I have a dream that one day someone in Sweden will rhapsodize American black metal the way we rhapsodize their earlydeathmetal. In 20 years when we have RFID chips in our brains, and the Greys are riding on the subway, and the Bush family is finally outed as reptilian, some disenfranchised six-foot-six (ahem... two meter) 6th grader will push a button on his own head, project a keyboard onto the Ikea lunch table he’s sitting alone at, and type up his first blog post at Ologisk Grej (ya that’s Swedish for Illogical Contraption in case you didn’t know).
And the first American black metal band that I imagine he will rhapsodize is the Rocky Mountain occultist behemoth Nightbringer. (He and I will have that in common because this is my first post for you fine folks.)
He won’t care that they’ve released two of the same songs on three different albums (ok to be fair 2 of them were comps, but still). He won't care that they went all pretentious and self-proclaimed to be black metal of a "higher caliber".
All little Bjorn will know is that if he's lucky, the first song he will hear is Of Silence and Exsanguination, off Death and the Black Work. He will have 2 minutes of brooding ambiance to light candles and turn off the lights before he hears the first semblance of a musical instrument, and he has another 30 seconds or so to get out the fucking bedpan cuz shit is gonna get messy when the vocals kick in.
At which point he’s sucked under the tide, and a minute later he’s drowning so far under it that he has no idea which way is up. They sound like death at the bottom of the ocean and to me encapsulate the sound of absolute fear.
So, you know, if that’s your thing, you’ll totally be one of Bjorn’s bros someday.
They used to put on a free festival in a remote area of the Rockies every year, near their home in Green Mountain Falls, though this year it seems they opted to play Maryland Death Fest instead. (Hey even the blackest of the black need to pay rent.) I went one year and it was killer. There was no stage, just a big fire pit and some tiki torches, and the power came from a generator 20 feet away. I remember some female friend of the band trying to spraypaint a small Roman column meant as a prop for their show, and she asked one of the dudes for help. He just said “I’ll help you take off your top,” and kept walking.
Worth seeing live just to see the facepaint and mic stand. They use bogus names and do the corpse paint thing, but... aw hell... they are of a higher caliber. No doubt.
So without further ado I present to you, from way back in 2008, their first full-length, Death and the Black Work.
Download Here / Purchase Here (at least, that’s your best bet)
Yes indeedy, another addition to the hallowed ranks of the IllCon Team! These a beast hails from the hoary, grey wastes of the (B)east Coast of these United States, and brings with him a wealth of cryptic and forbidden knowledge. He enjoys long walks on the beach, fireside cocktails, and horrific, Christ-raping black metal. Welcome him properly in the comments section. HAILS.
IllCon Radio returns tonight with a whooper of a program. Author Martin F. Dinner will be on to discuss his new self-published book The Morrissey Conspiracy! A hard hitting expose on the former Smiths singer's involvement in the murder of Princess Diana, The Illuminati and international mind control among other things. Pretty sure Moz is a racist too. After that it's open lines so give us a ringy ding ding at 415-829-2980.
Illogical Contraption Radio tonight LIVE in Studio 1A 10pm-Midnight PST on FccFreeRadio.com
Exognathous hexapods, or insects (class Insecta), are natures most successful animals. There are by far the most numerous of all animal classes, both in number of species and individuals. Their success has been due to a myriad of adaptions that allow them to occupy every single terrestrial niche: highly variable mouthparts, protective exoskeleton, wings, complete metamorphosis, adaptive feet and rapid reproduction. Insects are fungovores, detritovores, herbivores, carnivores and both ecto- and endoparasites. Some have several feeding strategies at different stages their lifespan. In a way insects mastery of the earth makes them the ultimate life forms. Think your some hot shit as a human? Look to the insects...
Let me explain: this is basically your standard nature documentary like BBC's Life in the Undergrowth, but instead of David Attenborough we have the fictional Dr. Nils Hellstrom (played by Lawrence Pressman): a Lovecraftian prophet of man's doom at the hands of insects. Imagine old HP was asked to write the script for a Discovery Channel nature special on insects, and you have The Hellstrom Chronicle. Through the film he elaborates on insects adaption to their environment, claiming that they will inherit the earth from humans once we finally do ourselves in. Sometimes his narration will border philosophy, but its not so bad and I'm pretty sure Travis Ryan approves.
Coupled with the bleak narration the films has some incredible close photography of insects. Battle scenes, feeding, birth, pupating and mating are shown with brilliant detail (as much as youtube allows). Fortunately the entire film is on the youtube, enjoy:
Best parts: ant (Formicidae) vs. termite (Isoptera) battle, retarded fake hidden camera footage, locusts swarming (locusts are actually the same as grasshoppers [Acrididae], the difference is in behavior and many locusts have solitary phases in addition to gregarious ones), insects mating to easy listening music, closeups of termite queens, beewolfs (Philanthus) killing bees (Anthophila) and driver ants (Dorylus) killing a chameleon (Chameleonidae).
