Beneath the Panels #3: Nameless and the Tree of Life

Beneath the Panels #3 is up on Joup. It continues my attempt to interpret and catalogue the Occult underpinnings of Grant Morrison and Chris Burnham's new comic Nameless. For this third installment dealing with issue #1 we get into some serious Qabalah, Tarot and media-tampering. This one's a doozy and it prompted a bit of an 'episode' last night after I ate a quarter slice of a pizza made with THC oil, tripped pretty hard and met what my brain at the time chose to dress in an Enochian persona but was apparently a fairly dark aspect of my own psyche. Whewwww... glad that's over, and here's another reminder to myself NOT to eat pot.

Sunn 0))) + Ulver

This has been out for some time, and I've dabbled a bit with it before, however it was not until this morning that I really gave Terrestrials a good, solid listen. After uneasy dreams of London I found myself awake at a ridiculous hour - ridiculous when faced with the reality that Saturday is one of the only two days I have to sleep in - and in the hazy, marine-layered morning air I found this collaboration between Sunn 0))) and atmospheric black metal liaison Ulver the perfect soundtrack to quietly sipping a pot of strong, black coffee and re-reading key sections of Richard Kieckhefer's Forbidden Rites: A Necromancer's Manual of the Fifteenth Century while researching the next chapter of my Beneath the Panels: Nameless series.

"... the rites contained in this compendium illustrate strikingly the links between magical practice and orthodox liturgy. The analogy I will use is that of a tapestry whose dislay side implies a reverse side; so too, a society that ascribes a high degree of power to ritual and its users will invite the development of unofficial and transgressive ritual, related in form to its official counterpart, however sharply it may differ in its uses."

-Richard Kieckhefer, page 3 of the introduction.

Love My Way - Cruel Black Dove

I lost track of Cruel Black Dove somewhere around 2012 but was recently reminded to look them back up - GREAT band. Their cover of The Psychedelic Furs' Love My Way was the first track I heard from them and, of course, when a band does such a fantastic job covering an 80s song this iconic, well, they get my attention. The Full Powers E.P. is well worth the $5 or so if you can download it from here (the link appears a bit wonky) and you can find a bunch of free downloads- including this cover - here on the band's website.

Black Mirror

This is seriously one of the most riveting 48 minutes of drama I have ever seen. All six episodes of the British Black Mirror are fabulous, but this first one really smacks you across the nose and announces the fact that the creators are NOT messing around when it comes to extrapolating the dark side of the tech curve. Black Mirror does for technology today what The Twilight Zone did for Nuclear proliferation in the 50s and 60s.

Black Sabbath live 1970

My good friend John Bickness sent this to me recently. I think there was footage from this on a VHS I had back in the day, The Black Sabbath Story or something like that. War Pigs with the original lyrics, pre-fringe John "Ozzy" Osbourne.

Ruleth thou dost!!!

Spring Trailer (Via Bloody Disgusting)

Romantic Lovecraftian Horror? I'm in.

Beneath the Panels #2: Nameless

Beginning with the second entry into this limited Beneath the Panels column I've begun in order to trace the Occult influences/ideas Grant Morrison has built into his new series Nameless I've moved the column over to Joup. The second installment which deals heavily with the Enochian undertones in this first issue just went up.