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RELEASE DATE: 06 / 02 / 2023
The second entry in the new Crucial Blast Video line is a limited-edition VHS release of the gnarly 2022 Small Town Monsters documentary AMERICAN WEREWOLVES. Blending raw witness testimonies, some contextual folklore and anthropological commentary from researchers, and an increasingly mind-bending visual style that brings the encounters with the subject into a surreal nightmare reality, WEREWOLVES documents the bizarre "Dogman" phenomena, where people are unexpectedly encountering monstrous, bipedal canids, often in rural regions and often in proximity to early Adena-Hopewell mound-builder sites. Focused on encounters in Ohio and Kentucky, this film bridges the narrow chasm between run-ins with "high strangeness" and the irreal state of true horror.
Each year, dozens of encounters with what are described as “upright canids” are reported throughout North America. These beings often behave in similar ways, with many reports recounting a creature that is aggressive, ghastly, and disturbing. While many theorize that the “Dogman” is some sort of unidentified species of animal, many believe that what they were confronted with was something else.
Something more.
AMERICAN WEREWOLVES aims to explore an oft-overlooked aspect of American folklore. However, where previous STM films delved into similar subject matter by presenting the details of the phenomena through a panel of experts, authors, folklorists and investigators, WEREWOLVES leaves the storytelling to the witnesses. Comprised of around a dozen witness accounts, the film takes on this bizarre topic by leaving it up to the people who have experienced it to present it to the viewer The encounters discussed range from brief run-ins on rural country lanes to horrifying, face-to-face confrontations that seem like the stuff of nightmares.
Crucial Blast Video is proud to partner with Small Town Monsters to present this limited VHS videocassette of 2022’s AMERICAN WEREWOLVES, bringing this strange amalgam of regional cryptoid docudrama a la LEGEND OF BOGGY CREEK, surrealistic 80’s shot-on-video horror, and UNSOLVED MYSTERIES / SIGHTINGS-esque, made-for-tv production aesthetics to eerie analogue for the first time.
Limited to an limited run of 300 copies, this edition also comes with a twenty-eight page full-color booklet that includes a brand new essay on the film "Witness To The Hyper-Feral", psychedelic stills from the film, behind-the-scenes production photos, and "Stalking The Bestial", an interview with American Werewolves director Seth Breedlove.
The original film trailer can be viewed HERE
As I continue to get caught up with assorted obligations , I will be announcing forthcoming releases from the Crucial Blast Video line. These will include older documentaries on cyberpunk, industrial music, and technomancy; anthologies of experimental horror shorts and reissues of obscure surrealist / experimental horror films; newer award-wining documentaries on everything from avant-garde artists and the occult, to collections of live footage of Japanese hardcore bands and infamous noise artists; bizarre pieces of esoteric videography to new shot-on-video avant-splatter; and all points in between.
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ORDER AUDIO CASSETTE $10.00
ORDER DIGITAL ALBUM $7.00
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RELEASE DATE: 06 / 02 / 2023
As of early 2023, the band High Noon Kahuna is firmly in my personal list of my three best-loved, absolutely favorite local bands. I could be accused of a certain amount of bias, seeing as how I've been friends with some of the members of this band for over thirty years. But it's really about how strongly this band scratches my itch for bitchin' noise rock. And these guys dig at it like it's 1994. A full-on POWER trio, the Kahuna crew include dudes who have done time in some local institutions like seminal Maryland doom metal outfit Internal Void and mangy math-rockers Admiral Browning, as well as lesser-known but no less bangin' operations like the electronic-damaged slowcore duo Black Blizzard and the cult art-punks Vox Populi from West Virginia. So there's a lot of experience being funneled into this band.
The American post-punk vibe reverberates beneath everything these guys do, but that cymatic force arranges their pieces into new and energetic shapes. When thinking about how to describe High Noon Kahuna, the best I have been able to come up with is asking you to imagine the following brew: merge the raucous, ascerbic wit and muscular stage presence of God Bullies with a heavy smattering of early Sonic Youth, back when that latter band was still in the same zip-code as the NYC noise-skuzz crowd; add to that already-pungent mix a huge dose of bulldozing Melvins-level drone-crush that enters zones of eruptive metallic crunch just when you're not expecting it, and a chronically wicked guitar attack that is touched (in the head) by the cumulative energies of Dead Kennedys's East Bay Ray, vintage O.G. surf licks a la Dick Dale and Eddie Bertrand, and just a dank whiff of second wave black metal. All at once.
