Another entry in the Handmade Birds "Black Alchemy" series of ultra-weird heaviosity, this blast of grotesque breakcore noise comes in a black velvet bag with metal tokens, each one tagged and numbered. Beautifully constructed pieces of arcane terror.

This Midwestern "Otaku noise" project from Kelly Donovan has been around for over twenty years, jesus christ. It feels like just yesterday that I picked up the Basket of Death / Princess Army Wedding Combat split, one of the wildest things I've ever heard. Like a mix of Hanatarash and a kind of proto-gorenoise with these berserk speedcore breaks, anime samples, and completely brain-damaged musical interludes. That CDR was fucking awesome, I wish I could find my old review of it. Anyways, I hadn't heard anything from Princess Army Wedding Combat in ages, and was stoked when I found out that this glorious weirdo had returned after a roughly decade-long hiatus with a bunch of new stuff. One of the most recent of these PAWC monstrosities, Star Leaf, was released as part of the amazing "Blue Series" of limited-edition cassettes from Handmade Birds, alongside the likes of Warlock Corpse and Last Days Of Humanity. Excellent company for this crazy shit.

It doesn't fit into any category, though PAWC doesn't break out the noisecore / noisegrind elements here, going for something way harsher and more caustic. As usual, the imagery and song titles are all cutesy anime aesthetics, but when this tape starts up, it feels like being fed into a glitching electronic woodchipper. "Model Graphix Solnoid" is pure harsh noise, pummeling and psychedelic in the way that Pain Jerk and Incapacitants are. Rumbling skull-rattling distortion strafed with weird glitch, demonically possessed Atari 2600s, massive squelch, all rolled into an awesome, seething mass of grinding chaos. But when "40 Tracks of Earlicks and Kisses [Deep and Tingly][No Talking]" kicks in, it turns into ultra-brutal free-form breakcore, hyperspeed beats (blastbeats, really) and sick, mega-spastic mach 10 ultra-complicated drum n' bass breaks slammed into another writhing blast of noise. The whole of Star Leaf seems too oscillate between these, moving from zonked-out lysergic harsh noise on tracks like "Mysterious Murmurations of Motorik", " Doodlebug", "Waiflike Barrow Wight Tombmate", " Grey Digital Target “ and the title track, to those awesome breakcore jams like " 24 Tracks of Catgirl Toxoplasmosis ", "Fistful of Pocky ", and "45 Complaints From Ensign Rumy" that feel like Shitmat getting sucked into a Merzbowian maelstrom. The noise has a heavy mix of cracked electronics, trashed samples, and junk-noise qualities, constantly heavy, hypnotic, an avalanche of completely chaotic mangle, and those sounds bleed over into the breakcore tracks. It's a wonderful, skull-splitting mess.

God dammit, do I love this stuff.