Crucial Blast (32 items)

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  Artist/Title: AUN - Multigone 6 Format: CDR Label: Crucial Blast Price: $9 Catalog ID: CarbonDist_ BLISS32 ".This seven track disc is undeniably the heaviest music that AUN has created so far, a grinding, distorted soundscape that begins with the keening electronic drones and muffled, disembodied metallic riffing that becomes endlessly tanged in a nest of squirming low-end noise in the opening title track, and steadily ratchets up the heaviness with each track, until we come to the punishing "Palejoy", a bludgeoning Industrial metal dirge that has massive, Godflesh-like percussion fused to processed, almost synthetic sounding doom riffage, a black cloud of buzzing, ultra downtuned black dirge drifting over a muffled, slow motion breakbeat. In between, AUN erects vast walls of crumbling distortion and rhythmic guitar loops forged into apocalyptic ambient drift streaked with heavenly synth choirs and sweeping cosmic fx, crushing fifteen-minute blasts of immolating amplifier ragas formed from a nebula of melting woodwind sounds, distant elephantine tympani drums, hellish symphonies of rusted, scraping strings and celestial electronic whiteout that ends up sounding like something from Skullflower's Orange Canyon Mind but one hundred times heavier, and strange deep-space blues jam instrumentals with impossibly detuned guitar soaring through black holes of reverb and tape fluctuation. This is seriously crushing stuff that stands out in sharp contrast to the hordes of amp-leaning feedback riders, and is highly recommended to anyone into KTL, Final, Black Boned Angel, To Blacken The Pages, K.K. Null, Aethnor, Fall Of The Grey Winged One, Fear Falls Burning, Hlidolf, Messiah Complex, and other heavy, textural industrial/ambient/sludge groups. Multigone is packaged in the signature Bliss sleeve with full color artwork, and the disc is attached to the interior of the sleeve on a plastic hub. Issued in a limited edition of 300 copies."

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  Artist/Title: Black Elk - Always a Six, Never a Nine 8 Format: CD Label: Crucial Blast Price: $11 Catalog ID: CarbonDist_CBR70 "Always A Six, Never A Nine is the second album and the follow up to the 2006 self-titled debut from Portland, OR aggro wreckers Black Elk, whose psychotic brand of crushing, noise-rock influenced heaviosity is a return to the unhinged underground rock force of bands like Jesus Lizard, Melvins, Black Flag and Hammerhead. This new album features ten songs of seething weirdness, with the dissonant, crushing riffage, lunging rhythmic push and awesome freaked out, Yow-esque vocals of singer Tom Glose that made their debut a fave among anyone who remembered the days when Amphetamine Reptile ruled the underground rock scene, but with some interesting new elements (bleak, blackened guitar ambience, a smattering of piano, skyreaching guitar harmonies, etc.) that add new shadows to Black Elk's ferocious sound. Always A Six, Never A Nine is packaged in a heavy four-panel gatefold jacket with an eight page lyric booklet. "

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  Artist/Title: Burmese / Fistula - split 4 Format: CD Label: Crucial Blast Price: $10 Catalog ID: CarbonDist_CBR38 "Hyper destructive low-end violence from two of the American underground's most ferocious hate-sludge outfits. Available from Crucial Blast on August 1st, 2004. Crucial Blast regrets to announce the end of your hearing. The good news is, the cause of your deafening is the dual assault of feedback-warriors BURMESE and battle-sludge titans FISTULA. BURMESE annhilate everything before them with a lethal blast of low frequency skree tantrums, cough-syrup drenched blastbeats, WHITEHOUSE-worshipping noise, and demonic free improvised violence. Think KHANATE, DROPDEAD, EARTH, and MERZBOW in an earth shattering, widow-making basement deathmatch. Ohio 's FISTULA batter up with megaheavy sludge, blistering blackened thrash, diseased rock, and some incredibly infectious riffs . Hear these tarpit battle anthems, hail the low frequency berserker. BURMESE burn you down...FISTULA pisses all over the ashes. "

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  Artist/Title: Fistula - Goat 6 Format: CD Label: Crucial Blast Price: $10 Catalog ID: CarbonDist_CBR84 "Ohio is rotting. Fistula once again team up with Crucial Blast to deliver another heavy dose of their septic, filthy, lumbering death-sludge in the form of Goat, a five-song Ep of low-fi and low-end nihilistic filth and rabies-laced caveman thrash with songs based on the ghoulish discovery and subsequent investigation of the eleven decomposing bodies found in the Cleveland home of Anthony Sowell in the Autumn of 2009. This new disc delivers more of the pulverizing, slime-covered sludge and primitive death metal rot that these Buckeye barbarians have been carving out in the back of Medina garages over the past ten years, continuing to follow in the coagulated blood tracks of Frost, Autopsy and Winter, but filtered through Fistula's uniquely mangled and inebriated scum-haze and utterly negatory worldview. "

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  Artist/Title: Geisha - Die Verbrechen Der Liebe 8 Format: CD Label: Crucial Blast Price: $11 Catalog ID: CarbonDist_CBR68 "This hour-long, six track monolith follows Geisha into a psychedelic black storm, their blown-out and raw rock infused with a bone-rattling recording and covered in a thick sheen of white noise and gritty distortion. As with their previous album, the spirit of seminal noise rock / sludge rock (think Cherubs, Melvins, My Bloody Valentine's Isn't Anything for coordinates) is combined with violent, chaotic NOISE and tainted with blurred VHS cassette visions and vague allusions to BDSM, and then jammed through an orgone accumulator, forming a ferocious, crushing rock beast that reveals it's powerful hooks and melodies underneath the churning distorted bass rumble and sludgemetal riffage , blasts of psychedelic drone-noise and corrosive skree, percussive pummel, and deranged singing. The sound is immense, and the first five tracks on Die Verbrechen Der Liebe deliver Geisha's in-the-red heaviness and hooks in surplus. "Prelude To Amber Pays The Rent", "A Wilderness, Except By Sight", "Sportsfister" - every one is a crusher. But then Geisha pull out the monstrous thirty-minute, thirty-five second closer "Theme From Diana", and the tone changes completely. This track is a re-working of a "metal percussion" set that Geisha originally performed live several years ago, and it begins as a slowly building fog of voices and effects and shimmering metal that blooms into an expanse of droning, fx-heavy guitar, looping samples, cosmic effects, and improvised percussion. It's a kind of rumbling industrial dronescape that stretches out forever, until suddenly in the last few minutes the drifting drones and psychedelic guitars and sampled voices suddenly explode in an immolating nuclear blast of overdriven, speaker-annhilating noise and the track immediately, terrifyingly changes shape into a monstrous lumbering noise-metal dirge that bulldozes out of your speakers, whooshing Hawkwind effects swooping overhead, the band knotted together into a white-hot blast of ultra heavy riffage, distortion, and a wall of percussive force. "Diana" is one of the most crushing pieces of music that I have ever heard from Geisha, like some majestic and brutal conglom of Swans, Skullflower, Merzbow, and Burmese forged into a destructive space-metal supernova. Crucial Blast is releasing the CD version of Die Verbrechen Der Liebe in a limited edition of 1,000 copies, packaged in a full-color gatefold jacket. "

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  Artist/Title: Geisha - Mondo Dell'Orrore 4 Format: CD Label: Crucial Blast Price: $12 Catalog ID: CarbonDist_CBR52 "Devouring/rebirthing the concept of "noise rock" into something frighteningly beautiful and brutally heavy, GEISHA deliver crushing blasts of impossibly hyperdistorted rock baked in massive frequency overload and massive hooks and melodies and sinister crushing riffs, all of it slathered in filthy throbbing feedback and white noise horror holocaust, like the early 90's alt rock of Isn't Anything-era MY BLOODY VALENTINE and DINOSAUR JR. mashed together with the most brutal sort of Unsane/Am Rep style racket and distortion-drenched psych/noise into a sludgy metallic mass, jamming with a small army of pedal-smashing harsh electronics troglodytes playing awesomely catchy/crushing pop songs buried beneath a hellish storm of skree and amp-blowing fuzz. Terrifying. Beautiful. Licensed for North America by Crucial Blast."