Since they've started hitting the live circuit en force, the "surfy" aspect seems to be something that some people have focused on, but that's just one strand of the DNA; High Noon Kahuna are more brooding, soulful, and battering-ram heavy than you might otherwise guess, with a rhythm section ready to drive you into the dirt like a rusted nail. Take it from me, these guys rule. If it was indeed 1994, this band would have already been added to the Amphetamine Reptile roster in a heartbeat. Bit it's not, and they aren't, so we've got the goods. Come and see. Come and hear. The band self-released their debut full-legth album Killing Spree earlier in 2022, but with some brief touring on their horizon and my ongoing lust for analog, they've partnered up with Crucial Blast to deliver this audio cassette edition of the album. Not just that, but an entire half-hour-plus mass of sound on the b-side called "Foreshadowing Vol. I", a slammin' sound-collage of songs-to-be, tape-noise antics, crushing riff-workouts, and nascent hooks that can only be heard by playing the flipside of this particular little infernal machine.
This limited-edition cassette is released in a run of one hundred copies, with full color tape art on black shells.
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ORDER AUDIO CASSETTE $9.00
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RELEASE DATE: 06 / 02 / 2023
The Ophidian Mysteries: Demos 2021-2023 cassette is a collection of all of the previously digital-only demo recordings from this outrageously cacophonic bestial noisecore outfit, along with a sixth, previously unreleased demo that appears here for the first time. Seven Headed Serpent came to me like a message from the ether; or maybe I had just Google-searched the words "bestial noisecore” and this band was the first thing to pop up. Either way, this Texan outfit spews out a very specific mélange of ultra-violent anti-musical filth that I've been looking for. The only thing in the vicinity of this is the similarly-monikered "bestial” noisecore of Acwelan, but there are clear distinctions between the two bands, save for their intention to rip the listener to pieces. Over the course of nearly three years, Seven Headed Serpent has been steadily issuing short, absurdly brutal blasts of noisecore via their Bandcamp page and disseminated through shady Youtube channels every few months. That first time that I hit "play" on their debut Awakened From Ancient Slumber demo, I was enthralled: here was the spastic bastard vision of venomous scum-blurr that I'd been searching out, an eerie and relentlessly hyper-violent maelstrom chopped up in twenty-second micro-blasts, an unholy fusion of early Oath Of Black Blood Beherit and demo-era Von style minimalism, and the old-school hyper-speed noisecore laid down by the likes of Sore Throat, Seven Minutes of Nausea, and Anal Cunt.
There's already a strain of noisecore-adjacent chaos that you can find in the "war metal" underground, but nothing like Seven Headed Serpent. The combination of improvisational pandemonium, ludicrous machine-gun blast tempos, and gruesome, bone-gargling vocalizations turns each one the band's demos into a bizarre ritualistic experience. Track after track of almost industrial-esque drum machine disorder and hideous, inhuman vocals are splattered with effects to the point of psychedelic meltdown, and yet you'll hear these "songs" sometimes drop into a crushing bass-heavy groove for a moment, or a more mid-paced Conqueror-like blast that jerks you out of the insanity. Those vocals from main member R. (aka Ryan Wilson of Intestinal Disgorge, The Howling Void, and Pneuma Hagion) can be seriously unsettling, veering between an echo-laden animalistic roar and disturbing whispers, garbled guttural shrieks and trippy incantations. Freakish electronics and blots of distorted nonsense blur with extreme anti-riffery and indecipherable guitar skree. Flatulent machinery collides with severely bestial grunts and bursts of insane guitar shred, while something akin to the sound of limbs being ripped from a torso keep emerging in the back of the mix. That drum machine element is strongest on the earlier demos, as from Naas on , R. was joined by drummer Polwach Beokhaimook who brought a less mechanical, more car-crash style blast attack to the Serpent's maniac slime-meditations; anyone familiar with Beokhaimook's work in key gorenoise outfits like Cystgurgle and Vomitoma will recognize the additional free-form percussive confusion and inhuman speeds that he brings to this mangled sonic abomination.
At this point it should be clear that if you are looking for "music", well, don't look here. This is base primitive chaos, an attack of acute, depraved disorder. I can't get enough of it. But what there is, it's all here. The Awakened From Ancient Slumber, Upheaval , Naas , Withering Storms of Howling Death , and Unleashed demos are all presented in chronological order, with the final set of recordings being Reckoning, a previously unreleased nine-track "demo" recorded in January 2023 and exclusive to this release.
