Crucial Blast on BLOODYMINDED "Within The Walls"

Crucial Blast has always spent time writing thoughtful reviews of BloodLust! releases and here is a look at the BLOODYMINDED "Within The Walls" album that we had not previously seen:

Still one of the key shapers of American power electronics, Chicago PE mainstays Bloodyminded return with their first new album in seven years, and it's one of the most harrowing industrial/noise albums of their career. Within The Walls is some of the grimmest material I've ever heard from the band, steeped in clinical electronic drones and waves of deeply unsettling dark ambience that move through uneasy psychological spaces. The album wastes no time in its effort to creep you out as the opener "All The Cities Are Occupied" layers those eerie dissonant drones and cold wheezing electronics over sounds of creaking, scraping metal, like the sound of a pick-axe being dragged down the length of some long, dank culvert, surrounded by bleak synthesizer sounds that have been summoned by David Reed of Luasa Raelon / Envenomist. But then they'll follow that up that with something like the Whitehouse-worthy blast of squealing feedback abuse and pandemonic derangement of the title track, a disorienting din of crazed voices shrieking and raving over an assault of pestilent fluttering distortion and severe speaker-shredding noise. The album often surges into that level of extreme, assaultive sound, traveling swiftly out of the passages of cold dark ambience into these vicious onslaughts of deformed synth noise and sputtering oscillators, becoming a churning backdrop of diseased drone and insectile chaos that takes that classic Whitehouse-influenced style of power electronics and twists it into something even more monstrous.

    But the focal point of Bloodyminded's bleakly violent vision on Within The Walls is not the harsh, ear-rending electronics, but actually the myriad of voices that appear together throughout the album, a legion of voices that evokes the interior pandemonium of a schizophrenic, the screeching garbled horror of tracks like "Night Strikes" teeming with a barely controlled violence, the nihilist lyrics spilling out in streams of surrealist horror as the voices shift between English and Spanish, gouts of guttural bellowing and sneering hatefulness, a multitude of psychotic howling and gnashing teeth that ceaselessly pan back and forth over the screaming malignant squeal and chirping electronics. It's only at the very end, when the band slips into a reworking of the Locrian song "Inverted Ruins" that the album transforms, as the coldly ambivalent synth melody that Sanford Parker weaves around the skull-scraping feedback slowly blossoms into a kind of mesmeric, malignant darkwave; in that final moment, Bloodyminded's high-end violence somehow morphs into some akin to a more atmospheric Skinny Puppy, a striking and wholly unexpected climax to the otherwise blistering aural abuse that makes up Walls.   © CRUCIAL BLAST

Crucial Blast on The Fortieth Day + Sshe Retina Stimulants + Terence Hannum "Advent" CD

The Fortieth Day + Sshe Retina Stimulants + Terence Hannum "Advent" CD
This collaboration between Locrian's Terence Hannum, Italian noise outfit and Sigillum S offshoot Sshe Sshe Retina Stimulants and Chicago industrial duo / Bloodyminded spinoff The Fortieth Day was a one-off live performance that took place on a college radio show late on night in 2009. The recording first appeared as a limited edition cassette release on Hannum's Land of Decay imprint and ended up going out of print fairly quickly, but now this Cd reissue resurrects this dark industrial document for wider consumption, and it's definitely something that both fans of The Fortieth Day's brand of grim industrial music and Hannum's various projects will want to hear, a relentlessly ominous collection of rumbling layered noise, death industrial-style atmospherics, and sinister drones that spreads out for nearly an hour. The tracks range from minimal murky drones and distorted low-end throb to grinding slabs of blackened synthesizer and malevolent feedback manipulations as the musicians layer their various sounds to create these abstract noisescapes, and at times this performance starts to take on the form of a kind of pitch-black space music, a rush of utterly lightless kosmische drift billowing out of some gaping wound in the fabric of space. Clustered electronic notes howl beneath strange metallic noises and blasts of shrieking high end feedback, and waves of heavily phased synth shoot across the soundspace, turning this into something harshly psychedelic and threatening. Other tracks shift into eerily minimal sequences of demonic quasar pulses and peals of harsh droning feedback, as if you are hearing a Klaus Schulze recording after it has been exposed to aeons of corrosion and degradation, reduced to a charred and withered electronic soundscape deeply stained in dread and rust and rot. On the sprawling thirteen minute "Intermodal", the group ascends into the harshest realms of electronic overdrive on the album, whipping up furious gales of distorted synth and spectral effects and vicious granular noise. Drum machines lazily pound beneath layers of murk, resembling the vaguely rhythmic banging of debris against the hull of a derelict oil tanker. Sinister discordant guitar noise wails in the distance, and massively distorted voices drift through the shadows. Advent fits right in alongside the rest of The Fortieth Day catalog with its grim, crumbling industrial sludge.
© CRUCIAL BLAST

Crucial Blast on BLOODYMINDED "Gift Givers"

BLOODYMINDED "Gift Givers" CD
One of the premier American power electronics outfits, Chicago's Bloodyminded continues to crank out their series of reissued albums through member Mark Solotroff's Bloodlust! label, here resurrecting the band's third album from 2005 Gift Givers in a new re-designed eight panel digipack package. Featuring guest appearances from the likes of Eyehategod frontman Mike Williams and Mauthausen Orchestra's Pierpaolo Zoppo, Gift Givers is a cruel assault of rumbling, nightmarish industrial noise and chaotic power electronics, opening with the sound of pounding processed drum sounds throbbing beneath waves of undulating synthesizer drone, while ominous voices are looped over top of the heavy malfunctioning rhythms and blasts of distorted noise.

