New release available now on Outsider Art, Cù Sìth - Lyke Way CS.

In the label’s words:

Cù Sìth is a home for devolved approaches to sound that don’t require planning or participation in the modern circus of release schedules.

The starting point for Lyke Way was the question how do I take a noise signal (White, Pink, Brownian etc) and animate it to give it movement?

Digital via Bandcamp, cassette, available in a July OA bundle here

Outsider Art

Dean Lloyd Robinson has been operating Outsider Art since 2012 and has produced over 125 releases to date. Aside from his own work as knifedoutofexistence and Playworker, regular artists on the label include Cremation Lily, Pale World, and FLESHLICKER.

We first became friends sometime around 2010 or 11, when a microscopically small corner of DIY hardcore took a much needed left turn and embraced influences from industrial, power electronics, the occult, and historical countercultures outside of music. I’m talking bands like Buffalo’s Gas Chamber, the UK’s Rot in Hell, Ireland’s Drainland, my own band Column of Heaven, Chicago’s Sea of Shit, and a whole slew of what seemed to be mostly one or two release only one-man bands that were trying to be Integrity but accidentally created something quite different. In 2026 this approach is no longer a separate strand though Chicago’s Sarin and Ireland’s Unyielding Love appear to have kept the lineage intact.

In 2024 I toured the UK with knifedoutofexistence (obliquely named in reference to Column of Heaven1) and my 80 year old father usually asks me how Dean is every third phone call2.

Interview with Dean Lloyd Robinson (Outsider Art/ knifedoutofexistence)

What was your transition from punk underground to noise underground - both in listening and in operating. Is there even a difference between approaches?

My trajectory into punk was getting into Nirvana, getting into the classic 80s USHC after reading books about Nirvana, then USHC to powerviolence, and as I listened to more powerviolence more noise crept into those bands (as you would know as you were responsible for one of those bands). At the same time I met three people at shows in Poole and Bournemouth who were doing noise and power electronics; Dead Wood, Cliff Bastard and Content Nullity. Krayon, Reckno, and a few other Dorset weirdos were also doing shows at that time that I started going to.

I was lucky to meet people making experimental music and noise around the time my taste was naturally drifting there. Initially there was very little difference in terms of performing, I was playing a lot of punk shows when I started doing noise, and whilst I still will do that on occasion and still have a lot of love for punk and hardcore shows, I primarily play shows with full noise/experimental bills now.

The initial idea was to be able to play shows without having to rely on band members, and without requiring any traditional musical skill, I was trying to scratch the same itch being in a band did but without the logistics and restraints of other people.

As I’ve grown, broadly the difference for me is that punk/hardcore is outward facing, more socially minded and more about a crowd, and experimental music is inward looking, very personal and any crowd is absolutely secondary. I know this isn’t the same for everyone, but that’s how I see making and consuming it.

Is it fair to say that Outsider Art is an extension of Knifedoutofexistence? Where do you see yourself fitting in the broad lineage of DIY traditions? You’re reasonably productive in terms of new releases, but you’re also touring regularly and developing material in front of others and your live sets clearly aren’t improvised.

A lot of what I release on the label is people I’ve connected with through touring or other labels I’ve worked with, so most of the people I’ve released I wouldn’t be in touch with if it weren’t for touring so much, so in that sense the project definitely informs the label.

I prefer to work with people I’ve had personal connections with over going for the safe bet of bigger names or more established projects. I’ve always seen what I do as an extension, or a logical end point of punk. Here’s three chords start a band becomes here’s no chords start a noise project.

The DIY attitude hugely informs what I do, the label is very hands on. Cutting, sticking, photocopying and dubbing all in the comfort of my own home. Community and politics are also important to me, and a lot of that is learnt from punk too.

Live sets used to be a lot more improvised, it would be a case of playing things live, working them out and then recording, but after lockdown it became more an effort to reproduce in a live environment what I had recorded in that time.

What are you trying to convey/ achieve with knifed, what are you trying to convey with outsider art? How do the two inform each other?

Knifed is my way of trying to process life; making something out of the bad times, something to focus on, a vehicle for processing, creating, connecting, and catharsis. When people connect with the themes or emotions expressed, it’s incredibly flattering and rewarding, if what I do helps someone or gives them something to relate to, it is incredibly important to me. I don’t think what I’m doing is some great mission to help people of course, I’m very aware of the selfish nature of the project, but people do tell me how the project connects with them.

With Outsider Art, I’m generally trying to give a home to things I think deserve to be heard, hopefully help a few newer or lesser known projects out and contribute to a subculture that has given so much to me. I tend to work with people who are quite like minded, and I think a lot of what goes on around Outsider Art has helped foster a bit of an alternative to some of the tired and edgier elements of noise (or at least I’d like to think so).

Is Outsider Art an open label? There’s a lot of releases on the label, but it seems like a closed circle. What’s your criteria for releasing something?

I’m open to hearing things, but I mostly release people I’ve played shows with and connected that way. I usually have a list of people I’d like to work with and a couple of releases in the bank, so I’m not sitting around waiting for unsolicited submissions.

The criteria is generally a project and or a person I have some kind of connection with, the music fits my personal tastes, and in complements the other releases on the label. This generally means something somehow related to noise and experimental, the umbrella there is pretty wide there though, and there’s been a handful of releases with more traditional song structure.

In the early days there was a couple more hardcore releases, and about six years ago I reissued Mike from FLESHLICKER’s grind band The Viennese Aktionists. I can’t see myself releasing many traditional bands these days, but Beheading and Misha Philips who I’ve worked with and would work with again in a heartbeat have material resembling more traditional music.

What does the future of underground music hold?

It’s really hard to say as so much is dramatically changing right now, the DIY landscape is almost unrecognizable from ten years ago, so there’s bound to be huge changes.

At one point it felt unimaginable to operate in DIY without MySpace, which digital platforms do and don’t survive will have a huge impact on the future of the underground.

Venues are closing at a staggering rate, and if that continues, I think people will have no choice but to do shows in houses and cafes etc etc, so I think we could potentially see a rise in DIY shows in non-traditional spaces. While venues closing en masse is a bad thing, if we saw more shows in spaces outside of bars where the music and performance is the primary focus, it would be positive. I see genre lines continuing to blur even further as well.

Something you’ve enjoyed listening to recently

I played a couple of collaborative shows with the previously mentioned Misha Phillips a few months back, and she gave me a CD-R copy of the next album she’s done as Smoking Room. I adored the first Smoking Room LP, and this one is just as good. Some incredible songs, with real attention to detail and texture. Misha is a brilliant songwriter and musician and I hope this one gets into the right ears when it’s out.

Something you’ve enjoyed reading recently

I recently read Tender Points by Amy Berkowitz in a single sitting. The book explores the relationship between trauma and chronic pain, and touches on on many systemic issues. It’s written in a very readable way, including some very insightful references to her time spent in and around noise, which she has a great deal of respect for. It’s an intense book, there’s some very heavy subject matters explored, but I thought it was effective, and I’m glad she was able to write it as I’m sure that experience was very helpful to her, and is definitely a book that could help others too.

Vermis, Lost Dungeons and Forbidden Woods - Plastiboo

Vermis is a guidebook to an unmade video game from a time long gone. It’s the ghosts of nostalgia for a cultural turn that was never fully taken, like dungeon synth for the book reading crowd.

I absolutely detest nostalgia and think it is the least valid approach to art anyone can take, but Vermis is fairly open ended and has no “do you remember Pac Man/ Nestlé Milky Bars/ the 1980s?!?!?!?!?!?!?!” nonsense, and it requires some level of cultural initiation to be appreciated. Interesting how it made me fill in the gaps and I imagine that’s different depending on your own experiences and interests in how you’ll respond.

Book 2 is also on my shelf, see how that is when I get there, I suspect book 3 will be wearing the concept thin.

Criminal: The Deluxe Edition, Vol. 3

Criminal is hands down one of the best contemporary comic books, Brubaker and Philips make a great team and whilst I don’t love everything they do (Houses of the Unholy seemed unfinished, the Reckless series just felt rushed) Criminal has never been anything short of incredible.

Amazon are currently developing a TV series, which makes sense and could go either way. If you like hard-boiled crime fiction or comics and haven’t read Criminal you should fix that.

Punisher, Vol. 1: The King of Killers, Book One

Punisher is like Moonknight in that everyone seems to think they can write him and most can’t. If you haven’t read Punisher and want to, try the Garth Ennis run from 2000/ 2001, or the Jason Aaron/ Garth Ennis Punisher Max run. In the Punisher Max universe characters age in real time, injuries hurt and have long lasting effects, and if you’re dead you’re dead.

King of Killers is ok, not the worst, definitely not the best. Frank Castle joins The Hand and is tasked with killing Ares, the literal god of war. Just go with it.

There’s a (temporary) redesign of the Punisher skull in this run that ties in with his being in The Hand, it was done explicitly to separate the comic book from The Stupid People with Punisher skulls on their trucks. You know exactly who I’m talking about. The logo redesign is ugly and bad.

Punisher, Vol. 2: The King of Killers, Book Two

The final volume of this Punisher run starts to take us somewhere more interesting: what if Frank Castle’s just used his wife and children’s death at the hands of The Mob as an excuse to stage a perpetual war against criminals? What if Frank was always incredibly violent? What if that violence was causing Frank’s wife to leave him and take the kids? What if it’s all just a convenient excuse?

In the realm of fractal Intellectual Properties this is the thing I’m usually looking for (aside from a decent story), where does it diverge from other tellings of the same story and does it work? How do the various writers manage to take new paths and not lose sight of the core of the character?

Remember You’re a One Ball! - Quentin S Crisp

From the title I knew immediately that this would be mean school children, involve the 1970s, and be thoroughly depressing.

Remember You’re a One Ball! is beautifully written and unwraps into something interesting, but it doesn’t do very much with that unwrapping and sort of clatters to a halt. At its core Remember You’re a One Ball! is a novel about a modern pharmakos.

Crisp (and this is the one time I’ll write this, confusingly Quentin S Crisp is not the same author as Quentin Crisp) doesn’t tend to write the same thing twice, which has gone someway into consecrating him as a writer’s writer - a term I’m sure no writer really wants to be saddled with. His books are generally not that easy to find and if we keep this in Bourdieuan terms his success has never been in the field of large-scale production.

There seems to be a narrative around Crisp that he’s too good of a writer and mainstream publishers won’t touch his work because they only want generic, easily marketable books. I’m sure that there’s an element of truth to that - and there are quotes from rejection letters in this book - but if Remember You’re a One Ball! is the book that narrative is based on then it’s a frankly laughable proposition. No Mainstream publisher was ever going to want this book; it has a solid core of misanthropy, the narrator is unpleasant, and there is deep cruelty to children throughout.

The Water Bells - Charles Wilkinson

This one didn’t work for me, I kept thinking I’d missed something. Some of the stories were like less satisfying Robert Aickman, some were like less engaging Reggie Oliver and there was a perpetual feeling that the work needed an editor.

However, I have been known to disregard something prematurely or approach it at the wrong time only to enjoy it much more at a later date so I’m more than willing to try again. Wilkinson’s story in Soliloquy for Pan, that I’ll get to talking about in roughly 30 books time, was a notably excellent contribution in that particular collection.1

Essential Judge Anderson: Shamballa

There’s a centring on isolation, loss, and the struggle with conforming to expectation in Alan Grant’s scripts, it’s very well done and quite beautiful, probably the most human that Mega City One and the Judges have been portrayed.

Leviathan’s Farewell is a heartbreaking tale concerning the suicide of an empath who meets the last whale on Earth. Expertly done, not the usual Judge Dredd stuff at all.

Arthur Ranson provides most of the art in this 2000AD best of compilation and it’s honestly amazing but occasionally a little strange, like an early 80s photo strip comic converted into fine line. It looks like there art was shrunk so some of the line work is hard to register, when it’s present colour helps this problem. Everything looks very still in the compositions, hence the photo strip comparisons. It’s an unusual approach and I noted a few times that Ranson does not know how to draw a punch being thrown. But, the artwork is absolutely stellar.

The Light Inaccessible - Peter Bell

This was the first Peter Bell book I wanted to read but it was always out of print. The Light Inaccessible isn’t his usual weird fiction/ ghost stories, it’s travel writing from his trips to remote Scottish Isles, though Bell still centres the numinous here.

As I started reading the book I thought it might rekindle some romanticized “what if?” that I sometimes have around an alternative timeline where I didn’t migrate to Canada at age 30, but Bell manages to disabuse me of any idyllic island life fantasies. Island life is harsh and only for the very wealthy (or very stupid) if you don’t have roots in this part of the world.

Coming to Canada was absolutely the right move, I only entertain these thoughts now as my cultural involvement declines and Toronto becomes increasingly unrecognizable to me. The landscape here is filled with the same ghosts of memory that the UK is for me.

Rip It Up - Kou Machida

Rip It Up deservedly won the Akutagawa Prize in 2000, Akutagawa is a good reference point for this book and his collection Hell Screen is a book I deeply enjoyed. He wrote the short story that inspired the film Rashomon, which in turn birthed one of the best jokes in The Simpsons, one that I’m not afraid to admit I didn’t get for a very long time.

It’s a first person narrative from a dislikable person, one of the core parts of the book is a deeply anti-social person talking about the artifice of human interactions.

Machida comes across as a non-suicidal Osamu Dezu, for all the bile I’m not really picking up ambient misanthropy from the author.

The translation is good and feels alive, and there’s lots of talk about this book being experimental and hard to make sense of but I didn’t get that at all.

You’re Only As Happy As Your Saddest Child - R. Ostermeier

Walsh (Ostermeier) tale’s usually involve a nexus or a threshold and a price to be paid. The nexus is always between the human and inhuman, or the modern and the pre-modern, where folklore, ritual, custom, and fae all cross paths with our reality.

The title of the book comes from the story Open House, which is probably my favourite in this collection.

The story Gretl is the closest Walsh has got to an American style tale of isolated rural people as savages preying on civilized interlopers, though it’s still a very British take on the Texas Chainsaw Massacre/ The Hills Have Eyes et al set up.

It also contains Rumsey Schoolchildren, which was originally published as a standalone novella in 2024 and my first introduction to his writing. I’ve since read everything I was able to get by him.

Honestly, this isn’t the strongest collection of Walsh’s work. It’s still very good but feels patchy, some of the stories were for other presses so follow a specific theme that may not be exactly the one Walsh would have chosen.

This instalment typed to the sounds of:

Snět - Makváni Okovech

Despoilment - Vindicated Retaliation

Agonal Lust - Unabridged Suffering.

The Savage Sword of Conan Vol 3

The Conan franchise and general worlds of Robert E Howard seem to be in fairly good hands with Titan as the current owner, at least in the comics I’ve been reading. There’ll be some other Robert E Howard works from Titan later in the year, so no need to talk about any of those here.

Savage Sword of Conan’s original run - starting in 1974, published by Marvel - was a black and white larger than standard American comic sized publication, which allowed for Marvel to call it a magazine instead of a comic book and thus bypass the requirements of the Comics Code Authority. The Comics Code Authority was essentially the censorship body overseeing American comic books from 1954 until this century (it finally died in 2011 after DC - years after everyone else - finally stopped submitting comics for approval). What this meant was the Savage Sword of Conan could go for a more adult audience with blood, gore, monsters, and sexy ladies.

A short list of some of the things prohibited by the Comics Code Authority that Savage Sword of Conan got around:

• Scenes of excessive violence shall be prohibited. Scenes of brutal torture, excessive and unnecessary knife and gunplay, physical agony, the gory and gruesome crime shall be eliminated.

• All scenes of horror, excessive bloodshed, gory or gruesome crimes, depravity, lust, sadism, masochism shall not be permitted.

• All lurid, unsavoury, gruesome illustrations shall be eliminated.

• Inclusion of stories dealing with evil shall be used or shall be published only where the intent is to illustrate a moral issue and in no case shall evil be presented alluringly, nor so as to injure the sensibilities of the reader.

• In every instance good shall triumph over evil and the criminal punished for his misdeeds.

• Scenes dealing with, or instruments associated with walking dead, torture, vampires and vampirism, ghouls, cannibalism, and werewolfism are prohibited.

• Females shall be drawn realistically without exaggeration of any physical qualities.

• Suggestive and salacious illustration or suggestive posture is unacceptable.

In 2026 is Savage Sword of Conan a big deal? No, not at all, these volumes sit next to the Faust Omnibus on my shelves, which makes all of this read like the Teletubbies. But is it good? Yes, it really is. The art is usually hit, occasionally miss, but most of the stories are very strong and worth reading.

Standout story in volume 3 - The Mark of the Beast.

Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation - Jeff Chang

A great deep dive into the history of hip-hop. The earlier chapters dealing with Jamaican diaspora and gang culture were the strongest for me. What’s interesting is that hip-hop would have died had the keeping it real brigade (that is a facet of all underground art and culture movements) had any power.

