Controlled Death / Rudolf Eb.er - Death Ceremonies

Death Ceremonies is an unholy alliance between two titans of the extreme noise underground: Controlled Death (the alter ego of Maso Yamazaki, founder of the legendary Japanoise project Masonna) and Rudolf Eb.er, the Swiss provocateur behind Schimpfluch Gruppe and its notorious sound-action rituals. Originally conceived in the late 1990s during a fertile period of collaboration between the two Osaka-based artists, this long-simmering project now manifests as a harrowing, 180-gram vinyl release limited to only 400 copies—a document of sonic necromancy steeped in rot, ritual, and ruin.

Where Masonna channeled manic energy into explosive blasts of noise, Controlled Death turns inward—submerging into suffocating minimalism and oppressive dread. On Death Ceremonies, Yamazaki’s Korg MS-20 analog synth conjures cavernous drones that pulse like decaying flesh, while his distorted vocal invocations—half prayer, half exorcism—drip with alienation and feverish paranoia. His contribution radiates unease: a slow descent into psychotropic darkness, each tone trembling with existential tension.

In contrast yet perfect balance, Rudolf Eb.er brings his singular strain of acoustic horror and actionist ritual. He saws a near-dead violin into splintered harmonics, layering it with field recordings, ritualistic clatter, and degraded tape manipulations that evoke forest ceremonies gone wrong—obscure witchcraft performed by unseen forces. The result is a sonic theater of decay: death industrial at its most tactile, suffocating, and organic, where sound itself seems to decompose.

The album is not content to merely shock or overwhelm—it invokes, creating a space that feels haunted, ceremonial, and disturbingly sacred. Every sound is deliberate: the hiss of tape, the scrape of bow, the low-end hum of analog machinery. Together, Controlled Death and Rudolf Eb.er channel the primordial essence of early black metal, industrial ritualism, and post-mortem ambient, reducing them to raw, abject sound matter.

Death Ceremonies stands as one of the darkest and most unsettling collaborations in either artist’s catalog, merging the Japanese noise tradition’s visceral extremity with European ritual-industrial sensibility. This is not a record to be played casually—it’s to be experienced as a descent: an initiation into decay, paranoia, and purification through noise.

Edition of 400 copies on 180-gram vinyl.

For fans of: Brighter Death Now, Sutcliffe Jugend, Atrax Morgue, The Rita, M.B., SPK, Trepaneringsritualen, and early Cold Meat Industry releases.