Isolation: Day 193

Musick:

Michael Gira, the brainchild behind Swans, announced recently that their 1987 album Children of God will be re-released via Gira's own Young Gods Records in cooperation with Mute. This is Jarboe-era Swans, arguably the most lauded, and one I am not nearly as familiar with as I would like. You can pre-order the CD or Vinyl from Gira HERE.

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Watch:

Being that The Mandalorian Season Two is on the horizon, I will be signing up for Disney+ again soon. After Marvel/Disney released this trailer for the upcoming WandaVision show yesterday, looks like I'll be sticking that sub out for as long as it takes to see this show as well, because folks, this looks insane! I'm not entirely sure what the premise, set-up, or plot of the show is, but I'm definitely digging the almost Doom Patrol vibe I'm getting (notice I said almost Doom Patrol, as in irreverence for the medium and conventions). We'll see if WandaVision is as weird as it looks, but as Mr. Brown observed to me recently, with the MCU flicks making a 'Bajillion' dollars, Marvel may have the elbow room to indulge in some weirder ideas for a while, and that, I'm all for.

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Playlist:

Windhand - Grief's Infernal Flower 

Sepultura - Quadra 

Le Butcherettes - Don't Bleed 

Mannequin Pussy - Patience 

Exhalants - Atonement 

Earth, Wind, and Fire - I Am 

Black Sabbath - Sabbath Bloody Sabbath 

Carpenter Brut - Trilogy

Mastodon - Medium Rarities 

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Card:

On the nose as usual, being that I should be completing the first of three acts in Shadow Play, Book Two this week. 

New Swans Track!

New Swans! From the album Leaving Meaning, out October 25th; support a truly independent artist and pre-order a signed copy of the new album directly from Gira's Young God Records HERE.

Being that Swans founder/brainchild Michael Gira stated upon its release that 2016's The Glowing Man would be the final Swans album from my personal favorite incarnation of what is one of the longest-running, consistently changing bands ever, I am extremely curious to hear where this new album leads.

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Friday night K and I saw Joker. I was on the fence with this one, but now that I've seen it there's no reason to even review my reservations. Joker is easily going to be in my top ten films of the year. Easily. If you have superhero/comic book franchise fatigue like I do, take it from me: don't let that keep you from seeing this one in the theaters. Nothing remotely 'comic book' about this film. The hype is real - annoying - but real. I'm the trailer below, but my advice is to not even watch that, just go see it. Wow. Phoenix is absolutely amazing. Makes me want to re-watch PTA's The Master, which I'll probably do in early November.

Oh, and I absolutely loved the juxtaposition/influence on Joker from Scorcese's King of Comedy, which I just watched again recently.



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31 Days of Horror:

10/01: House of 1000 Corpses/31
10/02: Lords of Chaos
10/03: Creepshow Ep 2/Tales from the Crypt Ssn 1, Ep 1
10/04: IT Chapter 2, AHS 1984 Ep. 3
10/05: Bliss/VFW
10/06: Halloween III: Season of the Witch/Night of the Creeps/The Fog
10/07: Halloween 2018
10/08: Hell House, LLC
10/09: Dance of the Dead (Tobe Hooper; Masters of Horror Ssn 1 Ep 3)
10/10: Creepshow Episode 3
10/11: Jenifer (Dario Argento; Masters of Horror Ssn 1 Ep 4)
10/12: Poltergeist/Phenomena

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Playlist from the last few days:

Deftones - Koi No Yokan
1919 - The Complete Collection
Dr. John - Gris Gris
Queens of the Stone Age - Rated R
The Nukes - Why Things Burn
Blut Aus Nord - Hallucinogen
Godspeed You! Black Emperor - F#A# (Infinity)
Various - Joker Soundtrack (Playlist)
Bauhaus - The Sky's Gone Out
Ritual Howls - Their Body
Deth Crux - Mutant Flesh
Turn Pale - Kill the Lights

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Card of the day:

Direct reference to an under-developed aspect of my outline for Shadow Play Book Two. Duly noted.

2018: February 1st, 6:31 AM

Last night I absolutely killed the penultimate scene in my current writing project. It felt great. Today - if I have a chance - I'll move into the climax. This is all still just first pass, rough draft but it's still major progress. Once I write the climax and finale, I'll go back and add in a few chapters that I've come up with to flesh certain characters or ideas out - stuff I didn't know we were going to need until construction of the ongoing continuity revealed their necessity to me. One is probably a scene with Truby's "Half-man", although we intend to turn that on its ear a bit. After that I'll run everything through Grammarly, then tidy up and send it to Keller, who will read and add concepts/scenes/edits accordingly. Our deadline is in April - Thursday the 12th to be exact. Which is serendipitous indeed...

Started my musical day with Track #3 on Swans' 2016 release The Glowing Man. This is the title track and it's just fantastic. There's a real sense that Michael Gira's sound lodge has been influenced by the doors on this one, and after all the spacey effulgence that comprises the roughly the first half of the track, listen for the sheer awesomeness that Gira and company pull out at around the 15 minute mark. Mmmm-mmm!



