In the works for over a year, the first issue of As Loud As Possible lives up to the expectations that had been building up with noise and industrial fans. Sub-titled "the Noise Culture magazine", As Loud As Possible was created to offer a well-written and professionally edited publication that would focus exclusively on the world of experimental noise, power electronics, post-industrial music, and related forms, and with this hefty 156 page commencement, things are looking really good. Sure, we have Special Interests which focuses on similar editorial content, but ALAP has a different feel from the grittier, more personal vibe of Mikko Aspa's zine; in fact, Aspa himself is one of the contributing writers for this issue.

There's a ton of stuff to stuff your eyes with: the extensive cover story on Rudolf Eb.er and Runzelstirn & Gurgelstock, for starters, and a MASSIVE retrospective of Broken Flag Records that is essential reading for fans of the influential UK post-industrial label; there's an autobiography of the Haters written by GX Jupitter-Larsen; columns from GX Jupitter-Larsen (Haters), Steve Underwood, John Olson, Andy Ortmann (Panicsville), Mikko Aspa and several other writers; short interview pieces with Vomir and Helicoptre Sanglante; an essay titled The Politics Of HNW: The Roots Of Wall Riding by Sam McKinlay (aka The Rita), which is the best overview of the HNW philosophy that I've read so far; extensive and insightful interviews with Putrefier, Zone Nord, Sewer Election, Alien Brains, Climax Denial, Cheapmachines, Nicole Chambers (Ides Recordings), Apraxia Records, John Smith (the editor of the seminal early Industrial fanzine Interchange), Carlos Giffoni (No Fun); overviews of classic older Industrial albums; and tons of in-depth record reviews that I'm still in the process of reading. Perfect-bound and nicely designed with a clean, organized layout that incorporates all sorts of fantastic visual content (both rare/vintage and contemporary), this excellent magazine deserves a place on every noise/industrial/power electronics fan's coffee table. I can't wait for the next issue.

Anyone into the UK post-industrial scene should know Anthony Di Franco. Throughout the 80s and 90s, Di Franco produced some of the heaviest sounds to creep out of the British post-industrial underground during his time in such legendary bands as Skullflower, Ramleh, Novatron and Ethnic Acid; in addition, for a couple of years in the mid-90s Di Franco released some monstrously heavy deathdrone recordings under the Ax name on the Freek Records label, all of which were super limited and disappeared fairly quickly. I myself have been trying to get my hands on this stuff for years without forking out for some major collector's prices, but now we've got this killer collection on Cold Spring that delivers a big chunk of Ax's recorded output.

Almost all of this material has been re-mastered and reissued on Metal Forest, a collection of the Nova Feedback Lp, the Ax II 12", and one song from the 1997 Astronomy Cd. It's crushing stuff, each lengthy track centering around thick layers of ominous, heavily distorted Korg synths and clouds of abrasive feedback and electronic noise. These crushing distorted drones come pouring out of the speakers like black lava, slow oozing streams of super-heavy amp-hum and grinding monochord heaviness, often sounding like a more industrialized Sunn O))) jam, but with some noisier traits that clearly come from Di Franco's background in harsh noise and power electronics.

The first couple of tracks focus in on simple but MASSIVE dronescapes, beginning with the sauropod throb of "Kortex" as it detonates in slow motion within a cloud of black static, sounding like some super-heavy dronemetal outfit covering an old Maurizio Bianchi piece, growing ever more crushing as Di Franco pours in more and more distorted synth over his bleak industrial pummel. On "Nova Feedback 1", loops of grinding synth and buzzing electronics are woven into a mesmerizing oceanic mass of pulverizing drone, followed by the titanic thrum of "Heavy Fluid" as it shimmers in a relentless coruscating glow of white-hot light, a single-chord drone wavering in space, dipping and rising like a chunk of infernal aerial technology riding on the plumes of some sulfurous ether. Then you get "Theme One", where the creeping synthgrind is joined with bursts of random percussion, some very Skullflower-esque bass sounds and string-scraping guitar abuse, and shocks of wild electricity, overall tapping into a sound that is very reminiscent of what Matt Bower was doing around the same time with the 'Flower.

But then Di Franco could also whip up some seriously ear-destroying noise with Ax as well. Take the title track, a massive wall of distortion, a vast churning mass of black static and impenetrable hiss that is pure HNW, and it's as heavy and brain-blotting as anything you'd hear nowadays from Vomir or The Rita; the second half of the track shifts abruptly into a kind of desolate industrial ambience made up of distant rumblings and eerie metallic drones, occasionally obscured by blasts of reverb-drenched sound, glimpses of massive half-formed riffs moving in the gloom.

The two-part "AX II" is also much noisier in comparison, a nearly twenty minute epic that assaults it's layered amplifier drones with a nearly constant barrage of spacey synth noises and trippy electronic fx, at times resembling a heavier version of CCCC's cosmic noise destruction, while transforming into an undulating mass of blackened, buzzing synth-drones and Lustmord-esque doomdrift for the second half of the track. More massive feedback symphonies and rumbling mechanical drift forms across "Nova Feedback 2", at times sounding like predatory alien aircraft lifting into the stratosphere, the sound of Metal Machine Music reconfigured as horror movie score, and closer "Cluster" transports Di Franco's waves of majestic tremolo buzz into the outer nebula, a Skullflower-esque distorted riff taking on a kind of kosmische density as it loops around and around, a wall of ominous psychedelic crunch.

This really isn't that far from the magma-metal dronecrush of Black Boned Angel and 00 Void-era Sunn O))), and the blackened metallic drift of Circle Of Eyes, but the synth-heavy industrial aspect of Ax's music is obviously coming from a different place. Its incredibly heavy stuff though, a piece of 90's underground heaviness that fans of Di Franco's other bands will definitely want to hear...

After hearing his contributions to the now out-of-print Philosophy of a Knife compilation on Peripheral, I immediately fell in love with his brand of ultra-skeezy, ultra-heavy skum electronics, a brutal low-fi blast of hatred that turned the classic UK power electronics sound into something a bit more bestial. You've got the elements in place - distorted raving vocals, harsh electronic noise and feedback, hardcore misanthropy - but somehow it sounds like something new in the hands of Bagman, offering a fresh strain of violence somewhat similar in feel to the blackened bestial industrial of Project: Void while clearly under the influence of the sexual perversions of prime era Sutcliffe Jugend.

Men Who Solicit Sex is the latest load of venom that Bagman has dropped in 2012. Over the course of this study in sexual slavery and illegal solicitation, Bagman sandwiches samples from documentary footage concerning the sex trade in the UK in between his pulsating cancerous electronics, throbbing tumors of rhythmic synth arpeggios swarmed by nauseating feedback, a vile black sheen covering everything. His vocals are utterly psychedelic, run through an extreme amount of distortion to the point where they are little more than a cloud of reptilian verbal hatred. The production is raw, even by power electronics/noise standards, but it's fucking perfect. That is definitely one of the things that I love about this project's recordings. Its so distorted and blown and abrasive, the sound possessing a real weight to it, which is not something that is always present in PE. This is dark stuff that constantly seethes under a constant threat of imminent violence.

Highly recommended to power violence extremists. The disc is presented in jewel case packaging with a booklet of disturbing graphics and text, and wrapped in clingy black cellophane with a set of Bagman stickers. Limited to one hundred copies.

��I don't remember exactly where it was that I first discovered Bagman's blackened fusion of misanthropic electronics and oppressive harsh noise (probably the Men Who Solicit Sex disc that came out on Murderabilia), but I know that it had instantly seeped into my brain, infecting me with an utterly malignant atmosphere. This one-man UK outfit has been producing this pitch-black noise since at least 2008, and has already amassed a pretty impressive list of releases since then, each one a sonic representation of abject horror, the residue remaining after one gazes unblinkingly into the bottomless abyss that is humanity's capacity for evil and cruelty. When I throw on one of the few Bagman releases I've been able to track down, it feels like every mote of light in the room is being slowly crushed, leaving behind a caput mortuum of dread and disgust. Bagman's recordings ooze with the unfiltered horror of the human mind, translated into a series of violent audio frequencies. This stuff ain't no fun, that's for sure. Carrying on the tradition of transgression found in the early UK power electronics scene but combining it with a much more brutal and suffocating sonic assault, Bagman's early recordings are rumbling, bestial noisescapes littered with the voices of hate-mongers and murderers, criminals and degenerates and scenes of sexual deviance all suffused into the crushing walls of black static filth, junk metal devastation and monstrous electronics. Previously out of print, three of Bagman's malevolent early CDR releases have now been reissued on limited-edition cassette through the Infernal Machines imprint with all new artwork, recommended only to enthusiasts of the most nihilistic strains of extreme electronic noise and rabid industrial horror.

