LAY, JOSH / CROWN OF BONE
This Is A Tourniquet Of The Light, The Black Obituary CDR (Obfuscated Records) 9.00
This Is A Tourniquet... showcases two of Crucial Blast's favorite current artists from the "black noise" realm, who demonstrate how useless that term tends to be when trying to describe the breadth of aural horror on this disc. Both artists go in very different directions with their sound, but both end up in the same sulfurous pit.
Josh Lay's low-fidelity blackpsych nightmare "A Shroud Of Ice & Bird Feathers" begins with nocturnal forest chatter and the steady whine of some sort of engine, then slowly spirals out into deep midnight weirdness as strange vocal sounds and circular drones start to stack up, the distant chitter of crickets and other woodland life begins to sing in earnest, and something monstrous struggles to gain control over an increasingly disobedient oscillator tone. For more than twenty minutes, Lay drags you through this hallucinogenic soundscape, his gnarled witch-grunts leading the way through tangles of lysergic computer slime, creepy music box melodies, lengthy pulsating drones, and fetid pools of filthy black ambiance. Most of it sounds like an extremely disturbed/drug-addled soundtrack, like this weird cross between an old power electronics tape and an experimental score for an early 70s French horror film. I had to play this one twice before I even got to the Crown Of Bone side of the disc.
When you do get to the Crown Of Bone track (the twenty five minute pain-saga "Tormented In A Gouge Of Razors"), the haunted, black forest ambiance of Josh Lay's music is swallowed up by a horrific wall of noise that only grows more savage and destructive the further in you get. The sound is recognizable if you've been listening to Demonologists, as Crown of Bone is the new band from former Demonologist Dustin R. At first it takes the shape of a roiling wall of distortion, a rushing avalanche roar of harsh noise, but then all of a sudden the bestial, death metal style vocals come raging out of the skuzz, and it suddenly kicks into a monstrous assault of extreme distorted HNW with those fearsome vocals plunging and diving through the roaring noise. Brutal blackened noise that works hard to try to achieve the sound of Hell itself. The piece isn't pure roar, though. It occasionally fades into calmer stretches of rumbling ambiance and factory noise, bursts of percussive chaos thundering over sheets of metallic thrum, strange wailing noises in the distance, but these always lead back to the the black blasting distortion, a maelstrom of bone-crushing formless distortion that sucks everything into it's gaping maw.
It's a small-run CDR released in a pressing of a mere one hundred copies, but it's pro-manufactured and looks top notch. A real brain-mangler of a black noise album...
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