Here, we plunge deeper into the black, moving further beyond the realms of diaphanous dronemusic and dark post-industrial sounds into pits of total negation, fits of aural horror, and eschatological metal forms. This is a series of limited-edition, hand-assembled discs, each one curated and designed by Crucial Blast and limited to a strict collectors hand-numbered edition of 200-300 copies, and packaged in a library case with insert materials and other extras. The modes of sound explored here include black ambience, harsh wall noise, true black metal filth, cloven-hoofed psychedelic drone, and other harsh, negatory, unfriendly forms of elite audio. Here, we burn a hole straight through the night.

TIME MOTH EYE Undeath ART ZINE + CDR SET
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If you've been following the Crucial Blast stock lists for awhile, you've probably noticed my love of the Pennsylvania based folk group Stone Breath. Folk music isn't something that you see all that often here at C-Blast, but Timothy Renner's group (and assorted other projects) travel along darker roads than most, evoking ancient, crumbling cemeteries and dark hollows covered over with undergrowth and moss. These places exist outside of the omnipresent buzz of the modern world, and I never tire of visiting their shadowed corners. Undeath is a new full length disc from Renner's latest offshoot, Time Moth Eye, and it follows some of the same spectral trails as Stone Breath but also possesses a noticeably creepier feel, a kind of graveyard drone-folk that echoes over overturned headstones and partially exposed bones in long forgotten burial plots along the back roads of rural Pennsylvania, possessed of an ancient, cobwebbed ambience. Along with the music, this release also includes a thick artist's chapbook that contains forty-four pages of eerie illustrations and scratchboard drawings that are deeply connected to the moldering sounds captured on the disc...
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SKY BURIAL Transmissions From The Void CDR + ART CARD SET
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...Since the dissolution of his long running power electronics/harsh noise project Fire In The Head, New England noise artist Mike Page has gone on to focus on his other project Sky Burial, which had long existed as a "softer", less violent side of Page's musical work. The first time that I heard Sky Burial was on the self-titled disc that he released on Housepig sometime around 2006, and was impressed by the vaguely menacing drone rock experiments and dark ambience that was featured on it's six tracks. In the last couple of years, though, Sky Burial has evolved into a much more distinct sound that while definitely less confrontational and abrasive as his work with FITH and Irukandji, is still plenty dark and malevolent, a kind of sinister cosmic bliss-out that brings together his obvious love of classic 70's space music and krautrock (Tangerine Dream, Popul Vuh, Vangelis, Klaus Schulze, Cluster, etc) with an undercurrent of grimy, apocalyptic industrial dread. Being a huge fan of both dark industrial and old-school kosmische music myself, I've been getting more and more into Sky Burial's music with each new release, and when C-Blast received a copy of the new Sky Burial album Transmission From The Void to check out earlier this year, I was sucked in to it's glazed black-nebula ambience instantly. Consisting of a single album-length track, Transmissions is one of the darkest pieces of cosmic drift that I've heard from this project so far, it's nearly forty-five minute runtime constantly moving through clouds of intercepted radio signals and distant rhythmic grinding into clusters of gorgeous synthesizer drift that ascend into the stratosphere, then crashing back down into blood-freezing stretches of infernal machine-drone and swirling abyssal ambience....
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YAMI KURAE La Sposa Dello Stagno CDR + ARTZINE + ART CARD SET
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...with La Sposa Dello Stagno, the Crucial Blaze series is proud to introduce the incredibly creepy and disturbed music of Yami Kurae. Hailing from Italy but enshrouding themselves heavily in a mix of Japanese graveyard folklore and musique concrete techniques, this sounds like nothing that I've ever released before. The group feature members of the experimental Italian rock group Slumberwood (A Silent Place/Tannen Records), but this is not 'rock', nor any other easily identifiable musical form. Yami Kurae is the sound of Japanese demons slowly plucking away at ancient Tsugaru-jamisen songs on broken shamisen taut with cat-skin and spun silk beneath a blood-red moon. It is the nonsensical utterances of insane ghosts lurking between tombstones. It is a bizarre kind of low-fi dessicated deathfolk drenched in dissonance, dementia and disease. Across the twelve songs on La Sposa Dello Stagno, the band weaves together nightmare visions of dead spirits, harshly dissonant improvisations, fractured nocturnal folk, haunted chiming melodies, strange demonic gurglings and brain-damaged caterwauling vocals, the sounds rendered through a murky low-fi recording that is then twisted up and damged by sudden bursts of malfunctioning tape noise and other electronic fuckery, the recording sometimes dropping in and out, or warbling as if we're hearing this music being played back on old decomposing tape reels. After listening to La Sposa several times in a row, the image that kept creeping into my head in an effort to describe this strange din was that of a strange meeting of Jandek, AMM and Abruptum gathered together to perform a set of ancient Japanese folk songs while gradually becoming more and more ruined on low-grade opium...
