An essential acquisition for anyone currently in thrall to the jet-black industrial transmissions that have been emanating from Theologian over the past few years, the double-disc reissue of Your Suffering Will Be Legendary collects the previously rare and out-of-print bonus discs that were released by Leech's the pre-Theologian project Navicon Torture Technologies as an accompaniment to the sprawling Gospels Of The Gash boxset that Malignant put out back in 2009. The material on these discs captures NTT at its most oppressive, unleashing vast waves of rumbling black synthesizer roar across the abyss, layering his chthonic dronescapes and abyssal orchestrations with additional vocals, electronic elements and other sounds that have been contributed from a killer lineup of collaborators. With a heavy influence from classic kosmische synthesizer music and the sinister electronic soundtracks of John Carpenter felt through Navicon Torture Tech's crushing death industrial, this project produced some of the darkest, heaviest sounds of its kind over the course of the last decade. Each of the tracks featured on Your Suffering... has Leech working with a different collaborator, and the lineup of guests is pretty impressive: Deutsch Nepal, Black Sun, Kristoffer Nystr�ms Orkester, Aun, The [Law-Rah] Collective, Troum, Inswarm, Hecate, Herbst9, Zombi's Steve Moore, and former Swans chanteuse Jarboe all appear throughout this collection.

The first disc features such standout tracks as the clanking industrial dirge "Soul Eater", which features Scottish sludge metallers Black Sun providing us with one of the heaviest tracks in the collection, an almost Godfleshian mechanical power-dirge bathed in black static, and the orchestral dread that creeps across NTT and Cenotype's "The Last European" (a reference to Clive Barker's The Damnation Game) is pure black cinematic beauty, a gorgeous kosmische synthscape, all billowing black clouds of starry void. The Inswarm collab produces a suffocating black blizzard of black ash and crushing slow-motion klaxon blasts, and Covet appears on "I Won't Survive In A World Without You", a strange haunting soundscape centered around fragile piano and eerie minor-key violins that circle around the sounds of disturbed voices and distant weeping. The tracks that feature Law-Rah Collective and Herbst9 all produce fantastic pieces of ritualistic dark ambience filled with hypnotic percussion, ominous bells, washes of black-hole synthdrift, while the Autoclav1.1 track blends ethereal cosmic ambience with harsh percussive loops like a cold industrial version of Zeit-era Tangerine Dream. Towards the end of the disc, the Hecate track offers up an invocation to the Elder Gods written in pounding tribal rhythms, looped fragments of ancient horror movie soundtrack music, and creepy spoken word samples. Killer!

Leech opens the second disc with Jarboe's blurred, washed-out vocal textures swirling through the organ-like power-drone of "You Are Worth Fighting For", a mesmeric wash of rumbling electronics and cosmic drift. Deutsch Nepal's work on "Victvm Vermis" produces one of the album's finest moments of lush dark ambience, a nearly ten minute cave-ritual possessed with distant echoing cries, trance inducing drum loops, and gusts of immersive twilight drift. The Fragment King collab is one of the real surprises, as "Gumrot (Decaying Face Edit)" drags Leech's layered black synthdrones and rumbling abyssal frequencies into the realm of frenetic experimental drum n' bass, one of the few heavily rhythmic tracks in here. "In The Folds Of The Flesh" sees Leech combining his crushing synth sound with the grim death industrial of Megaptera offshoot Kristoffer Nystr�ms Orkester, and the result is intensely dark and evocative, almost like an industriaized Goblin score running in slow motion. Leech and Zombi's Moore craft a blackly giorgeous blast of expansive deep-space drone on "Love Theme", while Prometheus Burning brings a murderous, Wax Trax-esque throb to the blackened industrial of "She Throws Me To The Dogs". The Eidulon collab "Pillars Of Flesh" ventures deep into Lustmordian dungeons and bottomless black pits with its rumbling catacomb ambience, later transforming into a nightmarish black industrial dirge with heavy doom-laden drums and Leech's hellish wailing vocals, and Troum bring their crushing guitar drones to "Sonnenaufgang", an oceanic blast of blissed-out dark rumblings and amplifier reverberations layered with Leech's grinding synth textures.

Out of all of this stuff, though, one my favorite tracks turned out to be the closer "The Moral Of The Story Is Dreams..." from NTT's collab with The Bird Cage Theatre, a project that I hadn't heard of before but who delivers one of the album's most stirring tracks, a fog of malevolent synthesizer melodies and distant singing, sinister pipe-organ like tones creeping through the murk, the sound epic and eerily beautiful, standing in somewhat stark contrast from the immense electronic blackness that stretches to almost every other corner of this collection.

Absolutely essential to fans of NTT's Gospels Of The Gash, anyone into Theologian's stuff will obviously want to hear this as well. This amazing double disc set of blackened ambience and abyssal power electronics comes in a gorgeous black DVD-sized digipack printed in metallic silver ink.