Recommended.

40 Years of Scream!

Scream! was a children’s horror comic that ran for 15 issues in the UK in 1984. It was in the wake of the success of 2000AD, as British comics began to shift away from the ripping yarn adventure comics format on the one hand (Captain Hurricane, Roy of the Rovers, War Picture Library, etc), and the frankly unfunny even to children romps of Desperate Dan, Oor Wullie, and Dennis the Menace.

I was 10 years old and loved Scream! (The exclamation mark is in the title)

Rebellion published this 464 page omnibus edition in 2024, and as a historical piece it’s great, as a contemporary read, not so much. Scream! apparently dissolved in endless behind the scenes meddling and approval - likely through fear of the comic being caught up in a moral panic - and you can see it start to infect the strips, many of which are the exact same ripping yarn (Gosh! Jeepers!) style of the earlier war and adventure comics, but they have some ghosts thrown in. Worst offender is Monster, the tale of a deformed uncle and his nephew trying to escape to a doctor in Scotland from the clutches of law. Terry (the deformed uncle) was locked away in an attic his entire life and the entire thrust is some kind of 1980s disabled people are terrifyingly violent and have immense strength thing. Alan Moore wrote the very first instalment (which is good), the rest, total arse.

The strip that probably stands the test of time the best is The Dracula File, a kind of cold war Dracula returning to England story that has great art and some genuinely disturbing moments. The 13th Floor still has its moments, in a very Twilight Zone resolution kind of morality.

Not bad, just don’t expect to be blown away by it, particularly if you didn’t grow up with it.

The Revenants - O Jamie Walsh

Jamie Walsh is the single author of every title published by Broodcomb Press, though some are written under different names. O Jamie Walsh appears to be him writing in the roll of Omissioner (a role in the literary world he has created). R Ostermeier is *usually* written from the perspective of a therapist/ counsellor living in The Peninsula (where the tales all take place). Other books have other authors attributed to them, sometimes it’s a character in the novel itself.

The Revenants is the twin of the O Jamie Walsh novel The Settlements, both written with the same brief - the rules are at the back of the book - but essentially each section no longer than two pages and finished the day it’s started, later editing allowed.

Fantastic stuff, I think I preferred The Revenants over The Settlements, but that might just be because I was familiar with the format.

Inherent Vice - Thomas Pynchon

I read this because Benoit from Dead End Follies wrote a review of it and our tastes intersect in a some places. Sorry Benoit, couldn’t finish it. It’s related to noir fiction but Pynchon does not have the skill set to write with the brevity that genre requires and maintain clarity and you can see him building this rough framework to guide his novel.

The evening I gave up on this book (made it to the half way point) I watched One Battle After Another with my partner, in the opening scene I wanted to turn it off because of the dialogue, but we stayed the course and watched the whole thing. The film ends, I mostly hated it - I liked the reinvention of the car chase later on and I liked the *idea* of the extended sequence with the raids on the apartment complex - credits roll “based on the book Vineland by Thomas Pynchon.”

The lesson of the day, Thomas Pynchon is 100% not for me.

Liber Ketola

Breathtaking, Timo Ketola’s passing was a huge loss for the art world.

A lot of “I didn’t know he did that cover” and “I remember having that album” moments (I sold off over 95% of my collection several years ago, including every metal - and related micro-genre - and noise/ power electronics/ industrial record).

Things this book made me revisit:

• Kaamos - just slightly too early for that switch back to respectability for death metal, self titled album (2002) is wonderful morbid occult death metal. I hadn’t listened to the second album (Lucifer Rising, 2005) until reading this.

• Verminous - Swedish unhinged death metal. Refreshingly feral in approach.

• Cranes - English weirdos, listed in a Dauthus intro, not a band Ketola did art for. Absolutely great band, very unclassifiable and mostly only works if you can spend time with a complete album in one sitting. My recommendations - Fuse (1986), Wings of Joy (1991), Peel Sessions 1989-1990

Black Kiss Omnibus - Howard Chaikin

This was the forbidden comic when I was an early teenager and I wonder how my early sexuality would have been shaped if I read this instead of Robert Crumb for my fix of horny comic books. As an adult, yeah, pass, it’s fine but like all pornography the repetition is both its strength and downfall. Is it transphobic? Probably, but it’s also pornography (and a light noir to hold it together), and pornography doesn’t tend to do much beyond reducing people to basic parts.

Who Raped My Horse? - Johnny Ryan

Ah Johnny Ryan, with that title you already know what you’re getting. For all his gross out sledgehammer approach he’s a master of the art form, understanding narrative cadence and how to move a scene perfectly. It’s no surprise he was a writer for the surprisingly excellent Looney Tunes Cartoons (2019-2023)

The Crimson Petal and the White - Michel Faber

There’s a cool device in this book, where you, the time travelling reader, are essentially being lead to various scenes by an unknown guide who sets the scene for you like a museum guide. This and From Hell are probably the only Victorian period pieces I’ve enjoyed.

Hellebore #8 The Unveiling Issue

Hellebore is always worth a look at. Among the contents of this issue are articles on Pan, Sid Barrett, and Brian Jones; everyone’s favourite sham mystic Lobsang Rampa; 1974 BBC drama Penda’s Fen; & Fairy Ointment.

My dear friend Nick Gergesha passed away suddenly in December of 2025, I had been at his wedding three months earlier. The viewing and the funeral felt like the hangover from the wedding, half of us were wearing the same clothes we were wearing in September1.

Nick was 35 years old.

You can still listen to his music on Bandcamp.

May 24th there was a celebration of life at Lee’s Palace in Toronto. A lot of Nick’s friends played sets at the event, an old band I was in, Column of Heaven, did our first and last show in 12 years for the occasion. We played the same set we played on our 2014 tour with Full of Hell.

Nick in the red shirt at the infamous show at Soy Bomb in Toronto on said tour.

For the celebration of life my partner put together a zine for Nick, there may be copies left here.

Because it was a zine I wanted my piece to look like it was a standard zine contribution, so I reviewed the records I inherited from Nick.

In 2006 when my best friend and former bandmate passed away from cancer, entwined with the grief was a fear that I had to remember every single moment we spent together. The burden for me was that if I forgot something had happened then it was gone forever as he was no longer there to do the “hey, remember that time when we almost got into a fight at a venue in Belgium with a bunch of football casuals and one of them said “your Princess Diana is ugly!” and we laughed in his face?”

Twenty years later I’m less concerned with trying to catalogue all of the specifics and more interested in remembering the spirit.

Nick Forever.

Record “Reviews”

My own record collection was culled from around 5,000 LPs of that vast genre known as Men Pretending to be Scary with Guitars or Noise Devices to under 300 mostly reggae and high-brow academic experimental records several years ago. I helped Maddi move the last few things out of their apartment and was invited to take some of Nick’s records. I took some old favourites and a few things I’ve missed since I stopped collecting. Most of what I took is Men Pretending to be Scary with Guitars. Nick, I love you and miss you every day, but hard pass on the screamo.

Spoiler alert, these are not record reviews and I give pretending to review them part way through. This ended up becoming my own exercise in finding the person in the physical objects they’ve left behind, particularly when those objects don’t actually represent the person very well when you drill down.

Neanderthal - Fighting Music 7”

An obscure record that influenced lots of music in the 36 years since it was released. One of the two people in this band has become an on and off close friend of mine over the last twenty years. He’s infamously hard to handle, but no friendships are entirely smooth sailing. He’s weird and difficult? He’s in his 60s now and still making music that is essentially him doing his scary demon vocals over tortured home built oscillators, of course he’s weird and difficult.

He once told me he only wants to sing about outer space now because he can’t bring himself to engage with politics - other than animal rights - through his art. I feel that and I hit a similar place a few years ago, just replace outer space with folklore.

Pixies - Trompe le Monde LP/ Doolittle LP/ Surfer Rosa LP

When I was a teenager The Pixies were seen as scary and hostile, they had this unhinged vibe about them. This probably stems from it being a time when cultural differences between the UK and the US were a larger gulf to cross, now everything is the same everywhere. I don’t know if they were seen as unhinged in the US and Canada.

Pixies are basically late 80s pop music at this point, it’s the music from the glut of “hey, I remember 1989!” talking head cheap TV shows from 20 years ago. I hear Pixies in No Frills2 when I’m doing my weekly shopping and realize that my history is now weaponized nostalgia. I’ve slowly become a demographic and the cultural cool I once had access to is now on a spreadsheet of how to sell things to Men, No Kids, aged 40-60.

GISM - Detestation LP

GISM singer Sakevi was famous for being “crazy”, crazy in a way that people would love the band for, but if it was contemporary and Western they’d be cancelled quicker than if you booked Kickback for a daycare fundraiser. Sakevi had a belief in absolute freedom and GISM’s frequent use of anarchist phrases symbols was not the same anarchism as CRASS and their contemporaries, it just meant no rules, no limitations.

For Sakevi violence was the ultimate expression of no rules, no limitations. I say this without any emotional or moral position, but that just sounds like any boring bully in the world.

Nick once told me he was too scared to go to shows my old band The Endless Blockade was playing, he was in high school and the talk at school was how terrifying we were and how dangerous our shows were. I think we were probably hostile in the same way Pixies were, it seems quaint now looking back at it.

Melvins - Eggnog + Lice All 2xLP

Another weirdo band that won the battle for respectability.

Here’s a review of an unrelated film on Letterboxd that says everything

…some guy with a bunch of kaiju figures and lava lamps on his bookshelf, Melvins t-shirt, Frank Kozik Killdozer poster in the bathroom, ambient sound of kung fu VHS tapes on permanent loop… this genre of guy is mostly extinct now.

I really am much more generic than I used to think I was. My house has a Frank Kozik Killdozer poster outside the bathroom (I wouldn’t put that in the bathroom) there’s Kaiju everywhere and even a lava lamp. Sometimes I feel like I’m a mosquito in amber ready to have my DNA taken to build a Gen X theme park that will end in disaster (“oh no, the guys who wrote zines and songs about John Wayne Gacy and Charles Manson have got out of their pen!”)

Big L - Lifestylez ov da Poor & Dangerous LP

I bought a shirt of this album to wear onstage at his memorial show because I love that Nick owned this (amazing) record and it feels like a wildcard for him. Taking the two Biggie records was far too on the nose for me. Ready To Die and Life After Death, I can’t do that right now, though I definitely lingered on them as I dug for gold.

Integrity - Those Who Fear Tomorrow LP/ Systems Overload LP

Ringworm - The Promise LP

Two scary bands from the scary scene that was Cleveland in the early 90s. Integrity always had this bad guy image, back when bands were happy to play up to the villain trope that people projected on to them. Half of what was written about them was clearly not true.

Several years ago Integrity made shirts for Pride month with their skull emblem in rainbow colours and I laughed, but the reality is I was laughing because my image of Integrity is frozen in time, people change, we should allow them to change, otherwise we’re just cops with good record collections. Side note, yes, Column of Heaven are playing a cover of Systems Overload tonight.

Spectral Voice - Eroded Corridors of Unbeing LP

Now I come to the issue we all have to face as lifers in ugly underground music. How do we reconcile the use of pain and death as art? At some point we all experience pain and death, how do our record collections - filled with this shit to the point of utter idiocy - speak to this? Do they speak to it? Can they speak to it? Does owning 1,000 death metal albums make actual death any easier to deal with?

Horror films occasionally revel in misery (here’s looking at you August Underground), but there’s often something else going on; Bring Her Back, A Dark Song, and Anything For Jackson are explicitly about dealing with loss and grief. Horror has an easier time navigating (and being allowed to navigate) the various paths it travels. Music unfortunately can often be reduced to either degenerate shit (noise and power electronics), crybaby shit (doom metal), macho shit (hardcore) or pro-wrestling shit (black and death metal).

Grief - Come to Grief

And here’s a band called Grief. How does this record speak to who Nick was as a person? The truth is it doesn’t speak to Nick as a person other than it being a great album that’s full of good riffs. It’s an important album from an important band. The lyrics are goofy as fuck, but it’s OK to lean in to a character in music, something we need to say out loud more often than we do.

Mortiferum - Disgorged from Psychotic Depths LP

Sometime in around the 2010s we started to get a bunch of spooky guitar bands that were one-upping other spooky guitar bands. We had the arrival of bands who were death metal and the death part of it was a spiritual component, a worship of an embodiment of literal Death, rather than “hell yeah, gore is cool!”.

(Mortiferum isn’t one of those bands.)

I figure those Death worship bands just want the same peaceful life we all want and Death isn’t actual death, but a longing for an inner silence, like a halloween version of basic meditation, but dressed in a cool skull shirt with spidery writing on it. As a cool skull and spidery writing shirt guy I can relate.

Only an idiot (and there are a few in the world) or someone that has never experienced loss is going to worship death meaning a literal end of life. But loss is something we all face at some point, no one will escape it. Finding peace with it through personification, through metaphor for a quieted mind makes sense to me.

Blood Incantation - Interdimensional Extinction LP/ Starspawn LP

It’s been said that art finds it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. And by capitalism it’s shorthand for The Bad Things That Happen. Jameson said it, Žižek said it, Fisher doubled down on it. It’s a reference to all the apocalyptic works out there, humanity hanging on by a thread, everything gone, from Planet of the Apes to The Walking Dead to a band that called their album Interdimensional Extinction.

Personally I think the answer that positions capitalism as a malignant entity changing our perceptions so we can’t imagine another way of life is only half an answer. Like I said we all face loss, every single one of us. Sometimes I think art that imagines the end of the world exists not because we can’t imagine a different way of life, but because imagining the end of the world is a way to bypass every single element of grief and loss we will face at some point because everything stops at once, including you.

Gorguts - From Wisdom to Hate LP

This band was a contradiction after their earliest material. It’s essentially prog rock with cookie monster vocals and a scary name they came up with as teenagers in 1989.

I like this one a lot, I like that they’re a really heavy version of pony tail and no headstock guitars prog rock but they’re still called Gorguts.

Carcass - Symphonies of Sickness LP

Much lauded as the originators of a specific kind of transgression in music, I’ve always felt Carcass were just nice kids who wanted a better world and the band was how they depicted everything bad they didn’t like. In their first album, 1988’s Reek of Putrefaction, on the insert you can find “Thrash not hash/ Wheat not meat/ Gore not war” among the collaged images of rotten body parts. Carcass were ardent vegetarian teenagers who came from the shock and awe background of punk and accidentally created an entire way of doing death metal and grindcore.

Symphonies of Sickness from 1991 is Carcass greatest album, still full of the exuberance of youth, not yet fully descended into the serious business blandness of their later releases.

Strawberry Switchblade - Since Yesterday 12”

Glasgow’s Strawberry Switchblade wrapped their message inside the sugar coating of bright 1980s synth pop and had two hits and a not very interesting full length album.

Trees and Flowers (1983, their first hit) was a song about agoraphobia, depression, and anxiety:

For I hate the trees

And I hate the flowers

And I hate the buildings

And the way they tower over me

Since Yesterday (their second and much bigger hit from 1984) pulls a similar trick - the Trojan Horse of sugary pop hiding hopelessness at its core - but it’s a trick that can only really succeed once or twice before it wears out its welcome and becomes trite.

And as we sit here alone

Looking for a reason to go on

It’s so clear that all we have now

Are our thoughts of yesterday

And as great a sentiment as it is for the purpose of this song, it isn’t really true, we don’t only have our memories of better times or of people missing from our lives. We have lessons and we have each other.

Sacrifice is out now on Closed Casket Activities, with cover art by Rich Carson.

Also includes a feature from Karkossyn (see last post), mastered by Justin Broadrick.

You’ve seen Rich Carson’s art, you potentially own a shirt with some on and don’t know it as he’s one of the regularly featured artist on Isolation Man shirts1.

When we were discussing potentially cover artists for Scraping the Divine one of the names mentioned by Full of Hell in the first round was Rich Carson, obviously we went with Savage Pencil, but I filed Rich’s name away for future use.

When I first reached out my e mail was probably some hurried mess of “I had a vision where I was the Hanged Man from the Major Arcana [hence the album title] can you do something like that with a wolfagram for a head???” The back cover of a decayed church organ and the inner art of organ pipes turning into snakes came from my explanation of the song title “There’s Worse Things Than Serpents”2

Rich is a tattooist, painter, illustrator, and vocalist of Unyielding Love, amongst other musical projects. I asked him some questions earlier this year in preparation for Sacrifice being released.

An Interview with Rich Carson AKA Canopic Ire

What was the switch from drawing for fun to “I can do more with this”?

I always enjoyed drawing and painting as a kid. It was either Lord of the Rings inspired, or I remember having a fixation on the movie Signs. Not sure how the latter holds up these days3, but I was usually drawing corn fields or wraiths instead of doing school work. I prefer solitude and getting lost in other worlds. This one is ill fitting.