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NEKRASOV The Ever-Present 2xCDR/ART ZINE
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...starting with the extremely limited disc In Solitude And Darkness, The Last Step Is Made that came out on Void Séance last year, Nekrasov has now also started to work with the rigid aesthetic of the "wall", sculpting brutal, immersive infernos of extreme static noise that are reminiscent of Vomir. The mindset is certainly similar; going for extremely long unbroken tracks of churning high density distortion that remains unrelenting and unchanging, Nekrasov's efforts in HNW drag me down into the same sort of depressed, lightless Zen state that the French master is so adept at invoking. This is no small feat.
In Solitude was a successful first effort in the field of HNW from the artist, and now follows that with a new two-disc set called The Ever-Present that we have issued on our Crucial Blaze sub-label. This set offers more massive black walls of rushing static noise, with two half hour long pieces on the first disc, and a single monolithic track on the second disc that stretches out for over an hour. Each of these tracks is formed from varied frequency levels and different approaches to texture, shifting in tone and extremity as the listener moves from one track to the next, but it all flows together rather seamlessly as an exercise in intense, super heavy trance-blast. In addition, deep listening reveals myriad sonic events and nuked drones that swarm deep within the maelstrom of The Ever-Present, and the monolithic "III" in particular ventures into more detailed regions of noise where fragments of grinding rhythmic clank, smoldering static riffs, and howling blackened melodies can be heard buried underneath the roaring inferno...
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GLASS COFFIN Remnants Of A Cold Dead World CDR/ART ZINE
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...With all of the highly stylized, heady music coming out from the American black metal underground right now (much of which is sounding less and less like anything that you'd actually call "black metal"), having Glass Coffin nail-gun your skull with it's gnarled, scumbag satanic thrash and drug/booze-addled hatred is a pleasant change of pace over here at C-Blast. Up till now, I've only come across a couple of releases from this one-man band; a split tape with Tombstalker, a Cd-r on Black Goat , a split 7" with maudlin necro droner Moloch. All of that stuff ripped, but Glass Coffin's ferocity and filthiness reached a fever pitch on the new album Remnants Of A Cold Dead World. When the band sent the recording to me earlier last year, it immediately tore my head off upon the first listen and replaced my worthless skull with a charred and smoking wooden cross jammed upside-down into the burnt stump....
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ILKKA VEKKA Death Psychedelia ART ZINE
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Like most people who have had their eyes melted by his work, I'm pretty sure that the first time I was exposed to Ilkka Vekka's visual art was through one of his releases with his psychedelic industrial noise/drone project Haare. The majority of Haare's tapes, discs and 7"s bear Vekka's signature style of acid-damaged collage and ghoulish death imagery, giving them a unique visual language that synchs up perfectly with the dense, deafening walls of blackened noise and factory-floor cacophony that he summons from out of some black hole. Vekka's artwork has also been popping up in other places within the underground noise/metal realm recently, such as the eye-popping covers that were commisioned for the Finnish noise magazine Special Interests in 2010. Like the artwork on the Haare releases, these covers are kaleidoscopic blasts of color and geometric figures and occult symbology that feel as if they are drawing equally from both the psychedelic poster art of 60's artists like Martin Sharp and Barney Bubbles, and the stark high-contrast nightmare imagery found within the cassette covers and Lp sleeves of 80's industrial culture. It's a potent fusion of messy psychedelia and corrosive cut-up images that Vekka has developed. This zine collects a number of Vekka's pieces, and is divided into roughly two sections. The first focuses on all new black and white collage pieces that appear here for the first time; the second half of the chapbook features a number of album cover details and Haare-related art, including a couple of full-color reproductions. All of these lysergic visions gathered together here are deranged, hallucinatory and visually intoxicating, and are only a small portion of the ever growing body of work that Ilkka Vekka continues to create. The thirty-eight page zine includes an index of the art pieces, a partial Haare discography, and comes in a black hand-numbered envelope printed with the black Ilkka Vekka logo, a set of vinyl stickers, and a set of four full-color 1" badges. Released in a limited edition of 100 copies.
