESOME harmonies and effects that come from out of nowhere. And the sound is big, full, which you don’t normally hear with bass/drums duos like this. It's a wall of riff and rock and catchy hooks, really energetic and jacked up and over the top! For everyone that wept over the loss of THE WHIP and KARP, you must get this immediately! Plus, we’ve heard that Hydra Head is supposed to be releasing a CD of unreleased THE WHIP studio stuff in the near future!

BIG NURSE + REALICIDE Real Big Nursicide CD $4.98 Realicide

This disc documents some of the sonic events that led up to a brain melting live collaboration between the Nashville dwelling free-rock unit Big Nurse and Cinci gabba/speedcore agitators Realicide. On paper, it seems like an odd fit, but after listening to Big Nurse and their deafening blasts of crumbling chaos rock, the shared bond between these two bands starts to make itself more clear to me, labeled as it is on the inside of the sleeve as "defective punk rock falling apart". The disc opens with two tracks from Big Nurse, "Big Wall" and "Ny-Quil Thrill Kill", two colossal free rock jams, the first sounding six drummers all playing different songs simultaneously while the guitarists and bassists ram their instruments (and any other object they can lay their bloodied hands on) right down the collective maw of their amplifiers. Brutal, utterly destroyed improv that sounds like the Dead C on meth, or an even more blown out and violent than usual Grey Daturas jam with a full backline. The second track is a swirling sea of black sludge, all distorted blown out sludge riffs and brown-notes and spacey psychedelic guitars swamped and drowning and buried in the mix, a thick syrupy black haze of low-fi Sunn O))) sludge drone and demolished stoner riffing. It's all crushing and loud and way in the red, and if I didn't know any better I woulda sworn that these two jams were being beamed straight into my cranium from the wilds of New Zealand.
Then it's Realicide's turn, and they spew an untitled live track recorded in Big Nurses's hometown in 2005....this is something different from the normally-gabba powered group, a murky stew of tribal drums and clattering percussion and piercing feedback that sounds like it escaped off of Prurient's Black Vase, and eventually overrun by blasting amp rumble and droning feedback hum. What the fuck? It basically sounds like a continuation of the crushing free-rock destructo slop that Big Nurse was slinging just minute prior...finally I'm checking the notes in the sleeve, and yep, this is Realicide as joined by several members of Big Nurse.
But it's the fourth track that's actually presented as a full blown collaboration, a massive noise rock orgy recorded at Sudsy's in Cincinatti in March of '05, the full lineups of both bands joined on stage and captured here in a low-fi minidisc haze of industrial/tribal percussion, roaring guitar noise, and grating screams, a massive twenty minute free noise jam that moves from tweaked pedal-humping psychedelia to melted metallic dirge and No Neck-esque clatter.
Finally, we get another Big Nurse track, but even this is filled with the collaborative spirit...recorded in St Louis in '05, this turns into a mighty hypnotic psych jam with members of the audience climbing on board and contributing to the wall of percussion that bulldozes it's way like a pile of drumkits staggering through a fug of psychedelic fx and one skulldrilling garage-rock ur-riff that is pounded out to fucking infinity.
Falling apart punk indeed, this is great stuff provided that you don't mind the murky production of these mostly live recordings. The disc is another screenprinted jobbie from Realicide Youth packaged in a foldout xeroxed poster sleeve, and limited to 100 copies.

BONGZILLA Nuggets CD $11.98 Barbarian

Before you Bongzilla fans scramble for the "buy" button, take note: Nuggets is actually a redesigned and renamed reissue of their Shake: The Singles collection CD that went out of print over a year ago. However, and I know this'll aggravate any diehard Bongzilla fans out there that already own Shake, this redux of Bongzilla's collection of out of print singles contains three additional tracks that didn't appear on the original CD. Here's what this one has: fifteen tracks of lumbering, super heavy stoner sludge with spacey fx and fronted by vicious torn-larynx screams, and completely and wholly obsessed with pot and marijuana culture. Primal, resin-coated sludgecore from the Wisconsin sludgelords....the tunes featured here are bit more raw and simple compared to their later albums like Gateway, though some of these tracks ('Smoke', 'Budgun/THC') are also some of their trippiest jams, with lots of killer Monster Magnet style space fx shot through their bluesy swamp metal dirges.
This collection features Bongzilla's tracks from their Mixed Bag 78" on Rhetoric, the 5 Bong Hits demo, the Hemp For Victory 7", their splits with Cavity, Meatjack, Hellchild, and their tracks from the Painkiller II, Assassins, Nothing Records, and Twin Threat To Your Sanity and He's No Good To Me Dead compilations; the tracks from these last two compilations are the ones that didn't appear on the original Shake collection.
Crucial for fans of Bongzilla and druggy, ultraheavy sludge metal a la Corrupted, Eyehategod, Weedeater, early Boris, Church Of Misery, Buzzoven, Fistula, etc. Comes with new artwork, too.

