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One of the coolest quotes that I've come across on High Noon Kahuna's debut album Killing Spree came from Philly deathsludge entity / underground commentator Rot Coven, who described the music on "Spree" as an "utterly baffling blend of 70’s proto-metal, Black Flag / Bl’ast-ish hardcore punk, kaleidoscopic psychedelia, and what sounds like some kind of heavily amplified surf music (which kept making me think of the weird “surfy” parts of Agent Orange for whatever that’s worth to anyone).... like some acid-damaged mid-80’s Arizona band that would have played shows with JFA, Mighty Sphincter, and the Sun City Girls."
Man, I could not have put it better myself. That comment was probably the most astute assessment of the band's 2023 disc I've read. The band and that album were (and are) most definitely weird, totally ignoring any semblance of genre guardrails for an explosive riot of melody and heaviness, chaos and musical proficiency, and most importantly, hammering riffage and serious earworm material. High Noon Kahuna traverse those hinterlands between noise rock, hardcore punk, sludgy metallic crunch, surf guitar flourishes and Morricone-esque atmosphere, and wild-eyed, spaced-out psychedelic adventure, where it all bleeds and blurs together into something that is just as unique as their name demands. It's the result of a shared background in the DMV underground that goes back decades; between guitarist Tim Otis (Admiral Browning), drummer Brian Goad (Internal Void / The Larrys / Nagato), and bassist / singer Paul Cogle (Black Blizzard / Vox Populi / Nagato / Slagstorm), each member of the trio has left enduring fingerprints on much of what has been going on in the outer fringes of the DC suburbs for nearly forty years.
That uniqueness takes on a darker cast with their sophomore album This Place Is Haunted, their second release with Crucial Blast. Recorded with Kevin Bernsten at Developing Nations, Haunted's mix of burly, noisy rock and mysterious texture work in tandem to evoke the ectoplasmic shadows of the title. Visions of spirit boards and swirling motes of dust above a long-past séance. Ecteneic forces and shaking tables. A door opens. And something looms over High Noon Kahuna's peculiar, punchy songwriting and wigged-out soundscapery. The twelve songs on Haunted wind through a phantasmal labyrinth of odd noise, roaring anthemic hooks, stretched-out stratospheric psych, eerie layered melody, and moments of dark, doom-laden heaviness. Like their first album, it's a long strange trip through a sun-bleached delirium, but this nearly hour-long epic overturns stranger stones and peers into darker corners.
Mangled distortion and luminous, moody Hammond organ hover over the mesmeric backbeat of "Atomic Sunset", the point of entry for Haunted's other-worldliness. Heavy space-rock electronics swoop over ominous groove laced with desert-baked melody and Otis's strained, soulful howl. "Lamborghini" erupts from that heat-haze with a cruising instrumental that shifts into higher gear, only to give way to the sludgy pop mastery of "Prehistoric Love Letter" that unloads raucous, distortion soaked hooks and keening multi-part harmonies backed by the thunderous rhythm section. It’s quite possibly the catchiest thing I've ever heard from High Noon Kahuna, and channels my most beloved aspects of noisy, catchy, guitar-heavy rock from the early 1990s into a single gleaming chunk of haunting perfection. Which makes the majestic doom-laden crush of songs like "Midnight Moon " and "Good Night God Bless" all the heavier, their dark lumbering riffs strafed with wah-soaked leads and stomping tempos, washes of frantic noise and lysergic effects all descending into sinister psychedelic pandemonium, often surrounded by creepy creaking cacophony that coalesces into something akin to poltergeist activity.
This Place Is Haunted proceeds to push deeper into this strange haze, songs like "The Devil's Lettuce" laying out that Morricone-meets-Ventures guitar vibrato amid sprawls of narcotized trance-rock, alternating these deeply mesmeric instrumental explorations with harder, bittersweet noise-rock / gritty 'gazey numbers like "Brand New Day" and the ferocious "Sidewalk Assassin". And again, it's also some of their heaviest stuff yet: the crunching might of “Mystical Shit" sees Kahuna erupt into punishing locomotive power, an unstoppable central riff driving the band through the shadow-infested badlands, part Teutonic hyperdrive, part hypno-metal atavism. Throughout it all, Cogle and Goad's pummeling bass guitar and drumming lock together as a Gordian knot, creating a continuous hypnotizing backdrop of endless groove; through this, Otis unleashes a storm of spaced-out effects, meandering mournful melody, massive crushing riffs, and that inimitable lead guitar style that effortlessly blends the spikiness of early hardcore punk with his brand of "Spaghetti surf" that melts reverb and tremolo together into lush waves of sound. You can particularly hear that on the sensuous swaggering "Tumbleweed Nightmare", almost apocalyptic as its grim visions move through tremolo n’ reverb-soaked sun-bleached waste and into the slow-burn, looming instrumental intensity of "Flaming Dagger" that pushes onward into twilight and beyond. But the finality of "Et Ita Factum Est" leads the listener straight into midnight ritual, drawing together all of the huge 'gazy crush, tendrils of spectral and translucent guitar, bursts of stomping , droning riffage and bone-rattling rhythmic thud, summoning a vast, psilocybin-soaked blast of ghostly power-sludge that turns into a bizarre post-punk nightmare, dancing in tandem with towering flames, vague spindly figures obscured by the blackness, and weird witchy voices (courtesy of drummer Goad) wavering in the shadows, leaving everything, including you, touched by the numinous in the end.
