Kyūketsuki – Nightmare Detective

Kyūketsuki is the experimental Black Metal / Industrial project of French multi‑disciplinary artist Maxime André Taccardi, performing here under the alias Yūrei.

Merging cinematic Dark Ambient, raw LLN Black Metal, and Japanese Folk instrumentation, the 2025 digital album ‘Nightmare Detective’ follows the Japan‑centric release Oni, continuing Taccardi’s fascination with body horror and extreme music.

A breakdown of the tracks leads us to ‘Tetsuo’s Dance I & II’ reimagines Chu Ishikawa’s Tetsuo Dance and Lost, channeling Shinya Tsukamoto’s body‑horror techno‑industrial intensity through agonizing Black Metal textures.

The title track draws directly from Tsukamoto’s Nightmare Detective, tapping into motifs of dream invasion, psychic harm, suicide ideation, and inner monstrosity that permeate Taccardi’s work.

‘Devil Fetus’ nods to Lau Hung‑chuen’s Hong Kong Category III possession film (akin to an NC‑17 rating in the US), expanding the album’s pan‑Asian horror scope, while ‘Aokigahara’ evokes Japan’s notorious “sea of trees” at Mount Fuji — a symbol of despair in contemporary horror — as a soundscape of ambient dread and mortuary stillness.

The album moves fluidly between pounding metallic percussion, saturated synth‑noise, ritualistic chanting, and lo‑fi tremolo haze, opening cinematic spaces that reveal Japanese folk timbres anchoring the industrial ferocity.

It is a hypnotic successor to Oni, the blood‑painted cover echoing Taccardi’s blend of corporeal visual art and sonic extremity.

Within a catalogue of ten Kyūketsuki releases — including Akuma, Katana, Seppuku, and Himitsu — Nightmare Detective marks a more explicit homage to Tsukamoto and Ishikawa, replacing the broader folkloric and martial tones of earlier works with a direct industrial‑film lens.

Its dedications situate it firmly in Tsukamoto’s sonic world: mechanised rhythms, metallic clangor, and corrosive ambience, paralleling Ishikawa’s 2006 soundtrack but refracted through Taccardi’s Black Metal / Industrial vision.

For those seeking industrial‑cyberpunk energy, tracks like ‘Tetsuo’s Dance’ and ‘Tetsuo’s Dance Part II: Lost Kaijū’ lead naturally into the title cut for the pure Tsukamoto/Ishikawa current; for slow‑burn atmosphere, Aokigahara and Necrosis drift inexorably into the possession‑horror pummel of Devil Fetus.

Like Quentin Tarantino’s cinematic mixtapes that lift, remix, and recontextualise decades of film into something unmistakably his own, Taccardi draws from a deep well of cultural and genre references to create an equally distinctive audio world.

The inustrial/cinematic horror on “Nightmare Detective” is dense, insidious, and suffocating, rewarding repeated listens as its textures and tensions reveal themselves, and it makes a strong case for the Kyūketsuki discography to be reissued in a deluxe box‑set complete with Taccardi’s visual art and extensive liner notes — a fitting monument to a singular and uncompromising artistic vision.