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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. Then there is the grimy, mutant blackness that infests these recordings, the demonic vocal slime and filthy crypt ambience that permeates Lycanthropic Warhead's sprawling post-industrial soundtracks even at their most pounding and propulsive, with hints of the surreal black ambience of French weirdoes Moëvöt and the shapeless, shambling black metal improvisations of Abruptum. A series of bizarre beatscapes and macabre blackened drift and grinding mechanical dirges stretched across two hour-plus discs, that consists of one of the stranger releases that we've issued through the new Crucial Blaze series.
Infinite Castigation also includes a set of eight full-color reproduction prints of larger collage pieces that were created by the minds behind Lycanthropic Warhead, each one an amalgam of stolen exploitation poster art from the 70's and occult symbology that have been re-assembled into new visual hallucinations of violent lust, masturbating demons, and black acid frenzies. This set of eight collage prints (each one tying in to a different track on the discs) is bound together with a full-color obi strip and enclosed in the plastic dvd-style case with an insert card, a Lycanthropic Warhead vinyl sticker, and a set of 1" Lycanthropic Warhead badges. This release has been issued in an extremely limited release of just thirty-seven copies, and is only available direct from Crucial Blast.
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LYCANTHROPIC WARHEAD Infinite Castigation 2xCDR + ART PRINT SET