Last heard some years ago with the suffocating Buried Steel album, where Andy Swan and Damian Bennett came forward as the main perpetrators of this sonic violence, whereas today the presentation is more anonymous, apart from the named guest contributors. Jo Quail’s cello on ‘The Fifth Book of Agrippa’ is admittedly pretty outstanding, and the combined effects of this harrowing track are considerable. Elsewhere we find Terence Hannum from Locrian, Manuel Liebeskind from Berlin adding vocals, and even a sample handed in by Iron Fist Of The Sun. While at least 50% of these guests are tainted with one extreme metal genre or another, the inclusion of Quail is almost worthy of a Sunn O))) extravagance.

According to the press, the band aimed to produce the most “disorienting” production possible, feeding on their own live shows and soundchecks to reap further ideas for this unholy mix of deathly-doom poundage, nasty electric noise, and industrial-inspired moves. Even remix culture is in their sights; Adrian Stainburner and Bereneces have been roped in to remix two tracks on the CD, and apparently the vinyl pressing offers a different mix, made by the band, instead of the Martin Bowes production. Grim fare, but occasionally exhilarating, and bonus marks for the stylistic mix of flavours and styles thrown into the basin. (10/10/2024)

At one time I tried to find a way into their music, since they tick a number of boxes for me – excessive Japanese guitar music, which appealed to me ever since hearing the PSF Tokyo Flashback releases in the 1990s; use of “gothic” typeface for the band name, cementing an association with Black Metal, although they never made a BM record in their life; and extreme heavy metal drone, since I must confess that some 20 years ago I was actively seeking any advances on the work of Earth and Sunn O))). One band I tried was Burmese, but they didn’t quite fit the bill. Neither did Corrupted, oddly enough, but I’m still intrigued by the mystique of their shrouded endeavours, so I guess their strategy is working.

Even this release is odd and perhaps even untypical of their output, but be aware that it brings together two separate releases in a new package. The first of these, Felicific Algorithm, appears to be simply field recordings – not a genre I’d expect to be attempted by these blackened sorcerers – gathered in Amagasaki, Osaka, and Fukushima as long ago as 2012. Along with these menacing, low-frequency mechanical hums, there’s a short terrifying text referring to radiation, rubble, and a Geiger counter. The obvious implication is that we’re slowly exploring (in forensic detail) the aftermath of an atomic explosion, an impression made all the more unsettling by the line “we cannot hear children’s voices from anywhere”. Arrgh! Proceeding with remorseless slowness, this is dismayingly grim fare, though not without its darkly compelling attractions embedded in the carefully-managed dynamics, which keep us in a constant state of tension with the low purring before erupting into howling storms of noise.

This head-scratcher originally surfaced as a vinyl LP in 2018 on Cold Spring, playable at 33 or 45; its status as a canonical Corrupted release is disputed by hard-core fans, some of whom pointed out that it arrived just after a change in the lineup of the band, and there was even a suspicion that it was concocted in the studio by Martin Bowes, house engineer for this label, with no members of Corrupted appearing on it at all. No such ambiguity applies to Mushikeras, which was played by Kaz Mike, Rie Lambdoll, Mark Y and Chew – i.e. Chu Hasegawa, who has also played in Omoide Hatoba, the latterday psych band. Mushikeras is from 2023, originally “published” online as a digital release, perhaps the first record made by this particular lineup; it may be closer to the ultra-slow doom sludge that Corrupted fans crave. Starting out as a maudlin “ballad” – yes, there are vocals and even an uncredited piano, played in the sentimental way that only metal guitarists can manage – it gradually morphs into lumbering shapeless monster-mode, punching home its ambiguous message with primitive drumbeats, tortured vocal howls and whispers, and anguished guitar riffing. I want to say it’s set in a “minor” key, but somehow these Japanese wizards have managed to reinvent minor chords on their own terms, with mixed and layered guitars, arriving at something even more disturbing to the human psyche than the key of C-minor.

