CORY STRAND "BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA: A REINTERPRETATION" 5CDr (AOW 65)

Another John Carpenter rework, this time paying homage to one of his most undersung (and perhaps misunderstood) films, the delerious/hilarious and grossly imaginative action send-up Big Trouble In Little China.  Eschewing the seriousness of some of his earlier work, Big Trouble In Little China found Carpenter having a blast with both the film and its soundtrack, turning in a suite of songs that was more traditionally rock-oriented than anything he'd done prior.  The film, too, reeked of American rock and roll swagger, with Kurt Russell hammily stepping into the iconic shoes of Hollywood's eternal cowboy John Wayne, assembling in Jack Burton a character both triumphant and deplorable in his affection for a certain sort of patriotic ideal.  Carpenter married that staunch ego to the subconscious and mismaligned mysticism of the Far Eastern martial arts traditions, emerging with a wild, colorful, and highly enjoyable film that has attained deserved status as a true cult classic.  In working with this soundtrack I tried to have as much fun as Carpenter must have; strangely enough, the set stands as some of my most brutal and bludgeoning yet glaringly melodic walled noise to date.  Enjoy.

-Cory Strand

Packaged in a DVD case in a limited edition of 5 hand-numbered copies.  $25 ppd. in the United States, $37 rest of world.

ORDER HERE: www.altarofwasterecords.storenvy.com

CORY STRAND "HELLRAISER: A REINTERPRETATION" 3CDr (AOW 62)

A landmark film in every sense of the word, there was no way I couldn't do something with Clive Barker's horrifying mythology eventually.  Rather than using the score that actually appeared in the film, I took as my source the original soundtrack Barker commissioned from Coil, a weird, vaguely John Carpenter-ish descent into quaking realities and alternate dimensions of physical pleasure and total psychological despair and torment.  I've tried to properly reflect that dichotomy with the music here as well, balancing swathes of purgatorical ambient with bludgeoning, uber-distorted sludge walls that become as ultimately transcendent as they are punishing, finally bleeding out into a lovely grey-sky conjuration of breathless eternity.  There has been some great work done by other artists this year and last with "Hellraiser"; I can only hope my work adds to the existing dialogue and engagement.

-Cory Strand

Packaged in a DVD case in a limited edition of 5 hand-numbered copies.  $18 ppd. in the United States, $30 rest of world.

ORDER HERE: www.altarofwasterecords.storenvy.com

CORY STRAND "FIRE WALK WITH ME: A REINTERPRETATION" 3CDr (AOW 63)

I don't think I need to really explain my affinity for David Lynch.  Before Altar Of Waste I was making a series of Lynch inspired recordings as Lethe, and I'd like to think some of his aesthetic has carried over into the work I've done since.  "Fire Walk With Me: A Reinterpretation" takes as its source material the soundtrack to Lynch's woefully underrated Twin Peaks prequel film and attempts to map out the darker spaces hidden betwixt the gorgeously soothing melodies of Angelo Badalamenti and David Lynch's masterful score.  Washes of hanging empty ambience are paired alongside severe walls of crumbling bass architecture, culminating in an evocation of violence so radiant it deadens the stars.  The surreal has been given leave to wreak its havoc on the wavering pockets of reality Lynch so effectively brought to light with his complex and bizarre series; the music here is my interpretation of some of that havoc.  The owls are not what they seem.

-Cory Strand

Packaged in a DVD case in a limited edition of 5 hand-numbered copies.  $18 ppd. in the United States, $30 rest of world.

ORDER HERE: www.waltarofwasterecords.storenvy.com

CORY STRAND "THE MOTHERFUCKING PRINCESS" CDr (AOW 64)

The third volume in my loose "pop ingenue" series takes the saccharine work of Avril Lavigne as source and becomes a belching monument to overproduction and a distorted refraction of teenage yearning as envisioned by middle aged songwriters and the manufactured sass of a woman masquerading as an irreverent brat.  Everything here is process and a dissection of feeling, taking something that might once have been real and tearing it asunder from the outside in, revealing the rampant, vacant emptiness hidden behind the promise of past experience and illusory connections.  Towering halls of lockers and the japing sneers of hundreds of twisted mouths, all snarling collectively in one direction.  Have you lived through this one too?  A brutal 80 minutes of shredding wall vomit.

-Cory Strand

Packaged in a DVD case in a limited edition of 5 hand-numbered copies.  $10 ppd. in the United States, $22 rest of world.

