Neuntöter Der Plage - Last Wish b/w Acid Reign / Taliban/Paranoid Time - Air Lice (SNSE LP / 10")

As advertised, the final two documents from the recent SNSE bundle. If you can't make your way through the forest of forward slashes I set up in the title there and need a refresher, the first is an LP by Ryan Opperman's Neuntöter Der Plage project while the latter is a 10" split between Taliban (Miles Haney and Joel Rakowski) and Paranoid Time (aka SNSE boss Pat Yankee). Both are limited to 300 copies or thereabouts and both come in sleeves with pasted-on covers and inserts; the NDP one is sleek and black and evil while the split is more of a DIY 80's hardcore job. Both look and play like the walrus' whiskers though, which is good news.
This Neuntöter Der Plage is, as I said, Ryan Opperman's beast, and you might know his name from associations with projects like Xombie, Redrot, Post Mortem Junkie, Klinikal Skum, and the Skeletone label. You might, but I don't. "Last Wish b/w Acid Reign" is Plage's vinyl debut, after various cassettes and CD-Rs that I haven't had the good fortune of running into. If you weren't of the knowing type (like me) and you just plucked this LP off the wall at Joe Schmoe's Record Emporium (okay let's be fair: Aquarius or Amoeba), you might think it was some long-lost now-reissued Broken Flag or United Dairies document that totally slipped by everybody when it first came out of the 80's power electronics heyday...and sonically speaking, you wouldn't be lightyears away either. At least, in terms of the dark, menacing drones that pierce both lengthy pieces. But these are works for electronics and vocals, and it's the vocals that give this baby away as being a product of the new millenium, or at least the near-turn thereof. Opperman delivers these two rather intense manifestos over both sides, in a guttural throat that's somewhere amongst the pipes of those from Stalaggh, Abruptum, hell even William Bennett's stern tone is somewhat detectable here. At it's lowest form you could tag this record as a black metal/dark ambient cross over, but it's really a lot more than the sum of its parts. Which is pretty impressive given the general simplicity of the approach. Perhaps a better indication of the intimidation at work here can be drawn from an excerpt of what's being recited on "Last Wish" (lyrics are included): "a dark that gently blisters your skin/it can only be felt with all of your senses/choking body and mind/this cold night/tell me your last wish.../is it not to cease to exist?". Fucking yeah man, I get chills down my spine just typing it and you better believe I was Han Solo frozen in carbonite at the beginning of Empire when I was hearing it.
The Taliban, or Taleban, (Pashto: طالبان, "students," literally seekers of knowledge) are a Sunni puritanical Muslim and Pashtun movement that ruled most of Afghanistan from - wait, that's not it at all. Ha ha! This Taliban is the "free noise" duo of Miles Haney and Joel Rakowski, and their product has been seen on labels like American Tapes, Gods of Tundra, Fag Tapes and Haney's own Tapeworm Tapes. On their side of this 10", they put forth the kind of noisy junk skree I can't even pin down, but it's got scads of brightly-embellished tabletop rabble to spit up inky darts of holy hot-wired sound and various busted plugged-ins galore. What's real nice about this one is that it comes at you in waves, little sound lines crashing off your face only to recede just as quickly...like dry heaving your way through bat country. At least it doesn't play it all stagnant like some of those other types, I like a little spice in my love life. Meanwhile, Pat Yankee's Paranoid Time plays two untitled tracks of mad scramble circuit bending and what could be totally garbled vocal whoops, gasps, and meltdowns, maybe I should've saved the dry heaving thing for right abooouuut here. Sounds like vox and synths and maybe even a laptop juggernauting these sounds out, but they're being totally mauled by whatever the whole setup is feeding into, quite ouroborosly indeed. I wouldn't call it the most blazingly memorable side ever played but maybe that's cause it just finished blasting it's way out the memory portion of my brain - you'll definitely dig it if you're usually up for this kind of glurge. Don't take my word for it - I'll have you know this was Bull Tongue best of oh-six number 39. Say no more? Well I won't, but I'm pretty tired by now. These clips can do the rest of the talking. That's right, keep scrolling...not too far now.

MP3:
Neuntöter Der Plage - Last Wish (excerpt)
Neuntöter Der Plage - Acid Reign (excerpt)

Taliban - Untitled (excerpt)
Paranoid Time - Untitled (excerpt)
MP3s courtesy SNSE