I'm a burnout, and it's a GUILLOTINE, not a GALLOWS, depicted above and on our playlist last night, but we still had a semi-fun game of hangman, didn't we? One Master—super-cool guys; way into exploitation film, and we jawed about Euro-sexsploitation and a good many other things. That could have easily been the show, just us talking about Cannibal Ferox (which is showing somewhere in Williamsburg this weekend, btw) and other sleazy delights. One Master's set? Hard as old nails and steady as a tuned engine; loud and strong—what a great band! That's not to say that they don't also have plenty of atmosphere, a blackened world of sound, there for the listener to lose themselves in. Black metal in general has always struck me as music that can be all about the subjective/introspective feeling that's created by the best of its artists, all about the contextualization of sound as mood—while still being hard as hell—and One Master exemplify that perfectly. Catch them tonight at The Acheron in Brooklyn. Hopefully, the band are happy enough with the end results of last night's live session that a short-run cassette release of it comes to light.
Last night was your basic "black-out"—something that usually doesn't happen unless Seed Stock are in the house, but I was simply so thrilled to have One Master there, and I laid the focus of the rest of the program/selections on that, so pretty much everything we heard could be loosely (or very firmly) described as black metal, unless you're going to split genre hairs on me, and please don't. Though I opened with Stray Executioner/Hive Mind, and closed with Sombre Presage, they were the hearty, dark-ambient bread that encased the overall proceedings. ...
In addition to the praise for One Master—really the stars of the night—you remarked upon:
My Castle of Quiet is back next week...and back in two with live guests Bludded Head (on tour from TX)—sure to be monumental!
Click on the dawn above; a day that will bring the end of a condemned man or woman, to reach the streaming-audio archives and playlist for last night's horrorcast™.
One Master, from Connecticut, have made a quick name for themselves in US black metal (albeit over ten years of work) with two solid, flawless full-lengths. These records do exactly what you want new black metal to do—take the genre seriously, have a footing in the style, but have your own, singular identity and write great songs. One Master do all that, and their Forsaking A Dead World (CD on Eternal Death; betraying a penchant for early Bathory, Kampfar, and whole host of other things) laid solid ground, proving the band's mettle as songwriters, while opening the door for The Quiet Eye of Eternity (Peasant Majik LP, 2008), a complex, intelligent, and again masterfully written and arranged black metal album, just raw and dirty enough, with spectacular songs.
Here's a section from The Quiet Eye of Eternity on YouTube
I awaken, buried alive in a glass-faced coffin, @ midnight.
OM @ 12:30 approx. WFMU 91.1 FM WMFU 90.1 FM (Hudson Valley) in Rockland County @ 91.9 FM wfmu.orglive on the Web, with real-time accu-playlist and message board.
Thrilled to announce that the Jailbird tape is now out on House of Alchemy, a two-sided sonic collaboration between Todd Watson (Husere Grav) and myself. ... Todd sent me some raw audio files, I squashed them and knocked them around, in both Audacity and Sound Forge, lengthening and overlapping them in the process. Todd himself then had a final round of "squashing" on Side B.
Hope you all like it, and that you'll patronize House of Alchemy, one of the finest American tape and CDr labels, always in the forefront.
Adam Richards of HoA calls the tape, "Blistering, static drones, slowly unfolding. Dark sounds for dark times."
Have at it, bro—that's gonna hurt! ... Yeah, noise is "not music," heard that one before. I'm reminded of the time I played Folke Rabe's "What??", a full LP side, back in the early 90s when I still doing a freeform show, and some douche called and said that I should take the record off and throw it in the station dumpster. (Folke Rabe - highly respected Swedish composer, been at it since the 60s, just sayin'; maybe there's something you don't know) ...and in fact it was prophecy on my part to title this week's horrorcast™"Nobody Knows Anything." That was aimed squarely at all you know-it-alls out there, the information addicts, the pedants, and everyone who is SO SURE the path they're on is the right one (this was all conceived before the broadcast, just so that's clear. ...) People get so ANGRY; I don't get angry when I hear chipper, old-time, "bygone-era" music for the 10,000th time on FMU (as the banjos and mandolins go chunka-chunka-chunka, and some guy sings about his "gal" through a toilet-paper tube), or an over-hyped, over-praised, post-post-post pop/rock combo like Times New Viking inexplicably making a big impact, or making "Wavvves," hahaha—I simply tune in later when something I enjoy is playing. Opinions! I could go on all day about the music that irks me, but why bother? I think it's a maturing notion to accept that there IS room for everything; especially on a mixed platter like WFMU, a sheer oasis of radio that would should all just be grateful for.
