Abyssal Rift

***Abyssal Rift emerges from the bowels of hell with its debut-full length monstrosity, Extirpation Dirge, a thirty six-minute miasmatic behemoth of dark and antihuman death-doom conceived by Columbus, Ohio-based multi-instrumentalist Matt Auxier (of industrial acts 6th Circle and Ash Prison) handling all instruments, songwriting and recording, with the exception of drums (performed and recorded remotely by David Mahony of Irish black/grind terrorists Unyielding Love). The band is the manifestation of Auxier's long-running history as a metalhead and of his extensive appreciation (parallel to that for industrial music) for dark and atmospheric death metal bands like Incantation, Disembowelment and Immolation as well as for 60's and 70's prog bands like Goblin, King Crimson, Eloy, and Amon Düül II, which in the context of his expertise and knowledge as a producer and home studio owner, has yielded a dense and disorienting dark death metal beast shrouded in surreal atmospheres and an hallucinatory form of dirge-like experimentalism. An all-devouring obfuscation of abyssic crush depth, "Extirpation Dirge" seems horizonless and bottomless as it propagates and gravitates downward like a churning maelstrom, alternating moments of obliterating machine-like dark death metal destruction to others of misery-torn doom and cinematic widescreen experimentalism, with dense synth work alternating contemplative passages of clean guitars and ominous presages of spectral dark ambience.