Skullflower / Mastery — Split

This new split vinyl release from Cold Spring brings us recordings from the UK based industrial veterans  Skullflower, and San Francisco based one man black metal project Mastery.  The acts couldn't be much more different from each other although the common thread that weaves its way through this disc is defiantly strange breeds of metal.  Skullflower has been doing its thing off and on since the 80's and their experience shows itself with the waves of post industrial nausea that flow from this record.  Mastery on the other hand started in 2005 and is utterly modern in its approach to musical mangling. 

The Skullflower side opens up with heavily distorted and discordant guitars that blossom into almost horn-like blasts.  The heavy drones carry on throughout the rest of this side and to much affect.  It brings to mind a bassy less organized version of Xasthur, sans vocals or drums.  At times the guitars give the sense of being metallic instruments.  The whole first track and pretty much the whole side feels like one really long introduction (or apocalyptic outro more likely) that never resolves.  The first track ends abruptly and the next begins in the same fashion.  The second track carries on much like the first with the fuzzed out directionless guitars with the addition of random debris and scraping in the background, it would be easy to criticize this record for its simplicity and lack of direction, but the music is so good and raw that such things do not matter.  The third song begins abruptly as well, this time with an 80's sounding horror movie lick cutting through walls of white noise and a somewhat cheesy synth pad.  The 80's lick gets kind of annoying quickly but is counteracted by a gurgling rhythm which begins to merge with the white noise to form a tide which starts to wipe away the song.  After this the tracks starts to delve into some early PTV territory with some really interesting phasing happening between the lines.
 

The Mastery side of the record blast straight into driving rhythms that speedily become fast and chaotic.  The only word for what happens next is ADHD metal.  It has almost has the grindcore quality of never staying anywhere too long but lacking any of the typical brevity (the track is just under 18 minutes).  This song cycles through so many movements and ideas that it comes off sounding gimmicky or like some kind of parody, passing the border of ridiculousness.  What is impressive is the stamina of the playing (although that is questionable these days, depending on how it was recorded), the relentlessness never stops.  About six minutes into it the theme turns Spanish and gets more interesting with an odd blend of fast and slow on top of toy monkey like drums.  Then, you guessed it, jumps back into more incoherent shredding, at this point he is reminding me of the spastic 8-bit kids, but done with real instruments.  Around 9:30 the music gets a lot tougher and less showy but this doesn't last for too long before the wanking starts up again.  The last half of this track is way cooler than the first yet the great moments never last, the better parts having a Leviathan feel, the others not so memorable.