We totally fell onto these guys by accident, discovering this handmade double-disc set after hooking up with Japanese noise label Dotsmart to grab some of their new JESUS OF NAZARETH CD. Self-described "bizarre hobby violent music group" ABISYEIKAH are an ultra enigmatic duo dealing in high-power psychedelic noisecore violence and insane/stoopid electronics/soundbite meltdowns. Jiyuumo Kattemo Onajida Nandemo Iikara Yacchimae! is a double CD-R set, with the first disc filled to the gills with 99 tracks of Japanese pop culture soundbite loops, stoned and stumbling casio-pop jams, hideous lo-fi noisecore with retarded vocals, like a FEAR OF GOD/ANAL CUNT hybrid fronted by Yamatsuka Eye, sliced with paint-peeling electronic noise and dance music...along with fucked up/drug damaged sludgy breakbeats and zonked techno, beyond-gutteral toilet-bowl-monster vocal psychedelia, beatboxing, squeaky electro-acoustic fuckery,childlike babbling, and loads more. Totally nuts. The second disc is even more abusive harsh noise mixed with mongoloid beats, chainsaw noisegrind eruptions, vomiting phone pranks, braindamaged rapping, and skull rupturing blast spread across 99 tracks. Insane shit, with nary a moments peace to be found in this 2 hour-plus scum marathon. The packaging is handmade and killer, a full color double-disc digisleeve gatefold thing with some crazed group pics.

2008's Absolute Magnitude is the latest album from the reunited Japanese noise/improv/industrial/rock duo Absolut Null Punkt, which features drummer Seijiro Murayama (who used to play in Fushitsusha back in the late 80's) and KK Null (from Zeni Geva, natch) teaming up for another go-round of blistering freeform noise blat. Some of the older ANP albums like Ultrasonic Action treaded closer to a kind of industrial thud-rock similar to that of Zeni Geva and Swans, but the recent ANP albums have gotten progressively more abstract and noisy, and WAY more psychedelic. Which is ace by me. Absolute Magnitude doesn't really have anything that I'd describe as a riff, and the duo certainly don't come near the crushing angular noise-metal of Zeni Geva, but Null's guitars do get pretty damn extreme on this disc, spewing out thick jets of howling, bleeping, soaring effects-blasted guitar noise that sound more like the sort of stuff you'd hear on one of his solo albums, only here it's backed by the propulsive drumming of Murayama, whose rhythms often slip into a killer hypnotic throb that turns some of this stuff into a sort of super-abstract computer-battle krautrock. On the other hand, the second track explodes into full-on chaos, Murayama bashing and skittering crazed anti-rhythms and clanging industrial percussion that smashes headon into Null's distorted, mangled spaceship FX. Gets pretty heavy, in fact.

The first track starts off with a six minute splatterfest of pounding, tear-down-the-walls improv drumming, dense squalls of harsh industrial noise rushing in from opposing directions, and bits of jacked-up synth squiggle and raygun photon blasts zipping around all over the place; all of that electronic

blat and Null's thoroughly mangled guitar skronk suggests the crazy spaceship chaos-scapes of his noisier solo stuff, but melded with a furious, almost free-jazz-style percussive assault. But when it hits the midway point, everything drops out except for a smattering of random bleating electronic noises, and then the band rebuilds the track slowly into a throbbing, pulsating sci-fi krautrock jam, the drums pulsating beneath robotic synths and streaking high-end effects, and it gets pretty dense and hypnotic as the band rides this noisy, psychedelic groove to the end.

But track two is way more abstract, a sprawling soundscape littered with busy tribal free-drumming that percolates in a haze of damaged synth noise, wheezy digital glitch, Null's weirdly processed guitar that he somehow manages to turn into a screaming sax-like bleat, stretches of spatial percussion and random sounds, and Moog-y synth arpeggios. And the third track essentially combines all of the elements that came before into a massive thirty minute jam that takes you from Nullsonic brand starship bleep to super-distorted industrial/free improv dirge to furious blasts of way-out guitar skronk and hammering drumbeats, wandering in and out of more of those wicked overdriven synth/drums workouts with wild looping prog-style arpeggios that circle around Murayama's treated drumming.

Comes in a full color digipack.

Punishing early-90's re-issue that collects the entire Ultrasonic LP and two tracks off of the Ultima Action LP from K.K. Null's pre-ZENI GEVA noise rock monster, originally released in the late 1980's and remastered onto one 68 minute disc. ABSOLUT NULL PUNKT's jams were recorded way back in 1986/1987 in Japan, and even after 20 years, this is still a SKULLCRUSHING series of death improv beatings. Consisting of a spare bass/drums/guitar trio (featuring drummer Seijiro Murayama, who was also the original drummer for Keiji Haino's Fushitsusha ), Ultrasonic Action delves into a combination of free improvised rock, caustic, feedback saturated punk slop, and plodding dirge that recalls early Swans, accompanied by primitive percussion and Null's terrifying death howls ...sort of an industrialized improv take on freeform sludge rock, but definitely much more fucked up than that delivered by Zeni Geva. Definitely paints a picture of what K.K. Null would go on to create with Zeni Geva and his other, later projects. Excellent, completely abrasive and ear shredding atonal rock destruction. Released on Zeni Geva's Nux Organization imprint.

Angel'in Heavy Syrup are four women from the land o' the rising sun who play like a bizarre cross between the Cocteau Twin s and the Butthole Surfers in the bathroom of a jazz lounge in Osaka. Sorta. Angel'in Heavy Syrup -- one of Japan's finest psychedelic rock bands ( and possibly one of the best bands of any kind in the world) -- return with a full-length album of all new material. The current lineup consists of vocalist/bassist Mineko Itakura and guitarist Mine Nakao, both of whom have appeared on all of the band's albums, and guitarist Fusao Toda, who joined the band in time for the second album. Naoko Otani provided drums on the album. This all-girl trio lays down some heavy duty, riffalicious, totally mesmerizing underground psychedelic rock bliss with GORGEOUS ethereal female vocals and a distinct Japanese delivery. Hands down, one of our ALL TIME favorite albums ever!!!! So, you wonder, what do they sound like? Well, that's a good question... describing them is easier said than done. Take the aforementioned psych bands of the flower-power era, mix in a large dose of folk juju, sprinkle on a smidge of free jazz, then season liberally with influences like the Butthole Surfers, John Coltrane, and various noise artists. Garnish with unexpected time changes, odd meters, impeccable technical skill (Fusao and Mine could play rings around nearly all the "hot" guitarists in American and European circles, and Mineko is not only an amazing bassist but one of finest singers in Japan) and lots of exotic-looking flowers.

Angel'in Heavy Syrup were formed in Osaka, Japan in 1990, and they are possibly the greatest band in the world. On their psychedelic side they are nfluenced by the likes of Gong, 50 Foot Hose, and Amon Duul, but they are definitely influenced by more recent, noisy contemporaries such as Hijokaidan and Masonna as well. Morita Doji, a Japanese pop-folk singer of the 70s and 80s, has also had a big impact upon them. Now defunct out-music label Monotremata Records (one of the great underrated labels of the last few years) graciously made this album domestically available in conjunction with the album's simultaneous release in Japan by legendary avant-garde label Alchemy Records. From the first blast of reverb-heavy psychedelic noise at the beginning of "First Love" to the fading burst of Echoplex that closes "Fate," the six lengthy songs on this album rank among the band's best work. All three of the musicians are in fine form here, with strong songs and stellar playing making this one of their best releases to date. To top it off, the deluxe packaging of the CD (with a sixteen-page booklet and artwork by Masahiko Ohno, guitarist of Solmania and Alchemy's lead designer) make this a highly attractive release - and for the first time, the band's lyrics are printed in English.

