New Music from Oranssi Pazuzu

From a still unannounced forthcoming album due October 11, 2024, on Nuclear Blast Records, I don't think I can dig a band more. After discovering these guys within the last year, I'm falling head over heels for Oranssi Pazuzu and this new single only further cements that.

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Bungle:

This... is an unexpected miracle:

Quote Unquote 1991-1999 is a 6 LP vinyl boxset that includes remastered editions of Mr. Bungle's original three Warner Bros. albums: 1991's Eponymous, 1995's Disco Volante, and 1999's California. All three of those records rank among my favorite, most influential pieces of music. Disco Volante—despite the fact that I haven't listened to it in some time—remains one of my favorite pieces of music ever recorded (right behind Fantômas's Delirium Cordia). Here's the solicitation for the boxset:

"6LP boxset of Mr. Bungle's three legendary albums on Warner Records: Mr. Bungle, Disco Volante & California. Each album comes as a 2LP Gatefold, all packaged together in a metallic foil box. Mastered by Scott Hull exclusively for vinyl from the original mixes (some for the first time ever). Features two alternate takes of inter-program material from the Bungle archives"

I'll say this was a little confusing to order because everything I found linked to this release navigates back to Rhino Records' page for their 1000-copy yellow vinyl variant that sold out instantly. I scooped up my standard vinyl copy from Acoustic Sounds, HERE.

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Read:

Traveling again, so I'm stalled out on Stephen Graham Jones' Don't Fear the Reaper because I didn't want to carry a Hardcover book with me this time, so I'm picking at Clark Ashton's Smith's story "The Black Abbot of Puthuum."

Smith's prose is hit-or-miss with me; his "The Door to Saturn" is one of my all-time favorite Fantasy stories. The Black Abbot is one I've attempted to read before and not made it through, so we'll see how it fairs this time.

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Playlist:

Black Sky Giant - The Red Chariot

Zeal & Ardor - GREIF (pre-release singles)

Ted Leo and the Pharmacists - Shake the Sheets

This Movie Saved My Life Podcast - 1994: A Year in Cinema, Part 1

The Bronx - II

LCD Soundsystem - Eponymous

Wham! - Make It Big

Huey Lewis and the News - Sports

Talking Heads - Remain in Light

Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band - Night Moves

Boston - Eponymous

The Doobie Brothers - What Were Once Vices Are Now Habits

Underworld - Beaucoup Fish

Scissor Sisters - Eponymous

David Bowie - Hunky Dory

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Card:

While traveling, I have my trusty mini-Thoth deck that Missi gifted me once upon a time. Love this deck. Here's today's Pull, followed by a caveat:

• Queen of Cups

• Ace of Swords

• Seven of Wands: Valor

Emotional or "Watery" Aspect of Emotion, Intellectual Breakthrough and Victory (Netzach). This seems to tell of an internal accomplishment; a breakthrough with one of the (many) things bothering me. This has been affecting my sleep for some time, which is one thing to deal with when you're home and work from home, quite another when you're on the road. 

Caveat: Before I retrieved my travel deck, I found an online "Daily Tarot Reading" site. Here's that spread:

• XV: The Devil

• I: The Magician

• XVI: The Tower

Talk about a different reading! This suggests my day will be filled with Tension, and that I'll be looking to tear down the old and start anew. I post this here just to record the data, as I really put no faith in an online reading service. 

Blood Machines Official Trailer

SO happy I helped kickstart this one! There are two slots for this year's Beyondfest still to be announced - I'm hoping one of them is Blood Machines. My hope for the other slot is either Babak Anvari's Nathan Ballingrud adaptation Wounds or the Soska Sisters' Rabid.

Speaking of Beyondfest 2019, I was able to get tickets to almost everything I wanted:

Joe Bob Brigs - How Rednecks Saved Hollywood
Tammy and the T-Rex
Joe Begos Double Feature: Bliss and VFW, with Begos and crew in person
Tom Atkins Triple Feature with Mr. Atkins attending: Halloween III Season of the Witch, Night of the Creeps and John Carpenter's The Fog

The only flick I missed out on is Richard Stanley's adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's The Color Out of Space with Stanley in person, but I'm cool with what I was able to score. There's also tickets available for a bunch of other films I'm toying with, but I'll probably decide some of those last minute since most are during the week.

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NCBD - so weird. Third NCBD in a row with no books, and I'm not particularly bothered. In fact, probably to sub the weekly comic experience, I chomped down hard on my re-read of Rick Remender and Matteo Scalera's Black Science, which I erroneously reported ended last month, but actually ends next week with issue forty-three. As of last night, I am eight issues into the re-read, and having an absolute blast with it. Such great world building, both story wise and with Scalera's incomparable art.