��Bagman's 2008 EP For Kenneth McKenna is another portrait of boundless human cruelty, inspired by parts of Max Call's lurid 1985 serial killer tome Hand of Death: The Henry Lee Lucas Story and the bizarre online mythology surrounding Florida inmate Kenneth McKenna that began to appear subsequent to that book. A purported member of the "Hand of Death Cult", McKenna was a denizen of the Florida prison system who claimed to have been involved with all kinds of bizarre crimes, including the production of snuff films that featured the feeding of humans to alligators and anacondas. The five tracks featured here continue to explore the charred sonic wastes between harsh noise wall and power electronics, summoning visions of those bizarre satanic prison cults and reptilian snuff videos in the volcanic fog of Bagman's chaos. Some of this material is actually a little more atmospheric than his typical sonic onslaught, the tracks alternating between brutal walls of crumbling blackened static, punishing high-frequency feedback abuse, horrific power electronics assaults formed out of crushing bass frequencies splattered with those signature monstrous vocals, to more haunting, solemn noisescapes like "Hand Of Death" that layer muffled metallic noises and eerie half-formed synthesizer melodies over fields of smoldering low-end rumble. Clocking in at just over sixteen minutes, McKenna is one of my favorite of all of Bagman's releases, permeated with a sickening atmosphere of rot and decay that seeps from every second of this raw electronic filth.

�� Limited to two hundred copies on pro-manufactured cassette.

��I don't remember exactly where it was that I first discovered Bagman's blackened fusion of misanthropic electronics and oppressive harsh noise (probably the Men Who Solicit Sex disc that came out on Murderabilia), but I know that it had instantly seeped into my brain, infecting me with an utterly malignant atmosphere. This one-man UK outfit has been producing this pitch-black noise since at least 2008, and has already amassed a pretty impressive list of releases since then, each one a sonic representation of abject horror, the residue remaining after one gazes unblinkingly into the bottomless abyss that is humanity's capacity for evil and cruelty. When I throw on one of the few Bagman releases I've been able to track down, it feels like every mote of light in the room is being slowly crushed, leaving behind a caput mortuum of dread and disgust. Bagman's recordings ooze with the unfiltered horror of the human mind, translated into a series of violent audio frequencies. This stuff ain't no fun, that's for sure. Carrying on the tradition of transgression found in the early UK power electronics scene but combining it with a much more brutal and suffocating sonic assault, Bagman's early recordings are rumbling, bestial noisescapes littered with the voices of hate-mongers and murderers, criminals and degenerates and scenes of sexual deviance all suffused into the crushing walls of black static filth, junk metal devastation and monstrous electronics. Previously out of print, three of Bagman's malevolent early CDR releases have now been reissued on limited-edition cassette through the Infernal Machines imprint with all new artwork, recommended only to enthusiasts of the most nihilistic strains of extreme electronic noise and rabid industrial horror.

��Originally self-released in 2008, Bagman's Welcome To My Fucking Misery was the first release from the project, delivering four lengthy tracks of vile, blackened noise and rumbling bass horror that stretches out for nearly half an hour. Tracks like "In Bonds" and "Power Thrust" explore the themes of deviant violent sexuality and bestial violence that course through the flesh of Bagman's electronic soundscapes like cancerous cells, the murderous whispered vocals blasted through so much putrid distortion that the images of depravity, sadism and savage lust become unintelligible murmurs, their hateful energy transmuted into a pestilential blur of sound. This is seriously heavy stuff, huge droning slabs of charred distorted rumble infected with those demonic vocals, often sinking into an almost HNW-style wall of distortion. There are strains of a more subdued, dread-filled atmosphere that lurk beneath all of the corroded blown-out drones, sputtering feedback, insectoid buzzing, punishing sheet-metal percussive rhythms and scrap-metal rituals, but moments appear briefly, quickly consumed within the pulsating black horror of Misery's foul, raw extreme electronic chaos and visions of abject suffering.

�� Limited to two hundred copies on pro-manufactured cassette.

One of the most vicious of the newer British power electronics outfits, Bagman has been a favorite of mine since discovering the For Kenneth McKenna Ep this past year, and I've been hunting down whatever I can find from the project. The Public Catharsis #1 Cd-r (released on 412Recordings) is a recent live doc of this leather-armored scum warrior in action, and is way better than you'd expect for a live power electronics recording. Recorded in London in July of 2011 at ILL FM, this is actually the first ever live performance from Bagman, a twenty-two minute piece of predatory electronics perfumed in copper-scented ambience, where Steve Bagman stalks the stage, his head bound in a thick black leather mask, armed with Korg synths and looping effects chains that are piled into murderous assaults of filthy electro-throb while film footage and photo stills of sinister creepshots, rotting corpses, energetic bondage sessions, and the Great Constrictor, Kenneth McKenna flow across the wall behind the stage. Man, do I wish I could have been there.

The performance opens with a recording of children singing the lullaby "Hush, Little Baby", their voices becoming gradually more distorted and pushed into the red before Bagman violently crashes in with an onslaught of droning ambient feedback, howling cavernous squeals and foul distorted vocals, raving incoherently over a filthy backdrop of blackened dronedrift that becomes increasingly more ominous and threatening as the set continues. For the next twenty-odd minutes, the music shifts from massive rumbling amp-drones and ghastly machine hum to looping sampled voices and washes of sinister reverb-soaked noise. As with his other recordings, the influence of legendary UK power electronics duo Sutcliffe Jugend is heard throughout Bagman's psycho-sexual ravings and visions of merciless sadism and abuse, but he also gives this his own distinct edge via the incorporation of blasted melody into his fogbanks of black static and factory ambience, appearing here via fragments of ultra-blown-out film music are woven through the clouds of toxic black hum, and the eerie notes that drift across the background of "It Girl".

The disc comes in a twelve-page glossy booklet, and is hand-numbered in an edition of one hundred copies.

��I don't remember exactly where it was that I first discovered Bagman's blackened fusion of misanthropic electronics and oppressive harsh noise (probably the Men Who Solicit Sex disc that came out on Murderabilia), but I know that it had instantly seeped into my brain, infecting me with an utterly malignant atmosphere. This one-man UK outfit has been producing this pitch-black noise since at least 2008, and has already amassed a pretty impressive list of releases since then, each one a sonic representation of abject horror, the residue remaining after one gazes unblinkingly into the bottomless abyss that is humanity's capacity for evil and cruelty. When I throw on one of the few Bagman releases I've been able to track down, it feels like every mote of light in the room is being slowly crushed, leaving behind a caput mortuum of dread and disgust. Bagman's recordings ooze with the unfiltered horror of the human mind, translated into a series of violent audio frequencies. This stuff ain't no fun, that's for sure. Carrying on the tradition of transgression found in the early UK power electronics scene but combining it with a much more brutal and suffocating sonic assault, Bagman's early recordings are rumbling, bestial noisescapes littered with the voices of hate-mongers and murderers, criminals and degenerates and scenes of sexual deviance all suffused into the crushing walls of black static filth, junk metal devastation and monstrous electronics. Previously out of print, three of Bagman's malevolent early CDR releases have now been reissued on limited-edition cassette through the Infernal Machines imprint with all new artwork, recommended only to enthusiasts of the most nihilistic strains of extreme electronic noise and rabid industrial horror.

��A gaze into the abyss. Originally released in 2009 as a limited edition CDR on the Greek label Subliminal Recordings, Bagman's In Their Blood And From The Gutter is one of his earliest recordings, a foul, hateful blast of brutal harsh noise and screeching feedback littered with disturbing incoherent samples, recordings of far-right American political extremists, and blasts of garbled verbal hatred. These four tracks stretch out for nearly half an hour, each one an expansive blast of crushing distorted rumble and caustic black static, blasts of howling feedback carved into strange rhythmic forms, the cacophony of collapsing structures often breaking away to reveal a seething core of bestial vocalizations and sputtering low-fi drone. Massive low-end synthesizers growl through the suffocating blizzard of crackling static and roaring distressed vocals, bringing a doom-laden feel to tracks like "Breath Constriction" and "Hunting Ground". Ultra-heavy, hellish electronic noise that often steps into power electronics territory without losing it's chaotic, skin-shredding abrasiveness. It is some of the heaviest material that this project has produced, fueled by a monstrous throbbing black rhythmic power, those distorted rumbling synthesizers pulsating like the core of a dying black star. Bagman strips away the civilized face of humanity, and finds a festering, demonic evil leering back at us.

�� Limited to two hundred copies on pro-manufactured cassette.

Been awhile since I've picked up a Band Of Pain album; the last actual full length that we got here at C-Blast was 2003's Qu� Amiga?. I'm still waiting to hear something new from this venerable dark ambient outfit, but in the meantime Cold Spring has reissued this sinister soundtrack that BOP's Steve Pittia (also a founding member of cult UK noise rockers Splintered) did for Nigel Wingrove's controversial nun/blasphemy/art-sleaze flick Sacred Flesh in 2000. Sacred Flesh is probably the finest original score to a nunsploitation flick I've heard, as Pittia crafts a series of twelve pitch-black soundscapes that evokes all manner of fleshen debasements, religious/sexual imagery and descents into the bestial nature of the self.