BURMESE / CADAVER EYES split CD $12.98 Heart & Crossbones

FINALLY, new music from Burmese! It's been two years since the San Fran band released their Men album on Load, and I've been itching for more of their Whitehouse-inspired sludge/noise/grind violence. And on this split album, they're joined by one of the few bands that can withstand their white heat, the Israeli percussive metal/noise project Cadaver Eyes! Hell yeah.
The disc alternates tracks between Burmese and Cadaver Eyes. Burmese's stuff is a continuation of the vicious grind and power electronics sound that the band has been forging. Brutal low end grindcore built from blasting drums, deep ferocious gutteral roars, and splattery riffs is smashed into stretches of abstracted noise, which is still very influenced by Whitehouse all the way down to the confrontational song titles ('No Blood No Cum', 'War Vs Women'). Savage vocal freakouts emerge over rumbling feedbacking dronescapes. Warning alarms scream alongside fractured grindcore. Eleven tracks total from Burmese, and these are the first recordings from the new lineup of the band, which has 'em reduced to just one drummer now alongside the two bassists and multiple vocalists. Some of this almost sounds like Man Is The Bastard chopped up into 15-second chunks of meat, for chrissakes.
Every four tracks or so, Cadaver Eyes appear with a couple of longer pieces. Here they are a duo, with Cadaver Eyes drummer/vocalist David teaming up with someone named Zax on no-input mixer, and the five tracks that they contribute to the album were recorded live on Brian Turner's show on famed radio station WFMU earlier in 2007. Somehow, two guys manage to whip up a murderous frenzy of abstract grindcore that sounds like an entire squadron of feedbacking amps, blastbeating drummers, and cannibalistic vocalists all going off at once. Impossibly distorted riffs are pulled apart into rubbery rumbling black tar drones, and sampled death metal riffing is plundered and manipulated over David's splattery drumming. 'The White Supremacy' and 'Chocolate Soldier Disintegrates' fuse together as one massive glob of Khanate-esque doom that is thoroughly infested with piercing sinewaves and crazed screams. 'Execution Procedure # Three' comes off like a fusion of RRRecords-style harsh noise and tumbling noisecore loops layered over and over on top of each other creating a dense mass of improvised grind. And on their final track, Cadaver Eyes start off by painting a series of cymbal loops and subsonic bass drops with grimy feedback for 'Ba Yom Yom' that moves into percussive blasts of noise and bass, and then deliver an unrecognizeable cover of Skynryd's 'Sweet Home Alabama' that reinterprets the song as a doomed glitchscape splattered with dying shrieks and sludgy bass riffs. Crushing !

CROM Hot Sumerian Nights CD $13.98 Underdogma

Out of all of the weirder bands from the power violence/ Slap A Ham / Pessimiser scene of the 1990's, none were weirder than LA's Crom. Formed in the early 90's by Phil Vera (also of 16 and Despise You), Crom combined an over-the-top obsession with Conan The Barbarian (as you might've guessed from their name), crushing metal and hardcore riffs, whacked out sample frenzies, and loads of inside jokes and bizarre humor and created one of the weirdest hardcore/metal albums ever, The Cocaine Wars 1974-1989. Ostensibly a concept album about Robert E. Howard's Conan character and hardcore cocaine use, Cocaine Wars was a pastiche of samples from the Conan movies, sloppy, raging grindcore a la Man Is The Bastard and Crossed Out, 80's metal and thrash metal, pilfered classic rock samples, the sound of howling wind, and other weirdness. After that album came out, Crom disappeared from view, but have continued to build a cult following based on the sheer wackiness of their music. When we listed Cocaine Wars in the Crucial Blast store about 2 years ago, I thought that they were a footnote in the annals of extreme hardcore and metal, but lo and behold, the mighty Crom has risen again and bestowed this brand new full length that picks up right where their previous album left off. Right off the bat, the ridiculous cover art of five dungeon-faring adventurers traipsing into view and the one in the middle giving us the finger tips me off that Crom is again out to fuck with us. The Conan obsession is still in full effect (see song titles like "Sons Of Set", "Zamora", "The Ballad Of Subotai" for evidence), maybe even moreso than the previous album if thats even possible, and the music is again a studio-assembled collage-cum-clusterfuck of sound that burned a hole straight through my brain. Old school thrash metal, hardcore, doom metal, grindcore, and noise rock are all combined into these songs...it's hard to call the songs on here "songs" at all, really, as the tracks will just trail off into nothing, or appear out of nowhere, but when the music is happening, it's crushing, pulverizing metal with crucial riffs that prove that these guys are adept at all modes of metal. In amongst the thrash riffs, crushing doom dirges, and fried out grind are samples from Conan The Barbarian, bits of Middle Eastern sounding music, network TV sound cues, weird almost-silent tracks of room ambience, layered whispered vocals, fragments of that song that Reggie Bannister plays on his acoustic guitar in Phantasm, Warren Zevon, Manowar, bits from other Schwarzenegger overlaid with Conan samples, samples from old thrash metal records, and tons of other unexpected and disorientating samples and sounds. It's essentially an uberfucked plunderphonic album made by heshers, but it's not as random as you might think....all of these sonic elements have been puzzled together into a warped, pot haze sword and sorcery saga that kind of makes sense, although a hefty bag of weed might aid your decoding of Hot Sumerian Nights.