A double compact disc boxset of heavy analog synthesizer powerdrones and space noise. This collaborative project between Damion Romero of 90's "power-acoustic" outfit Speculum Fight and P-Tapes, and Hiroshi Hasegawa of Astro/C.C.C.C./Mortal Vision recorded between 1995 and 2005, and their entire output is all gathered together in this swank box set. Romero and Hasegawa collaborated live, in studio, and through the mail during this time, creating extended explorations into the psychedelic power of vintage analogue synthesizers. taking cues from the psychedelic black hole electronics of C.C.C.C., who were considered the Hawkwind of Japanese noise. But Astromero is definitely a force unto itself, as these guys create skullbending assaults of UFO liftoff and circuit hum, colored green and black in the purring shadow of a gigantic, monolithic refridgerator erected on earth by some eldritch race. Pulsing drones and crackling black-lightning rhythms throb in a manner reminiscent of Kluster, Faust, and Conrad Schnitzler. The first disc features studio/mail collaborative material,including guest spots from L.A. Free Music Society member/Keiji Haino collaborator Rick Potts and C.C.C.C. member and Mason Jones collaborator Miyuko Hino...and the second disc is compiled from two live synchronised performances in 2002 in Tokyo that ends in the gnashing jaws of an apocalyptic bass loop. Ten years of powerdrone/electro psych blast conceptualism capsuled in a molded metal tin with glossy color insert folder, and sealed with a printed label. It comes together as a killer, fully satisfying compendium of imaginative Japanese drone/noise and electronic psychedelia. Limited to only 500 copies.

Wow...this is a massive triple CD boxset that collects recordings of all four of Astromero's live performances from their 2006 U.S. tour, fully documenting their earth-shaking sets in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland and Brooklyn. The duo of Hiroshi Hasegawa (also of legendary Japanese psych-noise band C.C.C.C. and South Saturn Delta) and Damion Romero (formerly of Speculum Fight and head of the P-Tapes label) have been far from prolific, with the self-titled double CD set on Troniks from 2005 collecting their only studio recordings, so this hefty set is a must for any fans of Astromero's crushing space-noise. The duo originally existed between 1995 and 2005 as an offshoot of Hasegawa's post-C.C.C.C. project Astro, where he further explored the transcendental power of distorted analog synthesizers. When Hasegawa teamed up with Romero in the early 90's, the two of them collaborated both through sending recordings back and forth through the mail and eventually meeting up in person. The result is some of the heaviest synthesizer-based freeform drone noise ever, a combination of the ultra-low-end synth throb heaviness that Romero had experimented with in his own work, and the sweeping cosmic electronics of Hasegawa's music that came out sounding like someone took only the crazy electronic sounds from Hawkwind's Space Ritual, made them one hundred times denser and heavier, and played back the psychedelic synth sounds at skull-shattering levels of volume and distortion.

It wasn't until 2006 that folks over here in the U.S. would finally get a chance to witness the power of Astromero. The four-date tour was centered around a performance at the No Fun Fest in Brooklyn, NY in March of 2006, and a trio of West Coast dates were included in the itinerary. This set captures every one of these performances, with the first disc featuring the Los Angeles and San Francisco sets, the second disc featuring two seperate shows that took place in Oakland, California, and the third disc capturing the monolithic performance at No Fun. Each performance typically runs from 20-40 minutes, and erupts with huge showers of heavily distorted synth buzz and crunching, crushing low-end frequencies that sometimes reach Earth 2 levels of ambient heaviness, over top of which the two musicians unleash all manner of squiggly analogue signals and swooping oscillator noise, deep-space blips and bleeps, sounds that could be swarms of intergalactic battle angels singing in choir, and fluctuating sinewaves that make my heart shudder. Every one of these performances is epic and unbelievably loud, and totally improvised, and in spite of that fact this never sounds like the kind of chaotic earblow skree that people usually associate with Japanese noise. Astromero are on a totally different level, forging crushing, almost overwhelming but totally engaging slabs of trippy, psychedelic formlessness. Highly recommended to anyone into Astro and/or C.C.C.C. and psychedelic, brain-melting cosmic drone noise.

Troniks packaged this three-CD set in a huge jewel box with a cool, minimal design on the outside that focuses on the set's track listing and Astromero's logo, and on the inside it has photos of interstellar oceans of stars burning through the night sky, and an eight-page booklet with track notes, show details, and photos from each of the performances.

���� A rare 2005 release from one of Japan's most respected experimental sound artists, Aube's Metalive showcases a pair of complete live sets along with a shorter excerpt from a third performance, packing this disc out with over sixty-five minutes of evocative, expressionistic noise. Using the amplified and mutated sounds of banal, everyday objects, Aube creates massive, often terrifying noisescapes that become incredibly dense and overpowering. Visceral and textural, his stuff is some of the best stuff to come out of the Japanese noise underground.

���� The first full live set on this disc is from a 1997 performance in Germany that finds Aube slowly building a vast dronescape, starting off with the barest of peripheral hum, but then stretching and layering this minimalist pulse with streaks of flinty feedback and soft electronic tones. He gradually incorporates clusters of clattering metallic noise and high-pitched sinewaves into the soundfield, allowing mesmeric, almost subliminal rhythms to form from the feedback process, rumbling rattling loops materializing from within roiling waves of black static, building to a tense, almost threatening atmosphere that charges the air across the second half of the track as ghostly thumps and sinister distorted throb continues to slip in and out of focus. Impressive and ominous work.

���� The other full set comes from a 1998 performance at Yamamura Salon in Ashiya, Japan; much like the previous track, Nakajima starts this off with a soft, minimal hum that becomes the springboard for a larger and more layered noisescape. Rhythmic fluttering and soft pulses of muted feedback slowly spread out across the set, rising and falling in intensity as it gives way to a series of bathyspheric sonar-like pings and luminous drones. More minimal and mesmerizing, the set is flecked with lots of interesting tonal artifacts and hushed rhythmic movement, even slipping into sections of spare, almost technoid throb and miniature symphonies of clanging metal.

���� That looping, rhythmic feel carries over to the final eight minute track, recorded in Germany in 1998; fragile, vaguely sinister sounding loops whirr in the darkness beneath gently wavering feedback drones on this one, finishing off the disc with it's eeriest piece of music, a somewhat spooky dronescape that's further layered with more forceful metallic rattlings and a prayer-bowl like resonance that in the end graces the performance with a strange, vaguely ritualistic atmosphere.

���� Issued in a limited edition of one thousand copies, Metalive comes in a clamshell case with full color artwork.

The Japanese sound designer Aube (Akifumi Nakajima) has become legendary for this extensive body of work that centers around extremely detailed noise tapestries that are created by manipulating and mutating a single sound element; past releases have seen him using everything from recordings of water to a single voice to the sound of pages being torn from the Bible, and each work is a dense, detailed collage of sound that might range from sublime drone to brutally harsh slabs of noise. This two song EP was released by AufAbwegen for Aube's Spring 2007 tour of Europe, and both of the six-minute pieces presented here are created from an old Roland SH-12 percussive synthesizer. The first track "Blau" is a sizzling aquatic dronescape, filled with bubbling electronic noises and metallic drones. The other side, "Rot", is more aggressive though, opening with harsh squelchy blats of distortion and an increasingly chaotic stream of squiggly, glitchy electronics. On clear vinyl in a full color sleeve, and limited to 500 copies.