I did a lot of work for different bands and businesses. I was interested in tattooing but really disliked the culture of tattooers. The narcissism, megalomania, rock star attitudes. I still highly dislike the culture, but I’ve learned from others that the craft of tattooing is very much whatever you make it. I don’t have to associate with this modern dialect tarnishing it.

When did you start tattooing?

I was getting tattooed a lot and eventually my tattooer and confidant took a chance on me and got me into a shop with great people. I think that was about 8 years ago. I’ve been around a couple of shops and recently opened my own private studio called “Crawling King Snake”. I love tattooing. I’m excited to see what the future holds.

What are some of your influences? Have they changed since you started? Who are your peers?

In terms of influential people I would say the longest and most consistent would be John Blanche. His Warhammer artwork has always effected me. I redrew his designs as a child. I can look at his work today and still see new things within it.

Talk us through the process for the Sacrifice cover art,

Sacrifice was a really interesting piece to work on. Anything highly symbolic or steeped in metaphor allows for me to delve into darker waters and find something worthwhile there. The dialogue between the artist and myself is important I feel. It's another thing when a band wants "a skull" or whatever, that's also fine. But getting inside someone's head a bit will always yield better results, or at least a more cathartic experience, selfishly, for me.

Do you mentally separate illustration, painting, and tattooing, or are they from the same wellspring but require different tools?

This is a good question. I’ve a penchant for lists and compartmentalising, very much to a fault. I definitely tried to keep everything separate for a long time, even neglecting things I enjoyed pursuing purely because it didn’t fit very illusory fencing that I had built for myself.

Nowadays I’ve gone entirely the other way, It’s a maelstrom of creative stuff. Whether it’s music, painting, tattooing, or newer pursuits, it’s all very much within the one universe. The logic being that if you enjoy one aspect of what I do, you may enjoy another. I know that’s often been the case with me. If I like someone’s music, I probably want to see their paintings, and so on.

Does your visual art inform how you approach your audio art in any capacity?

Very much so. I tend to picture songs like paintings. Even if I don't ever paint it, I can understand the layers, shadows, mood, much more effectively if I approach it that way. Everything needs guidance, whether it's from yourself or a less understandable voice, and seeing or hearing something come as a result, it's a reward for setting your mind on fire.

What music are you working on currently?

I've a dungeon synth project called Geheimnisknecht which I slaved over for a while now. I've released solely on physical format previously. The new record "Black Lightning Majesty" will be available in all the usual places however. I have never before felt the same incessant need to do something, even to my own detriment, as I have when creating this record, this project, this world. It'll be interesting to see how it's received.

What have you enjoyed listening to recently?

I've been listening to Robbie Basho a lot, there's a semi recent remastering of his album "Bouquet" which is worth everyone's time. Outside of that probably just Led Zeppelin, Budgie, Thin Lizzy. I find it very hard to listen to music in any way similar if I'm in a writing phase. Which I currently am for Geheimnisknecht and my heavier band Unyielding Love.

What have you enjoyed reading recently?

Dune. This interview would never stop if I went on about Dune. It’s the closest I’ve ever come to the feeling of discovering The Lord of the Rings as a child. It’s a fascinating series and the new Villeneuve films have been exceptional, I think.

In terms of non fiction I want to read Daisy Fancourt’s book “Art Cure”. That’ll be next on the list. I heard her talk about it live recently. Her research is fascinating and almost sounds like science fiction.

Sacrifice is out now on Closed Casket Activities, and features material from Karkossyn on the track Our Voices are Already the Wind.

Cover art by Rich Carson, mastered by Justin Broadrick1.

Troubled Youth

I first came across Karkossyn while doing a deep dive into the UVB-76 catalogue, UVB-76 operates in a way that I still look for in record labels - carefully curated music from related artists, operating within a set of parameters that are coherent, but aren’t so narrow as to be restrictive. They’re probably primarily a drum and bass label, but they’re not of the anodyne coffee shop drum and bass that took over the cultural landscape as the genre gained respectability and column inches in the serious press; the edges are still rough, sound systems and rap battles are in the DNA. It’s not polite, it’s not genteel.

Troubled Youth ep (2023) by Karkossyn is distinctly British, and more specifically distinctly Bristol in origin and approach. Drifting deep bass, hard hip hop drums made at drum and bass speed then slowed back down, dying machine sounds, all wrapped in a moving fog with buried warning sirens trying to break through. It’s not care-free happy dancing music.

After Troubled Youth came a split cassette with Chicago’s Stave (who is also worth going through their entire catalogue) on the Standards and Practices label in 2023

This month Karkossyn releases the Undergrowth ep on Erosion from Glasgow.

In June 2024 we played together in Bristol and discussed working together, the result being Our Voices are Already the Wind on Sacrifice.

A Conversation With Tavis Hitchcock

Surprisingly this is the first interview Tavis has ever done.

What was the first music you heard that made you want to make your own music?

I guess it all evolved from techno music really, thats what got the ball rolling for me back in the day. If I had to pick an album though it would probably be The Haxan Cloak’s Excavation, sonically it’s just a gem. A flip switched after I heard that.

What was that early music making process like for you and how has it changed?

The early days were the best part! I went to music college and I was always really anti plug-ins & refused to use them as a sound source so it forced me into thinking differently. My best mate & I would go out field recording in abandoned buildings and random spots sampling anything & everything.

From there, I got into Eurorack & started manipulating and re-sampling all of those recordings, slowly finding my sound. I wanted to play live originally, I did a few shows but found I was moving away from live modular techno. It’s much more simplified these days but those core techniques are still there. I’m always recycling audio, I still use a lot of those early recordings in my tracks.

How does your approach to DJing versus making music differ and do the two inform each other.

I just like to sketch people out, that’s kinda the point really. I’m always drawn to those darker sonic palletes, Whether it’s with real heavy tunes or with noise & atmosphere, it’s all the same thing to me so that’s the motive I kind of keep in mind both playing and producing. It’s what’s happening behind the beats i find more important I think.

You’re clearly aligned with the heavy weight side of the scene in Bristol, your sound has elements of drum and bass, hip hop, and dub, without ever really strictly becoming any of those genres. Where do you fit in amongst your peers?

Yeah I don’t really have a genre I dunno it’s up to other people & how they interpret music I guess. I just fell in with the right people and became good mates with people who are making sick music, we’re all doing our own thing and that’s what you want really. The Bristol scene is very united, full of people doing music, putting shows on, doing radio etc. Theres a lot of support & it’s always growing. it’s a great community, I’m away from it currently and I do miss it.

You recently moved to Australia, how was that move for you? Is it permanent?

Who knows really just going with the flow, I’m enjoying it here in Melbourne, it’s been a tough change, pros & cons all over the place. Outside of the music stuff, England is pretty grim, everyone’s skint and it’s hard to build a life outside of living in houseshare’s or with your parents. Although I guess it’s like that in most places now though. At least it ain’t pissing down out here.

Tell me about your new release on Erosion

The new record has been in the works for a while and we wanted to have a collection of tunes still seasoned with that Karkossyn sort of flavour but with variation in the tracks so there’s a blend of dark ambient, more jungle/dnb and breakbeat industrial stuff in this one. Kris2 did a really sick remix as well and it’s nice to have mates involved in what you’re doing

Tell me about some music you’ve recently enjoyed.

I like Carrier’s3 new stuff, sparse beats, it’s real interesting. Officer John’s stuff is really nice. Absolutely love ML Buch’s Suntub. For live performance, I saw 5 Star Killer (formerly of Dregs) a while back and that was unreal.

Tell me about something you’ve read or watched recently that you enjoyed.

I’m not much a reader to be fair but film/tv wise, I rinsed Game of Thrones recently & thought it was really good until the last season. Lost in Translation was another recent film I watched and thought was quite beautiful and lingered on my mind after watching.

Next Post: an interview with Sacrifice cover artist Rich Carson

Sacrifice is out now via Closed Casket Activities, and the usual digital suspects. You can order in the UK here, and in the EU via Evilgreed.

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I’ve long welcomed coincidence and accidents in my music making, I mentioned briefly some of the mistakes and venue structural damage that was reincorporated back into the album in the previous post.1

The day before release day I was re-reading the excellent tale Rumsey Schoolchildren by R. Ostermeier and came across this quote:

The Soul of any tale is to keep you locked inside it. To leave something of yourself behind, within it. Call it sacrifice. Call it an offering.

I don’t remember it from my first reading, but it captures the spirit of the album, so up it went in the release day post.

Long after I’d named Sacrifice I was reading the Tartarus Press collection The Sound of His Horn And Other Stories by Sarban and read the story The Sacrifice “in which a young artist encounters an Eastern-inspired tragedy in an idyllic English country garden.”2

The passage the stood out to me was:

“And here comes I,” she addressed the boy aloud, “the last of your adorers. A poor substitute for the scores of maidens you once had to serve you. I wonder what service you exacted; or what sacrifice?”

She knelt upright, her eyes on the figure but the mind busy with a vein of serious thought that her playing fancy had accidentally opened.

“I suppose there’s no devotion without a sacrifice,” she said. “I do love you. If you could tell me what sacrifice to make I think I’d make it.”

Which I knew I wanted to incorporate into the packaging for the album.

R.B. Russell & Mark Valentine

I recently spoke with R.B. Russell, co-owner of Tartarus Press and administrator of Sarban’s literary estate, and Mark Valentine, author of Time, A Falconer A Study of Sarban about Sarban and his work.

R.B. Russell is also an accomplished author and essayist, his 2025 novel The Woman Who Fell To Earth is one of my favourite reads of the last few years, a deceptively deep strange tale that touches on toxic online culture, navigating the legacy of artists with dramatically different personal values than our own, when obsessive archiving and collecting begins to look like mental illness and hoarding, and more importantly what we leave behind for our loved ones when we die3.

I’d also recommend the episode of the C86 Show where Ray talks about his book Fifty Forgotten Records. Find wherever you listen to podcasts or follow the link.

Mark Valentine is an author and essayist I’ve been following for several years, my recommendations are the short story collection Lost Estates published by the excellent Swan River Press4, and the essay collection Qx5 by German press Zagava6.

Sarban

Who was Sarban? and where does his work fit into the field of strange stories/ weird fiction/ supernatural & fantasy literature?

Mark Valentine: He was John William Wall, a career diplomat from a working-class South Yorkshire background. His stories were inspired by the strange stories of H.G. Wells, Walter de la Mare, Arthur Machen and Lord Dunsany and they are written in a slightly old-fashioned, Edwardian way for their time, the 1950s.

R.B. Russell: Sarban has not always been thought of as fitting into the supernatural/weird fiction tradition, in part because his work is often overshadowed by The Sound of His Horn, an ‘alternative history’ that was often marketed as borderline science fiction, and often packaged quite sensationally. But, as Mark writes, in his supernatural fiction he was working with a conscious appreciation of the best authors in the genre.

Sarban was seemingly only an active writer for a very short period in the 1950s, why did he write for such a short period of time?

MV: He was only a published writer from 1951-53, with three books, but in fact he wrote fiction all his life. He worked on a long fantasy novel about a world dominated by women, and he also wrote more short stories, finished and unfinished. There is also an unpublished novel set in the Middle East, where he served, rejected twice by his publisher.

RBR: Sarban doesn’t seem to have stopped writing after his brief career as a published author, but one assumes that much of his fiction was composed for his own pleasure. As a career diplomat, he wrote his three books under his pseudonym, presumably so that his employers would not realise. Some of his unpublished writing may have raised even more eyebrows if it had been known.

Across several of Sarban’s tales there appears to be hints towards an interest in BDSM, is this fair to say or is this an overreach?

MV: He is interested in the theme of hunters and the hunted. He understands the allure of hunting and depicts the hunting of human prey in The Sound of His Horn. As part of this, he imagines scenes of entrapment and slavery, but his sympathies are with the hunted.

RBR: Mark’s analysis is absolutely correct. In some of the stories published posthumously he takes this fascination still further, suggesting that the theme was a serious interest that he returned to often.

Who is his work descended from and who is continuing the themes Sarban wrote about?

MV: See answer 1 for influences. I don’t know of a contemporary writer who would claim to be directly influenced by Sarban, though there are writers working in the more general supernatural fiction tradition of which he was a continuation, including those published by independent presses such as Tartarus, Swan River, Sarob and Zagava.

RBR: Like Mark, I can’t think of any contemporary authors that obviously carry on themes from Sarban. His fascination with the power or control that characters have over one another is an old one, of continuing relevance.

In the particular case of the alternative history novel The Sound of His Horn (1952), in which he imagined the consequences if the Nazis had won the Second World War, this was pre-dated by Murray Constantine’s Swastika Night, but there is nothing to suggest he read that particular book. The same theme was taken up by Philip K. Dick in The Man in the High Castle (1962), Len Deighton’s SS-GB (1978), amongst others. Sarban’s book was an early example in that particular sub-genre, but it is difficult to assess its impact. (It was often, and widely reprinted.)

Ray, why is it important to keep the work of Sarban in print and where does this fit within Tartarus Press? Is it fair to say that Tartarus Press has two main thrusts, one of promoting new and contemporary authors (Dare Segun Falowo, Reggie Oliver, Rosalie Parker), and one of keeping texts in print by classic authors (MR James, Robert Louis Stevenson, Edith Nesbit)?

RBR: Yes, keeping Sarban in print, along with Machen, de la Mare, Aickman and others, is important because they all have a place in the development of the genre. But from the beginning, Rosalie Parker and I felt that we wanted to play our part in the continuing development of supernatural/weird/strange fiction. Seeing authors we have first published and championed, like Andrew Michael Hurley and Angela Slatter, go on to have successful and influential careers has been very satisfying.

Which are your favourite Sarban tales? I’m partial to The Doll Maker and The Sea Things.

MV: Yes, The Doll Maker is a favourite, as is Ringstones. In these, Sarban was able to develop the story at greater length. Both are very subtly and skilfully told and build up a convincing atmosphere, with a strong sense of place.

RBR: I think The Doll Maker is probably my favourite. Sarban manages to write about the supernatural and make it compelling and atmospheric, while still keeping that uncomfortable sub-plot about power and control hidden just under the surface.

What are you both currently working on? Either editing, writing, or other. What have recently enjoyed reading or listening to in other people’s work?

MV: I’m editing an essay anthology, The Magus of Mexico: Malcolm Lowry, Magic and Myth, for Zagava. Lowry’s work is permeated by his interest in the esoteric, including the Tarot and the Kabbalah, and the book aims to bring this more to the fore.

Recent reading has included the forgotten Edwardian fantastical verse of Norman Boothroyd, for an essay to appear at the online literary journal Wild Court.

In music, I’m greatly beguiled by the work of the experimental Welsh triple harpist, multi-instrumentalist and singer Cerys Hafana, in particular their rediscoveries and reinterpretations of apocalyptic Welsh hymns. Something quite Machenesque about these!

RBR: We are about to reissue a revised and augmented edition of Mark Valentine’s short story collection, The Uncertainty of All Earthly Things,7 which has been satisfying to work on.

I have recently put together a collection of my own short stories for publication in the New Year, which is likely to be called The Sanctuary and Other Strange stories. It is always more daunting than publishing anybody else’s work! (The soundtrack to this has been old obsessions, Garlands by The Cocteau Twins, and the albums of Labradford.)

My recent reading has included The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane and Wildwood by Roger Deakin. From their nature writing, I have moved on to Justin Hopper’s excellent The Old Weird Albion, which feels like a natural progression into rather stranger realms . . .

Next post: A conversation with Tavis Hitchcock aka Karkossyn

The Soul of any tale is to keep you locked inside it. To leave something of yourself behind, within it. Call it sacrifice. Call it an offering. - R. Ostermeier

Sacrifice is out now on LP and the usual digital suspects via Closed Casket Activities

After originally released in an edition of 100 tapes by Industrial Coast to tie in with some UK shows it lives once again.

This is what I wrote last year in substack about it

Sacrifice is an internal monologue about what comforts we forgo, or more importantly, what horrors we absorb into ourselves or are absorbed into in order to access knowledge, understanding, experience, or just plain old Gnosis. This is not a new theme in my discography.

And this is updated info from the press release:

After recent releases with Full of Hell and The Body Nolan returns to his early 90s pirate radio roots and brings us eight songs of industrialized dub and hip hop, initially written at home then loaded onto samplers and road-tested and reconfigured at various sound systems and live shows across the UK and Canada throughout 2024 and 2025.

You can read the whole thing on Bandcamp, including tales of playing in church crypts with collapsing ceilings, and dying samplers.1

Sacrifice features Karkossyn on Our Voices are Already the Wind, is mastered by Justin Broadrick.

Cover art by Rich Carson2.

Expect these follow up posts over the coming days:

• An interview with Raymond Russell and Mark Valentine about author Sarban.

• An interview with Tavis Hitchcock aka Karkossyn.

• An interview with Rich Carson.

“And here comes I,” she addressed the boy aloud, “the last of your adorers. A poor substitute for the scores of maidens you once had to serve you. I wonder what service you exacted; or what sacrifice?”

