This English creator Craig Varian intrigued us with their unusual Mother Moon album for this label, a strange utterance from a wistful soul driven half-mad by the poignant memory of something they had never experienced. This condition is a known thing and seems to afflict others in similar musical genres; I think Cold Cave is one of them. For today’s record, our man has focussed on sampling horror movies – perhaps effects, music, dialogue, or all three – something they’ve been doing since 2008, if not earlier. While I can’t think of any specific instances, I always think such sampling is quite a commonplace in many forms of grungey horror-rock and industrial maniacal mayhem-records for the last 40 years, usually done with intent to shock and jolt the listener or simply wallow in flames, gore, pain, satanism, the supernatural, witchcraft, and any other juicy themes that can be excavated from such soundtracks.

However, 400 Lonely Things is doing a lot to transcend all of that. From what I can hear on today’s offering, there’s a good deal of artistry in the way that loops and segments are pasted together in the murky editing board, and evoking a much wider range of emotional responses than the simple “shock treatment” to which I allude. Indeed, press notes go so far as to use the “hauntology” word to hook in more listeners. Craig Varian is apparently a connoisseur of 1980s “video nasties”, perhaps housing a vast library of VHS tapes in his mansion, and is evidently drawing from deep intimate knowledge of his sources. Further manifestations of this forbidden lore can be found in the booklet of photos, presenting many grainy images and rephotographed details all taken out of context, and designed to unsettle.

Given the usual offerings from this dark label, The New Twilight is a welcome instance of moving and poetic concoctions of eerie oddness, casting a limpid spell over the eyelids.

They did it live at the Cinémathèque Française in 2021, then a year later Potemkine Films invited them to add the same music to a DVD re-release (to commemorate the 100th anniversary of this landmark piece of cinema history). That plan didn’t quite pan out, for licensing reasons it seems, but now here’s the music on a CD along with some excellent graphiste images and comic strips from Marie-Pierre Brunel, Foolz, Caroline Sury and Alexios Tjoyas, printed in a handy paperback in stark black and white.

Nothing wrong with the music of course, which is a pleasing array of electro-acoustic sounds made with saxophones, trumpet, Buchla synth, percussion, live electronics, voices, and even a hurdy-gurdy – an instrument I would personally love to see deployed more often in an experimental context. Quentin Rollet has one of the most recognisable voices in improvised sax-playing today, reminiscent of Steve Lacy or Lol Coxhill in its slippery shapes, and only a hard-hearted troll could fail to be swayed by his altruistic charms. But it’s not dark enough for me. The trio’s take on Nosferatu doesn’t really get close to the atmosphere or uncanny terror of Murnau’s images. Instead, they play the film as though it’s a slightly unsettling walk in the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont after closing time on one crisp Autumn night.

The track title ‘Entre Chien et Loup’ is a French phrase which I’ve heard and read many times, and admire its precision in expressing such a subjective condition and a very human apprehension of things we don’t fully understand, things bordering on the supernatural. Yet the music here doesn’t fully capture it. I had high hopes for the long track ‘La Traversée en Eaux Troubles’, which is evidently intended to accompany the grisly sea voyage of the vampire and his memorable appearance when he springs up out of the coffin he has stashed below deck. But the music is a rather pedestrian meander through modal playing and digital drones, barely registering a flicker on the fear-o-meter.

The four visual artists do a better job of quickening the blood pulse with their images; Brunel accurately reflects the bleakness and futility of the source, Sury sings of the violence and how the characters are locked into a framework as unbreakable as one of her heavy-outlined emblems. Tjoyas gets closest to the horror with his ugly, trembling lines and inexplicable pictograms; Foolz somehow finds a species of black slapstick humour in episodes from the story. Great package, but the music needs an extra dose of horror to truly match the diabolical plans of Count Orlok! From 27th June 2024.

On Watching The Void, Arvo Zylo has joined up with Michael Krause to survey the output of Panic Records & Tapes, a label active in Chicago from 1984 to 1990. Scott Marshall was the founder of this label – he was also a member of the noise band Burden Of Friendship, a pioneer of noise in Chicago – and there’s 16 releases that we know of listed in Discogs, mostly on cassette, although there were also three vinyl releases in the series What Is Truth? This CD collects seven instances of Panic material from Unit 731, Little Dougie, Research Defense Squad, The News Sensations, as well as two cuts by Burden Of Friendship and Scott Marshall solo.