Japanese sound artist Akifumi Nakajima has become well known in the avant-noise scene for his manipulated soundscapes created under the name Aube. Since the early 90's, Aube has focused it's aesthetic on taking a specific sound source, often recordings of water or electric lights and similiar mundane sources, and reshaping the sounds into an unrecognizeable ambient soundscape. Aube's more recent output has tended to lean towards calmer, more meditative realms of sculpted sound, but if you dig back into his earliest work, you'll find recordings of impossibly dense, chaotic noise that is just as brain-melting as what his peers in Masonna, Merzbow, C.C.C.C., Pain Jerk and Incapacitants were doing. The Purification To Numbness full length was recorded in 1994 and was released as part of the Pure series on RRRecords, and breaks away from the processed recordings of water that Aube was beginning to experiment with around this time. Instead, the three massive tracks that comprise the album ("Elementary Particle", "Purification To Numbness", "Ele-Mentally-Particle") are monolithic, twenty-plus minute meltdowns of psychedelic industrial noise. Some of this is comparable to the psych/space blastnoise of C.C.C.C. as Aube erects a similiarly massive wall of roaring distortion that is splattered with an endless onslaught of trippy electronic fx and weird almost musical loops spiralling into the mouth of the storm, but then there are the swarms of honking brass-like tones that descend like armies of free jazz players, frothing at the mouth and doing battle with an enemy armada of spaceships from Galaga. It's quite a trip. Admittedly, there are a bunch of Aube recordings that I haven't laid my ears on yet so my working knowledge of his output is somewhat limited, but geezus if this isn't the most brutal, coked-up galactic

noise assault that I've ever heard from Aube, and that third track especially is some kind of immolating jazz/electronic black hole. Fans of hard-edged Japanese noise gotta hear this. Packaged in a plastic sleeve with xerox-damaged paper covers in the messy RRRecords stylee.

��� Released in 2002 by Manifold Records, Aube's Howling Obsession is one of the more menacing recordings to come from Akifumi Nakajima's long-running experimental noise project. Like most Aube releases, this focuses on a single sound source that Nakajima proceeds to manipulate and expand into a wider array of sounds, here crafting a black soundworld using only a small speaker to generate his noises, the black cone of his speaker transformed into a gateway into a dark chromium universe. The four main studio tracks that make up Howling Obsession were originally intended for a cassette release on an ill-fated US label that never materialized, and were revised and re-mastered for this proper release through Manifold, supplemented by a sprawling live track.

��� Nakajima produces some stunning droneworks on Howling Obsession using just that single speaker; the title track is an intense piece of deadzone soundscapery, an eighteen minute sprawl that starts out with just the muted buzz of an electrical current, a deep, almost subliminal pulse felt more than heard as it slowly fades into view. It slowly expands into a mesmeric static tone-prayer, gradually joined by layers of piercing high-frequency feedback that swell in volume, somewhat comparable to the minimalist nihilistic noise experiments of Italian artist N., but more meditative, focusing on the soft fluttering movement of the speakerbuzz as he gently manipulates his sound across the length of the track. It's disrupted by Nakajima's volleys of scrapes and rattling noises, created by running the speaker noise through a variety of effects processing, drawing back to the sound of distant thunder before surging back into a storm of chittering distortion, an insectile swarm of crackling noise that proceeds to spread out into a textural field of black static somewhat akin to some of The Rita's more subdued recordings. The other three studio tracks that follow range from brief feedback mantras that stretch rhythmic noises across a black void ("Replicate") and surreal soundscapes populated with malformed mechanical loops, spurts of acrid distortion and searingly abrasive locustblast electronics that reach Bastard Noise-style levels of sonic violence ("M.O.L."), to the ghostly, over-modulated chrome-wet drones and asthmatic industrial throb that dominates "Ex-Terminal". All in all, it's some of the bleakest material I've heard from Aube, and rather captivating.

��� You can hear some elements of the previous tracks in his live performance of "Howling Obsession" from 1997 that closes the disc. At first this twenty-four minute performance goes much darker and creepier, a hushed dronescape of delicate feedback streaks burning out against the black aural backdrop, deep speaker rumblings rising and falling across the length of the track, punctuated by some seriously tinnitus-inducing high end feedback. But later on, the set develops into a more pugilistic din of harsh noise, erupting into blasts of garbled 8-bit chipviolence. An intense enough experience just listening to this track on the album, I can only imagine what it was like to be there in the flesh as Nakajima coaxed these monstrous sounds from his equipment.

Decimation Cycle is another older Bastard Noise 7" that recently resurfaced through one of our suppliers, apparently unearthed from somewhere in the depths of Eric Wood's closet. I never had the chance to pick this up when it first came out way back in 2002 on Japanese label Utsu Tapes (run by Guilty Connector's Kohei Nakagawa), and it's been out of print from the label for years, so BN-freaks who've been hunting for this record should probably move quick if they want to get their hands on this. The two-song EP was part of an ongoing line of collaborations between Man Is The Bastard offshoot Bastard Noise and Japanese noise outfit Guilty Connector, a partnership born of a similar sonic aesthetic and attitude that has resulted in a number of recordings; this is definitely one of the more aggressive collabs that the team produced, both sides radiating some pretty vicious electronic hatred.

Each track is a roughly five minute long maelstrom of frenzied oscillator abuse and extreme electronic noise, roaring distorted static and caustic high-end skree all bleeding together into a mind-melting blast of abstract sonic violence. This definitely finds itself firmly footed in Bastard Noise's signature brand of psychedelic locust-blast electronics and lysergic effects-chaos on the first track "In The Face Of So Vast A Threat", which relentlessly scratches at your cranium with its torrent of sputtering, shrieking noise. But on the second side, the title track shifts into a much more evil sound, with Wood shrieking his horrific visions of apocalyptic extinction over a low, chirping noisescape, this creepy atmosphere punctuated with sudden blasts of extreme glitch, crazed synth squelch and waves of rumbling low-end frequencies that transform this track into a kind of toxic, monstrous power electronics.

   Though it looks like it might be awhile before we get another album of the sort of crushing, alien prog that Bastard Noise has been doing lately in full band mode, we can still count on BN mastermind Eric Wood to keep feeding us his more straightforward electronic assaults, which almost always blast my skull away. Even better is when we get some new Bastard Noise stuff where he's teamed up with legends of Japanese noise; this recent 7" threatens deafness with not only an a-side that has Wood teamed up with Hiroshi Hasegawa of cosmic noise gods C.C.C.C., but also a punishing blast of galactic horror from his collaboration with the mighty Government Alpha, delivering two sides of pro-Earth, anti-human technological devastation.

    BN's track with Hiroshi Hasegawa sweeps across the first side with a skull-melting blast of electronic noise, the squealing, violent frequencies cut-up amid snippets of absolutely desolate ambient drift and garbled circuitry. Crank this side up to maximum volume, and it's fucking terrifying, those stray motes of deep-space drift and half-glimpsed melody that surface throughout the track only serving to exacerbate the nightmarish vibe. When Wood eventually unleashes his inhuman screams later in the track, it's a choir of agonized shrieks and monstrous guttural rumblings that rise over waves of distorted feedback and whirring, insectile electronics. It's one of the most nightmarish sounding things I've heard from Bastard Noise lately, like some fragmented S.O.S. transmission beamed back to us from the bowels of Hell.

    The Government Alpha collaboration "A Diabolical Journey" offers a slightly more subdued dose of cosmic death. Wood continues to bellow and belch his misanthropic fumes, but those glottal, death metal-esque detonations are smeared over a more ambient expanse of sound, swells of minimal drift rising and falling between bits of almost orchestral drone and peals of distant metallic agony. It's like some strange cinematic version of a power electronics assault, the harsher sounds melted down and poured across distant gleaming vistas, the track only beginning to squirm out into more tortured forms towards the end as the artists finally unleash the full fury of their oscillators and effects units, bathing the final moments of the record in a horrific, irradiated glow.

