A murderous three-way split that is initially notable for featuring the newer solo noise projects from two of the members of Gallhammer. You might remember that all-girl Japanese band from the 2000s, where they became some sort of underground phenomenon, fawned over by a thousand metalhead fanboys who collectively drooled all over the trio's unique brand of primitive blackened scum-metal that was in essence a Hellhammer tribute band. Now, that might sound a little snarky, but believe me, I was just as obsessed with Gallhammer as everyone else was. Those albums they put out on Peaceville were superb slabs of low-fi, grotesque metal-punk, and I picked up the whole bunch before the band rather unceremoniously broke up in 2013. I knew that lead singer and bassist Vivian Slaughter (aka Eri Isaka) was involved in some more abstract, experimental projects with her partner Sven Erik Kristiansen, or Maniac as he is better known, the former vocalist for Norwegian black metallers Mayhem. Together, they'd put together some terrifically creepy music with projects like Sehnsucht. But I didn't know that Isaka had also taken on the mantle of Viviankrist, producing a ton of solo electronic noise over the past decade, and really going into overdrive around the time of the Covid pandemic. I'm still catching up with all of that stuff that she's released. One of the first titles that I picked up was this disc from Phage Tapes, which teams up Viviankrist with her former Gallhammer bandmate Risa Reaper and her own noise project, as well as K2, Kusafuka Kimihide's longrunning junknoise harsh electronic producer who has been one of my all-time favorite Japanese noise artists of the past four decades. He is actually the person who supervised this entire release. I love this guy.

Per the liner notes, Kimihide and the other musicians all agreed to a specific limited palette of instruments and effects, with each artist creating around twenty minutes of work for this full-length; the inlay presents a kind of minute manifesto that they used as the guidelines for the production of this nine-track compendium. The track listing alternates the artists: Viviankrist's "Bleached Sun" kicks off with a cosmic blast of crushingly heavy psychedelic industrial, bringing together a distorted slow-motion tempo with expulsions of squealing, seething noise, dropping massive chunks of ultra-distorted crush, and unleashing an ocean of black lava that oozes beneath all of the electronic mayhem. This first track is awesome, sounding a bit like what I would expect a collaboration between Dissecting Table and Bastard Noise would pan out. That background thud plows through all of the crippling electronic chaos that Vivian throws at it, with huge bass drops and flamethrower-eruptions of mega-blown-out circuit-shred everywhere. There's also a bit of variety here. The other tracks "Iteration Tension" , "Common Hectic Basis", and "Awake Asleep" are just as creepy and thorny, her noisescapes jutting barbed spikes and crashing metal-loops, but sometimes coming together into berserk bleep-structures like that of a ancient mainframe computer turned artificial DJ, often moving into atmospheric, mesmerizing directions. There's even a couple of spots where Vivian evokes strange synth-sigils in a fevered atonality that feels like the work of members of the Berlin School collectively suffering from traumatic head injuries. Frequently forming into strange fractal spirals that spin all the way down into the abyss.

The Risaripa material is distinctly different, functioning on more of an older industrial music level, like an amplified, roid-raging take on early Grey Wolves or Dead Body Love. But there's also a severely demented "black metal"-esque wretchedness that shows up early on. Like her first piece "Warning", which batters you with ceaseless distorted rumble, swirling effects-pedal mayhem, and waves of excruciatingly heavy hiss, but then suddenly Risa pops up in the middle of the pounding rhythms and looping skree, delivering her batshit-crazy vocal attack as she gibbers and screeches and mutters like a roving psychotic amid the clanging, bone-crunching machine-pummel. A miasma of raw force, exposed gristle, creaking gears, and the leathery fluttering wings of something possibly demonic. That first one is killer, evoking the heaviest perpetrators of vintage 80's industrial music alongside extreme psychedelic noise and goblin-like tittering that to me sounds somewhere between It from Abruptum and Yoko Ono. It sounds fucking insane. "Jinx" and "Heaven" sound just as horrific, this totally fucked-up pneumatic crush accompanied by the unintelligible jabbering of something frail, malicious, and abominable.

And of course, K2 comes in and shows everybody how it's done. From the ten-minute earthquake of "Bible Is A Bored Book" that sets loose a terrifying din of damaged electronics, brutal feedback trepanation, gnarly rhythmic glitch and, of course, those signature avalanches of colossal "junk" noise that makes me feel like my entire house is falling into a sinkhole, this shit is extreme . Kimihide Kusafuka is an absolute master of corralling the cacophony, exercising a virtuosic control and response to the hellish sounds he's generating. I can't rate one K2 recording or release from another, his work is so consistent that even though i always have an idea of what metallic maelstrom I'm diving into with his stuff, the journey is always different, always fascinating, always brain-splattering. The only other K2 track, "Death In Silicon Valley", is also ten minutes long and continues with the psychedelic onslaught, further pursuing the often cosmic-tinged kaleidoscope effect that his work creates as a deluge of anarchic oscillators and vomiting synthesizers collide with truly gross whirlpools of over-modulated gurgle and cloudbursts of black feedback.

A 100% solid noise album all the way through, impeccably curated. Each artist feels as if they are responding in kind to the audio carnage of the others. It's incendiary.