Our young maiden was hanging out in Devon for no particular reason, other than that she had happened to be there with a band whose name has not been recorded in the annals of history. While the rest of the groupies were getting all the action - & some of the drugs, too, may I add - Crust chanced upon some dirty squatters making a hell of a noise in front of a banner with
Amebix scribbled on it. That ever-elusive - & some also claim bourgeois-tinged - bliss known as love at first sight grabbed her by her matted hair & swept the littered floor with her. Amebix reciprocated by plunging into a gut-wrenching ode of love & lust & other things better left unmentioned, the likes of which the world had never heard before. That was it, then - love at first sight.
Crust remained Amebix's main squeeze for years to come. Frequent moves from one squat to another, starvation to the point of despair, drug use & abuse, & a host of other rough deals helped her shed her baby fat & blossom into a unique creature described by her devotees as formidable, imposing, galloping, monolithic, demented, & other forgotten words sitting all smudged out on grey, crumbling paper stacked in sunless attics worldwide. Crust was Amebix's muse while their rite of passage lasted, & they, in turn, were devoted to her with a fierce determination that no one has ever fully comprehended. Sure enough, Crust - who had a gentle & compassionate soul underneath the leather jacket & stained tee - popped the cherry for numerous other bands as well. & yet, little of it remains as a memory in her head (though, last time I saw her, she did tend to wistfully plunge into stories about early
Hellbastard, Axegrinder, late Anti System,
Antisect, & early
Sacrilege)...
Following the demise of Amebix, Crust - a mature, world-weary squatter who had seen it all & done it all by now - did the obvious thing: she shacked up with Zygote for a while. Things went pretty well, there were even some memorable moments, but Crust was restless: she wandered around for quite a few years, crashing on squat floors in the UK, Poland, Sweden, Greece, & elsewhere & giving rise to numerous 'Crust sightings' (but, strangely enough, not to rumors about her having been abducted by aliens & made to mate with dead actors). Some say she also spent a lot if time in Japan, but there's no consensus - more eurocentric fans claim that was her twin sister or even a Made-In-Japan Crust look-alike; the issue remains to be resolved in one or another historical thesis published by Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux or, at least, Profane Existence. At any rate, by the time the interlude was over, & following a bad case of diarrhea from tzatziki gone bad, Crust packed up, rode a patched up Zeppelin to the other side of the Atlantic, & swiftly moved to Portland, Oregon where her good friend Discore had been sending raving letters from (that was the mushrooms growing in the vast forests nearby - Discore was a flower child gone to the dogs, after all).
She lived there quite happily, occasionally patting the heads of local bands paying homage to her by laying dead mice at her feet, & even doubling up on them with Discore at the helm. & yet, she was only properly revitalized when she met a young southerner band of idealists calling themselves
His Hero Is Gone (
From Ashes Rise also got some, of course). Their liaison lasted a long time, during which she toured extensively with them, even going as far as Norway (only to sleep with a band of slobs called
Jin'Rik'Sha'). When HHIG disbanded, Crust repeated the pattern she had established more than a decade ago & became the (more autocratic & self-assertive now) muse of one of their offshoots -
Tragedy. Oh my, what a relation this has been up to date... Sure enough, there's been little variation in bed - both she & Tragedy have gotten pretty old by now, as our readers surely realize... & Crust sometimes gets either suicidal or homicidal (but definitely depressed) when she thinks of the time the great unwashed got their claws on those cheap, Made-In-Taiwan Crust Plastic Dolls (TM) which find their illicit way into the continent through Gibraltar... But still!
It's been rumored that Crust decided to get that ole' Zeppelin out of the attic, & then attempt the trip back to the UK for the first time in ages, when her parents were found dead (tragically strangled by their own potted aspidistra after watching a rerun of The Little Shop Of Horrors). It's also been rumored that she decided to stay there & shack up with a young band called Fall Of Efrafa & see whether she can't remind the european scene what a wee bit of sex with the original Crust will do to you & your music. That's certainly where I met her on the aforementioned occasion (though Fall Of Efrafa were nowhere to be seen - let that be a lesson to all of you spreading gossip behind people's backs). She was overly excited & looking forward to meeting up with good old trusted lovers Tragedy again, as they will proceed to demolish every squat in their upcoming european tour.
& boy, oh boy, did I get to hear a story or two about a german band called Jeniger or what... How she met their young, grindcoring, all-over-the-place selves & screwed their brains out... & how they gained focus, then, from one day to the next, & rushed into the nearest studio to record the prelude to their 12" masterpiece... & how Crust stood by them all the while, showing them all the tricks she had learned in her heyday & then a few more (the memory of some of the details still makes your humble narrator blush)... Crust handed me a copy of that historical recording, dedicated to her by the band (her indescribable countenance immortalized in the form of a sticker coming with the 7") & shooed me out despite my protestations. I think she clearly did not want to answer questions about how a band playing grindcore in
their first 7" managed to turn into a monstrous, demented, lovecraftian deity called Zeroid which went to bed with every dark mistress on the planet (alive or not - & preferably not). I finished my tea & left, the 7" you're about to hear clutched in my sweating fingers. Outside, light was posing theatrically as the debris of dawn.
This is an amazing piece of vinyl from a now forgotten band which delivered some great records and somehow was ahead of its time: Narsaak formed in Darmstadt, Germany in early '90's and last summer they called a day after their final gig. "The members played in several bands after the split most of them in SKELETON ARMY & BASTARD KING just to name a few. Since late 2006 we are back on the map with almost the same line-up where we broke up 8 years ago". Their discography includes a handful of seven inch releases and weirdly not any lp, Their back catalogue is in their myspace and some of these are already posted here and there (split w Notwehr, split w Dead Beat, split w Stack, Hunde, lust and tod comp, etc, their swan song is the split with Planks which was released recently.