This edition of Ophidian Mysteries: Demos 2021-2023 comes on red cassettes with full-color artwork, and includes a brief set of liner notes from C-Blast scribe A. Allbright.
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ORDER AUDIO CASSETTE $9.00
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RELEASE DATE: 06 / 02 / 2023
This self-described "garage band" from McAllen, Texas showed up on my radar earlier this year and comprehensively smashed my skull into fragments. Looking back at the Youtube upload that the band did for their debut Noumenal Field Recordings EP (released online at the very end of 2022), I had commented the following: "...holy fucking shit, is this awesome.
Like someone crammed early Sore Throat, Harry Pussy, and The Stooges into a malfunctioning Cuisinart. I'm in heaven .". You know what? I'm still in heaven.
Sink your teeth into this hunk of rotted meat. The Noumenal Field Recordings EP hits physical media for the first time here, paired with the previously unreleased Tierra Y Voluntad (Land And Will) EP, and both sides of this machine will fuck you right up. Just like I spewed all over that video comment section months ago, Noumenal Field Recordings rips through eleven songs of blown-out aggression that effortlessly walk the line between classic early 80s three-chord hardcore and heavy doses of Brainbombs / GG Allin - level sludge-punk barbarity that you can smell from here. Onto that feral sonic assault, the band wields feedback-screaming slabs of freeform noise rock in the Harry Pussy vein, blurts of brain-damaged Casio weirdness, obnoxiously catchy hooks, and barbs of clotted noisecore that hit and run faster than you can even try to catch the plates. This shit is no joke, even when it sounds like the band is having an absolute blast. That first EP is so ugly, so mangled, so fucked up, and yet so weirdly literate, with nods to Nick Land, Marx and Thoreau. The lyrics are fantastic, too. Which is doubly confusional since it seems that these songs were written on the spot, recorded live and apparently totally off-the-cuff and improvised in that aforementioned McAllen garage. Blows me away.
And that B-side Tierra Y Voluntad (Land And Will) is even weirder and more scathing. More shit-fi droning HC and shreiking, bloodthirsty vocals collide with bizarre backing roars and inexplicable noise, sampled speeches giving way to boombox-grade ur-punk, every riff and every bass note sounding like it'll give you tetanus if you scratch yourself on 'em, the drumming weirdly mixed with an echoing effect (perhaps simply due to the utterly and awesomely atrocious recording approach. Fleeting moments of lobotomized thrash break apart against shrill noisecore that goes so hard at 1,000 mile per hour velocity that it all turns into a delicious mush, only for another one of Gasket's wickedly catchy hooks to stumble out of the carnage. That side culminates with the unholy power electronics / improvised destruction of "Hole In The Head", a previously stand-alone track from Gasket that I begged them to include on this slab. Like I said, I'm in fuckin' heaven...
The Noumenal Field Recordings / Tierra Y Voluntad (Land And Will) cassette comes in kraft-brown j-cards befitting the look of the original digital uploads, issued in a limited edition of 100 copies.
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ORDER AUDIO CASSETTE $9.00
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RELEASE DATE: 06 / 02 / 2023
Here is another recent debut that immediately chewed my face off upon first contact. Coming from the fertile war-metal grounds of Alberta, Canada, the band Lysergic suddenly crashed into our reality at the beginning of May 2023 with this three-song blast of freakish, psychotronic black / death metal. The band remains anonymous but has tendrils digging into the Calgary metal underground. More importantly, this outfit delivers something I've been waiting for, a sound that channels the exact mental and emotional state I arrive at whenever I listen to stuff like Conqueror, Black Witchery or Revenge after shotgunning two bottles of cough syrup. For years, I've been waiting for this. And Lysergic brings it. Made up of three explosive tracks ( "Erratic Noose Departure", "Maggot Crown Usurper", "Throne Annihilation" ), the EP detonates eruptions of convulsive and hallucinatory war-blast that slips in and out of dimensional phase, merging a sulfuric whirlwind of barbaric riffs, hammering drum-machine generated tempos, electronic derangement, and foul vocal emanations with a fractured and downright psychedelic quality befitting its name. There is no lessening of the core brutality behind this specific sound; this shit is ferocious, a roiling mass of air-raid siren horror, raw and relentless blastbeat drumming, primitive chainsaw guitar, all glomming together with sickening, echoing snarls and moments of unmistakable Conqueror-worship. But this carnivorous blast-attack spins out of control pretty fast, those inhuman, reptilian vocals getting tangled and knotted in crazed amounts of delay and reverb, emitting a hallucinatory, tracer-like aural effect, joined in with what fast turns into a phantasmagoria of noxious electronic skree, over-the-top guitar noise, grinding loops of distant voices and sculpted feedback, the spaces between songs filling up with cacophonic, monstrous sound deformation. And when the tempo eventually shifts into a slower, sludgy muck, it all leads this tape into a foul final crush of collapsing sonic structures. It's fucked up.
