New (?) Music From Stereolab!

I'll admit that I'm not nearly the Stereolab fan today that I was in the late 90s-early 2000s. I had quite the collection of their albums on CD, but eventually realized it was hard to listen to a lot of those records in any mind-frame other than a passive one. The textures of their music are amazing, but a lot of it ends up being 'mood' pieces. Kind of sonic wallpaper, as one friend put it. That's not a dig, however, my listening has become increasingly 'active' since I first fell in love with the band. Still, very cool to see they're releasing another of their Switch On series, which, if I remember correctly, are all B-Sides and rarities. In keeping with these past releases, and again emphasizing the sheer volume of music this group has released in the last several decades (quantifying how many decades will put me in danger of feeling frighteningly old) I'm not entirely sure if Super-It ever saw the light of day before, however, here today, it sounds pleasingly fresh. 

You can order Electrically Possessed, the fourth volume in Stereolab's Switched On series, one HERE, it drops Friday.

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Watch:

I have been wanting to see The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears for a couple years now, and it finally landed on Shudder, so I left work on time yesterday, loaded up a chillum when I got home,e and fell straight into this one:

The first 40+ minutes are a delight. After that, however, despite fighting like made to keep an open mind and positive outlook, this one devolves into what I would say is little more than aesthetic. I want to love this film, but a perhaps overly generous three-stars is all I could muster on Letterboxd. Still, Tears is GORGEOUS even as it tries your patience, and the OST is fabulous.

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Playlist:

The Soft Moon - Black Sabbath

The Soft Moon - Criminal  

The Soft Moon - Deeper

Stereolab - Electrically Possessed (pre-release singles)

The Raveonettes - In and Out of Control

Ghost of Vroom - I Hear the Ax Swinging (pre-release single)

Ghost of Vroom - 2 (Single)

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Card:

Pretty gnarly advice for me and a friend (I think) on how we can get tripped up by our own thinking and expectations of what we believe is "going to happen" based on pre-existing experience, which emotionally, can masquerade as emotional empirical evidence, such a thing that is not to be taken on faith. 

From the Grimoire: "Beware the mire of the mind; consciousness needs to flow freely, not become muddied by obsession. Push past what you think you know and be open to the Universal influence that can often reinvigorate our thoughts and practices."

I Hear the Axe Swinging

I emerged from a mid-afternoon nap yesterday to a text from Mr. Brown alerting me to the fact that Mike Doughty and Andrew "Scrap" Livingston's Ghost of Vroom dropped a new track. "I Hear the Axe Swinging is from the forthcoming album Ghost of Vroom 1, out March 1st. Pre-order the album HERE.

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Watch:

K and I started Penny Dreadful this weekend. Wow! I always suspected I would dig this show, and I don't know if my relationship with it is so good because our timing meant it dovetailed with my finishing Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, but this one is fantastic. There's an obvious debt to Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but Penny Dreadful is dark, disturbing, and often quite gruesome, and the show's ambitions to bring together so many iconic Horror personalities is really served well by in-depth research. 

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Playlist:

White Lung - Paradise

Melvins - Working with God

Sleaford Mods - Nudge It (single)

Lard - Pure Chewing Satisfaction

The Blueflowers - Relapse EP

Gwar - Scumdogs of the Universe

Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats - Wasteland

Type O Negative - Origin of the Feces

Small Black - Duplex (single)

PM Dawn - Set Adrift on Memory Bliss (single)

The Bangles - Different Light

Van Halen - 1984

Def Leppard - Pyromania

Chuck Berry - Berry is on Top

The Raveonettes - In and Out of Control

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Card:

 "Look unto yourselves for answers, as it is in your partnership you will find that which you seek."

What's the Rush?

 This made me laugh out loud. Wow, I love Jello Biafra!

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Watch:

Can't wait, even if the first season of Shudder's Creepshow was a bit of a mixed bag.

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Playlist:

White Lung - Paradise

Nothing - The Great Dismal

Megadeth - Rust in Peace

Nothing - Downward Years to Come

Orville Peck - Pony

NIN - Add Violence

How to Destroy Angels - Welcome Oblivion

Genghis Tron - Board Up the House 

The Cure - Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me

 

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Ebb and flow, which is exactly the tactic I'm currently using to balance between another final (for real this time!) edit on Murder Virus, and working on Shadow Play Book Two. This is not normally how I work; jumping between books prevents momentum. However, I received the proof for MV and reading it as an actual book - as opposed to a document on a screen - is a lot of edits to the surface. Which is a good thing. 

