Over the last year, it has become one of my favourite British labels. I’ve bought their LPs of twelve-string ragas. I’ve bought their cassettes of minimalist electronic drone. I’ve bought their CD-Rs of twisted analogue noise. Are there any other formats that Nottingham’s Blackest Rainbow want to try and sell me? Oh, here is one: a comic. About vampires. Yep, this excellent new double album (triple on vinyl) from Natural Snow Buildings comes housed within a glossy sixteen page lovingly-illustrated comic book on the subject of the Vampires of Roumania. Now, do I look like the sort of person who reads comics? Do you think I’m some sort of geek? Probably one with long hair? Who has “trouble finding the right girl”? Who spends way too much of his money on limited-edition cultural ephemera? Eh? Er. Um. Right. So how much do you want for one of these again?

Experimental French duo Mehdi Ameziane and Solange Gularte are beginning to make a habit of releasing wonderfully packaged curios such as this. Their discography already comprises around a dozen or so releases, either solo or together, some in runs as small as fifteen copies. Even I don’t have those. But across these two Blackest Rainbow discs they show off the full range of their talents. At least one of them (Solange) is a classically-trained musician, and while lo-fi drones dominate, more traditional songcraft surfaces to great effect. Songs stretch out to epic distance, yet remain rich in sonic detail and even melody- listen to the way that hypnagogic keyboard melodies dissolve into fuzz guitar lines on “From Their Body At Will”, or to how shimmering strings and wailing woodwinds can be picked out, even amongst the dense eastern-flavoured epic “Porridge Stick Into The Fire And Dust In The Direction Of The Sun”. When the vocals (his? hers? I must confess I don’t know) emerge from between these moments of spiralling psych, it is utterly arresting – that crackling vocal on the grainy folk of “Gorgon“, or the cinematic Julee Cruise-esque “The Vein Of Invisibility”.

Even without the comic book (which is admittedly well drawn and amusing: it includes a handy section on how to tell if a man is a vampire: apparently he “may help out with the housework and cut woods”), such moments of undeniable beauty would have lifted this release far above the ordinary.

Quantities are (naturally) limited. Try Blackest Rainbow or Norman Records.