Harder, darker, but absolutely brimming with infectious melody, High Noon Kahuna's This Place Is Haunted executes a killer mixture of classic noise rock, heavy shoegaze, psychedelic crunch, and experimental creep. The band is working on a whole new level here. This rumbling riff-beast brilliantly evokes everything from Amphetamine Reptile-era abrasion, soaring Hawkwindian space rock, and the searching instrumentals of Earthless, to the spookier fringes where both krautrock and post-punk blur together, specters of classic doom, and the scintillating guitar sounds of vintage surf and soundtrack music, even dipping into the concussive groove of bands like Kyuss and Queens Of The Stone Age at times. With This Place Is Haunted, High Noon Kahuna have firmly cemented themselves as one of the most unique bands to ever emerge from the DC/MD area, weirder, heavier, and catchier than ever before.
HIGH NOON KAHUNA - UPCOMING LIVE SHOWS:
04/27/24 Frederick MD - Olde Mother Brewing - w/ Trap ratT , High Horse Cavalry
05/23/24 Asheville NC - The Odd - w/ Kalgon , Florist
05/24/24 Richmond VA - Another Round - w/ Blazoner , Hex Machine
05/25/24 Staunton VA - The Brick - w/ Heemeyer , Orenda
05/26/24 Lexington KY - The Green Lantern - w/ Quitting , Tsunami Samurai
05/28/24 Washington DC - Pie Shop - w/ Cardnils Folly (Finland) , Magick Potion
06/23/24 Frederick MD - Cafe 611 - Maryland Doomfest
07/13/24 Falling Waters WV - River Jam
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CULTIC Whip Seduction SHIRT (BLACK GARMENT)
$20.00
CULTIC Whip Seduction SHIRT XX-LARGE (BLACK GARMENT)
$22.00
CULTIC "SEDUCER (EXPANDED EDITION" CASSETTE + "WHIP SEDUCTION" SHIRT BUNDLE - ORDER HERE:
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Dark Dungeon Metal Overdrive!
Man, I was immediately obsessed with Cultic as soon as I heard 'em; their 2019 debut album High Command stomped me into the dirt with its visions of dark epic fantasy and primal death/doom. That album demonstrated Cultic's sure hand at grinding you into dust, their sound grounded in a fetid mixture of classic 1980s heavy metal, primitive death metal, Hellhammer / Celtic Frost, and a smattering of barbaric hardcore punk. But that pummeling style was elevated by its use of electronics, weird effects and post-industrial elements, turning their already sufficiently crushing and filthy death churn into something stranger, spacier, more otherworldly, perfectly encapsulating the feel and atmosphere that emanates from the band's stunning original artwork (from drummer Rebecca Magar, a talented visual artist and the force behind the art/design house Wailing Wizard). Fiery dragons and clashing medieval armies, eldritch monoliths and sinister sorcery - Cultic's album art evoked everything that I loved about the darker fantasy novels I read in my youth, backed by atomic hammer riffs, scowling vocals, vintage synthesizers, and dark martial bombast. That album and its 2022 follow-up Of Fire and Sorcery (both released on the band's own Eleventh Key label) featured a raw assault of vaguely psychedelic mid-paced Morbid Tales-damaged deathsludge, and from the early demos through to the latest album, Cultic has followed a contorted upward trajectory into ever-heavier, more down tuned riff-laden primacy.
In 2023, the band released the two-song Seducer EP through Eleventh Key. With new bassist Andrew Harris (also of Baltimore trad doom heavyweights Alms) joining the husband-and-wife team of Brian (vocals / guitar) and Rebecca (drums) Magar, these guys sounded more embittered, lustful, and just plain violent than ever. Ancient synths and gorgeous dark ambience, ethereal female vocals, and mesmeric dungeon industrial starts off the title track, then pulls the rug out from under you as the trio lunge out of the shadows with one of their heaviest riffs ever. The awesome screams and mocking, acid-tinged roars melt into the atavistic spaced-out doom-death as "Seducer" lumbers through more of those killer Moogy electronics and weird effects. It's ridiculously heavy in spite off all the bizarre hallucinatory audio swirling around. Then "Seduced" bathes you in eve more lush, grim keyboard sounds, the most kosmische kind of dungeon synth bliss, and once again the band scatters that bleary ether when they drop into another fucking scuzzy, spine-bending hunk of slo-mo death metal . It's terrific. These two songs have better production than previous recordings, while maintaining their raw, caustic filthiness. If these two tracks are indicative of what Cultic's next album is going to be like, god help us.