In short, if you care to spend the best part of one hour staring directly into the cold hard face of pure nihilism, here’s your perfect album. (12/04/2024)

Certainly enjoying the brevity of some of these two-minute marvels – certain colleagues I know are still trying to come to terms with Napalm Death, which makes me long to give them a blast or five from this cassette – but also loving the way that very precise tunes and compositions are emerging from what most infidels and acolytes might mistakenly see as little more than a churning lump of very deep bass notes. Yep, very low frequencies are still the order of the day. For those who joined the party late, Dan Peck blows the tuba and Tom Blancarte operates the double bass, and with drummer Brian Osborne they serve up music which combines energetic free improvisation with as much doom metal as they have an appetite to swallow, simply doing it for the love of playing. With extra side detours into gothic sinister chamber music and spooked organ on ‘Xenobites’, and a sampled scream from a horror movie on ‘Meat Baby’, the listener is guaranteed a supernatural gore-fest aptly aligned with the stark and potent imagery of the great Matt Minter on the cover artworks.

The Gate aim to bring us “more introspective and heavier” experiences on the B side, in the form of such desolate gems as ‘Inside Poems’ – more samples here, this time probably lifted from a sci-fi end-of-the-world flick, used as a prelude to a stern and unforgiving doom-march hymn that’s as sober as a Puritan sermon (wouldn’t it be great to see the trio wearing pilgrim hats on stage?) – and of course ‘Stump Dweller’, emerging as a fan fave from the few listeners enlightened enough to hear this tape. This stubby gnome of a piece, a true brute among brutes, lurches confidently from its forest lair ten times as large and capable as any black bear, notwithstanding its grotesque and ugly visage. And while the closing piece ‘Troll Junkies’ might lead the unsuspecting listener to expect a root of bitterness torn from the minds of Nick Cave and Lou Reed in a bad mood, in fact it’s a beautiful dark hymn, melodic intervals played on the organ to confound Satan, and subtle shifting time-signatures to wrong-foot the horned one as he leads us sinners up the garden path.

The cumulative effect of this tape is remarkable, instilling doubts and profound gloom among the enemy as surely as it rouses the martial spirit of true believers. The achievement of Peck and his compadres, transmuting their musical skills and passions into palpable manifestations as real as any Frankenstein monster loosed from a laboratory, is considerable enough, but amazingly – on the strength of this bone-cruncher – they keep finding ways to do it better. Essential! (22/12/2023)

Besides the band-mates Zawadzki, Dziemski and Aranguren (drums, gtr and vox respectively), this release is supplemented by a number of guest recruits drawn from the world-wide “dark army” of underworld doom-rocksters and industrial death merchants, notably Attila Csihar who has wailed about the futility of the universe in the company of Sunn O))), plus one member of Imperial Triumphant, one from Senyawa, a crazy vibraphone player Tomasz Herisz, and an equally demented sax player Aleksader Papierz who screams alarmingly through his metal python whenever he’s let out of his box. Leaving A Dream (ZOHARUM ZOHAR 300-2 / OLD TEMPLE OLD.209) lurches across a plethora of genres and splinter genres, sometimes including very experimental sound-scaping in among the more conventional goth-tinged, semi-operatic rock dirges with their hideous vocal parts, songs which trudge reluctantly through Hell while dragging the twin stones of Wrath and Hatred.

It’s tempting to think Kielbasa is attempting a Stephen O’Malley-styled studio extravaganza with this monster, except he’s more steeped in Eastern European culture, frequently expressing the history of political oppression through musical metaphors, and lamenting about it in a very desolate way as expressively as any pack of full-throated wolves in search of their next meal. Unlike O’Malley, this record doesn’t do much to emulate the richness of Miles Davis or Alice Coltrane records either, despite liner notes’ assurance of same, referring to a long shopping list of “references” which includes “jazz”. The emotional intensity is heavy going for sure, amounting to a bludgeoning of the mind with metal hammers, not made any easier by the general lack of cohesion and form in Whalesong’s sprawling churn of sound. Maybe he spends so long overdubbing all the instruments, he forgets to make a composition. On the other hand, I found slightly more experimentation, subtlety and sheer strangeness on the second disc, which includes longer pieces such as ‘From The Ashes’, a harrowing vision torn from the slough of despond where the writhing tortured voices do much of the heavy lifting; and ‘She Kissed Me With Her Venomous Lips’, where the excesses and high volume antics of the first disc have been peeled away, leaving us with a bedrock of pure, seething, evil.

