Leiche Rustikal

condition (record/cover): NM / NM

Edition of 500 numbered copies (this copy is unnumbered).

Artur Zab's most widely circulated LP, released in 2002 on the Austrian Steinklang Industries imprint (catalogue SK 21) in a hand-numbered edition of 500 copies plus a separate 100-copy CDR edition. Eleven tracks: "H.en," "Luzifer," "Rudra," "November," "Poranek," "Mutagen," "Black Church," "J:H:V," "In Separable," "Galu," and a 2002 remix of "Ave Verum Corpus" originally heard on the Epitaph cassette.

Steinklang's in-house description of the record as "monumental old-school industrial with powerful percussion and striking voice interludes" gets at what the LP does well: the sound-field combines Laibach-style rhetorical weight with a rhythmic-noise propulsion that places it beyond Laibach's classical-industrial template. "Luzifer" is the vocal-driven centrepiece, "Galu" the most propulsively rhythmic track, and the dark-ambient "Asle" moves toward the ritual drone end of the project. Artwork by M. Presch.

The Steinklang label (Austria, since 1992) had a house aesthetic that combined industrial, ambient, and neofolk output, and by 2002 Zab had settled firmly inside that family. His subsequent album Impuls (Steinklang SKD03, 2004) would extend the sound further into droning ritual ambient. Rudra remains the project's clearest statement and the point at which Leiche Rustikal achieved its fullest-scale realisation.