New Iceage

No, I'm not talking about where all this freaky weather is eventually going to lead us, I'm talking about new music from Iceage! Seek Shelter is out May 7th on Mexican Summer. Pre-order HERE.

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Watch:

K and I finally got back around to finishing His Dark Materials season 2 on HBO. Damn. This show is fantastic. The scope! I'm chomping at the bit to re-read these books, and since the three-book set that was so ubiquitous in the early 00s that sat on my shelf for over a decade went with the ex, I snagged a copy of the Omnibus that came out a few years back. After I finish Frankenstein, I believe I'll be digging into that one.

While I wait for the third and final season, I took to youtube to see if I could find anything documenting the two-part stage play adaptation that I saw in London circa 2004. This was all I could find, but it gives at least a little bit of an idea of what this looked like:

 

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Playlist:

Genghis Tron - Ritual Circle (pre-release single)

Tomahawk - Eponymous

Airiel - Molten Young Lovers

Beach House - Thank Your Lucky Stars

Beach Slang - The Deadbeat Bang of Heartbreak City

Queensrÿche - Empire

Melvins - Working With God (pre-release tracks)

Melvins - Houdini

Melvins - (A) Senile Animal

White Lung - Wild Failure (Single)

White Lung - Paradise

Genghis Tron - Board Up the House

The Raveonettes - Raven in the Grave

The Raveonettes - Lust Lust Lust 

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Something important is obscured, or for some reason I am just not seeing what is right in front of my face.

Genghis Tron - Ritual Circle

 

More new Genghis Tron. Very much looking forward to this record when it drops! Pre-order Dream Weapon - out March 26th - from Relapse Records HERE.

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READ:

I wanted to plant this HERE. really for myself, so I can find it again easily later. In going through old Orbital Operations emails for inspiration, I found this link to Sean Bonner's website. I am wholly unfamiliar with Mr. Bonner, or at least I was before reading this - but it's interesting that I read this now. There would appear to be a lot of synchronicities with me reading this post at the moment, not the least of which is that I'm about to turn 45. Anyway, since Orbital Operations went on hiatus last year, I've sorely lacked intermittent missives that at least in some regard pertain to the process of writing or creating or just structuring time (hence re-read old OOs), and Mr. Bonner's newsletter looks as though it may help fill that void.

 

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NCBD:

This is obviously a big one. I'm curious if, after the reveal at the end of issue #1, The Last Ronin will remain so highly sought after. My guess is no, but who knows? Also, who cares - the book is bad ass and I'm super excited for the next chapter.

One of my favorite series in years, issue #4 of We Live kind of set the whole series on its ear, and if I'm not mistaken, this is the final issue of the series. 

Another final issue. Hopefully, both We Live and Miskatonic will be back with second seasons. If not, it's been a hell of a ride for both in a very short time.

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Playlist:

Nothing - The Great Dismal

Dance with the Dead - B-Sides, Vol. 1

Teenage Wrist - Earth is a Black Hole

Ozzy Osbourne - The Ultimate Sin

Ozzy Osbourne - No More Tears

Mr. Bungle - Raging Wrath of the Easter Bunny

Primitive Man - Immersion

Ceremony - In the Spirit World Now (Synthetic Remixes)

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Balance and synthesis, two things I'm a skosh hung up on at the moment. I received the proofs of Murder Virus and am a bit underwhelmed at how the art looks in person. Also, I found a fucking typo on the first page! WTF!!! I've gone over this so much, I'm no longer seeing what's in front of my face. Ultimately, all this is easy to fix before the on-sale date of 3/23/21, but it's the point. 

The Gate Dismal

I'm pretty late checking out Nothing's latest release, which came out last year on Relapse Records. The Great Dismal was included in my Golden Ticket haul from Relapse, and I'm still working through that. A Fabricated Life begins the record, and I won't lie - its slow, soft, dreary sound hasn't been where my head is at. That said, listening to the record on headphones for the first time this morning, I'm able to grasp the nuance and vibe of the song, and it has stirred something within me. Something that harkens back to the first Nothing release, Downward Years to Come, which I discovered back in 2013. I love this band, and haven't spent nearly enough time with them these past two records, so I'll start correcting that today.

