Somewhat modeled after the legendary French black metal collective LLN, the small n' obscure Les Ap�tres De l'Ignominie (or "Apostles of Ignominy") circle is made up of a triad of strange Satanic black metal bands that include Darvulia and Malhkebre alongside a shadowy doom metal band called Sektarism. I'm a big fan of all of these bands, but out of all of them, Sektarism is easily the most fucked-up sounding of the lot. A couple of years ago, I listed a Cd release from Sektarism called L'Offrande, which featured one long song of stumbling, shambling doom that was swept up in a murky basement atmosphere of drunken Satanic ritual and hateful ravings, with a really low-fi and noisy recording that was maybe a step or two above 4-track quality, and with so much rumbling feedback and dissonant guitar noise that I described that recording as a weird combination of blackened ritualistic doom in the vein of Trees and Bloody Panda, and the most destroyed, distorted moments of Fushitsusha's Path�tique as filtered through the rotting skull-meat of a French opium addict. Sounds pretty great, right? That Ep won me over immediately, but it wasn't until just a few weeks ago that I came upon the other two releases that Sektarism had put out in the wake of L'Offrande. Only released on cassette by the equally mysterious new imprint Zanjeer Zani Production, the professionally assembled and printed Le Testament and Hosanna Sathana tapes just came out last year (2011), and each follows the same route as the first Ep: a long, sprawling blackened garage-doom jam that wanders drunkenly through an extremely low-fi haze of extreme misanthropic hatred, narcotics, noisy primitive doom, and shrieking Satanic flesh-lust. If you are one of the few that have already fallen under the black spell of Sektarism's shambling, seemingly improvised sludge, these more recent recordings are essential.

Hosanna Sathana is the second Sektarism tape, and again, it's one long, nearly half-hour track that grabs huge fistfuls of blasphemous imagery and Satanic vomit and smears it all against a backdrop of stumbling, low-fi doom metal. And again, it's raw as hell, the meandering and formless drug-damaged Satanic garage doom shrouded in room hiss and ambient murk. The song starts off with chugging Frostian riffs and droning murky chords rumbling amid buzzing spacious ambient room sounds as the drummer plows ahead, seemingly improvising at times as the band chugs through spacious droning sludge and primitive doom metal. Eklezjas'Tik Berzerk's unintelligible mewling shrieks and moans rise out of the background, reciting strange French lyrics that celebrating death-worship, disease and Satanism, constantly shift from ecstatic chanting to bizarre possessed mewling to guttural, orgasmic barking as the rest of the band wanders in and out of strange psychedelic jamming. The riffs collapsing into billowing clouds of effects and feedback, the bass droning incessantly and often circling endlessly on simple hypnotic grooves while the drummer drifts into lots of jazzy fills and improvised rhythm changes. To me, "Hosanna Sathana" seems more abstract and droning than the other Sektraism tapes, with more forays into long stretches of rumbling amp-drone and feedback hum, and at times taps into a similar exploratory vibe as Spanish avant-doom metallers Orthodox, albeit one that is far more wretched and diseased sounding...

Released in a limited edition of ninety-nine copies.