Saturday, December 24, 2011

Hypnagothique #39 – Clash of the Titans Vol.5 - Veil of Thorns Vs. Vasilisk




クレイジー意地の悪いお尻蜂蜜アナグマ #1
Whirling Dervishes – Vasilisk
Dead God – Veil of Thorns

クレイジー意地の悪いお尻蜂蜜アナグマ #2
Acqua – Vasilisk
Rain – Veil of Thorns






Sunday, December 18, 2011

Movie Sunday - Writers Shaping Their Own Worlds

Well, Movie Saturday has become Movie Sunday this week because of a terribly unreliable ISP. Anyway, here's what inspires us this week.

A meditation on future event potentiality can be seen as a quantum state in which all possible actions, outcomes and phenomena existing until attention from the observer solidifies it into a single state. Here are three very different examples of artists who saw things not as others saw them, but the worlds they conceived shape the one we're in in strange ways.



PKD was paranoid and thought he was under surveillance. So did Hemingway, and it was thought until recently that Hemingway's paranoia had no basis in reality, but he had indeed been watched by government agencies. PHilip K Dick raised many questions in his work that we had better find answers to. As irksome as recent years have been, without reflecting on the issues of consciousness, the very real threat of being subject to pre-crime punishment and many other topics he originated that seemed so fantastic at the time.
Philip.K. Dick documentary on BBC's "Arena" originally broadcast on 9th April 1994.  
Elvis Costello Interviewee
Philip K. Dick (archive footage)
Thomas M. Disch
Terry Gilliam
Himself - Interviewee
Kim Stanley Robinson
Himself - Interviewee




Consider this - a recluse from Providence writes tales for a tiny fringe publication and ends up influencing writers generations later. Through the continued popularity of his work and spreading influence of those he influenced weave their way throughout culture. Culture shapes thoughts, and thoughts determine actions. I have put forth the idea that all narrative is myth, and that political, commercial, cultural and religious myth is largely what determines what manifests as the world in which we live. The Chthulu mythos is like the mythological equivalent of "art for art's sake". Freeing the imagination from mundane perception is as valuable as conscious memetic engineering. There is real value in not having to justify everything in practical, pragmatic and material terms. Our current political/corporate power structure is Terry Pratchett's Auditors possessing human institutions. we can take comfort in the cold, indifferent universe and rest assured that the Old Ones will awaken and chaos never died...

http://www.snagfilms.com/films/title/lovecraft_fear_of_the_unknown 
H.P. Lovecraft was the forefather of modern horror fiction having inspired such writers as Stephen King, Robert Bloch and Neil Gaiman. The influence of his Cthulhu mythos can be seen in film (Re-Animator, Hellboy, and Alien), games (The Call of Cthulhu role playing enterprise), music (Metallica, Iron Maiden) and pop culture in general. 
But what led an Old World, xenophobic gentleman to create one of literature's most far-reaching mythologies? What attracts even the minds of the 21st century to these stories of unspeakable abominations and cosmic gods? 
LOVECRAFT: FEAR OF THE UNKNOWN is a chronicle of the life, work and mind that created these weird tales as told by many of today's luminaries of dark fantasy including John Carpenter, Guillermo Del Toro, Neil Gaiman, Stuart Gordon , Caitlin Kiernan, and Peter Straub. 




It's fashionable to hate on Crowley in certain circles these days, but I'm not inclined to take part in that. What are the current tendencies towards social control but an old Aeon struggling to live on while in its death throws?
Aleister Crowley "The Wickedest Man in the World." Featuring the Voice of Joss Ackland and Music Score by Rick Wakeman.

Saturday, December 17, 2011

Menagerie of Suffering - Bright Colours of Horror For The Dark Season

To assuage thee horrorz ov thee season, the fine folks at Grimtown Records have put together a most atmospheric compilation and bring it to you for free. We contributed a track which, inspired by the theme, we recorded in an abandoned theatre (of terror) deep down in a rusting valley. We made sure to capture the reverberations and eldritch voices hid therein...

Grimtown Records is proud to give you our first free compilation:

Menagerie of Suffering

a tribute to Italian horror and exploitation

We’ve put together a brilliant playlist for you, with a variety of artists who share their unique experience and visions. From pataphysics, ambient and noise, and further on to pure seventies retro. Download and distribute far and wide, and keep the spirit of exploitation alive and screaming. 
If you like this music (and art), don’t be afraid to let us know, and don’t be afraid to tell the artists involved. Musicians are all psychick vampires, and want your emotional feedback. If there’s enough of it, there might be more releases in the future.

TRACKLIST:

01 Three Winters – Atrocities
02 Atropine – Glass Jaw
03 Magdalena Solis – Prophetic Dreams
04 Others – Nero su Rosso
05 Miza[R] – Di Comunicazion Radio
06 Continental Fruit – Viva Fangoria
07 Veil of Thorns – Gli Occhi Della Notte
08 Dead Skull – I miei Colori
09 Gyron V – Killing for Satan
10 Gird_09 -  Seven Doors of Hell
11 Epilektrician – Scene 75, Interior – Bathroom Carnage
12 Andreas Brandal – All the Colors of the Dark


Magdalena Solis has also provided a video which will be made available as soon as possible. In the meantime you can watch it here:

Magdalena Solis - Prophetic Dreams from Magdalena Solis on Vimeo.

Cosmic harlots in a sacrilegious ecstatic dance. To a world where dreams are the only true prophecies. 
The song 'Prophetic Dreams' appears on Magdalena Solis 's album "Hesperia", released on Dying For Bad Music, 2011. Various footage mangled & distorted & mixed by Magdalena Solis. Tribal make-up pictures and 'Venus del Sur' drawing by Dolorosa (http://dolorosa-reveries.blogspot.com). Daggy Diva pictures by Jules Dazzle.