This expanded version of the band's Seducer EP includes the early demo version of "Seduced" which has its own alternate electronic charms, and reveals a much more primitive, caveman vision of that song. Like hearing early Cathedral jamming in some rickety, oil-stained garage, soused out of their gourds on dextromethorphan. It's rad. On the B-side, this release features several bonus tracks: first is the two-song Prowler demo from 2017, recorded when the band was just the original duo of Brian and Rebecca. Their first-ever recording, previously released on a now out-of-print CDR, Prowler sounds fully formed, just more raw and low-fi, and without the electronic elements that would later develop into their current sound. These two songs are crushers, "Cruel Orders" and "The Prowler" delivering those signature dark fantasy lyrics, trippy grunting vocals, and knuckle-dragging doom-death. In addition, the EP is rounded out by a feral 2018 live recording of "Conqueror" that unleashes the band's full war-wrath, and circles back around with a killer live 2019 recording of "Seducer" that's stripped down to its bulldozing basics.
Nearly forty minutes of primo gargantuan Gamma World barbarian death metal. So for an "EP", this Crucial Blast reissue crams in the goods. It's also beautifully designed by the band themselves: Seducer boasts more of Rebecca's striking, Frazetta-esque artwork, which perfectly captures the carnal violence of this music. It's one of the coolest looking tapes we've put out over here yet. I can't express how stoked I am to be working with this band, as I've been a longtime fan of the couple's work, both Rebecca's fantastic art and Brian's previous musical dark arts in the ritual black ambient / doom-drone outfits The Owls Are Not What They Seem and Layr. Can't recommend this band enough.
Released alongside the skull-stomping new Seducer (Expanded Edition) EP, the Whip Seducer shirt features a stunning, brand-new design by Cultic drummer and acclaimed illustrator Rebecca Magar. This design is exclusive to Crucial Blast, and features what could well be my favorite art from Rebecca / Wailing Wizard to date - for real, I'm possessed by an overwhelming impulse to get this tattooed on my person. Perfectly capturing the sleaze, filth, and carnal violence of Cultic's brand of atavistic, dungeon synth-soaked death metal, it's also one of the coolest designs that we've released over here at C-Blast. This is a highly quality three-color print courtesy of our collaborators at Forest Passage Printing, available on black 100% cotton Gildan garments. GET SEDUCED.
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CRUCIAL BLAST Psychotronic Catastrophism SHIRT (BLACK GILDAN)
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CRUCIAL BLAST Psychotronic Catastrophism SHIRT (BLACK GILDAN) (XXL)
$22.00
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For the twenty-fifth anniversary of CRUCIAL BLAST, we are stoked to present the first in a series of Crucial Blast shirts featuring brand-new commissioned art from our favorite visual artists. This design features the gnarly collage art of Cody Drasser, guitarist for the acclaimed New York prog-death outfit AFTERBIRTH and grave ambient project CAULBEARER, as well as a highly skilled visual artist in his own right; we've been longtime fans of Drasser and his music/art, with several releases from him in the C-Blast catalog..
Amazingly, this is actually the first time ever that we've issued a CRUCIAL BLAST design. After 25 years, the time is now!
The "Psychotronic Catastrophism" design is an accurate glimpse into the neurologic strategies behind the art, music, film, and literature that we release here at Crucial Blast. Issued in a limited printing, on black Gildan 100% cotton short sleeve t-shirt, two-color print, with the Crucial Blast sigil on the back of the shirt.
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The swirling, sweat-soaked psychedelic black metal of Grave Gnosis first infected me when I discovered the band's 2021 album Lux Nigredo and 2022 EP Towards the Nameless Darkness a while back. Both of 'em are terrific and terrifying blasts of incredibly chaotic and mind-bending black metal that likewise caught the attention of many that follow the USBM underground, despite only being available as digital downloads and super-limited cassettes. Slick with swamp slime, the band's music is a smoldering torch in the darkness, mutating the raw matter of black metal into nightmarish and exuberant ritual. There's a distinctly marshy Southern stench that permeates their blend of raging black / death metal, psych, and neo-classical, wafting off the triumphant galloping riffs, harsh and blazing blackened blast, and miasmic trippiness that completely enshrouds their music. But on their latest, Pestilence Crowned , all hell fully and truly breaks loose as the band ascends to a new level of Satanic savagery and twisted, psychotronic violence. This shit is wild . Possessed with a powerful shamanic presence, the nine songs on Pestilence are thoroughly tangled with specific formulae of ceremonial magic and violent adoration, a direct continuation of the themes running through Nigredo related to the band's system of Vedantic Nihilism. Each song becomes a paved stone on the honeysuckle and kudzu-covered footpath to a particular transcendental state; no mere soundtrack to patchwork blasphemies, this album directly interacts with the nervous system and the third eye.
