Sentient Ruin Laboratories

Uranium

Corrosion of Existence

Sentient Ruin Laboratories

***American nuclear black industrial weapon Uranium returns to embody industrial music’s most terrifying triumph. In its life-entombing thirty six minutes “Corrosion of Existence” takes the mysterious one man band’s concept of nuclear devastation to its most harrowing and inevitable conclusions, unfolding five new monstrous tracks of plutonium-fueled auditory terror that will dominate tyrannical above and beyond anything that the most lawless frontier of extreme industrial has ever fathomed or imagined. An immense industrial and blackened noise construct inspired by acts like Godflesh, Swans, Brighter Death Now, Gnaw Their Tongues, and Merzbow levitates out of a world-ending idealization, colliding with excoriations of techno and breakcore as well as with black/death metal influences from bands like Teitanblood, Portal and Irkallian Oracle into an unimaginable cauldron of destruction. Like an unstoppable chain reaction that has evaded any containment, “Corrosion of Existence” exponentially escalates the destructive yield of its black/death metal-inspired 2023 predecessor album “Pure Nuclear Death”, transmuting its never-before-heard sonic assault into Uranium’s most oppressive and inescapable conquest. A gigantic gaping void is blown out into the architecture of existence, revealing a massive radioactive wound seared with layer upon layer upon layer of caustic sequences and smoldering synth tapestries. A downpour of robotic samples pounds like radioactive rain falling from a nuclear maelstrom, engulfing the biosphere and sending a gigantic swath of fallout to travel horizonless, burying everything in a suffocating sarcophagus of molten corium and melted concrete. Torrents of gnarled, sampled guitars and bass compound the destruction, while the album's tectonic drum...

Noir Noir

Black Curtain / Divine Swelling

Sentient Ruin Laboratories

***For over fifteen years Spain's recluse visual master, composer and death fetishist Noir Noir has dredged the most forlorn depths of death industrial, dark wave, and raw black metal to uncover an auditory death ritual of unprecedented wretchedness and magnificence. The project's two crowning achievements - 2016's mini album "Black Curtain" (originally released on cassette by Fallow Field), and 2022's "Divine Swelling" (originally released by Hedonic Reversal as side one of the split cassette with Vesakh), now finally see their righteous enshrinement, remastered (courtesy of death-industrial master Grant Richardson) and released for the first time ever on vinyl and CD formats (and reissued on cassette) as due solemnization to one of underground industrial's most defiant, enigmatic, and transformative entities.While the band's sparse but enduring output has touched upon various digressions in the realms of dark ambient, noise and power electronics, these two releases in particular are the ones which showcase the band's most coherent, focused, and visionary output, being the foremost two releases in Noir Noir's discography which most define and consecrate the project's monumental morbid triumph. By far the band's two most pervasive and straightforward releases, "Black Curtain" and "Divine Swelling" unfold a prodigious death-scarred voidscape of oppressive ritualistic rhythms, glacial sequences and tortured proclamations that condemn the listener to an all-consuming auditory punishment. Obviously influenced by, or convergently evolved from, the darkened explorations of acts like Brighter Death Now, Lurker of Chalice, Mütilation, Trepaneringsritualen, Skinny Puppy, Throbbing Gristle and Dead Can Dance, these crowning forty minutes of Noir...

Deathwinds

Toward Doom...

Sentient Ruin Laboratories

***After over a decade, the debut album by Vancouver's bestial black metal punks Deathwinds reopens the gates to an unholy dominion of chaos cleansed in nuclear vice. Casting the listener back to a dark age of primitivism and savagery, on their long-awaited debut album Towards Doom... the Canadian war-punk horde invoke the legend of bands like Hellhammer, Celtic Frost, Discharge, Doom, Black Witchery and Blasphemy to summon an apocalyptic twilight of destruction. The original core lineup of Bestial Desolator on drums (Encoffinate, Radioactive Vomit, Temple of Abandonment) and of Nocturnal Black on guitars and vocals (Ceremonial Bloodbath, Nightfucker, Radioactive Vomit) is joined on bass by Nuclear Hammer Throne (Ahna, Ceremonial Bloodbath, Encoffinate, Grave Infestation, Temple of Abandonment, The Nausea), replacing original bassist Filth Destroyer, to embody the band’s most sanguinary incarnation yet and christen its most pestilent abomination. Wielded like a war mace in a post-nuclear new neolithic age, these eleven songs bludgeon with merciless cruelty and barbarity as the hands of time are rolled back to re-embody black metal and punk’s most primeval instincts of destruction. Discharge's, Hellhammer’s and Celtic’s Frost’s iconic chainsawing guitars reincarnate into a new weapon of annihilation, instigated into absolute chaos and carnage by a thunderous onslaught of barbaric hammer beats, merciless blasting and disemboweled screams. A dense, death-bearing atmosphere of lead and toxic fumes overhangs the blasted plains and scorched dominion, underpinning the album's foul aura of belligerence and evoking visions of end-time turmoil and of a collapsing society being sent back to a...

Gawthrop

Kuboa

Sentient Ruin Laboratories

***Seoul’s Gawthrop return to reconsign the sub-genre of sludge metal to its most resplendent and burdensome form, unfolding a monumental death and doom-scarred feedback-worshiping monstrosity that will stomp, crush and flatten the listener to death. The enigmatic South Korean amplifier-torture cult had already given the world a glimpse into their cryptic auditory horror through 2019’s self-titled and 2022’s "Jumbo" demo tapes (both remastered and re-released by Sentient Ruin as the "Deterioration" vinyl LP compilation in 2023), but what awaits the listener on the band's first official full-length offering is something so wretched and imposing that it will test the composure and impressionability of even the most unfazed skeptics. Across its grueling thirty six minutes "Kuboa" unravels an utter masterclass of downtuned auditory nihilism that will leave both die hard fans of sludge/doom and extreme metal enthusiasts in general alike in awe and overcome by the ghastly payload of absolute slow-crawling death they've just been crushed by. The legacy of pillars of the genre like Corrupted, Noothgrush, Coffins, and Meth Drinker lives on through through seven epochal and genre-defining slabs of all-devouring subsonic auditory torment that restore sludge/doom to its most iconic and crowning glory.