Opening theme "Sacred Flesh" blends ominous orchestral elements with mysterious percussive sounds and sparse rhythmic noises before leading into the lush synth-horror of "Elizabeth, Bride Of Christ", where vast rumbling, buzzing synth drones undulate in the abyss, emitting clouds of Lustmordian dread and cavernous reverberations, where the lusty whispers of "Christ's wives" are buried beneath more demonic-sounding utterances and the thick, slow-drifting sound of symphonic strings being processed into evil drones. The tracks that follow vary in feel and texture while remaining consistently ominous and threatening throughout: "Strength To Resist" features muted, abstract orchestral ambience and blackened electronic drones, while "Submission" conjures bizarre images as the sounds of running water course through orgasmic moans, stretched out organ drones and grim synth/string arrangements. Pounding industrial percussion hammers away relentlessly under "In Media Vita"'s bleak expanse of forlorn-sounding strings, colorless keys and the sound of a crackling bonfire, and the nightmarish ecstasies of "Beat Out Desire" introduce a grinding machine-like rhythm and an infectious grungy bass line that slithers alongside liturgical sounds, the howling of nuns lost in the throes of orgasmic bliss. Most of this soundtrack is made up of massive orchestral nightscapes, though, carrying with them a pervasive atmosphere of spiritual desolation and dread. There's even shades of John Carpenter that appear here, specifically in the black synths of "Sister Ann".

I'm pretty sure this is the most evil-sounding piece of music that Band Of Pain has produced, and fans of Atrium Carceri, later Lustmord and Endvra will dig this for sure.

Didn't even know that this killer new project from Justin Broadrick (Godflesh/Jesu/Final/Techno Animal, natch) and Bill Laswell (Painkiller/Praxis) even existed until right before the disc came out! You�d think that there would be more hype about this considering the lineup. And man, is this a monster of a debut. The first collaboration between Laswell and Broadrick since Painkiller's Buried Secrets, The Blood Of Heroes is a concept project based on a somewhat obscure post-apocalyptic action flick from 1989 called The Blood Of Heroes that starred Rutger Hauer. I myself haven�t seen this movie in years, but I remember liking it allot when it originally came out; the film detailed a scorched future earth where nomadic "Juggers" travel from town to town engaging in a brutal blood sport that bears some resemblance to rugby, only it�s played with bone-crunching full impact violence and dog skulls. Using themes and details from the film, Laswell and Broadrick create a narrative that explores this brutal future society through a mixture of massive speaker-wrecking dubstep, industrial metal riffage from Broadrick, drum n' bass/breakcore and ambient electronica...basically a badass conglom of Godflesh grind and malevolent dubstep/raggacore, with contributions from breakcore producers End.user and Submerged and Dr. Israel from Method Of Defiance handling the mic. For anyone who thought that there was more room for pure heaviness in dubstep and raggacore after The Bug�s London Zoo, this album is probably going to blow your doors off�

The opener "Blinded" alone is worth picking this up, a crushing apocalyptic dubstep assault with vicious toasting from Israel over punishing industrial flecked drum n bass breaks and slow grinding dubstep grooves, delivering some ultra-crushing dance floor devastation. The gorgeous industrial dub of "Chains" has Broadrick draping lush Jesu-like blissed out guitar and dreamy electronica over MASSIVE booming breakbeats, and on "Salute To The Jugger, the band welds grinding metallic guitar and swirling ominous samples to crushing dancehall dirge with more of Dr Israel's booming toasting and sinister hip hop flow.

The album continues through more Godflesh-meets-Enduser industrial-metal junglist fury laced with ululating female cries ("Breakaway"), gorgeous driftscapes of Jesu-style crushing melodic guitar over slower drum n' bass grooves swathed in spacey effects and sampled ambient noise ("Transcendent"), heavy but so catchy and mesmeric, and intricately assembled, atmospheric dubbed-out electronica and cinematic soundscapes with spoken word from Israel that further fleshes out the world of Blood Of Heroes. Even though the music on this album is very much rooted in dubstep and drum n' bass, Broadrick's trademark heaviness is all over the place. "Remain", for instance, starts off just like a Jesu song, massive crushing dreamsludge poppiness joined by lush electronics and breakbeats, but over time it morphs into more skittery, stuttering drum n� bass without losing the gorgeous melodic riff/hook at it's center. "Wounds Against Wounds" combines more massive blown-out Godflesh-style low end crush with manic jungle rhythms and a suffocating atmosphere of dystopian dread. "Descend Destroy" starts as a druggy dubscape of delayed toasting drifting through the ether, looped guitar, dark droning ambience, then turns into a sort of menacing industrial hip-hop jam, Dr Israel flowing over more grinding industrial sludge and pounding breakbeats, sounding a lot like Techno Animal streaked with dubstep bass buzz and spacey effects, later on morphing into apocalyptic drum n bass. That's followed by the eerie ethno-ambience, Middle Eastern strings, and ululating vocalizations of ""Bound" that lead into a scorched dubbed-out drum n bass assault, and the album closes with a wave of tribal drums and dubbed out jungle skitter, delirium of effects laden toasting, swirling angelic voices and murky dark ambience. Some of the heaviest stuff that Broadrick has done in years, it sounds like a natural progression from the heavy dub/breakbeat experiments that Godflesh engaged in during the mid 90�s, now fused with modern beat technology and much more complex programming. This disc fucking rules, and I hope to hell that this isn�t just a one off project�

Comes in digipack packaging.

Being a big fan of the whole UK post-industrial scene, the Pathological, Freek, Broken Flag and Headdirt labels, bands like Skullflower, Ramleh, Splintered, Slab!, etc., it's weird that I never got into the band Bodychoke before. Part of it is that their stuff has been out of print for years and I just never came across any of their albums, but Bodychoke also came along later in the 90's, around the time that this scene began to drift deeper underground. Thanks to Relapse for reissuing this 1998 album, though, because this stuff rules. Cold River Songs originally came out on the Purity label, and has been presented here in a remastered form with three bonus tracks (originally from the limited Completion cdr) and new artwork and album design.

The band was formed by members of power electronics legends Sutcliffe Jugend and Whitehouse, a massive noise rock unit that fused together industrial rhythms, crushing riffage, dark dramatic baritone vocals that sound a whole lot like Michael Gira from Swans, and nihilistic lyrics. By the time that Bodychoke recorded their third and final album Cold River Songs, they had evolved into a sinister combination of the pummeling mechanistic heaviness of Godflesh, the grim and dramatic crush of Swans, and the gloomy post-punk of Joy Division and Nick Cave.

The album starts off with the heavy guitar noise and tribal drumming of "Control", ominous martial snares coming in, the sound very Swans-like, and then it changes into a frenzied noise rock jam, screaming vocals and seething riffage, bits of electronic noise and cello, a pummeling industrial noise rock groove. The next track "Cold River Song" is a longer jam that starts off with atmospheric clean guitar strum and drums, the cello coming back in and giving the sound an epic, dolorous feel, and as the song stretches out for almost ten minutes, the softer post-rock sound is contrasted with violent eruptions of distorted riffs and pounding percussion, building slowly to the chaotic crescendo at the end. More cello dominates "Your Submission", whose sparse bass lines and skittering dubby percussion at first creates a dark, brooding vibe, Paul Taylor's deep crooning vocals and the electronic noises adding to the moody post-rock crawl, but then the track erupts into a super heavy spaced out tribal jam with screamed vocals, corrosive slabs of guitar noise, pounding militaristic snares, scraped cello strings, a pounding industrial post-punk heaviness that segues right into the song "Victim". This track starts off almost like a chamber rock piece, eerie cello drones and electronic ambience and tribal percussion slowly building to another frenzied noise rock eruption, squalls of guitar noise and heavy drumming pounding out a hypnotic waltzing groove, similar to later-era Swans or Killing Joke.

The Swans comparison is most obvious on "Ideal Home", though. It's a standout track that's much more somber and restrained than the rest of the album, a slow moody dirge that's led by the bass guitar and cello and surrounded by clean guitars and violins and subtle percussion, dramatic and brooding and very Swans-like, especially when the distinctly Gira-like singing comes in. And "Aftermath", which closed the original album, is another ominous post-punk jam, almost entirely instrumental save for some deep chanting choir-like vocals, the sound minimal and spacey, droning horns and moaning cello mixing with minor key guitar and sprawling dramatic ambience, finally building into squalls of psychedelic, Skullflowery noise guitar. The three bonus tracks at the end are similar, winding noise-laced rock with explosive feedback, haunting cello strings, pounding Killing Joke-style drumming, and fierce screamed vocals. This album is so heavy and haunting; I can't get enough of it, and can't believe that I've just now discovered it. A definite recommendation for anyone into heavy noise rock, Uk industrial, that sort of thing; this is one of the best albums that I've ever heard from that era of underground UK heaviness!

