BURIAL HEX/CROWN OF BONE

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. On the b-side, black noise project Crown Of Bone (featuring a former member of Demonologists and Ensepulchered) follows with "Strangulation Rites". In a similar black, pulsating vein as his previous splits, this is a massive blast of harsh, endlessly churning blackened noise, a monstrous maelstrom of violent distortion and guttural death metal-style roaring, vague rhythmic sounds and crashing metallic cacophony all consumed by the raging inferno of Crown Of Bone's assault. It has all of the chaotic intensity of Government Alpha or Richard Ramirez or Vomir, but there's a malevolent streak running through this oppressive noisescape with bits of creepy half-glimpsed melody and those inhuman distorted vocals seething within the storm. And then right towards the end, after an extended passage of rumbling, locomotive reverberations, a swarm of evil black metal tremolo riffing suddenly descends, closing the track out with a final blast of frostbitten power. Punishing. Released in a limited edition of two hundred professionally manufactured tapes. (label info)