Bone Fetish

Bone Fetish

Sentient Ruin Laboratories

***Deranged Canadian goregrind sociopath Bone Fetish brings you its first self-titled full-length perversion, a career-spanning compilation atrocity containing all of the project's recordings up to this date, including 2021's "Buried" demo, 2022's "Convergence" demo, 2024's "Mummified" demo, and five more brand new and never before released aberrations, all remastered and resequenced by Will Killingsworth into a cohesive and gut-wrenching monstrosity of utter nihilism and destruction. The twenty five-minute, seventeen-track gore-infested death and grind onslaught is a deep dive into a deranged mind slipping off the edge and being consumed by its most inverse and unutterable delusions, ranging from hallucinatory corpse-fucking fantasies, to rotten-flesh eating impulses, all the way to violent sodomy, necrophilia, and self-dismemberment idealization. A harrowing sonic depiction of an unfortunate human mind erratically coded and wired on the completely wrong values and interests, resulting in some of the most vile and inhuman deviancies conceivable. Shreds of early Carcass, Impetigo, Haemorrhage, Pathologist, Disgorge and Necronist reverberate throughout the torture dungeons, the entrails spattered sewers and the robbed sepulchers, unfolding a rabid and frantic assault of cruelty and perversions that is attempting to violently destroy itself just as fast as it can destroy every other breathing thing around it in the most inefficient, sadistic, and irrational way possible.

Hold Me Down

Devour

Sentient Ruin Laboratories

***Virginia-based industrial metal nihilists Hold Me Down reach the milestone of the second full-length album, christened under the name “Devour” and designed as further progression of their abysmal exploration into the outer realms of synthetic sonic abandon. What unfolds on this second mechanized auditory assault from the Richmond voidscapers is an all-corroding synthesis of industrialized terror harkening back to formative years of extreme industrial music when bands like Swans, Throbbing Gristle, Skinny Puppy and Godflesh were looking for new pathways to transform their times’ confusion and alienation into an oppressive audial dehumanization. A torrential onslaught of pounding drum machines and atonal guitars creating a physical and mental cage of submission, within which the listener is trapped and cornered, only to be further punished by a white, colorless, and sterile burden of noise. The only human thing toiling within the ashen framework of this stark and dystopian cyberscape is vocalist Jim Gullickson’s devastated voice, the last spasm of humanity disintegrating within the aseptic turbulence of a paranoid, life-draining contraption. The way the album is built and conceived is intended to mimic human sensory dismantlement, or its destruction from within, similarly to how our digitalized society erases individuals leaving only empty shells. The senses are used as sensors to gain access to the listener’s humanity, into which an injection of sterilizing sequences and nerve-eating samples are inserted to scrape the consciousness clean. A new era of post-industrial enslavement and banishment of any human thrive has just cast its purifying shadow across the...

Hateful Abandon

Threat

Sentient Ruin Laboratories

***Bankers are getting richer, cops more corrupt, and politicians are running entire nations into the ground to stuff their pockets, while the rest of us toil and wilt in a gutter of helplessness and resentment, as the shadows of war and class enslavement elongate further into a futureless, horizonless twilight. After ten long years shrouded in silence no one would have imagined or foreseen the return of Bristol’s masters of bleak sonic detestation. Yet their grandiose re-emergence from the shadows is not only unexpected, but it restores Hateful Abandon to their most shimmering and relevant form, resounding as more necessary, intimidating and bloated with bile than ever before, as they regain their role as sinister immune response to a broken world overrun by bastards. The duo of multi-instrumentalists Tom “Swine” Price and Martin “Vice Martyr” Brindley thus rebound to resplendent despondency after a decade of silence with “Threat”, a brand new full-length release of cross-disciplinary sonic execration once again weaving the grim fibers of post-punk, industrial, anarcho and crust punk, black metal and darkwave into their own idealization of resentment and scorn toward a world they do not recognize or accept. “Threat” not only perfectly continues the legacy of their previous three acclaimed full-lengths (2008’s “Famine”, 2011’s “Move”, and 2014’s “Liars/Bastards”) erasing a ten-year absence completely, but it evolves the duo’s unrivaled vision further, cementing their status of defiant outsider cult consecrated by a career spanning almost twenty years that has has seen few credible rivals or imitators. Once again...

Hell

Submersus

Sentient Ruin Laboratories

***After eight long years Sentient Ruin orchestrates the towering return of Hell to the full-length release format through the monumental achievement of its fifth official album Submersus, a masterwork of scope and vision that is destined to immortalize the legacy and magnitude of the project’s unparalleled immensity and imagination. In yet another feat of unrivaled auditory heaviness which will further cement his status of visionary, MSW takes the listener once again deep into the darkest abysses of inner turmoil and personal struggle, reaffirming the Oregon musician’s inscrutable and unique ability to transform emotional torment into a masterclass of crushing sonic burden. Across its five abysmal movements Submersus recaptures the unfair and woeful essence of life which has driven the project from its inception almost twenty years ago, embodying the affliction that shapes human existence as it’s perpetually torn between ephemeral and fragile moments of respite, and their inexorable dissolution, as joy and hope are cyclically eclipsed and devoured back into the eternal storming vastness of circumstance and inevitability. Pessimism and resignation act as the inescapable tidal forces to this immense emotional abyss which implacably pulls all toward it, drawing life deep into the maelstrom where it's drowned under its own weight and implodes into the lightless crush-depth of unending sorrow and despondency.

Hexerei

Realms...

Sentient Ruin Laboratories

***The second full-length hexation from Finnish terrorizing black metal coven Hexerei: forty minutes of the band's staple assault on the psyche vomited from beyond the shreds of sanity. Five new abysmal, wretched curses of venom-soaked aural pestilence conceived as a gateway to absolute bedlam. On their new vomit of creation titled Realms..., the deranged Finnish cult explores even more outer dimensions of terror and insanity, scouring the depths of delirium to uncover a cryptic primordial essence of complete world inversion. This second full-length disfigurement cements Hexerei’s profile as absolutists of the unutterable, and sees the Finnish scourge distance themselves even further from any concept of musicality, forcing upon the listener a berserk strain of virulent antimusic rarely observed at a such a crippled and primeval state. An intentionally destroyed audio quality and a completely regressive approach to the canonical decencies of songwriting and recording exalt a sonic delirium of complete inhumanity that redefines the concept of raw black metal entirely, reconsigning it to its ancestral and legitimate origin as vector for boundless violence and absolute evil. The ancestral path paved by Cultes Des Ghoules, Katharsis, Armagedda, Vorum and Concrete Winds thus finds new instigators to the propagation of occult and grotesque audio as terror, and “Realms.....” stands grandiose and inscrutable in its defiant goal of returning this particular strain of necrotic extreme music back to a certain dimension of absolute malignancy where it was birthed and belongs.