DARUIN / GRKZGL Drain CD-R $5.98
Neus-318

More intense Japanese hard-drive carnage from Neus-318! I discovered this Japanese CDR label a few months ago, and while much of their catalog is made up of kooky abstract computer noise and glitch collages, some of their stuff is straight up skullripping digital noise that leans towards the psychedelic ends of the Japanese noise scene. I scoured their catalog and picked up their most aggro, brain wasting releases for Crucial Blast, which Japanese noise fans should definitely check out.
Drain sees the laptop glitch-drone artist Daruin teaming up with another Japanese noise project called Grkzgl that's new to me. Each artist has an epic twenty-minute track, and both use heavy ambient sounds and manipulated computer noise to create an ominous buzzscape that together make for the heaviest release out of all of the Neus-318 discs that we've picked up. Daruin opens the disc with mastermind Kazuya Ishigama sculpting a dark cloud of deep, rumbling drone, distorted and super heavy and somewhat Sunn O)))-esque that drifts in tectonic time as microscopic chiming tones move backwards in time around it. As ritual bells and subliminal rumblings join in, the piece slowly builds in volume until the underlying drone that appeared at first becomes warped by overmodulated fx. The sound is stretched out, pulled apart, streaked with looping metallic scrapes and draped with gossamer layers of black ambience, then evolves again into a blast of crystalline chimes before softening out into a field of dark abstract ambience that closes the track. I hear little bits of KK NUll and Sunn O))) and dark ambient and tactile electro-acoustic sound sculpture all swirling together here, and it's a fantastic piece of grim, creepy abstract drift. I'd definitely like to hear more of this type of sound from Daruin!
On the second track, Grkzgl strips the ambience down even further, taking away almost any extraneous sound at first and leaving only a massive slow-moving, slithering sinewave drone. This drone is all low end, a glacial reverberating buzz like the sound of a piece of large electronic equipment humming in the middle of the night, that electrical hum then distorted and shaped into a buzzing and hypnotic rumble, super minimal and spare but rib-rattling when heard at high volume. As Grkzgl's blackened hum uncoils, it's joined by tiny flashes of dark shimmer and chirping feedback tones that circle the drone and recede back into the void, but on the second half of the piece it changes shape and turns into a flattened field of muted pulses and fluttering feedback tones. Super abstract and minimal, the first half reminds me of the minimal amp-buzz scultpures of Not.
Packaged in a full color paper sleeve that comes in a plastic wallet.