Since the Recycled Music cassettes that RRRecords puts out have zero information about the release included with them and the RRR site is slim on release info, I usually have to rely on online databases like Discogs.com to find out when any of these tapes came out. The Con-Dom cassette in the Recycled Music series is unfortunately lacking in release year info on the site and the tape has yet to be officially entered into Con-Dom's own discography list on their site, so I have no idea how old this entry in the series is. I'm guessing that it's one of the older tapes, though. Regardless of when this came out, it's a lethal dose of perverted power electronics from one of the seminal groups from the original UK industrial scene of the 1980s alongside Whitehouse, Ramleh, Sutcliffe J�gend and Grey Wolves. The name of Mike Dando's hardcore electronics project is short for Control-Domination, and has been kicking around since 1983, releasing some of the most controversial released from the early days of power electronics. This Recycled cassette captures Dando's acidic PE assault with two untitled side-long tracks that average around twenty minutes apeice, and each side is a relentless pummeling of vicious vocal ranting about what I presume to be the usual array of social issues that Dando explores, and the vocals are run through so many electronic effects that his language is mutated into an indecipherable alien roar that sprawls out across queasy, extremely distorted oscillating sinewaves and crunchy dissonant noise that sounds like it might have been guitar generated. At times, this set gets pretty nauseating with the violently fluctuating tones, photon blasts and extreme use of effects, especially on the second side. It's an intense and unsettling listen. Like the rest of the Recycled Music series, Con-Dom's entry is dubbed over an old commercial music cassette and packaged in the orignal tape cover covered with duct tape.

This old recording from the early British noise project Consumer Electronics just resurfaced recently on RRRecords as a CDr, and it sounds as nasty and abusive now as it ever did back when it was first released. The solo project of a young Philip Best of Whitehouse/Ramleh infamy, Consumer Electronics took a more primitive (yet no less ferocious) approach to constructing severe electronic abuse, and this mid-90s release on the Pure series cuts right through your headmeat with six lengthy assaults of extreme industrial violence. Although the disc was originally released in 1995, the actual recordings all date back to 1982-1983 and are culled from rare cassette and limited vinyl projects. The sound of Teenage Nurmeburg is a kind of murky, dread-soaked proto power electronics, with tracks such as "Sex Deaths", "Genesis Of A Child Star" and "Fusing Devices" (all of which could have doubled as song titles for Whitehouse) lashing out at the listener with looped percussion buried under sheets of tape hiss, loads of low-fidelity slime and airplane hangar reverb crawling across the concrete floor, and weird electronic zaps and synth effects. Best's vocals have a heavily flanged, deformed effect that make 'em sound much stranger than what he did on those Whitehouse albums around the same time, and sometimes erupts into monstrous guttural roars that have a shocking effect when they suddenly blare out over the sordid backdrop of cavernous rumblings, high pitched squeals, strange samples of British youth behaving obnoxiously, and musical fragments and chunks of pop songs. It can go from extremely caustic and nauseating feedback/synth abuse into something that can be surprisingly rhythmic, even hypnotic at times, which of course just adds to the uneasy feeling that permeates all of Consumer Electronics. Also of note is the monolithic opening title track, a nightmarish blat of filthy basement electronics that was recorded back in 1983 and features guest material from John Murphy of industrial pioneers SPK. Comes in a multi-color xeroxed sleeve.

I'm working on getting my hands on everything I can find from Content Nullity; this UK based power electronics/death industrial outfit has turned into another one of my favorite current projects in this field, after having been deeply creeped out by the recent Scorn Of Totality tape on Audial Decimation. If you're at all into the darkest, heaviest currents of modern PE, this is a band you should be listening to. The superbly-titled Absolute Dread tape came out a few years ago on Phage but is amazingly still in print; issued in a limited run of one hundred pro-manufactured tapes in silk-screened packaging, this is another terrific dose of Content Nullity's misanthropic industrial/noise crush, recorded earlier in the project's career.

One track per side, beginning with the black botfly swarm of "The Parasites That We Are" that slowly wells up out of the darkness in a hive-buzz of distorted synths and grainy tape-hiss, a steady mindless buzzing drone curling through the murk, everything awash in black static. Strange vocal sounds, faint traces of orchestral synth and various minimal effects start to peer out of the depths, but it's all devoured by the waves of bass-heavy distorted rumble that begin to pour in. When the real vocals finally come in, they're so rheumy and reptilian that they end up adding a whole 'nother layer of creeping horror to the sound. Later on, the side actually starts to get into some pretty gorgeous kosmische drift, but the black pulsing death-synth fluctuations that appear keep things from crawling too far out of the abyss.

The other track "Throw My Bones Down The Well" starts off more as an ominous harsh noise experiment, piercing feedback waves coursing over distant percussive rumblings, but then does an abrupt shift into all-out brutality, crushing distorted feedback and junk-avalanche destruction rushing around collapsing mountains of concrete and glass, becoming increasingly more violent and thunderous as it proceeds. Some pounding rhythmic forms and spastic glitch appear at various points and it lurches into a strange malfunctioning mechanical rhythm towards the end, but for the most part this is pure crushing chaos.

Whoa! All of you UK noise rock fans better take notice...we stumbled across a long lost stash of this long out-of-print 7" EP from psychedelic sludge mutants Cosmonauts Hail Satan, released way back in 1992 in a hand-numbered edition of 666 copies by the mighty Shock Records, the label run by Stefan Jaworzyn of Skullflower / Ascension / Shock Xpress fame! This EP was the very first release from Cosmonauts Hail Satan, and it's more of the bizarre, distorted psych-plod and drug-fueled satanic tape cut-up delirium that appeared on their Cape Cannibal Skull Island Apocalypse disc. The two sides are just two halves of a single track, a deranged industrial sludge rock jam with pounding percussion, heavy tribal drums knotted into hypnotic primal rhythms, massively distorted bass and guitar oozing Melvins-esque sludge, thick streaks of low-end amplifier drone, caustic guitar noise, and TONS of looped samples from old witchcraft flicks and horror movies strewn over the top. It's a blast! These guys never achieved the same level of notoriety as their peers in Skullflower, Ramleh and Splintered (well, maybe not Splintered, those guys were lost to obscurity too...), but it's the same sort of heavy, noisy UK sludge rock; fans of this stuff should move quick if you want a copy, as we only found a couple of these rare records.

Totally degenerate, B-movie fueled riffbattery, a stumbling, malevolent thug-noise monstrosity somewhere between Skullflower and Brainbombs ! Holy fuck !! We had never heard of this band prior to receiving the disc from Amanita, but the cyclical, retardo-krautrock-on-percocets thud that oozed out of the C-Blast stereo had us swooning. Segments of assorted grindhouse cinema and b-film dialogue cut-ups are smeared across hideous neanderthaloid feedback wrangling and looped distortion gunch. Gorgeous muzak bliss is ground, hamburger-like, into the concrete by a brain-damaged Godflesh riff set on endless repeat. Synth freakin, trance-inducing drums, exploding electronic tracers. You could almost call parts of this "free jazz" , if it wasn't drooling on you so heavily. A fuzz n' filth encrusted bass guitar slaps all steppers to the wall. Even the freaking drums sound like they're connected to a fuzz-box. Mutoid subterranean buzzsaw howl pounds at what little is left of your spirit. Apparently this is the sole full length album that this UK outfit spurted out, circa 1995, and includes some WAYYY out of print cassette only tracks. Stefan Jaworzyn ( Skullflower ) contributes some smartass liner notes. We love discoveries like this, especially when it turns out to be a crushing orgy of free-skronk sludge and horror movie inspired tape-loop dementia/psychedelia !

This is the second older 7" from Cosmonauts Hail Satan that has come into the shop recently; the first was the Satan Yuri And You 7" on Shock Records that we found (and which is still in stock), which I still can't believe is still floating around out there. UK noise/thud rock from this era is really hard to find since most of this stuff was pressed up in really tiny runs, and I don't expect either of these 7"s to lurk on our shelves for long.

This UK noise rock band was a contemporary of Skullflower, Splintered, Bodychoke, and the other noisy guitar-centric bands on the Shock Records roster, but they were considerably weirder than those outfits thanks to the band's obsession with skeezy exploitation cinema that resulted in lots of strange samples being wound around their pounding dirge-rock trances. Released in 1995 on the UK label Secret Devil Records, this rare two-song Ep contains some of CHS's most restrained music, at least compared to their other stuff that I have in my collection. The first song "Deep River Misery" is a sparse industrial hypno-rock hallucination of pulsating motorik drums, slithering bass, wispy feedback, cannibal b-movie samples and strange rain forest samples, creaking guitar and amp noise funneled into a kind of creepy, murderous trance rock, sort of like a sparser more psychedelic take on hypno-crunchers Gore or Circle. The b-side song is "Stacy Keach", an ode to that square-jawed star of Mountain Of The Cannibal God and Road Games in the form of a slinky industroid throbber, a deep serpentine groove shot up with black synth buzz, almost Scorn-like beats, and more creepy pilfered exploitation film samples arranged into strange new codes on this pounding head-nodder. Pretty sweet.