Playlist for yesterday looks like this:

Zen Guerilla - Positronic Raygun
Nevermen - Eponymous
Faith No More - Angel Dust
Glass Animals - How to be a Human Being
Tuneyards - I Can Feel You Creep into my Private Life
Zen Guerilla - Positron Raygun
The Horrors - Primary Colours
Deafheaven - Sunbather
ttt (Crosses) Eponymous

Card of the day is The Priestess:

"The Will (Womb) that takes the Magus' spark (seed) and gives it form."

Can denote change/fluctuation; governed by gracious or pure influences.

The active difference between this and the preceding card in the deck's Major Arcana, The Magus, is that the Magus generates their own power, the Priestess taps into the power of the Universe.

Note the grid - I liken the difference outlined in that last sentence as the difference between so-called High Magick and Chaos Magick, the school I have always identified the most with. Chaos Magick is hacking the operating system or grid of reality. And there's that grid...

Looking forward to Sonny's Joup Friday Album tomorrow. In the meantime, I'll be posting the second installment of my "Drinking, Fighting, F*&king, and Crying later today. This week's song topic? Fighting.

Swans Live

Last Friday night I saw Swans live at the Fonda Theatre in Hollywood. This tour, supporting the group's newest record The Glowing Man, is the last in the current line-up Swans founder/mastermind Michael Gira has been utilizing to record a truly stellar run of albums that have completely re-invented/re-invigorated the group over the last few years. I'd not seen Swans live before - I've really only gotten fanatically into them since 2012's The Seer - and I wanted to be sure I did before this iteration ended. It was at amazing; in every sense both an ordeal and a learning experience.

You simply cannot understand the sonic experience of Swans live until you see them. You just can't. When you hear things like 'they play dangerously loud', even if you're not necessarily discounting the statement as hyperbolic, you still just cannot imagine HOW LOUD it is.

Pain. Yes, pain.

And while this is a bit of a bad thing, it is also awesome in the truest sense of that very over-used word. Awe-inspiring. 60% of the experience Friday night was observing the physiological reaction my body was having to the sound waves unleashed upon it. Then there was the psychological reaction, and the emotional. It was, in a very real sense, an altered state. A magickal one. At that volume the music has a palpable physical presence - you know what it's like when something alien invades your personal space? That begins to approach the presence I'm talking about. It was, incredible.

If you have the chance to see Swans before this tour is over and you want something unlike anything else, please go. Michael Gira is a true artist/shaman/catalyst and we need to support people like him, so they continue to do the things they do. But I would add, if you do go, bring ear plugs. You may choose to forgo using them, but at least give yourself the option.

The video is not from the show I saw, but I thought it a good example of what the band looks and sound like live. Without the volume I describe above, of course.

New Swans Track - A Little God in My Hands

I'll admit, until 2012's The Seer I never had as strong an affection for a Swans record. Granted, there weren't a lot of their albums I knew, primarily because, and this may sound a little goofy, but at some point ten years ago or so I purchased the reissue of Cop/Young God/Greed/Holy Money and honestly, it scares me to this day. There is a malevolence that hangs over that record that really gets under my skin. I liken it to watching Silence of the Lambs - Lambs is an amazing piece of cinema that I love just for its craft, but the actual tone of the film - while perfect for the story - puts me in touch with one of the darker, more perverse nooks of the human psyche and I simply cannot go there very often. The same is true of SE7EN, which I love even more for its craft but which tends to absolutely demolish me, each one of my meager three viewings of that particular film sending me on a spiral of paranoid, hate and frustration that takes a few days to recover from. Now, the fact that filmmakers could do that to me with images and sound on celluloid either means I take movies waaaay too seriously or that they are extremely powerful examples of the art; I tend to interpret this as the latter but also know in my heart that it is actually more of a combination of both. The same is true of that early Swans stuff. I sought it out because I had read what an influence they were on Justin K. Broadrick and upon initial listening attempts to Cop/Young God/Greed/Holy Money I saw the influence, but I also caught a glimpse of a hell that seared my psyche and thus have only sporadically gone back to make new attempts at desensitizing myself enough to fully embrace those records.

And then there's the question if I should try to desensitize myself, but I'll leave that to a later day.

All that said Michael Gira and contributors have definitely refined the band with age. Despite my emotional handicap to the old music I've kept up on Swans as a cultural cornerstone and have ear marked the many iterations the group has gone through over the years. The Seer was a record that didn't make my best of list in 2012 because I didn't hear it until the very first days of 2013 and upon hearing it immediately thought that it would probably have ranked in at #2 on that just-published list at the time. The Seer is... all encompassing; a micro-verse in a record's form and something of a journey that I like taking on a somewhat regular basis. These are no longer the bowels of hell Swans take me to, merely some of the more... colorful suburbs of those fantastic realms.

According to the mighty Brooklyn Vegan Swans newest record, To Be Kind, is out on May 13th via Young God. I'll definitely not be waiting until January, 2015 to purchase it.