Hey look, a thing!

Yeah, sort of back in the saddle. Expect typical end-of-the-year shenanigans in the coming weeks.

Anyways, I was on my way to school the other day, and being a commuter student from the next town over means I arrive at school either a) way too early, or b) during class. Being the dilligent student I am, I tend to go for the first option. So I arrive a solid half-hour before I need to for an 8 AM class, meaning the campus is essentially dead. I set up camp in the cavernous main hall and planned to do some much-postponed reading and listen to some tunes.


Appropriately, I decided to put on some music that, much like my reading, had fallen on the wayside. And while I didn't exactly regret puttng off Northanger Abbey, postponing Tobias Hellkvist and Dead Letters Spell out Dead Words's White/Grey/Black was pretty stupid on my part. Super dense celestial drones, ebbing and flowing with the just the right amount of ebb... it's wonderful stuff for lonley winter mornings, really. If you've got an empty field or long, snowy bus ride in your near future - and you count yourself a fan of the somewhat epic brand of ambient by Stars of the Lid or Eluvium - be sure to give it a listen. Although the decidedly "Black" part of the collaboration lives up to its name, so maybe I should qualify the field should be "devoid of life" or your bus ride to school should be "in a potentially dangerous blizzard." Or something.


Tobias Hellkvist and Letters Spell out Dead Words - White/Grey/Black

Sorry, folks.

End of the semester at school, so this writing-for-pleasure has taken a backseat to writing-for-my-degree. Sorry!

& extra sorry to whoever is in Toronto on a Mac right now and has been checking for hourly updates the last couple days; stay in there champ, updates soon!

Dust, American Dust

Personally, as a musician, I have a hard time with making simple things engaging. It's probably not just me, but when I'm writing, I have the tendency to want to make things as grandiose and epic as possible - that's engaging, surely. Surely, I tend to think to myself, that a piece must keep evolving and twisting and turning to be involving. It's entirely desirable, but that's the rut I seem to be in. Thank god for artists like Pete Fosco, who make such a powerful case for simplicity that it makes me want to give up ammenities such as, oh, multiple instruments, overdubbing, et cetera.

I can't tell if it's genius or simply confidence that makes Dust, American Dust so compelling: is Pete Fosco doing wonderful things with guitar, distortion and reverb in an elaborately calculated way, or does he just sit down and instinctively know something great is going to come out? It could certainly be either, really; give it a listen and see if you can tell where it's composition and where it's improvisation.




In any case, what matters here is the sound, maaaan. Hazily floating somewhere between aggressive-harshness and dreamlike-fuzz, Dust, American Dust sort of sounds like a shoegaze guitarist lost in space: all loud guitars and reverb and fuzz and feedback, but with no band for context, it all feels very lost. Very surreal, very sublime, kinda harsh, kinda scary. You know how it is.


Pete Fosco - Dust, American Dust

This thing is sadly out-of-print, and I'd love a copy, so if anyone has one they [for some strange reason] want to sell [or give] to me, get in touch. In the meantime, buy some other releases from Digitalis Industries - tons of cool stuff on there

In colonial times, we fought for our right to own - and whip - slaves

If you can't manage to see the tongue-so-firmly-in-cheek-it's-practically-ripping-a-hole nature of this album, then you either haven't heard it or are entirely unfamiliar with the likes Anal Cunt or GWAR or with, really, the entire notion of parody in heavy music.

Slave Whipping Blasphemy is the supposed duo of Sir Reginald and Seamus DeVille, allegedly both full-fledged members of the KKK and having appropriately grim, blurry band pictures in full attire. Hailing from the deepest recesses of Texas and kicking out some completely twisted, but actually really fucking good black metal, SWB have gotten a fair share of internet flak for their racist themes, unsurprisingly. But godfuckingdammit, if you can't see the inherit humour of a KKK-led black metal band, or song titles like "The Kall of the Kvlt Klux Klan" then the entire internet must be a large, scary, terrible place.

What separates this from most parody-metal is that this music is actually sort of good. I only say "sort of" because I am kind of hesitant to admit it, because this is actually a wickedly solid 20 minutes of lo-fi blasturbation. "Nigger Anthem Massacre" serves as well as any black metal intro in terms of setting the atmosphere - in this case, the colonial south - and each of the 8 following tracks is legitimately memorable and distince, which is much more than can be said about many a modern metal album. Take, for instance, the eerie bellows in "Uncle Tom's Cabin in Flames" of slaaaaaaa-aaave whipping blaaaasphemy, slaaaaaa-aaave whipping BLACK METAL which is ridiculous on paper but awesome on record, so I guess your enjoyment of it will be based entirely on your frame of mind. "Abraham Lincoln, I Fucking Hate You" is a comedy classic, and faux-grim black metal satire abounds in almost every track (such as having your slaves plow your fields UNDER THE FREEZING MOON).

