New Music from Swans

 

More new music from the upcoming album The Beggar, out June 23rd on Young God Records/Mute. Pre-order HERE.

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Watch:

RIP Tina Turner. Here's a fun little clip of her on Letterman back in the day. The song is one from the era where she kind of followed Bowie and a lot of other aging 70s icons into a brief dalliance with what I'd call new age adult contemporary - not really my thing, but I'm not really posting it for that reason. Stick around to the end and watch Letterman go absolutely Ga-Ga for her before asking her to demonstrate how she taught Mick Jagger to dance.

There's a joy to Lettermen when he's in the presence of performers he really admires, and it shines here. Also, very cool to hear Tina Turner talk about her relationship with the Stones.            

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Read:

Kind of a NCBD addendum picked up a book I'd not expected to this past Wednesday, Damian Connelly's Blood, Love, Ghosts, and a Deadly Spell:

A very cool softcover collection of B&W Horror that puts me in mind of old Vertigo and Negative Burn comics. The first story in this, Helena, was my favorite, and it definitely has me interested in picking up Connelly's other books, You Promised Me Darkness and Follow Me Into Darkness. 

Blood, Love, Ghosts, and a Deadly Spell is published by Fairsquare Comics and Alien Books. If you can't find it in a shop, you can order from Fairsquare HERE. 

          

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Playlist:

Forhist - Eponymous

Yeruselem - The Sublime

The Sword - Warp Riders

The Ocean - Heliocentric

Ganser - Odd Talk

The Ravenonettes - Raven in the Grave

Blackbraid - Blackbraid I

High on Fire - Snakes of the Divine

The Dead Milkmen - The King in Yellow

Beach House - Become EP

Beach House - Thank Your Lucky Stars

CCR - Eponymous

Sleep - The Sciences

Ghost - Phantomime EP

The Hives - Tyrannosaurus Hives

Druids - Shadow Work

Soft Play - Sockets (single)

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Card:

From Jonathan Grimm's Bound Tarot, which you can buy HERE.

• Page of Cups - Princess in Thoth, this is the physical aspect of emotion

• Seven of Swords - Completion of Will, or perhaps more commonly, of conflict

• Six of Swords - Here, I think, Balance of conflict

This is one of the more difficult Pulls to read in quite some time. I definitely think this has to do with my current project, but I'm unclear how, exactly, so I'll do what I always do in situations such as this: leave the cards up on my desk where I can see them all day. Sometimes that's enough to trigger understanding.

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New Swans!!!

New music from Swans! From the forthcoming album The Beggar, out June 23rd on Young God Records. Pre-order HERE.

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Watch:

One of the things that saved my sanity over the last few days of my recent two-week stint in LaLaLand was getting stoned at my hotel one night and discovering Bobby Fingers had released his new Diorama video. The subject of Mr. Fingers' machinations this time?

 

There is a level-up in this video that absolutely blew me away, and that's all I'll say. Well, besides confirming that Bobby Fingers is now my favorite anything on the internet. Watching these literally helped quell the total disgust for humanity that arose in me while stationed in LaLaLand this time.

 

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Plastic:

I have to confess that I've become one of the many disillusioned Hasbro Pulse fans. The company's entire manner of doing business is just disgusting. Due to this, and because I've cut my nerd-spending in half, there have been quite a few recent releases from their GI JOE Classified and Transformers lines that I want but have ultimately passed on. That said, here are a few I did allow myself to splurge on:

Copperhead is one of my all-time favorite characters, and this redesign is spot-on perfect in my opinion.

I don't know anything about Range Vipers, and this is obviously a rather "Sci-Fi" figure - an approach I do not normally appreciate in the series, but as a straight-up horrific-looking action figure, this thing is rad AF. Look at that brain!!!

This last one I actually have not yet ordered but am on the fence. One of the issues I (and a lot of other collectors) have with Pulse is their insane price markup. I've had Scrap Iron in my cart on their site for a few weeks now and, although this guy was one of my favorites of the original series' earliest figure designs AND a figure I never had as a child, this figure's pull is strong. I loved the character in Larry Hama's comics - that scene where he blows up the station wagon with the Soft Master, Billy and Mr. Coffee-in-my-Brandy has always stayed with me. That said, when you're at checkout and see a final cost of $57 for one figure, well, that's just INSANE, regardless of whether or not it comes with a 'vehicle' like old Iron's anti-tank drone. Magic eightball says I'll probably end up ordering this, but it irks me nonetheless. 

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Playlist:

The Veils - Total Depravity

King Woman - Celestial Blues

King Woman - King Woman on Audiotree Live EP

Led Zeppelin - Physical Graffiti

Lard - Pure Chewing Satisfaction

Godflesh - Pure Live

The Police - Regatta de Blanc

Silent - Modern Hate

Savages - Silence Yourself

Neverly Boys - Dark Side of Everything

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Card:

From Missi's Raven Tarot:

I turn 47 today, and in light of this event, I wanted to pull a card from Missi's Raven Tarot as a sort of "Card for the year." Makes sense I would see The High Priestess, as I feel like she has been lurking in quite a few of my dailies of late. 

