Vólan is a band from Moscow I'd never heard of until this morning when this live session from Audio Tree popped up on my youtube feed. Pretty awesome! You can hit their Bandcamp HERE for more music and merch!
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I'm a pretty big fan of Robert S. Wilson's Nightscape Press, and as such I backed their recent Kickstarter HERE. I'd actually meant to post about this earlier, but there's still twelve days left, and even fully funded, this is absolutely worth contributing to. Nightscape is a fantastic and fully independent publisher, and my hope is they will be around for many years to come.
Previously, I've mentioned Nightscape's brilliant Ashes and Entropy anthology - easily one of the best books I read last year. I also recently picked up Dark and Distant Voices, Nightscape's short story collection by Tim Waggoner. I'm only one story in - ALL my pleasure reading is on hold as I work on final edits of two different versions of my forthcoming novel (I'll explain that at some other point). The point is, Mr. Wilson runs a top shelf company who deserve our support.
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Playlist:
The Thirsty Crows - Hangman's Noose
Aerosmith - Pump
Motörhead - 1916
Nirvana - Nevermind
Low Cut Connie - Hi Honey
The Rolling Stones - Sticky Fingers
Roxy Music - For Your Pleasure
Urge Overkill - Saturation
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I've been pretty excited for the new Shudder Creepshow series, and if this first trailer is any indication, it's going to be better than my expectations even. Not easy to do, when reviving something so iconic, but based on everything I've seen from the streaming service so far, they are 100% up to the task.
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New episode of The Horror Vision went up yesterday. This is a special 'Double-sized' edition, where Ray, Anthony, Tori, and myself tell our listeners a little bit about ourselves. After that, topics of discussion ended up revolving around Luca Guadagnino's 2018 Suspiria remake and the merit/non-merit of remakes in general. Finally, our movie of the episode reaction bit is on Matthew Holness' film Possum.
Continuing on into the heart of Robert S. Wilson's Ashes and Entropy anthology, I read John Langan's short, Breakwater earlier today. Fantastic short fiction; kind of a mash-up of the Crime and Horror genres, I blew through Breakwater at a pretty quick clip, and caught my breath when it ended. After a complicated relationship with Langan's novel The Fisherman, I'd been wanting to read something else by the man, and this story definitely pointed me in the direction of his newest collection, Sefira and Other Betrayals:
Look at that cover art - unnerving is an understatement for artist Santiago Caruso's image, more of which you can find on his website HERE. Mr. Langan's website is HERE and you can order a beautiful limited cloth edition of Sefira directly from Hippocampus Press HERE.
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Playlist from the last two days:
Talking Heads - Remain in Light
Iggy Pop - The Idiot
High On Fire - Snakes of the Divine
Godflesh - Post Self
Crystal Castles - II
The Soft Moon - Criminal
The Soft Moon - Deeper
The Raveonettes - 2016 Atomized
Dean Hurley - Anthology Resource Vol. II Philosophy of Beyond
Blur - 13
The Blues Brothers - Briefcase Full of Blues
Bavaria Buam - Live
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Card of the day:
Balance. I need this right now. Trying to balance my interests has put things out of whack, creatively.
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.
Possibly my favorite track by this band yet! There's the 90s thing, but there's something more. I really think Skating Polly will be a force to reckon with out in the larger world at large in six months to a year. In the meantime, I'm glad I'm able to watch it happen for them.
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New episode of The Horror Vision went up last night. If you saw it drop and had trouble downloading or streaming it, our apologies. I experienced a hard drive hiccup while mixing the track down in Premiere, which resulted in a track initially empty of audio save for the first few opening bars of the theme. I was able to troubleshoot and fix the problem inside of an hour, so all the horror goodness is now available.
You can find the episode on Apple, Spotify, and Google Play. Topics of discussion are Yann Gonzalez's gorgeous Knife + Heart, Vincente DiSanti's Studio-worthy F13 Fan Film Never Hike Alone, David Lynch's Twin Peaks: The Return, Robert S. Wilson's new horror anthology Ashes and Entropy 2. Oh yeah, and our movie reaction is to Greg McLean's Rogue, a gnarly giant crocodile flick from 2007.
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Playlist from 6/24:
Swans - To be Kind
Motörhead - Ace of Spades
Ministry - The Land of Rape and Honey
Cold Cave - Cherish the Light Years
Trentmøller - In the Garden (Pre-release Single)
Shellac - The End of Radio
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Card of the day:
In the zone. I made little progress on reading my copy of the Shadow Play proof yesterday, but I expect today will go much better.
