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.

The bulk of the cassettes that we got from Infernal Kommando are from that one man black metal project known as Zarach'Baal'Tharagh. I found out about Zarach'Baal'Tharagh after we picked up that collection of demos that At War With False Noise put out on cd a while back, and ever since then I've been looking for more of ZBT's utterly brain-damaged primitive black metal psychosis. The guy behind ZBT, Luc Mertz, has got to be one of the most prolific loner black metallers ever; according to Metal-archives.com, he's up to eighty demos as of this moment, with more surely on the way, and whats really wild is that so far everything that I've heard from this self-described " French master of bedroom black metal" has been amazing (and amazingly bizarre). This is exactly the sort of uber-fucked stumbling low-fi black metal mess that fans (like myself) of Furze, Striborg, Defuntos, Wormsblood, Alkerdeel, Raw Hatred and Tjolgtjar lust for.

This 2006 cassette is the 38th "demo' from this uber-cult French black metal project, and it's as damaged and inebraited as the rest of the Zarach'Baal'Tharagh catalog. A single song titled "Dementia" that stretches out for more than 46 minutes, recorded low fi and skuzzy, the primtive recording swamped in murky production and tape hiss, but underneath all of that skuzz is a constantly evolving black metal epic that moves from abstract out-of-tune black dirge to punky mid-paced thrash, sprawling filthy ambience and ripping psychedelic leads, with Zarach'Baal'Tharagh mastermind Luc Mertz unleashing his oddball mix of pterodactyl screams and gargling vocals over it all. It's as if there are twenty different songs in here all glommed together into a single stinking pile of brain-damaged bedroom black metal. The recording sounds like it was probably mostly improvised, and the music meanders from one part to another, but as messy and chaotic and whacked out as this most definitely is, the genius of Zarach'Baal'Tharagh also means that the riffs are killer, the atmosphere is truly diseased, and listening to this black-psych epic is like crawling through an infernal scrapyard of slow dreamlike dirge, messed-up psychedelic leads and vocals that almost sound like Gibby Haynes from Butthole Surfers at times, stumbling blackpunk hypnosis, vast pits of reverby vocal noise and overloaded FX, everything clouded by the murky low-fi production but when it slips into one of those blackened grooves, it's fucking awesome.