DEATH MANTRA SELF TITLED

Miserable ambient Black Metal of the dismal Hippy-ish variety, Cascadian influences geographically and audially, mesmeric and drifting with slow, misty and mournful parts. Funereal and mesmeric riffs, meditative and cold. Very lo-fi sound and atmosphere. Reminds me of early Wolves in The Throne Room, Xasthur and the excellent Skagos, too. If you dig Black Metal on the emerald side, ethereal and bleak as shit, burn a Nag Champa and imbibe some poitín, this is for you. Sounds like hemlock growing through the frost on a dead fox’s eye.

Stench Ov Death Prod.

ETHEREAL SELF TITLED DEMO

3 tracks of grinding Death Metal excellence, dynamic and brutal Deathgrind with some killer guitar work, catchy as fuck slobbering riffs from across an interesting gamut of crusty Death Metal and Grindcore, some amazingly discordant solo work and excellently maniacal blunt vocal, and some really nasty breakdown parts constructed around moronically heavy double bass and tempo switches. Hard as fuck. This is another band that features the inimitable blast beats of Isaac Horne, so you can expect some special kung fu shit going on behind the kit. Excellent drum sound, too, with lots of live presence and rehearsal room sound. Ethereal went on to complete a full length on Aggressively Uninterested, which I look forward to checking out. This one’s gnarly as sin.

Bandcamp

GOD IS WAR – ‘CRUELEST TO OUR OWN’

God Is War mixtape on Deathbed Tapes, with some tracks collated from other releases and some unique to this tape (I think). Suzerain Eurorack Harsh Electronics, big fat crushing noise sequencer beats in dominating Dubstep/Industrial like patterns and menacing, glowering, skin-flaying bass pulses, disturbing sample manipulations, hyper-aggression and militant sweat, nail-biting gonzo hair trigger ambiance – combat enhancing stimulant overdose in a Tel Aviv nightclub, seconds from total hulk meltdown and unremitting violence. Chami makes many references to McCarthy’s masterwork ‘Blood Meridian’ across God Is War’s various releases, taking quotes as song titles and drawing allegory and allusion to the novel’s warlike philosophy and extremely hostile standard-bearing intent. Domineering, disconcerting… dehumanizing. War is God.

Deathbed Tapes

ANATOMY OF THE HEADS – ‘EXORCISME LANGSUNG DI DATARAN MINAHASA’

Bizarro shamanist Drone/Noise collage, a psycho-actively potent, aggressive, portentous swirl of maligned psychedelia from the deep jungles of the sub conscious, tape decay layers and screeds of samples from impossible sources stitched into the sound, operating in impenetrable high concept and shadowy secrecy, conjuring a world of retributive curses and offerings to obscure deistic forms – two long tracks drift from malignant amplifier Drone to crushing Noise to mosquito-ridden Musique Concrete, sweltering dense palettes of hissing caustics, science fiction effluvia, B Movie absurdisms… disorientating blind alleys of melody obscured in the morass… undefinable, sorcerous sounds from far outside the perimeter fence of Harsh Noise, Industrial and Musique Concrete…

Bandcamp

NEE! – ‘NEE!’S FINEST: DOES NOISE BELONG IN MUSIC?’

Another masterfully curated discography release from the front lawn of ol’ Mortville Noise, this time from Dutch Noisecore uberfreaks Nee! “119 tracks / 77 minutes of unhinged, bulldozing, blast-driven grindnoise on 98 CD tracks, all recorded between 1996 and 1999”. Furiously silly immutable Noisegrinding extravangance – Cave-dwelling, hard-headed riffs ‘n’ audible chord parts with musical sense sent spiraling into fits of spastic percussive rage amidst blast beat laden leaden Noisecore, there’s killing riffs and slow miserable parts all over the place with unsettling unserious noisy weirdo instrumentation, low grunt vocal mixed with deranged blurts, bort borts and shrieks, the musical elements adding only more confusion and alienation. Sounds a little like Fear of God or a less crusty Sore Throat. I was only familiar with Nee! from their excellent tracks on their split with Warsore, and I’m very pleased to have checked this out. Purchase a CD while they’re available and support the scene!

Mortville Noise

DUGHPA – ‘III’

On ‘III’, Kumulonimbus’s Dughpa adopts a long form means of expressing cosmic images of spacefaring at the endless frontier, eschewing the shorter songs of his previous works for two lengthy pieces of ambient soundscape and kosmische atmosphere, shimmering, blackly beauteous and expansive, pressed to hissing tape. These two pieces remind me in timbre and colour of Schulze’s ‘Cyborg’, each runs a varied yet thematically solid gamut of the lo-fi synthesized sounds as you’d expect from Dughpa, a very ponderous and foreboding listen bristling with detail and intent. The postcard sized cardboard Flex that comes with the LP is hilarious and brilliant, too; two very short tracks of bleeping and blooping from the dashboard of the corrigated sillicon voidcraft, recorded onto chippy cardboard, barely audible and entirely reliant on the format to accent the sound. It’s just great, fun and serious in equal measure. Regain Records still has copies of the LP available, with aforementioned Flexi and a wicked little art Zine. Get one.