The extreme screeching feedback abuse that has always been a focal point of Bloodyminded's assaultive sound is all over Gift Givers, but it's layered beneath the heavy, churning noise-loops that dominate much of these seventeen tracks, with lots of layered voices (speaking in a mix of French, English and Spanish) and demonic shrieking and buried percussion creating an intense state of sonic delirium; when that squealing feedback is dragged into the forefront of Bloodyminded's sonic assault, the band utilizes it to form eerie half-formed melodies, as heard on the haunting "Pro-Ana". On other tracks, the synthesizers sputter and shriek, vomiting up streams of garbled fluttering effects and buzzing black drones, waves of harsh granular whoosh and oppressive jet-engine roar. 

The guest contributions stand out among the rest of the album; "Private Thoughts" features synthesizer noise and vocals from Italian industrial legend Pierpaolo Zoppo, producing an eerie, abrasive electronic soundscape, while Mike Williams brings his wretched screaming to the track "Ten Suicides", a standout track that had previously appeared in a slightly different version as the b-side on Williams's That's What The Obituary Said 7" from a few years ago.

Gift Givers also stands out from the rest of the Bloodyminded catalog with it's strange imagery. The free-associative lyrics read like a surrealist cut-up of self-help literature and a coroner's autopsy report, and are laced with a variety of creepy visuals of extreme eating disorders, obsessive self-destructive behavior and scenes of self-mutilation, while the layering of different languages in the vocals give several of the tracks a deranged, Babel-like feel of intense disorientation, especially on the monstrous "Blood Customs", which takes on the aspect of a Catholic exorcism ritual. With these explorations of extreme psychological and physical duress, Gift Givers turns out to be one of the more unsettling listening experiences that Bloodyminded has brought us so far, and fans of the recent Sutcliffe Jugend output in particular will want to check this out...

© CRUCIAL BLAST

Crucial Blast on The Fortieth Day "IV" CD

The Fortieth Day "IV" CD
More post-apocalyptic industrial crush from the duo of Isidro Reyes and Mark Solotroff, both members of the confrontational Chicago power-electronics group Bloodyminded. As The Fortieth Day, the two musicians engage in a much heavier, more droneological machinedeath assault using synthesizer, drum machine, bass and guitar to sculpt massive rhythmic noisescapes, and over the past decade they've been cranking out some supremely crushing mechablast on short run cassettes on Solotroff's Bloodlust! label. This material has gradually been getting reissued on disc, including the 2007 release IV that features two half-hour long tracks of apocalyptic industrial drone. The first of these slowly enters amid crackling electricity and looped drones, leading to abstract guitar figures looping around grinding machine noise and wheezing engine-roar that builds into an ominous, heavy black throb. More of these dissonant guitar loops are introduced as clanking drum machines circle around heavily distorted synth drones and sputtering low-end feedback, and at times this gets so blown-out that it feels like the speakers are about to shred apart. The machinecrush is constantly evolving as the duo cranks up the distortion, turning these layered loops and rumbling engine drones into massive walls of rhythmic factory throb that almost resembles an incredibly distorted dronerock band off of the old HeadDirt label buried under a mountain of tape hiss and growling electronic noise, backed by tinny, skittering drum machine rhythms. The other track is a lot less propulsive, though. By this point, the duo are burning everything down with controlled feedback, fractured melodies, waves of machine grind, layered drones and effects pedal abuse that results in a hallucinatory machine-noise soundscape, with none of that percussive pounding showing up until almost ten minutes in, the deformed clatter of the drum machine crawling beneath creepy distorted keyboard melodies and sheets of shrill feedback.
I've really been digging all of these Fortieth Day reissues, each one a punishing chunk of hypnotic industrial dread. © CRUCIAL BLAST

Crucial Blast on M.O. (Mauthausen Orchestra) "Where Are We Going" CD

M.O. (Mauthausen Orchestra) "Where Are We Going" CD
For the 2008 album Where Are We Going, Italian power electronics pioneer Pierpaolo Zoppo shortened his Mauthausen Orchestra name down to M.O., but the black pulsating electronics that he is known for are still in full force. It is more subdued than the tumorous throbbing horror of such classic Mauthausen Orchestra recordings as Necrofellatio and Murderfuck, and dispenses with the explicit images of hardcore sex and extreme violence that made his early albums so notorious, but this is still an unsettling listen, it just takes it's time digging in under your skin. Released by Bloodlust! in a nice digipack package, Where Are We Going is a series of controlled, minimal meditations using extreme distortion that strive to capture the essence of a futile existence, and when I crank this to a sufficiently damaging volume level, it achieves a kind of sonic brain-death through a mixture of abrasive drones and blown-out melodious keyboard dissonance. I'm reminded of Bianchi's recent organ-drone experiments, but Zoppo goes for a much more abrasive aural assault. Such as on the opening track "Intimate Pulsation", which starts as a minimal noisy drone, but evolves into steady streams of over modulated digital distortion that build into a thick multi-layered roar of sputtering, crackling noise. "Sometime Happen" is a much more dramatic piece, a seething mass of ultra-distorted drones and keyboard clusters with extreme blown-out melodies and atonal notes forming within the wall of roiling distorted noise. The densely layered melodic chaos again reminds me not only of Bianchi, but also of some of Prurient's extreme synth pieces. More of these extremely distorted synthclusters form the nucleus of "When Suffering Becomes Show", but it later morphs into a swarming metallic buzz and fluttering keyboard notes, and ends up resembling an experimental electronic score for a 70s science fiction film. The shorter track "Confusion" is almost kosimiche with it's clusters of murky mid-range keys and whooshing tones bathed in speaker crackle, and "Not Allowable" creates a disorienting effect with phased organ drones that stretch endlessly outward. Altogether, these distorted synthdrones burn their way into your grey matter nicely. © CRUCIAL BLAST