    Comes in some really nice (if slightly labor-intensive) packaging, the olive-green vinyl packaged inside of a sealed, printed vellum envelope.

���� Recently nabbed a bunch of old, rare, out-of-print Bastard Noise / Man Is The Bastard-related stuff, all of it new, but apparently hidden away in one of the darker corners of one of our distributor's warehouse. One of 'em is this long-gone 7" that came out on legendary punk label Alternative Tentacles back in 1999; featuring one track each from Man is The Bastard's electronic noise offshoot Bastard Noise, and Japanese harsh electronics terrorizer Pain Jerk, as well as a collaboration between the two on the b-side, this is probably one of the most abrasive things that ever came out on ol' Alt Tentacles. It's pretty ferocious, Pain Jerk kicking things off with a brutal blast of psychedelic electronic noise on "Face Down In A Pool Of Piss" that unleashes some serious distortion-pedal abuse, and then followed by the stretches of subdued insectile chitter and mesmeric celestial pulses that make up Bastard Noise's "I.M.F. Secrets" that rounds out the rest of the side.

���� The main draw, though, is the collaboration track "Imminent Economic Collapse". Here, the two noise artists deliver a longer, more mind-melting dose of trippy analogue synth noise and violent frequency sweeps, all set against grinding electronic drones and churning clouds of grainy shortwave static. Anyone familiar with both artists will be able to pick out their various signature moves in this chaos, but they mesh together really well, which would be just one of several collaborative experiments that the two projects would engage in over the years. And it's pretty goddamn heavy, too, once BN's Eric Wood finally starts bellowing his barbaric caveman grunts over the track's onslaught of apeshit oscillators and rapid mechanical judder. Brutal. As with all of these other rare Bastard Noise records we picked up, quantities are extremely limited.

Prepare for a descent into death-dub delirium! Just seeing that this new Japanese band featured the duo of Chew (vocalist for legendary sludge metallers Corrupted) and Kohei Nakagawa (the guy behind the longrunning extreme noise outfit Guilty Connector) was enough to make me want to pick up this self-titled debut, but this ended up being even better than expected. These six songs are formed out of an immensely bleak brand of slow-motion, industrial-tinged heaviness, focused around spare, echoing drums that creep and shuffle through a vast, dark expanse, that almost dubby percussion moving beneath encroaching waves of crushing detuned drone and streaked with bits of trippy electrnic noise. The opener "Brainwashing" alost resembles an especially doom-laden Scorn track, or perhaps something from Necro Deathmort, all slow-mo snare hits and erchoing kick drum, draped in murk and reverb, the sound of a doom metal drummer playing solo in some isolated cave chamber. AS the album moves through each subsequent track, however (the whole album seems to be essentially a single piece of music), the sound grows more frenzied and noisy, those drums becoming lost in gales of shrieking electronics and crushing low-end diostortion, and halfway in all you can make out are the violently crashing cymbals swept up in a hurricane of noise. The second half re-emerges into a much more psychedelic space, though, as swarms of frenzied tape delay effects and garbled glitchy electronics take over, joined by even slower and mor stretched out drumming, shrieking feedback and controlled blasts of distortion, contrasting space and stillness with those bursts of abrasive sound and echoing percusive skitter to lead the rest of the album into a spaced-out, utterly desolate sprawl of ashen doom-dub, desaturated isolationist ambience and ghostly electro-acoustic creepiness, a whirring, clanking, echoing nightmare that at times resembles some doom outfit channeling Lee Perry in the shadows of the world of Eraserhead.

Pulvering sludge metal from Japan combined with traditional Japanese instruments and music? That sounded like a combo that needed to be checked out, and

I'm glad I did - this CD from 2002 is one of the more interesting psych-metal imports that I've gotten in at the Blast recently, a two song, twenty minute

mini-album released by the amazing Japanese label S.M.D. (who I worked with last year in regards to their Japanese release of the Grey Daturas Dead In

The Woods album), who have also hooked us up with the crushing Shinsho album from Ryokuchi. Birushanah originally started in Osaka in 2002 with

bassist Sougyo and members of the Aussie sludgecore band Dad They Broke Me who were staying in Japan at the time; the members of DTBM would leave the band

shortly after, but not before recording this two song debut that also featured Corrupted's Shibata on fretless bass.

The two songs on Touta ("Shoketsu" and "Ikei") are certainly something different. The opener "Shoketsu" starts off with a lone bass guitar playing

a heavy dark Japanese-sounding melody using that sort of traditional, atonal scale, and it becomes joined by deep wordless chanting, minimal percussion and

the deep buzz of a didgeridoo. But then five minutes in, that hymnlike processional suddenly explodes into crushing, sludgy dirge metal, a huge hypnotic

riff, angular and convoluted grinding over and over above two percussionists, one playing a regular drumkit and pounding out a steady stream of pummeling,

complex beats, the other playing some kind of found-junk-metal percussive set and smashing out these clanking steel-pipe rhythms a la Trephine in tandem with

the drummer! Monstrously heavy and chaotic, it's like hearing a mathier Neurosis if the members were actually Japanese warrior-monks. Then comes "Ikei", and

once again it begins with a more traditional style of music, an awesome droning Japanese psych jam, the digeridoo again buzzing away but now it's joined by

all kinds of Japanese percussion and Japanese folk instruments, super catchy and trippy but HUGE sounding, coming to an ecstatic close as every instrument in

the room gets cranked to eleven in a mass of sound, and then the band suddenly lurches forward into a grisly stuttering stop and go riff, manic drumming

kicking up a storm as the detuned guitars and fretless bass lock horns in twisted sludgy riffage, weaving back and forth over an increasinly weirder song

strucure. Then they start breaking off into these frenzied math metal breakdowns that remind me of Dazzling Killmen, and alternate those chaotic fretboard

freakouts with brutal angular sludge with more of that awesome junk metal percussion and grinding drumming pushing everything forward in vicious starts.

Birushanah's brand of psychedelic math sludge is pretty damn amazing, and definitely VERY crushing, and with their being a new album coming soon from the

band on Level Plane and apparently some US touring in the works, I'm betting that these guys are going to get huge. Pretty essential for anyone that is an

equal fan of Zeni Geva and Neurosis!

If the Birushanah album Touta hadn't been an older title that we just happened to pick up for the first time from the Japanese label run by one

of the band's members, it would have been a shoe-in for our Featured Release this week. As soon as I heard that album, this Japanese band immediately became

one of my new favorite bands, seemingly custom-made for my lust for demented metal with their bizarre, exotic fusion of traditional Japanese music and

planet-crushing industrial avant doom. When it rains it pours, and I just found out that Level Plane just released a brand new album from Birushanah this

month titled Akai Yama, and it's even more freaked out and brutally percussive and bizarre as their previous album, a devestating slab of insanely

complex polyrhythmic math doom with awesome psychotic vocals and THREE DRUMMERS and contorted angular riffage that will fold your frontal lobe over onto

itself. An unchallenged album of the week and one of thee best heavy albums of the year, no doubt!

