christ this is a bit of a creepy record.

new album , or rather a cd reissue, from scott conners’ one man (well two if you include mark hunter on vox and ambience…) misanthropic misery machine.  defective epitaphwas a gnarly bugger of a record, this takes those ideas and fucks with them further.  not even sure malefic’s making black metal (not my label y’understand) anymore.  the only commonalities seem to be the still amusingly illegible writing that’s scrawled all over the genre and the recorded in a wet cardboard box production values.

not that it matters coz the four track hiss suits this new mangled shit so much better.  occupying the fucked squalor of a nomansland where postrock meets noise meets doom meets black metal meets ambient.  it sounds strangely disconnected, like it was recorded live in the room next door to where he’s vomiting up his charred racket, like when fog screws with yr aural perception, like the spektral elektricity and discombobulating delay down long distance telephone wires.

what vocals there are, are buried way down in the mix, all strangled whispers and hell-cellar shrieking.  anonymous and isolated.  like the man himself.

like the musics insidious smother.

which is a blurred braindamaged orchestra with smears of muffled symphonies, damaged percussion and nofi six string and cello thrash.  unsettling pretty folk harmonies bleed in and out of the evildrone, almost pastoral fuzz and off-kilter tones and textures.  it’s not so much a fucked folklore and thick forest ambiance that engulfs this record.  more the emptiness of broken cities and industrial ghost towns.

toying with the same kind of unsettling mental freakery as today is the day.  it’s as thick as hell’s soup, drenched in dank damp sheets of miasmic fuzz and klang and rattle.  shrouded in some grimy obfuscation, swathed in the addled funereal buzz of religious synth damnation.  anyway i’m sure by now you get the gist of my grim lovecraftian verbiage.

it’s damn fine and wonderfully ugly.

xasthur / hydra head