CRUCIAL BLAST RECORDS

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Infernal Machines is our cassette-specific imprint. As with the Crucial Blaze series of discs/zine/artbook sets, the focus is on the most negatory sonic forms that we are able to excavate from the industrial/noise/metal underground, 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. Our cassette releases are produced in small, limited-edition runs, and are designed by the Atom Black wing of the C-Blast collective. 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, and directly into your tape deck.

BAGMAN Welcome To My Fucking Misery CASSETTE
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I don't remember exactly where it was that I first discovered Bagman's blackened fusion of misanthropic electronics and oppressive harsh noise (probably the Men Who Solicit Sex disc that came out on Murderabilia), but I know that it had instantly seeped into my brain, infecting me with an utterly malignant atmosphere. This one-man UK outfit has been producing this pitch-black noise since at least 2008, and has already amassed a pretty impressive list of releases since then, each one a sonic representation of abject horror, the residue remaining after one gazes unblinkingly into the bottomless abyss that is humanity's capacity for evil and cruelty. When I throw on one of the few Bagman releases I've been able to track down, it feels like every mote of light in the room is being slowly crushed, leaving behind a caput mortuum of dread and disgust. Bagman's recordings ooze with the unfiltered horror of the human mind, translated into a series of violent audio frequencies. This stuff ain't no fun, that's for sure. Carrying on the tradition of transgression found in the early UK power electronics scene but combining it with a much more brutal and suffocating sonic assault, Bagman's early recordings are rumbling, bestial noisescapes littered with the voices of hate-mongers and murderers, criminals and degenerates and scenes of sexual deviance all suffused into the crushing walls of black static filth, junk metal devastation and monstrous electronics. Previously out of print, three of Bagman's malevolent early CDR releases have now been reissued on limited-edition cassette through the Infernal Machines imprint with all new artwork, recommended only to enthusiasts of the most nihilistic strains of extreme electronic noise and rabid industrial horror....
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BAGMAN In Their Blood And From The Gutter CASSETTE
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BAGMAN For Kenneth McKenna CASSETTE
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CURSEWORSHIP Curseworship CASSETTE
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... Hard to imagine that one of the guys behind the filthy slithering death metal and mutant black drones found on the debut tape from Curseworship is Ross Hagen from the long-running dark ambient outfit Encomiast. While Hagen has been exploring heavier sonic territory in recent years with his experimental black metal project Schrei Aus Stein among other projects, the barbaric black sludge of Curseworship is easily the heaviest thing he's been involved with. On the trio's self-titled debut cassette (released through our own Infernal Machines series), Curseworship crawl through a grim subterranean sound-space of old-school death metal worship, metallic crust, industrial noise and psychedelic synthesizer, fused together into an ugly, mesmerizing mass of cavernous rumbling horror. The a-side starts off with the lumbering, murky deathsludge of "Summoning", the gluey down-tuned death metal guitars and pounding drums creeping through a putrid haze of low-fi hiss and sputtering analogue electronics that swarm over the recording like expulsions of corpse-gas. There's no mistaking the old-school death metal influence here; these guys are drawing from Frost-style heaviness and the more primitive sludgy sounds of bands like Autopsy and Cianide, but that heaviness is heavily enshrouded in dense spurts of psychedelic electronic noise and swells of discordant riffage. At some points earl in the tape, Curseworship's music is so rotten and electronically-warped that it comes across as some weird cross between Hellhammer and Man Is The Bastard, crawling idiot death-worship lurching through the sepulchral fog until it finally dissolves into feedback and amp-noise at the end....
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CAULBEARER Haunts CASSETTE
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... Originally released as an extremely limited CD from Peacock Window, the debut album from ghostdroners Caulbearer is now reissued on limited-edition cassette via our Infernal Machines imprint, released in an edition of two hundred copies in full color packaging. Haunts is the first release from Caulbearer, a new duo that features visual artist Cody Drasser and which delivers some killer dark kosmische driftnoise on this ten-track album. Haunts drifts in on a bed of vast rumbling synth-drones, flecked with coruscating electronic noises and smears of whirling black drift; you can hear traces of classic 70's cosmic music in here, but you can also detect a much more chaotic and abrasive quality that at times feels closer to the dense psychedelic blast-furnace sounds of C.C.C.C. when Caulbearer decide the crank things up. The album is made up of a series of evocatively titled multi-part epics ("The Absorbing Ghost", "Siege Machines", "Shipwrecked Cathedrals"), each one a sprawling slab of neo-kosmische darkness that drifts in out of the abyssal realms similar to those inhabited by Maeror Tri/Troum, offering a similar approach to heavy subterranean drone-loops and deep-earth thrum ...