Hailing from Osaka, Japan, Birushanah started in 2002 and featured members of the Aussie deathsludge band Dad They Broke Me, and would also later have

former Corrupted/Tetsuo bassist Shibata in their ranks. When you listen to Birushanah, you can hear the raw matter of their doom/sludge roots, but as the

band evolved and brought in metal percussion and Japanese percussion alongside the regular drums and incorporated traditional Japanese scales in their music,

the band's sound has become more and more alien sounding. And yeah, I said that Birushanah have three drummers, or percussionists to be more

precise; they have one guy playing a regular drumkit, hammering away at pummeling slow motion beats and the occasional blastbeat, while two other guys bash

on makeshift metal and traditional Japanese drums in unison with the drummer. This creates an extremely dense and chaotic percussive force on Akai

Yama as all three percussionsist bash away at the same time, playing super complex polyrhythms and seriously bizarre time signatures that have an

industrial feel due to the metal textures. There are two bassists, both of which play traditional Japanese scales on their instruments, and the atonal scales

combined with the dual battery of having two bass guitars thickens up the sound MASSIVELY. This album features three tracks, but the first is a short two

minute introduction piece of Gagaku-like Japanese classical ambience. After that, the band lurches into two massive 17-20 minute tracks, totalling over 40

minutes of music. Each track is made up of different passages, moving through long intricate compositions of pounding tribal psychedelic sludge, with

yowling vocals and demented male singing, melodic basslines slipping in and out of strange rhythmic grooves, more subdued passages of foly Japanese acoustic

music, glimpses of koto (the traditional Japanese stringed instrument) in the crushing mathy sludge metal. Devestatingly heavy and nauseatingly angular

heaviosity that honestly sounds like Corrupted fused to Zeni Geva, early Swans, and Japanese classical, as weird and unlikely as that combination sounds. The

album artwork is perfect too, capturing the astral strangeness of Birushanah's sound with psychedelic space paintings layered with geodisic structures and

swrling abstract shapes. This one is on my list for one of the best metal albums of the year. Highly recommended.

We've got one (1) copy of this now out-of-print 2xLP in stock. Here's the original review from the CD release:

This latest collaboration between Japanese drone/sludge/rockers BORIS and legendary noise artist Masami Akita (MERZBOW) follows their previous matchups Megatone and 04092001, and returns to the drone-heavy fields explored on Megatone and BORIS� Flood. Languidly strummed acoustic guitars open the album, gauzy and delicate as single notes are plucked and hung on a wide open expanse of sound. Eventually far-off rumbles and approaching electronic flashes begin to appear around ten minutes in. At twenty minutes into the track, the roar of massively downtuned guitar crashes in, as Merzbow beams in crackling electronic shrapnel and glitchy noise over the amorphous swells of noisy powerdrone. The final half of the record crawls out of the heavy swirl and drifts into black with ghostly blots of computer noise and feedback, as the album�s opening guitar movements re-appear as the coda. Packaged in a killer casewrapped gatefold jacket virtually identical to the original CD packaging, super striking, Stephen O'Malley's hyper-abstract album artwork printed in blue, black and white metallic inks. Limited to one thousand two hundred copies.

OK, so I just wrote up Experience The Concreteness from C.C.C.C. side-project South Saturn Delta for last month's New Additions list, and went on and on at length how that was an even more brutal manifestation of the space-noise overdrive of C.C.C.C., Hiroshi Hasegawa's churning synthesizer furnace amplified into even more ear shredding levels of cosmic blast. Well, after listening to the latest C.C.C.C. album this past week, I'm thinking that I might need to eat my words - on Chaos Is The Cosmos, the prestigious Japanese noise cult returns with their first new album since 1996's Flash and it's as skull-shreddingly intense and crushing as any Japanese noise album I've heard in the past decade. Focal members Hiroshi Hasegawa (also of Astro, YBO2, South Saturn Delta) and wife Mayuko Hino (a former bondage-porn actress) are joined by Fumio Kosakai (Hijokaidan, Incapacitants) and Ryuichi Nagakubo (Tangerine Dream Syndicate) for a single 43-minute track that was recorded live in the mid-1990's, and the experience of being subjugated to C.C.C.C.'s brutal psychedelic overload hasn't lost an iota of it's power in the past ten years.

The group begins in the red. The sound is already fully formed as soon as you hit "play" - a gigantic maelstrom of screaming guitar noise writhing with deafening synthesizers and electronics sweeps over you, drowning you in layer upon layer of Hawkwind-like space effects, roaring subsonic drones, buzzing synthesizers, sickening synthesizer squelches that burst forth like alien saxophones squonking across the cosmos, squalls of tortured psych-guitar that scream and screech and scrape, melodic guitar solos that suddenly morph into demonic atonal nightmares, brutal klaxon blasts and cement-mixer grind. Where artists like Merzbow and Masonna and Incapacitants seek to destroy through high-end skree and abrasive white noise, C.C.C.C. forges a constantly changing vortex of loud, freaked-out improvisation that takes on mind-altering qualities. Towards the middle, the noisescape takes a terrifying turn as weird electronic blastbeat rhythms and Mayuko Hino's vocals enter the picture, and she moves from sections of distressed, panicky spoken word to jarring screams of fear and hysteria that tear through the storm of mega-effects. This only lasts for a few minutes though, and the last half of the track returns fully to the roiling cosmic noise.

This is a top notch release, one of the strongest from the old guard of Japanese noise I've heard in ages - C.C.C.C. fans have been waiting for ages for something new, and this definitely doesn't disappoint. Highly recommended to anyone into brutal psychedelic space noise.

Back in 1994, the San Francisco radio station KFJC hosted a one-off performance from a noise supergroup that centered around the intoxicating Mayuko Hino, former S&M actress and member of legendary Japanese psych-noise outfit C.C.C.C. Armed with sheet metal and contact mics and her imposing voice, Chaos Of The Night teamed Mayuko together with Mason Jones (Subarachnoid Space/Trance) on guitar, Elden M. (Allegory Chapel Ltd.) on sampler, and Monte Cazazza (of Industrial Records fame) on bass for a monstrous thirty-four minute jam that seriously holds it's own with the most pulverizing C.C.C.C. recordings, documented here on this disc from K.K. Null's esteemed (and sadly long-defunct) Endorphine Factory label. From the start, the artists blast a densely layered supernova of feedback and distortion that is filled with a constantly shifting kaleidoscope of warbling melodies, crushing distorted low-end, howling psych guitar screaming in primal ecstasy, and sweeping oscillating tones. Really massive, especially towards the last third when Mayuko's wailing vocals start to appear and the distortion seems to kick it up a notch for the last ten minutes as the piece erupts into pure chaotic bliss.

After that, we are treated to two shorter tracks that feature Mayuko partnered with just Mason Jones and Elden M., respectively. "Conscious" is a similiarly brutal wash of distortion and planet-wrecking psych guitar noise, and Mason unleashes a powerful wah-apocalypse over waves of whooshing feedback and ultra high end amplifier howl. Like the epic first jam, this is pure C.C.C.C. territory, the connection made concrete by having C.C.C.C. mastermind Hiroshi Hasegawa mixing the whole thing, and it ends in a crushing maelstrom of crunching guitar noise and Mayuko, heard from a far distance, screaming gibberish into the pit. The disc closes with "Refine", which by previous standards sounds almost "reserved" at times, with single manipulated sinewaves and oscillator fluctations breaking out into a solo, but these brief moments are obliterated by walls of meaty distorted crunch that ooze and pulsate inward while Elden M. streaks sped-up cassette noise into trippy swirls and trails through the massive buzzscape.

Released through the U.S. arm of Endorphine Factory, this brain-splattering slab of heavy psychedelic noise has been a tough one to come by in the years following it's 1995 release, but we've nabbed the last copies of this monster along with a handful of other Endorphine Factory titles - fans of C.C.C.C., extreme Japanese noise, Total, and psychedelic amplifier chaos should be putting their ears on this ASAP. The booklet contains insightful liner notes about the project that were written by Seymour Glass from Bananafish Magazine. Also notable is the surreal photo-collage from Monte Cazazza and Michelle Handelman titled Inside Herself that graces the cover, depicting a woman whose entire body has morphed into a huge vagina, out of which two hands are emerging to climb forth, Gozu-style.