ORDER HERE: www.altarofwasterecords.storenvy.com

WEHRMACHT LOMBARDO "AU CONVENT DE PANTHEMONT" CDr (AOW 61)

Cold and alien eroticism drone inspired by the Marquis de Sade's seminal "Juliette," a Satanic descent into sensual pleasures unbound.  The spectre of the perverse and the immoral hangs thick over Wehrmacht Lombardo's massive dronescape, with caressing bass tones giving way to distant cracks of the whip and imagined kisses of the tongue, flitting across bare and quivering flesh.  The sweet embrace of bodies together, writhing and pulsing, aching themselves across the landscape as one great and heaving mass of orgiastic delight.  There is no recognition besides the recognition of the self and the commitment to physical pleasure, the purely erotic becoming both the means and the end.  Masturbation attains a level of cosmic communion.  Black and infinite hallways extend their reach, beckoning, ever darker, their depths growing more voluminous with each jittering breath.  Can you take it all in?  Are there any limits anymore?
Altar Of Waste is beyond pleased to release this surreal vision of the lurid, a soothing but troubling exploration of de Sade's philosophy of the bedroom rendered into chillingly distant and sexually anxious drones.  Packaged in a DVD case 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

CORY STRAND "THE SHINING: REVISITED" 3CDr (AOW 60)

More explorations of Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind's masterful and disturbing score to Stanley Kubrick's brilliant film The Shining, this time using the track "Rocky Mountains" as the source.  While my last work with The Shining's soundtrack focused on the violence and severe psychic fracturing depicted in the film, "The Shining: Revisited" seeks to map out the very presences existing in the Overlook Hotel itself, the dark and pungent pockets of evil where indifferent and blindly cruel forces make themselves manifest on realities coaxial to their own.  Engulfing, oppressive, and drowning in contempt comingled with wry bemusement and mockery, these three discs represent some of the most very frightening drones I've created, a feverish evocation of the myriad horrors lurking behind the doors of the Overlook.  There are forces lurking in the shadows, stinking of malevolence and boredom.  While Carlos and Elkind's original work stands unrivaled, I can only hope I have created something of value to add to the existing mythology.

-Cory Strand

Packaged in a DVD case in a limited edition of 5 hand-numbered copies.  $18 ppd. in the United States, $30 rest of world.

ORDER HERE: www.altarofwasterecords.storenvy.com

I LIKE YOU, GO HOME " I SECRETLY LOVE YOU" CDr (AOW 59)

Utterly tortured and ripping psychedelic HNW/PE wails from beyond the realms of heartcrush, a transmission from the suicidal voids carved out by the broiling winds of rejection and dismissal.  It's difficult to describe accurately the torrents of anger, depression, resentment, feelings of failure and worthlessness, and total helplessness that these mindsets conjure, the seemingly endless nights of introspection and self-admonishment, the psychic lacerations of the self, the feelings of absolute and complete absence.  I Like You, Go Home's " I Secretly Love You" is one of few modern recordings to inhabit that headspace and get it totally right, a whirling holocaust of revulsion and disgust that somehow manages to reach a place of troubling personal transcendence and a reimagining of the self into an impervious and volatile construction of scars and coagulated blood.  The heart wants what the heart wants.
Altar Of Waste is beyond psyched to issue this love letter to the unrequited anxieties of modern obsessions and unhealthy fixations.  Every dream is crushed upon its dreamer waking.  There is no resonance.  Packed in a DVD case 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

BOAR "DROWN YOURSELF" CDr (AOW 58)

Re-release of this punishing descent into hopelessness from Boar, originally released by Breaching Static last year.  This is an eviscerating wallow through the most despondent of human emotions, a maelstrom of psychological devastation reveling in a hatred for the self and the utter irrelevance of all of society.  Gnawing contemplation quickly gives way to a fracturing of reality and a breaking of the consciousness, setting the psyche alight in the empty cosmos.  The terror of meaninglessness takes your hand and guides you towards the shores of oblivion, growing colder and clammier by the second.  This touch is inhuman, this place unreal.  There is no now, there is no action.  There is only the end and the embrace.  Submit to despair and breathe deep from these waters of defeat.  Suicide is not an escape but a recognition of the inevitable.
Altar Of Waste is thrilled to present this severe piece of sound sculpture in preparation for our upcoming collaboration with Boar.  "Drown Yourself" is a masterful construction of HNW, PE, and drone, fully reaching into every aspect of the genres but belonging squarely to none of them.  The end result is a work awash in torment and depression, hollowed and carved from the meaninglessness.  Packaged in a DVD case in a limited edition of 20 hand-numbered copies, with a wholly destructive new bonus track.  $10 ppd. in the United States, $18 rest of world.

