This CDEP features a new, exclusive song each from New York tech/prog metal wizards BEHOLD...THE ARCTOPUS and shred meltdown duo ORTHRELM, overdosing the listener on spastic complexity and insane instrumental prowess that will liquify your grey matter. Adorned in eye-blazing original artwork from VOIVOD's Away. DECIBEL Magazine said "...Both Behold... the Arctopus and Orthrelm stake their reputations on disciplined improvisation, but the work itself necessitates auto-destructive imperatives. Their elusive, dizzying sound evokes Zorn's work with Painkiller and Masada and is equally reminiscent of Coltrane's abandonment first of bebop, then the matrix he developed with Giant Steps before venturing outward into the spiritual impossibilities of modal jazz. Behold's "PAINcave" begins a dialogue between guitar and drums that culminates in a regurgitation of what's just been digested. Unlike Orthrelm, their use of viscous sounds lubricates and combusts, taking a circuitous route through dialogical syncopation, call and response, and load noise intensity. Like Zorn's work, it's moody and agitated, at once brooding and decisive, storming and wailing with purpose between chromatic tantrums. Conversely, Orthrelm's "Pithot 1" abbreviates their 2005 ode to concentration, OV. A series of profound declensions and cartoonish riffs, it scrawls a Mike Patton caricature, then burns it in effigy. As much a song as a trigonometry lesson, Orthrelm's guitars and drums chase a parabolic rollercoaster, cascading down asymptotic peaks with fearless elegance. Orthrelm draw a smiley face on repetition, the hallmark of nightmare logic allowing cat and mouse to lose meaning only to become a chicken or egg proposition in which the cat's left chasing its tail. Each generation is more distorted, violent, and funny: as Tweety is to Sylvester and as Tom is to Jerry is to Itchy is to Scratchy ad infinitum; or as Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? playwright Edward Albee once put it, "Good, better, best, bested."