The Bagman Cometh

Heaven is an Incubator posted the new album by Spain's Calderum. I'd never heard of these guys (this guy?) before, or the idea that anyone was meshing Black Metal with Dungeon Synth. I mean, talk about a sound you didn't know you wanted but you've been anticipating for years!

You can pre-order the Vinyl like I did, or the cassette from Death Prayer Records in the UK, just head over to Calderum's Bandcamp HERE.

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Write:

I just posted a story called The Bagman Cometh over on the Horror Amino app. I had a lot of fun doing this one, and a longer version will ultimately be included in my forthcoming FREE short story collection Its Soil Be Murder. To read the current version, go HERE. 

The piece is a mashup of random pictures from my phone, all used to prompt the story. I really dig this one; it plays with the whole Creepy Pasta/Urban Legend thing, while also bringing back a character from a short story I wrote waaaaay back in the early 00s but still need to publish. Maybe I'll put that in the Free Collection as well.

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Back:

Hasbro Pulse began a new Haslab campaign yesterday, and unfortunately, I caught wind of it early enough that I have about a week to struggle with whether or not to cough up $299 to back this:

Christ. One of my all-time favorite figures, the HISS Driver, working treads and the kicker? That fucking working beacon. 

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Playlist:

Calderum - Mystical Fortress of Iberian Lands

Krallice - Demonic Wealth

Black Sabbath - Eponymous

Blut Aus Nord - Disharmonium: Undreamable Abysses

Ruby Friedman Orchestra - Fugue in La Minor (single)

Pink Milk - Ultraviolet

Black Sabbath - Paranoid

Various - The Void OST

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Card:

Reminding me to make completely 'Scientific' decisions tomorrow at the home inspection; I must not succumb to emotion for or against the move. If it works, it works. If it doesn't, we go back to LaLaLand and start a new plan.

Sunken Dead at the Center

I have become quite enamored of late with Denmark's Black Metal auteurs Sunken and their 2020 album Livslede.  The entire album is quite a deep ride; there are so many textures here, beginning with what you might call a more traditional, second-wave Black Metal approach and then slowly mutating into a swirling mass of orchestrated, melodic chaos. This is beautiful brutality, which is serendipitous since my Beautiful Brutality (and Horror Vision) podcast cohost her_black_wings is the one who turned me onto Sunken in the first place.

Here's the group's Bandcamp. Check them out.

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Watch:

I finally sat down and watched Billy Senese's The Dead Center. Wow. I really dug this one quite a bit. Shane Carruth leads a cast that all turn in fantastic performances, and the editing creates a kind of spiraling sense of unease that climaxes with a supremely nihilistic ending. 

This one is included with Prime at the moment, so if you're in the mood for something that is both familiar and unique, give it a whirl. 

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Playlist:

Agnes Obel - Aventine

16 Horsepower - Hoarse

King Woman - Celestial Blues (pre-release singles)

White Zombie - La Sexorcisto

Sunken - Livslede

Diatribe - Odite Sermonis EP

Young Widows - Old Wounds

2018: May 15th 6:15 PM

First, because I've been All-Black Metal, All-the Time, let's do something as a pattern interrupt:



After I finished David Peak's Corpsepaint two nights ago I immediately ordered this:

Back when I worked at Borders, this always caught my eye. I'm so taken with exploring this fascinating subculture right now that I just can't look away, and I wanted some non-fiction to bolster and sustain the high that I still have from Peak's book.

Playlist from yesterday:

The Devil's Blood - The Thousandfold Epicenter

The Ocean - Aeolian

Venue - Desireena

Deafheaven - New Bermuda

Deafheaven - Roads to Judah

Card of the day today was:

An eight. Of course. The number of building. Because I've worked on T12 everyday for two weeks, and Keller and I are really building something, not the story per se, but also a system by which we intend to tell many stories, the next two after this one already slated.

Ghost Bath - Moonlover

Parsing for my best of 2015 list is becoming f^&kin' impossible. Here's another candidate. Beautiful; kind of reminds me of the first time I heard Opeth's older stuff. The album cover is disturbing as hell and kind of evokes the first season of True Detective if its villains had been members of a Black Metal-related cult. The tape holding the paper together in the background is the perfect little detail for me, makes it feel real.

Vindsval's The Eye

Let's trace the origin of a post like this, not just because someone out there might find it interesting, but because I'll find it interesting, as I've been a pretty rabid Blut Aus Nord fan for about two years now but have never heard of Vindsval's The Eye before.

Okay, so first, as I do at least once a day, I went to the wonderful heavenisanincubator blogspot and read up one a bunch of music I'd never heard before. Good times on The Incubator - always. Anyway, I found a post about Kylesa's Vulture's Landing and was specifically interested by The Incubator's description of Kylesa's sound as containing a "shoegaze" element. I followed the embedded link to Kylesa's label Season of Mist (if I'd be really paying attention it would have dawned on me that I was onto something, as I just re-read Neil Gaiman's Sandman vol. 4 Seasons of Mist and once again it has remained a slowly disintegrating echo in my head since). I looked around Season of Mist's sight for a few minutes, noting various bands on the label and then with the shoegaze + metal thing did what it always does and triggered me to go google search Blut Aus Nord - specifically looking for their label, Debemur Morti Productions' site. No matter where I go to read about Blut Aus Nord and their principal founder/creator Vindsval I always find something new, especially on DMP's site. And low and behold there it was - news that a sequel to the above-embedded album - written and performed entirely by Vindsval from what I've been able to find - 1997's Supremacy by The Eye.