She knelt upright, her eyes on the figure but the mind busy with a vein of serious thought that her playing fancy had accidentally opened.

“I suppose there’s no devotion without a sacrifice,” she said. “I do love you. If you could tell me what sacrifice to make I think I’d make it.” - Sarban

Monochrome Volume 2: Tentacles of Spiritual Contagion

Out now on Phage Tapes, the second volume in my mixtape series, post about volume one here and available here

Some compilation tracks, some unreleased material, some alternate versions. Collaborations with Xicada, Like Weeds, Stalingrad, vocal contributions from New Villain and Bondo of No Face Krew.

A lot of dub, a lot of industrial, a brief diversion into Jungle1.

The Quietus said

It’s inspirational in both word and deed. Like pulverising carbon until it transforms into a sparkly diamond, he takes these broad influences, lashes them to the tracks, and runs a distorted train laden with heavy-hitting industrial beats over them until they’ve morphed into something glittering and new.

And Igloo Mag described it as

Erratic and unsettling yet undeniably gripping

If you buy the digital from Bandcamp, purchasing from me gets you Volume 1 as bonus tracks and gives me some money. If you buy from Phage Bandcamp the money goes back into the label being able to continue releasing weird and occasionally harrowing music, take your pick. Available on streaming everywhere (for now), physical copies still out there.

A Monday Night In Middlesbrough

Live document of my summer 2024 sets, recorded in sunny Middlesbrough at Cafe Etch. Contains a song from the Full of Hell album in a drastically different form.

Money goes back into Industrial Coast being able to continue to support local and international artists, both known and unknown.

Steve Kirby is a national treasure. Defend Industrial Coast.

At time of writing there’s less than 10 copies left on Bandcamp and all the copies are sold out on BigCartel

Powerwolf

Powerwolf is an album I produced for Atlanta rapper and The Abyss podcast host Luke Cage back under my Wolfagram2 alias in 2020 that’s finally seeing the light of day3.

CDs available via Bandcamp, I think it’s on streaming as of today.

Hangashore

Hangashore is a feature film I scored last summer, it’s playing the following film festivals:

• September 12 at 8pm in Halifax, NS (Atlantic International Film Festival)

• September 16 at 12pm in Sudbury, ON (Cinefest Sudbury International Film Festival)

More festivals in Ontario, Newfoundland, and Prince Edward Island being announced this fall.

The film is a thriller that takes elements of Icelandic and Eastern Canadian myth and folklore. Musically I was steering very clear from both SPOOKY FOLK MUSIC and SPOOKY ATONAL ELECTRONIC DRONE, though the latter creeps in at times. There are some Coil and Nurse With Wound audio choices in there, but it’s a film score and does the things you’d largely expect a film score to do.

The soundtrack will be eventually released in physical and digital editions.

Here’s a teaser trailer.

Hatred Surge - Rotten to Forgotten

A post about Hatred Surge should be its own separate thing, so here’s a quick note to say that the Rotten to Forgotten 7” is out now. Four songs; two four-track demos from Deconstruct, two four-tracks demos from Human Overdose with vocals by Azeta, Matt Gomes, Dylan Walker, and this guy. Comes with a 32 page zine by the band.

Available here. Hatred Surge forever.

Closing out

Unfortunately no additional writing this time around for various reasons. There’s a piece on the anti-Spotify discourse that I’m sitting on (in short I’m pro-giving Spotify endless bad press but it doesn’t address the problem), and some thoughts about the first Jesu EP (2004’s Heart Ache), I’ll post them another time.

Next live show is October 1st with the very excellent One Leg One Eye at BSMT254 in Toronto.

Today’s Playlist

Drawn and Quartered - Lord of Two Horns

Bong-Ra - To Mega Panopticon

JID - God Does Like Ugly

Loyola Boyz - From the Mud

Lustmord - Carbon/ Core

DjRUM - Under Tangled Silence

Some Recent Stuff I’ve Enjoyed Reading

Eric Stener Carlson - Tales from the Coming War (superb, highly recommended)

Absolute Batman Volume 1: The Zoo

Quentin S Crisp - All God’s Angels, Beware!

The Rooming House

Jacqueline Harpman - I Who Have Never Known Men

Stephen J Clark - A Mythology of Masks

Bram Stoker - Dracula’s Guest

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June 28th Middlesbrough w JK Flesh

July 5th Bristol w Gorgonn

July 17th Toronto w Delta Kane & Doctor Cement

July 18th Kitchener w Delta Kane & Doctor Cement

July 19th Hamilton w Delta Kane & Doctor Cement

July 24th Peterborough w Delta Kane

July 25th Ottawa w Delta Kane

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Monochrome

Monochrome volume one: House of Flying Daggers is out now on Iron Lung Records

Sometime last year whilst pulling a release from a label in an effort to save my sanity and not go completely postal I realized I had a vast amount of tracks either just floating around in virtual shared drives or in semi-finished states on my hard drive and some of the material should be heard.

Every time I release an album there’s always material that doesn’t make the final cut (there’s probably two albums worth of material cut from Scraping the Divine), and anytime I try and learn a new audio skill there’s a lot of demos of me trying to figure out how something works.

So Monochrome is the occasional home for material that for whatever reason didn’t make it very far; sometimes it’ll be abandoned remixes and collaborations, sometimes it’ll be compilation tracks that were physical only releases, sometimes the better end of the demos I do, and sometimes the tracks that I like, but that ultimately didn’t fit on the final version of a release for whatever reason.

House of Flying Daggers is the first Monochrome release (and volume two is probably about a month away) and is mostly tracks raided from the Wolfagram1 archives and finished off.

Several of the tracks on House of Flying Daggers began life as segues or small jokes (you’ll hear it immediately) in my live sets. Duck Season was put together for a show where I was the only non death metal or grind core act on the bill.

Mandrake 2 is a new version of a track from my split with Like Weeds (Industrial Coast) that I wanted to revisit with New Villain on the mic; cut down on the noise, get some vocals on it.

Recent Listening

Dangerous Creatures - Dead Earth 1.0

Scanner & Nurse With Wound - Contrary Motion

Lukah & Statik Selektah - Lost Language Found

Saprogenic - Expanding Toward Collapsed Lungs

Dripping - Archaic Scriptures of Epistemology

Hilary Woods - Birthmarks

Beastie Boys - Ill Communication

Best Books I’ve Read Recently

D.P. Watt - Petals and Violins: Fifteen Unsettling Tales

Benjamin Tweddell - A Crown of Dusk and Sorrow

Bernardo Esquinca - The Secret Life of Insects and Other Stories

Right, flight to catch, see you soon.

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Quicker than usual post for me, new album out on Industrial Coast now, available here if it’s not sold out.

Cassette only at present, mastered by Justin Broadrick, cover art by Canopic Ire1

Karkossyn features on one track, I highly recommend his EP Troubled Youth on the consistently excellent UVB76 label

Sacrifice is an internal monologue about what comforts we forgo, or more importantly, what horrors we absorb into ourselves or are absorbed into in order to access knowledge, understanding, experience, or just plain old Gnosis. This is not a new theme in my discography.

Live action 2025

Industrial Coast has me on the bill with JK Flesh in Middlesbrough on June 28th.

July 5th has me back in Bristol, this time with Gorgonn, his Six Paths EP on SVBKVLT was a favourite of mine a couple of years ago.

Last time I was in Bristol the show was in an ancient crypt with a full sound system and parts of the ceiling came down during my soundcheck.

In (a very small part of) Canada catch me on these dates:

July 17 Toronto w/ Delta Kane2 and Doctor Cement

July 18 Kitchener w/ Delta Kane and Doctor Cement

July 19 Hamilton w/ Delta Kane and Doctor Cement

July 24 Peterborough w/ Delta Kane

July 25th Ottawa w/ Delta Kane

I will end it here, currently fostering a very sweet dog until she gets adopted and I can see her pacing and needing some attention/ training.

Recent Listening (today)

Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Forever to Tell and Danzig - s/t; these records are basically the same thing.

Various smartguy deathcore and slam bands.

Sly & Robbie present Dancehall Killers!

Drawn and Quartered - Extermination Revelry.

Stereolab - Instant Holograms on Metal Film.

Best books I’ve recently read

Robert Aickman - Cold Hand in Mine.

Solomon Kane collection of the 1970s and 1980s Marvel strips.

Department of Truth collection.

Reggie Oliver - This Haunted Heaven.

Nafre - In Blackest Blizzard: Initiating Thyself to Black Metal Necromansie.

Lynda E Rucker - Now it’s Dark.

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Out now on Closed Casket Activities Intensive Care & The Body - Was I Good Enough? Eight songs of everything all at once as it collapses in on itself. Cover art by fellow lifer Jon Kortland of Iron Lung and Pig Heart Transplant. Videos to two of the singles by skintape are on youtube and are the stuff of nightmares.

Hard to say much about this one, we’ve been sitting on it for a while so we could line up schedules and not tread on the toes of other releases from both parties.

In a recent combined interview and review feature for Louder than War I talked about collaborative works as not trying new things, but of highlighting things already present.

The best collaborations seek out underlying patterns and approaches and reframe them more upfront; it’s about someone else helping you to understand what’s already there.1

Both being two piece acts2 leads to a natural openness to expanding possibilities and ways of working.

In the Louder than War interview I dismiss the idea that there is anything to be gained in 2025 discussing music in terms of it being either extreme or experimental (things I get asked about a lot). Being “extreme music” or “experimental music” are generally convenient short cuts that describe less than people assume they do.

I’m not really very invested in the ideas of either extremity or experimental when applied to music, I grew up on Radiophonic Workshop, Public Enemy, and Carcass, it’s not extreme, music just encompasses different approaches and outcomes. By any metric FKA Twigs’ Eusexua is far more extreme, experimental, or challenging than most things you’ll find this year and Eusexua is a mass-marketed pop album with no pretensions to be anything else.

In an interview for Discipline Magazine that slightly predates the press cycle for Was I Good Enough? I talked about my interests in audio being less tied to genre and more to possibilities of creation.

The roots of noise, industrial, dub, and hip hop can be simplified into youth culture repurposing cheap consumer electronics and using them in ways they weren’t designed to form entirely new musical styles. Ultimately, these cheap consumer goods have been developed and sold back to us as specialist equipment…

…Hip hop and dub were historically about manipulating prerecorded music into new forms – hip hop used vinyl as a necessary creative tool, fetishizing it as both process and end product. Similarly, experimental music in its various forms has emphasized tape loops, found sound, and hands-on manipulation of prerecorded audio.

Does anyone in 2025 hear Transylvanian Hunger and find themselves shocked at the extremity of it? And is that even a meaningful way to interpret that album? Same question for Quaristice, is this experimental music or have we just reached the point where this is just music? I’m being disingenuous and leading you to my preferred answer, but my point is that calling Quaristice experimental, or Transylvanian Hunger extreme says nothing about the fields Darkthrone and Autechre operate in and how they’ve developed and spread. In the experimental category it misses decades of music that was not consecrated by academia and art funding institutions (Jamaica of the 1970s and black New York of the 1980s to name but two).

Finding the weirdos doing interesting things whilst avoiding Rap Rock

There’s a long history of utterly terrible music made by rock bands with a sampler, but there are some gems to be found that aren’t merely clunky attempts at replicating hip hop cadences with chugging guitars and/ or growled vocals over the top. I’ve spoken before about Justin Broadrick, mostly the first Techno Animal album and Godflesh’s Slave State EP, so there’s no need to revisit that ground.

Sometime around 1991 I picked up Lurch by Steel Pole Bath Tub on a whim in Jumbo Records in Leeds (when they were still in the St John’s Centre and Leeds was going through it’s Ballardian fascination with shopping centres), and much like Slave State Lurch was an instant “I get this” moment.

[Montage footage of teenage me studying the accompanying comic book/ zine (“who the hell are these Warlock Pinchers guys?”3), buying the albums Butterfly Lover and Tulip, fixating on the level of distortion on the bass, buying a bass and deciding that would be my instrument (you can blame Godflesh and Steel Pole Bath Tub, and maybe Dead Kennedys too), staring at the cover and trying to imagine what the film Red & Rosy by Frank Grow is about (we’ll be hearing from Frank soon enough), and being really into the idea of haphazard backing tapes and samples playing underneath feedback.]

Montage footage ends, it’s now 1993 and I buy a CD called Love God by the band Milk Cult. I buy it because two members of Steel Pole Bath Tub are involved and it looks weird.

Track 1 is billed as “The Original Soundtrack Recording! Of Frank Grows' “Love God”” and there are story board panels in the book. OK, Frank Grow, I know the name from Lurch.4

Musically this is pretty weird, like a low brow response to This Heat. The Clown Party suite at times could be outtakes from Coil’s Black Light District if Coil were channeling the quintessence of Slayer. Surrealist tape loops and musique concrète tied together with bursts of Dave Lombardo Motorik beats. Second Slayer reference, it’s very much there throughout Love God, check the primitive scratching used as mimicry of thrash guitar 16th notes.

Alas Milk Cult have been vanquished to be a forever footnote in the saga of Steel Pole Bath Tub’s incredible final album Unlistenable and the major label nonsense they had to deal with that lead it to it being unreleased for years. If they’re not a footnote in the cautionary tale of major labels they get a passing “Mike Patton did a song with this band called Milk Cult”.

The original substack piece I’d planned was a longer “this is the stuff that influenced Was I Good Enough?”. Just before converting my notes to the article I decided to watch Love God (the film) and huh, no Milk Cult. Lots of Lubricated Goat, fragments of Hammerhead and Bad Brains and others. But no Milk Cult.

So I did what anyone would do and instead of promoting our new album I spoke to Mike Morasky of Steel Pole Bath Tub about Milk Cult, and Frank Grow about Love God.

“Excuse me, I really dig women with blue skin, you know where I can find one?”

Love God the film is a surreal trip that is unmistakably a product of Gen X. It’s equal parts Pee Wee’s Playhouse, Liquid Television, Troma, and horny Kaiju. The film follows a number of threads including being truly seen and understood, and attempting to transcend mortality and becoming divine. And giant parasites in the sewer system, definitely giant parasites in the sewer system.

One review on Letterboxd pretty much describes half the people I work with in music:

Maybe the best possible version of a "before my time" Gen X sensibility I tend to have a love/hate relationship with. like, some guy with a bunch of kaiju figures and lava lamps on his bookshelf, Melvins t-shirt, Frank Kozik Killdozer poster in the bathroom, ambient sound of kung fu VHS tapes on permanent loop … this genre of guy is mostly extinct now.

Due to a clusterfuck around the rights you can watch it on the Internet Archive

Listen to Milk Cult, watch Red & Rosy and Love God, and buy our new record

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.

A conversation with Mike Morasky about Milk Cult

When did you first meet Frank Grow and what was the relationship?

Steel Pole Bath Tub was on one of our earliest tours and we played somewhere in San Diego. Afterward we stayed with a friend from Montana at his warehouse in downtown S.D. It was one of those art warehouses which were common at the time and all of his roommates were artists. Frank was one of them and we hit it off. Frank and I took his motorcycle to the university where I think he was working, borrowed a 16mm projector and he did a screening of Red & Rosey for us that night. We loved it, ended up using some frames from it for our Lurch album cover art and screened it before a bunch of our shows, including taking it on tour with us in the Pacific Northwest. We also formed a band with Frank “Blood Pumper’s Racing Club”, in which we covered some of the surf rock tunes from the film. I also did some other work with Frank when he was editing Sophia Coppola’s “High Octane” video series. We did a lot of collaborating in those days.

What was the beginning of Milk Cult and why was it necessary to do it separately from Steel Pole Bath Tub?

I had been working with Eric Holland and I had been doing a decent amount of work at a small S.F. studio called “Poolside” and we had a fairly free run of the place when clients weren’t working there. I had also purchased a Casio FZ1, which was a very early sampling keyboard and had an 8 track tape machine at home. I had been into sampling since I got my first sampling delay unit the “Korg SDD-2000” in Tokyo in the early 80’s and so I started messing around with the Casio at home.

Steel Pole had definitely done a lot of sampling and we were into it both practically as well from a conceptual art standpoint but in that context it was usually more of a segue or overlay of sorts and not usually key to the music itself. So the idea with Milk Cult was to do some works that were more centered around the sampling and abstract sound works itself.

At some point Frank had mentioned he had a new film that needed a soundtrack so I signed up. As the project went on, it seemed right to start collaborating, which is when Dale Flattum and Eric got involved. We did a bunch of work out of my house but eventually basically moved the project into “Poolside”.

What was Eric Holland’s role in Milk Cult?

At that time, Eric was mostly a creative engineer, doing all the mixing and ultimately handling the more technical side of things as well as sample editing and generation. As time went on Eric’s contributions expanded to creating core samples, loops, etc. It was truly a “studio band” of sorts and Eric was a key component for sure.

What equipment were you using in Milk Cult and how did you make Love God?

