SCHLOSS TEGAL

This is a tuneless scourge of noise. A drone-fest of mechanical grinding whines that is far less inspired than later recordings, which are far more appealing to the misanthropist within me. I bought this in '94 and have rarely listened to it since.

Scraping the layers of dust off the outer casing and listening to it anew has done little to help me see it in a new light. 'The Grand Guignol' resembles sounds that belong in a Pittsburgh Steelworks. Normally I'd love that kind of stuff in that 'SPK', 'Throbbing Gristle' style of approach, but there's very little to grab hold of here. It's grey, dull and bleak, and has a constant use of original human torture shrieks.

Slurpy, wet background noises have looped murderer vocals laid on top uttering such phrases as ' Hunting for Humans'. over and over again.

More screeching painful sounds follow as droning keyboards wail and throb with 'Certificate of the Wound', where bloody goings on are thrown in your face with agonising male and female shrieks of terror. It reminds me of 'Mark of the Devil' - that video nasty that was so grim it didn't see a full release until this year.

Spooky and grim - yeah. but on the listenability scale this scores zero. This is the sound of Zombie's biting into your arms translated into entertainment.

"Look at the World' has a hideous looped vocal 'I could kill someone' played over a flat tuneless chord which leaves me wishing I'd left this disc well alone in it's dust covered mummified state. Far better was to follow when they left all this 'murder' filth and depravity behind.

]Oranur III' is based on the theories of Wilhelm Reich with his outsider beliefs in 'Orgone' technology, UFO's and 'Cloudbusting' machines. This deep droning menace of an album sounds like all of the aforementioned condensed into a 40 minute prototype exercise in terror.

Comparisons could be made with bands such as 'Throbbing Gristle', 'Kluster' and 'Lustmord'. However, there's something deeply unsettling and undeniably disturbing about this particular recording. It's unrelenting in its oppressiveness.

The opener 'Oranur III' has a very eerie metallic drone which becomes very intense through waves of slowly pulsing keyboards. You can just imagine the creature from John Carpenter's 'The thing' slowly creeping up behind your back as you fiddle about with a torch unable to figure out if the batteries are working.

'Scary Bejeesus' is the only way to describe 'Dark Eyes'. A sliding, slushy drone of weird chords is played under effected spoken vocals which recite alien abduction encounters. In itself this should be laughable, but this and the following track '"L5' paint a very spooky and real death-like scenario. Gruesome sludgy, whining keyboards grate and grind creating in a swirling death effect leaving the listener very unnerved.

The HP Lovecraft inspired 'Beyond the Wall of Sleep' evolves into a more ethereal sound, like an old Victorian haunted mansion. If you listen carefully enough you can almost hear voices from past millennia in the distorted keyboard chords.

'You Just Got Tired' has more alien abduction female screams going on but is delivered with a swirling, electronic semblance of a tune, which runs through my mind for hours after completion. Beautiful... but ugly.

This is probably my most listened to album of all time since purchasing it in '95. 'Oranur III' is only suited to listeners of the more extreme end of prog. It is without a drum, guitar, bass, or tuneful vocal.

On the whole, this will be abject torture to most prog listeners. For me it's a thing of beauty that has not been matched in it's genre since it's release..