From the ghoulish ambience of opener "Amidst the Rotten Coils of a Great Centipede" with its ghostly cello, tribal percussion and eerie experimental electronics, and the subsequent blast of feverish churning chaos that is "Carnivorous Darkness", this stuff undulates in some seriously crazed ways. Moving through passages of solemn funereal chamber strings and traces of rustic folk music tradition in the gorgeous acoustic strum that appears on tracks like "Ragziel", this album strikes a balance between inchoate madness and progressive intricacy that doesn't really sound like anything else going on in the US black metal field. It all explodes in kaleidoscopic forms, heavily layered with rabid howls echoing into oblivion, strange almost sitar -like ragas spinning in blackness, Moog-like spaced-out synthesizers snaking around the darkly majestic melodies and fractured riffs; you've got moments here that echo the weirder symphonic bombast found in later Emperor and Aspera Hiems Symfonia-era Arcturus , others that hint at classic death metal influences, but Grave Gnosis is so much more chaotic and convoluted, beautiful and monstrous. They've delivered one of the best American occult black metal albums I've heard so far this decade. Drown in the fires of its spiritual intensity.
This cassette edition of Pestilence Crowned is complete with the band's supplemental material: while the tape comes in a traditional case, it is presented in a re-sealable sleeve that also contains an 11" by 17" foldout poster of the scorching, lysergic cover art, and the band's twenty-three page Pestilence Crowned booklet. The latter is an essential piece of the experience, not just a collection of expansive liner notes pertinent to the album, but a new grimoire written by Grave Gnosis frontman Caine Del Sol ( aka Ø ), with explanations both "mundane" and "esoteric" for each song. The liner notes go into intimate detail about the creation and recording of the album, but pairs that with dense occult text, ritual practice, and extensive sigil art that is all as feral, impenetrable, and liberating as the music of Pestilence Crowned itself.
The cassette / booklet / poster edition from Crucial Blast is limited to one hundred copies, hand-numbered.
::ORDER HERE::.
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I first met Baltimore-area musician Eric Rhodes years ago at an ill-fated show right here in my home town. Today Is The Day was supposed to play this absurdly small dive bar right down the street from me, there was no way I was going to pass that up. Alas, the band was stuck in traffic due to an accident on the highway, and they didn't make it. But the evening was salvaged by meeting Eric, who shared many of the same interests as I - we talked European prog, avant-garde death metal, and noise rock all evening. And he told me about his then-new band Genevieve; I assumed it was a reference to the Velvet Cacoon album, which it partially was. But as he described the band's sound, it was obviously something quite different. I followed Geneveieve's work over the subsequent past decade, watching this interesting, amorphous outfit move from early roots in Kayo Dot-esque chamber doom into something more idiosyncratic. That radical evolution tracked Genevieve moving from the gorgeous, Codeine-meets-Time Of Orchids-meets-blackened doom of 2013's Hope /Desolation demo (which is absolutely beautiful, harrowing stuff, check it out), and the early experimental digital releases that blended an increasing control of atonality and crushing black metal-influenced guitar sound with polluted sprawls of ambient guitar-noise ectoplasm, creepy-as-fuck improv industrial exercises, Abruptum-like horrorscapes, and the ever-present aura of prog and math rock, which would always manifest in the band's songwriting.
This mixture of sounds and textures really stood out on the two albums that Genevieve put out on local label Grimoire Records: 2015's Escapism and 2017's Regressionism. Here, it finally all came together into this monstrous and insanely heavy black / death chaos, barbed with bizarre dissonant leads, brutalizing tempo changes, churning concrete-mixer power that ripped everything around them to shreds. Nightmarish guttural vocals ascend into psychotic shrieks, each song unfurling into a pulverizing pandemonium of jagged edges and wrecked neurosis. But that math rock / chamber rock element is still fully present, appearing in the cracks that open amid the blackened blast, haunting interludes (sometimes using cello and acoustic guitar) and these beautiful, emotionally-wracked performances that magnify the intensity of the band's violent sound. Both of those albums are excellent and highly, highly recommended for those into the far-flung fringes of chaotic, experimental black / death.
