Quebec just keeps cookin’ with the weirdness', this time with an EP of the kind of nascent "avant slam death" vibe that I've been absolutely obsessed with lately. I certainly did not expect some of the weirdest death metal in recent memory to come out of the "slam" field, but by god, there is a lot of deliciously ultra-violent batshit-crazy sewage leaking out of this fringe wing of underground metal. This particular tape is the latest blast of bizarro brutality from Quebec's Alice Simard and her solo operation Crasse Intraveineuse, spewing five tracks of maniacal and hyper-violent tech-gore that clearly operates on its own specific wavelength. Simard is active in a horde of other fucked-up death/ gore / black metal bands, including Onchocerciasis Esophagogastroduodenoscopy, Vitrified Entity, Quantum Oscillations, Coffret de Bijoux, Filesharemaiden, Perihelion Gnosis....the list is colossal , and is doing some real damage to my already-overflowing "to check out" list. It's fucking nuts. With Crasse Intraveineuse, though, it's vomit-slam city, as the five songs spill out into a vortex of ridiculously complex and fueled on abstraction; there's a quote in the j-card, "...the tome of corrosion pulsates, with each step of the liminal ascent... described by the one song title. One of the very few peices of text in the ultra-minimal tape layout, it's a strange, cryptic statement that befits the EP's bizarre vision.

It opens with spectral dissonant piano, like a fragment of a Penderecki or Arnold Schoenberg piece, slow and haunting as the notes drift languidly through black space; but double-bass blasts roar beneath that piano when it suddenly erupts into faster, more manic flurries of atonality. The other tracks are likewise fucked up, " chainedarteryusurpedbylight" combining wild guitar shred and freeform death riffs with spastic, clotted percussion ruptures and sudden drops into knuckle-dragging slam breakdowns. The super-brief " liminalascent" slobbers all over the joint, a grisly mess of improvised tech-death absurdity, while the lengthier " blinded " returns with moody piano moments thrown into the continual slam seizures and bonkers shred / riff chaos., breaking away into long scenes of moody, almost Badalamenti-esque minimalism - this stuff is fantastic. Even when the improvised percussion starts rattling and creeping beneath that ambience, it keeps it solemn and somber .The last song then wraps it around to the ultimate vomit-vortex, sickening guttural belches and evil-sounding snarling swept up in a final wave of gonzo free drumming, totally malformed riffs, and anti-intuitive breakdowns.

It's a surreal gore-splat hyperblast, the contrast between the modern classical piano arrangements and utterly churning death metal creating a truly unique experience. Like a meeting between Eddie Prévost (AMM), Schoenberg's "Drei Klavierstücke", and the brutal madness found with "weirdo slam" bands like Cytoplasm, Dripping, Wormed, 7h.target, and Jenovavirus. I mean, what the fuck.

As part of Handmade Birds' Blue Series, the tape comes in a standard j-card/case with artwork, which is then housed in a printed cardstock slip-sleeve and accompanied by stickers, pieces of fabric, small wooden figures, each one unique and different in its presentation, and extremely limited.

And an addendum: whatever the reason, Quebec is the place producing the coolest extreme music right now. I swear to Christ, almost every band and project that I've gotten obsessed with since the start of 2024 has come outta this province. Quebec rules.