Jointly released with the Old Temple label, another Polish enterprise which has spawned many records of Black Metal, Death Metal, and Doom Metal. This record dares to pose the age-old question, “What happens to the dream when the dreamer disappears?” and was premiered with a special concert at the “Castle Party” festival – never attended it, but I expect it involves being clapped in shackles and shoved in a dark cell. We’ve heard previous horrors from Kielbasa, such as his remorseless Nothing Has Changed release from 2021, and Harmony Of Struggle, a nasty piece of power electronics from 2022. But if you want to swallow the full deep-dish experience, listen to this. From 6th September 2023.

“With every thought, the soul loses colour again” … that’s the English-language translation Google Translate gives for the title of Danish BM act Ildganger’s second album “For hver tanke mister sjælen atter farve”, hinting at the misery, bleakness and dark uncertainty threaded through the recording’s five tracks. The album’s cover art is no more reassuring in its dark murky colours and style suggesting inner storms and general chaos.

“En sjael til dom” (“A soul for judgement”) starts the album in epic depressive doomy blackness, from slow jangling-guitar moping to hard riff crunching confrontation and dense noisy storms of raw tremolo guitar grind, urgent beating percussion and above all the gruff declamatory vocals that add extra paint-stripper harshness to the music. You certainly feel as though you’re tumbling into a spinning black whirlwind, the centre of which leads you inexorably into another, more forbidding dimension than any you might have experienced in your worst nightmares or most desolate moments. However, it’s really with the second track “Ved horisontons ende” (“At horizon’s end”) that Ildganger’s full aggression and songwriting flair are unleashed in music that can sound shrill and almost hysterical with rapid-fire trilling riffs backed by pained synths. Drama ebbs and flows as the music transits through a brief atmospheric passage that suddenly ends in blasts of guitar noise, blast beats and sonorous orchestral synth background.

After a brief ambient instrumental punctuated by claps of thunder, rain shower and sighing choirs, the album plunges back into the existential storm with “Dans om tomhedens mund” (“Dance around the mouth of the void”), a solid and intense drama combining raw BM, symphonic BM grandeur and even snippets of post-BM radiance and melody. The track is so dense with layers of guitar texture and keyboard theatrics that it feels overwhelming, even suffocating at times, and a whiff of decadence and decay is not all that far away. The album closes with “Conflagration in the Heart of Stone”, the only track on the album with English-language lyrics, an even more histrionic piece that gathers up all that the previous tracks have unleashed and poured these forces into a mix of hard-hitting machine-gun percussion, showers of burning guitar and chiming jangly guitar melodies, and evil-sounding keyboard sighing. The track chugs off over the horizon in a mighty barrage of ferocious guitar shower, thumping percussion and deranged orchestral synth bombast, leaving behind a sad lament.

On the assumption that Ildganger is a solo project, the album as it is, is a sterling effort in song composition and performance, with all instruments harmonising very well even when the music appears most chaotic. The slightly murky production is both an asset and a liability: audiences will appreciate that the muddy quality adds bleak atmosphere but at the same time it makes the music seem a bit one-dimensional and blunted when perhaps it needs to be sharp. The guitars could certainly do with extra power and zing as there are occasions where they are reduced to a mere grinding presence. “For hver tanke …” is a decent enough recording though I’m not sure it has much staying power: it doesn’t offer much, musically anyway, that has not already been done with the mix of elements and influences from different sub-genres of black metal and dark ambient.

