A DOCUMENT OF EARLY ACOUSTIC & TACTICAL EXPERIMENTATION

I remember when I first purchased this a couple of years ago, thinking it would be some seriously dark and impressionistic pioneering electronic music with a strong penchant for the abstract, and then getting exactly that and in spades....... Well, all I can say is that be careful what you wish for, you just might get it!

This compilation features the material of the first untitled Lustmord album - back when he called himself Lustmørd (As to why he did so leaves me completely baffled, even if Denmark is the only country to use the letter ø...). Furthermore, you get John Balance off the trailblazing Coil as well as Nigel Ayers from Nocturnal Emissions laying down some spooky incomprehensible vocals. So far so good.

I guess you could call this album forerunner to a lot of stuff - in fact most of the gravelling, uncouth and abrasively mushy synthesizers here wouldn't feel out of place on an early Nine Inch Nail release. This is indeed industrial in the truest sense of the word. It takes skilled supervising abilities to work out what's doing what and to whom, and whether the music, if we can call it that, actually is or effectively 'lives'. It's soulless bottomless stark black ambiances levitating, hovering strangely abnormal on the air like human faeces with raggedy wings.

On top of the senseless stagnant sonic universe, that doesn't seem to head anywhere - be that in an intolerably slow manner, the production itself sounds uncannily like the studio was situated at the bottom of a bog. Muddy, grainy, distorted and uncompromisingly edgy - it sure does feel like an avant garde release that couldn't care less if anybody ever has the patience to sit through all of this contourless, colourless, soulless and may I add meritless excuse for a debut. Thank Ford, Lustmord evolved from this tripe - releasing a string of unparalleled dark ambient albums up through the 90s - staying on a sonic roll way up to the present day. This, however, is just plain awful music, -nah strike that because this is way past music, and not in a progressively profound manner - no, this is more like uninspired programmed contorted sound. If you can imagine trying to blend a mud smoothie and then mixing it up with a big plate of sick - throwing it wildly about in the air - relegating the scenario in ultra slow motion with the appropriate soundtrack of serrated emanations from a dusty cellar where the bulk of the material comes from scraping a microphone through the indefinable debris and grime that seems to gather in corners of neglected unlit basement rooms.