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.

Here's the second cassette from Stigma Diabolicum, the satanic ritual industrial project of Luc Mertz (also known as the demented genius behind the French outsider bedroom black metal band Zarach'Baal'Tharagh), and it's once again a surreal, dreamlike drift through abstract industrial soundscapes and grinding subterranean ambience. As part two in the Terror Inside saga from 2005, this picks up where the first tape left off, featuring fifteen tracks that make up a single piece called "The Demented Man (ZLT Rules)". Just over forty minutes of hazy machine dread, distant voices drifting on black clouds of tape hiss and metallic percussion, urban noises melted into slow moving tidal forms, vague melodies rising out of the murk and forming into a shapeless miasma of distorted ambience, chaotic oscillator freakouts, far-off demonic roars, weird spaceship computer fx, creepy vibraphone melodies, ...it's equal parts isolationist dread a la Lustmord, grimy old-school industrial soundscape of the RRRecords school of thought, NWW weirdness, Abruptum-esque anguish, and the minimal avant-garde tomb-thrum of the more recent Havohej records. Totally fucked.