It started in my home studio with a Casio FZ1 sampling keyboard, a bunch of fx (Yamaha SPX90), guitar pedals, portable cassette machines and an 8 track cassette machine. By that point, I was also running an early Apple computer (Apple 2?) with “Sound Designer” and “Alchemy” on it so I did a decent amount of digital editing there too but it was still very early days for that.

Dale was also contributing with his cassette constructions, which we’d both been doing for a while in Steel Pole. We then moved the project to Poolside where we had a 2” 24 track machine, a lot more mixing and processing gear and another, slightly beefier sampler.

If I remember correctly, I believe we tracked the whole thing to tape because protools had yet to happen. I don’t think Love God had any live acoustically tracked instrument performances on it other than maybe a turntable if that counts as “acoustic”.

What were your aims and how did you approach creating Love God?

With Steel Pole Bath Tub, we’d already spent a bunch of time exploring using the studio as an instrument, inspired by the likes of Brian Eno but we were still really a traditional rock group of sorts and so we wanted to explore some things a little more experimentally and free from the expectations of being in a band. Love God gave us an excuse to do that.

We were also very much into sampling as post-modern appropriationalism inspired by the early hip-hop scene, punk writer Kathy Acker and others.

Interestingly, after doing Love God, we started using samples as a way to drive collaboration with others, our later records were an “exquisite corpse” sort of process where we would create interesting patterns from appropriated samples and then have collections of artists pay along to that bed. We’d then sample that and make constructions from the results.

A conversation with Frank Grow about Love God

How did you first become aware of Steel Pole Bath Tub and what was that relationship?

I knew Mike, Dale, and Dorothy for years before they started the Milk Cult project. Me and 2 other roommate/best friends/fellow artists lived in a ginormous 6400 square foot artist “live/work” space in downtown San Diego. 24’ high ceilings! We called it Wild Child Productions. The bulding was the old San Diego First Baptist Church, which takes up a quarter of an entire city block, on the corner of 10th and E streets.

We rented the entire basement and divided it into 3 studio work spaces, 3 living spaces, and two exhibition/performance spaces. It also came with the industrial-sized church kitchen. The were a bunch of other art freaks living upstairs in the rest of the church. The band Crash Worship lived right above us in the sanctuary/chancel, lol. Their guitarist Jeff kept his 16’ anaconda in the Baptismal font.

Over the years, many bands passing through san diego ended up crashing at our place. Morasky was friends with one of my roommates, Mike Weix, and I met them when they played at the Casbah while touring their Butterfly Love album. I had recently finished Red and Rosy and they saw it and invited me to screen it before some of their shows. Good times those! They used a still from R&R for the Lurch album cover and I think they took a print on the road during their Lurch tour.

Anyway, I don’t remember exactly how Milk Cult came to do the track for the Love God short film… Maybe I approached them after hearing an early Milk Cult track? I had been working on the script for a few years so there was plenty of time to throw the idea around. I also traveled up to san francisco and stayed at Mike's a few times, actually, the four of us (SPBT and me on guitar) did a show as the Blood Pumpers Racing Club where we played the Red & Rosy soundtrack live at the Chameleon bar. I think it was on a Saturday afternoon. There were like 11 people there. I designed costumes for all of us that were like religious robes with drag racing fire safety style full-head hoods made of painted latex rubber. All striped and numbered and metal flaked. My hood had copper “exhaust pipes" extending from my head like horns/headers. I had two propane tanks strapped to my arms which fed gas through hoses to the pipe horns on my head that we lit on fire for the finale. Someone had a video camera at the show but I never saw the footage. Fun gig!

The Love God album came out in 1992 and contains photos and story boards from the film in the insert, the Love God film (somewhat) surfaces in 1997 and Milk Cult aren’t in the soundtrack. I’m assuming there are two versions of the film and Milk Cult didn’t make it into the final version?

There were two Love God films- the first was a short film that I made essentially as a fund-raising tool in 1992, a proof of concept film to inspire investors to fund the feature-length Love God film. However I wasn’t happy with the way the short film turned out, so I didn’t use it in our feature-film fund raising meetings. Without a doubt, the best thing that came from that film by far was the Milk Cult track.

By 1995 Ted Hope and James Schamus at Good Machine Productions in NYC were able secure funding for the feature length film. Part of the money came by selling the sound track rights to VelVel records, who were excited about releasing a compilation cd of the film’s music. I was already leaning towards using lots tracks from a variety of disparate bands and genres to create a more chaotic collage-like soundscape, as opposed to using a single composer, so the Velvel thing made sense at the time.

Remember- compilation sound tracks were currently a big thing due to Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction soundtrack becoming a solid commercial success the previous year.

But regarding Milk Cult / Steel Pole / Morasky not being included on the feature film… I can’t remember why that didn’t happen. They had just signed to Slash records, so maybe that had something to do with it, they were busy, I was busy, we were on opposite sides of the country now… I don’t know. I remember using Steel Pole as temp tracks in the movie during editing- especially Pseudophedrine and Bozeman- their Miracle of Sound In Motion album is still one of my all time favorites. I don’t know, its all a blur, we had to slam that entire film together in like 5 weeks I think, which is insane.

Stuart Gray [AKA Stu Spasm, frontman of Lubricated Goat] stumbled in at some point, which added to the chaos. We shot Love God in 19 days, had like 6 weeks to edit, and a few more weeks to finalize post- mix, color correct, transfer to 35mm. We had been accepted to Sundance so our deadline was hard, and no time for audience test screenings.

First time we all saw it was to “QC” the 35mm transfer. I put QC in quotes cause there wasn’t time to fix anything even if we wanted or could afford to… that was our cast and crew screening! In a screening room at the DuArt film lab in NYC. Crazy.

I’m aware of some extremely frustrating issues of rights around Love God, I believe there was a physical edition of it at some point, including a Love God manga and making-of DVD extras. What’s the status of the film now and why is it only available via the Internet Archive?

Good Machine produced the Love God feature film in 1995 and were able to secure a distribution deal in Japan and a few European companies but not for the US. Over the next several years, Good Machine was bought by Sony Classics, who shipped all of Good Machine’s physical assets and records to, I’m assuming, some Sony-owned storage facility. A few years later, Universal Pictures bought Sony Classics, and apparently they moved all the Good Machine records and assets from the Sony facility to a Universal-owned facility.

Around 2002 I ran into Marcus Hu, co owner of Strand Releasing, at the airport, who expressed interest in releasing a Love God DVD. Love God’s producer Anthony Bregman raised the money to master an awesome dvd that contained the film, the film with a commentary by myself, Anthony, and actor Will Keenan, a digitized copy of the Love God Manga, and a “making of” documentary.

The company who authored the DVD also designed the packaging, which I was able to supervise and sign off on, and they did a killer job. We were really happy with it and super excited to finally get the film out in the public. However, when it came time to deliver the master DVD to the distributor, we discovered that ALL the film’s legal documentation- the contracts, releases, synch and licensing deals, ALL the paperwork, everything, was missing. No one could find any trace of the film (the only 35mm print of the film also disappeared around the same time).

Apparently, sometime during the shuffling of Good Machine's assets between the various buyers and sellers all of Love God’s production documents and records were lost. Without these legal documents, distribution became, and remains, legally impossible.

It sucks because Good Machine did a rock solid job securing all the necessary rights, deals, licensing, etc, "in all media for perpetuity” and that beautiful DVD would have been released without any legal issues back in 2002, and today the film would be available to all interested streaming services.

Since then I’ve given away hundreds of home-burnt DVD copies, which I’ve stopped doing as I don’t own a DVD player anymore, but I continue sending out links to download digital files of the film and the soundtrack, and it’s currently available to watch on YouTube, unless they pull down for violating music copyrights (which happens now and then but I just repost it) which it isn’t because we definitely secured rights to all the music, but can’t prove it.

Red & Rosy (1989), Tetsuo (1989); what the hell was in the atmosphere that these two films both came out at the same time?

Yeah I don’t know… I loved Tetsuo and definitely felt an instant kinship and a deep respect for the film’s look vibe and custom film craft. The way I see it now, Red & Rosy was my memoir based on growing up in a crazy dysfunctional family amidst southern California's violent death-infused hyper stylized sleazy speedy drag racing subculture- really a sub-subculture, or the sport’s dark underside, because drag racing for a large part was pretty conservative, even back in the 1960s and early 70s. I don’t know where the fuck Tetsuo came from. Lol.

[I haven’t done a Recently Listened To and Recently Read in this post because I’m mindful of this being too long, if you want a separate post of that kind of stuff before summer when I’ll be posting about a number of new releases due out on Phage, Iron Lung, and Closed Casket Activities, plus a soundtrack in a feature film debuting hit my e mail/ DMs/ astral body]

The kinds of art you and I and many of our peers are pursuing, specifically art that functions in a way that’s largely subliminal …you essentially need to give yourself over to unknowing, and allow yourself to make choices that are intuitive and divorced from rational frameworks.

For the third and final post about my collaboration with Full of Hell I figured I should talk to (and credit) the person who inadvertently gave the album its title, author B.R. Yeager.

The edited DMs look like this:

B.R. Yeager re: art capturing the ineffable, not to get all woo woo, but i think of that almost like scraping the divine. was talking to my theology-head friend about the literal physical impacts of sound on the body, and i think dub/dub-influenced music (and fuck, lots of hardcore) is at the frontline of that - pushing extreme sounds against the body to force a sort of transcendence

Andrew Nolan Music is really just mathematic relationships between what we hear as notes. It’s all timbre and hertz cycles.

The idea that music can convey anything at all - anger, sorrow, joy - is something we’ve decided it does because it doesn’t really.

And yet it does manage it.

For me the juxtaposition of the right sounds can create a friction in me that is the scraping the divine you identify.

I first came across the work of B.R. Yeager when i picked up his 2020 book Negative Space on a whim and was immediately a fan. Negative Space is a psychedelic tale the occult horror of teenagers living in a world that never seems right. I quickly followed it up with Amygdalatropolis from 2017, an unrelenting nosedive in to the seductive hellscape of online life and for me is the only post-The Sluts (Dennis Cooper 2004) that has been successful in it’s use of message boards and internet posts to carry a story.1

Scraping the Divine is out now on Closed Casket Activities.

B.R. Yeager’s 2023 Burn You The Fuck Alive is available from Apocalypse Party.

The album title Scraping the Divine comes from a conversation that we were having about music and writing. I said I place no value in the facade of catharsis through art and that in both my own creation and consumption of art I’m chasing this fleeting notion of capturing something ineffable. I mentioned reading Quentin S Crisp’s Morbid Tales that awakened something in me that I found hard hard to verbalize.

B.R. Yeager I appreciate the opportunity to talk about this particular topic with you, specifically because it can be so fucking challenging to discuss, because the moment you’re talking about the divine, you’re talking about qualities and states of being that are inherently beyond the realms of human perception and articulation. But it’s an important topic because I think it undergirds the kinds of art you and I and many of our peers are pursuing, specifically art that functions in a way that’s largely subliminal. And in order to accomplish that, you essentially need to give yourself over to unknowing, and allow yourself to make choices that are intuitive and divorced from rational frameworks. A simple way this manifests in my work is the inclusion of details and depictions of events that hold tremendous personal importance to me, even when that importance is invisible to the reader. So my hope is that these details act as sigils, creating a cumulative subliminal effect to transfer nameless meaning from myself to others, but to also (ideally) clear space for a deeper, more divine meaning to enter. But what that is or whether that actually occurs, I don’t know. That brings us back to the beginning—it’s inherently impossible for us to know. I can maybe sense when that is happening, but there is no way for me to definitively know. I have a better handle on it when I experience those states in another’s art—I can feel something happening to me even if I can’t put words to it.

Would be very curious to hear your thoughts on this, especially with regard to your solo instrumental work. Are tones and rhythms sigils? Do you ask questions with your beats? What are some things you were exploring with this latest collaboration?

Andrew Nolan I like to reach towards an internal disconnection through working with sound to the point of exhaustion. I like to hit an oneiric state through music creation and then later use my work as a short cut to retrigger those states, either in meditation or something a few steps away from that.

Music and audio can absolutely be a form of sigilized intent and communication and I’ve done it repeatedly throughout the years, the difficulty is that you can inadvertently give literal life to something quite unpleasant if you’re being too fast and loose. For example, if you intentionally build a monument to ill-will of some kind, when you revisit that work years later you can suddenly be engaging with something you never really buried and still lives on; I suspect most underground artists have at least one of those golems in their catalogue.

For this collaboration I was putting myself in the producer role and thinking how I could make an alternate reality version of Full of Hell; make an album that sounds like them, but it comes from somewhere else. The challenge was achieving balance; I was trying to infect the base material, but not entirely overwhelm it with disease.

You wrote lyrics for the new Uniform record, you’re tabling at music fests instead of literary and small press conventions (like your contemporaries are), I took an album title from a conversation we were having, you’re making zines containing short fiction (Knife Wives). Let’s acknowledge what’s happening here; you’re a writer stepping outside of the traditional areas of promotion, distribution, networking where you’d expect to see writers.

B.R. Yeager A big piece is that I’m extremely disinterested in standard promotion and networking. It’s corny and annoying, but I get why it’s necessary and I’m not at all above it. I definitely play the game, I even enjoy aspects of it, and it’s fun watching the numbers go up. But ultimately it’s a distraction from the actual work.

But I enjoy doing in-person readings and tabling at events, not because I have a hard-on for self-promotion, but because I want to bring the work into real, physical spaces and engage with people who have parallel interests. So much of the literary scene I find myself in is online, and this isn’t specific to literature, or even reflective of the community as a whole, but social media is inherently only going to reflect the worst version of yourself. Those spaces are engineered to prey on your narcissism and your snitch tendencies, which naturally lends to a crabs-in-a-bucket mentality. You build a persona and end up living the gimmick. It becomes exhausting and distracting and not at all about the art.

The reason I’ve been operating in these musical realms is simply because it’s the stuff that makes me most excited and really cuts me open. At this point, music is probably a greater influence on my writing than other writing is. I feel at my most intuitive when I’m listening to music, and I have insane admiration for people who hone their instruments and voices, who go out and live the fucking pirate life bringing their art to real people in real, physical spaces, through processes that pose genuine material risks. It could never be me, curled up in bed scribbling my dainty little thoughts while the edibles kick in. Writing fiction is easy mode compared to being a musician.

Where do you land on this? From what I can see your social media presence is more or less the platonic ideal—not too personal, no cartoon persona, and mainly a hub for information on new records and live events. Behind the curtain, is it a struggle to balance, or is it just a natural extension?

Andrew Nolan One of the reasons I decided to start working under my own name was to remove an artificial separation between aspects of my life — “now I’m being a musician” — and to openly live with the fact that everything bleeds into every other area and makes the whole.

My social media presence is noncommittal at best. I’m hopeful that somewhere on the near horizon Generation Alpha will spearhead a kind of Digital Straight Edge and we can get back to having parallel streams of cultural endeavours that aren’t measured against the same criteria that all cultural products are now. Leave the idiots to their shitty Intellectual Properties and the resulting debates, shut the door on everyone —regardless of capacity or ability — being able to have access to a voice in things that they aren’t a part of, set fire to the word community being used instead of consumer.2

One thing I’m confident in is that underground art will put its thumb on the butchers scale of future cultural historians because collectively we’ve been so determined to keep physical media alive, so a lot of the major cultural products will exist largely as secondary sources in the future.3

There is not one single youtube video essay with millions of plays that will be accessible within ten years, yet extremely niche zines and noise tapes will frequently have a life that far outlasts their form and availability. Jarett Kobek’s How to Find Zodiac (We Heard You Like Books, 2022) is convincingly predicated on early 60s and 70s science fiction fanzines that were often released in micro editions.

I think Bret Easton Ellis recognized the way to win the long game regarding social media was to write and publish White as a book.

Congratulations on selling over 30,000 copies of Negative Space - which was the first book of yours i read - it’s well deserved but i have absolutely no context whatsoever for the figure.

Thank you. The figure I always hear is that 500-1000 copies sold is a lot for an indie novel, so as far as I know, 30,000 is incredibly rare. It’s significant supplemental income, but I’m strictly treating it as supplemental income. I have a day job, and am not considering writing full time, because even with an overall large number of sales, those are spread over the course of four and half years, quite inconsistently. Negative Space started slowly, selling primarily to the hundred or so people who had liked my previous book, and that accelerated very gradually over the next two years. Then, when we hit ten thousand sold, for whatever reason, that triggered a massive acceleration in sales, where we ended up selling another ten thousand in only a few months. But from there, sales have gradually decelerated, and it’s taken around a year and a half to reach 30,000. So my income from sales has been pretty inconsistent, ranging from “quit-my-job” money to “if-I-quit-my-job-I’d-be-barely-scraping-by-and-would-absolutely-need-to-supplement-with-a-day-job-or-freelancing” money, often within the span of months.