ORDER HERE: www.altarofwasterecords.storenvy.com

CLIVE HENRY "XVIII - DER SIEBENTE KONTINENT" CDr (AOW 53)

Densely layered and meticulously crafted, Clive Henry's work is a study in pure intensity both psychic and emotional.  The sounds are complex, intricately arranged and oftentimes nakedly raw, a scathing interpretation of HNW aesthetics filtered through the lens of heady literature and film.  "XVIII - Der Siebente Kontinent" reaches far into the crumbling psyche of modernity and immerses itself deep in the giant blank of dispassion, retreating ever further into the endless and deepening gray of purgatory.  Everything is worthless, an illusion, a construction, a fallacy.  The realization breeds alongside a growing resentment and bitterness, poisonous and rotting from the depths of the subconscious.  The future is drowning in an ocean of repressed nothingness.  Vapidity is a window to forever.
Altar Of Waste is honored to release this work from one of extreme sound's most innovative composers.  Based on Michael Haneke's film, "Der siebente Kontinent" is a harrowing, haunting, unnerving, and ultimately brutal exploration of contemporary malaise.  On a personal note, this is one of the most challenging and intense recordings I've ever heard.  Total immersion in the outer mysteries.  Packaged in a DVD case 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

OTOMO HAVA "MUSIC, LIQUERS, AND DEPRESSION/STATIC PARAPHILIA" 2CDr (AOW 51)

In the throes of hallucinatory bliss and phantasmagorica, unbridled and free throughout the wisping ethers of the unconsciousness, to the very outer edges of the known nervosia.  Clasped to sweet oblivion's illusory breast, drunk, passionate, and melancholy.  Breaking open the skies above, rendering the clouds servile, awash in the sickly stench of your own inadequacy, reeking of failures both nostalghic and yet to come.  The growing despondency, sinking further, ever more remote, condemned.
Then the horror, the blinding light, the nervousness and bitter anxiety.  The shredded sense of the corporeal and the now.  The deep and desperate need for some sort of coherency, some sort of order beyond the indifferent.  The insomniatic realization that your whole existence is splintering.
Altar Of Waste is pleased to bring Otomo Hava's vision of the wholly damaged psyche to light.  The night is yearning for your sorrows, growing ever more ravenous by the hour.  Truly difficult listening for the fractured and frazzled.  Packaged in a DVD case in a limited edition of 20 hand-numbered copies.  $15 ppd. in the United States, $27 rest of world.

ORDER HERE: www.altarofwasterecords.storenvy.com

CORY STRAND "A SERIOUS MAN: A REINTERPRETATION" 3CDr (AOW 57)

The Coen Brothers are easily placed amongst my favorite filmmakers.  Their ability to interweave total absurdity, nihilism, and extreme violence into their films without sacrificing the rich and deeply poetic philosophical inquiries at their heart is nothing short of masterful.  Alongside No Country For Old Men and The Man Who Wasn't There, A Serious Man explores the bizarre interconnectedness of the universe and mankind's growing realization that nothing ultimately matters, and moreso than either of the above mentioned works, A Serious Man attempts to take philosophy itself to task for its failure to provide any sort of feasible answers to life's perplexities and complications.  The ridiculous equation Larry Gopnik attempts to explain to his bewildered students may as well be a map of the universe as a whole, vast and full of complexities, myriad roads and paths all leading nowhere.  Existence is vacuous, devoid, a glacial collapse of meaning.
I wanted to work with Carter Burwell's score because it so beautifully articulates the themes of the film: the repetitious and cyclical nature of being, the failure to find meaning in any action, and the ethereal and haunting beauty of the mysteries we entwine ourselves in throughout our meandering lives.  There is no noise here, only a calm and inquisitive stagnant stillness, and maybe even a sliver of beauty peaking through the cracks.

-Cory Strand

Packaged in a DVD case in a limited edition of 5 hand-numbered copies.  $18 ppd. in the United States, $30 rest of world.

ORDER HERE: www.altarofwasterecords.storenvy.com

LA MANCHA DEL PECADO "ANCIANO Y ENFERMO" CDr (AOW 52)

Winter numbs the will, the desire, the lifeblood.  Winter is the ultimate isolation, the true and utter natural void.  Howling anti-black, nothing cast as everything, undiscerning, relentless, bitter and caustic.  It gnaws and shreds at every vestige of defense set against it, impervious to any hand save its own.  It crawls across the land, ever hungry and blind, consuming.  Its hollow rage grows and expands, whipping itself into a frenzy of icy knives, stabbing at flesh and instinct alike.  From the cold there is no respite; in the snow there is only the nullification of hope, dreams and memories buried under drifts of piling white waste.
La Mancha Del Pecado summons the winter in the absolutely nightmarish and desiccating "Aciano Y Enfermo."  Inspired by the worst snowstorm in Juarez since 1957 where the artist resides, this is a masterful exercise in drone destructionism, a perfect distillation of the void into a torrent of shrieking and howling amplifier vomit and feedback, the true sound of the deathly north made all the more terrifying and absurd by the fact that this storm manifested itself in the equatorial south.
Altar Of Waste is psyched to release this-these sorts of records are exactly why I started the label in the first place.  You will not emerge unscathed.  Fucking amazing.  Packaged in a DVD case in a limited edition of 20 hand-numbered copies.  $10 ppd. in the United States, $22 rest of world.