This kind of trippy, noise-damaged war-metal mutation has been worming out of the rotten woodwork in recent years, and man, I can't get enough of it. Lysergic dive a little deeper into straight-up electronic noise and loop-abuse than many of its peers, but like I mentioned, these songs never stray from that signature black/death sound, stripping it down to its most atavistic fundamentals, the riffs and drums locking into a droning hypnosis, but then splattering all of it with a chain of wrecked FX pedals, barbed metallic feedback manipulations, and piercing high-frequency sound-waves. A twelve-minute scream from the edges of churning black chaos: Dimethyltriptykon Uprise. Final Rope Reprieve.
Harsh stuff. If you've been prowling around the more grotesque edges of the "bestial" field in recent years, you've likely tapped in to some like-minded aberrations that push the limits of coherence and musicality; to my ears, this violent filth comes howling out of an adjacent DMT-damaged deathzone to the one that's populated by bands like Sect Pig, Methgoat, Nuclearhammer, Kapala, and Human Agony.
This cassette edition of Void Dissociation comes on purple cassette with full color artwork; the multi-panel sleeve includes the complete lyrics for the release.
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ORDER AUDIO CASSETTE $8.00
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RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
Long in the works and finally released as a split-label effort between Infernal Machines and depraved local imprint Volva just as the two bands were about to embark on their 2019 summer tour together, Morbid Deviations is the long-awaited split album featuring two of the Baltimore / Maryland area's most vicious and destructive black metal outfits. Released as a pro-manufactured tape with on-shell printing and packaged with a pair of 1" buttons each bearing the sigil of each band, and released in a limited edition of two hundred copies, this motherfucker seethes with all of the violent, inebriated energy that these two outfits have harnessed over the past decade.
The Athame side blows this up immediately with three sweat-and-blood stained blasts of morbid ugliness from the fringes of Appalachia. It's a fetid mixture of pulsating cellar emanations with brief moments of cavernous ambiance and abstract ritualistic rattling amid the crushing chaotic, sludge-n'-punk stained black metal of "Human Flood" and "I, Accuser", with an ode to classic 80's deathrock surfacing in the middle with Athame's barbaric rendition of Christian Death's "Figurative Theatre". There is a wretched, lurching, blasting hatefulness that grips the witch-blade and follows the continuum of their underheard but satisfyingly grimy discs With Cunning Fire and Adversarial Resolve and The Burning Times. To date, some of their best work that I've heard.
On the B-side, Baltimore's Xeukatre follow with their own uniquely putrid melange of Les Legions Noires-influenced filth and ghastly low-fidelity punk. Frenzied and rotten, their three offerings "Dirgelwch Ffydd", "Sigrdrifumal" and "Scalding Blizzard of Seraphim Tears" waft off of their side of this tape like fumes from a corpse-clotted gutter. One of the few releases to surface from the trio even after a decade of skulking around dimly-lit Baltimore-area venues , this is some of the best raw, unhinged black metal coming out of the area, and hopefully a portent of more new material to come at some point in the near goddamned future.
A full-length split album that features three exclusive tracks from each band, presented with professionally manufactured cassettes with black-on-silver shell print, in a limited edition of 200 copies. Each cassette comes sealed with a pair of ATHAME and XEUKATRE 1" badges.
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CRUCIAL BLAST WEBSTORE: NEW ARRIVALS LIST FOR JUNE 2023 COMING SOON
Yes, still here - it's been awhile since you've heard anything new from over here, and I'll be posting a statement ASAP explaining the personal catastrophes that I have had to deal with in recent past. If you've been waiting on anything from me, rest assured that I'm working my tail off to get back to you as soon as possible, and get you current.
In the meantime, Crucial Blast is here and bubbling, with new releases, store arrivals, announcements, ideas and other thought-forms on the fastly approaching horizon.
- Talk soon,
Adam Wright / Crucial Blast
As always, that's just the beginning. There's much more mutant heavy music and misanthropic art to be found on our shelves and in our bins...keep reading below to check out all of the strange and extreme new music, film, and art that's included in this week's new arrivals list.
Go to the Crucial Blast Webstore to check out our list of new arrivals...
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