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LIGHT Light 3xCDR/PHOTO ZINE
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When the black doom duo Light originally released it's three full-length albums, they were put out in tiny print runs that were only available from a couple of select sources and went out of print almost instantly. I remember seeing them listed over at Aquarius Records on their website and wanted to pick them up based on the amazing things that the guys at AQ were saying about 'em, but by that point they were already sold out. It would be a while before I would finally hear these three albums, but once I did, I was immediately hooked by the strange, blurred-out sound that Light created, completely sucked in to a twilight world via the bands phantasmal bedroom blackdoom. I listed to all three albums over and over, cranking them up and filling the office with the heavy waves of droning amp hiss and plaintive chords and anguished vocalizations, and realizing that this wasn't quite like anything else I'd heard before. Light's music obviously had it's roots entrenched in black metal of the most abject sort, as well as the more extreme variations of doom metal, but there's a delicate quality to this that strips away the metallic aspects and turns it into something else. The one reference point that seems most apt to me and that I keep jotting down when trying to describe this is that listening to Light is a bit like hearing a kind of stentorian blackdoom misery being filtered through the autumnal chill of Codeine's The White Birch. If that notion sounds at all appealing to you, then you need to hear this stuff. There's nothing shoegazey about Light, either, although fans of the current wave of "blackgaze" bands might just love Light's music as well. It's much bleaker and agonized and desolate than that kind of stuff though, and based on how I've been listening to this triptych of albums, I recommend all lights off when listening to the music collected on this set...
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KORPERSCHWACHE Notes From The Howling Room: Fifteen Years Of Sonic Immolation 8 X CDR BOXSET
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Going back to the mid-90's, the obscure Austin, TX outfit Korperschwache (German for "organic decay") has issued a steady stream of releases into the deep underground that showcased a distinctive sound sitting at the strange nexus between the early UK noise rock scene, the skull-rupturing power of Japan's more extremist noise artists, the massive gravitational pull of the formless guitar crush of bands like Earth and the Melvins at their most art-damaged, and, in more recent years, a filthy, blackened, low-fidelity underbelly that hints at the mutated black metal of bands like Abruptum, Necrofrost, and Vondur. From the beginning, Korperschwache has consisted of mastermind RKF on guitar, noise and vocals, assisted by the loyal mechanical timekeeping of Doktor Omega and occasionally joined by outside contributors. Korperschwache first took form as a side project of RKF's droning industrial rock band Autodidact, but became a primary concern soon thereafter, releasing a steady stream of releases over the years on cassette, Cd-r and digital download on labels like Peasant Magik, Inam Records, Colony, Dark Winter Moon, Public Guilt, Cut Hands and our own sub-label Crucial Bliss, to name a few, usually in extremely limited editions made available to the band's small but loyal cult of followers. The majorioty of these older releases have long been out of print, especially the extremely limited cassette releases from the early days of the band; a longtime Korperschwache fan, I myself never had an opportunity to get my hands on those early tapes, which featured some of Korper's harshest noise-based material.
Now, in conjunction with the brand new Korperschwache album Evil Walks that has just come out on Crucial Blast, we've assembled a series of reissues of early Korperschwache releases, some of which have never been heard by anyone outside of the band's immediate circle. The early cassette releases that have been excavated here are very different from Korperschwache's newer Loop-meets-Abruptum industrial blackpsych sound, many centering around brutal, high-volume noise assaults heavily influenced by both classic UK power electronics (Whitehouse, Ramleh, etc) and Japanese harsh noise (Merzbow, Masonna, Incapacitants, Contagious Orgasm). The later releases from this period began to creep into more guitar-focused dronepower and hypnotic amplifier bludgeon, with material like that of Night Country Fog (Korperschwache's previously unreleased collaboration with Smolken of Polish avant black metal/doom folk band Dead Raven Choir) beginning to direct the sound into the often melodic, always twisted psychedelic heaviness of it's current incarnation.
