Relay For Death have always sounded like they’re making music at the very end of the world - or perhaps just past it, when the ruins have cooled, and only the faint hum of electricity survives. With "Mutual Consuming", the Spikula twins refine that post-apocalyptic grammar into something both implacable and strangely serene: two side-long slabs of smoldering ambience, at once minimal and oppressive, delicate and devastating.

The title comes from traditional Chinese medicine, where yin and yang don’t fight so much as they devour one another, endlessly. Relay For Death take that idea and render it in sound: frequencies that seem to eat themselves, loops collapsing into static, drones feeding on their own reverberations. It’s not Ouroboros, exactly, but something more dyspeptic - an eternal feedback cycle where digestion never ends, only mutates.

Side A, "intone the morph orb", is a slow sink into an abyssal throb, like Thomas Köner’s polar drones except more toxic, thickened with radiation and decay. It feels like the inside of a glacier listening to itself dissolve. Side B, "terminal ice wind", blows colder: all brittle metallic resonance and cavernous breaths, an industrial cousin of MB’s desolate meditations. The piece unfurls like weather, impersonal yet all-consuming, leaving you with the unsettling impression that the storm doesn’t notice you, and never will.

Relay For Death have long worked in this hermetic register - grim, uncompromising, allergic to narrative - but here the sense of collapse feels almost sculptural. Noise, usually about eruption, here becomes about erosion: a slow wearing down of sound into absence. What’s remarkable is how immersive that void is. If destruction has a texture, the twins have managed to record it.

Originally part of the now-mythical "On Corrosion" boxset (the ten-cassette wooden reliquary that instantly vanished into collector lore), "Mutual Consuming" finally crawls back into circulation on its own. It still feels less like an album and more like an environment: a frozen, poisoned atmosphere in which the listener is allowed to drift, stripped of warmth but overwhelmed by detail.

Listening is like staring too long into black water: first frightening, then mesmerizing, then almost comforting. Relay For Death may claim there’s no through-line with their past work, but the bleak humor of that denial is telling. In the gorge fest of existence, the twins don’t offer catharsis or clarity. What they offer is endurance. A space where destruction, rather than resisted, is simply inhabited.

It’s nihilism with staying power. A music for when there’s nothing left to do but sit with the storm, and let it consume.