Norwegian one-man band Utarm has been creeping along the far fringes of black metal, psychedelia and industrial music since appearing with the 2004 Cd-r Goatheaded Rapist. The handful of albums that have come out since then have moved further into a unique, hallucinatory realm of broken-down horror-movie ambience, cracked haunted house organs, and a strangely beautiful form of ultra-distorted doom metal that hints at the molten incandescent sludge of both Goslings and The Angelic Process. It's been a couple of years since the last album (2009's Panic Chamber), but Apocryphal Stories sees Utarm returning with another majestic, monstrous collection of sidereal blackened doom and melodic noise.

The opener "Alt Etende Skaper" is a warped black mess of warblng electronic melodies, distant moans of anguish, eerie organ sounds and crackling distortion, a somewhat ghastly, rather gorgeous tangle of blackened guitar noise and fractured synth that to me sounds like Xasthur performing something from Maurice Jarre's haunting score to Franju's classic French horror film Les yeux sans visage (Eyes Without a Face). This nearly fourteen minute song is a masterful blend of delirious horror (wailing voices and Abruptum-esque screaming, dank reverb-heavy atmosphere, unsettling discordant touches) and withered, rotting beauty, but when suddenly erupts into a howling, massively blown-out dirge halfway through, it turns truly terrifying.

"Of Rape, Solitude and Bliss; the Triangle of Flesh" billows out into a creepy fogscape of feedback drone and mysterious whispers, rumbling ethereal amplifier-drift and melodious keyboards buried under crushing, deformed doom. The vocals that creep in are totally fucked, a heavily processed yowl that comes in alongside a classical string section, piano, bizarre backwards chanting and more of that slow-motion doom riffage, turning into this weird dreamlike wash of orchestral darkness and mutant blackened sludge and power electronics-like vocalizations that later erupts into noisy black metal tremolo riffs and crackling harsh noise. That's followed by the spacey, scorching wall of blackened shoegaze drift found on "Black Light Aeon Apocryphia", where waves of noisy, heavily overdriven guitar melodies circle around rumbling low-end tremolo drones and malfunctioning keyboards, demonic screams and a shitload of distortion and dissonance. That off- kilter, noisy 'gazer sound is also at the heart of "the Heaven of Men and a Left Hand Dagger", no percussion anywhere as the song slowly unfolds as a buzzing, blown melody and tortured wailing becomes enshrouded in increasingly extreme levels of distortion.

On the last song "Above Death", those waves of blown-out drone and clustered electronics are piled on to a murky almost industrial doom-dirge. A drum beat clanks and crawls far off in the distance, obscured by the sounds of whizzing synth noise and bleeping electronics, a slow trudging rhythm that disappears into another swarming black fog of howling psych-ward vocals, creepy whimpering noises, and almost Skullflower-like clouds of corrosive guitar.

One of the weirder offerings from Handmade Birds, Apocryphal Stories has become another instant fave for me, a demented and depraved black/noise/doom mutation that sings gloriously of Satanic ritual, self-realization, and expanding realities all set to a shambling soundtrack that sounds vaguely like Abruptum performing alongside Floridian sludge-gaze duo Goslings. Released by Handmade Birds in a limited edition of three hundred Cds.