Kuroi Jukai

Kuroi Jukai

Sentient Ruin Laboratories

***Remastered and reissued. Ten years of Kuroi Jukai’s unrivaled noisegrind masterwork, celebrated through its ultimate and most definitive presentation: a second, final, anniversary vinyl pressing with updated art, new vinyl colors, and completely redone 2025 remastering courtesy of Will Killingsworth of Dead Air Studios.Sentient Ruin is honored and proud to bring you a first ever vinyl pressing of the only, monumentally annihilating release to have ever surfaced from short-lived and highly elusive Edmonton AB-based Canadian powerviolence / noisegrind suicide commando Kuroi Jukai, Japanese for "black sea of trees"). By the time the release had posthumously surfaced on cassette in April 2015 through Canadian harsh noise label Aught\Void, Kuroi Jukai had already ceased to exist, becoming somewhat of a mystery in the Canadian punk and extreme/experimental underground. But this lone self-titled effort has since remained untouched as undisputed testament of the band's visionary quest for complete sonic ruin and remains a crowning achievement amongst the most ambitious and sophisticated noisegrind and underground extreme hardcore punk releases of the decade. With songs averaging thirty seconds in length and a sound pushed over the edge by a ruinous syncretism with fringe strains of harsh noise and power electronics, the harrowing mini LP is a conduit for armageddon that elevates the notion of audial terrorism to an extreme rarely before seen, all while the listener is obliterated with a violence and urgency that appears both senseless and baffling.

Prophetic Suffering

Rivalry of Thyself

Sentient Ruin Laboratories

In under half hour Canadian bestial death metal cataclysm Prophetic Suffering conceive the unthinkable and create a violent and dark monstrosity bringing together the feral black/death terror of Blasphemy with the gruesome and sanguinary gore-infested death metal of Cannibal Corpse albums like "The Bleeding" and "Tomb of the Mutilated". This obfuscating and chaos-wielding approach to USDM metal had already been observed before within the underground’s most forbidden folds, as exemplified for example through the perversions of cult terrorscapers like Drawn and Quartered or Angelcorpse, but what transpires from Prophetic Suffering’s abysmal vision is something of even less canonical lineaments, and which sets various precedents in the development of this peculiar strain of darkened and ultra-gruesome death metal. Foremost, a pervasive and weaponized use of black metal and technical death-derived dissonance that has metastasized into a torrential maelstrom of gnarled, atonal fretwork destruction. A mind-expanding contrast is created where the guitarwork stretches forward to embrace a mutating modernity still in becoming, while the rest of the band deliberately collapses backward, perpetrating a primeval onslaught of carpet-bombing hammer blasts, searing basslines, and soul-tearing death grunts. This contrast between the album’s transformative articulation and its visceral adherence to primitivism and barbarity is what makes “Rivalry of Thyself” such an abomination unto itself. A cataclysmic hellscape of enigmatic complexity and truculent violence in which impenetrable atmospheres enshroud a monolithic, screaming altar of mutilated bodies and trodden flesh, harkening back to a familiar golden age of extreme death metal just as it evokes sinister presages...

Samiarus

Reign Destroyer

Sentient Ruin Laboratories

***Samiarus (or Samyaza as more widely known in aramaic) is the arabic name of the leader of the Watchers in apocryphal abrahamic scriptures, a rebel angel who shared knowledge with men and birthed the Nephilim, becoming a danger to divine power and law, or, the absolute usurper. Conceived from within the SF Bay Area punk and metal underground (by current and past members of Abnutivum, Meth Sores, Flesh Dungeon, Doomsday, Slaughteruin, Abstracter and Mentor), emerging black/death metal terrorists Samiarus embody their namesake concept of abysmal occult usurpation to the boldest through their debut EP “Reign Destroyer”, twenty three minutes of blown out bestial sonic upheaval fuming from the iron jaws of terror. While deliberately embracing the cruelty and darkness of the so called “war metal” movement developed by bands like Blasphemy and Archgoat, Samiarus’ own formulaic design for the gruesome deposition of all oppressors has brought in a number of other influences to further weaponize their subversive terroristic vision. These influences mainly come from punk and hardcore bands like G.I.S.M., Doom, Raw Nerve, Cult Ritual, Discharge and Siege, as well as from some of the band members’ interest in certain strains of industrial noise, a concoction of retaliative audial tactics that has ultimately shaped an anarchic war-torn sonic scourge with a vitriolic and blown out sound, seething with dismal reflections on the human condition and on society’s worst embodiments.

Pasmo

Pasmo

Sentient Ruin Laboratories

***"Pásmo", meaning "zone" in Czech, or a place of rigorous uniqueness sculpted into its form by crumbling geopolitical and industrial power, wild nature, and ancient local culture and lore. Pásmo's mesmerizing debut self-titled album (originally released in spring 2024 on cassette by the Czech label Vřesová Studánka and now finding its first ever vinyl release) is an unparalleled voyage crafted through the mediums of dark post-punk and arcane heavy metal into the remote landscapes and mystique of the ex-soviet Eastern Bloc, narrated through the eyes of two self-described "backwoods stalkers" who are one with their culture, origins, and place, or what they call the "zone", the Moravian-Silesian region, one of the poorest regions in Czechia, immersed in majestic mountains and valleys with beautiful nature and folk culture contrasted by the vestiges of Gottwald's soviet industrialization of the region. "Nature and Metal" as the duo summarizes their music. Eight songs unraveling visions of soviet industrial ruins, abandoned factories, and dissolving concrete buildings scattered amongst the region's wild nature and consumed far beyond, eastward more into the relics of the old Soviet horizon reclaimed by nature and falling into dusty memory. An encompassment of Eastern European culture condensed into thirty five minutes of dark musical storytelling and spiritual reconnection to the zone. The epic crust punk of Amebix and Killing Joke's apocalyptic industrial post-punk transposed into the crumbling atomic bunkers, abandoned mines, and industrial rusted ruins of the Eastern wilderness. The visions, sounds and legacy of Chernobyl and "Stalker" transfigured into shamanic...

Clan Do Mortos Cicatriz

Tecnicas de morte

Sentient Ruin Laboratories

***The debut album by Brazilian death punk cult Clan Dos Mortos Cicatriz, fifteen cuts, twenty five minutes of sinister and cemeterial raw nekro-hardcore churned from the gutters and graveyards of Curitiba, Brazil. A grim manifesto of total refusal and an undying ode to death and suffering, Técnicas de Morte gives a voice to every slum, prison, mental hospital, war zone, morgue and cemetery on earth, reminding us all that no human state, act or behavior exists outside of suffering, misery and death. Throughout their crepuscular auditory journey the Brazilian cult display an unrivaled craftsmanship in conjuring and condensing the greatest moments of dark punk, hardcore and crust (Black Flag, G.I.S.M., Misfits, Rudimentary Peni), death rock (Christian Death, The Damned) and black metal (Hellhammer, Ildjarn) into their own magistral ritual of transcendence through the celebration death, bending each one of their influences into a masterclass of gangrenous sonic disarray, majestic evocative power, and frenetic emotional chaos. Each one of the fifteen short spells of rage and misery that comprise this unforgettable long player is both a poem, a denunciation, an epitaph, an oath of penitence, and a declaration of war, all strewn across a death-scarred canvas of frantic and stylish guitar licks, pummeling, demented rhythms, and a wailing sermon of spectral, hysterical vocals doused in morbid poetry and ominous existentialism.