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  Artist/Title: Gnaw Their Tongues - All The Dread Magnificence Of Perversity 8 Format: CD Label: Crucial Blast Price: $10 Catalog ID: CarbonDist_CBR78 "Picking up where 2008's An Epiphanic Vomiting Of Blood left off, Gnaw Their Tongues is back with nine new tracks of fearsome blackened orchestral chaos and abstract horror that still sounds like little else out there. On Dread, we're feeling an even heavier bass-assault compared to the other releases, and this is easily the heaviest Gnaw Their Tongues release yet. This monstrous, noxious bottom-end roar that skulks and slithers throughout the album suggests a foul fusion of Abruptum (which is still the closest reference point to Gnaw Their Tongue's black chaos) and Leonard Rosenman's most nightmarish film scores, piled in towering heaps of sadistic noise, warped orchestral strings, degraded samples, shrieking voices, and punishing lurching doom draped in suffocating atrmosphere. Hyper-abstract black metal sound-collage? Wagnerian avant-doom psychosis? That's one way of putting it, but Gnaw Their Tongues is ultimately impossible to pin down, defying simple categorization as this album plunges even deeper into a black pit of total cinematic horror, sexual perversion, and shapeless heaviosity. Once again, we've presented the cd version of this album in a deluxe heavyweight tip-on gatefold sleeve manufactured by Stoughton, exactly the same as the sort that we used for the cd release of An Epiphanic Vomiting Of Blood, and the package includes a six-panel full color booklet. Both the booklet and the gatefold features new artwork from Gnaw Their Tongues mastermind Mories, whose artwork continues to get more insane with each new release. Their are images of depravity, masochism, and sadistic enslavement captured here that we're betting are still haunting the poor saps who assembled these at the plant. And again, the song titles evoke total nightmare visions: "My Orifices Await Ravaging", "Broken Fingers Point Upwards In Vain", "The Stench Of Dead Horses On My Breath And The Vile Of Existence In My Hands", "Gazing At Me Through Tears Of Urine", "Rife With Deep Teeth Marks", and the whopping "The Gnostic Ritual Consumption Of Semen As Embodiment Of Wounds Teared In The Soul". The album opens with a sudden blast of pounding tympani-like percussion and roaring distorted bass, a massive blackened dirge wading through a swirling storm of metal smashing against metal, howls of anguish and terror, bursts of majectic brass fanfare and distortion and epic string sections struggling to emerge from the chaos, then turning into a sea of tense strings and choral voices spreading out towards the end that creates a less noisy but still totally evil atmopshere before becoming devoured at last by the bulldozing black industrial doom. Then it's on to "Verbrannt und verflucht", a mechanical black dirge filled with darkly beautiful orchestral strings and stumbling chaotic drumming, weaving back and forth between a crushing lopsided industrial groove and bombastic riffage that's shot through with brief sections of shimmering ambient drift and echoing chimes and harsh whispered vocals. The next track opens with an immense deep bassline, like the shuddering tones of a massive bowed cello rumbling through an underground cave system, then launches into another stumbling industrial groove, like a broken Godflesh track draped in harrowing Bernard Herrmann strings, dissonant riffage and some of the albums most overt black metal style vocals, a seriously pissed-off ripped-throat shriek soaring over the sludge. Halfway through, the song turns into a a gripping cinemtatic dirge, just heavy drums and looped strings and ominous bassline spreading out over several minutes, then sinking back into a morass of charred distorted drone, cello and weeping female vocals towards the end. "Stench" juxtaposes a reading of a poem from Gustave Flaubert over monstrous slow-motion doom, and " L’Ange qui annonce la fin du temps" reveals a seething mass of murderous whispers and demonic black ambience, deep pounding kettledrums echoing through the pit, dissonant piano and Lustmordian darkness swirling with swarms of atonal strings and hovering drones. A heavy rhythmic orchestral loops opens "Gazing" and leads this track into one of the album's most "grooving" moments, a massive winding doom riff working its way across pitch-black film-score strings and later joined by scathing blackened vocals. "Rife" starts off with a full minute of granular black noise before dropping in to a chaotic lurching off-time riff and a churning maelstrom of distorted electronics and looped orchestral stabs, but evolves into dreamy dark ambience laced with piano and hushed female vocals in it's second half, then exploding into a monstrous speaker-shredding bass-heavy drone at the end. And then as if things couldn't get any more terrifying and nightmarish, the title track appears, opening with a distant female voice screaming for help (a sample I recognize but can't place off of the top of my head), her frantic screams repeating over and over and over as the vicious black doom riffage and industrial percussion pours forth, massive blasts of brass fanfares and dense strings piled on top, the sound absolutely suffocating. But then four minutes in, the doomy heaviness and strings drop out suddenly and we're left with minimal fluttering drones and slow dissonant chords being smashed out of a piano for a minute, a brief moment of almost-calm, and then the drums begin to pound and the orchestral sounds and distorted riffage crashes back in with an epic final hook that's one of the most majestic moments on the album, almost sounding like My Dying Bride but drowned in noise and filthy buzzing bass and psychotic strings. Finally, "Gnostic Ritual" closes the album with a simple two-chord bass riff over pounding, heavily echoing drums, a blackened dubby doomscape filled with super distorted shrieks and harsh noisy ambience, slow and crushing and utterly depressing, and as the track continues the stripped down industrial dirge is slowly joined by waves of rumbling orchestral percussion, distant warning sirens, murky strings and suspended high pitched drones that builds in intensity until finally fading out on a smoking trail of crackling feedback and distorted bass."

