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.
Silcharde is one of the more mysterious projects that I've discovered through Infernal Kommando. This French artist has released a couple of cassettes, two of which came out through Infernal Kommando, but information on who is behind this and where they are from is essentially nonexistant. The I Love...My Death cassette is the second from Silcharde on IK, and features eight tracks of extremely abstract black ambience and weird industrial minimalism that every once in a while mutates into a bizarre sort of industrial black noise. Most of these tracks drift slowly and quietly through fields of distant electric hum and clouds of tape hiss, the barely-there soundscapes laced with almost imperceptible pulses and subterranean tones that echo the across vast plains of nocturnal silence. The calm is shattered occasionally by the sounds of huge pieces of metal being dragged, or smashed, or otherwise abused, and delicate strains of fluctuating sinewaves and ghostly vocals drift like sonic spiderweb across the void. This strange, murky industrial ambience makes up most of I Love...My Death, and is similiar to a more minimal Aethenor or Alvars Orkester. But on one track in particular, the deep drones are strafed by what sounds like a tinny prehistoric drum machine that suddenly begins blasting relentlessly, a black metal style blastbeat that never changes, instead becoming a metronomic blast that tears through Silcharde's dreamy abyssal ambience until the track just dissolves at the end. There's more of that relentless blastbeating later on, but when it reappears it's all muted and softened, as if you are hearing it from miles and miles away, just a machine like rumbling echoing through the night while nearby lurks someone wailing and babbling at the bottom of an abandoned well. Weird. I saw someone somewhere compare this to Aghast, but those ladies were nowhere near as abstract and minimal as what Silcharde is doing; this is much closer in feel to the fucked black ambience of Reverorum Ib Malacht or Neuntoter Der Plage. Really strange abstract ambience, limited to 250 copies.