Another killer cassette of fractured, experimental sonic darkness from the Bel�ten label, Burning Impurities is another quality release from Terence Hannum of psychedelic kosmische heavies Locrian, who seems to be cranking out more and more stuff under his own name since relocating to Baltimore from Chicago. And I've been digging all of it. Compared to some of the other tapes that Hannum has put out recently, the two half-hour-long tracks presented on Impurities are some of the closest in spirit to the classic 70's space music influences that have powered Locrian's recordings, venturing into more extreme regions of classic kosmische music and filtering it through storms of extreme electronic noise and depths of suffocating aural darkness.

   First up is "Ceremonially Clean", which begins as an exercise in heavy drone-music, running thick veins of buzzing feedback and rhythmic looped amp-rumble around murky melodic smears of sound, slowly evolving from the early blast of black buzz into eerier, more structured fields of quasi-kosmische drift. Abstract rhythmic patterns begin to emerge from Hannum's increasingly layered dronescapes, clanking and tapping rhythms materialize and circle around the stretched-out choral voices that appear out of the gloom, and blasts of crackling distortion and rumbling low-frequency noise are unleashed in controlled bursts as the track begins to build in intensity. It gradually spreads out into an incendiary white-hot electrical glow, a mass of pulsating heavenly synths, groaning almost cello-like resonances, and slowly shifting pools of iridescent drone and searing electronic noise that finally form into something almost resembling a power-electronics remix of a Popol Vuh piece.

   On the second track "Pass Through The Fire", Hannum unleashes a blizzard of deafening white noise that conceals a constantly shifting mass of gorgeous choral majesty; I'm betting that Tim Hecker fans would really dig this blast of grainy, ultra-distorted melodic drone, but Hannum's hands mold this into something much more brutal, the relentless roar of distortion remaining constant through the entire side, employing an almost HNW-like approach, like some classic space music outfit playing at the center of a swarming scourge of black flies.

   These beautiful, blinding eruptions of blasted drone are surrounded by the evocative abstract images of Icelandic photographer J�hannes Gunnar �orsteinsson on the sleeve to this excellent tape release, which is as you would expect highly limited, and includes a download code for a digital copy of the album.