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  Artist/Title: Human Quena Orchestra - The Politics Of The Irredeemable 8 Format: CD Label: Crucial Blast Price: $10 Catalog ID: CarbonDist_CBR76 "Human Quena Orchestra first took shape as a solo project from Ryan Unks, who had previously played guitar in the final lineup of the Pittsburgh metal band Creation Is Crucifixion. After moving from CIC, Unks began to work on a new project that would incorporate elements of black metal, crushing drone music, extreme psychotropic noise and psychedelic/krautrock influences into a sound that would be much heavier any of his previous projects. The first album from Human Quena Orchestra was released in 2007 on Daft Alliance; Means Without Ends was a disturbing, introspective slab of blackened industrial doom that stood out in stark contrast from the rest of the slow n' low extreme doom scene, utilizing layers of harsh textured distortion and electronics to create a caustic form of monstrous doom that shared as much of industrial music's cold, machine-like aesthetic as it did the ultra-slow riffage of the most extreme variants of doom metal. At the same time that the bands debut was taking shape, Unks was joined by another former member of Creation Is Crucifixion, Nathan Berlinguette (who was also a member of the dark ambient project M.Kourie and the deathdrone duo 5/5/2000). With the addition of Berlinguette's skilled application of dark ambience and expansive soundscapes, Human Quena Orchestra began to move into even more textured territory which has culminated with the second HQO full-length, The Politics of the Irredeemable, a series of apocalyptic visions and epiphanies of endtime realization, prophetic screeds that look to a future rendered pustulent and war-stricken by the failed machinations of the human race, presented as six chapters that enter your consciousness through a delivery system of extreme industrial dread. The Politics of the Irredeemable is crushing and oppressive, a crawl through abstract fields of low-end sound that move from punishing blasts of ultra-heavy machine-doom and earth-shaking tectonic riffs, to thick fogs of black electronic ambience that shimmer with subsonic pulses and celestial drones, the presence of malevolent electricity crackling in the air around the lumbering, nightmarish electro-sludge monstrosity of the Human Quena Orchestra. And at the same time, there are passages of immense beauty on this album that lurk at the peripheries of HQO's malevolent crush; the track "Aspirations" for instance, where pummeling slow-motion industrial percussions grinds in an infinite loop beneath a swirling nightsky of kosmiche synthesizers and heavenly, blissed-out ambience, the drums becoming like distant mortar blasts heard over the horizon as terrified screams ring out and stars fall dead from the skies. This is seriously apocalyptic deathmachine grind ambience. "

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  Artist/Title: Infidel? / Castro? - Bioentropic Damage Fractal 4 Format: 2CD Label: Crucial Blast Price: $14 Catalog ID: CarbonDist_CBR41 "Undefineable, uncatagorizeable, INFIDEL? / CASTRO! return with Bioentropic Damage Fractal,a 14-part, 2-disc epic of electro-acoustic ambient metal destruction that travels the extremes of density and sparsity, speed and sluggishness, length and brevity, beauty and ugliness. Hyper-complex and hyper-epic, the band weaves an engrossing tapestry of spastic electronic carnage, sweeping melodic bliss, futuristic heaviness, and swirling, hypnotic walls of sound. Concepts of degradation and the inherent instability of the organic are thoroughly explored in this cohesive and focused double CD. For fans of Fantomas, Sigur Ros, My Bloody Valentine, Discordance Axis, and Scanner."

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  Artist/Title: Korperschwache - Ritual of the Ouroboros 6 Format: CDR Label: Crucial Blast Price: $9 Catalog ID: CarbonDist_CBR_ KORPERSCHWACHE_ritual "One of two new installments in Korperschwache's ongoing tribute to the great serpent; featuring further exercises in blackened hypno-drone and necrotic black metal-encrusted trance rock from the diseased underbelly of Austin, TX, somewhere at the stygian intersection between Skullflower, Burzum, and Godflesh."

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  Artist/Title: Korperschwache - Sacrifice of the Ouroboros 6 Format: CDR Label: Crucial Blast Price: $9 Catalog ID: CarbonDist_CBR_ KORPERSCHWACHE_sacrafice "One of two new installments in Korperschwache's ongoing tribute to the great serpent; featuring further exercises in blackened hypno-drone and necrotic black metal-encrusted trance rock from the diseased underbelly of Austin, TX, somewhere at the stygian intersection between Skullflower, Burzum, and Godflesh."

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  Artist/Title: Monarch! - Mer Morte 6 Format: CD Label: Crucial Blast Price: $10 Catalog ID: CarbonDist_CBR82 "Yeah, this was supposed to come out ages ago, but a variety of impediments stalled it's release until now. The Crucial Blast release of Mer Morte is finally freakin' out, though, and I gotta say, it looks and sounds just as great as the previous Monarch collection on C-Blast, Dead Men Tell No Tales. If you've been following Crucial Blast for a while, you probably already know all about Monarch, the extreme slow-motion sludge/doom band from France who plays so slow, so glacially, that Decibel said in their review of Mer Morte that "even at their fastest, Monarch! sound dead". They ain't kiddin'. Monarch's previous releases pushed the envelope on just how slow and miserable and anguished one band can sound, but here their crawling black drones and tectonic doom rumble seems to actually be decaying. If you're looking for some big, fat riffs to bite into, this isn't the place to look. Like our previous Monarch release Dead Men Tell No Tales, Mer Morte is a reissue of a vinyl release that came out on the Spanish label Throne Records, this one from back in 2008. The Lp featured the monolithic track "Mer Morte" split into two halves across the two sides of vinyl; now, most Monarch fans find it pretty hard to not lust after their vinyl releases, which are all beautifully packaged and always super-limited, but it's also cool to hear the song uninterrupted, to hear it unfurl it's rotting black wings in it's entirety without pause, which is why we wanted to make this available on disc. And it's truly gargantuan sounding on this re-issue. “Mer Morte” is a single unbroken thirty-four minute sludge-and-feedback feast that sprawls out even further into the dismal black void that these French doom junkies have been lurking in for the past six years. As with previous releases, Monarch move through massive blackened tar pits of low-end riff and sheets of gluey feedback that are stretched out into monolithic slabs of sound across "Mer Morte", a grim, glacial ultra-doom monolith that crawls at a saurian sub-tempo. It's the most droning, static, deathly doomdrone that Monarch have so far released, not really that propulsive, certainly very little of anything that you could call a "groove", but instead just floating, decaying and corrupted, massive rumbling crush hovering in a sea of yawning blackness. And vocalist Emilie sounds as gaunt and ghostly as ever, her vocalizations materializing across the spatial doomscape as distant ululating wails, breathy whispers, and putrid death shrieks, at times disappearing almost completely into the black fug for minutes at a time, or lurking as a hushed lullaby whisper way off on the edges of the crushing subterranean thrum. At the same time, this disc captures the band at their most formless and distended, with long sections of droning buzz where the band collapses into waves of pure amp-rumble and minimalist percussion, smoldering black clouds of ghostly cooing vocals and howling feedback drone, and eerie tectonic melodies...definitely one of their most extreme and dismal slabs of doom yet, more ambient drone than doom really, but still completely CRUSHING. And once again, we've worked with the artisan printers at Stumptown Printers to create the packaging for this Monarch disc, presenting Mer Morte in a black offset-printed jacket with gold metallic printing and more artwork from Monarch's Michell. Might have taken awhile, but the wait was worth it!"

