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.

Les Tourments De La Charogne is the first cassette from the mysterious French black-ambient artist Silcharde. Even more ambient and isolationist than the bizarre atmospherics of the follow-up I Love...My Death, the eight tracks on this cassette make up an disturbing descent into cavernous nocturnal drones where shimmery metallic textures float slowly through vast expanses of darkness, followed by ghoulish whispers and dying breaths that have been looped over and over again into new layers of creeped-out sound. At their quietest, the tracks on Les Tourments De La Charogne evoke the same sort of isolationist dread as artists like Lustmord and Lull while injecting the sound with their own aura of graveyard decay and gusts of rotten air that feel as if they are billowing through long-forgotten catacombs. Creepy as hell and bathed in murky electronic effects and a layer of tape hiss, the deep unsettling vibe is occasionally punctured by swells of cinematic synth drones, or clanking industrial rhythms that appear for just a brief moment before becoming swallowed up again by the suffocating blackness. This actually does remind me of some of Aghast's more minimal material, as well as the deep-creep black ambience of Neuntoter Der Plage and Reverorum ib Malacht. Limited to 250 copies.