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Watch:

 

I stumbled across this short film - really more of a Proof of Concept trailer for a movie I can only hope gets made. Very cool use of CGI, ingenious locations, and what looks like the set-up for an intriguing take on Cosmic Horror. Directed by Matt Sears and written by Ryan Grundy, Mr. Sears' youtube channel appears packed with interesting content. Sub HERE.

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Playlist:

Cinderella - Long Cold Winter

Ghost - Opus Eponymous

Metallica - Kill 'Em All

The Plimsouls - Everywhere at Once

Perturbator - Dangerous Days

Metallica - Master of Puppets

Emilie Autumn  - Opheliac 

Keiichi Okabe - NieR: Automata OST

 

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Spot on today, as I've definitely been preoccupied with a sort of drifting that has displaced a lot of my creative intent. I'm sure it's just a phase, but it makes me contemplate ideas like, "What if I lose all motivation to write?" which is ridiculous, but, you know, this is the way the mind works.

Does this Slipper Belong to You?

Wow, I am in a weird headspace this morning. Woke up earlier than needed and went right to looking this album up on Apple Music. I've had hair rock on the mind for the last few days. This goes back to that Recontextualizing the 80s idea I was posting about here a few years ago. Some of this stuff from the Sunset Strip sound of the 80s is definitely best left forgotten, but some of it has a place in history. Or at least in my history, I guess. 

I never owned Cinderella's Long Cold Winter, but a friend in the neighborhood did, and I can remember hanging out at his house and popping it into the stereo more than a couple times. Other favorites at the time  (off the top of my head) would have included Metallica's ...And Justice for All, ICE T's Power, GnR's Lies, and NWA's Straight Outta Compton. This was really at the start of my getting into music in a 'beyond the radio' way, and this neighbor was loaded and, in the way of a lot of rich folk a bit clueless, so he tended to buy tapes and CDs rather haphazardly (I didn't have a CD player yet, so he was my first exposure to the format). 

I still have no idea why or how he chose to pick up a Cinderella album in the first place, this really wasn't his sound, but it was that anomaly factor that made me first pluck it from a pile of CDs and put it in the more than ample stereo. Over the course of a couple of weeks, Long Cold Winter became a go-to when hanging out at his house and listening to music, but that friendship dissolved shortly thereafter and he was lost to the waves of time. I haven't heard the album since. 

Once you get past Tom Keifer's throat-singing, this record has a pretty cool sound. The title track still stands as a damn good example of that 80s rock/blues sound that, in my opinion, was perfected on Gary Moore's Still Got the Blues for You, and it's this quality, as well as the ripping slide guitar sprinkled here and there, that elevates Long Cold Winter above your standard 80s Hair Rock sound, although Cinderella does that to varying degrees of palatability throughout the rest of the record, as well.

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Watch:

Joe Bob Briggs gave us the best of his Holiday specials he's done in some time last Friday with the Joe Bob Put a Spell on you, where he paired the Gore-cut of Tammy and the T-Rex with Anna Biller's The Love Witch. 

I was fortunate enough to catch the premiere of Vinegar Syndrome's release of the long-lost Gore-cut of Tammy at Beyondfest 2019 - the film actually followed an in-person presentation of Joe Bob doing his How Rednecks Saved Hollywood lecture. Both were fantastic, and it was cool to see the two together again. 

The Love Witch is one of the first movies K and I actively waited on the VOD premiere for back in the early phase of our relationship, due to a great LA Weekly article that talked about the absolute care and detail Ms. Biller put into making the film. 

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Playlist:

Deafheaven - Sunbather

Deafheaven - 10 Years Gone

Jim Jarmusch and Jozef Van Wissem - The Mystery of Heaven

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers - Damn the Torpedoes

Fleetwood Mac - Greatest Hits

Flying Lotus - Los Angeles

Daniel Pemberton - Motherless Brooklyn OST

Lard - The Last Temptation of Reid

Lard - Pure Chewing Satisfaction

Teenage Wrist - Earth is a Black Hole

Helmet - Meantime

John Carpenter - Lost Themes III Alive After Death

Zombi - 2020

The Bangles - Different Light 

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Card:

Coincidentally, as I draw from my Thoth Deck, I reflect on the fact that one of the things I most love about The Love Witch is there is a room in the film painted with the colors of the deck. 

 Hammering away with increased gusto but an edge of carelessness that can bring the whole damn thing down around your ears. Ease back and keep a keen eye. This is totally a nod that I'm overworking myself and need to take tonight to chill out. Science and Will must be strategic (to a degree), and still possessed of mindfullness.