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  Artist/Title: Monarch! - Dead Men Tell No Tales 8 Format: 2CD Label: Crucial Blast Price: $12 Catalog ID: CarbonDist_CBR59 "Hailing from the picturesque Northern Basque Country of France, MONARCH! unleash a slow motion avalanche of impossibly glacial, blackened sludge and hypnotic feedback, each song a series of epic tarpit riffage stretched out eternally over lumbering drums and the cavernous rumble of speaker cabinets. Over these yawning expanses of black void appears the demonic, throat-shredding shrieks and ghostly singing of Emilie, whose petite appearance belies one of the harshest throats in the underground Doom spectrum. Beyond heavy. MONARCH!'s mega-crawling ambient doom/drone/sludge follows in the grand tradition of fellow tarpit adventurers Melvins, Corrupted, Noothgrush, and Black Sabbath, and accompany their music with an iconoclastic design style that decorates their material with deceptively cute imagery drawing from the collective influence of Sanrio, Japanese animation, European graffiti, weirdo hardcore, and skateboard culture. This double CD set contains both MONARCH!'s newest album Die Tonight, and the now out-of-print Speak Of The Sea LP, both released in limited vinyl editions as European imports, with additional unreleased songs exclusive to this release. The North Amercian version of Dead Men Tell No Tales is presented in an offset-printed, 4-panel case printed by Stumptown Printers, with all new original artwork in the band's unique design style. "

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  Artist/Title: Nekrasov - Extinction 8 Format: CD Label: Crucial Blast Price: $10 Catalog ID: CarbonDist_CBR86 "Riding atop the recent wave of black metal/noise hybrids who combine the bleak frosty riffs and blackened ferocity of underground BM with blown-out and corrosive strains of industrial noise (see also WOLD, Emit, Grief No Absolution, Enbilulugugal, Vargr), the Australian one-man band Nekrasov has so far made a substantial mark in the realm of extremist necro-racket with a series of limited edition, brutally abrasive albums (Cognition Of Splendid Oblivion, The Form Of Thought From Beast, etc) that have mostly been self-released, save for some recent offerings on labels like Siege Of Power and Chrome Leaf. Early on, Nekrasov's sound was steeped in caustic noise, a blazing industrialized black metal assault that was doused in heavy levels of irradiated distortion and Merzbowian skree. But more recently, it's mutated into less metallic regions, alternating the hyperblast black metal with forays into crushing, demonic wall-noise and blasted ambience. Now, Nekrasov is back with a new full length (the first for Crucial Blast), and it's the most advanced slab of their blacknoize terror that we've heard so far. An octagonal prism of isolationist drone, flesh-rending mechanical black metal, abstract otherworldly beauty, claustrophobic industrial dread, and the most violent, suffocating strains of harsh noise, Extinction is pure cyclonic contempt for humanity. The eight-song disc combines hyperspeed cybernetic blastscapes and bleak black metal riffage, the tracks often revealing snarled minor key melodies that are buried deep beneath blizzard blasts of machinegun drum machines, the drums veering through nerve-fraying rhythmic shifts, and acidic croaks bathed in black hiss. Triumphant frost-bitten riffs scream out of maelstroms of violent distortion, and Choral voices soar through a cyclone of helicoptering blastbeats and sheets of blown-out, ultra distorted drone, streaked with bits of gorgeous vibraphone-like melody, somber Hammond-like organ drones and looped synth, sometimes breaking off into grinding slo-motion industrial throb or swirling kosimiche drift. The tracks on Extinction go back and forth between the noisier, more industrial like material and overt black metal, though the two sides of Nekrasov's sound are always present together. When the sound does move into pure noise, it's either vast fields of minimal ambient drift, metallic clank and distant percussive sounds, utterly bleak Lustmordian soundscapes, or crushing, almost HNW-style slabs of molten noise, scouring waves of hellish skree and crushing slow-motion tidal surges of jet-black sonic syrup flecked with dubbed-out blasts of tectonic crush and electronic glitches that ripple across the void. Closing the album, the title track descends even further into black industrial crush, a monstrous, almost seventeen-minute long sprawl of plodding, simple drum pound echoing within a slowly swirling fog of distorted fx, churning, billowing black ambience, buried black buzz, an endless whirlpool of blown-out synthesizers and the immense black breath of leviathan lungs heaving deep below the surface. Like everything else from Nekrasov, this album is loaded with blasting inhuman drumming and ferocious riffing that form into noise-drenched trance-scapes of bestial industrial BM, but the attention to texture and sound sculpture elevates this above most mechanized black metal projects, with immersive layers of electronic sound, creative stereo panning techniques, and other production tricks that create a harsh, alien atmosphere that is pretty unique to Nekrasov's sound. This is a scorching new chapter from one of our favorite bands out there right now fusing black metal and noise. The cd version comes packaged in a full color six-panel digipack."

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  Artist/Title: NOISEM - +- 6 Format: CD Label: Crucial Blast Price: $10 Catalog ID: CarbonDist_CBR67 "The first real release from the Japanese glitch/shred duo Noism, following their appearance on the Relapse compilation Drummachinegun and a series of demos. Formed by guitarist Yoshiro Hamazaki and programmer Tomoyuki Akiyama in 1999 in Tokyo, Noism focuses on ridiculously complex and spastic death/grind instrumentals using programmed drums that are cut up and spliced back together into impossible rhythms, a million brain-melting riffs and dissonant shredding, all of which is chopped up and processed into abstract death blasts that defy physics. This twelve-song, twenty-one minute disc features a unique, glitched-out chop shop of Planet Mu-style beats delivered at truly meth'd levels of chaos fused with sweeping technical death metal. Insane. Highly recommended for fans of extreme, way-out avant-guitar spazz and absurdly technical deathgrind. "

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  Artist/Title: Overmars - Born Again 8 Format: CD Label: Crucial Blast Price: $10 Catalog ID: CarbonDist_CBR77 "Call it some kind of dark providence, but back in early 2008 I had three different people all hit me up in the same week to tell me that we really needed to put out a US release of the new album from Overmars. I was already a fan of the French band's 2005 CD/DVD set Affliction, Endocrine...Vertigo, which reminded me of a mix of Neurosis-style slow-motion power and elements of Swans-inspired industrial rock, prog, classic old-school doom, goth rock, black metal, and the more adventurous end of the metalcore field a la Starkweather and Integrity (the former of which actually has a forthcoming split with Overmars on the horizon...), so I already wanted to hear their follow-up, which at the time had only been released in France on Appease Me, the label run by one of the guys from avant-black metallers Blut Aus Nord. After all of the raves I was hearing and the impassioned please to release the album in the US through C-Blast, I finally got in touch with the band and prepared myself for some major heaviness. But when I finally got my hands on a copy and listened to it for the first time, I was floored - that towering black/sludge/industrial/goth sound was there in full effect, but their sound was more oppressive and bleak and epic than ever before, and captured this in a single monolithic song that was almost forty minutes long. Born Again immediately became one of my fave releases of last year, a fucking devestating piece of music that documents the band evolving even further from the simplistic Isis/Neurosis comparisons that have dogged their previous releases. The album descends deep into themes of self-immolation, horror, and rebirth, and becomes a harrowing narrative as it moves through a series of different musical moods. Overmars had already established their atmospheric, electronically-tainted sludge-metal sound on their excellent 2005 album Affliction, Endocrine...Vertigo and all of the previous splits with Donefor, Iscariote, Fugüe and Icos, but Born Again is something new from the band; this forty-minute epic moves from pulverizing industrial dirge blanketed with heavily textured layers of processed guitar and fearsome gutteral roars intermixed with captivating female vocals, to passages of haunting dark ambience and bottom-heavy churn, and a magesterial finale that stretches gloom-ridden moody riffage, vaporous electronics and dramatic male/female singing across the song's final fifteen minutes, a tense, slow buildup that erupts into an earth-shaking crescendo of super heavy riffage. Immensely bleak and heavy, Born Again brings together elements of Godflesh's industrial pummel, black metal, tribal dirge , the violent nihilism of Swans, doomy death metal, and even some black strains of psychedelia into a monumental metallic black hole . Like I said, I really loved their last album Affliction, which I thought was an interesting variation on the Neurosis/psychedelic sludge sound with its heavy use of electronics, and if you liked that album as much as I did, I'm pretty sure that you'll be blown away by this darker new form that the band has taken. This Crucial Blast release of Born Again features a distinctly different album design than the original version on Appease Me, and is also packaged in a four-panel digipack (where the Appease Me release came in a standard jewel case)."

