That double disc re-issue of Evanescence/Ellipsis that Earache out out at the end of '09 compelled me to dig up the rest of Scorn's Earache output so I could get them in the bins here at C-Blast; the earlier, heavier Scorn stuff is some of my favorite music from Mick Harris's long-running industrial dub project, and we've had a lot of our customers asking about the hard-to-find Scorn stuff ever since the reissue set was listed. Much of Scorn's early 90's catalog is out-of-print now, but I was able to get several of their albums, including the amazing Colossus, the Deliverance reissue, a few copies of the rare Gyral album, and the debut album Vae Solis, which has seemed to have slipped into obscurity in recent years. I hardly ever hear anyone talk about this particular album, which is surprising seeing as how it not only features the entire lineup of Napalm Death's a-side of Scum (Nic Bullen, Mick Harris, Justin Broadrick), but is also a crushing slab of post-Godflesh industrial dub metal that newer fans of Godflesh, Swans and Pitch Shifter should be going apeshit over. The rest of these albums are equally rad, if you're into this kind of dark, doom-laden industrial dub/trip-hop; along with Painkiller/Bill Laswell, Techno Animal and Ice, Scorn was one of the most fearsome practitioners of post-industrial dub in the 90's, fusing grim electronic ambience with dub-heavy break beats and spacey effects. All of these discs are big favorites of mine.

1995's Gyral was the first with Mick Harris as the sole member following the departure of Nic Bullen, and the sound is appropriately sparse and skeletal, a reductionist version of the band's previous industrial dub sound. The pounding languid break beats are wound into looping circular mantras that anchor the dark, ominous ambient drift and electronic ether that float by, sonar pings and fragments of piano echoing through the shadows, percussive samples locked into air-tight tick-tock grooves, snares popping and leaving incandescent tracers dissolving against the blackness, the speaker-rattling bass coiling almost subliminally in the background. The whole atmosphere of Gyral is dreamlike and ambient, not quite as apocalyptic as releases like Deliverance, but definitely still quite sinister and bleak, with none of the vocals that were so prominent on prior albums. Eight tracks: "Six Hours One Week", "Time Went Slow", "Far In Out", "Stairway", "Forever Turning", "Black Box", "Hush", "Trondheim - G�vle". Gyral is an engrossing slab of industrial trip-hop/dark ambient dub, one of Harris's most hypnotic and heavy-lidded albums, and another personal favorite of mine from Scorn. SUPER LIMITED, I was only able to get a couple of copies of this album as it appears to have gone out of print, so move quick if you want to pick this up!