One look at that wacky album cover and I was hooked: I just had to find out what this Texan five-piece band Kólga was up to on its debut full-lengther “Black Tides”. The band counts as its members various musicians from a range of Texas-based rock and metal acts including Cleric (death metal), Dead to a Dying World (blackened sludge / doom metal), Sabbath Assembly (psychedelic rock / doom metal) and the wonderfully named Tyrannosorceress (black metal) so its music is bound to feature some elements from all of these genres. And lo and behold, on hearing “Black Tides”, I was flung back into the darker end of 1960s surf rock / psychedelia spiced with Lovecraftian-lite horror from the briny deeps. Yes folks, Kólga brings us a lively and whimsical (if sometimes creepy) interpretation of blackened surf rock that treats the arrival of Cthulhu and his horde of intergalactic monsters on Earth as an excuse for a pool party where humans and aliens alike can go on bad acid surfing trips and count themselves unlucky (or lucky, depending on whose point of view) if they don’t meet the Big Green Octopus-Face Boss himself for dinner.

With titles like “Space Beach Massacre”, “Squall of Cthulhu” and “Endless Bummer”, the various songs can be expected to parody black metal, the Cthulhu Mythos, B-grade sci-fi / horror flicks from the mid-20th century and other pop culture phenomena from the same period. To some extent this is true of most songs, though as the album continues the black metal aspect tends to drop out quickly and all that remain are the raspy inhuman singing (though there’s not much of that on what is mostly an instrumental recording) and a dark, almost black atmosphere hovering over the music. If you don’t care too much about being purist and insisting on an equal balance of black metal and psych surf music, you’ll find “Black Tides” an enjoyable if perhaps rough and ragged ride through kitsch pop culture and a mash-up of black metal, doom metal, Gothic horror, TV theme music and odd field recordings and sound samples of popping bubbles and watery, gluggy spoken monologues.

Nearly all songs on the album are outstanding in their own way: “Squall of Cthulhu” is the blackest and doomiest of the lot AND also features some of the most spirited surf rock riffing on the record; “Tethys” though bats that song out of sight with a grand symphonic epic style that goes through various key changes and turns into a wild psychedelic rocker culminating in a majestic doomy exit; and a trio of songs from “Riptide” through “Endless Bummer” to “Is This Real?” rips through beloved old 1960s TV theme music pieces like “Hawaii Five-0” and “Batman” in their melodies, rhythms and atmosphere. On this trilogy the organ gets a thorough workout along with trilling tremolo guitar riffs and chords that are ever so slightly dark and ominous though never truly menacing, and the result is music that just manages successfully to walk the tightrope between kitschy and gimmicky, and the dark abyss beckoning on the other side.

If there’s a criticism to be made, it could be that the Kólga guys are spreading themselves rather thinly over quite a lot of musical territory within the blackened surf rock genre and as a result, they fail to take full advantage of what that territory offers. “Is This Real?” dips its toes in crazed spaghetti-western film atmosphere but doesn’t go much further than that, and similar can be said of “Squall of Cthulhu” and “The Kraken” in their respective takes on black metal / surf rock fusion. Still, the fact that the Kólga musicians have a shot at exploring different facets of their chosen hybrid style, even if that makes for a rather uneven album, indicates that the potential for that style to develop and expand is vast, and the musicians are at an early stage experimenting with the music and seeing what works and what doesn’t. Future albums from these guys are likely to be more focused, more confident and maybe even more adventurous and eccentric.

Düsseldorf running Amok on their CD (ZOHAR 269-2) of same name…despite their German name this duo are all-Polish, but they do pay homage to a strain of Berlin electronic music with their sound, which is admittedly somewhat “cleaner” than many of the murkoid specimens which inhabit this label. Apparently the experts classify this as “EBM”, i.e. electronic body music, a sub-genre which splices together elements of industrial noise with synth-punk of the late 1970s and modern dance music. Amok ends up pretty percussion heavy, and when the drummer is let loose he can’t seem to stop filling up the cracks between the brickwork with his patented brand of aural cement. The multiple synth lines and macabre melodies are also working like steam engines, and the cumulative effect is quite melodramatic. All played by Tom Axer (synths, voices) and Jacek Sokołowski (drums), although Adam Radecki seems to be the original mastermind behind this project, active since 1989 on a sporadic series of cassettes for Odd Records.