These are all glimpses into a style of music that’s all but vanished now – hard-edged, ugly, confrontational, illogical, and expressly designed to upset the listener. A few of them use voice samples, cut-up and detourned announcements from the media, to make their barbed and sarcastic points; that’s regarded as kind of a gaffe nowadays, but in the 1980s it wasn’t quite as familiar, and some of this oppositional material arguably carries on the angry voices of American hardcore rock bands, such as MDC, Black Flag, or D.O.A. But the artistes here were also going for edgy, outlier weirdness, unafraid of presenting strange horrors and twisted forms to curdle the milk of unsuspecting listeners. Two supreme examples of this horror-show mode are Marshall’s ‘Nearer to Thee My Void, Am I’, a collage piece he unleashed in 1984, combining fragmented voice samples with vicious, lacerating noise; over 15 mins of merciless assault that makes a mockery of everything society holds dear, besides coming very close to unhinging your mental faculties. The second example is ‘Gilgamesh In Berchtesgaden’ by Research Defense Squad, here excerpted from a much longer 1986 release which appeared on Boleskine Und Berchtesgaden. Troublingly, this cassette originally appeared with a triumphalist Nazi photo on the cover, but thankfully the creators haven’t seen fit to go all the way down the same route as Douglas P. All the same, it might help position this dark work in the context of a time when many underground and industrial types saw fit to use provocative imagery on their cassette covers. Bob St. Clair and Paul Rosen might be the authors of this impressive and intense noise barrage, which I enjoy up until the closing moments when harsh voices bark out invective and bile in the style of Consumer Electronics.

The “fun” doesn’t end here. The CD closes out with six edited highlights from the “Voidwatch” radio shows, which is where Scott Marshall and others in the Chicago collectives truly spread their wings through their partnership with WZRD-Chicago, described as a “freeform radio station”. The short excerpts provided on this CD can only hint at the mayhem that took place at these Voidwatch events…all manner of creative freaks entered the performance space, two studios were brought into play simultaneously, resulting either in demented sound-collages or out-of-control happenings involving power tools and fireworks. Sometimes, even local campus broadcasts were also dragged into the general free-for-all malarkey, and the sense of adventure and risk (everything happening live in real time) must have been exhilarating to those who were there. Even now these 1984-86 snippets continue to make sparks fly and pulses race. Unlike some independent radio enterprises, it’s clear the Voidwatch crew had no thought of responsibility to the community, or of paying lip service to worthy ideologies; crazy happenings were the order of the day. A list of artists directly involved with this sprawling madness is provided in the CD, but guests, passers-by and radio staff were also brought in, simply by the power of the microphone, to be included in the mixes. Grand stuff.

Powerful collage artworks by James Koehnline complete this package, a snapshot from a time and place when creative spirits flourished.

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)

Harmony Of Struggle here with their second album Brutal Aesthetics (ZOHAR 310-2), following on from their 2022 horror Tearing Your Mind To Pieces. I confess I am still finding absolutely nothing to enjoy or recommend in Neithan’s brand of noisy power electronics, nor in the visceral cover art and confrontational track titles, with multiple references to suicide, despair, pain, and futility. If Sect7 is flirting with dark themes, as least she exhibits a modicum of empathy for the human race; Harmony Of Struggle would rather annihilate all of us, I suspect. The label take a different view, persuaded that HOS’s music has “gained a lot in sound…thanks to the new production” since 2022; further, that he’s engaged in some sort of sociological survey by examining the “techniques of manipulation” that result in these mass suicides and acts of cruelty, some of them given legitimacy by societal laws. Hmm! That’s as maybe, but it’s hard to make out the underlying message when our professor is shouting brutal obscenities at us through a megaphone, in a sea of distorted noise. It’s degrading to the audience; I’m making a mental note to not review any further records from this Neithan. (13/12/2023)