Nagoya,Japan's Hiroshi Hashimoto has been active as CONTAGIOUS ORGASM since 1986, working with a haunting mix of disjointed samples, anachronistic

collages, and early-Coil industrialisms. We always thought of CONTAGIOUS ORGASM as sort of a Japanese counterpart to the UK's NURSE WITH WOUND, although CO's

top-notch collage editing and cutup is very much in a league of it's own.From The Irresponsible Country Sounds is as varied as any of Hiroshi's best

work, with two tracks over twenty three minutes offering creepy and very pretty collage bliss. Cinematic and vaguely Eastern guitar(?) melodies are at the

center of each track, joined with an array of disjointed rhythms,horror soundtrack ambience,field recordings,tape manipulation,cooing cartoon voices,drum

machines,and random bursts of unidentifiable sound and static interference. Elegantly assembled, perfectly arranged sound narratives that are enjoyably

hypnotic. Packaged in a color CD wallet.

More intense Japanese hard-drive carnage from Neus-318! I discovered this Japanese CDR label a few months ago, and while much of their catalog is made up of kooky abstract computer noise and glitch collages, some of their stuff is straight up skullripping digital noise that leans towards the psychedelic ends of the Japanese noise scene. I scoured their catalog and picked up their most aggro, brain wasting releases for Crucial Blast, which Japanese noise fans should definitely check out.

If there's a flagship artist on the Neus-318 label, it's Daruin. Kazuya Ishigami's solo laptop noise project has released close to half a dozen discs on the Japanese CDR imprint, and all of them rank as some of the most abrasive and aggressive titles in the label's catalog. Daruin isn't just pure brutal noise, though; there's alot of textured ambience and mysterious sonic events that appear in his abstract electronic soundscapes that he creates out of distressed computer noise, digital feedback and found sounds. On this full length disc from 2000, Daruin crafts seven tracks that violent storms of electronic glitch and high speed bleeps, to expanses of dark, heavy subterranean ambience and eerie cave drift, to swarms of temple bells whipped into dense frenzies of sound, bizarre mutant vocal experiments that stretch the human throat into monstrous dimension-shifting wails, and swirls of percussion blurred into incandescent sheets of metallic shimmer. These noisescapes all sound like they are being transmitted back to us from some far-off planet, and at times approach the dense techno/bleep sculptures of KK Null. Out of all of the discs that we just picked up from the label, this is the most varied and psychedelic release from both Daruin and Neus-318.

More intense Japanese hard-drive carnage from Neus-318! I discovered this Japanese CDR label a few months ago, and while much of their catalog is made up of kooky abstract computer noise and glitch collages, some of their stuff is straight up skullripping digital noise that leans towards the psychedelic ends of the Japanese noise scene. I scoured their catalog and picked up their most aggro, brain wasting releases for Crucial Blast, which Japanese noise fans should definitely check out.

Drain sees the laptop glitch-drone artist Daruin teaming up with another Japanese noise project called Grkzgl that's new to me. Each artist has an epic twenty-minute track, and both use heavy ambient sounds and manipulated computer noise to create an ominous buzzscape that together make for the heaviest release out of all of the Neus-318 discs that we've picked up. Daruin opens the disc with mastermind Kazuya Ishigama sculpting a dark cloud of deep, rumbling drone, distorted and super heavy and somewhat Sunn O)))-esque that drifts in tectonic time as microscopic chiming tones move backwards in time around it. As ritual bells and subliminal rumblings join in, the piece slowly builds in volume until the underlying drone that appeared at first becomes warped by overmodulated fx. The sound is stretched out, pulled apart, streaked with looping metallic scrapes and draped with gossamer layers of black ambience, then evolves again into a blast of crystalline chimes before softening out into a field of dark abstract ambience that closes the track. I hear little bits of KK NUll and Sunn O))) and dark ambient and tactile electro-acoustic sound sculpture all swirling together here, and it's a fantastic piece of grim, creepy abstract drift. I'd definitely like to hear more of this type of sound from Daruin!

On the second track, Grkzgl strips the ambience down even further, taking away almost any extraneous sound at first and leaving only a massive slow-moving, slithering sinewave drone. This drone is all low end, a glacial reverberating buzz like the sound of a piece of large electronic equipment humming in the middle of the night, that electrical hum then distorted and shaped into a buzzing and hypnotic rumble, super minimal and spare but rib-rattling when heard at high volume. As Grkzgl's blackened hum uncoils, it's joined by tiny flashes of dark shimmer and chirping feedback tones that circle the drone and recede back into the void, but on the second half of the piece it changes shape and turns into a flattened field of muted pulses and fluttering feedback tones. Super abstract and minimal, the first half reminds me of the minimal amp-buzz scultpures of Not.

Packaged in a full color paper sleeve that comes in a plastic wallet.

More intense Japanese hard-drive carnage from Neus-318! I discovered this Japanese CDR label a few months ago, and while much of their catalog is made up of kooky abstract computer noise and glitch collages, some of their stuff is straight up skullripping digital noise that leans towards the psychedelic ends of the Japanese noise scene. I scoured their catalog and picked up their most aggro, brain wasting releases for Crucial Blast, which Japanese noise fans should definitely check out.

Deepspeed is another project from DJ Gackt, who I first heard on his Neus-318 CDR released under the name Bastarbation. That project focused on short, brutal blasts of digital noise that usually came in 10 second bursts, and it reminded me of a digital hard-drive version of classic noisecore, like a completely synthesized version of 7 Minutes Of Nausea or Anal Cunt transmogrified into vicious electronic glitches and white noise. This disc from Deepspeed is something totally different, though. The thirty-seven minute single track on Spacecaps is an intense full on analog synthesizer noisescape that goes through constant changes throughout its run time, an avalanche of malfunctioning computer blips and Atari 2600 noise, sweeping synth drones and spacey bass pulses, like being lodged deep inside of the guts of a spaceship as it zips through space at light speed, surrounded by a plethora of bleeps, bloops, oscillating frequency attacks and machine noise. Gackt's approach to epic synth noise actually puts him in the same realm as the psych-minded synth and FX box shapeshifters in CCCC, Astro, Solmania, and even KK Null's robotic guitar noise. There's nothing relaxing here, that's for sure. As with most of the Neus-318 cdrs, this disc is packaged in a simple felt-backed cd sleeve with a yellow glossy cover that sports some weird porno/cartoon imagery.

After being introduced to them on the Herz Aus G.R.O.S.S. compilation from RRRecords, I've been on the hunt for Dislocation's older releases, some of which turned out to still be in print. Their 1996 Lp Coyote's Call is one of the few US releases of Dislocation's music, a compilation of live and studio improvisations that was issued on the Fusetron label that we were able to pick up for the shop. Often compared to Borbertomagus, I've thought of Dislocation as more of a collision between the Ayler/Brotzmann school of free jazz and early 90's Japanese harsh noise in the vein of CCCC or some of K2's less devastating recordings. The improvisational saxophone playing is fused with low-fi guitar rumble and electronic noise, and the band frequently moves into skull-caving levels of intensity out of their smoldering industrial soundscapes.

Coyote's Call starts off with pretty warbling cosmic tones, then drifts into a sparse arrangement of Yoshinori Yanagawa's improv sax bleat and scrape, blurts of low-end guitar noise and electronic squeal, the sax much "jazzier" than a group like Borbetomagus and not as full-on assaultive, but still quite noisy and chaotic. The slow-burn blowing and cracked electronics eventually surge into rumbling fragmented noisescapes that really erupt when the guitar is suddenly cranked to ten and the sax takes off on a frantic blowout over the hissing, howling distortion and sputtering amp noise and juddering electronic rhythms. As it moves into the second section, the band continues to introduce more and more distortion and noise, junk metal clattering everywhere, blasting looped electronics that resemble damaged drum machine rhythms, growing more frenzied and violent as it goes on, the sax climbing into higher register scales, screaming over the industrial rumble, shortwave hum and electronic fx.