DARUIN From Cheap Days CD-R $5.98
Neus-318

More intense Japanese hard-drive carnage from Neus-318! I discovered this Japanese CDR label a few months ago, and while much of their catalog is made up of kooky abstract computer noise and glitch collages, some of their stuff is straight up skullripping digital noise that leans towards the psychedelic ends of the Japanese noise scene. I scoured their catalog and picked up their most aggro, brain wasting releases for Crucial Blast, which Japanese noise fans should definitely check out.
If there's a flagship artist on the Neus-318 label, it's Daruin. Kazuya Ishigami's solo laptop noise project has released close to half a dozen discs on the Japanese CDR imprint, and all of them rank as some of the most abrasive and aggressive titles in the label's catalog. Daruin isn't just pure brutal noise, though; there's alot of textured ambience and mysterious sonic events that appear in his abstract electronic soundscapes that he creates out of distressed computer noise, digital feedback and found sounds. On this full length disc from 2000, Daruin crafts seven tracks that violent storms of electronic glitch and high speed bleeps, to expanses of dark, heavy subterranean ambience and eerie cave drift, to swarms of temple bells whipped into dense frenzies of sound, bizarre mutant vocal experiments that stretch the human throat into monstrous dimension-shifting wails, and swirls of percussion blurred into incandescent sheets of metallic shimmer. These noisescapes all sound like they are being transmitted back to us from some far-off planet, and at times approach the dense techno/bleep sculptures of KK Null. Out of all of the discs that we just picked up from the label, this is the most varied and psychedelic release from both Daruin and Neus-318.

DARUIN / YINGFAN Hair Peach CD-R $5.98
Neus-318

More intense Japanese hard-drive carnage from Neus-318! I discovered this Japanese CDR label a few months ago, and while much of their catalog is made up of kooky abstract computer noise and glitch collages, some of their stuff is straight up skullripping digital noise that leans towards the psychedelic ends of the Japanese noise scene. I scoured their catalog and picked up their most aggro, brain wasting releases for Crucial Blast, which Japanese noise fans should definitely check out.
An hour long split disc of brutal digital noise and whacked techno/beastscapes from the Far East: The Taiwanese noise artist Yingfan starts this off with seven tracks of mostly-harsh electronic noise, nothing high-concept, just constantly shifting speheres of brutal synthesizer overdrive, sheets of liquid white noise textures, ancient videogame terminal sounds, damaged computer sounds ricocheting off of distorted quasi-beats and abstract rhythmic loops formed out of bits of ultradistorted noise. There are a few moments where Yingfan injects some deep space synth tones and cosmic drift in his brutal noise attacks, which like several other releases on Neus-318 bear some resemblance to the psychedelic space-noise of groups like CCCC and Astro, but mostly Yingfan forges pure harsh digital chaos that is more in the Merzbow/Kazumoto Endo school of violent hard drive skree.
Neus-318 house band Daruin makes another appearance and offsets the chaotic loudness of the Yingfan side with four tracks that are for the most part quite a bit more subdued. These tracks (with titles like "Dance With Russian In China" and "Very Nice History Of Victorious Country" ) are tiny mutant panoramas of life inside of a hard drive, weird soundscapes filled with a teeming mass of chirping tones, glistening organic pulses, insectoid chattering, aquatic bubbling sound, and occasional blasts of looping computer noise that drift overhead. At times this is like listening to a field recording of an alien swamp filled with the sounds of unimaginable creatures that are made out of silicon, steel, and flesh; elsewhere, the music approximates a deranged Nintendo game disco soundtrack, a type of fractured low-fi techno/noise hybrid. Daruin definitely keeps me guessing with each one of his releases.
Packaged in a full color paper sleeve with weird abtracted Japanese paintings.

DEAD BODY LOVE Low-Fi Power Carnage CD $7.98 Troniks

Since 1995, harsh noise master Gabriele Giuliani and his Dead Body Love project has been creating some of the heaviest harsh noise to be imported from Italy, and the genre defining cassette Low-Fi Power Carnage from 1995 is one of DBL's most malevolent works. It was originally released on Old Europa Cafe in a limited edition, and has now been reissued in a limited edition of 500 copies on Troniks in a wallet sleeve and accompanied by an 11"x17" glossy poster. The four tracks that make up Power Carnage are from an improvised performance in 1995, and come with the artist's explicit instructions that "this material is meant to be played at a very high volume." The half-hour epic 'Terror Is A Weapon' opens the disc with a constantly evolving deathscape of immense chunks of distorted low frequency noise looped into hypnotic holding patterns, a monstrous rumbling rock-tumbler drone of crusty crushing noise laced with eerie melodies sunk deep in the chaotic whirl of noise. The following three tracks 'Random Destruction', 'Peace Sucks - Let's Kill', and 'Thoughts Of Revenge' are much shorter in length, topping out at 12 minutes, but are equally violent and crushing walls of droning distortion-crunch. Giuliani's noise scultpures have a massive quality to them as if he was capturing up-close recordings of steel buildings crumbling and earth and rock being ripped apart, all in semi-slow-motion, and occasionally his loops of sound create a lumbering propulsion that is reminiscent of early UK industrial. Insanely heavy harsh drone-noise recommended to anyone into gritty, bass-heavy carnage of Skin Crime, Macronympha, the Militant Walls sound, The Rita, etc.