Amazingly, Clay Ruby has been blasting the material world as Burial Hex for nearly 20 years – and to mark the occasion, it’s been agreed (among the Dark Elders in charge of World Doom) that he should compile all his compilation tracks that were sent to small labels over the years. Although Burial Hex music is a supernatural and occult curse against the world, Clay Ruby himself is an affable fellow who can never refuse when asked to contribute a track to one of the many international agencies that dabble in this sort of thing, such as Brave Mysteries, Aurora Borealis, Small Doses – that’s just some of the obscure net-labels and vinyl-only merchants named here. Normally at this point I say that buying a CD like In Hiding (COLD SPRING RECORDS CSR328CD) obviates the need for hard-core collectors to scour auction sites and flea-markets of the underworld, but not quite; it seems Ruby has remixed every single one of these nine blinders, so it’s not precisely the same, and if you want to hear the original mix of ‘From Heel To Throat’ you may have to shell out £14 to get an original double-cassette of Life Ist Krieg on the UK label Clan Destine. Ruby’s intention in doing th’ refashioning (using tongs and staplers) was to make In Hiding a more coherent listen so it could be mistaken for a sequenced album; but don’t all remixers say that? As to me calling them “blinders”, well, there are a few moments here where you risk having your eyes burned out by red-hot pokers, but overall it’s a surprisingly subdued set of semi-melodious darkeries, in spite of strong imagery (assorted grotesques and mutant faces) on the digipak panels provided by Nat Ritter. Didn’t Burial Hex used to be noisier, blacker, doomier, and more ritualistic than this?

Far more horrifying is The Woods (CSR322CD) by Satøri, who I now learn is a 1980s die-hard from Margate active since 1984. Actually it’s just Dave Kirby now, but this used to be a band / collaborative thing, involving the talents of Robert Maycock, Justin Mitchell, and Neil Chaney at various times, plus they had releases on that nastiest of pathological UK noise labels, Broken Flag. On today’s CD, Kirby (working solo) offers nine cuts that he made in his Somerset lair during 2020-2023, all tagged with grim titles alluding to oppression, blood lust, satanic rites, and all-round unpleasantness. “Pure noise, harsh synths and brutal percussion”, say the label, to which list I would add a tremendous amount of reverb, or possibly some other studio technique that creates the effect of running into a solid brick wall and having all the air sucked out of your defenceless lungs. Many such audio “slams” to be heard on this CD, which don’t simply describe oppression – they force you to experience it. There’s also some occasional shouty vocals performed with all the self-importance, bombast, and drama-queen pomp I’ve come to expect from this kind of retro power-electronics nonsense. All I can say in favour of The Woods is to enthuse mildly about the clever open-ended structure of each horrible tune, which allows our man Kirby to execute some unexpected dynamic twists. Witchcrafty-style moody cover artworks by Helasdottir.

Well, so much for the “evil” face of this sociopathic record label. We turn lastly to Continuous Hole (CSR325CD), which is credited to Drew Daniel and John Wiese. 100% American noise nurtured and grown in the hellpits of San Francisco, Los Angeles, and, erm, Baltimore (that last locale is very far from being the 21st-century Gomorrah we’d expect). The CD rescues a 2018 LP that surfaced for five minutes on the Gilgongo label in America. No idea how they made it, but it might have something to do with cut-ups; we’re not told what source material was used, but the artistic coup has been to equip most tracks with a sort of pumping, hump-like fucking rhythm that’s about as precise as your old Dr Rhythm beatbox, yet they did it all manually – no MIDI or sampling guaranteed! Approvingly, the press notes speak of a “labour-intensive” process as Wiese and Daniel shared the mutual pleasures of “frenzied cutting”. Having used the “noise” word, I might want to reconsider that in the light of the strange and alienating tones that emanate from this rum beast. Certainly Wiese has been “harsher” in his prolific career behind the wheel of HMS Noiseblast, but I haven’t heard much new from him for many a year now. Drew Daniel comes to us from Matmos and also The Soft Pink Project, and though no stranger to rubbing shoulders with prominent noise idols, also seems to be something of a commentator and analyst, what with his booklet on Throbbing Gristle and his assorted liner notes for Coil and People Like Us. Continuous Hole is a jolly enough ride, I suppose, though I’m not feeling the truly visceral, dangerous and ferocious elements which other listeners have perceived; it appears more like a mechanistic game or toy, trying to prove some obscure point about physics or philosophy, using a rotating wind-up model. Even the cover photo casts a cerebral air, hinting at a modern alchemist or necromancer at work in their study. The six panel digipak artwork prints and repeats a black hole in the centre, as if the designer were aiming at an avant-garde version of The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

All three from 21 September 2023.

It’s a CD reissue of their 1989 release – I think the second item in their catalogue – after which they let their bones lie fallow in the charnel fields and soon reinvented themselves as MZ.412. It’s that latter incarnation that has plagued my life so much, and when Cold Spring reissued a number of their “core” releases, I had to summon all my writing abilities to convey the sense of sheer horror and nausea induced by those audio beasts. Malfeitor originally came out as a vinyl record on the Cold Meat Industry (yuck!) label and reckoned by some to be some sort of benchmark of achievement in the “black industrial” sub-genre which they invented, an accolade accorded to them by their faithful, and original vinyl slabs could now cost you anything between 40 to 60 bones. That’s not slang for money, you actually have to pay with your own bones!