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  Artist/Title: Robe - Bleak 8 Format: CDR Label: Crucial Blast Price: $8 Catalog ID: CarbonDist_BLAZE01 "The first entry in the new Crucial Blaze series of limited edition cdr/cd titles, which picks up where the now completed Crucial Bliss series ended. Now, our explorations into ambient drone, electronic noise and abstract heaviness descend into darker and more apocalyptic zones than before, and Robe's newest release Bleak combines all of these elements into an ideal flagship release for this new series. C-Blast customers may remember when I gushed over a stunning cassette that Robe. released on Thor's Rubber Hammer a while back; this new set of tracks continues in that intensely dark and oppressive vein, with seventy-five minutes of rumbling, creeping ambience and oozing, blackened bottom end raked with the blare of distant horns, smeared trumpets echoing across a vast ocean of black sludge, evil screeching violins time-stretched into endless drones, an immensely oppressive and threatening atmosphere drifting over formless glacial guitar/bass grind like plumes of pungent black smoke. It's like hearing corroded, distressed blasts of orchestral sound, broken and warped BM guitars and clanking machinery rotting beneath massive waves of low-end heaviness; the same reference points that I used for their Remains Of A Burning World apply equally here (Abruptum's Casus Luciferi, Neuntoter Der Plage, and Aderlating's most atmospheric moments), but leaning even more towards a sort of surrealistic industrial nightmare. This limited-edition release of Bleak is packaged in a clear plastic library case with full color artwork, limited and hand-numbered out of 250 copies, and includes a set of two full color 1" buttons, a vinyl Robe. sticker, and an foldover insert, all carefully crafted and assembled."

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  Artist/Title: Schrei Aua Stein - Tsisnaasjini 8 Format: CDR Label: Crucial Blast Price: $7 Catalog ID: CarbonDist_BLAZE03 "The third entry in the Crucial Blaze line is the new full length disc from Schrei Aus Stein, the experimental black metal/ambient alter ego of Ross Hagen from the drone/ambient outfit Encomiast. I've been a fan and follower of Ross's work with Encomiast going back to the beginning of the last decade, and we've released two of his releases as Encomiast through the Crucial Bliss series over the past five years, so when he emerged last year with this new project that combined his trademark droneological sounds with a noisy, moody brand of mid-paced black metal, I couldn't wait to hear it. The first release from Schrei Aus Stein was a limited edition disc on Starlight Temple Society called Talus that came out in 2009, an eerie blend of frostbitten mid-paced black metal, gothic post-punk throb, and sweeping arctic ambience, an excellent debut that showed that Hagen was going for more than just another downbeat depressive black metal project. Now, Schrei Aus Stein returns with it's second release Tsisnaasjini, a three song full length with songs that average at around thirteen minutes, long majestic soundscapes that still reveal a bit of that Encomiast ambience, but which delve into harsher, more unfriendly terrain than before, mixing together strange industrial dirge, blown-out depressive black metal, and ambient drone into icy realms of hypnotic atmosphere. Icy synthetic winds open the first track "Light On Wings", which takes off into a slipstream of arctic drift and low, oceanic static that reaches out for a couple of minutes before a series of low percussive rumbles begins to appear within the swirling blizzard of hiss and static, the vague beats slowly materializing into view as a creeping drumbeat that slowly plods forward through the wintry noisescape, the drums gradually joined by waves of guitar feedback and low bass buzz, and the song begins to take form from a nebulous wash of sound into a sort of eerie slowcore dirge that's all awash in amp grit and speaker rumble. Those guitars slowly form into minimal, droning minor key sorrow, a simple haunting riff that loops over and over while hissing demonic vocals drift in, enshrouded in reverb, an unintelligible smear of black malevolence over the plodding hypnotic dirge. On the second song "Like Arctic Moons", the sound shifts from that lumbering blackened slowcore into something a bit more like regular downer black metal, with slow, morose minor key riffs swarming over slow moving drums, stretched out shrieks and distorted howls echoing across the wintry backdrop of feedback and dissonant guitar drone, but as the song goes on, the music gradually picks up steam, getting oddly angular, the drums slipping into off-time rhythms, and then suddenly it locks into a mesmeric, almost motorik beat that begins driving beneath the eerie tremolo riffs, turning into a sort of krautrocky DSBM for a moment until the drums shift once again, this time into frantic blast beats while the guitars staying the same. It lurches back and forth between this hypnotic black pulse and stumbling doom and hectic thrashing, until it finally falls off into a long stretch of howling, buzzing mechanical drone, like the sound of machinery slowly winding down, becoming slower and slower, the drones pulling apart to reveal bits of shimmery metallic ambience, chimes and metal clank off in the distance, a creepy, mysterious dronescape that resembles the distant receding roar of a jetliner disappearing into a black hole, slowly dissolving into some minimal spacious ambience at the end, field recordings of trains and yipping wolves creating an eerie nocturnal drift. The last song "Vague as Blown Smoke" ends the disc with an epic blast of blown-out, abstract black metal, a classic sounding wash of blackened buzz, evil tremolo guitar swarming over swirling minor key guitars, droning bass and doom-laden drums, and malicious hissing vokills. Early on, the sound is distorted and creepy and off-kilter, erupting into a blazing wall of psychedelic black blast with layers of howling guitar and mechanized blast beats, and it gets more atmospheric and abstract as it progresses, morphing into a swirling ambient storm of abstract horror that slips in and out of doom-laden crush and passages of strange, bass-driven, industrial-tinged dirge, the instruments surrounded by wraithlike feedback and melting amp whir and whirling loops of delirious electronic melodies that slow down bit by bit until the music dissolves into pure cosmic drone at the end, with several minutes of surging waves of distorted low-end shifting beneath gleaming synthesizer hum and high-end shimmer that finally fades out into nothingness.... Anyone into the amorphous, melancholy black metal of bands like Velvet Cacoon and Xasthur should investigate Schrei Aus Stein, but this is much more droning and streaked with noise than those bands, often moving into pure ambient buzz within the storms of blackened violence. Like Talus, this is great stuff, and if you enjoyed that debut, you won't go wrong with Schrei Aus Stein's latest. The disc comes in a plastic library case with full color sleeve art, limited to a hand-numbered run of 250 copies, and includes a double-sided color insert card, a vinyl Schrei Aus Stein sticker, and a set of two Schrei Aus Stein 1" buttons."

