PHANTOM - Evil Electro Cyberpunk Dark Techno Industrial Dark Electro Music Mix

I've yet to hear a release from Malignant that I didn't like. If you are a fan of black industrial, dark ambience, the most demonic extreme of power electronics, there is at least a handful of albums that this label has released that you will fall in love with. Label boss Jason Mantis has an impeccable ear for high-quality, evocative electronic and industrial music (as well as an eye that seems to be perpetually peering into the abyss), not to mention one of the best visual aesthetics of any industrial/noise label currently going. Every one of Malignant's releases look amazing, most packaged in sumptuously designed digipacks, offering an elegance even to such slabs of abject filth as the grinding black industrial sludge of Sewer Goddess, or the dystopian junkyard dirge-crush of Sektor 304, or the midnight graveyard visions of Funerary Call. Can you tell that I'm a fan? Check out the Malignant releases below for my feature on the label for more word-spew on this fantastic label.

PHANTOM - Evil Electro Cyberpunk Dark Techno Industrial Dark Electro Music Mix

A stunning new album of orchestral doom from this Slovakian duo. Although, when I say "doom", I'm not talking about doom metal...rather, Phragments bring together slow, ponderous tribal drums, dark orchestral strings, and malevolent dark ambience to create a sort of ominous industrial chamber-doom for Earth Shall Not Cover Their Blood, and boy is this album a downer. If the music wasn't grim enough, the vocals (when they appear) are dark and dramatic and totally forlorn, and the lyrics deal in hopeless endtime visions of a ruined earth burnt black by humanity. Grim and despondant but also imbued with an ashen grandeur and an epic heaviness that makes this something that fans of more adventurous downer-crush should investigate. The opening title track blends the drifting Lustmord-like drones with distant war-drums and deep resonant cellos and gongs for an eight minute instrumental, and when the drums start to rise up towards the end, it's as if you're hearing some dark orchestra piece performing with the guys in Neurosis hammering out a wall of booming tribal percussion. It's not until the second track "Over Deadlands" that the vocals appear, a deep male voice crooning over a sinister loop of violins and crushing tribal drums and deep bass, like Swans performing a black magic ritual. The music drops out in the middle and leaves behind just a dark droning synth line, but then kicks back in, heavier and distorted, the vocals now alternating a blackened distorted rasp with the clear deep singing...creepy, heavy stuff. The rest of the album follows suit, moving from almost purely ambient passages of dark symphonic drone and grim soundtrack-like strings ("As Hope Turns To Ashes"), sorrowful industrial dirge ("The Fogs Have Risen", "Chant Of The Forsaken", The Return"), and hellish, doom-laden dread punctuated with monstrous, almost black metallish vocals (""The Kin Of Cain"), the sound always dark, always somber, always centered around minimal industrial throb, surges of powerful tribal drumming and thunderous tympani, and the murky atmospheric wash of those orchestral strings, deep groaning brass, and somber drones. Imagine Lustmord combined with Amber Asylum and Test Dept, Swans crossed with In Slaughter Natives, a doom-filled apocalyptic chamber music, dark and beautiful and chilling... fans of that recent Aghast reissue will probably dig this, as well as those into the dark martial industrial of Nordvargr's Toroidh project. Comes in a six panel digipack.

Megaptera are probably the one band that the "Death Industrial" tag fits best. Heavier than Brighter Death Now, Atrax Morgue or any of the other bands that fell under the banner of Death Industrial, this seminal Swedish project created some of the most crushing electronic music ever during it's heyday, and this 2007 collection released by the excellent Baltimore-based label and distributor Malignant showcases some of the most flattening tracks that Megaptera ever recorded. This disc is the last official release from the band since it decided to cease operations in 2006, and it's a collection of rare material culled from demo versions, studio outtakes, and tracks from the Zyklon B, Beating the Meat, Slaughter Age 95, The Book ov Shadowz, and Death Odors II compilations. The music represented here is unifyingly nightmarish and creepy, ranging from menacing dronescapes to pulverizing machine dirges. The more rhythmic pieces make for some of the heaviest industrial music you'll ever hear..."Disoriented" rides a monstrous percussive loop over slabs of subterranean black ambience and grim horror synths, and "The Passage" sounds like a a doomdirge version of the Terminator original sound track. The track "Lurking Fear" is the prime skullcrusher on this disc, however; starting out as a series of looped layers of chittering, grating machine noise and pulsating foghorn tones, the piece slowly builds in density as additional machine rhythms and noise loops and bleak drones stack up, until finally a crushing drum machine beat shows up halfway through, massive and martial, a brutal doom march stomping through a nightmare world of living machinery. Imagine Godflesh's Streetcleaner combined with some noisy, loop-based ambient noise...freaking pulverizing. This is ultra-dark, nihilistic music, the repetitious sound of late-20th century factory machinery forged into apocalyptic dirge. Staring Back At You is limited to 800 copies and comes in a full-color, six panel digipack, remastered by Magnus Sundstrom and with additional sound "boosting" by Thomas Garrison from the power electronics project Control.