Sutekh Hexen

Constellation Ritualistic Altars: Demo(n)s

Sentient Ruin Laboratories

***At last, Sutekh Hexen's earliest tracks from their first three legendary demos (2010's Constellation, Ritualistic and Altars), plus the "Order of Nine" single, get finally mastered (courtesy of death industrial master Grant Richardson) and released on vinyl and CD for the first time ever, consolidated into a singular assault of unrivaled raw black metal/noise mastery and consecrated into a definitive document of unwavering sonic disembodiment. The seven primeval spells here finally reproposed in their definitive form represent the earliest (and for some, favorite) stylistic incarnation of the band, when their horrific output was violently synthesized from a miasmatic vortex of feral raw black metal and scorching harsh noise, immersed into a cryptic plasma of suffocating ambience and wretched incantations. When the sinister Californian back noise sect first emerged in San Francisco around 2010 with these initial soul-disintegrating hexes, their evident greatness instantly reverberated with massive waves throughout the underground, leading to the birth of a revered cult that would dominate American abstract black metal, power ambient and blackened electronics for years to come. These debut recordings not only crowned Sutekh Hexen as absolute masters of their craft, but also established a formula that has remained imitated and definitive beyond purely experimental circles for years, ordaining the infamous black noise style into a coherent new movement that is revered and thriving to this day.

Ritual Ascension

Profanation of the Adamic Covenant

Sentient Ruin Laboratories

***Members of Void Rot, Suffering Hour, and Aberration come together in Ritual Ascension, a horrendous sonic desecration decomposing death metal into a subsonic hallucinatory miasma, and deforming into a hideous disfigurement of its former self. Devoured in dissonance and shrouded in catacombal atmospheres, the band’s horrendous debut full-length monstrosity "Profanation of the Adamic Covenant" takes the masterful death-doom horror of early Temple Nightside and of Grave Upheaval, and transfigures it further into the darkest abysses of surrealism. Not dissimilar to an auditory experimental horror film or to a stripped down version of Portal playing experimental doom, the work traces the grotesque lineaments of a disfigured subterranean hellscape through a masterful use of surrealism, dissonance and compositional abstraction. Slow, crushing, atonal dirges alternate lumbering behemoth-like trudges and enigmatic tectonic upheavals that build an immense ominous aura as the album unfolds a dense, mephitic atmosphere draped in malevolent ambience. The album’s monolithic and agonizing crawl is then violently disrupted by onslaughts of wrathful disturbances, where bursts of demented blasting, tortured screams and mangled fretwork blindside the listener, casting them further down the abyss, into a bottomless sepulcher of confusion and of complete chthonic torment.

Delirant

Thoughteater

Sentient Ruin Laboratories

***The re-emergence of Spain's black metal contortion Délirant from the depths of subconsciousness, reanimates the crawling ascent of mind and soul destruction through the medium of auditory disfigurement. Shrouded in dissonance and swathed in nightmares, "Thoughteater" is a sonic dissection of the abyss conceived by long running black metal recluse D.B. (also of Negativa and Hässlig). This sophomore full-length offering is a surreal descent into the darkest corners of the subconscious, the hypnagogic state, lucid dreaming, and deviant states of perception, achieved through the unorthodox but regal medium of twisting, dissonant black metal. Of the same abominable and shapeshifting breed as that wielded and perfected by acts like Blut Aus Nord, Akhlys, Deathspell Omega, Abigor And Mispyrming to harness superior realms of imaginative destruction and auditory deception, and which has redefined metal music in this peculiar form as an unparalleled vector for all-devouring musical surrealism. The obsession of becoming one with the void is the zenith of the work, its median and most abyssic turning point after the initial descent. Once the absolute depth of interior horror has been reached, the second half of the album unfolds embodied as a cathartic pilgrimage to seek the light through darkness, overcoming fear and doubt, anxiety and panic. In the grand masterplan of the album's deeply intimate and self-explorative nature, light and hope are contemplated, but absolutely crushing and abysmal realms of darkness and suffering must be endured before this re-emergence can be achieved, rendering "Thoughteater" essentially a personal expiation through the penitence...

Horse Butcher

Horse Butcher

Sentient Ruin Laboratories

***Members of praised surrealistic black/death metal deformers Hissing re-metastazie in Horse Butcher, a disfigured onslaught of gore-fucked bestial deathgrind worshipping directly at the altar of Carcass, Archgoat, Disgorge, Impetigo and Pissgrave. Where the imperative is repulsing, Horse Butcher step up to take the concept to its most inevitable and gut wrenching conclusions, bludgeoning the mind into a horrendous aural pulp of absolute violence and depravity. The band members’ roots in avantgarde experimentalism are not set aside here, rather preserved to augment the load of horror and disbelief in belching out these six tracks and twenty minutes of neanderthalian carnage and slaughterhouse madness. Several steps backward in human decency and dignity are needed to authentically perceive and metabolize the scum-fucking level of vile barbarism and inhumanity going into these tracks, but what really transpires is the band’s paradoxically nobel mission of reminding us all of what is unfortunately normal, real and happening everywhere every day in this world. A blindness and indifference against which Horse Butcher have seemingly waged a cryptic and gruesome war, by taking the horrors of the world straight back to the listener and shoving the putrid stench, cruelty and repulsiveness of human actions right back into humanity’s face. Gobble up and suffer fuckers.

Necrotech

Necrotechnology

Sentient Ruin Laboratories

***Brazilian industrial metal cult Necrotech emerge with their first declaration of oppressive audial cyber terrorism. Five songs, twenty one minutes of bludgeoning, crust-infused, industrialized megaton death doom inspired by legends like Godflesh, Swans, Nailbomb, Bolt Thrower, Corrupted, and Deviated Instinct. The crushing debut ominously embodies the specter of the “new third world”, a cyber dystopia rising where rogue technology, greed, militarism, pollution, injustice and deviant industrialism subdue and crush the individual, rendering them empty, helpless, numb, and downcast. New concepts and realities are beaten into the psyche as a new order is imposed, and Necrotech soundtrack this new world slavery with masterful musical vision and an imposing idea of sonic heaviness that not only marvelously reflects the oppressive ruin of capitalist industrialization on our earth and reality with unseen craftsmanship and lucidity, but also reinstates hope and credibility in a legendary sub-genre of extreme music which has in recent times has gone far too forgotten and overlooked.