DEEPSPEED Spacecaps CD $5.98
Neus-318

More intense Japanese hard-drive carnage from Neus-318! I discovered this Japanese CDR label a few months ago, and while much of their catalog is made up of kooky abstract computer noise and glitch collages, some of their stuff is straight up skullripping digital noise that leans towards the psychedelic ends of the Japanese noise scene. I scoured their catalog and picked up their most aggro, brain wasting releases for Crucial Blast, which Japanese noise fans should definitely check out.
Deepspeed is another project from DJ Gackt, who I first heard on his Neus-318 CDR released under the name Bastarbation. That project focused on short, brutal blasts of digital noise that usually came in 10 second bursts, and it reminded me of a digital hard-drive version of classic noisecore, like a completely synthesized version of 7 Minutes Of Nausea or Anal Cunt transmogrified into vicious electronic glitches and white noise. This disc from Deepspeed is something totally different, though. The thirty-seven minute single track on Spacecaps is an intense full on analog synthesizer noisescape that goes through constant changes throughout its run time, an avalanche of malfunctioning computer blips and Atari 2600 noise, sweeping synth drones and spacey bass pulses, like being lodged deep inside of the guts of a spaceship as it zips through space at light speed, surrounded by a plethora of bleeps, bloops, oscillating frequency attacks and machine noise. Gackt's approach to epic synth noise actually puts him in the same realm as the psych-minded synth and FX box shapeshifters in CCCC, Astro, Solmania, and even KK Null's robotic guitar noise. There's nothing relaxing here, that's for sure. As with most of the Neus-318 cdrs, this disc is packaged in a simple felt-backed cd sleeve with a yellow glossy cover that sports some weird porno/cartoon imagery.

DISCORDANCE AXIS Pikadourei DVD $17.98 Hydra Head

Essential live document of what might arguably be the greatest grindcore band ever. Even if you don't subscribe to the idea of Discordance Axis reigning over all of grindcore, this massively influential and hypercreative trio are one of the most revered grind bands of all time, a dizzyingly complex and intricate grind killing machine, fusing abstract lyrics unlike anything else in the grind canon with singer Jon Chang's killer graphic design aesthetic. And yet they never toured, and played what really amounted to just a handful of shows throughout their existence. For all of us (like myself) that never had a chance to witness the frenetic power of Discordance Axis live, Hydra Head issued this killer DVD in 2003 that we just picked up a few copies of for any blastfreaks that haven't gotten this yet.
Pikadourei has a bunch of features that Discordance Axis fans will love, beginning with the 'Tokyo 2001' film that captures a full set from their final Japanese tour with footage that is intensely distressed, the multi-angle shots edited together with distorted film, spastic glitches, frames freezing up, a frantically epileptic video-art vision of a DxAx performance. Could be one of the best vid documents of a live grind set ever. In addition, there is the '7.62 MM (Live 1996)' video that utilizes a similiar abstract video art approach, but this one is way more raw and wrecked, as it was created by damaging the video masters of the performance and fucking around with the vcrs and the tape itself while editing the video together. The result is something akin to a tenth generation concert videocassette mutated into a surrealistic grind haze. There's also a discography section, a photo gallery, artwork, a music video for the track "Ikaruga", and tablature. NTSC format, region 1 only.

DJ THUMPER First Blood CDR $4.98 Realicide

I've been getting more and more into Robert Inhuman, his hardcore gabba/digigrind/anarcho outfit Realicide and the whole tiny cottage industry that this guy has created around his music and art. I was first turned on to him through the guys from the label Outfall Channel, who also play with Robert in the band Hentai Lacerator, and from there I discovered his tiny label Realicide Youth which produces handmade, ultra DIY cdrs and tapes from his projects as well as from those artists that are a part of the western Ohio electronic/punk scene that cross Inhuman's trajectory. I picked up a selection of some of Realicide Youth's titles that are still in print, and all of this stuff comes highly recommended to fans of passionately created DIY gabba, speedcore, and industrial whatzit with a fierce punk rock attitude.
OK, this isn't for everyone, but I personally love this disc of 'ravesploitation' from Cincinatti gabber/hardcore techno artist DJ Thumper. It's another one of the killer handmade CDRs that we just got in from Realicide, the DIY breakcore/gabba/grind label run by Robert Inhuman from Realicide and Hentai Lacerator. All of this stuff reeks of old school handmade DIY energy and takes me back to the pre-internet days of do it yourself hardcore and punk...which is sort of ironic, seeing as DJ Thumper's music is constructed largely of pilfered top 40 dance pop hits. DJ Thumber is another project from Realicide member Mavis Concave and it's the most overtly "techno" release in the entire Realicide catalog, but this is hardcore, distorted, super aggressive techno that bleeds over into full on gabba at times. The whole premise of this project is the pilfering and butchering of video game theme songs and top 40 pop hits and creating these clandestine remixes that turn the originals into high speed blasting hardcore/breakcore mashups; Andrew WK's 'I Get Wet', Kelly Clarkson's 'Since You Been Gone', Drowning Pool's 'Bodies' are all plundered and mutated into thumping, pounding gabba jams with brutally distorted synth lines, screaming distorted vocals, distorted metal guitars, and speedy breakbeats. Obviously, this isn't for the techno haters out there, but I think it's a blast. Oh, and the last track 'Pound Puppies Suck It' is a remix from porno-noisecore squad Hentai Lacerator. Comes in a xeroxed paper sleeve with screenprinted disc and a vinyl DJ Thumper sticker, in a limited edition of 150 copies.

