Monday, January 28, 2013

SHIPPING RATES AND AN UPDATE

As many in the US know, international shipping rates went waaaay up this week.  As a result I've had to raise the shipping rates slightly for anyone outside the US.  I am really sorry about it-many of Altar Of Waste's supporters are from other parts of the world, and I hope the raise won't discourage you.  For what it's worth I am still losing money on shipping stuff out of the US every time, in an effort to keep things reasonably fair for those wonderful people who buy my label's stuff.  Without you, the label wouldn't be what it is.

In actual production news, there should be around seven new releases ready in a couple weeks.  There will be new recordings from Otomo Hava, La Mancha Del Pecado, Clive Henry, and a wealth of new solo works.  I don't want to give too much away but it's some pretty awesome shit.

Several things are sold out now as well.  See the store for details.  The Culver record is close to being gone as well, so if you're interested in that one, I wouldn't wait.

Thanks!

-Cory Strand

Monday, January 14, 2013

CORY STRAND "WEEPING PENITENCE" CDr (AOW 49)

An extension of my recently released "Wintertide" record, "Weeping Penitence" is an extremely dark, deep and glacial piece of full length drone intended for late night listening in complete darkness.  This is immersion drone of a suffocating caliber,  working towards the sort of cosmic horror vibe so effortlessly evoked by projects like Sleep Research Facility and Necronom IV.  Resonances are billowing and almost oceanic, an blackened cavernous sprawl of decay and gnawing dread.  If "Wintertide" was the slow encroaching onset of a blank and empty world, "Weeping Penitence" is that emptiness given full reign over the landscapes of the physical and the subconscious.  Agony drone for the anxiety-ridden.

-Cory Strand

Packaged in a DVD case in a hand-numbered limited edition of 5 copies.  $10 ppd. in the United States, $18 rest of world.

ORDER HERE: www.altarofwasterecords.storenvy.com
 

Friday, January 11, 2013

DEAD BODY COLLECTION "THIS IS MY HOME" 2CDr (AOW 37)

Dead Body Collection's "This Is My Home" marks a tremendous leap forward in the potential of HNW as a means of purely emotional expression.  Across these two discs, Alex weaves a blistering tapestry of mosaic sorrows, regrets, and claustrophobic nostalgiah, a poisoned requiem for a life that once was and the weight of the myriad failures accompanying it.  I have not heard another artist working in this genre so capable of summoning up such an array of bitter and melancholy feelings-there is a power in this record that defies categorization and reaches far beyond the confines of HNW's traditional definition.  Immersing yourself in this record is to make yourself vulnerable to recollections of your own failures and regrets, an evocation of sadness and fatigue that infects and lifts the spirit simultaneously.  This is a work utterly unlike any you have heard before, a master study in tearing down artistic confines and producing art that is both intensely, severely personal and instantly and terrifyingly relateable.  This is a map of the caverns of the heart.
Altar Of Waste is extremely proud to offer up this majestic piece of work from one of the genre's most prolific and creative minds.  Alex and I worked closely together on the artwork for this release, hoping to create something with a depth and resonance that would mark the uniqueness of the record overall.  I think we have succeeded.  Packaged in a DVD case in a limited and hand-numbered edition of 30 copies, "This Is My Home" also comes with a hand-constructed booklet of Alex's photos and writings.  It is easily one of the most lovely Altar Of Waste releases, and I am honored to have worked on it.  $20 ppd. in the United States, $28 rest of world (I apologize for the slightly higher price of this set-construction and assembly for this one took an enormous amount of time, effort, and supplies-but I believe it is well worth the expense.)

ORDER HERE: www.altarofwasterecords.storenvy.com

CORY STRAND 'WINTERTIDE" 2CDr (AOW 48)

Deep and static glacial droneworks in honor of the bleak and desolate winters that mark where I live, where the landscapes become blinding washes of white and the cold saws at your skin, desperate to flay you for warmth.  There is beauty in all this stillness, a sense of comfort and relaxation born from resignation, a projection of the self into the barren realms beyond the pillaring snowtides.  What exists in the winds?  What whispers between the snowflakes?  What floats, malevolent and base, beneath the great flows of ice that choke the rivers and lakes?  Will you venture out into this waste, yearning for connection to the natural and a taste of the indifferent whims of the blizzarding North?
I am very proud of this work.  It is an exploration into the muted and seemingly infinite expanses of ambience so masterfully mapped out by towering figures in the genre like Eliane Radigue and Kevin Drumm.  While I will not say that my work holds a candle to their output, I will hope that this double album will be of comfort to you in the freezing, moonless winter nights.  There is an elegance to all this emptiness.  There is movement in the spaces between.

-Cory Strand

Packaged in a DVD case in a limited and hand-numbered edition of 5 copies.  $15 ppd. in the United States, $23 rest of world.

