This entry in Handmade Birds' new "Criticial Fabric - Yellow Series" is actually a physical reissue of an album that Mater Suspiria Vision released on their Bandcamp page in digital and CDR form only, and thank goodness for that - the entropic "witch house" of Mater Suspiria Vision always sounds superior on analog format, particularly cassette. The glacial degradation of magnetic tape is an integral piece of "witch house" DNA in my own opinion, so it's killer to thave this 2020 full-length finally summoned into physical, analog form. That whole witch-house thing seems to have petered out somewhat, at least from what I can tell, with some of the various artists that were part of the initial zeitgeist moving into other esoteric fields of dance and electronic music, dragging their ghoulish, chopped n' screwed aesthetics behind them. Mater Suspiria Vision and its main figurehead Cosmotropia de Xam have been pretty consistent on their end, though, with a flow of releases ove the past decade and a half that for the most part remain rooted in Vision's unique blend of occult imagery and subject matter, 1970s Euro-horror motifs, melting ambient creepiness, sweeping cinematic scope, alluring visual design, and of course, those irresistable, FX-drenched beats and vocal mutations that send you tumbling down a mine shaft of eerie, spectral dub and mesmeric breakbeat trance.

And if you love what this band does, Crack Witch 3 delivers it in magnificent form. From the massive delay and echo overload of opener "Trip 2021", this gets very trippy, very quickly. Strange voices muttering beneath slow surges of distorted noise, sound soaking everything while leaving tracer movements fleeting across your field of vision. Deep, dark psychedelic noise soaring in every direction. And then as the synth sounds and chopped-up rhythmic elements dive into the mix, it flows forweard through bizarre technoid beatscapes, sounding increasingly alien as youmove into the slow-miotion doom-laden industrial crunch of "Dystopia In Utopia " and "Caterpillar". Both these and a few other songs feature the distinctly "witchy" sounding vocals of one Æchidna Morgan Kamen, her whispers and velvet croon smeared over the album's lysrergic EBM and skittering beats, and reach up to moments of incredibly blissed-out crumbling carnage, at times like hearing an 80's synth-pop outfit performing as they are being sucked into a peat bog. There's little in the way of "structure" here, Mater Suspiria Vision obviously being more attuned to creating an utterly surreal and warping experience, even when the music coalesces into something akin to the hardest moments of Twitch-era Ministry passing through a malfunctioning stargate. It's fuckin' terrific. The song titles match the patchwork occult cyberpunk vibe, samples running through "Uncontrollable Flesh", "The Desire Of Catherine Ballard" (a nod to Cronenberg's masterful 1996 film Crash) and "Ectoplasma" that verge on the incoherent, but which add a vague dark drama to the relentless, slamming dance music and mutated dronefields. It feels exactly like what my character would have been listening to in an old Shadowrun campaign. The old-school EBM influence is pretty consistent, parts of the album harnessing the most infectious qualities of classic Nitzer Ebb and Front 242, but there's always this bizarre ritual aktion or unseen horror lurking in the shadows that sets Mater Suspiria Vision apart, that crackling current electronic body music perturbed by blurred incantaions, bits of industrial dub dissolving into pure Euro-horror film-score atonality, dissonant piano ringing over screaming women. The pair of songs that close this out are again accompanied by Æchidna Morgan Kamen's wordless ululations, "Lullaby For Angels" and "How Angels Kill In Ecstasy " emerging into surprisingly heavy punch-press machine rhythm, seared by sickly electronics and huge swells of distorted drone. It's crushing, slow-motion power-dirge growing heavier and more distorted and deformed as those hushed , lingering angelic vocals loop into infinity, before dissipating into lush dark ambient drone and soft sussurant vocal drift...