Truly fearsome and mangled electronic/tape carnage is the name of the game for Skin Crime's 1995 entry in RRR's famed series, bringing the unrepentant harsh noise that this long-running U.S. noise master has been skillfully crafting since the early 1990s. Along with his work with his label Self Abuse Records, Patrick O'Neil's solo noise project is virtually royalty in the U.S. noise underground, consistently delivering diverse but generally punishing electronic abrasion.

As usual, each side is untitled, a sprawl of scouring, acidic sonic chaos. Screeching trebly feedback rings high above crushing walls of mega-distorted bass frequency, bizarre roars and howls that feel like human vocalizations at the edge of physical endurance, but which could just as easily be pareidolian ghosts in the machine, heard by desperate ears hungering for some kind of human contact. Grinding mid-range drones drive over the black sulfuric earth like autonomous earthmovers, surrounded on all sides by punishing high-end squeal and whooping effects pedal witchery. Huge and vast and hideous, brutal and psychedelic, evoking hulking mutations slavering and gasping as they make their way through scorched urban wastes and hyper-violent electrical storms. Menacing war-fighter-like buzzing rips over head, then swallowed by cacophonous blasts of volcanic mayhem. The whole A-side sounds like a field recording of a late 1990s military action, with various aspects of the noise assault developing patterns and clear manipulations that seem to be reaching to achieve a kind of battlezone satori. How many adjectives can I dredge up out of my skull for the concept of violence? Not enough to really convey the bulldozing barbarism of what O'Neil summons on that first side.

The flip could almost be described as somewhat "ambient" compared to the nearly half-hour savagery of the preceding piece. Skin Crime's M.O. is still extant, but the roaring distorted maelstrom and flailing feedback abuse and deeply tangled garble of incomprehensible but still quite disturbing sounds feels flushed and washed out, a monochrome vision of an utterly destroyed space, deeply detailed and layered with sounds right out of a nightmare, but maintaining it's absolute thematic ambiguity from beginning to end. This symphony of skree and earshred, massive bursts of high-voltage buzz and crazed bestial pandemonium could be anything, any event that's dominated by a rapid state of destruction or confusion. Trippier stuff here, to be sure (human voices and fractured transmissions appear more clearly here in varying states of distress, scattered amongst the debris and live lines, but no less intimidating.

Comes in RRR's trademark recycled hand-scrawled cassette packaging .