We've picked up a bunch of different cassettes from the French black metal label Infernal Kommand for Crucial Blast, all of 'em filled with weird and freaked out occult black metal mutations and queasy psychedelic ambience scraped from the underbelly of the French BM underground. Some of the tapes that we've been able to get are from familiar freakazoids (like the brilliantly fucked one man black metal of Zarach'Baal'Tharagh), while others are new discoveries, from the pitch-black void-ambience of Aymrev Erkroz Prevre and the ritual industrial murk of Stigma Diabolicum, to the sadistic satanic power electronic/crypt-drone rites of Silcharde, Malvoisie's bizarre didgeridoo-fueled black metal hallucinations and the perverted blackgrind overload of Kratornas. All of this stuff is brilliant and fucked, the sort of damaged outsider black metal weirdness that we lust for constantly, and fellow fans of all things blackened and noisy and abstract should definitely check all of these titles out.

There's probably only a few of you who will recognize the name Meldhkwis, but in the annals of satanic French ambient/industrial music, he's become infamous for creating soul-crushing black dronescapes under the name Dapnom. With his roots in the French black metal scene, Dapnom's recordings are intensely evil and bleak, taking the otherworldy dread and misery that the Les Legiones Noires evoked and channeling it through the minimal orchestral aesthetic of dark ambient pioneers like Lustmord and Raison D'Etre. The result is some of the most hellish dark ambience of the early 21st century, and any fans of black ambience that haven't heard Dapnom yet should go directly to the collaborative double CD that Dapnom released with Melek-Tha pronto.

Aside from Dapnom, however, Meldhkwis keeps busy with a handful of other projects that even more obscure and underground, like the mysterious

Aymrev Erkroz Prevre. With Aymrev Erkroz Prevre, Meldhkwis strays from the severe isolationist evil of his main project and ventures into a murkier and more psychedelic territory. On this 2006 cassette, we're immersed in two half-hour long tracks, both untitled and each one taking up an entire side of the cassette. The sound is murky, everything indistinct and obscured by a thick, almost inpenetrable cloak of subterranean drone, but all around the vast Lustmordian drift there are ghostly strains of what might be distant orchestral strings, smears of backwards percussion and booming tympani echoing from far away, harrowing Goblin-esque strings, eerie synth tones and brief glimpses of demonic vocal utterances. Swells of heavy distorted riffage seep up from the earth, Sunn O)))-like blasts of detuned thunder that hover for a short time and then dissolve into the blackness. The whole experience is soaked with an oppressive nightmarish atmosphere, a soundtrack for black magic rites and midnight acid trips, those insistent drums bestowing a ritualistic energy to these fearsome murkscapes. Fantastic demonic ambience, highly recommended to fans of Kaniba, Black Seas Of Infinity, Melek-Tha, Sorc'henn, and Uno Actu.