Crucial Blast on Intrinsic Action "Sado-Electronics" CD

 

INTRINSIC ACTION   Sado-Electronics   CD   (Bloodlust!)

A classic slab of American power electronics that is finally available again, the debut Intrinsic Action album Sado-Electronics was originally released on Tesco Organisation back in 1992 and later reissued with new artwork on Bloodlust!, the label run by IA's own Mark Solotroff (also of Bloodyminded and Anatomy Of Habit). Although the band had been in action since 1984, they only released a handful of cassette releases prior to this Cd, and leather clad and frothing at the mouth they set upon this collection of brute force sadistic-sexual nightmares, lust-murder fantasies and terminally morbid visions gushing from the skull of bandleader Solotroff on tracks like "In A Glass Cage", "Metamorph" and "Shock Pit", set to a pulsating backdrop of primitive electronic noise and throbbing black synthesizer. The eleven tracks that make up the Sado-Electronics portion of the disc center around stripped down arrangements of delayed vocals rippling across heavy carcinogenic electronic throb, agonizing feedback abuse and crackling pestilential static, and often settling into an evil hypnotic lock groove pulse that took the Whitehouse influence into an obsessive new direction and combined it with a sinister minimal synth sound that had echoes of Suicide (just check out the opener "Male Payment"). The other half of the disc comprises the Surgical Stainless Steel: First Operation Incision Durations, a series of ten untitled short extreme electronics/death-synth pieces that range from crushing PE attacks to ghastly Atrax Morgue-esque drones.

I've been dyin' to get my hands on this disc for awhile and am seriously stoked that it turned up again in the Bloodlust! catalog; it's definitely one of that labels must-hear releases if you're into the early U.S. PE underground. Re-mastered for this new edition, with updated artwork and photos that differ from the old Tesco version.

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Crucial Blast on Bereft 7-Inch

 

 

 

 

 

BEREFT   Tough Man   7" VINYL   (Bloodlust!)

A couple of the older "private series" 7" Eps from Bloodlust! turned up recently, allowing us to get both the hard-to-find Whorebutcher 7" and this 2006 Ep from the misanthropic New England power electronics duo Bereft in stock for the first time. As with the rest of Bereft's stuff, this is ultra-heavy shit that combines a hardcore-influenced vocal attack with excoriating lyrics and ferocious electronic noise. The a-side track "Tough Man" immediately launches into a sonic assault of extreme high-end feedback and distorted rabid vocals, a ferocious seething power electronics delivery that repeats the threatening lyrics over and over for maximum effect, while harsh rhythmic rumblings detonate beneath the acidic high-end skree, growing into the monstrous mechanical vibrations that take over the final few minutes. Real fuckin' intense. The other track "Religious Leaders" is at first a departure from the aggression on the first track, unleashing massive waves of cosmic synthdrift and metallic drone across deep, reverberating blasts of percussive power, creating a really heavy death industrial feel. The demonic vocals are situated deeper in the mix, adding to the malevolent atmosphere, but then it evolves into something harsher, erupting into roars of collapsing metal and nuclear blast distortion, transforming into a slow-moving and monstrous maelstrom of broken metal and irradiated synth noise that dominates the last few minutes of the side.
 
Comes in a plain white sleeve with a xeroxed insert, limited to three hundred copies.

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Crucial Blast on Whorebutcher 7-Inch

 

WHOREBUTCHER   Fanatic   7" VINYL   (Bloodlust!)

There have only been a handful of releases from this American power electronics project over the past decade, but every one that I've picked up has been incredibly violent and vicious sounding, and I'd rate Whorebutcher's output as some of the harshest to come out of the American PE scene. His works have tended to be hard for me to come by though, with this limited 7" from the Bloodlust! label being the first of his titles that I've even been able to get for the shop. Released several years ago as part of Bloodlust!'s minimally packaged "private" series of white sleeve 7"s, Fanatic is a two-track eruption of extreme power electronics that flaunts some of the most agonal feedback manipulation this side of early Prurient. Opening with a roar of fast-moving distorted chaos, the first track "Fanatic" is a relentless shrieking nightmare of painful feedback abuse, brutal blasts of percussive distortion-pulses and murderous whispered vocals blasted through insane levels of distortion. What you can make out through that squealing, shrieking chaos paints a hideous picture of sexual sadism and obsessive violence, visions of violent debauchery set against layers of crushing electronics.