Physical release was limited to 10 copies because it was so fucking kvlt.



Slave Whipping Blasphemy - A Kall To Whips

Now, the real question is: are you going to leave your Last.fm scrobbler on while you listen to this?

Kram Ran

I'm not patriotic in any sense of the word. As Bill Hicks once said, "my parents just fucked here, that's about all." But nonetheless, I can't help but be proud when two parents fuck in my country and produce some legitimately exciting musicians, the latest of which I've been introduced to is Kram Ran.

Hailing from Winnipeg (a city fondly reflected upon by many in the Canadian music scene), Kram Ran is a one-man affair culling influences from... well, shit, everyone according to his Last.fm page: "A Silver Mt Zion, The Robot Ate Me, The Microphones, Radiohead, Xiu Xiu, Tim Hecker". Which isn't entirely inaccurate, really. The beginning of "A Death & Kill" tricks you into thinking that Silver Mt Zion influence is at the start of the list for a reason, before segueing into a jumpy piano riff and positively manic vocals calling to mind Xiu Xiu's Jamie Stewart quite handily. Kram Ran seems to channel Xiu Xiu fairly often, actually: "To Dance With Your Dear Dread" opens with a searing wall of keyboard destruction and the buried, desperate vocals and, later, "And Once Upon a Time" recalls a certain singer's quiet, barely-in-tune whimper; it also reminds me of the brilliantly naive vocals on Our Brother The Native's latest, if that's a point of reference for anyone of you (and if not, get the newest Our Brother The Native, goddammit). But hell, the comparisons are started to piss me off, so I imagine anyone associated with the Kram Ran camp was tired of it since I brought it up.

What probably wasn't clear in that last paragraph is that this actually, truly is an excitingly original EP. I'm not going to go into detail because I really want you folks to hear this yourselves, but definitely grab this thing; it's free, and completely worth your time. With equal parts fraught desperation and contemplative crooning (check out "Kill Then Give" for a good mix of both; the falsetto breaks halfway in give me the shivers, I tells ya), and, appropriately, a lush blend of acoustic and electronic instrumentation, A Brief Affair of Limping and Gathering of Clipped Wings is one of my favourite home-grown EPs of the year.




Download the whole thing and/or buy yourself a copy here (only $5)

Midterms are over, hooray!

I had to catch an early bus to school this morning. Luckily the bus stop is 5 minutes from my house and there's a Tim's across the street, so I could grab a muffin because I overslept and didn't have time for a proper breakfast. I got a chocolate chip one, but I could tell it was touching a banana muffin, which ruined a solid half of the muffin top.

Anyways, it's about 6:55 AM at this point and I stand around the bus stop, waiting for the [always] late GO Bus to arrive. The stop is on a fairly major street that runs through the whole city, and connects to two highways and most of the major roads around these parts, so traffic was pretty dense come 7. I'd been standing around eating for a solid 5 minutes before I notice a dead cat on the road, next to the curb. It looks fairly intact considering how dead it is.

Now every time a car goes by I cringe, because this well-preserved dead cat is about 3 inches away from becoming decidedly less well-preserved. I turned up my music because the only thing worse than watching cat brains paint 5 of an 18-wheeler's tires, I reasoned, would be the sound of cat skull cracking, or worse, of not-quite-dead cat screaming (though I was confident it was thoroughly deceased.)

The bus came eventually (late) and it too managed to miss the cat. I got on the bus and gave the driver my overpriced ticket, sat down, and didn't hear any cat-crushing as we pulled away from the curb.

It wasn't there when I got off the bus 8 hours later, nor was there any noticeable pool of blood/sinews/bone fragments, so I assumed all went well.

What I'm trying to get at is I'm done midterms now, so things should be picking up here again. And to keep things relevant to this post and this blog, I'll probably post some Birchville Cat Motel when I get home from work. Sound good?

Midterms

I'm balls-deep in midterm essays right now, but that should wrap up by the end of the week & I'll be back on the ball. Sorry for the lack of... anything.