We've made these early, rarely-heard Korperschwache releases available in two different forms: first, as high quality individual 320 kbps mp3 downloads of each album that include a digital booklet with liner notes and visual material for each release; and secondly, as a limited-edition boxset titled Notes From The Howling Room: Fifteen Years Of Sonic Immolation that contains all eight of these reissued early albums on Cdr, eight discs that total almost eight hours of material, each album remastered and on a disc with full color artwork, the set of discs packaged inside of a molded vinyl case with a set of insert cards for each release bound together with a black-on-black obi strip, a vinyl Korperschwache sticker, and a 1" Korperschwache badge, released in a strictly limited edition of 100 copies through the Crucial Blaze imprint...
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DEMONOLOGISTS Miscarriage Of The Soul CDR + CHAPBOOK
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The latest assault from the Crucial Blaze series. Miscarriage Of The Soul is a new full-length from the Indiana blacknoise duo Demonologists, whose lineup includes a former member of cult black metal weirdoes Ensepulchred; this band has been possessing the sound system at Crucial Blast over the past year, with releases like their split with Blue Sabbath Black Cheer and the Sermons Of Death And Eternal Damnation tape that recently came out on Waves Of Decay getting mucho play. Their grim, malevolent noisescapes are as extreme as it gets, going beyond mere industrial black noise into Merzbow-style levels of ultra violent electronic destruction. This is ritualistic deathworship rendered through howling, smoking amplifiers, extreme pedal abuse, and hateful vocalizations, equal parts infernal power electronics, obliterated black metal buzz, and crushing harsh industrial noise. Total nihilism. Absolute misanthropy...
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RECLUSA The AntiConscience CDR/ART ZINE
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...a new offering of vile, absurdly heavy low-fi mechanized horror from this cult Ohio outfit. A seventy-seven minute descent into filthy sub-Godflesh / (early) Pitch Shifter machine pummel, putrescent guttural vocal-fumes, ultra bleak dark ambience, diseased dub, deformed deathdoom, blasts of orchestral terror, & murky industrial noisescapes. Hopeless, terminally nihilistic ugliness from the bowels of the American Midwest. The disc comes with a 20-page chapbook of nightmarish artwork and writing...
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VOMIR Renonce CDR/BOOKLET
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... Renonce presents a single monolithic track of crushing noise wall from the French master of HNW Vomir, almost fifty-two minutes of absolute nothingness, just a seemingly infinite maelstrom of extreme low-end rumbling, severe unchanging distortion, crunchy oceanic filth, and abyssal static that Vomir forges into a primordial wall of black frequency chaos. Fans of Vomir's formidible catalog of releases should have a clear idea of what to expect from this. Total ego-destruction, an obliteration of awareness, of the self, of the present moment via pure suffocating noise, total immersion within the vortex, drawn in and crushed within the inescapable gravity of a collapsing star. The philosophy of absolute isolation and withdrawal that is found in most of Vomir's works is also explored in greater depth on Renonce, not only though the relentless tectonic crush of the recording, but also through the writings from Vomir mastermind Romain Perrot that are included here as well. A set of four original free-verse poems from Perrot are included here in an eight page booklet, printed in their original French language text with English translations overseen by Perrot and Crucial Blast; each of these pieces compliment the sonic nihilism of Vomir through ruminations on seclusion, silence, and a deep, considered distaste for one's fellow humans. A formal renouncement of social connection, and of human contact...
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SCHREI AUS STEIN Tsisnaasjini CDR
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...The third entry in the Crucial Blaze line is the new full length disc from Schrei Aus Stein, the experimental black metal/ambient alter ego of Ross Hagen from the drone/ambient outfit Encomiast. I've been a fan and follower of Ross's work with Encomiast going back to the beginning of the last decade, and we've released two of his releases as Encomiast through the Crucial Bliss series over the past five years, so when he emerged last year with this new project that combined his trademark droneological sounds with a noisy, moody brand of mid-paced black metal, I couldn't wait to hear it. The first release from Schrei Aus Stein was a limited edition disc on Starlight Temple Society called Talus that came out in 2009, an eerie blend of frostbitten mid-paced black metal, gothic post-punk throb, and sweeping arctic ambience, an excellent debut that showed that Hagen was going for more than just another downbeat depressive black metal project. Now, Schrei Aus Stein returns with it's second release, a three song full length with songs that average at around thirteen minutes, long majestic soundscapes that still reveal a bit of that Encomiast ambience, but which delve into harsher, more unfriendly terrain than before, mixing together strange industrial dirge, blown-out depressive black metal, and ambient drone into icy realms of hypnotic atmosphere...