Yutani are the somewhat mysterious trio from Warsaw with nine tunes on Not Much Of A Talker (ZOHAR 257-2). I like the title here, reminding me of when I once stormed out from a party of colleagues in a bar without saying goodnight, and later one of them told me there was no need to apologise for making a “Polish Exit”. Since then I’ve assumed that a sullen, uncommunicative mode might be a character trait of this noble race. Yutani don’t exactly manifest it here though, and this combination of bass guitar, electronics and drums is clearly the product of a threesome who have quite a lot to tell us, even if it might project a vaguely aggressive and dissatisfied air. Yutani seem keen to tick a lot of genre boxes (electronic, dark, psychedelic, chillout, industrial), unless that’s just the press department working itself into a tizzy. Some nice moments here, and full marks for telling us that the bass and drum parts were “recorded in dirty basement rooms of a building that no longer exists”, and having a drummer named Inutile Carcasse, but the musicians could benefit from developing a lighter touch.

Popsysze are another combo departing from the usual Zoharum aesthetic, and on their Emisja (ZOHAR 258-2) album deliver seven tracks of very competent and crisp gtr-bass-drums trio music, occasionally adding lyrics. If you’ve ever craved an Eastern Europe rethink of Firehose or Meat Puppets, this would be a good place to start. Apparently the producer Michal Mielnik and mixing by Michal Kupicz accounts for the “light touch” in the sound, since it seems on their previous Kopalino album the trio couldn’t help inclining towards their dark masters, such as the cocoa bean. The lyrics are sung in Polish natch, but they allude to imminent environmental disasters threatening the globe, not that you’d know given the equivocal and even-tempered timbre of the vocalists Jarosław Marciszewski and Jakub Świątek, who might as well be singing about an unsuccessful trip to the laundrette for all the emotional passion they muster. Still, I suppose that cover graphic could be read as an indicator of the growing global warming problem…

Back to more grisly territory now with Tearing Your Mind To Pieces (ZOHAR 267-2), a remorseless power electronics album from Harmony Of Struggle. It’s certainly very “retro”, what with the digipak covered with unpleasant photos of wartime atrocities and injured men, harking back to Throbbing Gristle and other shocking nasties from the industrial past, although the front image (no less unpleasant) has a combination of sexual and violent imagery which could be mistaken for a more extreme take on Surrealism. HOS have the hubris to name themselves after a release by Clandestine Blaze, the Finnish Black Metal solo act whose espousal of National Socialist Black Metal themes in their oeuvre have resulted in several sales being blocked and banned by the Discogs site. Plus you’ve got track titles here like ‘Shock Tactics’ and ‘In Control’, in a tracklist which reads like the Heinrich Himmler instruction manual. So far, so horrible. HOS is Neithan who might be Michal Kielbasa, also behind such projects as Whalesong, Lifeless Gaze, Grave Of Love and Nothing Has Changed – with this smorgasbord of depressing acts, he covers Black Metal, Doom, and Industrial genres. Plenty of horrifying themes on this release, and even the sound itself is deliberately made into something extremely ugly by excessive layering, distortion, and sound manipulation, with results accurately described as “deformed”. Jointly released by the hateful Polish underground label, Old Temple. Strong meat warning – approach this record at your own risk.

Reformed Faction comprises three ex-members of famed minimal droners Zoviet France, i.e. Andy Eardley, Mark Spybey, and Robin Storey, who in a moment of rapprochement joined forces again in 2005 and released Vota (ZOHAR 262-2) followed by a string of records for several years thereafter. I think Eardley may have walked away from the group at some point, but I haven’t looked into the tale too closely. The Zoharum label evidently revere Zoviet France, given their comprehensive reissue programme of Storey and his Rapoon albums, so one can see why they’d be keen to put this one out, although Klanggalerie already did a very good job of it in 2006. Even so, today’s version has been remastered, and the cover design has been slightly tweaked, with no expense spared on the spot-varnish on the digipak panels. I’ll admit I’m not the world’s foremost collector of Zoviet France, but this Vota album is winning me over with its subtleties. I like the understated, suggested melodies and moods, indicative of larger forms lurking below the surface of a misted-over pool. If it’s done through live group performances, as I assume a lot of it is, it’s all the more impressive for this mastery of many diverse elements – instruments, tapes, loops, and electronic effects blended like ingredients in the world’s largest and sweetest layer cake.