Terror

Hymni Belli Occultum

Sentient Ruin Laboratories

***Brazilian one-man bestial black/death commando Terror emerges with its first act of ritual terrorism, an eighteen minute EP of gruesome extreme metal warfare weaponized from the cult of Archgoat, Holocausto, Tormentador, Sarcofago, Bestial Warlust and Conqueror. Across these five edicts of third world barbarism the totality of our new world dystopia is glorified and instigated down to its most antihuman and savage traits, with the cult of all crime syndicates, cartels, gangs, slums, warfare, violence, militarism and corruption thrown into an abyss of occultism and esotericism to embody the true lineaments of the modern world antichrist.

Obsoletion

Obsoletion

Sentient Ruin Laboratories

***If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stomping on a human face, forever... These famous words by George Orwell set the tone and resound throughout the debut full-length album from Brazil's dark hardcore punk sect Obsoletion. A grim and foreboding crossover hybridization of blackened hardcore punk and primordial heavy metal drawing influences from bands like Cro-Mags, Integrity, Sheer Terror (from which the band took its name), Mayhem, Celtic Frost, Hellhammer, G.I.S.M. Carnivore and Possessed, and serving as a dismal soundtrack to a dark world that is rapidly deteriorating and just getting worse. The bleak and primeval self-titled assault masterminded by the São Paulo cult conjures shadows of a stark future dystopia and of sinister visions of fear, alienation and paranoia coming from within oppressive militarist technocracies and corrupt surveillance-states aiming for total social enslavement, while the natural world and man's last shreds of sanity revel and toil in a final battle for retribution and survival. The album's lyrics and its staggering retro-futurist art design (by Fernando Giotefeli, Jordy Kuster and José Vinícius) also explore concepts of magic and occultism from the 19th and 20th centuries, transfigured into present and future unrest, making themes such as cyborgism, post-humanism, and surveillance capitalism extremely relevant and ominous. The band's raw and gruesome riffs weaponize these themes and ignite the barricades, engulfing the listener in a maelstrom of tear gas, fire and shrapnel, compounding twenty minutes of wrath and refusal into a violent sonic cyberpunk epic that celebrates the glory...

S.H.I.

4 死 Death

Sentient Ruin Laboratories

***"4 死 Death", the second, game-changing full-length usurpation from Japanese experimental hardcore/metal/industrial supergroup collective S.H.I. (Struggling Harsh Immortals) finally finds it's first ever release on CD and cassette tape via Sentient Ruin after its original 2021 release on vinyl via Relapse Records. Simultaneously re-released along with the equally crushing 2015 debut album "死", the two reissues are a mandatory spiritual mission for Sentient Ruin to reconsecrate two of the most visionary, devastating, and overlooked Japanese hardcore releases of the past decade.  Masterminded by legendary vocalist and performance artist Katsunori "Cherry" Nishida of Japanese hardcore and heavy metal cults Zouo and Danse Macabre, and co-conspired with other long running members of the Japanese experimental punk and metal underground coming from bands like Nashi, Outo, Mobs, The Rude Boys, Gewalt and Rise from the Dead (among others) "死" sees S.H.I. construct a majestic syncretism of violence and experimentation by fusing hardcore punk, heavy metal, noise rock, industrial and psychedelia into an unseen demolition of reality. "死" and the subsequent 2021 Relapse Records-issued full-length followup "4 死 Death" (also now released by Sentient Ruin for the fist time ever on CD and tape formats) represent the transfiguration and perfect continuation of Nishida's enigmatic and uncompromising vision into the future, carrying Zouo's and Danse Macabre's bludgeoning and caustic torch into the experimental unknown as a violent and bleak means of transcendence. The two albums stand stark, enigmatic and imposing as a dark and death-scarred psychedelic trip into Japan's iconic and most deviant underground fringes...

S.H.I.

死 (Death)

Sentient Ruin Laboratories

***死", or "Death", the game-changing debut album from Japanese experimental hardcore / metal / industrial supergroup collective S.H.I. (Struggling Harsh Immortals) finally finds a worldwide release via Sentient Ruin on the long out of print CD and cassette tape formats, a reissue aimed at rendering justice to one of the most visionary, devastating, and overlooked Japanese hardcore releases of the past decade. "死" was initially released back in 2015 as a full-length compilation of the band's first two EPs (2013's self-titled 7" and the 2014 followup "Lucifer Rising" 7", both released by Crust War in Japan) at first appearing on CD format in Japan through Black Lodge Records, then on tape in Australia in 2016 via NGM Records, and finally on picture disc vinyl in the US in 2022 on Anti Remorse. Masterminded by legendary vocalist and performance artist Katsunori "Cherry" Nishida of Japanese hardcore and heavy metal cults Zouo and Danse Macabre, and co-conspired with other long running members of the Japanese experimental punk and metal underground coming from bands like Nashi, Outo, Mobs, The Rude Boys, Gewalt and Rise from the Dead (among others) "死" sees S.H.I. construct a majestic syncretism of violence and experimentation by fusing hardcore punk, heavy metal, noise rock, industrial and psychedelia into an unseen demolition of reality. "死" and the subsequent 2021 Relapse Records-issued full-length followup "4 死 Death" (also now released by Sentient Ruin for the fist time ever on CD and tape formats) represent the transfiguration and perfect continuation of Nishida's...

Clan Dos Mortos Cicatriz

Debil

Sentient Ruin Laboratories

***“Débil”, a glorious and sprawling remastered discography vinyl compilation covering the entire release history of one of Brazil's most definitive dark punk bands, conceived and envisioned side-to-side by Sentient Ruin with the band as an omen of more, and greater, things to come from our partnership. With “Débil” Clan Dos Mortos Cicatriz condense a fifteen-year career influenced by the darkest sides of punk and hardcore as well as by crust, Oi!, goth, deathrock, post-punk, and black metal, into twenty eight-song triumph of crepuscular and cemeterial death-punk majesty. Riddled with a tangible sense of loathing and malaise, these twenty eight tracks encapsulate the history of a band influenced by acts Black Flag, Misfits, G.I.S.M., Void, Christian Death, Rudimentary Peni, and Hellhammer as they revel in the most remitted and destitute declinations of punk, digging deep into the most skeptical underworld of the genre devoid of idealism and dominated instead by pessimism and negativity. Despite being an experimental act with some digital releases exploring side-genres like noise, ambient and avantgarde, this staggering forty-six minute anthology remastered by Will Killingsworth contains all the strictly-punk tracks published by the band so far, covering the band's short 2017 self-titled debut album (which was re-recorded by the band in 2022), the subsequent "Febril" and "Febres Intermitentes" mini-albums from 2018 and 2019 respectively, as well as the recent 2022 "Senil" EP. All the tracks display Clan Dos Mortos Cicatriz's superb death-punk craftsmanship and their strict adherence to the golden eras of all the main styles which influenced...

