This week, Crucial Blast Records will deploy the Pennhurst / Xesse CD, encapsulating two entire obscure recordings from black/occult/industrial collective, Total Occultic Mechanical Blasphemy, a.k.a. T.O.M.B.
Pennhurst / Xesse unites two out-of-print recordings from Philadelphia-area’s T.O.M.B., a sect which specializes in creating transcendental and disparaging ritualistic noise compositions and purely horrifying soundscapes, bearing residents of occult folk/noise band, Dreadlords (Not Just Religious Music), and satellite members from parts unknown. Pennhurst / Xesse paroles over an hour of nightmarish harshness and ethereal disturbances, much of which was captured in abandoned mental facilities and prisons; Devotees to the arts of Nekrasov, Gnaw Their Tongues, Nordvargr, Melek Tha, Wormsblood, Wolfskin and other gruesome worship of harsh, sonic, sound manipulation, come, worship.
Originally released in 2009 as an extremely limited CDR, Pennhurst features five tracks of abysmal necro-industrial filth, formed from source material T.O.M.B. recorded at the notorious Pennhurst State and Norristown State Hospitals — two Philadelphia-area mental asylums that have boasted disturbing legacies of abuse and experimentation in the past. As with their other releases, this centers around nightmarish industrial soundscapes built from the band’s blighted blackened electronics and creepy field recordings, the tracks often erupting into blasts of suffocating hellish noise. The whole thing adds up to one of T.O.M.B.‘s most intense blasts of sonic terror. The other half features Xesse, one of the band’s more “ambient” works, constantly shifting between placid lifeless drones and strange echoing graveyard rituals and the swells of hallucinatory heaviness, eventually giving way to some seriously mind-melting cosmic drift towards the end. The voices shift from blasphemous ranting to garbled unknown tongues as it drifts out into an abyss of swirling dub effects, delicate chiming tones, and rhythmic metal pounding that finally erupts into frantic percussive chaos, the thunder of hammers on metal shaking the chthonic depths, then fading into silence. Order physical and digital manifestations of this output HERE.
These two albums are an insane journey into hellish, dark noise and ritualistic reverberations. If you areinto any kind of blackened, vicious susurrations, this … band is exactly what you seek. Many bands tend to push that they are “THE MOST BRUTALS” or “Constantly pushing the metal envelope”, but they are very wrong! This band take sonic excess and puts it straight through a grinder, and adds screaming madness to the pulsating pile that was intelligible noise. Must have for discerning audiophiles!
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