Back in stock. Definitely standing out from most of the punishing power-electronics, harsh noise and death industrial that Freak Animal has been putting out, Will Over Matter's Lust For Knowledge exists in its own weird realm, the fifth album from this bizarre outfit featuring Harald Mentor, AKA Sami Kettunen of Finnish crustcore maniacs Katastrofialue, black metallers Goatmoon, and blackened weirdos Ride For Revenge. The atavistic occult electronics of Will Over Matter is a pretty far cry from anything that I've heard from Kettunen in the past though, a mesmeric industrial ritual enshrouded in ancient silver-tinted erotica with nods towards Thelemic magic.

Like the sound of warning sirens being wrenched from the sparking and smoking guts of malfunctioning mid-20th century computer equipment, the primitive power electronics of Wall Over Matter's Lust For Knowledge unleashes across these seven tracks, as murky mechanical rhythms plod and probe and shift beneath each long track, woven from simple pneumatic rhythms that transform into an insidiously hypnotic pulse; over these clanking rhythmic backdrops, Kettunen discharges all sorts of blistering synth noise and shrill drilltone abrasion, that first track almost ritualistic in how the layered sounds interlock into the cosmic transistor clank that sprawls across the opening twelve minutes, the robotic plod slowly expanding as more and more layers of locust chitter and distorted laser blasts and distant star transmissions build around the rhythm, only to eventually collapse into more malfunctioning mainframe chaos at the end, joined by deadpan vocals declaiming the mysterious lyrics in a daze over an infinite, insistent bleeping. Then there's the utterly atavistic techno of "Blades Sharpened Again", a brutal bass-heavy squelch that mutates into a bizarrely danceable beat fused to weird, vaguely melodic singing; this stuff is pretty goddamn infectious, but it's also so vestigial that it makes the noisy industrial techno on that Alberich 2xLP reissue included in this week's new arrivals list sound like 808 State. Will Over Matter pounds that rhythmic noise into your skull with an almost clinical efficiency, made even more vicious when the malevolent, black metallish screams eventually materialize. The more subdued stuff on the album is creepy as well, "Flight Of The Star" sounding like the speech of some amoebic monstrosity gurgling over a dreamlike creakscape made up of various minimal rhythmic noises, then shifting into something akin to a Thelemic ritual being performed over power electronics being performed on ancient Soviet-era sound generators. There's a definitely Broken Flag-like vibe to this stuff, the crude electronics sounding anything but modern, but that ancient, ramshackle feel gives this it's weird power as well, at times falling somewhere between the charred industrial throb of early Maurizio Bianchi and the cracked, denuded throb of contemporary industrial techno.