DYSTOPIA self-titled CD $13.98 Life Is Abuse

Dystopia's last album took so long to come out that it almost reached mythic status, but here it is, the final album from the Calfornia crustlords. Eponymously titled, Dystopia's swan song is as vicious a statement as the band has ever made. Six all new tracks plus a cover of an unreleased song from Carcinogen, the old SoCal grindcore band that Dystopia drummer Dino used to play in. Recorded between 2004 and 2005, the album is rife with apocalyptic death metal that is heavily tainted wih the stench of old Earache crust and grind, with snarling, screeching vocals, awesome midtempo chugging riffs, blastbeats, super slow doom parts, lengthy samples that are used Southern Nihilism Front-style and layered over plodding, bass-heavy dirges, and their trademark breaks into weird, spacey psychedelic passages. These guys are one of the best crust/grind bands ever, as crushing (and misanthropic) as Eyehategod, and as whacked out and ripping as bands like Gasp and Suffering Luna (who if anything were heavily influenced by Dystopia themselves). I'm pretty sure that anyone that has been anticipating this last Dystopia album isn't going to be disappointed, as they are going out with a roar. From the infectious crushing rocking anti-junkie anthem 'Leaning With Intent To Fall' to the tweaked out electronic fuckery that ends "My Meds Aren't Working", this record is as powerful and pissed and heavy as anything else the band has done. Highly recommended.
The CD version comes with an additional 20 minute untitled track that seems to be ofm nothing but silence - I'm still trying to figure what that's all about. The disc also comes with a thick full color 20-page booklet loaded with lyrics, photo collages, grafitti, and writings that are again much in the style of Mike William's Southern Nihilism Front album design style (a la all of Eyehategod's inserts).

DYSTOPIA self-titled LP $13.98 Life Is Abuse

Dystopia's last album took so long to come out that it almost reached mythic status, but here it is, the final album from the Calfornia crustlords. Eponymously titled, Dystopia's swan song is as vicious a statement as the band has ever made. Six all new tracks plus a cover of an unreleased song from Carcinogen, the old SoCal grindcore band that Dystopia drummer Dino used to play in. Recorded between 2004 and 2005, the album is rife with apocalyptic death metal that is heavily tainted wih the stench of old Earache crust and grind, with snarling, screeching vocals, awesome midtempo chugging riffs, blastbeats, super slow doom parts, lengthy samples that are used Southern Nihilism Front-style and layered over plodding, bass-heavy dirges, and their trademark breaks into weird, spacey psychedelic passages. These guys are one of the best crust/grind bands ever, as crushing (and misanthropic) as Eyehategod, and as whacked out and ripping as bands like Gasp and Suffering Luna (who if anything were heavily influenced by Dystopia themselves). I'm pretty sure that anyone that has been anticipating this last Dystopia album isn't going to be disappointed, as they are going out with a roar. From the infectious crushing rocking anti-junkie anthem 'Leaning With Intent To Fall' to the tweaked out electronic fuckery that ends "My Meds Aren't Working", this record is as powerful and pissed and heavy as anything else the band has done. Highly recommended.
The LP version of Dystopia is on clear vinyl and limited to 3,000 copies. It comes with an oversized 6" by 6" thick full color 20-page booklet that's loaded with lyrics, photo collages, grafitti, and writings that are again much in the style of Mike William's Southern Nihilism Front album design style (a la all of Eyehategod's inserts).

