New Grimes and Release Date!

We now have a release date for the long-awaited next Grimes album. Miss Anthropocene will be out February 21st, and you can pre-order it HERE.

Being that I'm relatively new to her music - having really only been converted about four or five years ago - this will be the first new record Grimes has released that I've waited for. And I feel as though it has been a long wait.

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Joe Begos' new film Bliss came out on Blu Ray/DVD this past Tuesday and I highly recommend you go out and pick this one up. I saw this at Beyondfest back in September and loved it, and upon re-watching it last night on Blu Ray, I found I enjoyed it, even more, a second time. Easily in my top top if not top five of the year:



And here's the awesome Spotify Soundtrack Mr. Begos put up to coincide with the release of the film.




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Lo and behold, NCBD this week turned out to be a pretty big deal for me. It's been a while, but I left the shop with a couple new titles that I'm excited about supporting. I'm not thinking of backpaddling on easing off monthlies, but there were a few that were small press, so I'm paying it forward, in a manner of speaking.

And I'd completely forgotten there was a new Terry Moore series on the stands!

I don't really know anything about Five Years, but I'm fairly certain there are a couple of familiar faces on the cover to Issue #1.

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This week's playlist:

Flying Lotus - You're Dead
Deth Crux - Mutant Flesh
Amy Winehouse - Back to Black
Timber Timbre - Eponymous
Snatch OST (playlist)
James Browns's Funky People Vol. 1
The Edgar Winter Group - Shock Treatment
Return of the Mack - Mark Morrison (single)
Revocation - The Outer Ones
Revocation - Teratogenesis EP
Final - Solaris
Arthur Ahbez - Gold
Barry Adamson - Stranger on the Sofa
Me and That Man - Songs of Love and Death
Flipper - Album
Hall and Oats - Greatest Hits
The Knife - Silent Shout
Billy Idol - Greatest Hits
Megadeth - Rust in Peace
Tyler Childers - Purgatory
Oh Baby - The Art of Sleeping Alone
The Nukes - Why Things Burn
Fields of the Nephilim - The Nephilim
Barry Adamson - As Above So Below
Tamaryn - The Waves
The Sword - Age of Winters
Sunn O))) - Life Metal
Spotlights - Love and Decay
Kode9 - Nothing

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Card of the day:

Hoping this is good news pertaining to the submission I sent out yesterday afternoon.

2019: June 28th - Oh Oblivion. Sweet, Sweet Oblivion

Very much in a Visions headspace this morning. I'm starting this post at... almost 2:00 AM, but probably won't post it until I wake up in the daylight. Running on fumes, as I've been up since 5AM, but I just returned from a night of catching up with a friend in Hollywood and now I want to get a rough idea for a story I had while driving home listening to Secret Chiefs 3 down on paper. I'm off today (Friday), so I'm having a few late night Sierra Nevadas, trying to suss out the skeleton to this thing I probably won't actually work on for some time. But I like to have a bunch of gestating concepts, so at some lull in the future (lull? When?), I can scroll through a list and pick something to hash out.

There's something magnificent about driving La Cienga between Stockard and Centinela late at night. It's as close to a secluded spot as you can get in LA proper, which is to say it's not very secluded at all, but it has a certain Between quality to it. Always inspires me.

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Next day now. Woke up and read another story in the Robert S. Wilson-edited Ashes and Entropy Anthology, this time Nate Southard's Ain't Much Pride. Wow. My favorite story so far, and that's saying something. This is turning out to be a fantastic collection. If you're interested, you can order it directly from Nightscape Press HERE.

I enjoyed Southard's Ain't Much Pride so much that I looked into his other work, and I'm really interested in his 2018 novel Porcelain:

"Comedian Jason Hawkes carries with him a mountain of emotional issues and an impressive drug habit. When he learns his high school sweetheart went on a shooting spree before turning the gun on herself, he returns home to confront a past that includes a drunken orgy in an abandoned factory and six close friends who never spoke to each other again. Something more sinister is at work than teenage hormones, however, and what Jason learns as he reconnects with his past will either fix him or shatter him further. And it could send an entire city into an abyss of lust-fueled horror.

SOLD! You can buy this one directly from Lethe Press HERE. I intend to.