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I've been doing a lot of digital reading. So much so, that it's becoming a bit of a problem. Kindle books are so cheap it's insane. Case in point, this was $0.99:

Forty freakin' stories by a variety of different authors. Some of those, like the Lovecraft and the Howard I already have, but there's a ton of stuff I do not. In fact, what led me to this one was researching T.E.D. Klein, whose OOP paperback Dark Gods keeps coming up in conversation as essential reading to further Lovecraft's mythos, but which runs for about $50+ on eBay. Klein's story The Events at Poroth Farm is included in this one, and it also comes recommended as a great place to start with his work. Instead of that one though, I started with a Clark Ashton Smith, whose SciFi/Fantasy work I adore, but whose entries in the mythos I've never read before. I'm about a quarter of the way through The Return of the Sorcerer, and it is, as I suspected, fantastic. Smith's handling of Lovecraft's work actually reminds me a lot Howard's, whose Lovecraft-related work I actually probably like better than Lovecraft's. Sacrilege, I know, but the man can write. And so can Smith.

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Well, I went and saw Rob Zombie's 3 From Hell two nights ago. I didn't like it. My short review is up on Letterbxd HERE. I'll add that I am happy RZ made the movie he wanted to, it just wasn't to my tastes or what I wanted from a sequel to two movies I adore. Despite of my negative take, I'll still go see the next one when it comes out (there will be a next one).

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Playlist of late:

Danzig - Danzig 1
Sepultura - Chaos A.D.
Mark Korven - The Witch OST
Slipknot - We Are Not Your Kind
Marilyn Manson - Antichrist Superstar
David Bowie - Aladdin Sane
Flipper - Generic Flipper
Various - Under Frustration, Vol. 2
Brass Hearse - Eponymous EP
Rob Zombie - Apple Essentials
Brass Hearse - In Death (I'll Love You More) single

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Card of the day:

To me, this card always indicates a solid foundation, or re-gathering thereof. And that's what I've been doing of late - a lot of rest. I've felt out of sorts, stressed out, and my wrist in probably badly sprained. I may continue to rest today, even if I am neglecting my writing. We'll see. The reading - of comics, The Queen's Conjuror, and now some Cthulhu Mythos, is also an attempt at re-cementing my foundation, and that combined with the added rest is helping put me back together a bit after traveling and a grueling return to work last week.

New Laird Barron Collection in April

image courtesy of http://darkwolfsfantasyreviews.blogspot.com/

About two years while I was still at the bookstore, one of my regulars recommended Laird Barron's "Weird Fiction" to me. That's a flag phrase with me. You may have noticed I'm a bit of a Lovecraft fanatic and Weird Fiction is, along with authors such as Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith, a moniker most colloquially associated with ol' Howard Phillips . Also, there was something about the manner in which my customer described Barron's work - an immediacy and a sureness that imparted to me the idea that I would become a fanatic for this man's work as well.

I did.

image courtesy of goodreads.com

I began with The Imago Sequence and Other Stories. I read that so fast my freakin' head spun. It was a bit of work locating a copy, but in the interim of leaving the store and starting my new job some friends opened their own book store here in the Southbay, the-ever touted Bookfrog, and they were kind enough to order it for me (because they order everything and anything at request).

Next was Occultation, which came out shortly after finished Imago. Another anthology, Occultation was an even better, more consistant read. The infinitesimal tendrils of dread Barron had begun sowing through my heart in The Image Sequence were growing stronger in Occultation, and I was starting to get glimpses of the bigger picture behind the cracks and corners of his work.

image courtesy of grimreviews.blogspot.com

That picture came full on clear, complete with hideous gray eyes and wickedly aspiring teeth when The Croning was released some months later. Barron's debut novel The Croning is a deeply inspiring work that deftly examines the mundane yet terrifying aging process within the context of immortality, dark ritualistic aeons and things that go bump in the night. It is a fantastic first novel as both a stand alone entity and - what's more important to the fanatic in me - to the cosmic scope of the mythos Barron is creating.

image courtesy of imdiebound.org

Like Lovecraft, Barron's tales are in a shared world or Universe and overlap in sometimes obvious (i.e. character swapping) sometimes nearly invisibile ways. Like the fabled Butterfly Effect one character may do something in one story and it will reach fruition in another. This is Lovecraft-esque without falling into the admittedly overdone trap of writing within Lovecraft's world. This is a very talented author using that as the template and saying, "Now how can I do this, but make it my own?"

For two or two hundred more stories, I'm in.