Lastly we have Groth (ZOHAR 268-2) by Groth, which is about one of the worst records we’ve heard this year. Utterly undistinguished and obnoxious metal music from this Polish foursome, of which the most nauseating aspect is the histrionic vocalist who seems to have affected an American accent and throws in plenty of outdated rockist cliches, perhaps in some misguided bid by the band to gain wider commercial acceptance. When the singer finally manages to shut his yap, you can hear how truly mediocre are the gtr-bass-drums trio manufacturing this clumsy, misbegotten mess. Still, the label seem to think they’re onto something, praising the “lurking ambient-psychedelic connectors” in between the sickening riffage and poundage. Yuck.

On the same day that MoE released “Skinwalker”, their collaboration with UK band Bruxa Marie, the Norwegian trio also released “Saint Vitus Dance”, itself also a collaboration with Escalantes (Martin and Oscar). As with “Skinwalker”, we can expect a lot of noisy experimental jazz improv / sludge doom rock fusion, though with Martin Escalante on saxophone the recording leans a bit more to the free jazz side. Even so, sludge doom metal fans shouldn’t dismiss this album as there’s plenty here that will appeal to them: the down-tuned bass guitar lines, the crashing cymbals and thumping percussion, and the oppressive atmosphere that follows as a result. A female vocalist adds her own special brand of madness and malevolence to the general commotion which ranges from the gritty and noisy to the skittish, the squally, the screechy and the stentorian.

Call your first track “Auto Da Fé”, you can expect to be subjected to scrutiny rivalling that of the Holy Inquisition itself in judging whether your music is as confrontational and discomforting as its title suggests, and in this case the musicians pile on the chaos and horror, coming from squealing sax, thundering drums and gritty down-tuned bass drones with the weight and pressure of concrete pylons. There’s desperation in the music as it draws near the end, with the sax screaming for dear life and the drums and bass drown out its higher notes. A brief pause and all-out cacophony explodes in “The Greek Fire” with sax, drums and other instruments in a fight for their lives. The really arresting and interesting track though is “Bagpipes from Guanajuato”, featuring a bawling horn-like instrument and two vocalists, one male and the other female, both (but the female in particular) singing or keening at the extremes of their respective ranges while the music increases in harsh density, chaos and volume.

“The Sandman” is a duel between two saxophones (alto and tenor) on the one hand and sludge metal bass and percussion on the other, with the female singer from “Bagpipes …” declaiming lyrics over the squealing and the thunder before it all collapses under distortion. Bringing up the rear is the title track which, like the neurological disorder it’s named after is a jerky piece of two saxophones disputing with each other before being interrupted by solemn sludge doom drones that threaten to split the very ground beneath our feet, all the way to the centre of Earth. The drones dominate the track from then on, with the saxes and soprano singing weaving squiggly melodies around the solid bristly textures.

Like “Skinwalker”, this album is definitely not for the faint-hearted, and is even more confronting if less sonically varied. Much of the experimentation here comes from the soprano singing which surely draws inspiration from singers like Diamanda Galas and others who use extended vocal techniques. This, together with the saxophones and the sludge doom elements make for an album that, as its front cover artwork insinuates, is combative and challenging.

Recorded back in 2019, in Newcastle upon Tyne, “Skinwalker” is a collaboration between noisy British punk band Bruxa Maria and Norwegian jazz trio MoE. Between these two acts, fireworks might be expected to fly constantly but “Skinwalker” turns out more restrained and controlled than you’d expect. Four tracks, of which three exceed ten minutes, are on offer here, all of them brimming with caged fury and aggression which, if unleashed, could turn this recording into a tapestry of burning monstrous chaos. Fortunately these two acts, each with plenty of experience in the studio and live setting on their own and in collaboration with others, know when to let slip the dogs of jazz noise war and when to bring them back to heel, even if only temporarily.