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Playlist from 6/27:

Swans - To Be Kind
High on Fire - Electric Messiah
The Jesus Lizard - Lash EP
The Dillinger Escape Plan - One of Us is the Killer
Dean Hurley - Anthology Resource Vol. I: △△
Dean Hurley - Anthology Resource Vol. 2: Philosophy of Beyond pre-release singles
Primus - Frizzle Fry
Secret Chiefs 3 Traditionalists - Le mani destre recise degli ultimi uomini
John Carpenter and Alan Howarth - Prince of Darkness OST
Grimes - Visions

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Card of the day:

Fives are always unstable. It's not really a bad thing, just a phase to move beyond. Fours are stable, but to avoid stagnation, you have to add something. This is good, but affects the balance of things. The goal is to keep adding, and that's kind of my thing right now. After a discussion with a friend, I'm thinking about postponing the release of Shadow Play until the first week in September. This is tough, because it's done, however, there's a lot of really good reasons to consider this. I just have to research them. So yeah, the stability of being finished and releasing it into the world - if you can call that stable - is thwarted by adding a new facet, which is essentially a very small, grassroots marketing initiative. Something I'm terrible at. But we're terrible at things until we do them enough to become good, or at least proficient at them. So yeah, I guess there's some instability/worry right now. It will pass.

2019: March 14th

I had completely forgotten there was a new album from Le Butcherettes that dropped in February! Only a couple listens in, I prefer the back half of the album to the A side, but overall bi/MENTAL is a stand-out piece of music.

New Music from Grimes, but not Grimes? The music is not grabbing me the way anything on Visions or Art Angels did, but the song isn't really the point. Double click on the embed here and listen to the track on Grimes' official youtube channel. While you're listening, read the summary. It's fascinating. Apparently this is not from the forthcoming Grimes album, but from a musical she is working on. This character is named "Dark." Grimes has a really interesting creative thought process, which is why many of us like her so much. Can't wait to see what comes next. But yeah, I really want that next Grimes album...



Playlist from 3/13:

Talking Heads - Remain in Light
Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats - Blood Lust
Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats - Wasteland
Second Still - Eponymous
Deafheaven - New Bermuda

Card of the day:

Creative Drive (Binah, the Mother); striving toward a goal. Yep.

2018: November 30th - NEW GRIMES!!!

Wow. Just wow. I saw this dropped last night, stopped everything I was doing, put in headphones and closed my eyes, went off to Grimes World. The textures at work in this song feel three-dimensional, no doubt based on her use of the stereo field, as well as a knack for choosing sounds of all kinds - many not traditionally 'musical', and using them to really fill out the sonic space. If this is any indication of the new album, it is going to be a perfect step forward from Art Angels.

Re-watched Hereditary a couple of nights ago. My god, even though Mandy is probably my favorite film of 2018, this is far and away the best film. It lost none of its ability to traumatize me, and really opened up more interpretation-wise with this second viewing. I'd imagine I'll be talking a lot about this come our 'year's best' episode of The Horror Vision. Two observations:

1) Toni Collette had certainly better at least be nominated for best actress.
2) Watching the deleted scenes, you see how good writer/director Ari Aster is at 'killing his darlings.' Not that any of the deleted scenes were darlings necessarily, but watching what he shot and then removed, you see how he was originally trying to flesh out Peter and Steve's characters more, and how he pulled back and gave us only what we needed. The inclusion of any of those deleted scenes would have, in my opinion, hurt the movie's power, so Aster knew exactly where to draw lines and how to intuit when he had enough.

Pretty impressive for a first movie.

There's some criticism out there that Gabriel Byrne's Steve in particular, is a poorly written, two-dimensional character. I for one disagree. He is exactly what the movie needs him to be. I stuggle with this some time in my own work, the idea of adding more to make sure my point gets across, or to ensure a character is 'fully realized.' Then I watch something like this and see that with restraint great things can come. Spaces in the character can evolve, spaces that draw people in the way the people in their life do. We all interact every day with people we only know in one particular role, or way, and it doesn't diminish their role or strength in our lives. Why wouldn't the same be true for characters in a film?

For a counterpoint, watch Rob Zombie's Halloween - RZ spends so much time ensuring that we understand William Forsythe's Ronnie is white trash that it becomes overkill and, frankly, derails the movie.

Playlist from 11/29:

The Doors - Strange Days
LCD Soundsystem - Sound of Silver
Kylie Minogue - Fever
Cocksure - Be Rich
Emma Ruth Rundle - Marked for Death
Grimes - We Appreciate Power (Single)
The Besnard Lakes - The Besnard Lakes are the Roaring Night

Card of the day:

Another card I see a lot. I'm curious if this convergence of regular cards I've pulled during the year are rallying to clarify a point I've missed?

Grimes - Kill V. Maim

Based on my historical music video preferences I should hate this.
I do not. I LOVE it.
I feel like Grimes just made a better version of Sucker Punch than ZS did.

Grimes - Visions

...Is my choice for this week's edition of the Joup Friday Album. You can hear the album and read what I have to say about it on that link above, and you can watch the video for Oblivion below.