There is also the very real possibility that Negative Space has long past its tipping point. Which isn’t a bad thing—infinite appeal is an insane thing to desire, and even more so to pursue. But Negative Space is the only book that has ever earned me enough money to conceivably live on—my follow up hasn’t cracked 2,000 sales in its first year and a half—meaning I can’t depend on future work to compensate for Negative Space’s declining sales. I’m also not particularly prolific. It takes me at least three years to write a novel, so if the next book doesn’t make much money, it’s another three years of work to see if the next one will.

All of this is to say: even though I have had immense material success (by the standards of an indie author), it is still not enough to live off on its own. This is not a complaint. I am objectively very, very fortunate. There are far better authors who sell far less than me (Gary J. Shipley and Charlene Elsby4, to name two), just as there are far worse authors who sell more than me. Nobody knows why a certain book will take off, and even if it does take off, that does not guarantee a living, and it is certainly not guaranteed to last forever. Is it still worthwhile? Absolutely. But it’s important to talk about the reality of it.

What are you working on currently? How do you want people to see BR Yeager?

Currently working on the next novel, which is probably two years out from completion, but the first chapter will be published in a cool anthology next spring that I probably can’t talk about yet. I’m also co-writing an opera headed by this fantastic modern classical composer Samuel Garrett—it’s called God Rot, and he describes it as “a three-act eschatological opera performed by witnesses to an aging, unspecified mythic entity that resembles a god—but isn’t. The confusion around and consequences of this tragicomic character come to define three distinct time periods, chronicled by a historian at the end of time.” Very stoked on this. I recommend checking out this record for a taste of what he does.

I’m at a point where, honestly, I just want people to see the work rather than me as an individual. Me, the individual, is for my friends and family. The art is for everyone else. I’m happy to talk and correspond with people who appreciate the work (as well as those who don’t), but I’m not interested in having a public persona.

B.R Yeager recently read

Mirror Translation – Meghan Lamb

Was recently able to read an ARC of Meghan Lamb’s Mirror Translation, a collection of three stories set in an unnamed Eastern European country, where people encounter mirror versions of themselves, or people they suspect to be mirror versions of themselves, which may in fact be just their own narcissism spiraling out of control, or something else entirely. Nothing is answered, as it should be. But essentially it’s a book playing with ideas surrounding doubles and doppelgangers. It’s brief and great. Meghan’s a fantastic writer period. I think her approach to horror and speculative genre is akin to mine, in that she’s more interested in playing with the aesthetics and ideas generated by those realms, and not at all interested in paying respects to genre conventions and traditions. But she’s much smarter than I am. Great stuff, I think it’s coming out either later this year or sometime in 2025.

B.R Yeager recently listened to

Only Built 4 Cuban Linx… - Raekwon and Ghost

For the first time in probably a decade, I’ve been revisiting the first wave of Wu solo records, and it has really highlighted how my initial teenage encounters with them were pearls before swine. I loved those records then, but I can see now how shallow my appreciation was. Another major shift has been my turn from believing Liquid Swords to be the superior record, to my recent (and correct) realization that it’s Cuban Linx. It’s always been Cuban Linx. That’s maturity.

One thing I’ve been ruminating on is how Cuban Linx and Liquid Swords each present the aesthetic of a fully-realized, cohesive, album-length narrative, but neither record actually provides one. Sure, there are tracks with rich and vivid storytelling, but they exist as thematically coherent snapshots. If you read the lyrics in order, there is not a clear, overriding story arc across the albums—but it feels like there is. And the use of film dialogue works kind of inversely, in that they’re derived from narratives with traditional structures and story arcs, but they’re stripped of context, chopped up, and rearranged into the tapestry, which also gives a sense of continuous narrative without there actually being one. That’s endlessly fascinating to me. It’s like the idea of a story, or the ghost of a story, and I’d love to figure out a way to adapt that into what I do. Christopher Norris’s books (Hunchback ’88 and The Holy Day) work similarly for me, where there is a narrative happening in the background, but the actual text is focused on the objects in a room, or a piece of paper in a character’s pocket. Remnants and traces of narrative, but gaps where they should connect.

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Scraping the Divine, my collaboration with Full of Hell, was released last week via Closed Casket Activities.

When discussing potential artist for Scraping the Divine my first choice was always Savage Pencil - nom de plume of Edwin Pouncey - who I originally knew from his work in the 1980s for NME and Sounds, and who is probably known to most for his art for Sonic Youth and Big Black, and his more recent work for Sunn and Swans. His cover art has been seen across releases as diverse as Masonna, Rocket From the Crypt, Coil, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, and a Savage Pencil Presents dub and roots reggae compilation on Trojan records.

He’s done cover art for Masonna and King Tubby, of course I wanted to work with him.

Savage Pencil’s art is close to low brow artists and underground comix with some 60s and 70s style concert posters in the mix; think S Clay Wilson, Ed Roth, Spain Rodriguez, Robt. Williams as being in his lineage. But there is also a clear influence of Victorian decadence via Aubrey Beardsley and Sidney Sime, and the automatic drawings of Austin Osman Spare.

On a recent visit to the UK we were unfortunately unable to meet in person (he lives in London now and all of my time was spent in the north of the country), but we did talk for some time on the phone, mostly just shooting the shit, but also of our shared enjoyment of Arthur Machen.

These questions were answered via e mail in October 2024.

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What was your approach to creating the album cover?

For the album cover I wanted to do an automatic drawing, using the techniques I have picked up over the years by immersing myself in the work of such artists as Austin Osman Spare, Jack Kirby, Basil Wolverton and Stanley Mouse, among others. All of these artists come from different artistic backgrounds, but to me they are somehow linked together through their individual imaginative and wholly original approach to creating images.

The main eyes section of the album art is an automatic drawing, sketched out in a semi-conscious state with graphite and later worked on in ink and computer to add the detail.

The lettering for the title and tracks was slightly more thought out, using ruled ink lines and a computer to get the look of the words being scrawled out in an old grimoire.

Can you talk a little about the influence of Austin Osman Spare?

The visual work of Austin Osman Spare has definitely had a major effect on my work. I started off just liking the way he drew demonic forms, but as I got deeper into studying his art, I began to convince myself that I could take a similar direction with my own creations.

Early drawings had a strong Spare feel running through them but as I progressed, my own style began to take over and I now feel that what I learned from studying his line flows more naturally through what I am trying to achieve today. The demonic drawings I have done for Sunn O))) and this album cover all bear the hallmarks of Spare’s influence but, hopefully, cannot be completely attributed to his style. They are all my own work.

We’re both from Leeds, were you aware of or involved in any capacity with the chaos magic movement of the 1980s?

I was never really involved with chaos magic, so I can’t really comment, even though I realise that the teachings of AOS through his The Book Of Pleasure (Self Love) and The Focus Of Life books were an enormous influence. Leeds was a weird place for me to grow up in, though, and I was aware that something strange was going on there during the 20 years I lived there. I eventually escaped to go live in Colchester, Essex, only to find that East Anglia was even more witch haunted than my birthplace.

What was your first exposure to Arthur Machen and who else in the broad category of weird horror (I favour Mark Valentine's terms of borderland and otherworld stories) are you a fan of? Any contemporary writers you follow? As I get older I find Machen and Machen-esque writers more of a draw to me than Lovecraft and his descendants.

I was introduced to Arthur Machen’s writings through reading the Corgi paperbacks of his short stories. I became attracted to them because of the lurid cover art that usually had nothing to do with the stories inside, The Novel Of The White Powder being a particularly ugly example. After that I read his wonderful novel The Hill Of Dreams and became hooked.

I continue to read Machen to this day, as well as being a paid-up member of F.O.A.M. (Friends Of Arthur Machen). Mark E. Smith from The Fall was also a member of this austere club.

Machen has since become more interesting than Lovecraft to me too. At the time I was reading Lovecraft in the late 60s everybody else was into Tolkien. I thought that Lovecraft, and the rest of the Weird Tales gang, was the obverse of all that so I went in that direction. I came to Machen through reading Lovecraft’s letters and, over the years, he has become my favourite author. As well as his supernatural stories I also enjoy his writings about London, where he discusses old inns and various, mostly demolished now, landmarks of the city that were once part of his stomping ground.

I can’t think of any recent authors in the supernatural fiction genre that I have recently really enjoyed. It feels like the last great weird fiction writer I became obsessed with was Robert Aickman, but I realise there are plenty more out there like the late Mark Samuels1 and Ron Weighell. I’ll get round to reading them soon I reckon.

When did you first become aware of noise and industrial and what were your feelings towards it?

The first noise recording I ever heard was the title track from Weasels Ripped My Flesh by The Mothers Of Invention. It is just a huge barrage of squealing feedback-induced cacophony and I was immediately attracted to it. Later on in the 80s I discovered free jazz via the recordings of Albert Ayler, Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor, Noah Howard and numerous others. After that I ventured into the murky world of black metal, mainly through listening to the complete works of Abruptum – along with such noise favourites at the time as Merzbow, early Boredoms, Hanatarash, Hijokaidan, C.C.C.C.2, Masonna, Borbetomagus, Ascension, early Swans, Wolf Eyes and Skullflower.

They are very physical forms of music. You are also forced to use your imagination to fully appreciate what is being played. I am particularly attracted to guitar feedback manipulation, and with my friend sound artist Sharon Gal I have performed several times under the group name Meltaot. During these performances Sharon sings and plays electronics, while I accompany her using feedback on electric guitar and pedals. As with my drawing technique, these sessions are unpredictable and can go into some very interesting sonic areas where we both kind of trance out and surrender to the vibrations.

***

Savage Pencil has a book published by Strange Attractor Press (distributed by MIT Press in North America). You should buy it.

Scraping the Divine is out now.

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Almost 15 years later and they’ve done more with noise laced grindcore adjacent music than anyone thought was ever possible.

I’ve been lucky enough to sit in the backseat for minor parts of their journey; Column of Heaven touring with them (2014), filling in on bass for a show when Brandon couldn’t get in to Canada (2014), guest vocals on the song Ashen Mesh (2017), remixing the song Trumpeting Ecstasy (2017), Full of Hell/ Intensive Care split 7” (2018), live electronics for five shows (2024). There may be more that I’m forgetting. The bottom line is we’re all close friends and in 2024 I’m the one asking their opinions and advice on things now.

Our collaborative album, Scraping the Divine is out November 15th on Closed Casket Activities and is the result of several years of trading material back and forth until an album came out of the mire. Officially it started in 2019, but the vast majority of the work was done in 2022 and 2023.

How do you approach the balance in your writing? I’m thinking of the balance between noise freak outs and more traditional playing, and the balance between genre limitations (being a grind band) and opening up to new influences.

Spencer: I always tell everyone I just write what I think sounds cool to me. Most of what I listen to wouldn’t be considered mainstream even something pop/indie oriented like Dinosaur JR. Just because something is extreme doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be catchy and vice versa. I always just keep in the back of my mind “does this fit for Full of Hell and does it not sound too similar to something we done before.” So why not make a noiserock song with death metal influence; as long as it makes sense to me.

In collaborations how do you know decide when to take charge and when to relinquish control to a collaborator

Spencer: With collaboration records they should be collaborative but not necessarily everything can be at all times. If that was the case none of these releases would have ever been completed.

Sometimes you need to put ego aside and serve the record and that’s when giving up control works best. Not all of your own ideas work and maybe the other person does know more than you.

Dylan: The entire point of a collaboration for us is that outside voice, so I find it extremely important to know when to step back, especially as I get older.

It's like touching the wings of a moth, and it's different with every project, it really just depends on who is involved. Doing a record with The Body is very free flowing and open, whereas doing one with Primitive Man is much more focused and structured and definitely directed by a couple people.

I need to know my role, know what I can offer the project, and just look for the best openings. 

Three favourite pedals/ noise making devices.

Spencer:

1. Death by Audio Levitation delay (hasn’t left my board in years and is perfect for overdubbed background noises).

2. Boss bass overdrive-perfect for heavy blown out tones or nasty feedback.1

3. Death by Audio Evil Filter- rarely use it on guitar but I love using it on drums or other dubs. Also can get extremely harsh and bass heavy.

2

Dylan:

1. Soma Laboratory’s The Pipe is definitely my current favourite. Since my primary wheelhouse is vocalisations it's a priceless piece of equipment. It lets me create a huge variety of sounds, from huge soaring horn like soundscapes to really harsh on the ears modulated screams.

2. Organizer by Earthquaker Devices, It pairs really well with any kind of mic output (The Pipe or any kind of contact mic especially). That "church organ" chord sound is a really cool addition to a voice.

3. Trogotronic synths are my oldest and firmest favourites. I've had a fair few of them over the years. They're extremely fun and unpredictable until you practice on them for awhile. They just sound so iconic to me as a huge fan of Man is the Bastard/ Bastard Noise/ Amps for Christ, I can't put them down. The newest Trogotronic collab with OFF! is called the Antidote and it's absolutely amazing and the easiest to use to date.

When we discussed the lyrics neither of us had any interest in writing what was essentially purple prose about how life is shit.

Dylan: As I get older, I think it's easier to truly be myself through my art. As I attempt to grow and truly know myself, it has gotten easier to let it all be laid bare in a way. This kind of writing has always been the best way that I know how to communicate perspective, especially through descriptive metaphor. I'm not trying to sound pretentious at all but it always reminded me of painting something, or collaging. You can start with a very small piece (for me it's always titling) as a central theme and build off of that, and then strip away where it needs to be stripped away once you put it to music. Just like you, haha. 3

As far as the change goes, like I said at the beginning, it's gotten easier to be transparent, thus maybe it's easier to read where I'm at personally in my life. I've been confronting some deep existential dread over the past few years and trying to navigate my way through it and accept my place in the universe.

I think that the older you get the more you realize everything is essentially a shade of grey and there are no objective truths. It's freeing and proves a need to manifest a reality you see fit.  It's been much more interesting for me to not be stuck in the same static "humanity sucks" phase forever. 4

What does the future of genre based guitar music look like to you?

Spencer: This is a very tough question because now that guitar music is making a comeback it’s becoming very contrived and boring especially in punk and hardcore.

No one really seems interested in trying something new. I’m hoping more heavy music takes different approaches like I described earlier like why can noise rock be influenced by death metal or vice versa. I think it’s cool a band like Blood Incantation can go from Morbid Angel worship to seamlessly combining it with Krautrock or ambient.

Short answer just more creativity and less genre worship.

Recently Read (Dylan)

The Three Body Problem Trilogy - Liu Cixin

There's a netflix adaption now too, I enjoyed it. It's a science fiction series that touches alot of things that I'm really interested in... theoretical physics, Fermi Paradox, Dark Forest theory etc.. It's definitely got the existential dread in spades.. Essentially humanity accidentally ends up connecting with an alien civilization that lives in a system with 3 suns, making it very unhospitable. They decide to migrate to Earth and take the planet for themselves, prompting humanity to accelerate all of it's tech forward to defend itself/escape. I'm always going to be a sucker for theoretical astrophysics, quantum theory etc, even if I don't necessarily understand it top to bottom, haha. I want to know the mysteries of the universe, but all I have is fiction.

Recently Listened To (Spencer)

Poison Idea-War all the time

Bone Awl-Meaningless Leaning Mess

OLD-Lo Flux Tube

The Comes-No Side

Nuclear Death-Carrion for Worm

Available for preorder now at Industrial Coast, Andrew Nolan - I Am Afraid of Sunset, a previously lost album from 2009 now resurrected.

I’ve decided not to release this digitally for now, maybe forever. In the streaming era there is a flattening that occurs where all new releases are equally weighted and this release shouldn’t be considered my new album.

There are plans to use the material on this as the foundation for a release later this year.

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let the circle be fortified by the Holy Names of God

I’ve long had a fascination with the point in which the artist as creator disappears and something else enters and takes over. Sometime in the early 2010s I was in an end of semester presentation, two of the people were from different storytelling traditions, Paula worked within an African oral tradition1, and Kai, a mix of Scandinavian (she was Danish) and Inuit2 oral traditions.

Both clearly underwent a deliberate internal switch before beginning their presentation. Paula’s was very fluid, there was an almost imperceptible movement, like a semi jerk of the neck and head, and when she faced the room her eyes were noticeably wider, her mannerisms different, the cadence of her voice changed. Kai’s shift was more pronounced and more strained. She leaned back in her chair, stretched out her arms, put her fingertips on the desk in front of her, went bright red, stared at the floor, exhaled rapidly, then stood up quickly and was an entirely different person.

I did my own presentation, I forget the exact content, it was broadly about switching perspectives so that you allow yourself to learn from your surroundings and to open up new thought processes. It was equal parts Robert Anton Wilson’s reality tunnels, pagan animism, and mysterium tremendum. I definitely spoke about learning from animals3. Afterwards I talked to Paula and Kai and shared my observations of the change they both underwent, I remember Kai saying she doesn’t know what happens. why it happens, or even how she makes it happen but she feels a change whenever she’s about to use her oral traditions to speak in public. I remember she said she had no recollection of the leaning back and exhaling rapidly. Paula’s response was something along the lines of “I get ready to do it and something comes out”

Give unto me, I pray thee, one drop of water from the pure springs of Paradise, that I may quench my thirst.