Opening track “Shapeshift Skylight” is an exercise in building up audience anticipation for that burst of chaos, with a steady if minimalist rise in the uneasy music, starting with solo saxophone and building a dronescape background around it, until about halfway through when the vocals fade away and the stuttery saxophone goes completely bonkers. Gritty bass drones keep the music stern and harsh, and the hard-hitting percussion gives hint of subterranean power. The whole track becomes increasingly monstrous and demented, and in its derangement it exercises a hypnotic power over listeners with its continuously looping rhythms, motorcycle engine drones and grinding sheet-metal guitars.

“Weavers of Evil” presents as a suffocating performance of insistent looping guitar riffs against a backdrop of darkness in which tones, fragments of melody and effects pass in and out. The whole track has an unhealthy psychedelic edge, complete with a lead surf-guitar melody coming in the fifth minutes and dominating the music from then on. Cartoon voices and whistles lead the way into a hysteria of howling cacophonic instruments. By contrast, “The Wolf, the Owl, the Ritual” starts as a noisy space-ambient piece and more or less stays like that. Even though this a relatively short track at just over six minutes, it does seem much longer than it really is.

Last track “The Spirit is Out” is a genuinely creepy and malevolent piece of distorted doom-jazz drones and tones, more tough guitar grit, distortions of stringed instruments and some amazing moments of dronescape sounds that just seem to go forever and ever. This last piece is easily the most outstanding (if also suffocatingly crushing) work of sonic torture on the album: each crash of noise features massive reverb effects that pulse and shimmer outwards without end, piling effects upon effects until your entire brain is ringing with reverberating noise. Just when you think it couldn’t be any more intense and deranged, the music goes up several notches with rapid-fire throb, high-pressure water-hose noise drone and other layers of noise chaos.

This certainly is most uneasy-listening music and one of those recordings that should come with warnings that, after hearing this album all the way through, the stuffing between your ears will be permanently rearranged.

Today he goes even further and suggests we shouldn’t even bother with wandering around – just climb into a tomb, lie down, don’t move, and have done with everything. In fact that’s just what he did himself. Well, not really, but the starting point for his inspiration is an actual 12th century Christian artefact called the Doomstone, which can be seen in the crypt at York Minster. As far as we know it wasn’t actually part of a burial chamber, but the mere fact of its location in the crypt is more than enough to set fevered minds a-racing. That, and the florid imagery that’s carved into that stone; it’s pretty much a single image of Hell, depicted as a gigantic cauldron, into which souls are being cast by triumphant demons; flames lick the side of the cauldron, said flames also being used to torment other damned souls. Somewhere above the cauldron are figures symbolising vanity or luxury, and avarice; it’s plain that their worldly goods and vanities will serve them naught in the Hell which is to come.

TenHornedBeast uses his album to tell a story inspired by this scene, but evidently what interests him most is the pain and torment of Hell, as he lingers over the punishments as if they were some form of torture porn, and emphasises the utter futility of everything with his claustrophobic, harrowing music. The original Doomstone could be said to contain a message of Christian Hope, or at least a morality tale, pointing to two of the Seven Deadly Sins to inform the congregation that there’s still a chance of redemption; however, Walton’s not having any of that, and for him it’s full-on doom all the way. Even the structure of the work, beginning and ending with tunes about death, confirms that he wishes the human race would die twice over, the better to savour the painful sufferings that await us in Hell for all eternity. All this said, there’s still an aesthetic charm and cold beauty to be found in these glacial drones and slow-moving torrents of distorted filth, occasionally punctuated with distant percussive noises that might be the sound of the Gates Of Hell closing forever, or perhaps demons rapping the cauldron with their tridents and daggers. In places, TenHornedBeast’s work is quite distinct from much doomy Dark Ambient or Dungeon Black Metal, or other genres which you might wish to align it with; he has a rare delicacy of touch and subtlety in his layered mixes that a lot of musicians would do well to study.

Photos of the Doomstone taken by Walton are found on five panels of the six-panel digipak. From 16 May 2022.