The b-side "Obsession " is more subdued, following the vicious noise of the first track with what begins as an atmospheric electronic soundscape fluttering with distant klaxon pulses and crashing waves of blackened static, a steady ceaseless feedback hum running like a thick black vein through the lightless factory ambience of the track, only veering from this dark pulsating driftscape in its final seconds as it explodes into a brief gale of shrieking noise that brings this around full circle to the waves of vicious electronic hate. 

Comes in a plain white sleeve with a xeroxed insert, issued in a limited edition of three hundred copies on white vinyl.

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Crucial Blast on Sun Splitter LP

 

SUN SPLITTER   III   LP   (Bloodlust!)

I've definitely been picking up on a certain industrial influence that has been creeping into a lot of the underground metal/avant rock that's been coming out of Chicago lately; dunno if it's a direct by-product of that city's long history with mechanized sound with labels like Wax Trax and Invisible, but there's definitely traces of machine-music coming through in some of the Windy City's more doom-laden outfits like Bloodiest, Anatomy Of Habit, Rabid Rabbit, and Minsk. I love hearing metallic music incorporate industrial influences, and the latest Chicago band mixing the mecha with their metal is Sun Splitter, who I first heard on their excellent II cassette on Land Of Decay a while back. Sun Splitter has put a unique, punishing stamp on this sound, using drum machines to create the pummeling slow-motion assembly-line rhythms that drive their crushing guitar/bass drones and sludgy riffage, blending in electric organs and piano into their sound for added atmosphere.

III is the latest offering from Sun Splitter, a vinyl-only album out from Bloodlust!. As soon as opener "Eye Of Jupiter" kicks in, the band is battering you with you their concussive industro-sludge, a hypnotic assault of heavy mechanical drumming and chant-like vocals that snake through clouds of shimmering synth noise around the crushing low-end riffage, building into something akin to a psychedelic version of early Godflesh or Swans, but with that monstrous chugging industrial grind becoming fused to the vast droning narco-crush of Sleep and Om; a weird mixture on paper, but man, I was hooked from the first track. From there the album heads deeper into bludgeoning, down-tuned riffs weighted with moments of striking Sabbathian doom n' gloom, majestic leads soaring over bizarrely-arranged programmed blast beats, and a vocal delivery that goes from harsh frantic screams to weird chant-like utterances. Totally sounds like something that could have come off of the HeadDirt or Pathological Records labels, but with a very modern level of metallic heaviosity. The other tracks follow similar suit in their drive to pummel the listener with brutal repetition, the eleven minute "Parasitic Machine" driving home a pounding pneumatic rhythm while spacey, almost blackened guitar melodies and tremolo riffing ascend skyward as it builds to a crescendo that never comes. Instead, it drops off into an almost Lustmordain abyss of cavernous drones and distant ethereal chanting smeared with streaks of psych guitar, prayer-bowl resonance, and monstrous subterranean rumblings.

Sun Splitter drop a number of these long, mesmeric dronescapes among their heavier songs, and also make a couple of surprising detours from the chugging, industrialized hypno-crush. Like on the closer "Two Cold Oceans", where they lock in to an infectious hypno-rock jam that sounds surprisingly like Finnish avant-rockers Circle at first, a pounding shuffling drum beat driving the hypnotic music into endless circular grooves, a simple chugging riff repeating over and over, the guitars laying down a lysergic meandering melody; after awhile, it suddenly kicks in with much harsher, more evil intensity, the vocals changing from a stoned yowl to harsh blackened shrieks, the guitars surging in heaviness, continuing that looping heavy psych-hook as more and more electronic layers of noise and effects descend upon the music, until everything is swallowed up in a monstrous roar of crushing industrial drone and starry electronic nebulae and whirring Hawkwindian synth effects.

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Crucial Blast on Anatomy of Habit CD

ANATOMY OF HABIT   self-titled   CD
 
Although Chicago noise artist Mark Solotroff has been destroying eardrums for nearly thirty years, first with his early American power electronics outfit Intrinsic Action that combined rabid Whitehouse worship with an evil undercurrent of S&M sleaze, later with the extreme electronic abuse of Bloodyminded and the apocalyptic industrial sludge-scapes of The Fortieth Day, it hasn't been until recently that Solotroff has started to explore more rock-based delivery systems for his visions of dystopian violence and collapse. Starting with a self-titled 12" released in 2011 and followed by another, similarly untitled 12" the following year, Solotroff's new band Anatomy Of Habit (which also features Blake Edwards of Vertonen on metal percussion, drummer Dylan Posa, formerly of Flying Luttenbachers and Cheer Accident, bassist Kenny Rasmussen, and Greg Ratajczak of Plague Bringer and Winters In Osaka) has been building a sound that is equal parts crushing noise rock, 80's-style goth n' gloom, metallic sludge and hypnotic post-punk, with long songs that stretch out across an entire side of a record, marked by marked by slow buildups into pummeling sludgy heaviness and long circular grooves. Swans and Joy Division are obvious influences on the band's music, but there's also a bit of Om-like psychedelic repetition here as well, giving this a heavy, trance-inducing feel at times.