From the Grimoire:

"Can denote change and/or fluctuation. Matter or situation shaped by gracious or pure influences. The Priestess taps into the power of Life and the Universe."

All of which is to say - or at least in my interpretation - I will have a year where I continue to shape my future. Sounds boring, but as anyone who has changed their life for the better multiple times and is generally unafraid to do so at the drop of a hat, it's not easy. Nor is continually affecting my own creative force, honing these lumbering documents of a novel that is hard A.F. to write, but ultimately rewarding A.F. when it begins to come together.

Here's to the voyage to 48!!!

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.

**

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 - The World Looks Red/The World Looks Black

My morning, perfectly encapsulated.

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.

My Top Ten Albums of 2014

Tuneyards's Nikki-Nack is #1and Protomartyr and Jenny Lewis make an appearance. Read the full list over on Joup! Then go over and read Tommy's from Heaven is an Incubator, also on Joup!

Swans - To Be Kind Trailer

I cannot wait for this record. Swans' 2012 magnum opus - and yes that word is overused but NOT in this regard - The Seer really just blew my fucking mind when I heard it in the early part of 2013 (I've mentioned here recently that had I heard it in '12 it would have been #2 on my year end list). I've felt a bit removed from current music lately but this is something that I am really looking forward to, to the point that this is without a doubt a 'day of release' buy for me.

Apparently this trailer is for the DVD available with the deluxe edition of To Be Kind, out May 13th via Young God Records/Mute.

Can't wait!

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.

Swans - The Seer

Okay, so I'm fairly late in the game on this one. I spent a large part of the year (7 months to be exact) holed up and working on a screenplay that may never see the light of day due to artistic disagreements. In that time a lot of music came and went under my radar as I was completely unplugged from any semblence my usual practice of scowering high and low for new stuff. I played MAJOR catch-up during the last two months of the year, the whole time harboring a feeling that one of the albums that "got away" - Swans newest record The Seer yet somehow never managing to transmute that feeling into acquisition. Then, about  a week after I posted my top ten albums of 2012 on Joup a friend of mine gave me a copy of The Seer and I loaded it into my ipod. About a week after that on a day off I put the album on and had trouble ever turning it off.

Frankly, until this record the Swans frightened me a bit. About five years ago I picked up the Cop/Young God - Greed/Holy Money reissue put out by Some Bizzare Records and although I LOVED the music I had a bit of an adverse reaction to the general tone of the record. Now, this in itself is a little out of character for me. I love a lot of dark, sometimes violent music. I'm not a prude and I don't scare easy. However, at the time I bought this record I had just finished reading George Petros' book Art That Kills and it had unnerved me, made me question some of the areas of art that I dabble in. Sometimes things we take at face value have deeper meanings that we don't stop to contemplate. Petros' book - while covering many artists whose work I truly love and consider historically important - also covers some that, well, fell more on the 'leave that the fuck alone' side of things. What's more around this time some strange happenings had resurfaced and to put it very succinctly a friend and I were seriously questioning whether A) a Magick ritual we had crafted in the form of a song for our band The Forest Children had caused a violent crime in our old recording space, or B) we were losing out minds for thinking this might be the case. My initial reaction to the Swans record was a combination of a psychic hangover from Mr. Petros' book, this hazy personal event and, specifically, the lyrics for track #2 on the Swans disc, a song titled Job.

I put the record away for a while.

I am a MASSIVE GodFlesh/Justin K. Broadrick fan and after buying one of the earlier Jesu albums and finding myself smitten with the vocals of Jarboe I made the connection and dug Swans back out. At first I isolated the Jarboe-sung tracks, soaking in the haunting, spectral atmosphere I'd not made it to before. Then I held my breath and gave the entire two discs another spin from beginning to end.

Wow.

The first thing I noticed when I went back to Cop/Young God - Greed/Holy Money was how Michael Gira was so obviously a huge influence on them. Many a band quote Broadrick and GodFlesh as influences but I'd never really delved into what bands influenced them. But the overall tone of the album was just still too dark for me. Actually, dark is not even the tone. While beginning this post a couple of days ago I dug the record out again (much to my wife's chagrin) and listened to the entirety of the first disc. It still takes me to a mental place that I just don't feel comfortable going. But here's the thing - that in and of itself is a feat for an artist. Just because the record causes this reaction in me doesn't mean I don't think it's an important or 'good' record. Au contraire - this makes me think it is something extremely special, to be reserved for special occasions when my inner psychonaut feels the call to places darker than I normally trek.

Anyway, The Seer has trumped much of my list for last year - maybe all of it. It is a magickal, complex and limitlessly rewarding piece of music the likes of which I've not heard assembled in one place before. It is now time then, for me to go back and begin buying all of the Swans records I've missed out on over the years.