My ears have always craved new frontiers; it's a lifelong condition for me to seek out new complexities and challenges to stimulate my aural organs. I AM NOT A SALESMAN; not in that sense, anyway. You either like it, or you don't. Of course, we never want anyone to tune away, but there's enough of an audience for what I do, that one crank every few months does not trouble me. WFMU is about diversity, about sounds you cannot get anywhere else on the radio, so for a solitary listener to complain about a selection or two ... it's your thing, bro; with the advent of digital music delivery especially, it's all about choice—yours, and mine, and OURS. Plenty of supporters, as my weekly playlists evidence. Jeez, and I opened the show with The Doors! ... Enjoy the drillin'.
I also wanted to share some YouTubes with you, as lame as that sort of is, I've taken the plunge because there is just so much good shit out there, that can't be easily or readily heard any other way.
Here are some finds from Clew of Theseus
Hive Mind (record store set, Los Angeles)
Zyanose
Alleypisser
Hellvete (Glen Steekiste—which reminds me, our friend Tracy Widdess, designer / knitter / wonderful-Canadian artist of Brutal Knitting, creator of my demon mask, and contributor of a great many music selections, in addition to nursing my iPhone pictures of bands that play live on the show, will be providing visuals for a Gonzalez & Steenkiste gig (Gonzalez of Bear Bones, Lay Low), as well as having her designs worn by the band, or is it SAII wearing the knitties? Dead jealous of her art-filled trip to Belgium!)
Sick Seed
Clinic of Torture
Rainbow Bunchie (10 Hours) - instant joy!
KILT duo live @ the Prison Tatt showcase #2, 9.21.12
from my son: HEAVYQUEST, a Team Fortress 2-oriented variation on the Adrien Brody meme
...also from my son, Pokémon R/B/Y - Pokémon Tower (Extended)
...And I'll leave you with this professional, live-performance video from Yellow Eyes; this is something like the intensity of seeing them live.
Click on the hooded tribunal up top to reach the playlist and audio archives for last night's My Castle of Quiet show. Thanks for listening.
Kelly Jones (one of my favorite WFMU people, more of a behind-the-scenes person, though she used to co-host a talk program), said of my show once, and I'm paraphrasing, that I made her like music she didn't know or think she would like. In other words, I contextualized my music choices in such a way as to make the most unpredictable things palatable, even desirable. (By airing "Burn Down The Mission" during a fill-in show in the early 2000s, I had inspired her to seek out Elton John's Tumbleweed Connection, of all things.)
Thanks, Kel. This is all I have ever tried to do with the My Castle of Quiet program, since returning to the WFMU airwaves in 2009. The combination of my then 10-year love affair with black metal, grind, etc., and a striking revolution/redefinition in the 2000s of industrial-experimental music (or "noise" as it is now commonly known), inspired me to create a show with the more extreme sounds I was enjoying, showcased in a singular forum.
Not unlike Oldboy, at the far end of a long hall of opposition, both real and imagined, I punched my way through the membrane and did the show I felt I needed to do, in the great hopes that it would find its audience, as it has. As discussed a bit on last night's playlist, the Internet helped, by redefining what "mainstream" was, or rather to make that mainstream nonexistent, by sheer virtue of the range and scope of musical genres now available to all at a click. ...I knew that somehow horror films (and the classical appreciation thereof), new noise, soundtracks, and extreme metal, all housed under one banner, would make for potent, fresh radio. So here we are.
Back next week with music from Z.B.T., Control Resistance, Key of Shame, Astro/Fear Konstruktor, and a host of other gems edged out by our 3-hour limit this week, plus whatever floats across the moat in the interim. Luv ya.
Click on Oldboy to reach this week's horrorcast™archives and playlist.
Indeed,
Greg; I always thought of ..."Eugene" as quite perfectly cinematic, and
well inside the horror atmosphere, too (though it was in fact
prominently used in Zabriskie Point; not the horror-genre film we necessary had in mind, but the Floyd's post-Syd pre-Darkside material is almost all exceptionally film-ready.
