2013 Sundance Film Festival Shorts: The Apocalypse

I've been routing around looking at a lot of the shorts at Sundance. I REALLY liked this one.

From Sundance

JELLO BIAFRA & the GUANTANAMO SCHOOL OF MEDICINE LIVE @ SO 36

Biafra's new(er) group doesn't get the props or traffic they deserve. This is every bit as awesome as the Kennedy's - further proof who really wrote all those DK songs.

Fuck dockers.

Oh, and yes, that's Andrew Weiss of early Ween and Rollins Band fame, on bass.

Sound City Official Trailer

I respect the hell out of Dave Grohl but his music does next to nothing for me. It's textbook radio rock - not bad, just not for me. Likewise for most of the modern bands touted herein (Queens of the Stone Age and NIN being the exceptions). But I LOVE Neve boards and a lot of recording history happened at this place. I heard an interview with Grohl and Corey Taylor from Slipknot/Stone Sour on Kevin and Bean late last week and although I didn't particularly go in for the track they premiered for their shared music project The Sound City Players (which also features Rick Nielson of Cheap Trick and Krist Novoselic I'll put the song up as well. Props to Grohl for doing all of this, again it's not my cup of tea but it's cool to see someone with so much stature in the mainstream rock community actually do cool, creative and respectful stuff like this. And props to the bands who participated in the doc, from Fleetwood Mac to Slipknot to Cheap Trick and everywhere in between.

Wrong (2013)

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This looks amazing. And come on - William Fichtner is THE shit!!! Directed by Quentin Dupieux, the man who made Rubber (2010).

Decoding Tool's "Holy Gift"

I found this about two months ago. It's been some time since I've listened to Tool. They're a band I love but I have a very specific mindset that I have to be in in order to listen to. Part of this is because they are not a 'passive' listening band. Tool is very engaging with their music, I cannot just put them on in the background. I wrote a massive chunk of my first, unpublished novel to Lateralus and to this day it remains my favorite of their records. This was a time when I was also really falling into Magick and the album fit perfectly - the enigmatic way in which the band conducts itself lends to their mystique, as does a lot of the little 'hidden' things they do in their music and on their website. If you're interested in what I'm talking about go here. That's a link that was hidden on their site back around the time Lateralus dropped. How many famous rock bands spend time talking about/doing this kind of thing? To some it would be an act, the whole Magick thing, or a fashion, but to Tool and their inner circle there has always seemed to be the air of research into our world, and in keeping with this Tool's Holy Gift makes perfect sense.

There is a video here that explains the concept, but the basic gist is that the Fibonacci Sequence is integral to the record Lateralus - it contemplates or draws upon it in several places. Could there then be some hidden meaning/message in re-arranging the track listing of the record in accordance with Fibonacci's numbers?

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.