Each copy is machine-numbered.

���Since 2011's Sexless Merit, UK power electronics artist Zen Zsigo has been producing a beautifully depraved strain of electronic gloom under the name Cremation Lily, mainly through extremely limited cassette releases on his own Strange Rules imprint. These tapes have contained some of the most captivating noise experiments I've heard out of the UK lately, combining bursts of cruel power electronics with smears of ghostly ambience, gales of crushing sheet-metal chaos and, most notably, ethereal synthesizer melodies that add a forlorn musical element usually absent in this realm. New album Fires Frame The Silhouette is the first full-length vinyl release from the project, a stunning collection of dreamlike noise and harsh industrial abrasion that can sometimes rival Prurient at his most atmospheric, comprised of key tracks from previous cassette releases that have been reworked and remixed for this new release.

��� For the most part, the tracks collected on Fires tend to center more around building an oppressive sonic atmosphere steeped in gloom and the banality of daily life, than assaulting the listener with extreme electronic frequencies, though there are moments of severe aural abuse. Cremation Lily's sound finds itself in a disturbing realm populated with the likes of recent Sutcliffe Jugend and Consumer Electronics, the noisier aspects of these recordings rendered in service to an overall immersive sound, an ocean of decrepit industrial collapse. The first track "Drawings Hang On Police Station Walls" that opens up the record suggests a more traditional PE direction, but after that assault of shrieking feedback and scolding screams finally drifts into the void, the album falls back into a series of haunting synthesizer melodies buried beneath endless cacophonies of collapsing scrap-metal and squealing machinery. Eerie minor key laments slowly creep over and through the gales of entropic noise that Zsigo unleashes, sometimes breaking free of the chaos completely to focus on a single murky droning synthesizer floating through the abyss, it's only accompaniment a muted, mechanical growl ensepulchered in the depths. There are parts that almost resemble a classic John Carpenter score being played out over the sounds of a machine shop coming to life, all moody dark synthdrift repeating endlessly over a symphony of rusted chains, but the distorted vocals that appear intermittently throughout the tracks are so frenzied as to resemble the vitriolic ravings of a vocalist from an old hardcore punk outfit. Elsewhere, the sounds of church choirs drift languidly over endlessly echoing volleys of metallic clank and the ambient sounds of a dank oubliette, or surge into onslaughts of reverberant percussive noise and controlled blasts of cetacean feedback, encountering fragments of what almost sounds like triumphant film score music buried beneath massive droning synths and avalanches of empty oil drums, then finally closing with the swirling melodious synthmurk of the title track, a final glimpse of stark spellbinding beauty among the scenes of industrial carnage.

��� Limited to three hundred copies.

Culver is the alias for prolific drone head Lee Stokoe, who also runs the UK label Matching Head, plays bass in sludge-drone metallers Marzuraan, and has recently been enlisted as a live member of both Sunroof! and Skullflower. The Black Telephone Wire is a limited edition CD-R on the At War With False Noise, and the first thing that strikes me is how mellow this is compared to just about everything else I've heard from the label, the devotional drone/folk/sludge of Culver standing in bright contrast against the improvisation skullfucks administered by the likes of Kylie Minoise, Tetsuo, and Nackt Insecten. This CD-R contains a single track, 47 minute long, which begins with a dark, minor-key melody strummed and plucked slowly on a single acoustic guitar, the notes fingerpicked and left to hang in empty air, gradually picking up pace and becoming a repetitive folk dirge that builds in strength and volume as it transforms into a single droning chord, a buzzing acoustic ur-drone. Glacial drones and fuzzy electronic ambience rises out of space over the first 20 minutes of the track, and the drones and distortion and acoustic guitar gradually swirl together into a hypnotic, fuzzed out roar littered with aqueous melodies. Totally mesmerizing and quite heavy, especially towards the end when the distortion really kicks in, massive and beautiful, a black blizzard of icy sludge mantra that stretches out forever. An excellent disc of heavy drone that has a similiar vibe as that of Corrupted's forays into acoustic ambience. Released in a limited edition of 100, in an oversized sleeve with haunting artwork printed onto acetate sheets.

Guitarist and dronemaker Lee Stokoe has been a member of the new Skullflower lineup for awhile now, appearing on some of the newer studio and live recordings and performing live with Matt Bower, and his addition to the band has probably been a big factor in the 'Flower's evolution into the furious blackened dronerock behemoth. Also a member of the UK sludge band Marzuraan, this guy keeps pretty busy, and on top of all of this he's still able to crank out new material from his longrunning solo project Culver, which I'm always stoked to hear. Sugar Tip is one of Culver's latest slabs of crushing metallic amp-trance, released on the Chicago industrial label Bloodlust! and packged with Stokoe's signature style of brightly colored and surreal collage art.

The first track "Suicide Crypt" is roaring pit of blacknoise rumble, endless walls of buzzing, grinding, raging distorted drone like a massed Chatham-like army of doom metal guitarists all playing the same single chord behind a cascade of roiling low-end rumble and threads of humming high-end drone that almost sound like orchestral strings distended from massive gravitations pull. For more than twenty-one minutes this piece stretches out, a massive wall of roaring distorted dronebuzz, a purely ambient noisewall that undergoes only the most subtle chordal shifts.

At just two minutes, the middle track "I Know You're Alone" is just an interlude between the two other larger tracks, a swirl of muted low-end thrum and murky cosmic winds obscuring a vague melodic pulse, droning and dark kosmiche drift that leads straight into the final distorto-drone epic...

"Suicide Witch", like the first track, is both minimal and massive, a single feedback drone writhing serpentine through cosmic clouds of warbling high-end shimmer and thick metallic buzz, a mighty blackened raga buzzing through the void, Sunroof-style. As this goes on, the soft smears of ambient hum and metallic resonance that float around this roaring static raga-drone undergo slight shifts, forming into eerie fragments of melody that evolve ever so slightly over the track's twenty-three minutes, winding down at the end as the drones are stripped down layer by layer until all that remains is a throbbing electrical hum at the end.

Fans of Sunroof, Vulture Club, Ajilsvga, Birchville Cat Motel, RST, To Blacken The Pages, and other guitar-centric heavy psychedelic drone outfits, here's another crushing psychdrone archtitect for you to zone out to!

In amongst all of the wrecked outsider doom and low-fi skum-metal and blownout prog/psych destruction that At War With False Noise has been hurtling through our doors over the past year (Zarach'Baal'Tharagh, Sloth, Veee Deee, Seppuku, Alkerdeel, Gnaw Their Tongues, Marzuraan, Black Sun, etc etc etc), you might just forget for a second about the NOISE in At War With False Noise. In case you needed a reminder though (and if recent releases from Vomir, Rape-X, and Mike Page slipped under yopur radar), this split cassette is here to bring the noise, and lots of it. This tape came out last year and is already sold out from the label, but we have ten of the last copies available in stock. A set of shadowy industrial sketches from each group, Chicago's Death Factory and UK electronic heavies Messiah Complex each lay out around 30 minutes of filthy, crushing industrial abstraction.

UK duo Messiah Complex unleash a thirty minute untitled track of nihilistic droning machinedeathroar, much noisier and more violent than the rumbling dark ambient sludgedrift of their Meniscus disc on At War. Here, the band starts off with a swirling black vortex of oscillating distortion, then builds it into a roaring wall of malevolent noise and grinding electrical powerdrone, not quite at Vomir/Rita territory, but harsh and heavy as fuck nonetheless. This is more detailed, dynamic stuff than pure wall-noise; dense distorted rumblings and textured feedback swirl and surge and recede, sometimes revealing stretches of metallic hum, more often exploding in bursts of symphonic white noise, subsonic concrete-mixer thunder and sickening, roaring death metal-esque vocals. Awesome.

The Death Factory side is titled "De-composed Works" and is split up into four distinctly seperate tracks. This stuff is very cool - taking it's name from a Throbbing Gristle bootleg, Death Factory tap into that old school 80's industrial vibe with a series of distorted rhythmic dirges, high-freq feedback soundscapes, alien morse code patterns, radiant kosmiche synths, intensely cold ambient soundscaping, short powerful blasts of harsh noise, chirping insectile electronics, crushing distorted powerdrone and nightmare-inducing radio transmissions, and it all puts out this dank, paranoid cloud of urban unease that is quite effective, especially when Death Factory flows into an awesomely eerie Tangerine Dream/Klaus Schulze style ambient movement at the end.

As always, killer packaging from At War With False Noise: the tapes are packaged in translucent static-shield bags with a doublesided insert and sealed with a printed sticker. Limited to 100 copies, and like I said, these are the last of 'em!

