Folie à deux by EN NIHIL + MITH-XX

An intense, deep collaboration between the black industrial of old-school creepzone pilot En Nihil (aka Adam Fritz) and the hardcore power electronics of Quebecois entity Mith-XX, who also runs the excellent Flesh Prison imprint. Fritz has been making skin crawl since 1994, his brand of dark noise even coming up against the edges of extreme metal at times (his album on cult black/death label Red Stream, his collaboration with the experimental blackened sludge outfit Crowhurst from 2014, etc.), and this release has been a long time coming - I've been wanting to release En Nihil's work for ages, but was always stymied by some issue or another on my end. Mith-XX is a more recent creation, but has been gradually building a catalog of scathing harsh electronic titles that include recent collaborations with noise artists Richard Ramirez and Exome. This collab is a terrific first release on the label from either artist, who meet each other with personal demons in tow, and weave their shared experiences together into two different but equally nightmarish and acidic monoliths of ambient sound and hellish noise. The title Folie à deux is very deliberately selected for this project; its roots in the study of shared psychoses and hallucinatory states "transmitted" between individuals forming a kind of context for how the two artists engage together. Moving between qualities of "black ambient", "power electronics", and "blackened noise", the two sides of Folie accomplish an effective contrast in tone and texture, producing a fully collaborative vision from both.

The first side is "Eulogies and Apparitions", featuring En Nihil, with Mith-XX contributing. It opens with something akin to the roar of some gargantuan subterranean reptile-god stirred from its slumber, huge swells of monstrous distortion surging and sweeping upwards from a vast subsurface void. A ponderous, heavy percussive rhythm climbs out of the blackness, instituting a crushing throb that moves slow motion through these ongoing gusts of horrific cavernous roar and rumble. Bass-like drones and splinters of rusted feedback tentacle out of this blighted black industrial dirge, but give over to sudden ascents into glowing minimal ambience and distant thunderous rumblings, like a severe weather system abruptly moving overhead. Amid this, weird metallic squeals and demonic chattering slip in and out of the almost impenetrable shadows that cloud the background of the mix, and once again, En Nihil guides this into lightless, ethereal drift punctuated by huge slow-motion percussive boom, surrounded by a gaseous gloom that seems to obscure some kind of ungodly ecosystem. I think that Mith-XX's additions to this ten minute ambient nightmare are found in the streaks and cuts made by the higher frequency sounds and those chilling background noises, but in any event, the two artists meld their ideas together seamlessly.

Over on the flipside they dos the opposite, with "Prayer and Scrutiny" spearheaded by Mith-XX, and En Nihil injecting his charred sonics into the mix. This skews more towards the malignant power electronics that I've heard in Mith-XX's other work, and this track evolves / deforms into something rather different from the preceding side. It has that same pulsating momentum, but that looping, distorted pulse is buried underneath a thick cloud of searing synthesizer drones, insectile buzzing, and even some electronic elements that verge on space-rock whoosh that is stripped out and stirred into this evil-sounding mélange of low-frequency heaviness, penetrating high-end electronic shriek, and diseased dronescapes. These elements shift around over the course of the track, En Nihil holding down what I'm assuming is that black-rust technological crush while Mith-XX strafes the upper layers with an assortment of uber-abrasive circuit-burn; there are no vocals, at least none that I can perceive, but it's even more acrid and anxiety-invoking than the first half, ultimately dropping off into a sulfuric sputtering that leads to an eternal tension. Really unsettling stuff, even by their respective standards.

The cassette features minimalist, elegant art and text, and is limited to one hundred copies. Includes a digital download code.

Crucial Blast is an independent underground label, online shop, and small press specializing in cutting edge, weird, and experimental heavy music and related cultural artifacts, with a particular focus on blackened avant-metal, nihilistic noise/industrial, dark ambiance, infernal psychedelia, hardcore improv/free-jazz, and experimental horror film / literature.

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