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  Artist/Title: Scott Hull - Audio Film I 6 Format: 3CD Label: Crucial Blast Price: $6 Catalog ID: CarbonDist_CBR71 "...a terrifying fug of demonic drone that utilizes delirious stereo panning and slabs of obsidian ambience, and it slowly unfolds over the length of the piece to reveal layers of malevolent black drone and unsettling voices seemingly lost between planes of shadow. Audiofilm I plays out like a wildly hallucinogenic horror film score, and anyone into Scott's previous ambient/soundscape work will find this to be one of his darkest pieces yet. The disc is limited to a single pressing of 1,000 copies, packaged in a tiny 4" x 4" glossy gatefold jacket with stunning full color artwork from artist Seldon Hunt. Recommended to enthusiasts of the isolationist terror of Painkiller’s Execution Ground ambient disc, Lustmord, and Scorn... "

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  Artist/Title: Sorc'Henn - FARO: Death Of The Island Sheeps 8 Format: CDR Label: Crucial Blast Price: $9 Catalog ID: CarbonDist_BLISS38 "I've been haunted by the beautifully dark loopscapes of French artist Sorc'henn dating back to first hearing the band on their Harmonium pieces & dead reveries disc released by Faunasabbatha, so we were immensely stoked when Sorc'henn was interested in releasing some more of their music through Crucial Bliss. This new full length features four tracks of Sorc'henn's murky, dreamy drones that stretch out over a misty, grey-washed landscape much like the one pictured on the exterior of Faro's foldout sleeve, a lightless wetland that fades way into the distance, obfuscated by a thick veil of shadow, and the fourth track is additionally notable for being a collaboration between Sorc'henn and members of Portland black metallers L'Acephale and Virginia deathdrone outfit One Lifeless Eye. The first track is essential Sorc'henn, a twenty-one minute dronescape that is mainly made up of a single warbling harmonium loop that repeats over and over and over, as a young woman whispers lines of poetry over top. As minimalist and simple as this is, it's amazingly beautiful, and almost has a My Bloody Valentine-like quality to it, like one of the guitar-feedback ambient parts of Loveless that has been melted and crushed into a misshapen version of the original melody. The second track is a mere four minutes in comparison - a deep, murky field of subterranean rumblings and a distant crackling sound, like a phonograph needle stuck in a run-off groove over crashing waves of distorted tidal thunder and ominous harmonium drones. The next track is basically a continuation of the previous, with those sinister harmonium drones humming over surges of distorted low-end thunder and weird noises that pan from speaker to speaker. The last track, the collaboration between Sorc'henn and members of L'Acephale and One Lifeless Eye, is the longest on the disc at ovr twenty-six minutes. This one is a sprawling expanse of murky black ambience, a slow-swirling fog of muted harmonium notes, oceanic sounds, chirping noises that might be frogs, and hushed, whispered cackles and demonic processed vocals drifting across a vast void of Lustmordian darkness. " REVIEW FROM JULIAN COPE/HEAD HERITAGE: These past two months, my personal choice for all night repetition, ie: the piece that helps me most easily access the Underworld, has been the Uber-haunting 22-minute track ‘Dødsdansen (Death’s Dance), Life of an Island Lad’, from the FARO album by Sorc’henn. Released on that tremendous Crucial Blast subsidiary Crucial Bliss (www.crucialblast.com), FARO is a fine fine Black Metal record and, except for the more obvious and more stylized final 26-minute ‘evil’ track ‘Enez Varv Faaro’, goes about its sinister business secretly, intoning plainsong in cloisters, invoking camp-fires, digital distortion and wolves, and dancing at the edge of total ambience, nay, ambulence! Then, two minutes from the end, some old French torch song comes in and really sealeth ye atmosphere. Su-fuckin’-perbe!

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  Artist/Title: Subarachnoid Space - Eight Bells 8 Format: CD Label: Crucial Blast Price: $10 Catalog ID: CarbonDist_CBR81 "Eight Bells is the first new release from Subarachnoid Space in four years (following 2005's The Red Veil on Strange Attractors). Featuring the recording lineup of Daniel Barone, Melynda Jackson, Lauren K. Newman, Daniel Osborne and Steven Wray Lobdell, the music of Eight Bells continues in the heavy lysergic vein as their last couple of post-Release albums, fusing wicked metallic crunch with ethereal fx-laden guitar freakouts and some of the band's most narcotized jamming yet. Their last couple of records pointed towards a heavier direction for the band, and this new material continues on that trajectory, combining blazing luminous axe-howl over hypnotic heavy acid riffage and dense squalls of fx-stacked sound. The album comes in at just under 40 minutes, and is packaged in another one of Crucial Blast's high quality visual presentations with stunning new artwork from Stephen Kasner. We've been big fans of Subarachnoid Space here at Crucial Blast since back when the band was releasing albums on Release/Relapse and Charnel Music, and they have continued to be one of our favorite bands working within the heavy neo-psych spectrum. Since their formation in 1995, Subarachnoid Space has evolved into one of the preeminent navigators within the realms of psychotropic underground rock and have firmly established themselves alongside the brightest stars in the constellation of contemporary acid rock. Playing a form of lysergic and almost entirely instrumental rock that draws its DNA from the sounds of classic Krautrock, prog, long-form improvisation and metallic heaviness, the band has attracted a fervent and dedicated following over the past decade around albums on established independant labels such as Relapse Records and Strange Attractors Audio House. Subarachnoid Space have also continued to bring their ominous, ethereal riffage, soaring fx-laden guitars and pulsating rhythmic propulsion on the road with numerous tours and festival appearances, including multiple stints across the U.S., three appearances at the legendary psych-rock festival Terrastock, and a tour of Japan, and has performed alongside such a variety of artists as Sonic Youth, Acid Mothers Temple, Khanate, Wolf Eyes, YOB, Sunn O))), Danava, Red Sparowes,Boris, Lightning Bolt, These Arms Are Snakes, Master Musicians Of Bukkake, and Ludicra. Thoughout the band's existence, the one constant has been visionary guitarist and bandleader Melynda Jackson. A native of rural Texas, Jackson grew up an only child, and never considered that the isolated grasslands and windswept landscapes of her youth would eventually inspire her to evoke equally mysterious terrain through experimental, exploratory guitar and wordless vocalizations in Subarachnoid Space. Jackson moved to San Francisco at the age of twenty-six and within a year had become part of the fledgling version of Subarachnoid Space, which had been formed by experimental guitarist Mason Jones, already known within the post-industrial/psych underground from his long-running Trance project. After the release of the band's debut 7" Char-Broiled Wonderland in 1996, Subarachnoid Space went on to fine-tune their sprawling improvisations and began to tour frequently. This led to the band scoring a record deal with Relapse Records soon thereafter. After three albums on Relapse Records, the band went on to release material on a number of smaller labels like Elsie And Jack, September Gurls, and Strange Attractors Audio House, and continued to perform regularly, touring both the USA and Japan with Acid Mothers Temple and performing alongside Sonic Youth at the 2002 Terrastock V festival. After the release of 2003's Also Rising, Mason Jones retired from the band, leaving Jackson to assume control of the band and reshape Subarachnoid Space into something heavier and more song-oriented. This new phase of Subarachnoid Space saw Jackson bringing a darker and more metallic edge to the band's sound while still retaining the elements of fiery improvisation and rich textural guitar that the group was known for. Both 2003's Also Rising and 2005's The Red Veil further introduced the band to a new audience of left-field metal and heavy rock fans. Now, Jackson and Subarachnoid Space have returned with Eight Bells, the band's first new release since 2005's The Red Veil on Strange Attractors, and the newest chapter in Jackson's continually evolving vision of music as ecstatic ritual. The recording features a new lineup of Daniel Barone, Melynda Jackson, Lauren K. Newman and Daniel Osborne, and was produced by Steven Wray Lobdell who also performs on the album. The music of Eight Bells continues in a similar heavy lysergic vein as their last couple of post-Relapse albums, fusing wicked metallic crunch with celebratory sky-streaking guitar freakouts and some of the band's most narcotized jamming yet. Their last couple of records all increasingly pointed towards a heavier direction for the band, and this new material continues on that trajectory as it combines blazing luminous axe-howl over hypnotic acid riffage and dense squalls of fx-stacked sound. Eight Bells features five songs ("Lilith", "Akathesia", "Hunter seeker", "Haruspex", "Bird Signs"), and features stunning new artwork from Stephen Kasner."