The b-side picks right up from there, continuing on with the onslaught of heavy amp/guitar generated noise, effects, feedback and manic blowing and by the end becomes a dense, cacophonic din of free jazz howl that stretches on for some time before returning to the blissed-out cosmic tones from the beginning of the record.

Like their Carve Another Notch album that is also on this week's list, this is another fantastic album of volcanic, post-apocalyptic improv from Dislocation, and highly recommended.

This rare early 90s release (1994 to be exact) from Japanese industrial free-jazz/drone/noise collective Dislocation was the very first release on the now long-gone UK label Scatter, which also issued titles from Derek Bailey, The Thirteen Ghosts and Steve Noble during their brief run. One of the few outfits that was able to channel the sort of industrial jazz-noise obliteration that Borbetomagus pioneered, Dislocation explored a form of dark, apocalyptic improvisation that, on Carve Another Notch, vaguely resembles something akin to hearing Coltrane blowing away high above a scorched, nuked out metropolis that is slowly crumbling beneath an irradiated blood-red sky.

The album features two shorter tracks and the nearly hour long monolithic title track, starting with part one of "Between The Windows Of The Sea", a feast of scrape and howl, the sax blurting and honking above detuned scrabbly guitar and electronic noise and violent fx-pedal maneuvers. It's like a lot of Japanese noise from this era, energetic and apocalyptic, but with the addition of saxophone giving it a unique sound, sort of like Masonna crossed with grating free jazz sax. The second part features more melodic, Coltrane-esque blowing while the backing sounds grow more abrasive and sinister. Huge slabs of sheet metal are dragged slowly across a concrete floor while chiming cymbals and metallic clatter dances in the background, and the air dances with fluttering speaker buzz, flute-like tones, and bizarre squawking bird-like vocalizations.

Then it moves into the sprawling title track. It begins with high pitched sine waves darting around the shadowy, eerie sax lines, and grinding, rumbling sounds and random rattling percussion drifting up from below. The sound slowly grows more abrasive as the noisier elements creep out of the depths, warped tapes and orchestral sounds twitch and heave, a guitar is banged and clawed at, the sax disappearing for long stretches while the band wanders through fractured improv noisescapes and bursts of mangled shredding. The quieter moments delve into stretches of droning Middle Eastern-tinged ambience and bleak, washed out doomed ambience, and towards the end, strains of Japanese pop blare out of a tiny transistor radio and echo through an immense space before being swallowed by massive growling electronics.

It's been awhile since I've heard anything new from the Japanese industrial/doom/noise outfit Dissecting Table. Since the early 90's, DT's Ichiro Tsuji has produced some of the heaviest, most pulverizing industrial noise albums to come out of the underground Japanese noise scene, with an almost metallic, doom-laden heaviness appearing at times that turned his music into something closer to the likes of Human Quena Orchestra, Halo, early Godflesh/Pitchshifter, and other tectonic mecha-sludge specialists. Chaos Attractor definitely falls under this banner with a single forty-eight minute track that does indeed get very fucking heavy in it's second half, and fans of those aforementioned bands who like hearing a heavy dose of harsh electronic noise injected into their industrial doomcrush are going to love it...

Chaos Attractor starts with several minutes of squirming, fluctuating processed feedback and oscillator waves shot through with bursts of distorted moan and percussive noise, then explodes suddenly into total chaos, a wall of brutal psychedelic noise made up of harsh high end feedback flux and pounding distorto synth assault and screaming high end signals with a pummeling steady rhythmic throb at the center of it all. Scraping, howling anti-melodies surface out of the din, surrounded by writhing fast-paced whipstrikes of venomous electrical buzz, and after a while, it all starts to sound like a symphony of damaged turntables, power drills, revving motorcycle engines, and death metal distortion pedals all cranked to the hilt. The music settles down around the 12 min mark into a whirling, still very sonically active stretch of cavernous machine rumble and ambience, but then suddenly, almost immediately, it shifts into a bizarre form of ultra-distorted industrial doom. A grinding and insanely distorted metallic riff over heavy drums forging a lurching, lopsided anti-groove,

a steady stop-start stomp that drives the blown out ultra-distorto noise-doom. The vocals that come in are even more over the top, a ranting voice run through so many effects that it becomes a desperate sounding robotic warble, absolutely unintelligible, like the main character from Tetsuo: The Iron Man forced to front some monstrous industrial doom metal outfit, the sound drenched in ever increasing levels of drill noise and fx and feedback.

After about ten minutes of that, it returns to the maniacal electronic chaos, this time sounding like an army of Galaga machines on the rampage. The sound moves in and out of more spacious phased fx noisescapes and stretches of intergalactic battle ambience a la some of KK Null's more crazed material, cacophonies of total electronic mayhem like factories staffed with huge cybernetic insect creatures, bizarre mashups of the psychedelic electronics and those weird mumbled/muffled screams and freeform metal guitar zonk, ultra distorted death metal growls appearing as it descends into violent storms of cosmic fx, and finally returning to the massively over-distorted noise doom in the last minute of the track, before it abruptly slams to a close.

Comes in a full color wallet, and limited to five hundred copies.

As if isn't enough to have your skull caved in by the punishing sludgecore of Dot [.}, they've gotten together with powerviolence maniacs SU19B for a tag team assault of over-the-top heaviness called Drowned Into Swamp. Fans of extreme Japanese grind/sludge won't need much prodding, as these two bands are some of the heaviest outfits in the Japanese extreme metal underground.

The sound of a bell being struck repeatedly as some deep Tuvan-style throat singing materializes is how Dot [.] open their side; the creepy chant ritual of "Karma" is quickly joined by a MASSIVE pounding drum beat and howling feedback, and after a minute or so a simple, monstrous downtuned sludge riff drops in and the band erupts into crushing heaviosity, the deep gasping vocals pushed through severe distortion as the band grinds out the impossibly crushing tribal deathsludge. This jam goes on for more than thirteen minutes, sometimes slowing down to a time-stopping crawl but mostly sticking with a huge syrupy groove. The other track "Dirt" starts off with a galloping thrash riff that summons up some primo Celtic Frost style heaviness, then halfway through changes gears and slides into a noxious bass-heavy dirge a la Cavity or Eyehategod, a massive bloozy slow-mo riff that winds through endless droning feedback and disturbing samples, the guitars, bass and vocals blown out and distorted and in the red. It almost sounds like Dot [.] has been listening to their countrymates in Birushanah and have picked up some of that band's avant-tribal weirdness. It�s ridiculously brutal.

On their half of the split, SU19B have a couple of surprises up their sleeve. Instead of the disc simply launching into their brand of hyperfast Crossed Out/Neanderthal-inspired powerviolence, the first track opens with gleaming metallic ambience, distant percussive sounds and buzzing raga drones that shift and shimmer for more than a minute until a sinister atonal guitar appears; but then the band crashes in suddenly, slow and crushing, an angular riff that splits off into a spacey instrumental interlude every couple of minutes. The rest of the track continues to slowly crawl through this trippy, psychedelic crush before the band finally blasts off into chaotic grinding speed at the very end. The next track "Pressurewave" is a short drone interlude that suddenly explodes at the end into ultra-heavy grindcore slathered in electronic noise, which leads right into "Civilized Worm". This last track starts off with a garbled blast of electronic noise from none other than Guilty Connector, who drags out clanging sheet-metal reverberations, crushing fast=paced distortion, shrieking vocals, weird backwards effects, short stretches of just minimal creaks and pops, and chaotic oscillator freakout for seven minutes before fading into a subdued noisescape of grit and vinyl crackle. Out of this crackling, droning ambience, guitar feedback gradually emerges, later joined by a pounding tribal drumbeat, and eventually SU19B crashes back in completely with a monstrous doomsludge jam laced with deep guttural death metal sneers, electronic noise and dense feedback, almost like Coffins if they were drenched in industrial noise and malfunctioning amplifier noise. If you flip out over the likes of Eyehategod, Corrupted, Weedeater, Grief, and Coffins, you're going to love this. Comes in a garishly designed full color package with insane photo-collage artwork; limited to five hundred copies.

