Locrian "Falling Towers / After The Torchlight" at Crucial Blast

LOCRIAN Falling Towers / After The Torchlight CASSETTE (Black Horizons)

Coming right in the wake of their latest LP Territories (which I'll have listed and written up in next week's new arrivals list), this two-track cassette is a brand new offering of blackened cosmic psychcrush from Locrian, serving up some heavier kosmische-tinged blackness from the Chicago band. The first track "Falling Towers" is massive, a swirling sprawl of blackened guitar riffs and droning feedback and spacey synthesizers, like an especially sinister Earth riff floating through a vast void of rumbling cosmic drift, with horrific distended screams lathered in reverb and other effects, smeared across the pitch-black cavernous abyss, eerie melodic guitar winding across the blackness, almost like something from Old Man Gloom but far more bleak and sinister, disembodied abstract dronemetal hovering in stygian shadow.

The other track "After The Torchlight" is even longer and heavier, opening with a malevolent minor key black metal riff that slowly dissolves into a whirring dronescape of buzzing organ tones, rumbling low-end drift, chant-like moaning, electronic crackle and crumbling blackened heaviness, all fused together into a mighty psychedelic roar that gets more and more abstract and blurry, everything melting down into a massive wash of hum and drone and tectonic hum and plinking piano-like notes, crushing and formless and totally mesmerizing. And like that cassette that Locrian released on Fan Death, this features the recordings repeated on the flipside, but in reverse, the music warped and murky, even more abstracted and creepy and hallucinatory.
The tape comes in fantastic packaging,with screen printed black covers printed in silver ink, a shiny metallic silver label on the cassette, and limited to 200 copies.