- Vienna's Florian Bocksrucker seems to have a thing for the occult. His debut, last year's Tarot EP, featured ravens and a horned skull on the cover. The follow-up, on the insurgent local label Neubau, is called the SixSixSix EP and has a devilish set of track titles to match. That's not all—the EP's three tracks are built around samples from Ken Russell's The Devils, a 1971 film about a 17th-century catholic priest who was executed for witchcraft. Graphic and transgressive, the film was banned in several countries and heavily censored in others (the unedited "Rape Of Christ" scene was only rediscovered in the '00s). Bocksrucker uses it to add a pinch of devilish drama to his post-punk techno dirges.
Take "Sirius Match," in which our priest receives his sentence: "It is ordered that you be taken to the marketplace, tied to a stake, and burned alive!" The moment highlights the music's grim inevitability, and the sickly tint of its spine-chilling atmosphere. "The Devil Has Spoken" is grislier still, its droning low-end joined by banshee-wail noise and a wisp of ghoulish melody in the breakdown. Both tracks are decently terrifying, but "Mephisto's Offer" steals the show. Bocksrucker's usual 4/4 is replaced by syncopated kick drums that bob and weave circa 90 BPM, while dissonant bell tones offer the EP's most memorable splash of melody. In the breakdown, the priest makes a last-ditch appeal: "I know I am a weak and bad man. But after this journey I may find the strength to change…" The sound of a leering crowd erupts in a cloud of reverb, before the music resumes its deathly trudge.
Tracklist01. The Devil Has Spoken
02. Sirius Match
03. Mephisto's Offer