Nightmare Castle/Carrion Black Pit — Split
The CDR comes in a slim black cd case that features black & white artwork- on the front cover we have a picture of nun in front of a wall that holds whips & belts, and on the back cover there’s a picture of Bela Lugosi as Dracula pointing tow hapless 1930’s victims down a long stone stair case into darkness.
Up first we have the 22.23 minute track from Nightmare castle, the tracks entitled “Bistritz To Borgo Pass”- Bistritz is the town where in Bram Stokers original Dracula the character of Jonathan Harker first goes in Transylvania, and Borgo Pass is where the Counts carriage meets Harker and takes him to castle Dracula. Anyway onto the track it’s self, the track starts off with a brief movie sample from a Bela Lugosi Dracula moive where he utters the immortal phase “Listen to the children of the night, what sweet music they make!”- then we drop into the wonderful tense ‘n’ brutal horror fed ‘wall’. The ‘walls’ built around a taut, juddering & grating tone which I guess sounds more than a little like a mass of theatrical vampire bats attacking someone. Underneath this main tone is a loser slightly crusty ‘n’ dusty rumbling tone. The higher pitched grating tone remains fairly fixed & rabid though-out, while the other tone is still relatively fixed it does bumble & rage slightly off the fixed path ever so often. All told this is a great & imaginative piece of wall making that perfectly fits the cranky black & white horror movie theme of the track.
So up next we have the Carrion Black Pit's track which is entitled “ Witchcraft Through The Ages”, and this track comes in at just over the 17 minute mark. This tracks ‘wall’ jumps straight in with a bass bound billowing texture which seems to rip & bay around you like a raging 'n' roasting of a witches caldron in the middle of a winter storm. By the 4th minute the ‘wall’ slips into a more focused juddering billowing form, but pretty soon jittering rolls of castic static bound boils 'n' rage out of the ‘wall’ . For the rest of the track CBP shifts the ‘wall’ between more focused & disciplined sounding juddering, and more expanding & boiling to madly jittering static ruptures- this creates an effective building of tension then slight,though roasted, relief. All told it’s a nicely shifting & well made slice of tense ‘wall-making’.
So all told this is a great horror theme HNW release- I think the Nightmare Castle track is my favourite of the two here as I love the way it captures the camp yet creepy vibe of early black & white horror movies, but the Carrion Black Pit track is still an accomplished & raging bit of ‘wallmaking” too.