T.O.M.B. (Total Occultic Mechanical Blasphemy). Founded in 1996, heavily influenced/inspired by the ideology and themes of ‘black’ in black metal and being drawn to death, destruction and the occult, T.O.M.B’s music was started in cemeteries and doors from mausoleums and crypts were literally banged on for percussion. Also using electrical devices to capture field recording and noisescapes and different elements from cemeteries, crematories, morgues, asylums and abandon industrial locations, encompassing a sound library so diverse and bizarre to use metal, human bone, Aztec temple rocks, animal antlers, horns, crystals and cadavers.
Crucial Blast has issued the Pennhurst / Xesse CD, binding together two obscure recordings from black/occult/industrial collective, Total Occultic Mechanical Blasphemy, a.k.a. T.O.M.B.
Pennhurst / Xesse brings together two out-of-print recordings from Philadelphia’s T.O.M.B.
Pennhurst begins with Tomb a slow hammering of the human mind and soul. Like a background spectator on a war torn battlefield or the inner belly of hell. Maz Of Tha Damd has a tribal drum beginning with a thousand screaming lost souls trying to escape into our world, only the loudest being heard. Goetic Xaos has computerized rumblings in the underground with the weight of trains and unholy sent thunder with the screeching of the subway hitting like a cymbal to the head, crashing the sanity right out of the living. The computer voices of instruments being played screaming their pain of being hit over and over into your mind while the mentally scrambled stories of vagrants bouncing against the walls. Audi Alteram Partem-the female voices of the damned sing their soul imprisoned song, echoing the walls and tunnels of the underworld, like a summoning of night time spirits to rise. Penn Hurst begins with a devouring vortex succubus black hole of noise erupting out of the earth.
Xesse’s haunting voices chant a doomed ceremony. Silence Is Suffering-shoots sound out like witches and demons riding laser beams in the brain. Within The Circle Of Bones-conjures the spirit of the black forest awakening at midnight through the eye within the camp fire flame. In the deepest, darkest, isolated part of the woods where the outside world is not heard, don’t go there. The Inhuman Condition suffers the muffled spirits of demons and ghouls cast away, banished into the cracked walls as they cry out their anger and vengeance, slithering underneath the stone, looking through the encased window they can’t escape. Luciferian Homage has voices of agony and despair traveling from the well of darkness.
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 boast disturbing legacies of abuse and experimentation. 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.
Listen only if you’re comfortable/interested in what an asylum’s memory and voice could sound like.
Partial information taken from interview on www.cvltnation.com