You know the scenes in John Carpenter's Prince Of Darkness when the university students, trapped in the church while studying the vial of Satanic fluid in the basment, suddenly begin to experience dreams that turn out to be robotic transmissions from a post-Satan future? Well, The Church Of Dead Girls sounds like what those transmissions would have resembled if they had actually been shortwave love letters from some psychotic demonic presence. Impenetrably dark and grim, this double album from 2002 showcases two full discs of what NTT mastermind Leech has coined "Power Romance", a blending of harsh, blackened drone noise and claustrophobic ambience. The track titles all point to a seriously disturbed sociopathic sexuality ("The Gates Of Hell Open To Reveal Shiny White Skin...", "Your Womb Became The Receptacle Of All My Self Loathing", and "I Feel Ready to Perpetrate Wanton, Heinous Acts of Rape and Murder Upon Happy Lovers and the Population at Large..."...Jesus!), and the often crushing, always grisly black-ambient dronescapes create a suffocating delirium somewhere in between Prurient's recent deathwaves, electronic horror movie scores from the 80's, and the stygian loops of Melek-Tha. Much of the source material for these twenty tracks were provided by some heavy names in the black/industrial scene (Abfall, Bullethead, Egosplint, Fragment King, Loveissacrifice, Never Presence Forever, Nothing, and Steel Hook Prostheses), but you'd never know it without reading the liner notes. Leech has manipulated every bit of corroded, diseased noise into new, dreadful shapes. Tracks move from scorching, crunchy distortion that could pass for massively distorted guitars trapped in an endless delay system, to some really fucking creepy ambience with buried slasher movie samples and angelic female vocals swirling deep down in the mix. So bleak and heavy and atmospheric, this is might be the grimmest release on a label that already focuses on the grimmest, darkest ambient/industrial out there. Listen to this in the dark at your own risk.

Avatars marks the collaboration between Swedish black ambient master Nordvargr and Leech from Navicon Tortue Technologies, working together under the name Koerperwelten. The various works of Nordvargr have been lauded around C-Blast for some time now (MZ.412, Folkstorm, Goatvargr, Vargr, Toroidh, etc.), and I've become a big fan of the blackened, misanthropic industrial/electronics of Navicon Torture Technologies lately, so this project was highly anticipated over here. Koerperwelten actually appeared once before on the Enter Nordvargr compilation on Old Europa Cafe, but I haven't had a chance to pick that double disc set up yet. This full length lives up to my expectations though, and it delivers an evil sado-drone atack that is as perfect a blend of the two artists styles as I could've hoped for, with some additional surprises. On Avatars, we get six lengthy tracks of highly repetitive electronic dronescapes that blend together elements of rhythmic power noise and black ambience into sprawling, heavily rhythmic noisescapes, with swirling black waves of crunchy corrosive distortion and crackling electricty sparking and smoking over buzzing metallic drones and seething, massive bottom-heavy percussive loops. The dronier sections on tracks like "The Sun Destroyers" sound alot like NTT's black ambient material, but then you get "The Forces Of Chastity Are Massing Once Again", which drapes acidic sheets of noise and distortion over a brutally heavy rhythm and turns into something that sounds like a hyper-distorted Techno Animal track. On "Oestrus", shuddering subsonic pulses ripple out beneath modulated distorted sinewaves, and "My Heart Pumps Piss For You" combines thunderous peals of tympani drums and eerie electronic chirping and insectile sounds, before revealing haunting chorale voices and submerged grinding machinery and finally transforming into a majestic metallic dronescape filled with a symphony of distorted synths all roaring on the same wavering note. The rest of the album explores similiar territory, vast fields of droning buzzsaw ambience, sheets of blown out, blasted 8-bit drone, soundtrack synths and blackened krautrock throb, filtered through a highly malevolent, murderous hatefulness. The packaging for this is, um, pretty noteable too, and one printer apparently refused to print the 6-panel digipacks that this comes in due to the crude, explicit drawings by Jonathan Canady (Angel Of Decay, Deathpile) that depict group sex, decapitation and evisceration. This looks like an old death metal demo scrawled with adolescent images of sexualized ultraviolence, and it fits the debauched industrial filth that these guys have smeared all over this album. 041b061a72