And here we are with 2023's Akratic Parasitism. The band's third album, sharpened and concentrated, further perfecting Genevieve's unusual sound. As sweeping, majestic melodies rise through opener "Growth", the quartet expertly detonates maelstroms of ultra-violent, ravenous blackened death that swallow everything in sight, but which shatter into those amazing passages of clean, spidery guitar structures, ghostly vocals that waft through the shadows, and abrupt, off-kilter tempos that, to me at least, evokes the likes of Slint, Rodan, June Of 44 and other seminal 90s-era Louisville math rock outfits (as well as a heavy dose of early This Heat) . It seems like such an unlikely genetic code, but man, does it work. Akratic's eigh songs are slithering, undulating abominations, writhing with snarling shape-shifting vocals and grotesque roars, screaming at the heavens, the thick, suffocating chaos exuding something similar to the weird non-Euclidean death metal of bands like Ulcerate, Portal, Ehnahre, Altars, Dead Congregation, and Pyrrhon, that sort of post-Obscura Gorguts influenced death, but shot through with those abrupt shifts into shimmering angularity, chorus-drenched strings, spindly minor-key melody, choral voices, and impassioned, emotive singing that blossoms into something strange and achingly beautiful, before everything around it is brutally sucked back into their churning hell vortex. I haven't heard anything like it. The schizoid, form-splintering violence sewn through Genevieve's music continues to remind me of early Today Is The Day as well, funnily enough. One of the most interesting and ambitious extreme metal bands from the Baltimore area, Genevieve has found their way into a bizarre pocket universe of their own making.
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One of my latest obsessions is the burgeoning field of what I've been describing as "Death EBM", a loosely-connected cadre of artists and bands from around the wor4ld heavily influenced by the classic 1980s "Electronic Body Music" movement spearheaded by the likes of Nitzer Ebb and Front 242. Heavily relying on sequencers, distorted Korg and Roland synthesizers, pummeling drum machines, aggressive vocals, and punk-as-fuck anti-authoritarian lyrics, those pioneers developed a hybrid of industrial music; electronic dance elements and punk rage that absolutely dominated the late 80s underground. That style of industrial dance music went in and out of fashion over the subsequent decades, though, with some artists heading in a more "metal"-centric direction, others polishing their sound to a sleeker, more commercial technoid style. But in recent years, I've been following a serious resurgence in this style that seems to be coming primarily out of the harsh noise / dark industrial / synth-punk underground, with many of these new heavy hitters appearing on the Phage Tapes label. This new breed of EBM retains the violent 4/4 syncopated aggression and searing, distorted synthesizer sounds of the original scene, but bring a virulent strain of violent, grotesque electronics and vocals to the aesthetic, infecting these heavier EBM attacks with death metal-style shrieks, charred and blackened keyboard melodies, jackhammer-powered industrial abrasion, and trace elements of other extreme music forms that turn the whole EBM sound on its head, producing something uglier, heavier, harsher, darker and more ferocious than ever before, often drenched in violent, visceral eroticism. Phage has been mapping this incredible deathscape in recent years, delivering punishing neo-EBM from artists like Choke Chain, Distruster, Plack Blague, Wvalaam Klous, Harsh R, Talk Show, Fox Nova Project, Human Vault, It Spoke In Tongues and a host of other crushers. This shit is amazing, and anyone who's diggin' this heavy new brand of EBM should dive into that label's catalog, STAT.
One of the best of these dancefloor / headroom annihilators is STCLVR. Pronounced "Streetcleaver", this mutant from somewhere in Western NY blew the tail end of 2023 apart with the slammin' electronic body-horror bomb Post Self Abandonment , which came out on 12" vinyl through Phage right around Halloween. This cassette edition features the same material, and it's a beast. Merging caustic noise, power electronics influences, crumbling distortion walls, industrial metal, and monstrous vocals, this album builds upon the bulldozing EBM / synth-metal crush of the tracks from the Talk Show split cassette from 2022 (where I first encountered STCLVR's music, alongside the reissue of the Lovers album) and comes out even heavier (and more danceable) than ever. Ten tracks of brutal Death EBM that unleash a maelstrom of rabid electronic noise, horrifying death metal-esque screams and roars, gigantic rumbling industrial loops, vintage synthesizer arpeggios, and blasts of pummeling rhythmic power that invoke the hardest dance-floor eruptions of classic Belgian EBM. Equal parts harsh psychedelic noise, acid-damaged beast roars, lava-like distortion, and hardened beats that resemble Front 242, Nitzer Ebb, or Twitch -era Ministry filtered through a blackened cloud of rot and repulsion. The bass line that drives "Scumbag Finesse" immediately recalls the main theme from John Carpenter's iconic Assault On Precinct 13 score while adding chaotic, clanging rhythms, bursts of blast beat-level speed, and those ravenous shrieks; the propulsive four-on-the-floor power of "Plowed", underscored by grinding chord structures, erupts into a kind of electro-thrash savagery. The highly infectious beats that burn through the whiteout of "Cocaine Winter" join with melancholic synths, offering a discordian atmosphere that continues through the whole album; likewise, an element of Digital Hardcore seethes through songs like "Sea Hag 2023" and the menacing techno throb of closer "Tarnish", adding to the variety of rhythmic texture on the album. Forged from the black fire of mental and emotional struggle, STCLVR emerges anew, fearsome and unstoppable, and you can hear it through the entire album. Post Self Abandonment is triumphant.
