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Invisible Aggressor delivers three epic tracks of grimy horror ambience and crushing death industrial from this master of mechanized, synth-drenched dread. On his new tape for the C-Blast Infernal Machines series, Death Factory mastermind Michael Krause pays homage to a triptych of erotically-charged cult horror films from the early 80s: 1982's notorious were-cicada/swamp rape nightmare The Beast Within, the utterly vile The Incubus from 1981, and Sidney J. Furie's 1982 film The Entity, all three linked by a common theme of supernatural sexual assault at the hands of some unseen force. The dread-filled atmosphere of these films is directly channeled into these three sprawling, filth-encrusted soundscapes, filled with clanking metallic dread, black holes of kosmische drift, pounding ultra-distorted rhythms and ultra-blown-out low-end heaviness constructed from analogue synthesizer and modified circuit-bent keyboards, effects pedals and samplers.
The first side features "Succumb To The Beast" and "Night Of The Incubus"; the former starts off with a heavy rhythmic throb, crumbling metal structures crashing down around a maddening noise loop and pulsating bass tones, the sound riddled with a steadily increasing tension. It evolves into a hallucinatory loopscape of backwards sound and fluttering low end notes, rattling engine-like rhythmic noise and droning atonal keyboard clusters, all eventually peeling back to reveal an eerie synth melody towards the very end. That's followed by the clouds of murky black synthesizer that drift across the opening moments of "Incubus", a creepy kosmische wash of sound that later shifts into a more minimal field of electric-shock pedal abuse, arrhythmic metallic clanking, echoing mechanical movements and high pitched droning feedback, the noisy din littered with bits of meandering, vaguely psychedelic keyboards and stray synth noises that start to sound like heavily processed flutes. There's a vague resemblance to some of Atrax Morgue's stuff on this track, but Krause keeps things draped in lots of echo and reverb, giving this industrial noisescape a ghostly feel all the way up to the end, as a murky thumping rhythm drops in and out of the mix, a brief glimpse of washed-out Kompakt-esque pulse emerging from beneath the nervous swarming of distorted synth-drone.
The other side features the three-part title track, a sprawling industrial nightmare that starts off with waves of rumbling kosmische synth sweeping across a vast expanse of smoldering electronic noise, occasionally interrupted with blasts of crashing metallic percussion. Later on, this shifts into looping, rhythmic blast of blown-out bass and sputtering, growling synth chords, the sound thickening into a sludgy industrial drone as the track grinds on, those gong-like crashes continuing to ring out overhead. And then another clipped, distorted loop appears, a brutal booming mechanical rhythm suddenly taking over, giving this track a kind of hypnotic momentum that becomes more complex and heavy, while the synths grow more distorted, turning this into a punishing, sludgy mecha-groove that, for a just a brief moment, almost reaches a Godflesh-like level of percussive heaviness. From there, it collapses into more free-form percussive noise and clangorous dins of sheet-metal abrasion, finally transforming into warped choral voices, more sweeping cosmic electronics, and blasts of malfunctioning synth at the end.
Limited to two hundred copies on pro-manufactured cassettes.
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