Kevin Bittle has provided artwork for the PDF booklet.


Friday, December 16, 2011

Veil of Thorns History - Dead God




Opening proceedings on this one is a perky pop confection that will probably catch those who have been with us for a while off guard. Dead God consists mainly of a cassette rip of the third Veil of Thorns demo from 1992 that was never released. This opening track shows one immediately what a rock solid bass Cathy Chenoweth delivered in recordings and live. Here appears the many splendored pounding from Ruddy Bitch the Younger for the first time. That Emerson guy, well he moans and wails, on guitar he flails over hill and dale... Final track features a thunderous low-end bass apocalypsis brought by Christopher McClain.

Torrenters, and there have been many of you for these tracks, will notice there's a close match between Dead God and a release called The End of the Beginning. I figured I'd give this one one last go at cleanup on the sound and add in a couple tracks from The Dead God Sessions from the second lineup that aren't alternate versions of tracks from Cafe Flesh. I the result is a more solid experience, though still undeniably lo-fi and different from all other Veil of Thorns offerings.

Few people heard The End of the Beginning this at the time and none heard The Dead God Sessions outside the inner circle and Tiziana from Misanthropy Records. Raw recordings from rehearsal and pre production demos for the debut Veil of Thorns album in 1995. The Dead God Sessions tracks were recorded live in a single take in most cases, using two mikes, placed at either end of a 30’x30’ rehearsal room in Boston. The analog recording was extremely hot, so little compression or noise reduction was done.

Within days of the conclusion of the End of the Beginning recording sessions, Jarrett was gone and Cathy was on her way to New York. Christopher (Dogface) McClain was to step in and Veil of Thorns would start showing a new focus. McClain brought with him a massive bass rig that could raze small towns. In performing the title track live I would stick my head and microphone right in the speaker of the bass cabinet to add that overload of volume to the screaming at the end. Good times.

Already the vocals were less operatic, and there is even a hint of pop songwriting, something that was not to be revisited until much later on Birthed.

-P. Emerson Williams

Have a listen:

Wednesday, December 14, 2011

Saturday, December 10, 2011

Movie Saturday - Only From the Outside Can The Truth Be Seen


In "The Gun Is Loaded" Lydia Lunch delivers a brutally frank manifesto in a journey through the heart of contemporary American darkness. Her poetic nihilism is set against a barrage of real-life street-action, scenery, news footage, and the deranged music of J. G. Thirlwell.
The last Movie Saturday I brought you a couple examples of myth creators, artists who dive deep into our common well of stories to form a vision of what's happening to us beneath the surface. When we contemplate the myths that surround us we get a sense of who we are and where we are going. Or, rather, on the passive and of the larger mediated culture, where we are being taken against our will and against our best interest. Well, this week, let me show another approach.

Lydia Lunch will blast your defences and strip your pretences. She's talking to you, yes you! It will do no good to avert your gaze sheepishly. What she offers is a cleansing. You should thank her.



Edited by Adam Cooper-Terán
Featuring clips from the films:
"Unspeakable" directed by Marc Rokoff
"What is Art?" by Steven Johnson Leyba
"PAINing POORtraits" by Leyba + ACT 
Music by: 
David J
Jeanelle Mastema
Adam Cooper-Terán
Project 9
A Fallen Mind
and
United Satanic Apache Front
Including samples from Omar Souleyman's "Labji Wa Bajji Il Hajar"
and Eric Brosius' "Trail of Blood" 
Featuring Interviews with:
Barron Storey
Billy Warsoldier
Charles Gatewood
Chris Trian
Crazy Benny
Dave Archer
Durk Dehner
Genesis Breyer P-Orridge
Geraldo Rivera
High Priestess Blanche Barton
Hollie Stevens
Howard Bloom
H.R. Giger
Isabella Sol
James Luna
Jeanelle Mastema
Jennifer Fox Bennett
Joe Coleman
Leslie Leyba
Richard Metzger
and
Ugly Shyla

Unless an artist has the favour of the money that owns you, me and everything we survey, s/he is an outsider. Here's the mythological construct through which most in the Western world see society through that hides a basic truth - unless you're one of the top one percent earners, you are an outsider. You are owned, your children are owned, your house is owned jointly by the government and the bank. (It's an imaginary distinction that separates the latter two.)

What can an artist do in this age of institutionalized theft and militarized enforcement of subjugation but strip mythology of narrative until the superimposed patterns burned on the mind by conditioning and indoctrination  fades enought to show the actuality of how much you've been fucked. There is nothing for you in acquiescence. If ever there was a moment when you had to stop and take a close look at who and where you are this is it. You don't need to become an artist, live like Lunch or Leyba, but the only hope for any future lies in each one of us living our own truth. Step outside.




Featuring one of the last interviews with Willaim Burroughs and previously unseen vintage footage of him during the 50s and early 60s. - The great Beat Generation experiments took place in Tangier, the Moroccan city where William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, and the Moroccan painter Hamri taught Jack Kerouac, Timothy Leary, and Allen Ginsberg how to live outside the law. This DVD features one of the last interviews with Burroughs and previously unseen vintage footage of him in his prime during the 50s and early 60s. Also featured are The Master Musicians of Joujouka collaborating with avant garde Dublin musicians, veterans of the Tangier Beat Scene, and cutting edge writers. In addition, there is music from Bill Laswell, The Baby Snakes, plus contributions from Ira Cohen, Hakim Bey, Brian Downey (Thin Lizzy) and many more.
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