Let’s see how long I can last in this section because this can get real painful real quick4.

Spooky musicians and spooky occultists - let’s face it, these are usually one and the same - are enamoured with a romantic notion of both personal darkness and the Abyss. There seems to be a perpetual, wilful, misreading of Jung’s oft quoted line from Psychology and Alchemy

one does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious

and I strongly suspect that many expensive occult book owners imagine themselves crossing the Abyss by levitating across it whilst seated in the lotus position.

5

Willingly crossing the Abyss is a hard decision to make, I suspect most people either accidentally fall into into it whilst spending too much time on the cliffs around it, or like I did, realize after walking for a long time that they’re in the Abyss and should have taken a left turn at Albuquerque.

I promise to threaten with the Dagger and command back into the triangle the spirit incontinent

I was going through an old hard drive earlier this year, I found an unfinished and unreleased collaboration with Bastard Noise from around 2005 (I think these were Andy Beattie’s first vocals since Man is the Bastard ended in 1997), and a folder full of electronic music I’d primarily put together between 2009 and about 2013. At one point some of this electronic music was due to be released by Crucial Blast, but it never materialized.6

The material for Crucial Blast was centred on possession; it was essentially a tale of a musician contacting an alien entity and being possessed by it and the music was the outcome. This is also the period in my life where I started skipping blindly into the Abyss, ignoring all the massive signs everywhere telling me what road I was travelling on.

The material on I Am Afraid of Sunset is mostly from 2009 (I can tell one track is from 2011 based on one of the samples in the song) and contains the bulk of what was originally going to be released by Crucial Blast. I gave it a light edit for clarity, a few tracks were entirely discarded, and I added two songs from the same era that weren’t originally intended for the album.

Song titles have changed, the spirit is there, but they reflect more Abyss like subject matter because it feels appropriate from this distance.

Once i clear a backlog of commitments this summer I intend to rework aspects of the tape into my current style.

Recently read:

Batman: Zero Year - Greg Capullo

Superheros eh? They’re frequently following their True Will, putting themselves in the throes of possession, and navigating the gulf between phenomenal world of manifestation and its noumenal source.

Anyway, Batman: Zero Year, a great alternate origin story with excellent art. Enjoyed this one.

Recently listened to:

Ambient Mortality - Cromlech

Primitive Knot related, not that far removed from the host project, Cromlech strikes me as a different emanation from the same source.

Cromlech is a distinctly Northern English sounding industrial project, and I can’t imagine them coming from anywhere else and sounding the same. A rock band pulled apart and put together in the wrong order. Vocals aren’t attempting to be extreme in any traditional sense of the word, instead they have a dour overtone to them - stern yet non committal - not unlike what you’d expect to hear in German power electronics. Long songs, driving minimalism, simple pulsing rhythms, and far more than the sum of its parts. Album closer Megiddo Stomp at times reminds me of strange collision of Big Black and the Sisters of Mercy if they had Jim Thirlwell influence.

I play with Cromlech on June 13th at Wharf Chambers in Leeds.

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Some live dates coming up fast (I’m on a flight to Quebec City in the morning)

Five shows doing electronics with Full of Hell

• April 30th Quebec City

• May 1st Montreal

• May 2nd Ottawa

• May 3rd London

• May 4th Toronto

Solo shows:

• June 6th Toronto w Drew McDowall

• June 13th Leeds

• June 14th Bristol

• June 15th Coventry (TBC)

• June 16th Glasgow

• June 17th Middlesbrough

• June 18th Sheffield (TBC)

• June 19th Liverpool

The UK dates are all with knifedoutofexistence, Steve from Industrial Coast put in a ton of work and is responsible for me being able to tour thanks to his work with Middlesbrough Arts Council, without that involvement I wouldn’t be coming over.

Expect a conversation with Steve about Industrial Coast and the A Monday Night in Middlesbrough series of events in a future post.

Industrial Coast will be releasing a lost album of mine recorded in 2009 that is a primitive precursor to the type of material i’ve been doing since Black Creek in 2020.

The two shows that are TBC might end up being me dossing about York for the day, eating chips and looking at Roman ruins and Viking exhibitions instead. Feel free to join me.

Get in the Van

I toured regularly throughout my 20s and then in my 30s did 2-3 tours per year every year until I hit 40. The last tour of that era of my life was with Full of Hell exactly 10 years from the one I’m joining them on tomorrow, the Toronto shows are ten years and one day apart. Since then I’ve done exactly one tour (five years ago). For some reason at age 50 I’ve decided to return to it.

Poster by Chelsea Watt

I feel like I’ve mentioned this before and won’t belabour it, but touring was something that really opened my eyes to possibilities of other ways of living and organizing. It was the thing that took me out of the quotidian violence of life in the north of England (and later central Scotland) and gave me some hope for the world.

Touring was also the thing that helped me to understand music as a vehicle for creating cultural space and how different cultural spaces looked different (and similar) across Europe/ Australia/ Japan/ USA1.

Recently read:

The House of Souls - Arthur Machen

In the lawlessness of Public Domain there’s many editions of this book out there, if you want a cheap copy they’re easy to come across. If you value books for their physical form as well as their contents then I recommend the Tartarus Press hardcover edition.

It’s no secret Machen was much admired by Lovecraft, and both write extensively about forgotten ancient horrors continuing on in the present, the notable difference being between the two authors being that Lovecraft was an ardent believer in the good of the Age of Enlightenment, Machen, well, not so much.

Much of the horror in Machen comes from the horror of Epiphany and at this stage in my life I favour this approach to cosmic horror in the numinous over Lovecraft (who i still adore.2

The Tartarus Press edition of The House of Souls contains all the material in the 1906 original edition, including A Fragment of Life, which is a difficult story to read - it’s dismally boring, intentionally so - but contains the enlightenment and ecstasy that is key to understanding Machen’s work.

Recently listened to:

From Resignation to Revolt - Hiatus

I put this on after hearing of vocalist Wills recent death. Hiatus are inextricably linked to my early touring experiences and I will forever associate them with the possibilities of other ways of living that I mention above.

First gig in Europe trip I ever played (Ebola in Liege, Belgium) we played with Unhinged (Wills was on bass) and we stayed with Azil from Hiatus, the best host ever who plied 21 year old me with endless weed and strong Belgian beer while we watched documentaries on early Jamaican dub. Second European trip we played a warehouse in France with Hiatus that was like something out of Mad Max. Home brewed Absinthe was being pass around the crowd from an enormous jug by the Belgian contingent when Hiatus played. When I asked what it was Wills proudly told me it was “the drink that made Van Gogh lose his mind”. I’m surprised no one died drinking it in that warehouse.

From Resignation to Revolt is Haitus first album from 1993, I always had The Brain from 1996 as my go to Hiatus album, but listening again after so long From Resignation is excellent; it does all the standard things you’d expect a bunch of booze addled Euro crusties to do - anarchist politics, heavy Doom influences - but god damn they shred like none of their peers could. Tight as hell in a way that shows they were A) way more serious than most of their contemporaries and B) probably not actually as universally wasted as popular opinion would have you believe3. As mentioned, strong parallels with Doom musically, but as the album progresses it gets deeper in to No Security territory (speed, ferocity, precision), I won’t bury this in a footnote, No Security is the Swedish hardcore band in my book.

Anyway, listen to From Resignation to Revolt, follow it up with The Brain (which sounds like it could come out in 2024 and hold its own), raise a glass to the memory of Wills (in Shank we dubbed him the crust Jimbo Jones). RIP.

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Lack of posts

A fun spell in hospital put me behind schedule by at least two months on everything I’m working on. This also meant I didn’t do my post on crime rap, noir fiction, and true crime books that was tied into the release of the second Luke Sick & Wolfagram album and some songs I produced for Falcon Outlaw (Ghetto Youth’s Rise from The Tzu Keepers album and the single Shooters).

I have the notes, but it’s unlikely I’ll revisit them.

Garshas.

Yegg War (first album from 2020)

Tik Tok killed the Instagram killed the YouTube killed the video killed the radio star

Super Jen (human name Jennifer Creagh) asked me months ago to record a guest spot for her radio show More Noise Please and I finally did it (sorry Jen).

You can find it archived here (Wednesday January 17th 2024 episode) and here

Things you will hear:

• My favourite two songs of 2023 (billy woods & Kenny Segal featuring Danny Brown - Year Zero, and Blockhead featuring Quelle Chris - The Cella Dwellas Knew)

• My two favourite current local bands (Coprolith and Slash Need1)

• Two unreleased songs by me (one featuring New Villain and Crownovhornz from an upcoming release on Iron Lung, the other from a release on Avalanche Recordings)

• Me talking about rediscovering a long lost collaboration and saying it’ll be released (it won’t be, sorry, vocals aren’t mixed properly, master session long lost)

Things you will not hear:

• What my walk on music would be if I was a professional wrestler (Morbid Angel - Invocation of the Continual One)

• Th’ Faith Healers - Delores (way too long, i played Pop Song instead)2

• Any actual mixing

• Genre consistency

Genre

I was talking to a friend recently and she mentioned that she feels trapped in genres and it’s only when she leaves those genres to do other music that she feels unrestrained and free. She plays a lot of music - from noise related, to composing operas, to bestial death metal - so i asked how she reconciles this feeling given that some of her most visible work is very embedded within genre metal. The answer was one I can understand respect; that it’s fine being in a collective/ band that operates strictly within genre lines, but with solo and composing work it’s an issue.

My own feelings are fairly noncommittal; I think genre is helpful as a set of guiding principles when you’re creating, but as a consumer genre is largely useless other than organizing drinking arrangements & ad hoc social gatherings.

At its worst genre is a cheat code that can establish the mediocre somewhat quickly - though with limited reach - at it’s best genre is a series of signposts that show what the limits are and how far from the centre you can get before your sound becomes something else entirely3 .More on genre as an anchor further on.

Fuck genre respectability

I check out immediately when people attempt to bestow an intellectual respectability on something that doesn’t require legitimizing on any terms other than its own existence.

On youtube there is a cycle that comes and goes every few years where people play death and black metal on piano and the comments sections are full of people saying things like:

Sometimes the richness of melody hidden within certain types of music need this sort of treatment to be truly appreciated

And:

The 2:39 bridge sounds like it could've been written by Rachmaninov haha

And none of this is necessary, metal does not need to be culturally legitimized to be valid. Let’s face it, metal on piano sounds like a cross between a Harold Lloyd chase scene, Tom and Jerry getting up to some violent tomfoolery, and a cut scene in FFVII that’s 15 minutes too long.4

I don’t want to spend too much time staring into this particular abyss, but see any fawning “thinking mans metal” article by the respectable press. This generally translates as: cultural product removed from its milieu because the writer doesn’t understand the milieu enough to participate and realizes that they’ve found something in the genre they actually do like. Horror films suffer this indignity more than heavy metal does. See anything described as elevated horror. I like a lot of these films and some of the music being heralded, just not the people doing mental gymnastics trying to justify why it’s ok that they like some things and not others from the same cultural sectors.

Brutal Death Metal will either save us or kill us (likely both)

Mack from God is War was schooling me on Brutal Death Metal recently, this started because we were both ecstatic that Brodequin has new material forthcoming. I think I remarked that I wanted to bench press a horse whilst listening to the new song on repeat.

For Mack the appeal of Brutal Death Metal is in the skill level required to even enter the fray, for me part of the appeal is less the skill level and more the focusing of that performance towards a virtuosic aural violence. Paroxysm Unit might as well be The Cherry Point run through a pitch quantizer (for clarity this is not a dismissive remark).

Brutal Death Metal is the inverse of cosmic horror - oh poor baby mercifully can’t comprehend the contents of the universe? Well guess what, you’re a fragile bag of meat with a very thin, easily pierced layer of skin separating organs from air. Also microorganisms are constantly trying to kill you in horrible ways.

This fragility of life and physical form becomes not just theory but also practice.5

• Focal dystonia, lateral epicondylitis, and tenodinopathy for guitarists.

• Bursitis, median nerve compression, and a variety of musculoskeletal disorders for drummers.

• Nodules, cysts, and polyps for singers.

• Tinnitus, hyperacusis, and general acoustic trauma for all (both listener and performer).

With the constant push towards extremes of performance these are the body horrors being summoned into existence.

Acute Exposure to Undetermined Acetylcholinesterase Inhibitors

Repeat the word sugar 100 times and it loses meaning and form. The syllables blur together

Am i really saying Shh? How long does that sound last? How hard is that G supposed to land? Am I dropping the R consistently? Which syllable does the emphasis even go on in this word? I can vary how I deliver each syllable, but if all three are off is it still recognizable as the word sugar? How off is too off for this word to still be heard by the listener?

Basically, why do we even have words man?

Trichomoniasis - Makeshift Crematoria

Back to my point above about genre as sign posting the boundaries and anchoring an approach.

This album does the standard things you’d expect from a Brutal Death Metal album; pitch shifted gurgling vocals, obnoxious pinging snare, medical research paper song titles, gravity blasts.6 You know what you’re in for.

But it seems to become intentionally more abstract as it progresses; the awareness of where the genre limits are allows it to become something else; a shifting swell of sound divorced from the human.

By the time we get to Predacious Stylet the guitars have largely disappeared, replaced by swelling drones, and clangs with some woozy clean guitar bends fading in and out. The vocals are reduced to being a straight drone, the constantly blasting drums become literal patterns, the spaces between individual drums move the more you hear them, and the shifting velocity and the resonance of that snare sound creates new things that you notice, you lose track of the accents and where the driving part of the song even is anymore.

The drums are saying sugar 100 times in a row.

But this switch only works because of the twelve songs that precede and the six songs that follow. And you don’t even notice that you’ve arrived here.

Ultimately it feels like the forces that propel free jazz and HNW have been accidentally (?) applied to metal, it feels like Makeshift Crematoria is not solely predicated on disgust and brutality, but uses them as a guide. I also kinda hope that Trichomoniasis are cough syrup drinking, PCP smoking degenerates and that I’m projecting all of this on to them. I romanticize that Trichomoniasis are the kind of youth that will rob me outside a 7/11 somewhere.

Nithing do a related thing on their/ his 2023 album Agonal Hymns, we have the recognizable sign posts that tell us this is brutal death metal, but with unusual sounds and elements pushing through, offering new approaches.

Recently read:

Silver Nitrate - Silvia Moreno-Garcia

A recording engineer and a fading actor come across a lost cult film that a Nazi occultist embedded ritual magic into. The Nazi occultist in question seems to be equal parts Indiana Jones villain, Otto Rahn, and Hans Heinz Ewers.

Of course I’m going to read this book, great fun, and manages to say something meaningful about people and interpersonal politics and still maintain a coherent horror story that isn’t there solely as a vehicle for commentary.

Recently listened to:

I mean, mostly Nithing and Trichomoniasis when I haven’t been listening to final mixes and masters for some soon to be released material.

But also the first release of 2024 that I’m on just came out digitally (physical is in preorder), Stalingrad - She Called Herself Tania, and given that i only heard the entire album a couple of days ago (I’m only on one track) I think it’s ok to mention it.

I’ve written about Stalingrad before so if you want the historical context go here. This is already likely to be one of my favourites of the year, it flows perfectly and it clearly had a lot of significant thought and effort put into it. It’s a weird one, enjoy the journey. My own contribution is in the song Rise of the Consultants (last song on side A), Richard sent me a rhythm track and I did a dub version of it.

Andrew Nolan - Black Creek vinyl reissue of the 2021 cassette out now on World, Out Of This. Buy here.

If you pay for Bandcamp downloads find it here, and it’s been on streaming since it was originally released.

In 2021 Aerin asked me to do a release on her tape label Seith Communiti. I was stuck in a temporary rental near Jane Street with a laptop, two delay pedals, and a synthesizer and figured why not? Everyday I walked my dog through the concrete trough containing Black Creek.

Previously all material under my own name was long form audio collages built around field recordings; a loose attempt at creating an inverse ambient music - something in the background that would push through to the foreground, something that was not designed to relax, but to quietly cause anxiety.

But after three releases I was stuck moving that style forward; it was taking me too long to make anything, turning a years worth of various recordings into coherent pieces wasn’t really doing it for me. At the same time I was reaching the peak of my frustration by the amount of rappers that were sitting on entire albums of music I’d provided them with that were clearly never going to be released. If you give your stuff away for free it’s less likely to be finished by the other parties involved.

So I took the first tentative steps at combining the two approaches and Black Creek was the result.

I have a rule that I won’t talk about process in ASBO Oskorei, so I’ll start the backwards journey these newsletters are supposed to be, but the final two songs are the time machine that get us there.