Another much-needed dose of brutal distortion blather from that UK fright mutant Eeyow Karoom, whose past power skuzz we've dug mightily, ESPECIALLY when you bring up his mighty hypno skullfuck squad Cosmonauts Hail Satan, whose retarded noise rock trances are frequently blasted here at C-Blast HQ. With Message From The Zodiac, Karoom emits more of the ear destroying feedback skree and death storm that was slathered all over the Aggro Stations series he did(also released on the Suggestion imprint), this time tho revolving around the Zodiac Killer letters. It's fittingly sinister stuff, nine devilish and droning tracks of mean Broken Flag-meets Deathpile style speaker burn encoded in pure malevolence. It's a harrowing 45 minutes of horrific, massively distorted electric gristle, pure cranium shaving shit, with Eeyow's vocal vomit sounding not unlike Rawhead Rex beaming back verbal sleaze from the 26th Century. The killer packaging ties in with the Zodiac theme: an unassuming manila envelope hand-addressed to the Riverside Police Department contains a nice color digipack w/ disc along with a Zodiac badge, copies of some of the Zodiac's letters, and other xeroxed weirdness. Limited to 60 freakin copies, hand numbered!!!! Def for fans of Deathpile, MSBR, Prurient's harsher stuff, old Marax, brutal scum-drones, neighbor-hating feedback combat, etc.

Horrific metal junk chaos meets pitch-black static drone on this limited-run disc from Hal Hutchinson's now defunct Der Bunker imprint. No frills and zero fluff, this cd-r comes in a simple black and white Xeroxed sleeve.

First up is the one and only recorded appearance of Exterminant, a short lived project from Ulex Xane, whom you may know as the original founder of the acclaimed Aussie label Extreme Records as well as the guy behind the controversial long-running power electronics project Streicher. As Exterminant, he brings us "Solucion Brutale", a total skullfuck of harsh metallic junk-noise sculpted into looping patterns that ends up becoming an intense wall of psychedelic carnage. Mountains of collapsing metal, blasts of extreme filthy feedback, screeching oscillator freak-outs are all mashed together into this towering monolith of harsh noise. It takes the scrapyard abuses of K2 and Kakerlak and blasts 'em into a whirling vortex of lysergic scrape, rumble and roar.

One of Hal Hutchinson's earlier projects and a pre-cursor to his HNW work under the Pollutive Static name, Execution Support Act gives us "Horrific View Of A Killing Machine (The Act Of Killing A Criminal)", a long blast of swarming HNW, a constant rush of dense, black locust-static that completely fills the air and blots out all of the light. This wall is similar to the dead static-blasts of Vomir, and shares the same trance-inducing properties through its eight minute long meditation on self-negation.

Issued in a limited edition of fifty copies.

Long before there was Jesu, or Godflesh, or Techno Animal, or even Napalm Death, there was Final, Justin Broadrick's first project that he started in the early 80's as a response to the burgeoning UK industrial movement. Since Broadrick has been immersed in his work with Jesu over the past few years, I haven't heard much new material from Final outside of the double disc that Neurot put out a few years ago, which is too bad; I've always been a fan of the grim isolationist ambience, corrosive guitar noise and formless drones that have always marked his solo recordings under the Final name.

Considering how sweetly melodic and poppy his shoegazer-industro-sludge anthems have been getting with Jesu, it's jarring to hear how abrasive and crushing the sound of Dead Air is - compared to the Neurot release, this is virtually harsh noise! The first track "Slow Air" especially...holy shit! A massive chunk of super-distorted bass riffage grinding beneath clouds of acidic feedback and slowly hovering high-end drones. Huge and overdriven and fucking menacing, this ultra heavy industrial sludge is like a Skullflower jam gone rotten, the roaring murky crush laced with looping melodies and machine-like throb. The next track "Cave" is streaked with oscilatting waves of digital chaos and ascending feedback that gradually turns into a roaring wall of glitchy noise and grinding white noise.

Then comes "Fearless Systems", another super heavy industrial dirge, but this time the heaviness is laced with sinister little bits of melody and fluttering electronic squelch, while a massive sludgy two-note riff breathes in and out. SOme haunting, heavily processed guitar melody and blown out cosmic synth begins to appear over the track, and once again I'm reminded of old Skullflower, albeit dunked in tar and damaged noise and thick syrupy Tangerine Dream. Really beautiful. The next track "Disordered" is much more abstract, with just a minimal dronescape of crackling noise and descending engine roar. From there the album continues to become more fractured and noisy, sometimes sculpting the low-end drones into huge factory grooves, or delving into grating Whitehouse-style distortion, fields of fragmented guitar, chaotic shoegazey blisscapes, crushing distorted guitar drone, grimey rust-covered kosmiche drift, or, as on "Inanimate Air" and "Smeared Air", infusing warbling analog electronic noise with pulverizing overmodulated bass frequencies pilfered from dubstep.

Comes packaged in a gorgeous six-panel folder with artwork by Stephen Kasner.

A two-fer-one package from Relapse that bundles two of their more obscure releases from the 90's; both of these albums are pretty terrific, and if you're a fan of avant-garde post-industrial heaviness and experimental guitar-based ambience, highly recommended. Each disc comes in it's own complete packaging, but the two cds are housed in a printed slipsleeve.

First, Flux's art-industro-pop album Protoplasmic:

Um, it's sorta hard to believe that this far-out guitar pop is from the bassist from doomlords Khanate, especially if you weren't familiar with all of James Plotkin's earlier projects. But this was one of the avant-guitarist's primary projects in the 90's after the demise of experimental goof-grinders Old Lady Drivers, recorded around the same time that he was collaborating with Mick Harris from Scorn, who actually produced this album. That produced a cross-pollination of ideas that take shape on Flux's one and only album Protoplasmic from 1997, which sounds like a mix of futuristic trip-hop and heavy dreamy roboto mecha-pop filtered through Plotkin's mutant guitar. More than ten years later, Flux still sounds totally unique. The rhythms are weird and angular, broken jagged beats and fractured breaks that alternate with more rigid percussion that comes close to Scorn or Godflesh's heavy drum programming, but the guitars are crafted into lush, dreamy abstract textures and jagged melodic lines that give this a weird post-punk feel. Plotkin enlisted vocalist Ruth Collins to recite a combination of spoken word poetry and ethereal fx-soaked harmonies, and he himself delivers some neat robotic vocoder crooning in a couple of tracks. At times, I'm reminded of the angular anti-funk of Wire, but combined with dark, spacey beatscapes. However, once you get to the last half of the album, things get decidedly darker and more ominous. The song "Stretched Out" moves into shadowy regions, evoking the creepy darkhop/industrial dub of Scorn with distorted vocals over heavy programmed break beats and throbbing basslines, dark electronic drones and electronic fx.

"Airtrap" has Collins delivering another spoken word piece over dark rising drones and distorted synth sounds and chittering insectile noise a la Throbbing Gristle. But then the last track "Immanence" returns the big jagged drum machine beats and synth guitar sounds from earlier, almost jazzy and ecstatic, with glorious buzzing drones and huge looping bass locked into the propulsive grooves, sounding vaguely like Italian prog blasted through a wall of sci-fi synth.

The second disc in the package, Slab!'s dark industrial funk/sludge opus Descension:

Featuring members of esteemed UK avant/rock/noise bands like Sweet Tooth, Ice and God, Slab! were a similar sort of post-industrial crushsquad who went for a unique avant sound that tapped into both the industrial sludge of Godflesh and the nihilistic pummel of Swans, as well as a heavy post-punk and free jazz vibe, with a bit of Foetus thrown in. It's interesting that I got this disc in the same week that I picked up that Bodychoke reissue on Relapse, as both bands come from a similar sound, although Slab! were much more eclectic and weird. This Relapse reissue from the late 90's collects both the Descension Lp and the tracks from the People Pie 12", both of which came out on Ink Records back in 1987-88. This is pretty crucial stuff for fans of the UK noise rock scene of the late 80's; Slab! were a seriously heavy band that back in the day were compared to everything from Swans to Big Black to Material and The Birthday Party, which gives you an idea of how far-ranging their sound could be.

The first two songs set the trajectory for where Slab! are headed: menacing, near-whispered vocals and bleak oppressive ambience creeping over a massive hypnotic industrial sludge groove of "Tunnel Of Love"'s grinding robotic drums, electronic noise and crushing bass, then followed by sheets of dissonance,

gothy Depeche Mode-ish crooning, oil drum percussion, rumbling bass and pummeling mechanical grind of "Undriven Snow", which sort of sounds to me like a new wavey Godflesh.

"Dr Bombay" begins with heavy guitar noise and softly bleating horns, dark and jazzy, before launching into an unexpectedly funky industrial jam, multiple drummers playing in tandem, massive rumbling bass, the band launching into a sort of industrial strength no wave funk with free jazz horns. Reminds me of

16-17 a bit, but less abrasive, more heavy and hypnotic and, er, danceable. It all drifts off into pure free jazz territory for a minute, before dropping back into that propulsive groove, and then after another bout of skronky, splattery free jazz towards the end, the song shifts into a pounding industrial dirge, total Godflesh-like heaviness.