The band has assembled their first Cd release with this re-mastered collection of all of their vinyl tracks to date, compiling both of the self-titled 12"s here on this full-length disc. Packaged in a six-panel digipack, this is an excellent entry point into Anatomy Of Habit's dour, industrial-tinged gloom-rock.

The first Lp features the tracks "Overcome" and "Torch": "Overcome" sprawls out into a dark, brooding mass of slow-moving gloom rock, the minimal guitars and droning bass line giving this a real Joy Division-ish feel, the deep distant vocals cloaked in shadows, the song seeming to be building eternally as the chiming delay-streaked guitar notes and incantatory singing rises ever skyward. It gradually takes on a ritualistic vibe as the drums come in and the song locks into a kind of circular trance, the melody slowly spinning around, over and over, a gloomy shambling hypnorock loop; it builds like this for minutes at a time, the sound slowly growing in intensity, until it all suddenly lurches into the pounding, sludgy heaviness that takes over the last half of the song, a lumbering, droning low-end crush fused to a catchy melodic hook, somewhere in between Killing Joke and Neurosis's calmer moments of apocalyptic dirge. The seventeen minute "Torch" is another powerful gloom epic, coming in on waves of shimmering cymbals and distant whirring synths, then shifts into dark piano sounds and those far-off vocals before slipping into another monstrous slo-mo groove. This one has some of the band's heaviest stuff, blooming into crushing metallic war-sludge and massive chugging riffage, then later devolving into discordant, plodding heaviness at the end. 

The second 12" from Anatomy Of Habit features two more long tracks of their crushing, hypnotic post-punk, "After The Water" and "The Decade Plan", and sees the band introducing piano and synthesizer into their sound. After a haunting introduction of simple laid-back percussion and jangling guitar melody, "After The Water" opens up into a kind of slow, brooding gloom-rock, somewhere in between Swans and some slow-moving math rock outfit, the heartfelt vocals droning over this slowly developing hook; somewhere around the middle of the song, it changes into an almost militaristic rhythm with clanging bass and the vocals becoming harder, more stentorian, right before surging into a blast of crushing, pummeling sludge. "The Decade Plan" follows with slowly cascading clean guitars and speak-sing vocals that make the beginning of the song sound like some early 90s slowcore, then blasts into a crushing doom-laden riff, a strange stilted heaviness with clanking metallic percussion rattling in the background, slowly but inexorably building into a majestic finale.

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Crucial Blast on Josh Hydeman LP

Thanks to Crucial Blast, as always, for the thoughtful write-up!

HYDEMAN, JOSH   Madison's Fence   LP 

A stunning new album of jet-black synthdoom from Josh Hydeman, who you may or may not recognize as one of the guys from nudist power electronics creepos Twodeadsluts Onegoodfuck. Working solo, Hydeman crafts six expansive tracks of heavy, doomed synthesizer music on Madison's Fence that carries over some of the same dreadful vibes as his other, harsher project. The atmosphere here is a much more restrained one, though, the long tracks carved out of droning layered keyboards and buzzing black electronics, each piece casting a thick twilight gloom across the album. This permanent gloom really takes hold on the second track “Ash Covered Field", where Hydeman starts to weave in some heavy, murky guitar work that almost resembles a doom metal riff stripped of most of it's distortion, sent adrift over the thick textural buzz and gleaming obsidian electronics, like an Earth song permeated with wheezing ambient synths and industrial grit. That's followed by more synth-centric pieces where the eerie melodies cycle over and over, hinting at shades of John Carpenter's early film scores while at the same time infesting the corners of these tracks with seething power electronic elements.

This potent combination of doomed guitar crawl and black ambient synth continues on over to the second side, which begins with my favorite track on the album "Deadhorse". Again, it reminds me a lot of Carpenter's gleaming analogue 80's soundtracks, but with that glacial guitar clanging and creeping over those icy keys, it becomes something vastly more apocalyptic. The heaviest moment on Madison's Fence comes at the very end on the track "Volcano" when the guitars surge forward in a crushing wave of blackened Sunn O)))-style ambient sludge, washing over the faint swirling electronics.

A fucking fantastic blast of subterranean dread, highly recommended to fans of abyssal black electronics a la Wilt, Luasa Raelon, Angel Of Decay, and Theologian...

Crucial Blast on The Fortieth Day

The Fortieth Day  "Pelusium: 540 AD"   CD

Here's another reissue disc from The Fortieth Day, the grim industrial side project from Bloodyminded members Mark Solotroff and Isidro Reyes. I've been slowly making my way through the collection of Fortieth Day discs that Solotroff has been releasing on his Bloodlust! label, because as much as I dig the high-frequency terror of Bloodyminded, I find myself coming back to the intense blackened industrial dronescapes of this project much more often.

