Cranioclast
Koitlaransk

Sonorous massacres, sonic dirt, and otherworldly industrialisms tell us of old battles set in underground places where time is suspended, the atmosphere tense, and light completely absent.

It is the ultimate masterpiece by Cranioclast, heavyweights of the darkest and most abstract industrial music that, contrary to the customs of this never too celebrated entity, have released only a handful of records, but almost all of high quality and with very innovative veins. Veins that emerge in all their brilliance in this debut album, released in 1985 by the mysterious Principe Logique, a record you've likely seen me often cite in various reviews, a record I would not hesitate to place among the best of all time.

Oriented on obscure post-industrial forms that aim at detail and the soundscape as well as an atmosphere now ritual, now mantric, "Koitlaransk" is an unmistakably out-of-the-box work, an incredibly forward-thinking work if we consider that similar ideas are only recently being heard through artists such as Shackleton and Demdike Stare; a record that lives on its own merit, probably not easy to apprehend but simply indispensable once understood in all its grandeur. Razor-sharp noise blades, devious voodoo tribalism, and otherworldly drones symbolize the ideal meeting point between two legendary entities such as Nurse With A Wound and Zoviet France, while the disintegration of tapes and compositional grime recall the early Controlled Bleeding and the wilder David Jackman, and please excuse if it's not a small feat. The sound of this monolith is dark and visionary, a fearful monster in its subhuman and sepulchral course: out of this world, have I said it already?

After all, I like to refer to "Koitlaransk" as a manifesto of what is, in my opinion, the highest artistic expression that the musical world has ever been able to know (or not know, as the case may be): industrial in its most underground forms. The purest underground, DIY, a kick in the backside to distributors, and as far as one can be from the spotlight of rock, the glitz of pop, leech-like majors, cloying hype, and marketing driven by mere profit. And what amazes most—and what distinguishes this record from third-party masterpieces of the industrial scene—is precisely the sense of 'underground' it manages to emanate. Something arduous to explain in words. Something unforgettable when the ears are called upon.

You won't find it in the top lists of all time, you won't find it in books, you won't find it in charts around the web, but one thing is certain: this is a damn masterpiece.