ORDER HERE: www.altarof wasterecords.storenvy.com

CORY STRAND "WORRY AND RUIN" 2CDr (AOW 56)

The second entry in my loose series of recordings begun with the "Punishment Will Be Severe" album recently released on Occult Supremacy, "Worry And Ruin" presents a washed out and minimalistic journey through the musical landscape of pop goddess Pink, attempting to mine the wilting depression and caustic self-doubt hinted at in the source tracks.  Pink's self-built reputation as an underdog and outsider on the fringes of modern rock is betrayed by her success; in some ways, her songs virtually beg the listener to dismiss them, to not pay any attention to the ironically defeatist anthems sung by the ragged and vaguely punky girl who never really thought she'd be in the spotlight.  A yearning hides in between the obviousness, brashness as a concealment for years of wretched personal sorrows.
I think these songs are saying something ultimately more funereal than empowering.  The true message lies in the drawn out breaths in the recesses of the songs, the shivering lines where the voice strains to tear the sky.  You can sing along if you think you really know the words.

-Cory Strand

Packaged in a DVD case in a limited edition of 5 hand-numbered copies.  $15 ppd. in the United States, $27 rest of world.

ORDER HERE: www.altarofwasterecords.storenvy.com

CORY STRAND "MANSON AMBIENT" 3CDr (AOW 55)

When I was 16 years old my dad let me take the car into Minneapolis and go wherever I wanted to.  Having just read Helter Skelter for the first time, I found myself fascinated by the fact that Manson had been so closely intertwined with the musical scene of his era.  On a snowy March night I drove the car deeper into Minneapolis than I had ever been and landed at Oarfolkjokeopus Records, where I was told they had a couple Manson records on the shelf.  I came home with "Live at San Quentin" and "LIE: The Love and Terror Cult" and proceeded to blow my teenage mind by listening to the ragged and hallucinogenic blood poetry conjured up by Manson's delusional and unhinged consciousness.  I felt like I was in the presence of something weird and otherworldly, something legitimately dark.  The only other time I've felt it was the first time I heard Burzum, as though I was entwined in the grasp of a transmission from the void of the heart.
Fitting, then, that "Manson Ambient" is some of the most unsettling and difficult work I've created.  I didn't set out to make these pieces as such; initially this record was to be something lovely, almost slight in its melancholia.  I wanted to make beauty out of terror, and with this I could not.  What emerged out of the audial ooze was a nebulous goop of foreboding, something born out of the source material's immutable dementia. 
This shit is scary.

-Cory Strand

Packaged in a DVD case in a limited edition of 5 hand-numbered copies.  $18 ppd. in the  United States, $30 rest of world.

ORDER HERE: www.altarofwasterecords.storenvy.com

CORY STRAND "HALLOWEEN: A REINTERPRETATION" 3CDr (AOW 54)

What I like best about John Carpenter's seminal Halloween is his masterful use of non-horror elements and atmospherics to create an aura of almost suffocating dread and impending violence.  The film is virtually unmatched in its ability to coax horror out of the daylight, the oblique and vague infinity of night absolutely trumped by the sheer and ghastly presence of massive stretches of empty space and the gnawing horror of a lone car slowly passing through the streets.  The true terror of Halloween for me lies not in the grisly murders Michael Myers perpetrates in Haddonfield but instead in the relentless stalking he subjects Laurie to in the opening half of the picture.  His obsessive and haunting pursuit almost defines Carpenter's film and imbues it with a sense of hopelessness and nihilism not oft found in American cinema since.
In my approach to the soundtrack I have foregone any display of violence or severity, attempting to hone in on Carpenter and Howarth's desolate evocations of senseless and bloody-minded obstinance.  These are the emptiest spaces of "Halloween," given leave to walk the night and weave themselves into the fabrics of their physical presences.  Dead eyes stare back, hollow and full of the yawning bleak.

-Cory Strand

Packaged in a DVD case in a limited edition of 5 hand-numbered copies.  $18 ppd. in the United States, $30 rest of world.

ORDER HERE: www.altarofwasterecords.storenvy.com