Pelusium 540 AD, the title a reference to the first recorded outbreak of Black Plague, was released on cassette in 2007 on the Australian label Cipher Productions, and appears here remastered on disc for the first time. Like most of the other Fortieth Day releases, it's made up of two half hour tracks of monstrously heavy and relentlessly bleak machine dronesludge that the duo create using drum machines, bass, synth and guitar, with thick, oceanic waves of black bass rumble and roiling low-frequency smog seething underneath a constantly shifting surface of looped mechanical noises, droning feedback, swells of eerie melodic drift, scraping rhythms, smears of corroded chug run backwards. The first track is massive, monstrous, a dense and hypnotic blast of tectonic machinedirge, while the second is more abstract, a storm of jet-engine drones and howling feedback. A factory-din filled with sparse percussive cracks and random banging and repetitive rattling, the first eight minutes a rumbling, droning wall of low end noise, but then hints of melody start to surface, streaks of feedback and electronics bending into pretty little fragments of melodic sound that flit over the oppressive murk. It's a bleak, apocalyptic noisescape way out on the heavier end of the spectrum, with a heavy undercurrent of bonerattling bassdrone and amp-filth that makes this of interest to fans of the sort of industrial anti-rock that you might have heard on HeadDirt back in the early 90s.

Crucial Blast on Mauthausen Orchestra

Mauthausen Orchestra "Where Are We Going?"

For the 2008 album Where Are We Going, Italian power electronics pioneer Pierpaolo Zoppo shortened his Mauthausen Orchestra name down to M.O., but the black pulsating electronics that he is known for are still in full force. It is more subdued than the tumorous throbbing horror of such classic Mauthausen Orchestra recordings as Necrofellatio and Murderuck, and dispenses with the explicit images of hardcore sex and extreme violence that made his early albums so notorious, but this is still an unsettling listen, it just takes it's time digging in under your skin. Released by Bloodlust! in a nice digipack package, Where Are We Going is a series of controlled, minimal meditations using extreme distortion that strive to capture the essence of a futile existence, and when I crank this to a sufficiently damaging volume level, it achieves a kind of sonic brain-death through a mixture of abrasive drones and blown-out melodious keyboard dissonance. I'm reminded of Bianchi's recent organ-drone experiments, but Zoppo goes for a much more abrasive aural assault. Such as on the opening track "Intimate Pulsation", which starts as a minimal noisy drone, but evolves into steady streams of over modulated digital distortion that build into a thick multi-layered roar of sputtering, crackling noise. "Sometime Happen" is a much more dramatic piece, a seething mass of ultra-distorted drones and keyboard clusters with extreme blown-out melodies and atonal notes forming within the wall of roiling distorted noise. The densely layered melodic chaos again reminds me not only of Bianchi, but also of some of Prurient's extreme synth pieces. More of these extremely distorted synthclusters form the nucleus of "When Suffering Becomes Show", but it later morphs into a swarming metallic buzz and fluttering keyboard notes, and ends up resembling an experimental electronic score for a 70s science fiction film. The shorter track "Confusion" is almost kosimiche with it's clusters of murky mid-range keys and whooshing tones bathed in speaker crackle, and "Not Allowable" creates a disorienting effect with phased organ drones that stretch endlessly outward. Altogether, these distorted synthdrones burn their way into your grey matter nicely.

New Crucial Blast Write-Ups

With thanks, as always, to Adam, for the support and kind words!

REDROT   Psycho Bondage   LP   (Bloodlust!)    

Try keeping up with Ryan Oppermann's output. It's not easy, let me tell you. The guy has so many different (and distinct) projects that he's involved with, many of which are quite active and releasing new material, that I'm always finding something new from him I haven't heard before. Klinikal Skum, Xombie, Post-Mortem Junkie, and of course the mighty black industrial project Neuntöter Der Plage are all faves, but then I find out about this new Lp from Redrot, another project that I had never even heard of, but which seems to have been releasing stuff since 2002. Based on the heaving machine evil of Psycho Bondage, this is probably the heaviest shit that Oppermann has done. I'm talking about machine-press, pneumatic hissing, and extreme bondage-heavy, the four tracks constructed out of assorted layers of pounding, whirring, thundering machine rhythms and nauseous synthesizer noises, and Oppermann's moaning repetitive mantras. The four long tracks all have this monotonous, diseased feel, the weirdly groovy undercurrent of crushing mechanical rhythms giving this the feel of a seriously warped and demonic brand of Wax Trax industrial, but fused to the oozing, autopsy-table horror of the best death industrial (with echoes of everything from early SPK to Brighter Death Now to Atrax Morgue). The relentless crush and rumble of the rhythms also bring a Swans-like heaviness to the proceedings, so when I say this is heavy, I'm talking heavy, the metallic grind and syrupy distorted beats sometimes slowing down to a slow-motion detonation that feels like mortars going off. The more I listen to Psycho Bondage (and the louder I play it), the more this seems like a death industrial/power electronics record infused with the inexorable grind of the heaviest industrial doom; except where glacial riffs would be, there's the wheezing and buzzing of rotten synths and sputtering effects pedals, the howling hellish growls and screams and sado-mantras stretching and diffusing, turning into flutters of vocal vomit slung against the necrotic industrial backdrop. Really, the last track "Crawling Dead Sex" sums it all up. 
Limited to 525 copies on black vinyl.

ANGEL OF DECAY   Bleeding On The Flowers   CD   (Bloodlust!)  

