I was first contacted by Italian Grindcore band Cripple Bastards in 2008. They wanted me to remix a track from their album Variante alla Morte which they had just finished with release planned for 2009. They sent me a copy of the mixes and an Italian lyric sheet and I immediately saw an opportunity for Horrorshow.

I had been interested in Death Metal, Hardcore, Grindcore, Dark Metal etc. for a couple of years. The Gothic luxuriance, the irony and humour, the politics of disgust for an unfair world, the technical discipline and rhythmic complexity all struck a chord with me - but I'd never really had the opportunity to work in the area.

                Cripple Bastards demonstrate all the things I love about the genre: highly cultured and politically uncompromising - and capable of expressing it all in blasts of aggression as little as 2 or 3 seconds long at times. One of their specialities is having 2 vocalists, both equally scary but covering 2 very different ranges.

I contacted the band and suggested that rather than do a remix we should collaborate on a new piece for Horrorshow. My plan was to extend the sonic range of their style, primarily by replacing the guitars and bass with bells, organs and synthesizers.

As I set to work the filmic and narrative nature of the piece burst into life. The symbolic nature of the bells and the organ placed us firmly in a church and the Italian language made this a catholic church, or even cathedral - Rome itself? A ritual is taking place, but this is no ordinary Mass - this is a Messa Nera, the black mass.

                A single bell begins the piece but its sound slowly mutates into something new - something evil, filled with tortured souls calling on their fellow adherents to join them in a black mass. Our vocalists intone the texts of their diseased ritual of rape and human sacrifice. A wedding maybe? The bride as a sacrifice to pure evil - the bells seem to suggest so. The entire harmony in the piece is derived from one interval - the flattened fifth or tritone. Banned in religious music for centuries it is know as Diabolus In Musica, the Devil in Music. The Mass reaches its climax with the distorted and hideously stretched word Sacro - sacred. The bells ring out again in triumph, evil has prevailed.

Although this, like all the music in Horrorshow, is incomplete without the film, Cripple Bastards love this track so much they released it on limited edition vinyl, late 2009, in a special edition of their album Variante alla Morte.

Nevertheless the filmic nature of this piece is enormous and the visual scope in the home of catholicism and brutal satanic ritual is vast. This could be the peak in terror for the whole project.

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film directed by Dan Hardingham