Meanwhile the over-heated press notes for this Cold Spring reissue speak warmly of “evil incarnate”, “darkness fused with machines”, and “unequivocal dystopian outlook”…it’s about fear and it’s about death, and they express it using factory-type rhythms, “metallic” sounds, pounding percussion, and endless loops…in fine, the familiar tropes of that strain of industrial music which assumes that the entire world is an evil factory, in this case one which is going to grind you up into beef-steak Tartare. Well, compared to what I can remember of those other later MZ.412 albums – what I can bring myself to remember, as I lie on a bed with packets of laudanum in reach – we could observe that Malfeitor is much more back-to-basics, a stripped down and stark expression of the themes these Swedish maniacs wish to explore. The 1990s albums, particularly Burning The Temple Of God, were more like vast, ambitious, story-telling projects – unrolling horrifying wide-screen vistas of carnage, peopled with multitudes of black devils, in unflinching detail. Malfeitor, conversely, all seems to be happening inside a cramped, claustrophobic cell, probably a dungeon or torture chamber. I realise the cover art here seems to be taking place outside, in a dark Gothic fantasy version of a Nordic forest, but the original 1989 cover art…well, don’t even look at it, is my advice.

Hard to process this kind of grim, sickening poundage as a “ritual”, but fans of the genre frequently utilise this term, applying it to any recording or performance that is informed by a sense of purpose, no matter how ghastly it may be. I suppose we could say the vocal elements – sampled, spoken (in one instance, derived from a poem) – could be mistaken for a form of chanting, but the whole intention of Malfeitor is unholy, blasphemous, and malign. They may not make plain their alliance with Satan and their contempt for religion on this particular album, but all of that sentiment was to emerge in the forthcoming years. We have to assume this is mostly the work of Henrik “Nordvargr” Björkk, also known as Kremator and many other aliases, and participant in many similar horrific projects in his part of the world. My usual health warnings apply to this record. From 3rd January 2023.

Walter Campbell has Walter Ego, nine tracks of unsettling low-key drone that short-circuits common sense in the blink of a fly’s eye. This fellow was the co-founder of NVS, a punk band in California, and also declares that he sang in many goth industrial and alternative rocks bands from the mid-1990s onwards. There’s also Book On VHS, his lo-fi experimental noise experiment, and The Greening, a San Francisco duo which paid homage to Throbbing Gristle. In fact, having breathed a scornful word agin NWW in my opening salvo, I need to recant it when faced with this Campbell fellow who is happy to make plain his aesthetic debt to Mr Stapleton, and to related industrial / dark / United Dairies acts, including Cabaret Voltaire, Rudolf Eb.er, The Legendary Pink Dots, and Andrew Liles. What I enjoy about this CDR are the imaginative titles, torn straight from the notebooks of Robert Desnos or Louis Aragon (such as ‘Samus Eats Mother Brain’ and ‘Gazpacho Dream Police’), and the unsettling tone of the music, which never alights on a melody or a recognisable note when it can float endlessly on a thick fog. But it’s not all drone, as evidenced by those moments when logic is thrown to the winds and a random array of unpredictable sound edits may fly forth like a box of firecrackers from the hidden cupboard of Leonora Carrington. And there’s the collage artworks, although these are by Arvo Zylo (who also curated this set), and we’ll be hearing more from said Zylo as he’s the label owner. (In fact we first heard from him in 2011 and his bizarre self-released 333 album.) The cover image in fact is probably key to fathoming out the undercurrents of Walter Ego – a sleeping head, floating over a grey sea, living out the promise of track 5 ‘In Deep with the Deep Ones’. If such an immersion appeals to you, by all means dip into these hissing, tension-filled and nightmarish exploits.