The vinyl version of Post Self Abandonment is available via Phage Tapes.
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For nearly a decade, Gregorio Franco has been a steadily rising force in the field of dark, aggressive synthesizer music, producing some of the most innovative and full-on heavy "synth metal" you're gonna find in the underground music scene. One of the most prominent faces in the field of what is generally referred to as darksynth, Franco has traversed similar dystopian badlands as Carpenter Brut and Perturbator. But where he deviates is the unique addition of an impenitent death metal influence; where other contemporary synth artists are often content to peddle the same 'ol pastel-hued VHS-era aesthetics and "outrun" sounds, Franco injects bulldozing guitar tones reminiscent of Bolt Thrower and the Swedish death metal underground, alongside an ultra heavy electro-bass attack and brutalizing rhythmic power that's directly descended from industrial metal's most violent drum programming. Franco's music feels more suited to a war zone than a dance floor, and in fact has the ability to turn one into the other. And his creative flow is endless; along with a multitude of albums and EPs that stretch back to 2013, his Bandcamp account is constantly updated with unique covers of synth-pop classics and video game soundtracks alike.
Under the Tombhammer banner, Franco now expands his sound into even deeper, heavier territory. His electronic influences are obvious, at their core consistently paying homage to the classic sounds of early John Carpenter, vintage Tangerine Dream / Klaus Schulze, and the darkest of neon-drenched 80s-era film soundtracks. But with Tombhammer, Franco further incorporates a specific side of his metal background for the project. Heavily informed by the tone and feel of Nightfall-era Candlemass, the lugubrious funeral doom of Australia's Mournful Congregation, and the peculiar blackened orchestrations and apocalyptic resonance of Urfaust circa-Verräterischer, Nichtswürdiger Geist and Geist ist Teufel, Franco's guitar work and songcraft evokes the tangled black roots of graveyard trees, the blinding glare of a nuclear-red sun at twilight, the oceanic emptiness of an uncaring omniverse, and the deepest abysses of human grief. This stuff is genuinely heart-wrenching with its cold, dark beauty and oppressive emotional depth. Somber. Sonorous. Man, these songs moved me.
Pairing the song "Sprecher des Omnibus der Ewigkeit" from the online digital demo MMXXIII with a brand-new exclusive B-side track "Bereiche Magischen Leids", this EP is the official debut release from the mighty Tombhammer. Together, it almost feels like part of a score to a previously unknown Panos Cosmatos film. The first, ""Sprecher" (roughly translated from the German to "Speaker of the Omnibus of Eternity"), stretches out to the razor-thin light dying on the horizon line, immediately casting you into a sumptuous and billowing cloud of black- fluorescent synthesizer. When that riff comes in, the complimentary effect is crushing. I was in love with this as soon as it kicked in. Cinematic synth-doom? Soaring, darkly romantic doomwave? Forget all that, "Sprecher" simply pulverizes with a perfect blending of electronic texture and bone-smashing doom. Somewhere, some film director should be scrambling to find Franco's contact info because this is one of the best unmade film scores I've ever heard. The middle section where the cinderblock guitars die away and we are adrift in clouds of swirling ashen particulate? Gorgeous. The moment when that devastator of a riff comes flowing back in like a river of black magma? Punishing. This instrumental crush is as emotionally weighted and mournfully ethereal as the best late 80s / early 90s UK / European doom metal, and just as memorable. The B-side "Bereiche Magischen Leids" was recorded exclusively for this EP release, and shifts the experience more towards the electronic side of the spectrum. It is just as cyclopean in scope. Again, a curtain is dropped on an immense black void, luminous drones driving into the infinite, a menacing guitar melody uncoiling in the depths. A synth-drenched hint of Peaceville-style slow-motion dread sprawling outward, everywhere. And it builds. And builds. Attracting molten matter to the slow spinning iron core and amassing itself into a kind of ambient metal spheroid, swirling black guitar drone and eerie doom-laden melody and grinding synth all bearing down on you like the shadow of a newly birthed black sun. An amorphous elegy as counterpart to the previous trudge through majestic misery.
It rolls over you, somewhat like the darker work of Jóhann Jóhannsson, seeded with the glacial melodic style of guitarist Andrew Craighan. One hell of a debut.
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Finnish musician Marko Neuman has been busy as hell lately. I'd been following his work previously via the assorted high-grade bands he has been in (Dark Buddha Rising, Overdose Support, Sum Of R, Ural Umbo, Waste Of Space Orchestra). But until very recently, I hadn't heard his noise project Boredom Knife. It made an impact on me, though. Checking out previous releases like the split with Crepuscular Entity ?on Basement Corner Emissions or the Your Pain Is Getting Worse tape on Bent Window introduced me to a cruel, cold strain of harsh noise, a form of deep-field black static, flecked with elements of power electronics and K2-style junk-avalanche. I was already getting deep into it when Neuman sent me his latest recording, Stalker.