Oneironautics was a track built entirely out of the sound of the electronic lock at the apartment i was sequestered in for 6 weeks and Zeigarnik Effect was essentially the formula for the album. Both were heavily indebted to The Dream Forger, track one on side two of Techno Animal’s 1991 album Ghosts.

Freak Fucker

Bad was a basement record shop in the early 90s in Leeds, the main floor was goth and vaguely fetish gear (was it? Is this my memory filling in the gaps?) and band shirts. This was the place where 17- 20 year old me would blind buy noise rock and power electronics albums on the basis of staff recommendations alone

Ghosts was one of those recommendations.

Techno Animal was Justin Broadrick (Godflesh, Head of David, Fall of Because) and Kevin Martin (God, Pathological Records), and as the decade closed out would be known for their distorted take on drum heavy hip hop, but in 1991 that’s not where they were at.

The form of Ghosts is guitars that have been sampled, looped and had all human feeling intentionally removed, the same Godflesh drum machine, but with occasionally less authoritarian sounding rhythms, and Kevin Martin playing echo heavy saxophone over the top, making it marginally more welcoming to listen to by breaking the rigidity of the drums and guitars.

You can hear Godflesh in it - the mechanized terror and authoritarian pulse - but Ghosts is far less pinned to rock and metal, it has the same early Swans influence of Godflesh, but with none of the post-punk and a noticeable Art of Noise style approach to sampling.

In 1991 I didn’t yet have the musical language to fully understand what Ghosts was, I thought it sounded a bit like The Young Gods, but with the ideas of Kollaps era Einsturzende Neubauten. In 2023 Ghosts makes the most sense to me when I place it alongside the first two Main EPs1, it’s a similar approach, but more nightmarish, more Clive Barker.

LSD and Grays

Track 1, side 2. The Dream Forger. 8 minutes of slowly building saxophone, a repeating simple phrase that gradually builds through various Robert Frippe and Channel One techniques into a deep droning mass.

If we ended up at my place under the influence of LSD we would invariably have this song on repeat in the dark with the windows open. The night sky turning neon purple and Zeta Reticulans appearing in the room and harassing us.

An 8 minute song but as a teenager it felt like it went on for hours (even without the drugs). It’s the lull in the centre of the album and every single time we listened as a group of psychedelic addled delinquents we would all collectively feel the sudden pain of the sharp shift into album closer Tough Cop/ Soft Cop’s intro guitar loop. Tough Cop/ Soft Cop made absolutely no sense to me at the time, 30 years later and with a working knowledge of samplers it’s not that hard to figure out, but god damn this was otherworldly.

Jesus. Weeping. Hold on to me.

2

March 22nd, 1992, Godflesh plays The Duchess of York in Leeds. I’m 18 years old, Broadrick is 23 and in 2023 this seems impossible to me, but here we are, what the hell have I done with my life? Anyway…

Godflesh were a three piece for this tour, on second guitar was Robert Hampson - see footnotes - they started with an enormous wall of bass sound and they ended with Like Rats, that’s what I remember of the music. This was the era when British crusties looked and acted like they were sent back in time from a post-nuclear wasteland and it was my first experience with being in a room with them en masse. Some cosmic horror that took the form of a whirling mass of dreadlocks and studs burst through the threshold of reality and landed on my face, cutting my lip. Great fun. Five days later I was at a rave (Ark @ Leeds Poly) and got speed in the cut and it blistered up like leprosy.

I am a Godflesh EPs guy, yes, Streetcleaner is one of the greatest albums ever made, Us and Them is a downplayed gem in their discography (Broadrick is on record as hating this album), and the best single song by the band is found on Songs of Love and Hate (Frail3), but Godflesh EPs are my go to for the band; Cold World, Slavestate, Merciless, Slateman, Tiny Tears.

Godflesh really started to make sense to me in 1991 on the Slavestate ep.

Slavestate (the song) is built around a loop taken from Stakker Humanoid’s 1988 self titled absolute banger of an acid house track. Stakker Humanoid (original mix) starts every bit the standard genteel dance music of the time, then at 1:15 it all gets ripped away and the track’s main refrain takes over. Once the rug gets pulled from under the listener this is a harder and more sinister, less loving face of the rave culture of the time.

Godflesh take a loop from Stakker Humanoid, drop the tempo, and build the song on top of it, make it their own entirely by pulling the dystopian shock of the original out and working it to its logical conclusion. Slavestate would not exist without Stakker Humanoid.   

Would Slavestate have stood the test of time if Godflesh used Praga Khan’s 1992 Injected With a Poison - a song that did a far less effective bait and switch between utopian and sinister than Stakker Humanoid did -  as its basis instead4? Justin, I’ll send you $20 if you flip some of the harder parts of that song on a future release.

Godflesh would use this formula several times, building songs on top of preexisting electronic hits. Witch Hunt from 1999’s Them and Us repurposes Digital Underground’s Humpty Dance to significant effect, turning it from goofy novelty dance hit (cards on the table, I am a huge Digital Underground fan) into an oppressive and depressive new form. Landlord from 2023’s Purge drum track is an undisguised (they want you to know what it is) flip of Hardnoise’s timeless UK hip hop classic Untitled (1990). 5

This could all become talk about Godflesh and an interest in subverting culture and dance music, subverting and repurposing technology, but lets not overthink this and instead apply Occam’s Razor here: there’s always been a genuine love and understanding of dance culture and electronic music at the heart of Godflesh.

Intensive Care play our first show in four years on September 21st with Godflesh and Cell Genesis at Lee’s Palace, Toronto.

Next post will be after Garshas drops, in a week or two.

Recently read:

Dilla Time: The Life and Afterlife of J Dilla, the Hip-Hop Producer Who Reinvented Rhythm - Dan Charnas

The better biographies attempt to present a timeline and offer complete answers to endlessly repeated half-truths that go unexamined and pass into fact.

Charnas does both very well here. The unexamined half truths he convincingly takes to task are that Dilla was a drummer who played a sampler and that he intentionally left in mistakes or played everything by hand.

In non-biographical chapters Charnas uses very understandable (and not dry) music theory to explain what Dilla was actually doing and how changes in music technology allowed his style to take shape and take root. It’s hard to disagree with Charnas conclusions and it made me listen to Dilla with fresh ears again.

Recently listened to:

Killing Sound - Razor X Productions

Let’s continue to show Kevin Martin some love. Killing Sound (The Bug and The Rootsman in collaboration) was released by Rephlex in 2006 and is barely available on the internet. Some of the songs you can find on streaming if you you look very carefully, a couple of songs have been on youtube for a while but it was earlier this year the entire collection was uploaded. At the time of writing it’s had 234 views in the 8 months it’s been uploaded.

Stripped down aggressive dancehall; Hard vocals, hard beats, blown out bass, dub sirens, primitive time-stretched textures. The structures of the songs are largely attained by stacking rhythmic sounds then pulling layers back again.

A lot of the vocal tracks cut off sharply or trail off unnaturally, which makes me think much of this release is various acapella recordings recycled into new forms and suggests one possible reason as to why it may not be so readily available digitally.

Highlights for me include my first exposure to Warrior Queen, Boom Boom Claat with Cutty Ranks on the mic where the synths sound like someone took Joey Beltram presets and repurposed them to be the soundtrack to violent mass insurrection.

And best of all, WWW featuring Mexican. Mexican (who is he? Any leads please let me know, my own searching has been fruitless) regales the listener with a tale of him getting a brand new top of the line 2001 computer and downloading a shotgun that can hold 21 shots leading him to become the most sought after hit man. Mexican also vividly asks you to imagine him dressed all in black kicking your door in and shooting you in the head before he escapes and everyone tries to find him to give him killing contracts. Deliriously violent stuff.

It’s lazy of me, but generally when people who are into metal or industrial ask me for recommendations outside of their genres of choice that still sound raw and hostile I usually point them towards Razor X Productions. This is genuinely one of my favourite releases of the 2000s.

Or buy it in person at my next show (July 15th at The Garrison in Toronto w/ Lucretia Dalt & Stefana Fratila)

Art by Che Uno aka Cura Designs

Eight songs, this is the description on bandcamp:

As a child my favourite sounds were:

• The Tardis materializing.

• Davros delivering a monologue to the Fourth Doctor.

• Anytime in the King Tubby and Yabby You album (pink/ purple cover, that one...) where it sounds like your speakers are broken.

• The fade in at the end of Strawberry Fields Forever.

• Intro music to Chocky.

• The sirens in Cool C - Juice Crew Dis.

• The reverb on P.S.K./ Gucci Time.

This is my love letter to that era.

Nothing is real.

My childhood bedroom had an excess of furniture in it, old wardrobes and dressers that my parents didn’t want to get rid of lived in my room. In one of the drawers in the dresser behind my bed i found a paper bag of sleeveless 45s. The two I listened to the most were Kenny Rogers and First Edition’s 1969 cover of Johnny Darrell’s Ruby Don’t Take Your Love to Town, and The Beatles - Strawberry Fields Forever (1967).

On the streets. I get so excited.

Kenny Rogers and First Edition received multiple plays for two reason.

1. The part where all the instruments drop out and the drums and percussion sound like a someone having a great time fooling around with some cardboard boxes. Loved that.

2. The distinctly odd lyrics I couldn’t quite figure out at the time, but knew were pointing me somewhere outside of the traditional realm of pop music as I had experienced it.

I knew it was about a man upset with a woman. The line about getting a gun and putting her in the ground was clearly unpleasant, but confused me because it’s a jaunty and fun song; it’s the kind of sentimental novelty trash that you can imagine precocious kids the world over dancing and singing along to to please their visiting relatives. Except it’s a man feeling sorry for himself.

It wasn't me that started that old crazy Asian war

But I was proud to go and do my patriotic chore

And yes, it's true that I'm not the man I used to be

Oh, Ruby, I still need some company

And then he wishes he could kill his wife.

She's leaving now 'cause I just heard the slamming of the door

The way I know I've heard it slam one hundred times before

And if I could move, I'd get my gun and put her in the ground

34 years later Jonathan Canady would release his vile masterpiece - Deathpile - G.R. (Hospital Productions/ Force of Nature Productions) - and bring this same scenario to its gruesome finality.

The navy sent me on duty for six months

You couldn't wait, Marsha You found a new man

A new man that pimped you out

I came home from the navy

To a fucking whore

He turned you into a prostitute, Marsha

Or maybe you were one all along

We have same sad man returning from the war to an unfaithful wife.

By track 6 - Known Victims - we have the names of 13 women murdered by Gary Ridgeway. 1

Calm down, Ringo

Much less unpleasant than Kenny Roger’s wife hating proto-power electronics veteran was The Beatles - Strawberry Fields Forever.

Like Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town the thing that drew me in was the novelty of the song (the mellotron intro) and what kept me coming back to it was something I couldn’t reconcile with the rest of the song (the fade in at the end).

There’s really not very much to the fade in that happens at around the 3:35 mark and lasts for about 20 seconds but it was certainly enough to have me return to it repeatedly. The song ends then discordant flutes fade in, Ringo plays the sickest drum break any boy band would ever give the world, guitars repeat a single note, the flutes come back and it all fades out again. Parts of it sound like they’re going backwards, the flutes sound like they’re probably a tape loop, the drums sound like they’re comped from multiple takes.

To me this was the sound of a hidden song lurking beneath the threshold of experience briefly revealing itself before disappearing again. It was a glimpse of an inverse world, an unholy mirror of the original. I wanted more. Did all music have a hidden form only able to be accessed under specific circumstances?

A few years later and I’m no longer a frenzied child but an angst-ridden frenzied teenager. I read a lot of HP Lovecraft2 and come across Azathoth, the Blind Idiot God that lives at the centre of Chaos and who appears accompanied by the sound of frenzied drums and shrill flutes.

Outside the ordered universe is that amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the center of all infinity—the boundless daemon sultan Azathoth, whose name no lips dare speak aloud, and who gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time and space amidst the muffled, maddening beating of vile drums and the thin monotonous whine of accursed flutes. - The Dream-Quest of the Unknown Kadath

Once more for the people in the back.

The passage through the vague abysses would be frightful, for the Walpurgis-rhythm would be vibrating, and at last he would have to hear that hitherto veiled cosmic pulsing which he so mortally dreaded. Even now he could detect a low, monstrous shaking whose tempo he suspected all too well. At Sabbat-time it always mounted and reached through to the worlds to summon the initiate to nameless rites. Half the chants of the Sabbat were patterned on this faintly overheard pulsing which no earthly ear could endure in its unveiled spatial fullness. Gilman wondered, too, whether he could trust his instinct to take him back to the right part of space. How could he be sure he would not land on that green-litten hillside of a far planet, on the tessellated terrace above the city of tentacled monsters somewhere beyond the galaxy, or in the spiral black vortices of that ultimate void of Chaos wherein reigns the mindless daemon-sultan Azathoth? - Dreams in the Witch House

Other than signalling the arrival of Azathoth The Beatles never really meant much to me, it was mostly the music of the old and the tedious3. The music that people who didn’t like music would dismiss all other music to. As if the merit of Second Annual Report, From Enslavement to Obliteration, or Long Live the Kane could somehow be gauged by being measured against Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Of far more lasting interest and influence to me were Faust, who managed to take the hidden inverse song beneath Strawberry Fields Forever and materialize it fully.

Slow goes the goose.

The simplified story is this: in the lates 60s Polydor were looking for The Next Beatles and via Uwe Nettelbeck (picture a German Tony Wilson) took a chance on Faust. Faust took Polydor’s money, set up a studio on a farm, lived communally, did a shit ton of drugs and faffed about with weird barely musical ideas.

From Faust, Stretch Out Time: 1970-1975, Andy Wilson (2006)

Nettelbeck struggled to herd his pack of fleas in some kind of direction and keep the label off their back. Every so often they would send a tape of work-in-progress to Polydor, though these were as likely to contain studio experiments or location recordings as they were any kind of group playing or rock music; one was made up exclusively of recordings of the traffic passing  through Wümme on a single day, another contained “pure blasts of noise, the sound of someone cleaning dishes and us all trying to impersonate a female choir.” Nettelbeck nevertheless managed to persuade the label that they were making progress. For an entire year he succeeded in keeping Polydor at bay. Finally they could be put off no longer. They demanded to hear the results of their investment, so the group hurriedly convened to assemble their first album: “we tripped and took LSD, and we had to make the record in one night.”

The result was 1971’s Clear/ Faust.

First song (of three total), Why Don’t You Eat Carrots? contains brief fragments of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones before launching into delirious carnivalesque music, tape loops, field recordings, and just straight up noise.

Hans Joachim Irmela (quoted in Wilson 2006)

It’s like a compressed history of music and the idea behind it was that we would show that all this was good once, The Beatles etc, but it was over, it was no longer enough, we demanded a complete severance with it. Now comes the noise, the new thing.

The Red List split album between The Endless Blockade and Bastard Noise (20 Buck Spin/ Deep Six, 2010) was originally conceived as a collaboration (and the Blockade side contained some of that DNA, you can hear it in the structuring). When it was still a collaboration and not a split one thing I was keen to do was give a nod to Faust. The plan was to take the main musical refrain from Why Don’t You Eat Carrots? and rework it into our style, using it as a reference to Faust in the same way that Faust referenced The Beatles.

Faust at their best were in the same area as the fade in at the end of Strawberry Fields Forever, the madness under the surface breaking through and infecting its surroundings.

To finish in the same way I finished last week’s piece, I sometimes wonder what the musical landscape of today would look like if The Sad Skinhead was more influential than Here Comes the Sun.

Recently read:

The White Hands and Other Weird Tales - Mark Samuels

Mark Samuels excels in the short story format and it’s unfortunate that his work is largely consigned to the world of respectable small press obscurity. A broad theme that appears regularly in his work (without being an attempt at creating a mythos) are of occult external forces seeping in to the world, replicating rapidly, and leaving our physical, social, and cultural worlds barren and subordinate. This is absolute cosmic horror and the meaning and motivations of powers beyond our experience are neither revealed nor understandable. If this appeals to you pick up any collection of his short stories.

Recently listened to:

Hypervirulence Architecture - Hissing

In keeping with today’s theme, Hissing is death metal that sounds like a dimension beneath ours making itself known. I don’t know how to describe this and do it justice, most things that you read about and sound like they’re probably “blackened avant-garde death metal” are either joy-free technical abominations with a half-arsed attempt at some kind of discordant “jazz” influence, or they’re woefully inept howling into the void from people who if you’re trying to be nice about: “well, at least they have a hobby and are keeping themselves out of trouble.”

So I cannot bring myself to say this is somehow avant-garde metal, because no one is ever telling the truth when they put those words together. But Hissing manage to be both weird and grounded in genre and neither an intellectualized/ elevated response to something that frankly doesn’t need it (metal), or sputtering inanities being passed off as “outsider”.

Are people still drowning guitars in reverb and forgoing the use of a high pass filter and calling it The True Audial Essence of Death? Thankfully Hissing is not that either.

Listen. Buy.