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One of several recent tape offerings from the Virginia based experimental black/noise metal project Algea, one of the many musical endeavors of Evan Craig (Void Seance, Savage Cross, Ritual Stance).

The first few minutes of "Stagnation II" is little more than the sound of wind blowing across some vast void, an endless expanse of emptiness that stretches out in all directions. Gradually, faint distant drones begin to materialize over the horizon, and then suddenly the sound erupts into a primitive blast of low-fi black metal, super-murky and vague, the guitar blurred into an indistinct thrum in the background, the drummer pounding out an incessant unchanging blastbeat. This suddenly shifts into a slower noisier dirge when the drummer suddenly cuts out and its just a discordant guitar riff being banged out over and over, while piercing feedback drills through the fog of black distortion. This goes on for ages, plodding doom-laden fuzz joined by simple, lurching drums buried waaaaaaay down in the mix, everything shrouded in a thick crackling patina of blown-out noise. Some crazed, brain-damaged soloing appears, and later it shifts back into that droning, monotonous black blast from the beginning, while some weird, booming horn-like sounds reverberate out of the distance, almost sounding like something off of Frost's To Mega Therion.

That Frost quality gets really strong as soon as side two kicks off; "Stagnation III" begins with a killer doom-laden riff uncoiling beneath a squall of harsh, Merzbowian squelch, then explodes into super-murky blackened doom, wound around the same repeating riff but driven by lurching double bass thunder and spazztoid blasting and, again, swallowed up in a cloud of tape-hiss and low-fi filth. But instead of building into some epic blackened crescendo, it just melts down into a tangle of squealing electronic noise before dissolving into the same sort of desolate black ambience that started the tape.

Rotten, corroded black metal slime smeared with tumorous eruptions of electronic carnage, almost comparable to a no-fi version of Aussie BM experimentalist Nekrasov. Comes in a black and white, hand-assembled cover.