Miasma Of Occvlt Limbs

Occulta Caerimonia Putridum

Sentient Ruin Laboratories

***The wretched birth of mysterious chilean death-doom enigma Miasma of Occvlt Limbs is an experience to behold, and an abomination entirely unto its own. The band's death-devoured debut full-length album titled "Occvlta Caerimonia Putridvm" was silently digitally released on Bandcamp by sole mastermind Myiasis in early 2023 going virtually ignored, as sadly happens all too often to South American extreme metal, notoriously to the contrary a perpetual source of marvel and wonder when it comes to the most unique and obscure crafts of dark and deviant extreme music. With no exception to this tradition "Occvlta Caerimonia Putridvm" immediately self-identified itself as an unmistakable gem of Chilean extreme metal, unfolding a foul masterclass of utterly horrific and putrescent drone-infused death-doom. A crypt-born abomination of immense subsonic death metal dripping with filth and riddled with decay. Death-obsessed and reeking in putrefaction, "Occvlta Caerimonia Putridvm" sees Miasma of Occvlt Limbs slow down the meters of Incantation's putrid death metal even further, reaching the abysmal dimensions of Disembowelment where space is consequently created by the arbitrary stretching of tempos and the songs turn into a widescreen panoramic canvas primed for experimentation. It is in this state of slow-crawling, agonizing filth that Miasma of Occvlt Limbs reaches the zenith of its death-scared triumph, as visions of rotting sepulchers and decaying remains are conjured with horrendous mastery. And as the listener is subjected to this foul descent into the catacombs, the agony slows further, seemingly never-ending, as light fades from above and the scent of death...

Maudissez

Maudissez

Sentient Ruin Laboratories

***The debut monstrosity from cryptic French blackened nekro-doom and death-sludge heretics Maudissez is a grueling slab of utter nihilism and misanthropy vomited straight from the black abyss of the blindest religious darkness. Nothing is known about this band, aside from this gut-wrenching, tomb-like, subsonic aural profanation against all catholic scum which was recorded live in a church in France sometime in 2023 as a horrendous desecration ritual against the repugnant existence of organized christian clergy. The putrid offering was then self-released by the band digitally on Bandcamp and on cassette, before ending up in an inevitable unholy pact with Sentient Ruin to have the heretical onslaught spread to a wider audience for the first time ever on vinyl format. An implausible crossway of sorts between bands like Corrupted, Hell, Primitive Man, Dragged Into Sunlight and Gnaw Their Tongues, the enigmatic band's peculiar self-described anti-christian blackened sludge/death-doom displays an abysmal atmosphere shrouded in dissonance and a nekro-fucked audio quality reminiscent of raw punk and raw black metal, but with a massive bottom-caving low end, and absolutely smothering and crushing levels of heaviness. An utter abomination conceived as a vessel of encompassing auditory torment for Maudissez to perpetrate their enigmatic mission of appropriately denying, insulting and crushing the most laughable religion of all time through a wretched defilement of absolute, slow-moving sonic nihilism.

Hasslig

Apex Predators

Sentient Ruin Laboratories

***Hässlig's wretched debut full-length disfigurement. A lurid audial assault conceived by enigmatic Spanish recluse D.B. (also mastermind of Negativa and Délirant), Apex Predator vomits forth thirty six minutes of atavistic, demented and necrotic raw black metal/punk filth conjured through the eyes of all criminals, serial killers, and of the absolute scum of this earth. A sickening and cruelty-worshipping audial delirium inspired by iconic punk-infused black metal bands like Bone Awl and Ildjarn, with subtle touches of Oi! punk and post-punk thrown in the mix to metastasize a disorienting and trance-like defilement of triumphant sonic squalor.

Diabolic Oath

Oracular Hexations

Sentient Ruin Laboratories

***The abysmal alchemists of lysergic black/death abominations Diabolic Oath are back with their most warped and devastating work to date. On their new sophomore full-length uncreation Oracular Hexations, the band's staple approach of using completely fretless stringed instruments and a triple simultaneous vocal attack to depredate the listener's psyche, reaches truly majestic and catastrophic forms. Their technically daring and transformative approach to the usually dogmatic "war metal" craft has metastasized as a highly divergent and enigmatic mutation within the genre itself, where the crushing heaviness of the riffs concocted to their unconventional creation has resulted in an alternate reality of bestial black metal unbound with truly unseen and unthinkable auditory monstrosities. Shapeless, formless and free of any boundaries, the six lengthy spells contained within Oracular Hexations assume an almost globulous, chimeric form, appearing horrendous and misshapen to the listener as they morph and four-dimensionally sprawl like a sensorially annihilating mass devouring the psyche. The gnarled and grotesque nature of chords and musical structures created evoke a sense of disorienting and otherworldly disembodiment, becoming a fertile ground for degenerate forms of ritualism and esotericism that weave an unsettling conceptual canvas rife for the propagation of the absurd. Unbound with cryptic and abstruse mutterings about cosmological, multi-dimensional and impossible states of being, Oracular Hexations is an hallucinatory convergence between technical, crushing and flesh-scouring musical genius and truly grotesque forms of composition and storytelling. An indissoluble dualism between primeval destruction and inscrutable bewilderment which will test the psyche and flesh of those subjected...

Aberration

Refracture

Sentient Ruin Laboratories

***Refracture, the process of light deviating as passed through a medium. A similar concept explored by US necromorphed death metal disfiguration Aberration (formed by members of Void Rot, Suffering Hour and Nothingness among others), who finally present their long awaited debut offering "Refracture", a mind-bending, obliterating displacement of mutated dark death metal tonnage set to permanently reshape the lineaments of experimental and underground USDM. But there is no light contemplated in Aberration's contorted audial design, only darkness, and specifically, rather than light, the self, consciousness is passed through a perceptive medium of surrealism, and is refractured into "other" self, the core concept of all abominations. Bands like Antediluvian, Portal, Hissing and Altarage are no new comers to the art of death metal defilement through the ritual of perceptive and deceptive psychic mind wars, but what Aberration have accomplished with "Refracture" defies definitions and ads an ulterior progression to the end of death metal and of music as we know it. With dissonance used as a weapon and compositional surrealism metastasized into a ravenous dissociative medium, "Refracture" tunnels through the listeners brain like a psyche-boring destructive mass, devouring conscience and ravaging synapses through the sheer force of musical absurdity. An anti-reality is achieved through its sideways-moving sprawl and its labyrinthine, shapeshifting pace, with the listener's senses and mind used as helpless hosts in which a mutant parasitism is unleashed into a form of absurd, demented and frenzied perceptive devourment.