Though some of the conclusions are pretty hokey, this film is very interesting and will give you a new perspective on things. Just take everything with a grain of salt. This is still a very fun and interesting film, worth many repeat views.
This film had such an effect on writer Frank Herbert (of Dune fame) that he was inspired to write Hellstrom's Hiveafter seeing it. Its about a secret government agency investigating Dr. Nils Hellstrom, gradually it is revealed that Hellstrom leads a group of humans who model their society after social insects... Great read, probably Herbert's best after the Dune series.
I tried to find a insect themed metal band and the best I could think of was Ash Borer. Named after Podosesia syringae, a clearwing moth that is a serious plant pest in the eastern US. There is also a beetle called the Emerald Ash Borer (Agrilus planipennis), but if that's what they wanted to be named after they should have been more specific or used the scientific name. They play a typically Cascadian brand of melodic and doomy black metal.
Memories, memories... The good ol' Corporate Death sampler. Simpler days. This was my fuckin' meat and potatoes back in the late high school years, and along with the Virus 100 comp (as well as a couple entries from the Death... Is Just The Beginning series--all on cassette, of course) defined the future evolution of my musical preferences. I guess the Macabre and Incantation jams contained herein had the biggest effect on me in the long run, but there are tons of other smoothe tunes to be enjoyed here as well (a couple clunkers, too). King Fowley, Seth Putnam, Will Rahmer, and Frank Mullen all in the same place? Fuhggin fuhgeddaboudit! If you're a 90's DM nerd like me, Corporate Death is already your Mecca, but if you'd like to learn more about the world of metal cassamplers, check out this excellent article Stax wrote on the subject of 90's samplers over at Metal Inquisition last year. There is just so much important, esoteric metal knowledge to be passed down to younger generations. Please do your part.
Those were the good old days.
Track list:
1. Candiru - Opaque Sun 2. Amorphis - Exile of the Sons of Uisliu 3. Incantation - Emaciated Holy Figure 4. General Surgery - Crimson Concerto 5. Exit-13 - Societally Provoked Genocidal Contemplation 6. Dead World - Dead World 7. Convulse - Crying Back Yesterday 8. Mortician - Embalmed Alive 9. Disembowelment - Your Prophetic Throne of Ivory 10. Candiru - Angels 11. Anal Cunt - Radio Hit 12. Deceased - Robotic Village 13. Disrupt - Religion Is A Fraud 14. Macabre - Embalmer 15. Repulsion - The Stench of Burning Death 16. Exit-13 - Diet for a New America 17. Incantation - Unholy Massacre 18. Phobia - Sickening Discreation (live) 19. Mortician - Hacked Up For Barbecue 20. Disrupt - Mind Lock 21. Convulse - Memories 22. Anal Cunt - Chump Change 23. Mortician - Abolition 24. Anal Cunt - Unbelievable 25. Suffocation - Human Waste 26. Repulsion - Maggots In Your Coffin 27. Macabre - Serial Killer 28. Disrupt - Same Old Shit 29. General Surgery - An Orgy of Flying Limbs And Gore 30. [untitled bonus track]
German DM crew, Infected Virulence, released Music of the Melkor for the sole purpose of debunking the myth that Tolkein was the exclusive domain of Black Metal and Zeppelin. With a name like that, and a logo like that, and a sound evoking early Autopsy, you're expecting songs extolling gore-rape or at least the bio-techno apocalypse. So when they name-check Eärendil and Gondolin and other topics strictly verboten in death metal, it is jarring in the very best sense. Never is Middle Earth so grim and disconsolate as when interpreted by this Teutonic horde.
I've spent the last day listening to nothing but this CD, which I paid too much for on eBay 6 years ago. Folks, there is no false here. The drums hit hard. The tempos vary from mid-paced chug, to booty-droppin' polkas, to straight-up death blasts, often within the same track. Song structures are lyrically and sonically crepusculean.
Infected Virulence is a strange lot in that their members were also engaged in Croon, a stoner/doom band, and Tyccoma, a group metal-archives magnanimously dubbed "Progressive Power Metal." Music of Melkor, on the other hand, is a focused, nuanced, progressive, and brutal slab of early DM crafted in the forges of Morbid Angel, Obituary, Deicide, etc. With a twist. By the time epic closer, Tol Eressea, roles around, you've triumphed over Sauron, The Nazgul, and any number of Uruk-hai.