The next song "Dolores" features piano, shuffling electro rhythms, break beats, and deep dramatic vocals in a nightmarish electro jam, the vocals a Gira/Danzig-like baritone croon, big rocking basslines, trancey rhythmic beats, surges of strings and horns, like Godflesh mixed with orchestral samples and dark post-punk.

"The Animals" is a slow fragmented dirge with backwards tape noise and demonic pitch shifted vocals, simple plodding bass, creepy samples, simple pounding percussion, drifting off halfway in into minimal dark ambience, then returning to a free jazz-damaged version of the original dirge, subtle squawking horns bleating and echoing at the edges of the music, the drums building into a dense echoing wall of tribal pummel, the track becoming more hallucinatory, the guitar skronkier and more abstract and Sharrock-like.

"Gutter Busting" is another pounding industrial post-punk funk dirge with fiery horns and stuttering industrial breakbeats, crushing and Scorn-esque, with weird clean backing vox. The Swans vibe returns with "Flirt" (especially in the vocals), and "Mooseland" begins with improv drumming and guitar noise, bits of abstract piano, very free jazz, then blasts off with distorted bass guitar churning against the skittery jazzy rhythms. Both "Loose Connection Somewhere" and "Big Sleeper" also mix free jazz clatter and Swans'style pummel, and "People Pie" at first seems like another industrial sludge assault, but then pulls out exuberant R&B backing vocals on the chorus (!). The last track "Railroad" is a haunting jazz-sludge quake, all plodding bone-rattling bass , distorted heaviness, druggy chanting, a mechanical monstrous groove stumbling through psychedelic looped samples and narcotized horns.

Fucking awesome stuff, I dunno why more people didn't get into this band and album when Relapse reissued it, but it's remained one of the more overlooked and obscure reissues that Relapse ever put out. If you are into bands like Godflesh, Head Of David, God, Splintered, Cosmonauts Hail Satan, Bodychoke, Terminal Cheesecake and the like, though, you need to hear this. The disc includes an eight page booklet that has liner notes, band bio, discography info, lyrics and more.

An excellent new Cd from the Scottish noise duo Fordell Research Unit, The Illusion Of Movement has revived my lust for high-quality heavy dronemusic after having to choke down one too many humdrum drone discs lately. Made up of members Fraser Burnett and Grant Smith, Fordell Research Unit creates richly detailed buzzscapes across the album's four long tracks, which stretch anywhere from eight to eighteen minutes in duration, and even on the shorter ones they unfold an entire world of gleaming metallic hum and crackling speaker hiss and mechanical rattling that are pretty damn intoxicating. It's heavy stuff, too; on tracks like the aptly-titled "Dumped Washing Machine Floating Up River" and the crushing infernal engine-roar of "Gateshead Black Room", there's an undercurrent of burly, low-end rumble and churning guitar that succeeds in injecting a hefty amount of crunch into the clanging industrial drones. It''s not pure rumble, though; these long dronefields are laced with all kinds of eerie minimal melody, distant majestic ambience and looping fragmented samples that become pretty complex and layered the deeper you get into the album, and it results in a really cinematic quality on the tracks that reveals more of itself with each subsequent listen. The final track is the most fearsome, a throbbing black bass-pulse throbbing at the heart of a cosmic storm of howling dead voices, grainy distorted drones and massive orchestral guitar buzz. These guys show a lot of promise with this album, crafting massive slabs of heavy-duty industrial drone built from crushing walls of guitar rumble and feedback that seem to follow a continuous theme throughout the disc, building into moments of monotonous heaviness that are able to reach some of the same hypnotic peaks of machinecrush as Culver, Haare, DMDN, Jazzfinger and some of the harsher, more abstract Skullflower work (circa Tribulation). Released by At War With False Noise in a limited edition of five hundred copies.

This set isn't the deluxe reissue that we at Crucial Blast might have been wishing for, but it's still a colossal repackaging of two of my favorite Godflesh releases bundled with their DVD of all of their music videos, which has been hard to come by lately. This set includes the original release of Godflesh's 1996 album Songs Of Love And Hate, the companion remix/deathdub collection Love And Hate In Dub, and the In All Languages DVD all packaged together in a cool slipcase. The packaging for the two discs is basically the same as the original pressing, and the DVD is simply included as a second disc in the same case as the ...In Dub disc (which also includes inserts/booklets for both discs, thankfully including all of the excellent liner notes that accompany the video collection). So, if you already own all three of the original releases, you don't need to worry about double dipping, as this release doesn't offer anything new. But for Godflesh fans who still need to add these releases to their collection, or for those who are just now discovering the bonecrushing industrial metal/breakbeat power of mid-90's Godflesh, then this set (priced fucking CHEAP) is a must-get.

Ever since these Brits dropped their classic debut Streetcleaner on an unsuspecting underground in the late 80's, Justin Broadrick and G.C. Green continued to carve out their own unique language of pummeling riffage and unbelievably crushing drum machine programming, developing their sound into something that became increasingly obsessed with repetition and rhythm. The drum machine was one of Godflesh's most prominent identifyers, anchoring the hypnotic chugging bass and discordant riffage to a machine-like grind that took the Swans influence into even heavier, mechanistic territory, and there were few bands back then that came anywhere close to matching the sheer fucking heaviness of Godflesh. So when the band came out with Songs Of Love And Hate in 1996 and introduced their first album with an actual flesh-and-blood drummer behind the kit, it was surprising, as if the band was suddenly turning into an actual "rock" band. The drummer on Songs... is Brian Mantia, one of the founding members of the avant-funk/metal supergroup Praxis and a former member of Bay Area funk rockers Limbomaniacs (am I the only person that actually remembers that band?), and here he lays down a massive breakbeat-heavy groove across the eleven songs, pumping old school hip-hop beats with steroids and creating an undercurrent of pummeling industrial rhythms that are funkier than anything Godflesh had recorded up to this point. It ain't no fun, though, as the entire album seethes with a dystopian negativity that stretches from the hallucinatory image of the statue of Christ against a backdrop of a twilight nightmare world of endless cemeteries and fire-belching factories that is featured as the album cover, to the jackhammer endtime anthems like "Sterile Prophet", "Circle Of Shit", "Angel Domain", and "Frail". The guitars are MASSIVE, Broadrick's detuned guitar grinding out huge quasi-Sabbath riffs locked into infinite trance-states, and clusters of atonal chords that churn and squeal like gears in some hellish machinery. Greene's bass grooves slither through each track, a menacing monolithic low-end presence that never relents. Jesus, this stuff is still as heavy as ever, a paranoid, apocalyptic vision sculpted out of industrial hip-hop rhythms and harsh slow-motion riffage. Essential.

Love And Hate In Dub sourced Godflesh's 1996 album Songs Of Love And Hate and showed Justin Broadrick's evolving proclivities for electronic remixing and ultra-heavy beat manipulation that he was developing in the last half of the 1990's. Finally released on vinyl by Kreation, this album features Broadrick reshaping the original album's material into a scrap metal wasteland of crushing ambient dub, brutal drum n' bass, and metallic hip-hop influenced beats that make the history of the entire nu-metal movement completely irrelevant. Songs Of Love And Hate was itself extremely influenced by hip-hop, but it's sheer grueling heaviness, flashes of blissed out pop and paint peeling noise made sure that noone was going to confuse it for the nu-metal scene that was at full steam by 1996. But with his subsequent remixes, the album is completely transformed into something else, a fusion of Godflesh's noise guitar-led industrial rock heaviosity and the massive beatscapes of his work in Techno Animal and Ice. Jungle patterns and atypical rhythms ride out on waves of deep, low-frequency metallic drone and distorted basslines. Broadrick's vocal diatribes are stripped down into even more minimal mantras that float looplike over ...In Dub's grinding rhythms. The live drums that were used on the original album work perfectly for these remixes, sounding dirty and organic, but they are stretched out, dubbed out, looped and sliced, and become something even more relentless in their groove, and always monstrously heavy. Sure, this stuff is danceable as hell, but it might be the heaviest dance music ever made. A crucial album for anyone into crushing metallic dub, Scorn, Broadrick's later work in Techno Animal and Ice, and ultra-heavy drum n' bass/breakbeats.

And then there's the In All Languages DVD, a collection of all of the music videos that were produced for Godflesh. Songs like "Crush My Soul", "Mothra", "Slavestate", "Christbait Rising", and "Avalanche Master Song" are matched with damaged visuals, roughly filmed video seizures that are both nightmarish and mesmerizing through their thick layers of video murk and static, a perfect accompaniment to Godflesh's dystopian grind. The video for "Avalanche Master Song" features distressed footage of a young Godflesh performing live, while "Crush My Soul" was directed by the controversial artist Andres Serrano. About twenty-five minutes of material, and most of these videos received little to no airplay back when they were originally released. Essential for Godflesh fans, and accompanied by a booklet with informative liner notes on the creation and concepts behind each of the videos.

