Snares of Sixes - "Yeast Mother: An Electroacoustic Mass" CD

With tracks like "Urine Hive", "Lions To Leeches", and "The Mother's Throat", Walton and company lurch through an escalating, ever-shifting frenzy of creepy, labyrinthine melody and pummeling percussive chaos, over-modulated riffage and schizophrenic time signatures, where android mutterings give way to hideous blackened shrieks and bouts of bizarre crooning, the sound stitched with veins of crushing metallic heaviosity, fractured electronica, and surreal atmospherics as it reaches towards the menacing glitched-out tech-metal hallucination of "Retroperistalsis" that closes the EP.

Often difficult, frequently nightmarish, this stuff easily ranks as one of Walton's more challenging and oblique offerings. And for us, one of his most fascinating. Features Marius Sjøli and Robert Hunter (Hollow Branches), Andy Winter (Winds), Pete Lee (Lawnmower Deth), Nathanaël Larochette (Musk Ox), and Don Anderson (Agalloch, Sculptured), among others.

The CD edition comes in a six-panel digipak.