The Bloodlust! label is another one that I've been slowly making my way through, having missed out on most of the label's offerings of grimy, grim industrial noise when they first came out in the latter half of the last decade. One of these is this disc from Angel Of Decay, which has become one of my new faves since getting it in stock. It's a collection of two half-hour long tracks of crumbling black factory ambience from this short lived project from Jonathan Canady. You've no doubt come across Canady's work in one form or another over the years, as this guy has been involved with the vicious power electronic and death industrial groups Deathpile and Blunt Force Trauma, industrial metallers Dead World, the newer noise group Nightmares alongside David Reed (Luasa Raelon/Envenomist) and Mark Solotroff (Bloodyminded), and was the in-house art guy for Relapse Records for several years. Originally released on cassette back in 2007, AOD's Bleeding On The Flowers explores new stygian depths and nightmare terrain from Canady through the use of various vintage analog synthesizers.
The title track is a churning mass of machine noise and the monotonous chug of massive engines, rumbling rotors and other mechanical drones all bathed in delay and reverb. Grinding black synths crawl across this blasted industrial backdrop as howling distorted vokills descend upon it, resembling the fury of demons raging over a symphony of steel presses and buzzsaws. This fusion of industrial dronescape terror and oppressive, stentorian power electronics is covered in sonic filth, but it's also juiced up with a seriously heavy recording that combine together for a powerful, hellish listening experience.
The second track "Sick, Insane And Half Dead" is more minimal, smoldering distant distortion and peals of high end feedback swelling up alongside blackened gasping vokills and murkier washes of machine noise. From there, this travels through various stretches of grinding synth damage, harrowing passages of screeching drone, waves of crackling machine noise and the earth-shaking rumble of gargantuan turbines, all of these evoking further visions of demonically possessed ironworks that are filled with howling ghostly vocalizations, relentless pounding rhythms and swooping shrieking entities. Man, this is terrifying stuff all the way to the end; fans of the harshest Cold Meat Industries output will want to hear this for sure.

Crucial Blast on Mark Solotroff

Re-posted from Crucial Blast, with thanks, as always, for the thoughtful write-up!



B!134 Mark Solotroff "Archive04"

Part of Bloodlust's ongoing reissue series of past solo recordings from label boss Mark Solotroff (also of Bloodyminded and Intransic Action), Archive04 collects some mid-90's output that originally came out on the Italian death industrial label Slaughter Productions on cassette. All of that stuff has been out of print for years, so this series is great for any Solotroff fans that never stood a chance at getting their hands on these early synth-death works when they first came out. This fourth entry in the series is heavy stuff, the first two tracks making up the bulk of the disc with more than an hour of crushing tectonic harsh wall noise that forshadows the sort of black maelstrom that artists like The Rita, Vomir, and Last Rape.

These two thirty-minute tracks are from the 1996 cassette Evidence To Suggest Postmortem Sexual Assault on Slaughter Productions, each a vast side-long rumbling dronescape, like a muted HNW, all washed out and with almost all of the highs eradicated from the mix. A monstrous half hour avalanche of low end rumble that has subtle synth buzz fluttering on the periphery, becoming more apparent as the track progresses. The swarming black low-end drift is oppressive from start to end, a consuming mass of bass-heavy sound, a massive deathdrone wave of black lava washing over the earth beneath swarms of demonic locusts. When the second of the tracks kicks in, it at first seems to be less bass heavy, more of a fluttering, rumbling engine drone, a massive mechanical whirring trailed by swooping sine waves, still deep and murky and HEAVY, and eventually it flattens out into a similar expanse of churning muffled tectonic rumble as the first. This material is a must hear for fans of pure monolithic harsh noise.

"Blood Room", the third and last track, comes off of the Slaughter Productions.compilation tape Extreme Pleasures Vol. I. from 1995. It ends the disc with a jarring swarm of high frequency tones and swarming insectile chaos, the frenzied beating of millions of black wings, a sky full of swarming , chirping, squealing clusters of high-end noise.

Crucial Blast on Recent BloodLust! Releases

As always, I appreciate the well-written and thoughtful write-ups that get posted on the Crucial Blast website

FECALOVE Deadweight 7 INCH VINYL (Bloodlust!)

A vicious new slab of power electronics from Italy's Fecalove, aka Nicola Vinciguerra. My first exposure to Fecalove's murderous power electronics was through the super limited releases fromm the band that Vinciguerra has issued on his Italian division of Turgid Animal which he operates; everything that I've heard so far from this project has been supremely savage, purely visceral PE that's at the evil end of the spectrum, influenced by the likes of Whitehouse and Sutcliffe Jugend, but with nasty black metal style vocals that give these electro-terror shock attacks a real demonic vibe.
The a-side track "Deadweight" is exactly this sort of devilish power electronics. An omnipresent harsh electrical buzz runs through it, a thick static drone that underscores the ugly nihilistic lyrics and fucking evil vocals that start in almost immediately; where a lot of PE can be static and lacking in dynamics, this is not...it's a number of different parts arranged into something resembling an actual song, moving between a couple of different sections and making for a dramatic, terrifying dose of heavy electronic hate. On the flipside, "When" appears as a stirring call to a return to total bestial savagery, a seething power electronic dirge of flesh-tearing high-end feedback, massive low-end synth throb and those evil distorted vokills, blasting your skull with electronic violence until it ends in a violent salvo of crashing scrap metal.
Comes on pink vinyl in a hand-numbered limited edition of 200 copies, and packaged in a full-color sleeve.