The classic Godflesh image from the self-titled Ep from 1988, once again available as an official shirt from Earache. An iconic image from the legendary industrial metal band's early years, this design has been bootlegged countless times over the years, but this is a high quality, professionally printed shirt straight from the label, on black Gildan brand 100% cotton fabric. We have sizes small through extra large for this design in stock. The word from Earache is that this (along with the other classic Earache shirt designs, of which we also stock the Brutal Truth Extreme Conditions shirt) are only going to be available for a limited time...

At long last, Godflesh's seminal self-titled debut from 1988 is finally available on vinyl again, in the deluxe edition that this release has been in need of. This new 2014 edition of Godflesh features all eight of the tracks that appeared on the CD versions, including the bonus tracks that were never included on any of the previous vinyl releases. This version also comes in a gatefold jacket with a huge twenty-four by thirty-six inch poster of the iconic cover art, and a pair of inserts with lyrics and artwork; pressed on cloudy translucent clear vinyl with an etching on the D-side, issued in an edition of five hundred copies. Here's my old write-up for the original CD release:

Godflesh's self-titled debut is generally overshadowed by it's legendary follow-up Streetcleaner, and while the band's 1989 masterpiece is undeniably one of the greatest extreme music albums of all time, their eight song debut is just as crucial and influential on the entire spectrum of industrial metal and metallic avant-rock. This is where Justin Broadrick and G. C. Green first created their sound, a pummeling, mechanistic cross between the pounding, negatory NYC sludge of the Swans, grindcore's discordant, downtuned guitars, and the grinding, pistoning clang of factories spewing clouds of black filth into the skies. Merciless in their use of repetition, each track centers around a key riff that grinds over and over atop a pulverizing drum machine beat, with malevolent manipulated feedback and splattery drum machine breaks infiltrating the suffocating vibe. This was originally released as an EP in 1988 through the label Swordfish Records, but was later reissued around 1990 by Earache with two additional tracks added on to make this almost an hour long. Some of the bands most crucial jams are here: "Avalanche Master Song", "Ice Nerveshatter", "Veins", every one of 'em as heavy and oppressive and skullcrushing as they were the first time you heard 'em. And deep in these slow motion breakbeats and the thick guitar thud, you can hear the roots of the ethereal sludge sound that Justin would later develop into Jesu. Also of note are those two bonus tracks, "Wounds" and "Streetcleaner 2", both of which are more abstract than anything else on the album, lengthy blackened wastes of dark dubbed out noise, hypnotic tribal pounding and militant drum machine loops, distant screams and pitchshifted speaking voices, all nightmarish and surreal, very much inspired by later era Swans but doused in even greasier vats of late-80's dread. Beyond recommended.

Now available on limited edition cassette from Hydra Head.

Throughout 2014, there were numerous long-awaited albums that I was dyin' to hear, long in the works comebacks from longtime favorites like Mysticum and Eyehategod, but more than any of them, I was looking forward to the brand new album from Godflesh. This mucho anticipated comeback from the British industrial metal titans came on the heels of the fantastic Decline & Fall EP from earlier in the year that teased us with a glimpse of the molten fury of the band's reinvigorated sound, but even with that preface, A World Lit Only By Fire still stunned with it's relentless, hammering power. From the opening moments, it's clear that the band is firing on full force, hammering out the sort of punishing mechanized heaviness that their earliest albums were known for. And World has it, a triumphant return after a thirteen year silence, sounding like there's been no downtime at all.

Aglow in apocalyptic ambience and encrusted in corrosion, A World Lit Only By Fire strips away virtually all of the melodic undercurrents that appeared on the last Godflesh album Hymns (and which foresaw the heavily-layered shoegazey sludge that Broadrick would explore in more depth with his Jesu project following Godflesh's demise), going for a more streamlined and skull-crushing assault right off the bat with the syncopated mecha-crush of "New Dark Ages", massive downtuned guitars piling atop the robotic thud of the drum machine, the bass slung like slack power cables across the grimly hypnotic groove. That relentless chug continues through the pissed-off dirgey dissonance of "Deadend" that downshifts into even more bone-rattling slo-mo tempos, and the death-factory pummel of "Shut Me Down" swings a titanic hammer across it's punishing head-nodding groove; the power of this material is consistent throughout the entire album, with shades of the band's haunting post-punk tinged pummel seeping into some of the middle tracks, echoes of Killing Joke and Swans lurking beneath the grinding grooves and malevolent pneumatic rhythms, alongside brief glimpses of redemptive beauty that shimmer out across the occasional melodic riff that emerges out of the machinelike anvil crush. And then there's "Imperator", which would be the heaviest slab of industrial death metal I've heard in eons if it weren't for Broadrick's contrasting stoned-out crooning vocals. This is one lean comeback album, devoid of anything that would detract from the single-minded lethality of Godflesh's renewed vision, and the result is easily the best industrial metal album to arrive in recent memory. Highest recommendation.

Available on black vinyl.
What needs to be said about Streetcleaner that hasn't already been put on the books? We all revel in the enormous blissed-out sludge and shoegazy metallic rock of Jesu, and I'm a pretty solid mark for anything that Justin Broadrick has had his hands in over the years (Final, Ice, Techno Animal, etc.), but it all comes back to THIS. After forming the pioneering grindcore band Napalm Death and recording a portion of their first album Scum, Broadrick made his way through the industrial rock of Head Of David and then hooked up with G.C. Green to form Godflesh. I remember when Streetcleaner came out in 1989, it was possibly the heaviest thing I had ever heard up to that point, a crushing concoction of booming drum machine beats that moved from tick-tock mechanical rhythms and militant martial snare beats to crushing breakbeats, with bludgeoning, simplistic riffs and squealing harmonics welded together above the pounding percussive attack and huge bass-heavy bottom end. Everything about this record was terrifying: the cover artwork of legions of crucified men in front of a towering wall of fire, a still taken from Ken Russell's legendary Altered States, to the rigid, fearsome music and thoroughly unfriendly vocals inside, and the song titles that evoke grim images of dystopian horror and technological annihilation like "Christbait Rising", "Like Rats", and "Locust Furnace". Definitely THE album to start with if you are a newcomer to Godflesh's nuclear-strength industrial metal. This CD version of Streetcleaner also contains four bonus songs that were initially intended for an EP that never materialized, included here at the end.

Totally essential.

The classic Godflesh image from the self-titled Ep from 1988, once again available as an official shirt from Earache. An iconic image from the legendary industrial metal band's early years, this design has been bootlegged countless times over the years, but this is a high quality, professionally printed shirt straight from the label, on black Gildan brand 100% cotton fabric. We have sizes small through extra large for this design in stock. The word from Earache is that this (along with the other classic Earache shirt designs, of which we also stock the Brutal Truth Extreme Conditions shirt) are only going to be available for a limited time...

��� Finally in stock on vinyl, and back in stock on digipack CD...

��� Throughout 2014, there were numerous long-awaited albums that I was dyin' to hear, long in the works comebacks from longtime favorites like Mysticum and Eyehategod, but more than any of them, I was looking forward to the brand new album from Godflesh. This mucho anticipated comeback from the British industrial metal titans came on the heels of the fantastic Decline & Fall EP from earlier in the year that teased us with a glimpse of the molten fury of the band's reinvigorated sound, but even with that preface, A World Lit Only By Fire still stunned with it's relentless, hammering power. From the opening moments, it's clear that the band is firing on full force, hammering out the sort of punishing mechanized heaviness that their earliest albums were known for. And World has it, a triumphant return after a thirteen year silence, sounding like there's been no downtime at all.

��� Aglow in apocalyptic ambience and encrusted in corrosion, A World Lit Only By Fire strips away virtually all of the melodic undercurrents that appeared on the last Godflesh album Hymns (and which foresaw the heavily-layered shoegazey sludge that Broadrick would explore in more depth with his Jesu project following Godflesh's demise), going for a more streamlined and skull-crushing assault right off the bat with the syncopated mecha-crush of "New Dark Ages", massive downtuned guitars piling atop the robotic thud of the drum machine, the bass slung like slack power cables across the grimly hypnotic groove. That relentless chug continues through the pissed-off dirgey dissonance of "Deadend" that downshifts into even more bone-rattling slo-mo tempos, and the death-factory pummel of "Shut Me Down" swings a titanic hammer across it's punishing head-nodding groove; the power of this material is consistent throughout the entire album, with shades of the band's haunting post-punk tinged pummel seeping into some of the middle tracks, echoes of Killing Joke and Swans lurking beneath the grinding grooves and malevolent pneumatic rhythms, alongside brief glimpses of redemptive beauty that shimmer out across the occasional melodic riff that emerges out of the machinelike anvil crush. And then there's "Imperator", which would be the heaviest slab of industrial death metal I've heard in eons if it weren't for Broadrick's contrasting stoned-out crooning vocals. This is one lean comeback album, devoid of anything that would detract from the single-minded lethality of Godflesh's renewed vision, and the result is easily the best industrial metal album to arrive in recent memory. Highest recommendation.

Everyone's pretty much in agreement that Godflesh's Streetcleaner is one of the true high-water marks of extreme music; one only has to look at