Leslie Keffer has Reverie, whose cover art won’t let you look away – the word “visceral” doesn’t have enough syllables to adequately describe this anatomical aberration, and there are more details inside the jewel case to satisfy the curious surgeon, or repel the squeamish. This American lady is based in Ohio according to her BC page, and has been quite prolific since 2003 – over 40 releases tagged on Discogs. Nothing is given away about her artistic intentions on any corner of the internet so far discovered, which suits me fine – although her chosen avatar depicts herself as a Greek goddess or classical statue come to life, ignoring the curious onlooker with her stern and unblinking profile. Indeed her music here reflects that same cool indifference and aloof tone, coupled with the fact that it’s so determined to plough a straight furrow into what must seem like very unprofitable soil. I mean she seems very driven, focussed on her tasks. Through loops and abstract noise, possibly feeding tapes and other sources into a mixing desk where she turns her filters like a cruel manicurist from Hell, she succeeds in arriving at a similar dream-world to Walter Campbell above, except that her personal ocean has a much choppier surface than the calm seas of Walter Ego. It’s a controlled abrasiveness though, and the timorous listener need fear no outbursts of harsh violence from this mysterious woman. If I was wearing my taxonomist’s collar, I might be inclined to put her in a seraglio with She Spread Sorrow, Puce Mary, and Pharmakon; indeed there’s at least one Pharmakon album cover that is equal to today’s display of tendons, organs, and ribcages. Reverie dates back to 2003, is described as unreleased material, and she made it with voice and radios. I’m drawn into these mesmerising swirls like a slug falling into slowly-melting bar of nougat.

Unlike the nightmare twins above, Xerex Meets Dracula by Xerex has a slightly humourous edge to its rather over-cooked, Gothic organ drones, and the absurdist description printed on the back cover isn’t giving much away about the true circumstances of its creation. Karl and Jan, twin brothers from rural Germany? Conjoined twins, grown in a Petri dish in 1972? If you believe any of that, you’ll also swallow the tripe about this being a reissue of a limited edition LP…on the disc, 14 tracks which use everything from sound effects, tape loops, and organ music to present a warped portrait of everyone’s favourite vampire, in short fragmented episodes. It’s as though every chapter from the Bram Stoker novel were being rethought as experimental sound art, resulting in everything from organ music to bells and sinister drone effects. The episodic nature of it might be deliberate, since another part of the prank is to suggest it’s structured like a “choose your own adventure” novel, where the reader can follow different pathways towards different conclusions. Perhaps less successful than the above records in hypnotising the listener, but it does manage to hold your attention by the simple trick of staying in one place for the length of each track. This is very effective for parts IV and V, which are quite long and amount to some 15 minutes of puzzling drone, a watery outboard motor followed by a mad malfunctioning helicopter swooping around at night. Come to think of it, this cut might represent the Count in his bat form. The general aesthetic extends to the four painted images of Dracula used as artworks, which are somehow both slightly goofy and also weirdly alarming. An atmospheric blast…one to save for your next trip to Whitby for the Dracula Experience!

All the above from 28 September 2022; tune in to part two of this post for more.

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.

He’s been pursuing this plan for a number of years now, since 2012 to our knowledge, and though the project began as a necessary charm to preserve the hide of Clay Ruby himself, it’s now been extended to protect “the families directly involved with the Burial Hex project”, although I think regular non-initiates like ourselves can also use it, maybe by simply buying this CD and playing it (preferably quite loud and in the dark). I always imagine this scheme began life as a revenge charm on some highly-paid music biz executive after a music deal went badly, but it’s clearly now become a way of life for our hapless fellow, who must be tormented by as many demons as Saint Anthony in the desert. The more you look for them, the more they will appear. In the florid prose of the press release, there’s also some hints about denial, fasting, and a certain disgust at the realities of human flesh, a line not too far apart from the mortification of the flesh which the early Christian ascetics followed.

The magickal incantation aspects aren’t just confined to the music, but also extend to the cover artworks; the one on the back cover inscribes a lengthy written spell in a spiral form, placing it around the image of a mermaid or moon-witch, along with the famous Sator-Rotas palindromic square which has a long talismanic history. Also much to be said for the symbol-laden track titles, such as ‘Lion’s Breath’, ‘Double Scorpio’, ‘Lost Sailor’ and ‘Treasure Spirits’, which feel like they’re oozing from the pages of a 15th century book of emblems. Aurally, Burial Hex achieves his relentless ward-’em-off results by using much doomy percussion, distorted noise, and grotesque vocal incantations, words mostly unintelligible, but emotionally very direct, as if the vocalist were propelled by an urgent, near-hysterical force. Half the time, you feel the demons have won the battle, and are already possessing his body and soul. However, during the calmer moments on the album, the musician pulls off some remarkable feats of dynamics and tension; it’s not a full-on harsh wall of pain, and has moments of genuine eeriness and spooky vibes among the jolting shocks.

Nifty hype sticker uses the phrases “horror electronics” and “phantasmagoric post industrial” to evoke the power of this music. Strong potion in this bottle, from 4th March 2022.