In the legendarium, Melkor was the original name for Morgoth (incidentally, another quality German DM band Cobras enlightened you on here), who unleashed untold quantities of misanthropy on Middle Earth. The album's namesake is a reference to when Morgoth (then Melkor) and Eru threw down. Reportedy, they did this through music, which sounds kind of fishy to me. It works in 8 Mile to see who's the illest MC but you'd think they'd need battle axes or something from this page to decide who's the Father Of All Creation. Melkor's style was "loud, and vain, and endlessly repeated"...completely br00tal IOW and not at all unlike this record. Certified 3X Platinum by the GRAMMYS.
Anybody who's been a party to any sort of music writing at all knows that well-worn descriptors like “unique” and “original” are by and large a fucking joke. Ninety-nine percent of everything that's ever had that title slapped upon it fell so short of deserving the honor that terms like that are cheap, tawdry husks of the higher creative impulses they supposedly describe. This isn't to say that unique forms of creative expression are impossible, but they require a retreat into either the feral or the cerebral that most people are unwilling to attempt (though the nagging optimist in me would suggest that anybody is capable, given the proper motivation). The former has birthed well-loved aesthetic concepts as disparate as grindcore or (the lamentably-titled) outsider art, and it often seems that artists who fly by the seat of their pants in the direction opposite that of convention are often afforded more appreciation than those who take a more studious route. And while the more carefree approach might be more immediately gripping and viscerally satisfying, there is something to be said for those whose intellectual pursuits place their creative output in a league beyond anybody else's.
A prime example of this is Harry Partch. Partch studied composition from a very early age, amassing a substantial body of work for an artist as young as he was. He grew impatient with the limitations of the equal-tempered scale, the basis for the vast majority of Western music, and began to look towards microtonality, a process of dividing the octave scale into smaller components – his most famous take on this being the forty three-note scale (the equal-tempered scale is divided into twelve notes), though he employed a substantial number of variations on this. These ideas were all expounded upon in his 1949 book Genesis Of A Music, a product of twenty-six years of writing, that railed against the numbing conventions that centuries of inculcation in the equal-tempered scales had produced, instead favoring the ratio-based tuning scales of Greek philosophers like Pythagoras.
The problem, however, is that the majority of musical instruments from the Western world were designed for the twelve notes of which its music is most commonly comprised. Partch's necessity then spurred his inventiveness and an arsenal of odd instruments was born, pieces with monikers like the Cloud Chamber Bowl, the Quadrangularis Reversum, and the Zymo-Xyl that occasionally drew inspiration from violins, pianos, and marimbas, but often bore no resemblance to anything that had come before. He was, as he humbly put it, “a philosophic music man seduced into carpentry,” the builder of strange creations, as much sculpture as functional musical instrument. The music for which these had been produced was equally staggering, both in the breadth of the influences from which it drew and for just the sheer peculiarity.
Partch pulled from a variety of sources over the course of a life filled with extremes. His lifelong engagement with Pythagorean tuning was possibly the most readily apparent of his sources, but the hobo graffiti that he witnessed riding the rails during the Depression held as much sway over his later work. Prior to his destitution he had consulted with William Butler Yeats regarding an experimental opera treatment of Yeats' translation of Sophocles. His homosexuality, in an era in which it was largely considered aberrant (at best), was occasionally touched upon. The influence of music from Polynesia, India, and Africa occurred decades before the West began to look seriously towards those cultures' music.
What he did with those influences is the notable part, because few are easy to spot. Partch had his precedents, but his take on those elements had no direct predecessor. It's an eerie, sensual music, one that reaches across large swaths of the temporal and the geographical, plucking disparate strains of the arcane and blending them into a seamless whole, a junkyard opera on the edge of perception, a subversion of rarely-considered social fundamentals, a leap forward into a distant past. Disorienting and disarming, it is among the only bodies of work that deserves the tag “unique.”
I posted Caducity's 1995 classic The Weiliaon Wielder Questa couple weeks ago, so I figured I should follow up with the excellent Whirler of Fate which they recorded just two short years later. Fate eases off on the weird fantasy elements that made its predecessor such an oddball gem--but sweetens the deal with better riffs, tighter production, and an overall darker feel. There are still plenty of Hessian nerd-boners to be had here (what the fuck is that deal with that outro?), but Caducity's sophomore effort is a much more mature and refined beast, full of crushing grooves, sickening crunch, and enough double bass to gag a rhino. Whirler of Fate: LESS D&D, MORE MOSH. I'm OK with that.
I could't really find any acceptable Caducity band photos (besides the one I already posted), so instead, here's a picture of Elvira with Groucho Glasses on her tits:
And the first American black metal band that I imagine he will rhapsodize is the Rocky Mountain occultist behemoth Nightbringer. (He and I will have that in common because this is my first post for you fine folks.)
