Exquisite Fucking Boredom
(Tumult) Used CD $12.00
Brainwash jumps right in and says “ ‘Celestial Highway’ is a massive, stomping heavy metal riff, a big hairy acid-drenched slab of fuzzy blues cribbed from the Blue Cheer handbook. The jacked-up shredding that twists around the central rhythmic stomp is directly inspired by the third-eye Satanic soloing of Glenn Tipton and Tony Iommi. That shit keeps cycling around, pulsating fuzzy tendrils of bombastic riffage, hairy to the Nth degree, lifting up to the clouds on a silver machine of over-amped guitar wreckage. And then it repeats. Over and over. For nearly an hour…. Skullflower pushes the envelope of acceptability in terms of musical content…. The nuanced production … by Colin Potter … add[s] sheets of compounding noise run-off to each successive riff, alternately burying the … guitars in a pile of audio rubble, or uncovering and highlighting them by pushing out the borders of distortion…. [S]ome of the most bizarre and unconventional “stoner rock” yet conceived.” With hole punch in the lower right back corner
Last Shot At Heaven
(Noiseville) Used CD $10.00 (Out-of-stock)
Madly pounding drums, the occasionally audible bass, but mainly a demonic, noisy blur possessed by distorted guitars. Skullflower’s hideous cacophony — altered artificially, mechanically, digitally, chemically — wavers across the spectrum of intensity, tension, meander, flow, and stutter. A divine and mesmerizing sandstorm.
Obsidian Shaking Codex
(RRRecords) Used CD $10.00 (Out-of-stock)
Five lengthy pieces from 1993 that signaled a change away from tribal drumming and wild guitar distortions toward droning, chaotic dissonance with horror-industrial overtones. Classic, crushing Skullflower that peaks with the titanic twenty-five-minute “Smoke Jaguar.”
Pure Imperial Reform
(Turgid Animal - TA309) CD $10.00
Recorded 2006 live on an Antwerp radio station comes this new guitar wall "composition" from Matthew Bower and Lee Stokoe. A good harsh racket. UK import.
Skullflower / Limepit
(Posh Isolation) Used Split LP $15.00
One track each of meditative, black metal-inspired guitar noise and sublime damnation by Skullflower, backed with nihilistic sludge by members of Sarah’s Charity, rendered into belches of pungent amplifier puke and feedback-laden string torture. From 2009. Paste-on photocopy jacket. Edition of 333
Skullflower / Utarm
(Turgid Animal) split CD $11.75
Three tracks by Matthew Bower’s pioneering noise / rock unit, two by Norwegian relative newcomer. Extreme, beautiful, dark and wandering-in-the-woods noise, operating inside an experimental, black-metal-influenced twilight zone. Inspiring triumphant soundscapes, evil tepid ambiance and deadly esoteric world music. Edition of 500
Skullflower / White Medal
(Turgid Animal - TA440) 7-inch $10.00
The long-running and evil Skullflower and Yorkshire's demented black metal one-man band both straddle the middle ground between experimental and all-out black metal assault, but in very different ways. Artwork by Utarm's Sindre Foss Skancke. 400 copies on black vinyl.
Strange Keys to Untune Gods’ Firmament
(Neurot - NR067) CD $15.00 (Out-of-stock)
Guitar-based mass, Wagnerian bombast, Nietzchean worldview, and warlike cries of rebellion against the false, encased in a whirlwind both psychotropic and psychoacoustic, tortured, distorted, and eerily shamanic.
Taste The Blood Of The Deceiver
(Not Not Fun) Used LP $10.00
Blackened, doom-damaged terrains by Matthew Bower, who spikes abrupt vertical baths of blinding distortion and harmonic override with cavernous cultish riffs and deeply bleak ritual moods. The blood is fresh, but the body’s unrecognizable. Charred and forgotten, this is another stepping stone on the path to the upturned altar. Edition of 500.
Village Sorting
(Self Abuse - SAR05) 7-inch $7.00
From 1995. Other details, as laid out by The One True Dead Angel: “Quaking guitars, hornlike guitars, guitars soaked in feedback, guitars dripping blood, blown speakers, coaxial cables catching on fire, gladiators with raw meat dripping from their jaws [overrunning] the tiny village and [burning] it flat, violence [hanging[ in the air like the tiny blackbird of doom ... a relentless, thudding drum [beating] like the throbbing vein in a sociopath's withered skull ... bright shards of guitar rot [bursting] through the violence every so often, accompanied by squeals for help.”