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WOLFNUKE Nightwar CDR
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...the second document on the new Crucial Blaze imprint, Wolfnuke's Nightwar is a glorified demo, the first raw recorded work from this new Hagerstown, Maryland quartet that includes the C-Blast boss on bass and bellows, as well as a current member of long-running hardcore/grinders Strong Intention (Six Weeks / Coalition Records) on guitar. Wolfnuke seeks a different form of mayhem however, forging a furious, blackened thrash assault out of an unlikely combination of influences that include the obvious (classic second wave black metal and Teutonic thrash), the vitriolic crossover thrash of Cro-Mags's 1989 album Best Wishes, a lust for the driving, apocalyptic power of late 80's UK goth rock (Fields of The Nephilim, Sisters Of Mercy), and the violent aggression of Scandinavian hardcore. The four songs on Nightwar are universally fast-paced and dark as hell, starting with the nihilistic blackened thrash of "Beneath The Last Of The Neuro-Goat" and continuing through the blazing black metal-meets-crossover extermination vision of "Deathfire", the crushing mid-tempo blackened metalpunk of the title track and the anthemic matricide hallucination of closer "Filthwraith"....
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ROBE. Bleak CDR
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...rumbling, creeping ambience and oozing, blackened bottom end raked with the blare of distant horns, smeared trumpets echoing across a vast ocean of black sludge, evil screeching violins time-stretched into endless drones, an immensely oppressive and threatening atmosphere drifting over formless glacial guitar/bass grind like plumes of pungent black smoke. It's like hearing corroded, distressed blasts of orchestral sound, broken and warped BM guitars and clanking machinery rotting beneath massive waves of low-end heaviness; the same reference points that I used for their Remains Of A Burning World apply equally here (Abruptum's Casus Luciferi, Neuntoter Der Plage, and Aderlating's most atmospheric moments), but leaning even more towards a sort of surrealistic industrial nightmare...
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LYCANTHROPIC WARHEAD Infinite Castigation 2xCDR + ART PRINT SET
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...another offshoot of the new underground black/industrial community springing up through the cracks around Crucial Blast HQ, Lycanthropic Warhead first debuted on the Blastwave digital compilation that we released earlier in the year with the track "Vexator", a warped dose of beat-driven black hypnosis. The project returns with its first actual release, Infinite Castigation, a double disc set that features over two hours of Lycan War's heavily drugged beat-driven scum-ambience and gluey industrial-dub nightmares. The tracks sprawl out often for fifteen minutes or more, moving through passages of grinding, muted industrial throb and distant choral voices, long stretches of filmy abstract ambience and haunting vocal harmonies. Lush kosmiche synthesizers drift outward across vast black abysses of low-end rumble and slurred orchestral strings, while fractured breakbeats skitter and pulse deep below the surface. Sometimes, the music shifts into almost totally Lustmord/Lull-style dark ambience, heavily influenced by classic early 90's isolationist ambient with slow swells of ominous strings and time-stretched Tibetan horns, but the rhythmic elements are almost always present, appearing as broken drum loops that writhe in the distant shadows, or massive blown-out breakbeats crawling in slow-motion through massive inky clouds of symphonic drift. Fucked up vocals emerge throughout the bad-dream atmosphere as looped demonic screams and screwed n' chopped chanting, or undead monastic wails that float out of cracked crypt-walls and out of disturbed graves. The sound is a kind of rusted black mechanical delirium, influenced not only by those previously mentioned isolationist/dark ambient artists like Lustmord, Lull, and Raison D'etre, but also by the massive industrialized dub/hip-hop sounds of the Pathological Records roster and artists like Techno Animal and Ice, the dystopian beats of Scorn and Tackhead, and the corroded industrial creep of SPK and Throbbing Gristle, and the filthy crypt ambience of French weirdos Moëvöt and the shapeless, shambling black metal improvisations of Abruptum...
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