This twenty-three-minute release pairs two corresponding pieces, "Envy" and "Snap", the first a long and winding chaos-channel into the doom-laden intensity of the second. The atmosphere around this release is felt in the cold stare, the mindless gaze, and the resulting vortex of emotional destruction that was written in the postures of celestial forms long before the final act of exterminating envy and dominance occurred. Lines cut through the star-map of lethal obsession. The predetermined hunt.
Boredom Knife's Stalker emits a cold, piercing gaze instantly, the first side "Envy" churning out a dense wall of hollowed-out drones, black static, bursts of corrosive hiss, and strange pulse-like rhythms buried deep within the core of this ghostly noisescape. While there's much to digest here for enthusiasts of the "wall", Neuman produces something much more complex and dramatic. Feedback and speaker-rumble are carefully probed and manipulated, vicious high frequency noise expressed through rivers of metallic skree that are easy to drown in. That first track gradually and deliberately evolves from the mechanical whirr, junk-style clatter, and mangled (but weirdly melodious) carnage at the beginning, morphing into a steady field of layered screech and endless hum, sharpened metal scrape and clusters of bizarre, almost subliminal gurgling that continue to resurface throughout the track. It conjures a hypnotic, possibly psychedelic state of sonic overwhelm, each layer of cruel noise obsessively carved and sculpted into a latter half of near-complete roar, before it finally circles back to a final stretch of rhythmic squelch, immutable drone, and hideous shattered distortion that resolves into a final noxious junk-loop at the end.
This brief bit of structured noise is instantly obliterated with the onset of the b-side "Snap". Everything is sucked inward, imploding in a vast mass of roaring, raging static. Some semblance of the humanity heard on the previous track is dragged to the surface and obliterated. This piece concludes Stalker with a blast of oppressive, dominating black static that remains almost constant over the entire runtime. Bits of machinelike jitter, traces of peripheral musicality, horrifying shrieks, it is all swirling inward, into itself, this titanic maelstrom of over-modulated electronics and eerie voice-like entities, teeth-grinding distortion, and covert structures of sound, all going down the drain forever. This is where Stalker really turns into something psychedelic, affecting your senses and your perception of the space around you as that chaos keeps seething and spinning, occasionally shooting out chunks of strange sonic debris and whiplash tentacles of high-end feedback. And then, for the first time, a volley of fearsome shrieks and howls come flying out of that chaos, incomprehensible screams of abject horror. Just for a moment, those nightmare distorted vocals blow your hair back, and it all suddenly collapses into itself, leaving you with a brief moment of deadened electrical thrum before it abruptly stops.
I've listened to a number of Boredom Knife releases, and while much of his material shares this tenacious sadism and auditory blast-violence, this one gives me the creeps. Stalker finds that blood-specked middle ground between the gargantuan murderous PE of Slogun, and the obliterating heaviosity of classic harsh noise.
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ORDER 3" COMPACT DISC $9.00
ORDER AUDIO CASSETTE $9.00
ORDER DIGITAL ALBUM $3.00
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Similar to the recent online-only (thus far) release of the long-thought-lost Cremation Grounds full-length Lord Of Nerves, the 20-minute EP Abortion Sacrament is another recording that was produced in the late 2000s and had been thought lost for fifteen years due to the destruction of the hard drive that contained the original masters. As part of a recent organizing effort here at Crucial Blast, almost all of these recordings were recently rescued from that cursed external drive, and have been resurrected and remastered for your listening displeasure.
Coming from one of the preeminent entities of the Order Of The Warhead, the three-track Abortion Sacrament EP is the very first release that Cremation Grounds recorded around 2008-2009, and like other recordings of the era, dislodges a bog-damn of insanely misanthropic black noise / heavy electronics, gruesome blown-out industrial sludge, crushing harsh-noise-wall style constructions, and an overdriven recording style that may well have been itself the cause of that hard drive's suffering and collapse. Again, the gist of these tracks is pure in-the-red evil electronic obliteration, much of it crafted by the entities behind Cremation Grounds as a kind of "meditation through abomination" strategy, utilizing the recordings for deep meditative sessions typically accompanied by sacred entheogens, assorted psychedelics (both natural and otherwise), acts of self-debasement and self-abuse, extended scatalogical ritual, and the disintegration of the ego in the churning jet-black oceans of searing distortion and low-end rumbling rot that dominate the sessions.
Abortion Sacrament does not have quite as much of the molten scum-dirge that is found on the Lord Of Nerves full-length. But these three tracks make up for it in all-out sense-wrecking chaos and over-modulated electronic violence. Drums, vocals and percussion all exist within the roiling black-static detonations of the title track and "Spread Wide Upon Her Cremation Grounds (Adorned In Bone Ornaments)", but they have been destroyed completely by walls of crumbling, crackling electronic distortion, with the occasional muffled roar of guttural, monstrous vocalizations breaking through the carnage.