EARTH Living In The Gleam Of An Unsheathed Sword LP $11.98 Troubleman Unlimited

Just turned up some copies of the limited edition vinyl version of this dronier-than-thou live platter from the legendary rifflords.
Ah, Earth. We've watched this legendary iconoclastic dronemetal project evolve from the lumbering amplifier mantras of their 90's catalog into their current incarnation as a kind of windswept, glacially-paced Americana post-rock that has been captured on Earth's amazing Hex and Hibernaculum albums. When the reissue of Sunn Amps And Smashed Guitars materialized in 2002, Earth revived itself from years of hibernation and hit the road with guitarist/mastermind Dylan Carlson being accompanied by drummer Adrienne Davies for a tour of the US and Europe, and this 2-track album from 2005 documents a set of in-the-moment performances from Earth from when they cruised through NYC in September of 2002. While some may have been disappointed in the fact that, at the time that this was released, the only new Earth that we were getting at the time was in the shape of live releases, like the Sunn Amps reissue, that doomed release on Autofact, and this particular platter which came out shortly before Hex did. I definitely wasn't complaining though...as a matter of fact, both Sunn Amps and this album are two of my favorite recordings from Dylan Carlson and company - live, his sludgy, leaden dirges really sprawl out, and there is an uncontrolled, electrical quality to live Earth that I really dig. Living In The Gleam Of An Unsheathed Sword opens with "Dissolution III", a nearly 15-minute solo jam with Dylan strangling his guitar and melting down into a Quaalude feasting, stumbling free-dirge that went down at the WNYU radio station. Sorta sounds like Derek Bailey with massive metal amplification. Then it's off to the title track, a monolithic hour long dirge from a performance at the Knitting Factory, with Davis propelling Carlson's grooving, hypnotic riffage with spare, heavy drumming. This is more like the kind of stuff that Earth was doing on the Pentastar album, heavy and dirgey but really catchy and trance inducing too, a darkly evocative riff winding over and over and around ringing open chords, somewhere in between Tony Iommi and a Crazy Horse jam but slowed way down and basking in a subterranean glow. This disc is an excellent companion piece to Earth's studio catalog, with what is probably the longest Earth jam ever committed to disc!
MP3 SAMPLE: "Living In The Gleam Of An Unsheathed Sword" (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: "Dissolution III" (excerpt)

ELEMENTAL CHRYSALIS The Dark Path To Spiritual Expansion 2xCD $23.98 Glass Throat

The long awaited return of one of my favorite woodland doom folk duos, the Elemental Chrysalis, which features Chet Scott of Ruhr Hunter, Glass Throat Recordings and shamanic sludgemetal project Blood Of The Black Owl, and James Woodhead from At The Head Of The Woods. Their previous album The Calocybe Collection from 2005 was one of my favorite albums from Chet's Glass Throat imprint, a dark mystical descent into a shadowy forest world filled with droning acoustic guitars and deep baritone voices that floated over moss-covered stones and through huge ancient trees that blotted out the sun. It's been three years since that album first graced my ears, but their followup The Dark Path To Spiritual Expansion is even more dark and beautiful and doomy, a massive two-disc double album with long epic songs, sometimes stretching out twenty minutes or longer. Each disc containing four songs, the whole set packaged in a gorgeous six-panel oversized gatefold sleeve, a breathtaking package illustrated with amazing artwork of an ancient tree with a wooden door surrounded by smaller trees, knotted and covered in mushrooms, their limbs weaved together to create the name The Elemental Chrysalis. Inside, an evocative photo of a twilight mountainscape looming high over a huge lake. All of it printed in dark green and black. and the interior filled with lyrics, linernotes and album credits, and each disc mounted onto the sleeve on a rubber nub.
Where the first album was a drifting forestscape of acoustic strum and deep drones, the music is now a dark, slow moving folk sound, with a rich acoustic guitar as the focal instrument. Each plucked string and scraped pick is fully rendered, filling the space around each song with deep ringing notes and the driting decay of buzzing strings. The album opens with "In Through A Desert Door Of A Wooded Heart", and for most of it's twenty minutes consists of a rich dark melody played over and over, completely hypnotizing, eventually joined by deep rumbles, the hum of hazy Farfisa organ, a male voice intoning worldess vocals, spacey keyboards, the song stretching out and wandering through a gorgeous field of ghostly ambience. Distorted doomy guitars drift deep underneath the folk, but are always just on the periphery, a subtle rumbling presence. The tracks that follow are similiarly grim and beautiful and trance inducing, the acoustic guitar alternately joined by other instruments and sounds like bouzouki, cello, violins, piano, field recordings of woodland sounds, bells and gong, tympani drums, and the ancient traditional sounds of dulcimer and ocarina, psaltery and celestaphone. The Elemental Chrysalis take me back to the seventies folk of The Wicker Man soundtrack and the witchy music of Comus, but with an oh-so-subtle undercurrent of heavy ambient darkness. So beautiful and mysterious and grim, with bits of almost electronic sounding keening tones that reminds me of the rural dread conveyed in the original film score for Jeff Lieberman's backwoods dread classic Just Before Dawn. Slow, creeping forest twang, doomy and dark, the vocals a perfect combination of deep chanting and soft baritone singing, creepy throat singing and ghostly wails. Chet Scott and company have never let me down, but I was still blown away by how amazing this album is, an organic, autumnal funeral procession through untouched forests and ravines, psychedelic and lethargic, folky but massive. Highly recommended !!!

