Cult classic slab of early 90's death-dub/avant-grind/charnel ambient from this mighty trio, released on vinyl for the first time ever. Issued as a double LP on 180 gram wax limited to five hundred copies, and packaged with a printed insert and digital download, this reissue only features four of the five tracks on the record ("Parish Of Tama (Ossuary Dub)", "Morning Of Balachaturdasi", "Pashupatinath Ambient", "Parish Of Tama Ambient") due to space limitations, but that other track "Pashupatinath" is included in the complete digital download that accompanies the album. Even in this slightly truncated/edited form, Execution Ground is a real blast-beast, a highly influential piece of work whose reverberations can be heard in everything from Yakuza and Old Man Gloom to whole swaths of the Southern Lord catalog.

      Here's our old write-up for the album from the first time we picked it up:

      Within the realm of wall-busting, form-exploding extreme music, Painkiller were one of the most intense, most insane bands to sully the waters of avant-garde heaviness. They're one of those bands that I often find myself recommending to anyone I know with a taste for truly extreme music. Painkiller's stuff is that crucial. First appearing around 1991, the trio was made up of three of the biggest names in underground extremism at the time: you had John Zorn, already part of the foundation of the downtown NYC avant music scene and fresh off of plundering death metal and hardcore in his pan-genre ensemble Naked City; bassist and shit-hot producer Bill Laswell; and percussive maniac Mick Harris, who had arguably invented grindcore just a few years earlier with his band Napalm Death. This original version of the band only existed for about three years, recording all of their studio material between 1991 and 1994; it started off with the Guts Of A Virgin and Buried Secrets EPs, followed by the groundbreaking Execution Ground double album that was released on Laswell's own Subharmonic imprint.

      The group's aim was ambitious, seeking to fuse together dark dub and ambient music with grindcore, hardcore, and jazz in a completely improvisational setting; the whole notion born of Zorn's heightening obsession with the sounds of the nascent death metal and grindcore underground chronicled by Earache in the late 1980's, and the correlations that he was making between that burgeoning extreme metal scene and the freedom and ferocity of the 60's free jazz scene that inspired much of Zorn's sax playing. The result was fucking explosive. Painkiller was a bold new mutant entity, no clumsy conglom of styles, a genius bomb-blast of menacing dub snaking through volleys of screaming free jazz and the machine gun fire of Harris's blastbeats. It managed to sound heavy and alien and utterly evil at times, and what Painkiller were doing in the early 90s would end up having a massive influence on pretty much any band that followed who pursued the energies of both jazz and metal.

      That original Painkiller trio peaked with 1994's Execution Ground. Originally released as a double disc set on Subharmonic, Execution Ground is generally considered to be Painkiller's defining moment, a perfect fusion of the brutal thrash/free jazz and the dark dub sides of the group's sound. The first half (titled Execution Ground) features three long improvisational pieces that explore the trio's use of heavy dub and free jazz in an extended setting. The second disc, referred to as Ambient, takes two of those earlier tracks and completely mutates them, transforming them into vast, sprawling slabs of blackened, dubbed out ambient sound streaked with throat-singing like vocal drones, bleating sax, and unearthly flutterings. It's as crushing and ominous a blast of icy black isolationist drift as you would expect to hear from the likes of Scorn or Lull or Lustmord, but laced with a nightmare spookshow jazziness that elevates it to a uniquely desolate realm.