Crucial Blast announces the upcoming Springtime release of Pennhurst / Xesse, an album featuring two rare out-of-print recordings from obscure black/industrial metal collective, T.O.M.B.
The name T.O.M.B. is the acronym created from "Total Occultic Mechanical Blasphemy," perhaps the most appropriate shorthand summation of what horrific audiotorture this disparaging act supplies. Based mostly out of the Philadelphia area, with satellite members scattered abroad, and bearing residents of occult folk/noise band Dreadlords, this collective has infiltrated the underground with demos and full releases since the early 2000s. On April 15, 2014, Crucial Blast will officially disbursePennhurst / Xesse, a new collection of rare material from the shadowy outfit, featuring their ultra-limited Pennhurst album and the tracks from the one-sided Xesse 12" previously released on Prison Tatt. Featuring all new artwork and presented in a six-panel digipack, this full-length delivers over an hour's worth of the band's bizarre brand of vile electro-acoustic noisescapes, oppressive industrial drift and ghoulish vocalizations seemingly dredged up from the dank black bowels of some long-abandoned mausoleum.
Originally released in 2009 as an extremely limited CDR on Esto Perpetua Records, Pennhurstfeatures 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", droneological works. That's not to say that this is any less fearsome than the preceding tracks, though. This EP opens with a chorus of wailing voices, the sounds of abject suffering echoing and reverberating within some lightless underground crypt. A deep distant rumbling presence can be heard, just barely perceptible; it's quickly overcome by heavy waves of harsh crackling noise and fuzz that slowly sweep in and recede, washing away those screams of agony and leaving behind a residue of minimal, empty blackness in their place. The recording constantly shifts 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 shifting 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.
Pennhurst / Xesse Track Listing:
1. Primevil Sorcery
2. Maz Ov Tha Damd
3. Goetic Xaos
4. Audi Alteram Partem
5. Penn Hurst
6. Xesse
7. Silence Is Suffering
8. Within The Circle Of Bones
9. The Inhuman Condition
10. Luciferian Homage
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