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BETE LUMINEUSE Murmure Du Charnier CASSETTE
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If you're a regular customer of Crucial Blast, or have been soaking up much of the extreme black/death metal that has surfaced in recent years, you've seen the visual work of Industrie Chimere Noire. This Québécois designer (aka Joce) has been behind the distinctive and imaginative album design and artwork for a host of hideous, hellish death metal, black metal, and extreme industrial bands, including the likes of Abyssal, Portal, Fistula, Hooded Menace, Morne, Nekrasov, Unearthly Trance, and Utlagr, among others. Beyond his visual art and design, though, Joce has also been creating sinister, spectral music of his own with his solo project Bête Lumineuse, which has to date released a handful of split tapes with bands like Actuary, Lortie and Neige Et Noirceur. Practicing a kind of nightmarish kosmische sorcery, Bête Lumineuse's sound is surreal and suffocating, centered around brackish dronescapes and drifting fogbanks of mesmeric murk that often resemble the sound of some particularly baleful 70's-era space music cassette (think Tangerine Dream circa Zeit) that has just been dug up after being buried deep beneath a forest floor for the past ten years...
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GOAT Dead Gods Feed The Land CASSETTE
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... Dead Gods Feed The Land is the first new release to come along in years from the long-running American harsh noise artist Goat, and marks the return of one of my favorite U.S noise outfits. As one half of black industrial duo Goatvargr, Andy O’Sullivan has had a hand in crafting some of the most vicious black metal influenced industrial music of the past decade. As Goat, though, he traffics in pure, unfettered noise, blasting electronic chaos delivered at assaultive levels of volume and intensity. He's been creating this sort of extreme electronic noise under the Goat name since the late 90s, appearing on splits alongside artists like Folkstorm, KK Null, The Rita, Sixes, and Steel Hook Prostheses, as well as releasing some spectacularly abrasive noise tapes through his own Philosophy Shop label. With Dead Gods, O’Sullivan unleashes a firestorm of electronic noise and brutal bass-frequency abuse, the tracks splattered with rapid-fire FX-pedal violence and surreal, morbid soundscapes, and blasts of vicious junknoise carnage that threaten to leave your speakers tattered and torn...
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DEATH FACTORY Invisible Aggressor CASSETTE
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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...
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BURIAL HEX / CROWN OF BONE Resurrection / Strangulation Rites CASSETTE
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...This new entry in Crucial Blast's Infernal Machines limited edition cassette series again features the blistering black harsh noise of Crown Of Bone teamed up with another denizen of the black noise/death industrial / mutoid black metal underground. This time its with the renowned "horror electronics" project Burial Hex, aka Clay Ruby (also of Davenport, Totem, ex-Jex Thoth, Wormsblood, Journey To Ixtlan, Hintergedanken, and a bunch of other musical projects that I've been listening to over the past decade or more). Burial Hex's "Resurrection" is up first, opening with gusts of demonic breath and a distant scream of terror, then falling into silence. The first few minutes of the track are harrowing, that horrific screaming rising up in the background behind a veil of monstrous utterances cloaked in delay and other effects, and the sound of droning keys slowly drift in, dark electronic ambience gradually rising to the surface. Eerie, John Carpenter-esque synths slowly curl across the blackness while those vile, guttural intonations continue to roll out, and this all starts to take shape as a kind of anguished, hellish power electronics as those nightmarish breathing sounds and bestial moans becoming more erratic, the screams more desperate. Further into the track, those warbling background drones start to transform into the sound of creepy pipe organs, but then it turns into something much noisier and more chaotic, those droning keyboards suddenly swallowed up in a gale of screeching metallic noise and howling feedback, turning into a harsh, squealing industrial nightmare. One of the most unsettling tracks I've heard from Burial Hex...
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DEMONOLOGISTS / HHL split CASSETTE
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...one of my favorite current black noise artists, Demonologists has consistently produced high-quality and supremely vicious assaults of demonic electronic noise over the past few years, with their full-length disc / art zine set Miscarriage Of The Soul being one of my personal highlights of the Crucial Blaze series. With this split cassette, Demonologists return to C-Blast with more of their hellish noise, and are accompanied by their comrades in sonic extremism, HHL. This is the harshest entry into the Infernal Machines series, without question. Issued in a full color sleeve in a limited edition of one hundred copies...