As with the album, this material skews hard towards the harsh noise / black noise end of the sound spectrum, but likewise takes a great deal of inspiration from the diabolic filth of ancient, dissolving Finnish black/death demos. This sonic abhorrence crawls before the cracked and damaged altars of Macronympha, the no-fi bestial hiss of the earliest Beherit demos, classic Japanese noise a la Pain Jerk and Incapacitants, and the aura of eighth-generation dubs of Archgoat rehearsal tapes, all grown together into a swollen, pulsating, cancerous mass of cacophonous horror.
The EP is available on 3" CD in DVD-size packaging, hand-numbered in an edition of 90 copies. Sacrament is also available on audio cassette in a limited run of 100 copies, with a bonus tape-only track on the B-side titled "Enfolded In The Engorged Lips Of Kali", another nineteen-minute harsh blackened heavy electronics meditation that was recorded around 2010. Both the 3" CD and Cassette versions of Abortion Sacrament include full-color inserts and a vinyl Cremation Grounds sticker.
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COMING SOON:
JAY RANDALL + BASTARD NOISE Dichotomy Eternal 12" EP / CD / CS / DL
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RELEASE DATE: TBA
It's been a long time coming. Bastard Noise and Crucial Blast team up together again for the first time in twenty-five years, bringing you this nightmarish vision of interplanetary ruination, swarming insect-rage, and extreme electronics, with compatriot Jay Randall (Agoraphobic Nosebleed / Japanese Torture Comedy Hour / Isis) on deck with his own monstrous contributions to the two lengthy tracks that comprise Dichotomy Eternal. Caveman Electronics are live!
Marked by a bold quote from the late, great Terence McKenna printed on the back cover, this EP exudes the kind of cosmic contempt that Bastard Noise has perfected over three decades of sonic obliteration and circuit-abuse, but is further polluted by Randall's psychotic circuit-violence and psychedelic skree. This is one potent combo. The artists get down to crafting two massive sprawls of malfunctioning, oddly retro-futuristic hellscapes. The A-side "Education Fraud" emerges with Bastard Noise's signature mixture of malevolent, hissing whispers, harrowing shrieks, and Eric Wood's almost death metal-style guttural roars while ribbons of jet-black, Lustmordian ambient blackness unspool beneath bursts of chirping, squealing signal damage and waves of corrosive distortion, laced with a spoken-word aspect that reveals an utterly venomous anti-authoritarian screed from Wood. Creepy as hell, moving from bestial ambience to swirling high-frequency drones, hideous, heavily-layered vocals, engulfed in trippy squeals, ultra-blown-out static and extreme oscillation terror. You can hear some of the rattling, ramshackle loop / drone architecture that Randall brought to Japanese Torture Comedy Hour, particularly that band's magnum opus Voltage Monster; here, his contributions melt into the background of Wood's crazed, rumbling carnage, and blend together beautifully, building to a hyper-violent explosion of fractalized noise . The B-side is "Castrating Speciesism", an enraged animal-rights meltdown (a theme that has run through the band's work going all the back to the MITB days), and frankly it’s even more horrifying and brutal than the preceding side: again, vast swathes of dread-filled ambient whirr are stalked by hideous, inhuman roars, punctuated with blasts of over-modulated immolation and evil incantations. Hypnotic pulses ripple across blood-stained sheets of black drift; high-frequency pedal violence evokes the screams of millions of obliterated beings. There is no escape from perdition.
Pure malignant electronics, quite different from the ultra-heavy prog-noise / sludge-rock weirdness that Bastard Noise has been producing in recent years (much of which really feels like a return to the early Man Is The Bastard days); rather than the full-band assault, this collaboration leans more towards the piercing, ghastly vibe of recent similar collab works like Human Extinction Engine, or the B-side to the recent 2023 LP Incineration Prayer Self Righteous Suicide. Absolute psychotronic devastation.
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CRUCIAL BLAST WEBSTORE: NEW ARRIVALS LIST FOR JANUARY 2024 COMING SOON
Yes, still here - it's been awhile since you've heard anything new from over here, and I'll be posting a statement ASAP explaining the personal catastrophes that I have had to deal with in recent past. If you've been waiting on anything from me, rest assured that I'm working my tail off to get back to you as soon as possible, and get you current.
In the meantime, Crucial Blast is here and bubbling, with new releases, store arrivals, announcements, ideas and other thought-forms on the fastly approaching horizon.
- Talk soon,
Adam Wright / Crucial Blast
As always, that's just the beginning. There's much more mutant heavy music and misanthropic art to be found on our shelves and in our bins...keep reading below to check out all of the strange and extreme new music, film, and art that's included in this week's new arrivals list.
Go to the Crucial Blast Webstore to check out our list of new arrivals...
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