Ast Voldur
Psychoacoustic Trauma Asylum
6.7
This could someday grow up to be the kind of annihilation strike that I wanted The Amenta's last bomb to be, but for today it's just an EP consisting of two songs, three ambi-industrial soundscapes, and twenty minutes, so it's hard to gauge right now the size of the fallout later, but at least they've got me imagining a time, probably far off, but a period of time nonetheless. You'd expect music made by two dudes who met in an Australian government health facility who cite Aborym, Mayhem, and the haze of Axis Of Perdition as bands that they dig, to sound like this. Plain and simple. It's an unpolished, hungry little effort with an absence of production luxury that's all the more for it. The lack of a high gloss (while in the company of low-tech programming) gives their Blade Runner black metal an authenticity, especially when taking on the blips and bleeps sans the actual "metal," as heard in the sci-fi filmic qualities of "Step To Your Death With A Smile," that could easily have been pleathery B-cinema soundtrack fare had it not actually sounded like funded late 80s/early 90s android-on-human chase scene music; no obnoxious "techno", just vehicular beats riding the fine line. When it comes to the two compositions that involve strings and spit aside their synthetic, I'm catching a wiff of Godflesh mixed in with the heavier stink of something Aborym, which brings to mind the odor of something Akercocke. This is a good thing. If they continue to write in the tradition of their own "Mercurial," which capsizes melody with wave upon wave of sporadic bursts of blasts and tremolo picking, eaten whole by the fierce face of synths and sewage, then the other cyber-gangs might, maybe, eventually have to get stepped to on their own turf.
