Like many of the obscure underground artists that I try to document here at Crucial Blast, I first stumbled across Cody Spence Drasser's grisly surrealistic artwork by way of his musical projects. I had been digging around online for information on his releases a while back, as I wanted to stock a couple of ‘em in the Crucial Blast catalog; in recent years, Drasser has been busy with the dark ambient/noise project Caulbearer, which combines elements of classic isolationist ambient with bursts of incendiary electronics and dark kosmische drones to create expansive sound-fields of blackened industrial drift. It was then, while looking for more information on Drasser’s recordings, that I came across a website dedicated specifically to the artwork that he has been producing over the past two decades. A couple of clicks later, and I found myself devouring a host of horrific images and tenebrous tableaux seemingly retched forth from some ghastly dreamworld. I was staring into the pulsating, chitinous black heart of the Vomitous Mass.
Long before he began floating out into the chthonic ether with Caulbearer, Drasser's involvement in the extreme music underground was born in the blood-soaked charnel pits of early 90s death metal. As the guitarist for the short-lived New York death metal band Afterbirth, Drasser helped to produce a couple of demos of weird, filthy sewercrush during the band’s brief run, including the 1994 tape Psychopathic Embryotomy. That demo would go on to gain a cult following among fans of old-school death metal for its strange, murky atmosphere and ultra-heavy sound, which has been acclaimed by some as a precursor to the whole "slam death" thing that would grow in popularity later in the decade with bands like Devourment and Internal Bleeding (and even lead the band to recently reform after nearly twenty years in order to record new material). And at the same time that Drasser was crunching out riffs in Afterbirth, he was also beginning to produce his own visual artwork fueled by all of that sonic carnage, developing a distinct style that seemed to be inspired by a conflux of HR Giger's surrealistic biomechanical visions, the otherworldly album art of artists like Dan Seagrave, Away and Andreas Marschall, and the more bizarre fringes of horror comics art belched forth from the bowels of late 80s magazines like Gore Shriek. Drowning his grey matter in the cacophony of early death metal, Drasser began to work under the name "Vomitous Mass Graphics", scrawling out an array of surreal, morbid images charged with raw, ultra-violent energy. These pieces had a similar look and feel as the crude abattoir fantasies that you would find splattered across many of the death metal demo covers of the day, but Drasser’s work often headed into even more bizarre realms of oneiric depravity.
Released as part of Crucial Blast’s ongoing art zine series focusing on little-known artists on the fringes of extreme metal / occult / horror / surrealism, this new publication collects much of the grotesque artwork that Drasser produced under the Vomitous Mass name between 1992 and 1999, as well as several full-color collage pieces, fragments of sketchbook ephemera, and a selection of more recent artwork. As you flip through the pages of Vomitous Mass, you’ll find detailed black ink illustrations of hideous biological mutations, visions of shambling sentient meat-heaps rendered in sickening pastel hues, furiously scribbled scenes of delirious bio-mechanical chaos, dreamlike landscapes of towering crustacean structures, a smattering of spiny death metal logos and primitive demo cover-style flesh carnage, occult sigils rendered in intricate line art, and more. It also serves as a document of Drasser’s evolution as an artist, drawing a line from his early youthful renderings of crude phantasmal violence to his later work that reveals a striking progression in both technique and imagination.
Released in a limited printing of one hundred copies, with a cut-out cover design that sort of resembles those old step-back covers found on horror paperbacks from the 1980's.
CRUCIAL BLAST zine ISSUE VOID (Issue #0)
$8 USD
ABYSM: The Incomplete Crucial Blast Guide To Black Noise, Necro-industrial, and Ambient Filth: VOL I - A to E
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This Place Is Haunted –
CASSETTE (LIMITED EDITION)
HIGH NOON KAHUNA
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Dark Sky Equilibrium –
CASSETTE (LIMITED EDITION)
MOONBLADDER
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This Place Is Haunted –
COMPACT DISC
HIGH NOON KAHUNA
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Demo 2023 –
LIMITED EDITION CASSETTE
SADOMATIC RITES
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Shadow and Frost –
LIMITED EDITION AUDIO CASSETTE
HÉRÉTIQUE DU NORD
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Dumesday Book –
LIMITED EDITION 2 X CASSETTE BOXSET
DARSOMBRA
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Pestilence Crowned –
LIMITED EDITION CASSETTE / BOOKLET / POSTER SET
GRAVE GNOSIS
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CULTIC "SEDUCER" TAPE + SHIRT BUNDLE (XXL)
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CULTIC
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STCLVR
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Akratic Parasitism –
GENEVIEVE Akratic Parasitism CASSETTE (Smoke Shell)
GENEVIEVE
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Sprecher des Omnibus der Ewigkeit –
Limited Edition Audio Cassette
TOMBHAMMER
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Stalker –
Limited Edition Cassette
BOREDOM KNIFE
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Abortion Sacrament –
Limited Edition Casette Tape
CREMATION GROUNDS
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Abortion Sacrament –
Limited edition 3" CD in DVD-size packaging
CREMATION GROUNDS
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AMERICAN WEREWOLVES (2022) VHS Videocassette w/ Booklet
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Ophidian Mysteries: Demos 2021 - 2023 –
Limited edition audio cassette
SEVEN HEADED SERPENT
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Void Dissociation –
Limited edition audio cassette.
LYSERGIC
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Noumenal Field Recordings / Tierra Y Voluntad (Land And Will) –
Limited edition audio cassette
GASKET
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Killing Spree –
Limited Edition Audio Cassette - limited to 100 copies
HIGH NOON KAHUNA
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Hymns For The Broken, Swollen And Silent –
Gatefold Compact Disc
GNAW THEIR TONGUES
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Yeast Mother: An Electroacoustic Mass –
Digipak Compact Disc
SNARES OF SIXES
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Dead Mountain Mouth –
Compact Disc
GENGHIS TRON
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Graphic –
Digipak Compact Disc
TROLLER
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Morbid Deviations –
Limited edition audio cassette
ATHAME / XEUKATRE
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Crucial Blast Hagerstown, Maryland
Crucial Blast is an independent underground label and online shop specializing in cutting edge, experimental heavy music and related cultural artifacts, with a particular focus on blackened avant-metal, nihilistic noise/industrial, dark ambiance, infernal psychedelia, and hardcore improv/free-jazz. ... more