Brugmanziah

Regain Records

SPIRIT POSSESSION SELF TITLED

Spirit Possession’s Self Titled full length delivers the lunatic promise of their excellent demo – shrieking, hysterical Black Metal virulent with Speed/Thrash/Heavy Metal influences, menacing glowering poltergeist energy aura of boundless possessive savagery!  Trill and treble drenched Guitars and killer Bass work form unorthodox, mind bending Thrash tinged riffs in obstinately rocking arrangements, at once angular, dissonant and mindlessly catchy, fiercely conjured Drums display similar unorthodoxy and chaoticism amidst straight forward hammering grooves and rocking the fuck out, a summoning of upheave vocal glossolalia dribbling with madness and dripping with delicious delay decay, haywire synths and noise pieces fomenting madness and weird unsettling auras. Sounds similar to the works of Funereal Presence, Craft, Negative Plane and Aura Noir, for reference, although Spirit Possession’s particular angular edges and incensed vocal delirium are all their own. Excellent.

Vexation Records

Profound Lore Records

 

APARTHIVA RAKTADHARA – ‘অজ্ঞাত ঈশ্বর (AGYAT ISHVAR) DEMO 2018’

Sorcerous Black Death Metal from the extremely fertile underground Kolkata scene. Raw, loud and necrotic rehearsal sound, ripping riffs and purging atonal drum cacophony with lots of blast beats, singular and barbaric as fuck, torn throat vocal incantation, a savage, swirling rite of killing Kalikshetra violence! Blasphemous and esoteric, with less Harsh Noise or Power Electronics sounds/influences than many of their contemporaries in their scene. Summons a sound akin to demo era Morbid Angel or Necrovore, who’s ‘Divus de Mortuus’ Aparthiva Raktadhara cover as a bonus track in adoring devotion. A very short and promising demo to activate murderous chakral wizardry and immoral levitation practices.

Bandcamp

Iron Bonehead Productions

VARIOUS ARTISTS – ‘WEEDIAN VOLUME 1’

Blues Funeral Recordings’ WEEDIAN series is a loveletter to comp formats, able to introduce virgin ears to numerous artists in a well selected order – “Compilations like Burn One Up, Rise 13, Stone(d) Revolution and Welcome to MeteorCity were about finding new bands, making sonic connections, and rocking the fuck out, and that’s what the WEEDIAN compilation series is all about.” Volume 1 is fucken’ full of assorted groovy stony jamming, Trad Doom solemnities, vitiated Stoner Rock and Hard Psych perversions of the Rhythm & Blues. Some tracks that stand out to me –  Mephistofeles’ ‘Werewolf Boogie’ is more than worth the price of admission, a fucking merciless boogie stomp with irresistible power trio sound, wailing dead Beatle vocal and soulless lycanthropia vibes. Devil’s Witches summons an occultist ode to all things female and forbidden written in retrograded Dionysian Pre-Rock Doors and Dead language, sumptuously groovy guitar tones and unhealthy ’60’s obsessions. Potion’s ‘Women of the Wand’ incants a battlecry of warring Doom amidst ancient Heavy Metal heroics, rousing and stygian Sludge heavy. Dead Witches spring forth in a ciderous stupor to smash some heretics with decrepit poisonous tonal aura, witch killing riffs, and the spectral ghost of true ‘Wizard chained to their whims. Chained To The Bottom Of The Ocean cough a seismic tumble of miserable ‘Confederacy…’ era EHG groove with syrupy Guitar and Bass and harsh vocal battering. Twist, burn and enjoy.

Blues Funeral Recordings

GOD IS WAR – ‘KING OF THE ARABS’

Psychotic, despotic modular synthesizer Electronics from God Is War, alias of operative Mackenzie Chami of Koufar and Terror Cell Unit, among many others. Cassette released on No Rent Records. The supplanting and application of harsh Power Electronics and noxious Industrial textures, moods and aesthetic to a rugged, tough as fuck Electronics sequencer pattern paradigm – merciless, menacing bad guy music to dominate and debase. Crushing turbine sequence of building Bass pulse pressure in the nuclear reactor, irradiated Noise steam hissing from the seams of hulking, coiling, bombastic waves of synthesizer death. Reminds me in a lateral sense of the Power Noise sound akin to something like Converter, but even more harshly textural and gritty. “…This album is to signify the dawn of Hyper Violent Industrial music. Cower in your seat as the great purge commences. Gaze in awe at the aura of cosmic red blood as it swirls around the heads of those executed at gun point. Suffocate as the gases at Halabja fill your lungs. Go to your death defiantly. GOD IS WAR.” Crucial.

No Rent Records

VARIOUS ARTISTS – ‘THIS IS CAIRO NOT THE SCREAMERS’

Intense, harsh, speaker-destroying Electro Chaabi remix decay, Egyptian Grime and psychedelic electronics, bludgeoning dancehall disturbances both hostile and overwhelmingly, blindingly colourful, an electronic bacchanal of lucid, lurid phantasia from 7 artists. Corrigated shimmering beats stacked beneath wobbling sample feed, textural bass cascades like concaving concrete and warped tempo manipulations, radar blip bombast and slamming, screaming feedback application, cone-crushing audial hallucinations! An absolutely blazing collection of tunes. My ignorance to this particularly kaleidoscopic, killing corner of music sub sub genre is pathetic and unwarranted, and must be immediately corrected. Fucking crucial.

Nashazphone