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LUCIFERS FORESKIN Satanic Vulvacrafts CASSETTE
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...I've had a growing obsession with Ray Rivera and his many solo projects, which include such proponents of sonic scum as the blackened grind of Nazarene Whore, the bizarre gore-splattered techno of Purulent Wormjizz, and the psychedelic gorenoise of Black Putrefaction. This guy is some kind of troglodyte-genius, constantly coughing up these wildly creative, fully realized blasts of bizarre grind/noise/slime that, admittedly, do cater to a very small audience of pervos like myself. But man, if you worship at the altar of Ax/ction and weird hybrids of experimental black metal and electronic music and noise, this guy's stuff is a riot. Around a year ago, Ray sent me a CDr from yet another new project of his called Lucifer's Foreskin, and I instantly fell in love with the weirdly monstrous electro experiments, blasts of black noise and slime-encrusted industrial black metal primitivism spewed forth from the aperture of the Beast on that disc. Real filthy stuff, somewhere in between his gorenoise-style projects and some severely deformed industrial black metal...citing the likes of cult black metal/noise/grind/industrial weirdoes like Gonkulator, Havohej, Anal Birth, Stench Of Corpse and Beherit as influences in the thanks list printed on the inside of the cover to Vulvacrafts, Rivera has delivered his own perverted vision of blasphemous goat-tronics and shapeless basement blast that has turned into one of my favorite releases in the Machines series....
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RECLUSA Vacancy CASSETTE
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...Vacancy is the latest sonic abomination from this Midwestern skum-machine, a cassette-only release festering with eight tracks of ultra-heavy industrialized necro-doom, plumes of vomitous black noise, putrescent death industrial, and loads of hallucinatory graveyard ambience. The emphasis is more on the latter, with lots of long, droning sections of septic muck floating around the heavier grinding rhythms and absurdly guttural roars, with "Hallucinations In Pitch Black" burying a monstrous deathdoom riff beneath a mile of factory noise, morbid drones and vile toad like vocals, and some pulsating synth-horror appearing on "Dead In The Eyes" that suggests a meeting between the classic Italian death industrial sound of the 80s fused to a low-fi industrial metal mantra...
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RECLUSA The Anticonscience CASSETTE / CHAPBOOK
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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 cassette comes with a 20-page chapbook of nightmarish artwork and writing and a Reclusa sticker, issued in a hand-numbered edition of just forty-nine copies........
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CROWN OF BONE / UTARM split CASSETTE
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....Another new entry in our Infernal Machines cassette series, this split again features the fearsome black noise of Crown Of Bone teaming up with another denizen of the black metal/noise underground, this one featuring the somewhat secretive Cali black metal group Law Of The Rope. As with the other new Crown Of Bone split tape with Utarm, this features cover art created by Mories (Gnaw Their Tongues / Aderlating) and is professionally printed/manufactured, limited to two hundred copies.....
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LAW OF THE ROPE / CROWN OF BONE split CASSETTE
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... ...This installment in Crucial Blast's Infernal Machines series of limited-edition cassettes features two of our favorite bands in the current black noise/experimental black industrial underground, teaming up for this full-length album of corroded aural horror. With more hateful black noise from Crown Of Bone on one side and new nightmarish pandemonium from Norwegian necro-weirdo Utarm on the other, this stands as one of our most monstrous cassette releases so far, with cover artwork created by Mories (Gnaw Their Tongues / Aderlating), issued in an edition of two hundred copies on professionally manufactured tape.....
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PROJECT:VOID The Anthropogenic Process CASSETTE w/ DOWNLOAD CODE
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... Through a fusion of brutal power electronics, harsh noise influences and the blackest, filthiest strains of death industrial, Project: Void offers a litany of human failure and squalor with The Anthropogenic Process, a full length album released through our cassette/digital imprint Infernal Machines. There's nothing subtle about Project: Void's worldview - this is utter contempt for other human beings, a deep seated misanthropic outlook steeped in disgust that borders on the physical. That attitude by itself is enough to endear this project to the hard hearts here at Crucial Blast, but the excoriating humanhate is delivered via an incredibly nasty noise assault that kicks some serious ass. The album features ten tracks of bestial electronics that incorporates elements of extreme junk-noise and blackened industrial into an extremely heavy power electronics attack; I can hear traces of that classic Slaughter Productions sound seething under all of the feedback scrape and monstrous cackling, but The Anthropogenic Process has other ingredients that also set this apart. On a couple of tracks, heavy pounding drums appear, providing a thunderous backing rhythm to the flesh-rending electronic chaos, and elsewhere on the album, the sound of maniacal carnival organs appear, writhing over brutal blasting feedback. Controlled bursts of immolating harsh noise are cut with minimal black synth throb, and crushing and massively distorted bass riffs materialize alongside primitive keyboard soundtrack pieces that give birth to crushing bass frequencies and ultra-distorted percussive noise. It's Project: Void's vocals that really make this monstrous, though; the violent electronics are fronted by a mix of processed gurgling throat-slime and a scathing, almost black metal-style vocal style that adds a definite black industrial vibe.....
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