Just
getting around to listening to this horrorkaste™, after a longish
week-plus of (almost) solo parenting and a special out-of-town guest;
radio-show review was not being part of that plan, though it's a great
readymade world of thougtful semi-slumber now to queue up on the WFMU
iPhone app., and kind of flop into. Everything so far does seem informed
by that lead-in of the lengthy, live, "Careful With That Axe Eugene,"
its powerful tendrils ultimately reaching down into the night's
subsequent selections. ... In my personal / home listening, there's been
a natural / seasonal move toward more expansive, "psych" sounds, and
this has been in turn reflected in some of my radio selections, this
most-recent program framed in two massive psych chunks—the
aforementioned "Eugene," and later on, an epic saga from the basement
bunker of German Oak.
As Hans Platzgumer (H.P. Zinker)
once sang, "sometimes I just don't feel like talking," which for me
bleeds over into typing, and any sort of filial,
self-generated-obligatory Web communique (like for example this here
show review / weekly look back), and can easily get doffed for a good
bout of hiding beneath the covers, from the decided and known threat of
reality. BOO! The show itself is done fundamentally for me, and I aim to
please myself mostly, and the artists (and I think that would go for
many a WFMU DJ as well as many a creative artist in general—you do for
yourself, and OF YOURSELF, and you hope that there will be many on the
receiving end who appreciate what you do, and with joy and / or
gratitude come along for the ride.) That right there is your basic
disclaimer for "wow, I was late with this, this week." I get to the MCoQ
archives when I'm able, and sometimes a few days' separation greatly
enhances the appreciation for me...for example, as I'm typing, right
now, this Vardan sounds right juicy.
Anyway, it's time to stop typing. Great special programming coming up on The Castle:
Click
upon the image of perhaps one of the finest movie posters of all time
(functionally laid out, enthusiastic; generally drawn with great care) to reach the archives and playlist for last week's My Castle of Quiet show.
With my head down in behind-the-scenes label business, and WFMU's 2013 marathon (thanks again!), it's been a while since I waxed enthusiastic about the Prison Tatt label here on these pages.
Now we have two releases well worth touting, and the usual flood of P-Tatt "hometown pride" accompanies each.
Long in the planning, originally conceived as a CD, then moved to LP and held back for a while, for no real reason other than the sheer busy-ness of Mr. Pendu and myself, the Chaos*Majik LP, Telestic Madness : Majikal Musick, is now at hand. I grew up spending my time with records like this one, full-tilt long form electronic albums, like Klaus Schulze's Picture Music; these records shaped my consciousness, daring as they were, with pieces often taking up one full side of the LP. TM : MM is such a record; by a very glance at the vinyl, one can tell that you're in for a ride, and the full A side, "ErotoGnosis," does not disappointment in terms of cosmic-consciousness travel-guiding. ...Interesting thing, Todd Pendu does it all without synthesizers; narry a keyboard in sight, and his gear has mostly always fit inside a suitcase. Of course on this record we have the equally weighty contributions of Jesse Gelaznik, who also co-designed the Pendu Tarot with Todd, and three of those deck images appear on the album's front cover. Musically, Jesse brings some "chunk": some structure, melody and bottom end. We hope you'll enjoy this one as much as we do at the label. Kudos to Todd, who has been working this project at least since the mid-2000s, on the occasion of his first C*M vinyl release; we're honored to have helped make that happen.
Another outstanding vinyl debut, from Kentucky's doom / sludge / noise-rockers Wretched Worst. Originally slated for release on a different label, we were thrilled at PT when this project fell into our laps. After several years, great shows around the country, to which a cache of YouTube amateur clips can attest, and a bevy of CDrs, cassetttes, and singles (most notably the Sisters Piss tapes, and last year's 7" on Husk, Funeral Burning), Wretched Worst check in with their first, full vinyl LP, and it's everything fans of the band will have been hoping for. Worse Than Jail is an amalgam of their shorter, punch-out-over-before-you-know-what-hit-you numbers, and their longer, haunting, basement-torture-chamber-music semi-improvs. This one will be flying out of HQ, though we do hope to do some US-based wholesale and overseas trades/wholesale as well, but I won't know for sure about that until a week or two has passed. Please be patient, as retail orders are being filled first on both these titles. 100 copies pressed.
For track samples, longer descriptions/write-ups, and to purchase, please visit our site: prisontatt.com.
Also, our distro is swelling up with great releases for sale; many new additions! prisontatt.com/distro.html