ORDER HERE: www.altarofwasterecords.storenvy.com

Monday, January 7, 2013

EARTHENWOMB "BLUEBLOOD" 2CDr (AOW 47)

The causticity of modernity saps our collective being, rotting us from the inside out.  Royalty is exalted, hoisting their flags in a nod and desire towards neo-feudalism.  Existence is diseased.  Connections are fallacy.  The world is rife with illusions, obstinate reminders that suffocate transcendent thought and reinforce ideals of compliance and timidity.  Earthenwomb's "Blueblood" is a crossing of the wires, a garbled interception of radicalism broadcast from somewhere deep within the halls of oppression built up around us.  Crumbling walls of static cascade out, the brutality of live electricity reaching out to the soporific masses.  How long has it been this way?  Escape lies in immersion, the immolation total of an archaic design.
Altar Of Waste is pleased to release this dense and layered piece of sonic scathing, a reinterpretation of the shoegaze ideal of distortion saturation rendered into a nearly hour long squall of elegiac sorrow.  "Blueblood" also includes a reissue of "That Rotting Ambition, That Extinguished Hope," an equally destructive album-length work originally released by Glossolalia in 2011.  Wash yourself in the horror of the now.  Packaged in a DVD case with two different covers, in a limited edition of 20 hand-numbered copies.  $15 ppd. in the United States, $23 rest of world.

ORDER HERE: www.altarofwasterecords.storenvy.com

CULVER "CIRCLE OF SCARS" 3CDr (AOW 45)

The decaying dream erodes away in the pustulent recesses of consciousness, the oozing black tar of the mind that manifests as explosions of violence, vampiric fantasy, and schizophrenic deviation.  The eternal nothingness of the night, the glimmer of the stars above as they move ever further and further from our orbit, the alignments of ancient instructions hidden in the cosmos as they drift and float through the black ether, gaping maws of blinding horror and base intelligence, forever hungry and indifferent.  Pillars that once rose to the heavens stand crumbled and broken, temples once alive with human voices and rituals lies rotting and empty, hollowed out of the warmth they once possessed.  The landscape is blighted by a pervasive bleakness, a great wash of grey that becomes a flow of dripping black blood, drowning all in its ever-expansive path.  This world is haunted and dead.
Altar Of Waste is beyond psyched to present this massive set from Culver, one of the finest crafters of minimalist terror drone and death stasis currently working in the genre.  Lee Stokoe's vision is one of complete and numbing exploitative horror, a map of nightmares made real and the graveyard of dreams.  Packaged in a DVD case in limited edition of 20 hand-numbered copies.  $18 ppd. in the United States, $26 rest of world.

ORDER HERE: www.altarofwasterecords.storenvy.com

BURIAL GROUND "THE EXORCIST" CDr (AOW 46)

Altar Of Waste's second collaboration with Burial Ground pays tribute to one of the finest, most layered, and seethingly intense horror films of all time, William Friedkin's "The Exorcist."  While much of the terror of the film fittingly lies with Reagan's possession by Satanic forces and the abuses they inflict on her body, an equal amount of tension is generated through the psychological punishments endured by Father Karras and Father Merrin as they attempt to drive the ancient beings from the young girl's brutalized physical form.  "The Exorcist" succeeds as a film because it doesn't shy away from the fragility of the person, even when blanketed under the supposed protection of God's rites and emblems; we are always vulnerable to forces unbeknownst to us as well as our own psychological infirmities.  Burial Ground's work here is simply masterful, mirroring the complexity of the film through a variety of wavering tones and frequencies that evoke the lurking horrors in the shadows of our world.
Altar Of Waste is very pleased to release this newest piece from one of HNW's most intense and defined projects.  Packaged in a DVD case with stark and minimalist artwork by Gina Newman, in a limited edition of 20 hand-numbered copies.  $10 ppd. in the United States, $18 rest of world.

ORDER HERE: www.altarofwasterecords.storenvy.com

CARRION BLACK PIT "NECRONOMICON" 2CDr (AOW 44)

H.P. Lovecraft's infamous tome functions as one of the lynchpins of his meticulously crafted universe of deep cosmic terror and wavering sanities, a guide to and history of the Great Old Ones and their unfathomable and ancient evil.  The book drove many a protagonist mad in Lovecraft's tales and opened doors to unthinkable sights and terrifyingly obscure territories beyond the real.  Carrion Black Pit here evokes the aura of the weird and violent associated with the Necronomicon, structured as an invocation of sorts to the Great Old Ones themselves as well as serving as a transcendent piece of sonic manipulation in its own right.  Across two massive discs, Carrion Black Pit plunge the listener into an ever growing and hungry cosmic blankness, an anti-kaleidoscopic vision of mysteries and beings that mankind was never meant to know.  The intellectual gets rendered into the brutal; the mystic becomes the void.
Altar Of Waste is truly psyched to unveil this vision of hallucinatory existence, a severely intense scourge of sound that comes eerily close to the haunting dreams endured by so many in Lovecraft's fiction.  Packaged in a DVD case in a limited edition of 20 hand-numbered copies, with inserts.  $15 ppd. in the United States, $23 rest of world.

ORDER HERE: www.altarofwasterecords.storenvy.com

LETHE "TO DROWN" CDr (AOW 17)

One of the final two Lethe albums, "To Drown" is a deep drone piece constructed from heavily manipulated live guitar improvisations, drawn out to an expansive and suffocating length meant to evoke the nightmarish infinity of the mysteries of the oceans.  Drowning as portrayed here is less a physical embodiment than a state of consciousness, a breaking down of the mithril whisps that comprise the reality.  The astral is made manifest through floating in the depths, the inky nothingness hanging cold and indifferent all around.  Womblife as a horror show; pressure as emptiness.  There is no more need to breathe here.
Altar Of Waste is pleased to unleash this missing piece of the Lethe puzzle.  Packaged in a DVD case in a limited edition of 10 hand-numbered copies.  $10 ppd. in the United States, $18 rest of world.

ORDER HERE: www.altarofwasterecords.storenvy.com