���� Your pulse could potentially re-arrange itself upon exposure to this collaboration between Japanese noise titans Hijokaidan and Spanish industrial outfit Esplendor Geom�trico, taken from a performance in Tokyo from November 2013. Pretty powerful stuff here, forged around the group's use of heavy, repetitious rhythms, but still as harsh and chaotic as you'd expect coming from Hijokaidan.

���� The performance is divided into eight parts, starting off with a rolling, energetic breakbeat that emerges amid the terrifying garbled shrieks of Hijokaidan vocalist Junko. Blasts of corrosive electronics and feedback, and eerie droning string-like sounds materialize alongside that frayed groove, and it gets off to an intense start, an almost Boredoms-esque blast of percussive tribal trance and squealing, ear-damaging noise, both abrasive and surprisingly musical. As the group continues through the set, the music dies off or dissolves into more subdued interludes where it's just Junko yapping her head off maniacally, or a squall of what sounds like a horribly tortured electric guitar spewing its amplified guts out across the floor. Eventually that pounding, aggressive rhythm will rear its head again, shifting form into a brutal technoid thud or a blown-out breakbeat, or a heavily distorted industrial loop; it can actually get somewhat danceable, though probably only to terminally irradiated mutants.

���� They wind all sorts of frenzied noise around these pummeling, thunderous rhythms, continuing to mangle electric guitars into clots of gruesome skronk as Jojo Hiroshige makes his guitar sound like oil tankers being rent apart, or horrifying air raid sirens, or steel girders groaning beneath the weight of collapsing buildings, alongside synaptic-shock eruptions of piecing electronics. And man, Junko really goes for it, delivering an almost non-stop barrage of high-pitched screams and weird gibberish over the performance that ascends to terrifying heights of vocal madness. The intensity cranks up the further in it gets, turning pretty ferocious in the second half of the performance, evolving into a cacophony of bellowing demonic vocals, vicious freeform guitar skree and heavy tribal rhythms that are seared by controlled bursts of electronic noise. In all, though, this is a heavy, exuberantly brutal performance that highlights the strengths of both groups. Definitely recommended if you're a big Hijokaidan fan, but those into Cut Hands and Boredoms would probably dig this as well.

���� Released in a limited, numbered edition of five hundred copies.

More all-devouring Japanese harsh noise cut-up, this time from the Tottori-based project Elma. Reciprocity is a 2-track private press CD-r from the intriguing Neus-318 label that we just stumbled across, who have released a sizeable catalog of skull scrambling digital noise carnage and computer drone. Elma definitely falls on the noisier end of that spectrum, with each of the 20+ minute tracks on this disc spewing out a richly detailed vortex of squiggly distortion and granular laser blasts that's as harsh and brutal as any of Merzbow's loudest laptop work. Elma's noise constructs move from dense walls of distortion to dynamic flanger attacks stabbing fields of silence. A solid blast of psychedelic noise punishment that fans of Merzbow, Incapacitants, and the neo-blast of Groyxo will dig. Comes in a jewel case with color cover.

Back in print, now on 180 gram black vinyl.

Even though the band is from right down the road from C-Blast HQ, it wasn't until quite recently that I started to listen to these guys in earnest, starting with a rather blistering set I saw them perform in DC with Column Of Heaven around a year ago. The 7"s I'd picked up from the band were pretty cool, but after seeing them live I realized they didn't do justice to the strength of their sonic attack; in the live setting, their mix of brutal hardcore and cyclonic grind flayed the flesh right off of my bones. When the band's collaboration with Japanese noise pioneer Merzbow was announced shortly thereafter, this vicious album turned into one of my more anticipated new releases of '14.It's one of the best noise/metal collabs I've heard since Masami Akita himself teamed up with those maniacs in Gore Beyond Necropsy, with a ferocious sound that comes much closer to capturing the live savagery of the band.

The album is a short one at just twenty-three minutes long, but it hurtles at top speed through eleven tracks of blasting ferocity. Songs race by in a blur of ultra-violent blastbeats and discordant hardcore riffs, the multiple vocalists swapping back and forth between the frantic, bestial screeching and deeper, gruffer bellowing and a weird disaffected moan, the music blending equal parts spazztoid staccato powerviolence with blurts of massive dissonant sludge and full-on grindcore. Occasionally this will slow down into turbulent assaults of jagged noise-rock or pulverizing dirge, and Merzbow's presence is felt throughout, not only in the swells of jittery electronics and squealing high-pitched feedback that bubble up in the spaces between songs, transforming entire tracks like "Raise Thee, Great Wall, Bloody And Terrible" into outbursts of virtual power electronics, but also as an omnipresent texture in the midst of the band's raging grind. A layer of electronic filth and corrosion that smolders beneath the instruments, creating an edgy aural abrasion lurking in every corner of the album. Towards the end, things slow down to a seriously epic crawl, starting with "High Fells" as it drags itself through vast furrows of droning heaviness somewhere in between the industrial plod of early Swans and the barbaric trance of Neurosis, crushing riffs churning over noisy percussion as the vocals rise in wraithlike chant and vein-popping screams, while volleys of jazzy horns streak overhead. And on ""Ljudet Av Gud", most of that instrumentation is swept away, leaving just a creaking noisescape of distant electro-acoustic sounds slowly overcome by the rhythmic boom of hammers on empty oil tanks, building into a desolate industrial dirge that takes over the entire track. Building to the cathartic release of closer "Fawn Heads And Unjoy", the final blast of dissonant, delirious grind violence is splattered in free jazz squonk.

      That second disc that appeared with the skull-shredding collaboration between Baltimore grindbeasts Full Of Hell and Japanese noise legend Merzbow has finally made its way to vinyl. That double disc album that originally came out on Profound Lore was one of the fiercest fusions of extreme electronic noise and metallic chaos to come out that year; the Sister Fawn recording that followed the album proper was an interesting shift in sound, transforming the frenzied grindcore into something much more abstract.

      While the Sister Fawn disc was initially presented as something more of a companion piece, it actually holds up wuite nicely as an album all on its own. In fact, I gotta admit I thought this material is even cooler than the first half of their collaboration. Over the course of these five tracks, much of Full Of Hell's screeching grindmetal becomes absorbed into a cacophonous wall of industrial violence, their metallic aggression subsumed into Merzbow's swirling, screeching nebula. The tracks are longer, venturing into pummeling industrial junk-metal rhythms and howling feedback manipulation, blasts of crushing power electronics and more of that abject Swans-esque dirge that appeared on the first half. And squalls of apocalyptic jazz-infected noise erupt across tracks like "Crumbling Ore", delivering an acrid blast of sound that approaches Borbetomagus-like levels of intensity. The grindcore elements are still in here though, particularly on songs like the noise-damaged blast-assault of "Merzdrone" that welds a seemingly endless blastbeat to Merzbow's scorching electronics and shrill skulldrill distortion. The result is ferociously and psychedelic.

      Issued in a one-time pressing of one thousand copies on black vinyl.