FACEDOWNINSHIT Passing Times CD $12.98 Crimethinc

Passing Times is the album that led up to Facedowninshit hooking up with metal giant Relapse, and it's easy to see what had the esteemed label stoked...on this 2003 album, the (then) North Carolina based outfit reached beyond the sludge and stoner rock and crust tags that they have been given since their formation to become a gnarly, attitudinal fusion of all of those sounds, a bratty apocalyptic battle cry, equal parts anarchist punk agitation, heavily stoned negativism, and deformed metallic fury. These eight songs combine spastic blasting grindcore, guitar-heavy southern rock, galloping 80's metal, apocalyptic dirges, and filthy noise rock, a ragged, skuzzy hybrid of His Hero Is Gone, Unsane, midwestern noise rockers Hammerhead, Today Is The Day and Neurosis with a healthy dose of southern boogie that infects some of their slower moments. Album opener "Island" opens with a bit of ambient feedback before it erupts into doomy sludge rock with sweeping black winds of electronic ambience and caustic hardcore riffing. Brutal metallic noise rock and desperate hardcore punk collide on the jagged, thrashing "Eyeless", and "Interlude" combines a somber piano melody with soft swells of guitar and dark ambience, a gloomily gorgeous passage of spacey post-rock that explodes into the galloping metal and doomed noise rock of "Washed Away". The rest of the disc continues this back and forth between gnarly, punky AM Rep noise rock and crusty metal with those feral screaming vocals, atmospheric noise and seriously pissed anti-authoritarian lyrics, all the up until the final track "Twilight" that ends the album on a pounding, utterly doomed note. Presented in a six-panel digipack.

FETUS EATERS / DIORRHEA split CD $13.98 GrindMind

The label told me that they sent their last available copies of this split album to us, and we've got less than a dozen of them, so this might be the last chance that grindfreaks will get to pick up this rippin' split. 39 tracks, each band averaging 20 songs each. Thirty-six minutes of Fetus Eater's bizarro grindcore and Diorrhea's gnarly buzzsaw crust. Fetus Eaters are first up, and deliver more of their unique demented goofball grind that combines silly samples and weird unexpected sounds with blazing, RAW old school grind. I've always been a fan of their tweaked mutant grind that's influenced by both classic Earache Records brutality as well as Mr. Bungle and Naked City. Brutal grind a la Carcass and Brutal Truth with awesome crushing riffage and blazing blastbeats is laced with worldless vocal noise, kazoos, cartoon music sound effects, segueways into weird spacey soul music and looped sound collages, squelchy FX, blasts of brass fanfares, free jazz saxophones, ambient sci-fi electronics, and other crazy sounds. Furious and freaked out grind weirdness, I love these guys just as much as likeminded genre fucking grindfreaks Le Scrawl.
Diorrhea dial back on the weirdness but crank up the rabies with twenty two ferocious blasts of crusty Italian grindcore, ripping thrashy punk verses exploding into full-bore blastbeat annihilation, savage anthemic singalongs, two seriously pissed off singers that switch off on gutteral gorilla grunts and murderous screams. Little music box melodies, evil vocal experiments and drunken rock licks pop up here and there, but it's mostly a vicious blasting assault of punky noisy grind that mixes classic Italian thrash like Wretched and Raw Power with baked blastcore a la Cripple Bastards. Grind it!

FINAL EXIT The Seasons Are Going And Going...And Lives Goes On 3" CD $5.98 Rage For All

It's wild to see that this Japanese noisecore band is still around - the guitar and drums duo of Hisao and Ryohei have been at it since 1994, surely outliving almost every other band tha