Genre: Rhythmic Industrial

Originally released on The Umbrella Noize Collective; catalogue number: UMB041

01 Philosophy In Limbo
02 Limbo’s Keep
03 A Conoisseur Of Sin
04 A Cold, Heavy, Dirty Rain
05 “Pape!Pape Aatan Aleppe”
06 Miser’s Squat
07 The Border Of Styx
08 A Gurgled Lament
09 Phleygas’s Boney Hands
10 At the Gates Of Dis
11 Erinyes Atop The Ramparts
12 A Field Of Burning Graves
13 Warnings From A Shade
14 Getting Used To The Smell
15 River Of Boiling Blood
16 Harpies Perched On Suicide Trees
17 Naked In The Desert
18 Riding The Back Of Fraud
19 Evil Pouches
20 Frozen Tears
21 A Perverted Trinity

“Abandon Every Hope All You Who Enter”

In Dante Alighieri's Inferno, part of The Divine Comedy, Malebolge is the eighth circle of Hell, it is large, funnel-shaped cavern, itself divided into ten concentric circular trenches or ditches. Actually translated from Italian “Malebolge” means "evil ditches" or “evil pouches”, which became a title of the album. “Malebolge” is a result of collaboration of The Triumverate of Ctephin (responsible for rhythm) and Rabbit Girls (responsible for noise). This way a rhythm’n’noise album Evil Pouches saw the light, issued by Umbrella Noise first and then re-released by Roil Noise label, releasing industrial/noise/experimental acts, like Kenji Siratori, Ghoul Detail, Rabbit Girls, Mystified.

The portrait of Dante Alighieri was the best way to illustrate the album and the best variant for the cover. Just the music became a kind of unexpected turn-up for me as looking at the booklet I was waiting to hear some kind of dark ambient that might sound similar to Raison D’etre or Grimbergen. However, surprisingly I heard rhythmic industrial music close to Pneumatic Detach, in my opinion, but if Pneumatic detach is very “matematical” (dry, accurate, not rich with backgrounds that create the appropriate mood), Malebolge is a bit more atmospheric, although also filled with machinery sounds as if a huge mechanism was working/calculating not far away. Sometimes background and the rhythmic components may sound apart from each other, I had this feeling on track 4 – A Cold, Heavy, Dirty Rain. The sound is thick and multilayered. So multilayered that, as I already said, sometimes it seems the rhythm goes its way and the background goes its own way. I think it happens due to the fact that these two parts are very different – ambient one is not pure noise, it is rather constructed from atmorpheric patterns and reminds everything from small ringing bells to motives usually performed on organ – it is the part of the songs that bring mystery to the sound. The rhythmic part is quite difficult to perceive, since it is constructed from numerous broken lines and other small sounds and glitches that surround those broken lines. And that’s why it is difficult to connect the smooth background and the broken, choppy rhythms.

Every track is a short excursion to the Malebolge environment, a slow travel through the circles of hell which begins in Limbo (track 01 and 02 – Phylosophy in Limbo and Limbo’s Keep) and ends in the last, ninth circle, which represents a frozen lake with the devil staying in the middle (track 20 – Frozen Tears). The album tells a listener a story in sounds – track 04 (A Cold, Heavy, Dirty rain) deals with Second Circle, where the sinners are blown about to and fro by a violent storm, tracks 7 and 9 are an acquaintance with the river Styx and a boat man Phleygas who transports the souls accross the Styx in his skiff. Track 10 named At the Gates of Dis brings us closer to the city of sinners called Dis, which is itself surrounded by the Stygian marsh. Its walls contain the lower parts of hell. Track 12 - A Fieled of Burning Graves symbolizes the Sixth Circle, where heretics are trapped in flaming tombs. Tracks 15-17 are the ones connected with Seventh Circle. Actually the name of the album may mean both a reference to Dante’s Divine Comedy generally and be a culmination of the album, since “Evil Pouches” are a part of the Eigth Circle.

This album makes you not only listen, but also search for information and find out many interesting things around the Divine Comedy. Although the outlook of the CD is really simple, it has content worth checking out.