According to Brian “Lustmord” Williams, Psychological Warfare Technology Systems was originally envisioned as the first part of a Terror Against Terror trilogy that would’ve culminated in a record of blistering white noise. Williams made the record with frequent collaborator Andrew Lagowski in 1989, but it didn’t actually come out until three years later — by which time, both of these guys had filed it away as a “missed opportunity.” The concept behind Psychological Warfare Technology Systems was 100% genius, though: chopped up and screwed film dialogue, samples of semi-automatic weapons/ explosions/ air raid sirens/ helicopters and hard techno beats. Williams and Lagowski purportedly put the record together as a giant piss-take on Front-242 — an attempt to make genuinely menacing, yet danceable, club-ready anthems.

Upon its release, both Williams and Lagowski groused that an extended stay in record label purgatory had already dilluted the record’s ideas and dated the production techniques. The pure ambient stuff (”Biohazard”) sounds like filler and electronic music has gone through about a million different iterations, but the mid-tempo stuff is totally forward-thinking and quite unlike anything else that was coming out at the time. How dilluted can the ideas be, anyway? This record came out at the tail end of the Cold War but seemed to forecast global terrorism and increased militarization. Here we are in 2008, the world’s in much worse shape, and Psychological Warfare Technology Systems (which has now been out of print for over a decade) is definitely due for a reissue.

MP3: Terror Against Terror, “The Only Good God is a Dead God”
MP3: Terror Against Terror, “Tactical Intervention”

Here’s Eurogirl from French doomsters Monarch! doing her best Hank von Helvete impression (w/o firecrackers in her bum). HOTT!!

And heres Monarch!’s cover of Turbonegro’s “I Got Erection” from last year’s way out-of-print split 7″ with Moss. DOUBLE HOTT!!

Scott Harding — aka Scotty Hard — is in bad shape. Last month, the veteran hip-hop producer was involved in a car accident that left him partially paralyzed. Harding’s friends and admirers have set up a fund called The Scotty Hard Trust to help offset his massive medical expenses and are accepting donations via Paypal. Harding has a ton of credits to his name (Black Sheep, Wu Tang, De La Soul) and was more or less the house producer at Island’s subsidiary Gee Street throughout the early 90’s, but his work with bugged-out Brookyln duo New Kingdom was clearly his finest hour. Do you dig Dälek? New Kingdom was doing Dälek years before Dälek dropped Negro Necro Nekros and producer Alap “Oktopus” Momin has expressed his admiration for Harding’s production technique in countless interviews. I always hoped Harding would get his chance to work on a traditional rock or metal record, and wondered why he hadn’t, given his love of heaviness and distortion. I saw New Kingdom (with Harding on guitar) in Cleveland back in the summer of ‘96 and my eardrums still haven’t recovered. Get well, dude.

MP3: New Kingdom, “Paradise Don’t Come Cheap”

A lot of folks say they like death metal’s music, but “just can’t get into the vocals.” We at the Deciblog are here to help those people with the following MP3 we’ve assembled; a two-minute and twenty-two second file of Cannibal Corpse frontman Chris Barnes’ complete in between-song banter from a live 1992 bootleg. Download here.

According to Pitchfork, Phil Elvrum is planning to go “hard core” on the upcoming Mount Eerie EP Black Wooden Ceiling Opening. The album art sort of looks like a black metal cover and Elvrum described the band’s current sound as “kind of like Black Metal but made of natural materials.” We’re not sure what to make of this after listening to the track streaming on Pitchfork (”Don’t Smoke”). It sounds like a giant Flaming Lips/ Queen/ Blur/ Weezer mash-up. Not hardcore or black metal in the least, and more in keeping with the fractured pop Elvrum championed on The Glow Pt. 2. One one hand, the term “black metal” has already been drained of its essential menaing, to the point where a band like Teeth of the Hydra can describe its sound as “1970s black metal” and pretend like it means something.

“Black metal” now exists as critical shorthand for “sad/ambient/haunting songs recorded on a 4-track in someone’s bedroom,” as in: “Hey, have you heard this new black metal song by Beth Orton?” On the other hand, Phil Elvrum comes from the same scene as folks like Agalloch and Wolves in the Throne Room and the stuff he’s been doing as Mount Eerie is creative and blissfully idiosyncratic and fucked-up. But I’m going to say that Elvrum actually came a little closer to the Platonic ideal of black metal while shifting recording aliases on the 2003 Microphones record Mount Eerie, a concept album about the universe with Beat Happening’s Calvin Johnson acting as the voice of God. And yeah, it’s almost as hard to digest as that Liars record everyone hated so much.

MP3: The Microphones, “The Sun”

The special edition of the new Nunslaughter/ Mutilated Messiah split 7″ went on sale last week and sold out in three days.

You just missed your chance to own one of the nastiest records ever created.

Let’s qualify that a bit first. This is not the weirdest packaging we’ve ever seen — that honor probably goes to Throne of Blood’s out of print record I Hope You Fail Miserably And Never Accomplish Anything Ever Again, which featured molded latex and a glass eye and kind of looked like those Evil Dead special editions with the 3-D Necronomicon covers. And it’s not the grossest concept for a special edition, either, since deceased Japanese noise artist Koji Tano once put out a limited run (of a single copy) of one of his MSBR records packaged in a glass sheath filled with human sperm.

But this is easily a contender for the vilest packaging for a record in (relatively) wider release. 100 people just dropped $22 apiece for the honor of owning a record encased in a hard jacket made out of real maggots. To quote Kelly Bundy, “The mind wobbles.”

MP3: Nunslaughter, “Mother, Cunt, Whore”

Managing Editor Andrew Bonazelli loves mash-ups, so here’s Gucci Mane vs. Pelican for streaming/download at The Hood Internet. [via Hydra Headlines]

News for the new year: Dischord is re-issuing Scream’s 1983 debut Still Screaming on vinyl. The DC hardcore quartet got a little attention in the 90s when latter-day drummer Dave Grohl jumped ship for Nirvana and registered another little blip on the radar when brothers Pete and Franz Stahl revisited Scream in their abortive major-label group Wool. Franz Stahl also reteamed with Grohl a few years later in a Foo Fighters line-up, while his brother Pete played with Goatsnake. They’re well travelled. Anyway: Scream went through a series of minor identity crisises throughout the 80s, flirted with melody and time signatures and evolved into a really odd mutant rock act. Still Screaming is the record that put ‘em on the map, though, and crucial listening for fans of Bad Brains (especially the reggae-infused sound of “Hygiene”) and, of course, Minor Threat (endless dismissals of corporate greed probably still cause Ian MacKaye’s eyes to well up). There’s a couple of songs on the record that make me cringe when I listen to ‘em (”Amerarockers” sounds like…ugh…Sublime), but end-to-end, it’s a touchstone of DC hardcore and an absolute fucking classic.

MP3: Scream, “Fight/ American Justice”

MP3: Scream, “Who Knows? Who Cares?”