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Anyone who has been paying attention to the more experimental fringes of the black / death / doom metal underground in recent years has no doubt encountered the bizarre visions of the Industrie Chimère Noire. The nom de plume of Québécois illustrator and graphic designer Joce, the Industrie has produced a striking body of work since the latter half of the aughts, first coming to the attention of many in the extreme metal scene through his twisted, nightmarish artwork for Australian avant-garde death metal cult Portal. Since then, Joce has gone on to illustrate and design a plethora of releases on labels like Profound Lore, Sepulchral Productions and Choking Hazard, producing artwork for a myriad of skull-rupturing metal/noise artists that include Fistula, Utlagr, Wormlust, Unearthly Trance, Column Of Heaven, Yoga, A.M.S.G. and Actuary, as well as developing a distinct and recognizable style of line-art illustration that has become almost synonymous with certain strains of über-bizarro death/black metal.
Dans L’oeil du Mort is the first published collection of artwork from Joce and the Industrie Chimère Noire. Released as part of Crucial Blast’s ongoing art-zine series that focuses on lesser-known artists on the fringes of extreme metal / occult / horror / surrealism, Dans L’oeil du Mort features an array of artwork that stretches back to the Industrie's origins in 2007. A number of album art pieces are featured here in detail, as are several previously unpublished images that appear here for the first time ever. The thirty-plus macabre visions found within these pages range from Joce’s signature black-ink illustrations for bands like Portal, Nekrasov and Fistula, to more abstract experiments in manipulated photography, digital illustration, and old-school collage work. All of this stuff is possessed with a distinctive, morbid atmosphere: monochrome scenes of ancient Gallic graveyards and mottled funerary monuments; ghastly Lovecraftian nightmares of ultra-violent parasitic infection, sexually-charged tentacled monstrosities and corpulent forms in the throes of extreme mutation; snazzy industrial-influenced collage art polluted with vintage images of devil-worship; intricately rendered occult sigils and macabre panels influenced by antique woodcut engravings; gruesome digital manipulations of arachnid horror; and ghoulish full-color watercolor pieces like that found on the Unearthly Trance / The Endless Blockade split album, which seem to radiate an almost folkloric feel.
While the work featured in this publication showcase a number of different techniques, all of this material is connected through a common underlying atmosphere of morbidity and mutation that has become Joce's calling card. Through his scenes of ravenous, fecund spider-demons, desolate cemeteries, seething bacterial horrors and arctic devil worship, Joce produces a kaleidoscopic collection of nightmares and mysteries in a uniquely expressionistic manner. At times, it seems to intersect the raw visual aesthetics of 80’s-era death metal and industrial music with the deranged monstrosities and vile surrealism found in 70’s-era underground horror comics like Insect Fear, bathing his images in ectoplasmic deformity and malodorous rot.
Released in a limited printing of two hundred hand-numbered copies, this art zine comes with a set of vinyl stickers and a pair of 1" badges featuring more imagery from Industrie Chimère Noire.
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