The head of audio dismemberment at Crucial Blast has proclaimed an agreement with CLOAK OF ALTERING, signing onfor the release of the project’s third full-length exploration into sonic depravity, Plague Beasts.
The name of Dutch avant-metal madman Mories — a.k.a. Maurice de Jong — runs rampant throughout the experimental tip of the black/industrial metal underground, CLOAK OF ALTERING just one of the artist’s solo and collaborative acts/monikers, joining Seirom, Aderlating, Mors Sonat, De Magia Veterum and others, most notably his notorious blackened industrial/orchestral doom outfit, Gnaw Their Tongues. With CLOAK OF ALTERING, a project that Mories started in 2011 as a continuation of his earlier black metal band Ophiuchus, the artist’s fascination with the early symphonic black metal ofIn the Nightside Eclipse-era Emperor and Arcturus’s early efforts, as well as the more fiendish and fractured forms of industrial black metal as practiced by the likes of Dødheimsgard are much more apparent, each moving deeper into stranger and more mutated realms of electronically-damaged symphonic black metal.
With Plague Beasts — CLOAK OF ALTERING‘s third album, and first for Crucial Blast — Mories delivers a ferocious affront to black metal form and structure, combining his otherworldly strain of sweeping symphonic black metal with bursts of intense electronic chaos, waves of nebulous synthesizer and spastic rhythmic violence that, at times, feels more like something you’d hear off of a Planet Mu 12″, at times resembling some twisted nightmare version of prog rock keyboard freak-outs, or vintage 16-bit game soundtracks being fused to the gristle and graveyard stink of second wave black metal. More than anything else from Mories, this stuff is closest in spirit to the malevolent necro-industrial and fractured drug-fueled machine-ecstasies of bands like Aborym, Blacklodge, Dodheimsgard, Mysticum, and Abigor. But as with anything that this guy is involved with, Plague Beasts seethes with a deliriously demonic atmosphere entirely its own.
Plague Beasts will be set loose via digital delivery and six-panel CD digipak on April 29th. The opening and title track to the album is now playing at the Crucial Blast Bandcamp depot now; tune in and get nuked HERE.
Be on watch for further information and some of the disturbingly mangled audio from the album to be released shortly.
Plague Beasts Track Listing:
1. Plague Beasts
2. White Inverted Void
3. Translucent Body Deformities
4. Chaos Magician Of The Abyss
5. Ash666urA
6. Into Celestial Hell
7. Altering Forever