Of Darkness

Missa Tridentina

Sentient Ruin Laboratories

***Formed by veteran members of the Spanish extreme metal underground coming from bands like Graveyard, Teitanblood and Emanation (among others), Barcelona's abysmal black funeral doom miserists Of Darkness finally bring us their 2023 light-devouring full-length abomination on vinyl format for the first time ever. A colossal, subsonic deluge of agonizing misery churned from the wretched depths of a lightless abyss, “Missa Tridentina” stands regal and imposing as an absolute beast of 2023 extreme doom, possibly its greatest moment, beautifully adorned with atypical elements of neoclassical composition, chamber music, dark ambient, and ritualistic electronics to underline an impenetrable genesis of divergence. An experimental approach that has exalted the work's suffocating aura of surrealism and which embodies as a sentence of absolute oblivion, condemning the listener to a horrific disembodiment of perpetual aeonian torment. Few bands in recent times have had the vision and skill to harness the same realms of crushing, slow-moving terror we've seen masterfully captured in previous decades by the works of bands like Evoken, Nortt and particularly Tyranny, the former a band whom Of Darkness most resemble due to the unremitting darkness that burdens their aphotic craft. Yet the Spanish abyss-shapers seem to have taken this dismal, subterranean audial nightmare of theirs to an entire new realm of majesty, using experimental and improvisational ornaments assembled from unconventional approaches and instrumentations quite unprecedented for the style, to push their abysmal sonic magma into an even more blighted niche of extremity, rarely - if ever before - witnessed at such...

Ch'ahom

Camazotz Cult

Sentient Ruin Laboratories

***German ritualistic black/death metal warlords Ch'ahom and Sentient Ruin unleash a career-encompassing compilation of the band's entire discography to this day, spanning all the band's long sold out demo tapes from 2016 to 2021, repackaged and remastered by Will Killingsworth at Dead Air Studios into a glorious one-hour long onslaught of total sonic savagery. This vast and comprehensive restored retrospective both anticipates Ch'ahom's new era forthcoming (with the imminent release of their first official EP and first official full-length album which will follow shortly thereafter) and revisits the origins and existence so far of one of the most barbaric and animalistic entities to have appeared in the German extreme metal underground in recent years. The eighteen bludgeoning tracks here presented show us the band developing their sound and concept over a five-year span of cryptic obscurity, reworking the legendary warcraft of bestial black/death/grind legends like Beherit, Sadogoat, Blasphemy, Sarcófago and Proclamation into an occult and esoteric canvas exploring exotic ancient war cults and death rituals from pre-Columbian South and Central America. The end result is a gruesome terrorscape in which ancient visions of violence, ritualism, mysticism and bloodshed are joined into a ruthless aural assault of total black/death chaos and destruction. The feral aura and lawless primitivism seen on these tracks is further exalted by a raw and blown out production quality which has given a unique and appropriate character to the music through a methodic approach clearly descended from a punk and DIY culture which has vastly enhanced and...

Altarage

Nihil

Sentient Ruin Laboratories

Suffocate in the void that Altarage brings forth. Reality will suffer. Nothing can crawl away from the open mouth of "Nihl". In 2016 Spain's Altarage changed the face of death metal with a watershed moment that marked an inexorable point of no return, and Sentient Ruin was there to tell this story through release of the band's debut demo the year prior and of this beast on cassette tape format the following year. With its sheer tonnage and immensity, "Nihl" appeared instantly as a masterpiece that would pave the way to a new era of death metal and to a new way of conceiving and interpreting the notion of absolute heaviness. While the game-changing repercussions and influence this monster has had on extreme metal may still require some years to be fully assessed and understood, still nothing in the present can challenge what Altarage have accomplished and constructed within the omnipotency of "Nihl". Before "Nihl" dissonant, abstract, atmospheric extreme metal, and traditional riff-heavy death metal still lived two clearly defined, separated existences traveling on parallel trajectories which rarely touched. "Nihl" created a visionary and daring perturbation in this balance. A foreboding disturbance which sent the course of events on an entire new path, causing the two styles to inexorably converge unto another creating a new lineage of hyper-evolved death metal that conjoined the best of both worlds and triggered the birth of a new death metal world entirely its own. A world in which the notions of immensity, surrealism, and...

Chaos Echoes

Tone of Things to Come

Sentient Ruin Laboratories

***The ten year anniversary of Chaos Echœs' first ever release, celebrated as a limited edition vinyl reissue with enhanced artwork to homage and consecrate the origin of an unforgettable legacy that will never fade our memory's reach. With 2012's "Tone of Things to Come" Chaos Echœs instantly established themselves as the very future of underground extreme metal, elaborating a formula rooted in arcane sepulchral dark death metal characterized by lengthy instrumentals and innovative detours deep into remote areas of history, art, culture and lore that would dictate the rhythm and tempo of a staggering metamorphosis of ascension. Still rooted in the legacy of Incantation, Morbid Angel, and Immolation, at its inception "Tone of Things to Come" had however already revealed widespread mutations in the fabric of conventional extreme metal and opened the eye of transformation, with its omniscient glare gazing through a spectral veil concealing abhorrent forms of ritualism and exploration within it. Enigmatic minimalisms crafted from unconventional instrumentations and improvisational free-flowing jam sessions were an already well established means of transcendence and transmutation within this earliest form of the band, and "Tone of Things to Come"'s oracular load of experimentation was already foreboding musical changes in consciousness and perception on a massive scale lurking not too far away on the horizon. A would-be future for extreme metal which we all now too-well know, love, and will forever miss. There will never again be an entity quite like Chaos Echœs, one capable of opening worlds within the listener and which...

Junta

Junta

Sentient Ruin Laboratories

***Raw hardcore punk insurgents Junta arise from the concrete purgatory of New York City with their pulverizing debut self-titled full-length offering, a twenty-minute incursion of blistering upheaval and caustic retaliation. This dark document of crystalline urban terror introduces the NYC four-piece at the height of their rage as they emanate a grim edict against imperialism, genocide, capitalism and social injustice. Junta's uncompromising and militant vision has been known for years in New York City, frequently manifesting with benefit shows across the city aimed at the empowerment and defense of the city's vibrant multicultural underground to which they belong and have committed unconditional militancy. The self-titled eleven-track weapon of social unrest and abject refusal represents the band's sense of belonging and commitment to a social fabric torn by segregation and injustice and their strenuous combat against powers much larger than themselves which has resulted in a bleak manifesto of cultural warfare. The work encompasses the most bitter aspects of idealism and realism, with this ambivalent concept animating a raw onslaught of blown out, dissonant hardcore aggression interwoven with passages of poetry and spoken word that define and exalt an existence spent at the forefront of struggle and in a perpetual fight for enlightenment and retribution.