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  Artist/Title: Suzukiton - service repair handbook 4 Format: CD Label: Crucial Blast Price: $10 Catalog ID: CarbonDist_CBR39 "Service Repair Handbook is the introductory unveiling of fine-tuned, tightly-wound instrumental heaviness from Richmond, VA riff-technicians SUZUKITON. Executing an elaborate schematic of progressive, technical musicianship and earth-shaking rock propulsion, Service Repair Handbook delivers an onslaught of anthemic, pulverizing tuneage that intersects math metal, heavy prog, and stoner rock. Features both former and current members of Relapse Records artist ALABAMA THUNDERPUSSY. "

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  Artist/Title: Totimoshi - Ladron 6 Format: CD Label: Crucial Blast Price: $11 Catalog ID: CarbonDist_CBR58 "The fourth album from TOTIMOSHI. Slabs of crushing metered riffing and joyously ecstatic sludge ooze from the band's instruments over sunbaked vocal harmonies and flourishes of pure pop melodicism and bursts of old-school heavy metal energy. These songs wind through shadows of dusty blues and western music, riff-tastic instrumental rave-ups, squalls of immolating guitar noise, and smoldering post-punk dynamics clad in serious heaviness. TOTIMOSHI's distinctively elephantine rock grips the listener in the power of the big riff and saw-toothed hooks as it reconciles MELVINS/HIGH ON FIRE/KARP crush with pop and psychedelia, bolstered by powerful production courtesy of HELMET's Page Hamilton. "

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  Artist/Title: Totimoshi - Mysterioso 4 Format: CD Label: Crucial Blast Price: $10 Catalog ID: CarbonDist_CBR46 "¿Mysterioso? , the second full length from Oakland, CA-based trio TOTIMOSHI, intersects earthquake-heavy rock and wicked sludge riffage with the wiry hooks and dynamics of 80's post-punk / new wave, Spanish melodies, and an adventurous, occasionally improvisational fuzz attack. It's like someone gave an old Beggars Banquet band a cocktail of steroids, huge amps, and battered copies of Melvins' Stoner Witch and Mainliner's Mellow Out. Heavy, crunchy, catchy,hypnotic - ¿Mysterioso? winds, grinds, and explodes every step of the way. This re-issued, re-tooled version features enhanced CD-ROM extras, including video , photos, and more.."

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  Artist/Title: Trees - Freed of this Flesh 6 Format: CD Label: Crucial Blast Price: $10 Catalog ID: CarbonDist_CBR83 "The mysterious Portland ensemble Trees return with their second offering on Crucial Blast, Freed Of This Flesh, with two new fetid death rituals scraped from the crypt. Each of these tracks averages around fourteen minutes, an extended death-rattle formed from black glacial riffs suspended in space, tectonic percussive rumbles, anguished shrieks of torment and abject suffering, deep guttural demon-toad throat singing, and endless sheets of glistening metallic feedback that spill and drift to the far edges of their extreme time-stretched ambient doom, a crumbling, blighted majesty, noxious ambient blackdoom adrift on putrescent tides. The wretched vocal effluvium creeps formlessly across austere slabs of crushing heaviness arranged into ghoulish constructs of atmospheric dread, moving so slow that the music seems to lose all sense of propulsion at times, becoming lost in a fog of howling amplifiers and buzzing feedback, the guitars stretched into massive decomposing drones, the spaces between infested with controlled bursts of drums that skitter and rumble, almost "jazzy" in a vague sort of way, but still incredibly slow and ponderous. Freed Of This Flesh inhabits the same sort of black-tar depths as the likes of Burning Witch, Monarch, Khanate, and Bunkur while stripping the slo-mo heaviness into their own twisted, skeletal configuration."

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  Artist/Title: Trees - Lights Bane 6 Format: CD Label: Crucial Blast Price: $12 Catalog ID: CarbonDist_CBR66 "The debut album from the Portland quartet Trees delivers two epic tracks of monolithic, blackened doom metal with a twisted, noise-damaged approach and a dank basement vibe. Trees craft glacial abstract riffs and rivers of ashen amplifier goo that fans of feedback-laden heaviosity will find highly satisfying, a kind of grinding, slow-motion black hole psychedelia that has a similiar hypnotic death-ritual quality as artists like Bloody Panda and Khanate, but with their own unique trance state of swirling guitar textures, horrific jet black dronescapes and ghoulish, excoriating vocals. Features members of the PDX psych-sludge outfit Tecumseh (Important Records). This CD edition of the TREE's debut comes in a Stoughton printed 4-panel gatefold case. "

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  Artist/Title: Various Artists - Not Without a Fight 8 Format: 2CD Label: Crucial Blast Price: $12 Catalog ID: CarbonDist_CBR50 "Originally released in 1999, the NOT WITHOUT A FIGHT double-CD compilation was one of our first releases, a crude feast of brutal grindcrust, raw hardcore, and all-out noise warfare packed inside of a 64 page 7"x7" newsprint fanzine-style booklet loaded with rants, essays, poetry, artwork, and band info. It's been out of print for about two years now, but we've re-released it in this second edition of 1,000 copies, never to be repressed. The re-issue won't be available in select stores until January, but you can order it now through Crucial Blast. This limited-edition re-issue of the 1999 double CD compilation NOT WITHOUT A FIGHT is Crucial Blast's homage to the scuzz-caked grindcore/noise/sludge/speedpunk underground of the mid/late 1990's embodied in cheap cassette compilations and xerox-sleeved split 7" EPs. One of Crucial Blast's first ever releases, we grabbed exclusive outbursts from an array of subterranean sonic abusers, including BASTARD NOISE, AGATHOCLES, DAHMER, CRIPPLE BASTARDS, MACRONYMPHA, UNHOLY GRAVE, and loads of other purveyors of damaged, anti-social grind and noisecore, free noise and power electronics, spoken word, brutal fastcore, blazing D-beat driven crustcore, and lysergic psych-sludge. NOT WITHOUT A FIGHT is packaged in a DVD style plastic double-disc case that holds both CDs and a mega-thick, 64 page fanzine-style newsprint booklet loaded with band info, art, stories and rants. ARTIST LISTING: Mark Bruback, Cruel Face, Strong Intention, Bastard Noise, RPOD, SoIHadToShootHim, Katastrofialue, Unfound, Dark Skies Fallen, Retribution, Global Holocaust, Flammable Child, Depressor, John Bender, Aural Torture Mechanism, The Last Day No Human Voice, Agathocles, Daybreak, Puncture Wound, None Of Your Fucking Business, Dahmer, Samus, Mizuko, Cripple Bastards, Miseries AD, A Death Between Seasons, Macronymhpha, Unholy Grave, Falsies, Final Exit, JDog, Bloodstains & Bulletholes. "

