One of the three new limited editioon CD-Rs that we just got in from Faunasabbatha, the awesome and criminimally limited-edition new sublabel of Rural

Faune. Rural Faune is itself an amazing little CD-R label based outta France and which is run by our pal Bruno, who shares my adoration of handmade short-run

releases for especially noisy drone bands and abstract psychedelia, and his discs from Robedoor and Wolfskull were big faves of mine last year; but as heavy

as some of that stuff on Rural Faune was (and is), Bruno decided to start up this new imprint that focuses exclusively on "doom and black metal". Of course,

Bruno's idea of what constitutes doom and black metal is kind of warped, and so we get these amazing discs of WTF heaviness that I guess you could

call doom or black metal but which actually exist in their own fucked up, bedroom-crafted outsider metal soundworld: tortured abstract deathdoom haunted by

the voices of spirits trapped inside a crumbling sanitorium...blackened guitarnoisescapes....doomed funereal piano pieces...and improvised power sludge. Kind

of in the same headspace as Campbell Kneale's Battlecruiser imprint. Obviously this is right up my alley, and I'm hoping that we'll be seeing ALOT more from

Faunasabbatha in the near future.

Heads Of Pagan are another French duo, using voice, effects, and guitar to construct the 21 minute deathscape "Under The Tall And Darkened Arches", and

this is one nasty skullgrind; the piece starts off as a simple ominous riff that drifts over a rhythmic background loop that sounds like a heavily reverb'd

guitar being scraped and pounded, with sparse clean guitar notes and haunting little half-melodies being plucked and layered over top. As the track

progresses though, it becomes more and more chaotic as distorted feedback and rumbling guitar noise builds into a heavy free-drone, flanging and other FX

appearing in the dense murk of layered guitars, and finally turning into this massive undulating industrial sludgedrone, like one of Total's amp-shattering

feedback/noise jams colliding with Wolf Eyes in a satanic industrial ritual. Seriosuly heavy rhythmic psych-filth. The 3" CD-R was released in another micro

-pressing of 66 copies, and is already sold out from the label - we've got a mere half-dozen copies, and once they're gone, that's it. Packaged in a 3"

sleeve with murky skull-encrusted artwork.