Maurda

Cultus Brachypter

Sentient Ruin Laboratories

***Brachyptery, the condition in insects of having vestigial wings and having lost the capacity of flight. This is the cult of the dewinged, of the downcast and of the condemned. Now remastered (courtesy of Will Killingsworth at Dead Air Studios) and consecrated through its first ever vinyl edition and a graphic facelift, Maurda's catastrophic second short player "Cultus Brachypter" went largely ignored upon its original 2022 self-release, but its obscurity can be solely attributed to the hermetic extremism that defines it. In reality, a world is contained within these sixteen minutes and six movements of absolute eschaton. A world so impenetrable it takes complete sacrifice to enter it. With its ruinous sensorial assault, "Cultus Brachypter" initially evokes the war-torn bestial insanity of bands like Pseudogod or Teitanblood, but as the onslaught progresses the listener soon realizes they are being drawn into a desolate, void-like inner world of dehumanized alienation. The grim specter of DSBM rears its head as the minutes pass and the sense of misery and isolation becomes suffocating and reaches its inevitable consequences and conclusions. This form of enigmatic, inward-vanquishing extreme metal appears inscrutable in its uncommunicative isolationism, and can be solely superficially interpreted as an unprecedented fusion of war metal and depressive black metal in which feelings of dread, melancholy and self-loathing are taken to their extremes and weaponized into an abstract white-wall representation of absolute nihilism and self-destruction that ultimately evokes the grim soul-tearing lineaments of pure noise. Limited edition silkscreened single-sided black vinyl inside a...

Aberration / Diabolic Oath

Divinations

Sentient Ruin Laboratories

***In anticipation to greater, more horrific things to come in the new year, we proudly bring you the Divinations split 7” between Aberration and Diabolic Oath, two rising forces of surrealistic extreme metal darkness. This two-song declaration of war upon human psyche showcases the two US-based sorcerers of omnipotent aural terror in complete command of control of their respective crafts as they summon each their own staple idealization of humongous and hallucinatory black/death deformations. Divinations serves as a precursor and taste to what's to come, namely the spring 2024 release of the bands’ two new full length albums, Aberration’s colossal Refracture, and Diabolic Oath’s still secretive but completed second full length abomination.

Raw War

Total Raw War

Sentient Ruin Laboratories

***Victoria BC's Raw War were a lawless blown out nuclear crust assault that obliterated ears from 2009 to 2013. During that time the band decimated stages and established widespread chaos all over the Pacific Northwest with pulverizing live sets and a sound made of pure apocalyptic terror doused in the ashes of humanity's end. Influenced by '80s and '90s UK D-beat and anarcho-punk bands like Doom and Discharge as well as by early Scandinavian crust bands like Anti Cimex and Totalitär, Raw War soon established widespread terror in their native British Columbia region, bringing their derailing and off the chain assault of primitive, ear-splitting noise-punk cacophony to its inevitable end and extreme conclusions. An unnamed full-length album and 7" EP tentatively tiled Raw Terror were recorded but never saw the light. Marred by debauchery, lineup instability and their very nature as an entity that far too soon had decided to explode in a shockwave rather than quietly fade away, Raw War disbanded sometime around 2013 leaving a thirty-five minute unforgiving, primeval, bulldozing, crustcore onslaught unreleased and completely unheard of for ten long years. Fast forward to 2023, and Sentient Ruin stepped in to honor the legacy and work of one of BC's most uncompromising and visceral hardcore crust bands by finishing the work and releasing the entirety of the band's long-unreleased material (the untitled full-length album and the Raw Terror EP) as the comprehensive 12" vinyl/digital full-length release Total Raw War. Long live the Raw War. Long live TOTAL. RAW....

Abyssal Rift

Extirpation Dirge

Sentient Ruin Laboratories

***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.

Sulfuric Hatred

s/t

Sentient Ruin Laboratories

***The debut self-titled album by emerging East Coast chaos-mongering warnoise terrorists Sulfuric Hatred (formed by vocalist Alexander Jones of Undeath, guitarist / bassist Liam McMahon of Vile Ritual, and Sam Shereck of Stabbed, Exsanguinated, Bowel Erosion, Blame God, ex-Pink Mass, ex-Reeking Aura etc.) brings a new meaning and purpose to the concept of dehumanizing music and of its forced transmutation into a weapon. Bringing the listener to their knees to surrender, succumb and dissolve before the omnipotency and immensity of absolute armageddon, across its eleven tracks and thirty four minutes of musical terrorism, Sulfuric Hatred experiment on human senses the limits and effects of complete audial insanity. Black metal, grindcore, and death metal in this context can be used as nothing more than simplistic references for the sake of generalization, as the actual and true fabric really materializing this abomination is something that can hardly be associated to music and which is actually closer to pure noise, to other forms of experimental sensorial warfare or to abstract idealizations of pure terror. An underlying contradiction that can not be overlooked defines this senseless display of audial savagery: where in most bands and subgenera of extreme music an antihuman aspect is sought out musically, in the case of Sulfuric Hatred, the formula of bass, guitar, drums and vocals is actually the last human thing standing. The incessant carpet-bombing blasting, the ear-splitting screams, and the mangled, chaotic guitar carnage, in the chaos-torn world of Sulfuric Hatred are nothing but the last shred of...

Ch'ahom

Knots of Abhorrence

Sentient Ruin Laboratories

***Hallucinatory prog-infested bestial black/death metal horde Ch'ahom unchain absolute chaos-wielding sorcery with their debut full-length album Knots of Abhorrence, a triumphant arrival point of sorts testifying a long and transformative sonic journey started almost a decade ago, and now finally reaching its pinnacle and absolute consecration. Having started as far back as 2015 and existed for many years as a raw, bestial obscure war cult following in the steps of bands like Sadogoat, Blasphemy, Beherit, and Proclamation, in recent times Ch'ahom have been undergoing an expansive metamorphosis of their sound and songwriting, now juxtaposing a crisp and dense production quality to their primeval terrorscape, that exalts new elements incorporated from early 90's technical death metal in the vein of Timeghoul and Demilich, as well as from 70's UK prog influences derived from the band's peculiar interest in acts like Yes, Camel and Genesis. Ch'ahom's long running mesoamerican concept about pre-columbian rituals and death cults has also conversely benefitted from this recent sonic transfiguration, with their staple tribal contaminations and ornamental interludes (written and performed by the members themselves with traditional instruments) now assuming a whole new presence against the backdrop of the album's devastating scope and vision. Across it's sprawling forty-plus minutes and five dismal tracks, Knots of Abhorrence unfolds a pure masterclass of rare violence, atmosphere and intensity, carrying the listener across a gruesome wormhole and into another dimension of history's past where violence, carnage, bloodshed, magic and ritualism incarnate the sum of mankind's biggest and most ancestral fears....