GUILT OF, THE self-titled CD-R (Bloodlust!)

The debut full length from The Guilt Of..., the new industrial duo of Mike Williams (Eyehategod/Outlaw Order/Arson Anthem) and Ryan McKern (Wolvhammer). If you've followed Eyehategod for a while, you mightn have noticed that Williams has often cited the aesthetics of early industrial on the visuals and artwork of Eyehategod, in particular the grisly images put forth by SPK, and the bleak, nihilistic music of SPK (as well as Throbbing Gristle) is obviously a primary influence on the warped, deformed electronics that Williams and McKern create as The Guilt Of. The sound is at times comparable to early industrial works like Information Overload Unit, but Williams's hysterical, ragged screams and the occasional distorted guitars give this a weird sludgy metal feel that creeps in from time to time. The combination of primitive industrial, fractured sludge metal guitar slop, and noise/sample collage that appears on these six tracks makes for some strange, drugged soundscaping, with all of the dark, nihilistic imagery and atmosphere that permeates all of Williams's work. Simple plodding drum machines spit out repetitive beats that throb underneath the filthy droning buzz of synthesizers and traces of fractured melodies spinning within the murk; the background is alive with creaking metallic noise and gurgling Moog-like bass. The industrial dirges are creepy and minor key, grim death-marches over minimal electro thump, shafts of synth strings and searing, distorted synth sludge blasting upwards, and blown out guitar noise writhing and convulsing around Williams's gnarled, nightmarish lyrics, which he vomits and howls out, making this at times veer into a kind of sludgy power electronics assault. The first few tracks are all bent, plodding industrial atavism, but later the disc moves into delirious collages of spoken word over dark industrial noisescapes, and sampled Japanese flute melodies, tape noise, and mangled synths on "Allergic To The Infamous Healer". The track "Void Of Regressions" is a bizarre cacophony of Skullflowery guitar noise, drugged chanting, primitive electro rhythms, chugging metal guitar, swirling electronics and blackened vokills, one of the heavier and more hellish tracks here, and "Mechanics Of The Unheard Catalyst" delivers another weird hybrid of formless metal and old school industrial with it's meandering metallic guitar wandering over piles of looped rhythmic samples and thick synth squelch, buzzing drones and fucked-up, processed power electronics and damaged machinery; later, a fractured drum loop comes in, almost like an old school breakbeat, while a guitar shreds in the distance, as the song devolves into a clanking industrial groove. The frustrated, hopeless vibe ends with the droning electronic noise, feedback, and murky synths of the final song "Words Of The Given Past", with more monstrous, blackened growling vokills, chiming melodies, ominous whispers, looped sampled voices and bits of Willaims's spoken word. This sort of hallucinatory, mangled industrial has some of the mutant industrial vibe as some of Maniac's recent recordings with Sehnsucht and Andrew Lilles, but it's nastier stuff, with a feverish sickness seething beneath their sputtering machines and slithering sample-ridden electronic creep. Limited to 200 copies, in jewel case packaging.

MASTURBATORY DYSFUNCTION Getting Caught CD-R (Bloodlust!)

Total synthesizer destruction. Getting Caught is the first release from Seattle's Masturbatory Dysfunction, a one-woman synth-noise outfit who debuts here with eight lengthy tracks of crunchy electronic abuse that falls somewhere in between minimal death industrial and extreme synth blast. This stuff is as burly as Sixes, with lots of cold droning synthesizer buzz and sinister dronescapes surrounded with a strange spaciousness, the result of the material having been recorded in a music retail store; apparently, the lady who's behind Masturbatory Dysfunction would go into a major music equipment store in Seattle on her lunch break and blast out walls of noise on the synthesizers that the store had on display, which she would record on a portable recording device. There were several of these "recording sessions" that produced the source material for this album, some of which had to be obnoxiously loud and grating, and yet she managed to assemble all of this material without getting kicked off the premises. The end material was later digitally edited and organized, and mastered at abusive volume levels. It's wild that she was able to pull this off without getting the bum's rush, because a lot of this material is seriously abrasive. The title Getting Caught is an obvious allusion to her surreptitious recording techniques, but it also has creepier, more sinister connotations with tracks like "It Was A Mistake ", "Late Night Filth" and "Bye Mom". Sound wise, the tracks almost feel like field recordings at times, spacious and organic due to the synthesizers blending with the natural room ambience, but as the pieces move through grim, minimal minor-key chordal dirges and clouds of crackling high end static, they become punishing full-bore distortion assaults, walls of overdriven distorted synth shaped into crushing throbbing rhythms and brutal turbulent noise, weighted down with some heavy duty low-end turbine violence. Hypnotic, brain-flattening powerdrone and grim rhythmic plod combines with blasts of spastic 8-bit video game chaos and crushing static hum. The last track is the least brutal, almost pretty actually; a series of very minimal two-note melodies and sustained drones fuse into an oscillating chordal flux, which at first is droning and hypnotic, but gets heavier later on as thick choppy buzzing builds into a massive amplified engine roar. This disc is a powerful piece of industrial synth abuse, and is another excellent dose of extreme electronics for fans of the Bloodlust! aesthetic.