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  Artist/Title: Wether - Uncertain Ritual 8 Format: CDR Label: Crucial Blast Price: $9 Catalog ID: CarbonDist_BLISS35 "Wether is the blackened noise project from Mike Haley, the beardo that runs the classy Electric Human Project label and who is also half of Big China & Little Trouble...this entity has released an assload of cassettes and splits and even a wee bot if vinyl over the past couple of years, and all of it which I've heard has been excellent, a kind of formless, ganrled industrial blackness, usually very dirgey and crushing, possessed by the occasional blast of snarling black metal screams buried in distortion and awesomely malevolent synthesizer drones that, when they really get going, sound like the tarblack afterbirth of Wolf Eyes jamming on cues from John Carpenter's The Fog OST from '94. We finally hooked up with Mike to bring you this new full length of infernal hypnosis Uncertain Ritual, a collection of hellish mechanical atmospheres, meditative trance-loops constructed from machine clatter and blocks of white noise, torrents of bellowing distortion goo and black ambience that's creepy as fuck. This is super-high quality fx pedal/circuit-bent generated deathscape action, brutally heavy in spots with massive creeping industrial rhythms and whirlpools of ultra-distorted metal-like crunch, and tranquil and beautiful in others when Wether moves into placid drones and subdued underground vibrations. This is terminally evil shit though, and it falls somewhere in between the black ambient/industrial chaos of artists like Nordvargr and Abruptum, and the grinding electronic skum of Wolf Eyes and Anenzephalia. Uncertain Ritual is packaged in the signature Bliss sleeve with full color artwork from Crucial Blast, and the disc is attached to the interior of the sleeve on a plastic hub. Issued in a limited edition of 300 copies."

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  Artist/Title: Wildildlife - Peas Feast 12 Format: LP Label: Crucial Blast Price: $12 Catalog ID: CarbonDist_CBR72 "The band released this EP as a handmade CD-R that has been sold at shows over the past year, but the songs on Peas Feast are so cool that we wanted to give this a proper vinyl documentation, and have been remastered for vinyl by Scott Hull at Visceral Sound. The record will be pressed on yellow wax with black splatter in an edition of 1,000 copies, and will also come with a digital dropcard that will allow you to download the tracks from the Peas Feast EP as well as a digital-only EP titled Drongolet Demos that has a bunch of unreleased tracks from Wildildlife. The Peas Feast vinyl features four lengthy songs, starting with the zonked ultraheavy sludge and atonal, barbed wire guitar freakouts of "White Eyelidz" which goes from crushing glacial metal to drunken bassloaded punk rock in the bat of an eye, and then moves on to the pop genius of "Violent". "Violent" is the catchiest song these guys have, starting off slow with plaintive FX-soaked vocals swimming over pulverizing sludge metal riffage - think Harvey Milk but waaaaaay more freaked out and poppy and mutated by unnameable effects boxes....the hook here is so catchy it gives me a toothache, it's like hearing the saddest old alt rock song ever being played by Corrupted, complete with vocal harmonies. But then comes "Shining Son", another amazingly catchy pop song, still heavy but way more upbeat and driving, more noise rock than sludge, with a big burly bass riffs and ecstatic guitars that strafe the sky until the sludge rears it's head again, a massive swampy riff that rises up and flattens everything towards the end. MASSIVE. And then the final song, "My Song", formerly an acoustic song that appeared on Wildildlife's self titled debut 10", another amazing pop gem, but this time damaged and drunken sounding, the pop hook molten and oozing, the vocals a desperate howl, slow and sludgy and creeping but still unbelievably catchy and exuberant as it trails off into an almost Mammatus-like psych rock coda. Although this early material is more immediate and raw than the band's debut album Six, the music is crushing, catchy and totally spaced-out. On Yellow vinyl with black splatter in a run of 1,000 copies."

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  Artist/Title: Wildildlife - Six 6 Format: CD Label: Crucial Blast Price: $12 Catalog ID: CarbonDist_CBR64 "A couple months ago (we’re talking mid-Spring ‘07, here), I received an email from Robotic Empire boss Andy Low commanding me to check out a couple of songs that a band from San Francisco called Wildildlife had posted online, immediately. I knew that the dude has a solid idea of what kind of sounds I’m into, so I pulled up the link immediately and was totally blown away by the two Wildildlife tunes that I heard. Heavy, crunchy riffage rolling over celestial FX freakout and gang choral voices, part pop, part neo-psychedelic noisiness, part metalloid skullcrush. Super melodic and catchy but vaguely menacing and dark all at the same time. The band toured through here about a month later, and I was even more floored by their manic live energy; the band summoned up a wicked whirlpool of dense distorto crunch and freaky singing, raging metallic percussive pummel, tribal rhythms and crushing effects-soaked guitars, subdued floatational drones and ecstatically gorgeous melodies, all let loose in a series of sky-streaking eruptions of psychedelic lowcore and swirling, cosmic sludge. Going back to a review that Terrascope Magazine wrote about one of the band's earlier CD-R releases, this sounds vaguely like Black Sabbath and Butthole Surfers jamming together with ancient forest mystics, an experience both brutal and beautiful, and which proves that Wildildlife have already established themselves as serious purveyors of blown-out psych heaviness.These guys have become one of my favorite new bands, and I’m MEGA excited to be presenting their first full length Six through Crucial Blast. The CD version of Six comes in a posh, full-color 4-panel gatefold jacket printed by Stoughton Printers, which houses the disc and a full-color 8-page booklet filled with amazing, surreal photographs by Sabina Holber."

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  Artist/Title: Wolfnuke - Nightwar 8 Format: CDR Label: Crucial Blast Price: $6 Catalog ID: CarbonDist_BLAZE02 "The second document on the new Crucial Blaze imprint, Wolfnuke's Nightwar is a glorified demo, the first raw recorded work from this new Hagerstown, Maryland quartet that includes the C-Blast boss on bass and bellows, as well as a current member of long-running hardcore/grinders Strong Intention (Six Weeks / Coalition Records) on guitar. Wolfnuke seeks a different form of mayhem however, forging a furious, blackened thrash assault out of an unlikely combination of influences that include the obvious (classic second wave black metal and Teutonic thrash), the vitriolic crossover thrash of Cro-Mags's 1989 album Best Wishes, a lust for the driving, apocalyptic power of late 80's UK goth rock (Fields of The Nephilim, Sisters Of Mercy), and the violent aggression of Scandinavian hardcore. The four songs on Nightwar are universally fast-paced and dark as hell, starting with the nihilistic blackened thrash of "Beneath The Last Of The Neuro-Goat" and continuing through the blazing black metal-meets-crossover extermination vision of "Deathfire", the crushing mid-tempo blackened metalpunk of the title track and the anthemic matricide hallucination of closer "Filthwraith". Originally made available as a free download and cassette at local performances earlier in the year, the Nightwar demo has been presented here as a hand-numbered cd-r release in a print run of 250 copies and packaged in the Crucial Blaze signature library case with an insert card, a set of 1" buttons, and a vinyl sticker. It is also available on cassette, likewise limited to a print run of 100 copies."

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  Artist/Title: Yes, Collapse - final diagnosis 6 Format: CDR Label: Crucial Blast Price: $9 Catalog ID: CarbonDist_CBR_ YesCollapse "the final recording from this Dayton improv-noise crew; brutal industrial factory scrape, rusted sheet metal floating through dank halls, and the buzz of destroyed electrified instruments heard through 10 feet of concrete."