miscellany

a new picture or two:






















just taken to-day. very up-to-date, current, and ----exciting.

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news.updates.etc

+^ lots of new poetry going on - been very productive lately. below is a very new work (just penned the first draft less than an hour ago) - (sub)urban decay. and below that is a new, extended revision of empty temple that i feel is much more striking. also have some new pieces in progress, one titled "flowers for blackflower" and another tentatively titled "transcending". transcending is shaping up to be a bit of a tour de force - it is rather long (by my standards) and is very self-referential. both of these poems should be posted here in about a week.

+^ began work on new portfolio or chapbook (haven't decided which one it is yet), entitled BLACKFLOWER, BLACKMOON. should be finished by late may. here's a glimpse of the in-progress cover jacket:





+^ eagerly awaiting the arrival of the new subconscious studios "from the vault" series. i'm sure that the new download (fixer) is going to be AMAZING, and i can't wait to hear the rest of the released material. glad to see these guys jumping on the reissue wagon. cEvin key hasn't released a single album that i don't care for, and i'm sure he's sitting on some incredible unreleased material. he recently posted on the litany forum that he and the subcon crew are working on a future DVD release - including HILT live. how amazing is that?


+^ getting into reading a lot of classic poetry, giving me some nice perspective. was reminded today that the line "rose, thou art sick" from coil's love's secret domain is from no other than william blake's classic (and excellent) "the sick rose".




the blake poem:

O Rose, thou art sick!
The invisible worm,
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm,

Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy;
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy

-
lyrics from coil's "love's secret domain":

Oh rose, thou art sick
Seduce.. let loose
The vision and the void
Blood sickle.. honey suck

In little children's heavy heads
My dreams erupt while in my bed
Innocence is dripping red

In dreams I walk with you
In dreams I talk with you
In dreams
You're mine
All of the time

Heads on fire and drunken lights
Days devoured by hungry nights
In love's secret domain
This is mad love
This is mad love
In love's secret domain

Sweet tortures fly on mystery wings
Pure evil is when flowers sing
My heart
My heart is a rose

Give sanity a longer leash
Some of us have sharper teeth
In love's secret domain

Oh rose, Thou art sick
The invisible worm
The vision and the void
The blood sickle cuts
And the honey sucks

Oh rose, thou art sick.


--
coil and jhonn balance have a very understated influence on me. i'm quick to tell you that edward ka-spel, david tibet, and n. ogre are huge influences, but i neglect the strange and vibrant imagery of balance's work that sits on an equal pedestal with the above "trinity". i mean, look at "innocence is dripping red" - wow, powerful, overtly sexual, and yet somehow he retains that elusive subtlety. i am in constant awe. i also think that, out of all the above lyricists / poets i've listed, my poems most resemble balance's work in structure and phasing.

R.I.P.

why don't they release a book of his poetry

(sub)urban decay, draft.001

(sub)urban decay

the lines blur, distort, rearrange
‘round hollowed-out cylinders
cinders and husks

a man, empty face, white hair
sits undead on stoop, eyes
surveying cracked streets, upheaval

mailbox in pieces, and so is the mailman
we are all functions
we are all reduced and equivalent

the earth spat up its dead,
gaping graveyards
perfume of 100 years of sweat and tears

white granite ionic columns
crumbling
onto streetlamps, traffic lights, and forgotten idols

what is this existence
we are roaming pavement fields
we are building nothing

[
a young man asked me the other day
“where does the city end and the forest begin?”

they are all the same, son
]

As Forests Char

We’ll stand on mountains

Evoke Buddha
Somebody

Then burn charred trees
til they are red and black
And paint the sky with dust and ash and flame

We’ll uncover rocks and blemishes
Starve ourselves, burn our tuxedos
Dance on coals
Browse magnetic fields
And forget to comb our hair

Won’t you stop us?

We’ll play our songs to no known time signature
Refuse the dawn

We’ll lay Isaac on sticks and anoint him with oil
We’ll raise the dagger and dare the skies

Respond!

We’ll sing entropic melodies
To the tune of the rusted music box

We’ll bow down to no known gods


As forests char

empty temple

Windows staring empty eyes
Empty vessels
Rowing hollow to the other side

Empty temple
Teeming with the faceless
Writhing with anti-matter

Pedestals with no idols

Barren, discarded
Empty temple sprouted
Seeds of the tree of death

Tabernacle in the nether-garden

No-face stomping exit rites
High-contrast bodies
In empty temple

No-face chanting to no-tune
An ode to discord and hollow, a testimony
To bloodless
To vacuum
To dissonance
To ruin

Inner vacancy, holy of holies
Cold, corrupt and bottomless
Endless stone well of mysterious depth

Impenetrable by those with faces
Only the withered may worship here
Empty temple is no church,
No house of purity or prayer

Empty temple, empty patterns

A thousand no-faces
A thousand concealed and
Burned-away identities

Reveal, reveal
Unsheath
Unmask

If I had a face I would rip it off

What is this mask?

(revised 3/30)

collapse.

All the flowers shall bow to Blackflower

And all shall become the night

I’m swimming

There’s no shore

a thousand undercurrents

a thousand scythes

a thousand axes biting veins

under Blackmoon

And chromatic petals shall fall to the ground

And Blackflower reigns

There’s no shore

If walls have no shape

I’m drowning

Blackflower ate the sky and earth

And shattered all the gods

I’m sucked into the wake

Into the sea’s luminescence

The walls have no shape

There is no wall at all

Eyes gaze upon Blackflower

And shall never know the dawns

(revised 3/19)

burning calendars.

Time shattered by the wind

(and axe)

And scattered in the trees

We gathered up pieces

Put back together

Elmer’s, Scotch, and stitches

And now there are 363 days per year

And forty days a month

and sometimes now we skip a day

Or two, or four, or five

Seven days a week you say?

I know eight or nine

The calendar is burning

Its ashes touch the sky

Shadowclast Tunes

Some of you may be wondering whats up with Shadowclast, the musical entity.

Well, I'm sad to announce that it is officially "on hiatus" - due to the time-consuming nature of school, some technical issues, and some identity issues.

Identity issues? Well, when I released Next Week's Outline and Tesseract back in 2005, I was listening to a strict diet of "emotional" IDM from labels like n5MD, Merck, Hymen, etc. That style, as a result of being almost my sole genre of choice, came naturally to me and I found my material fitting easily into that mold (hence my release through enpeg digital).



However, the past two years have seen a vast and large-scale broadening of my music taste, newly (re)acquired love for a broad range of genres.

So now I face two dilemmas:
1) The music I create sounds identical to my "IDM" period material, but that no longer represents the music I want to make.
2) Tracks that sound more representative of where I am currently seem somewhat formless, jumping from rampant venetian snares drill'n'bass to depeche mode synthpop and are generally lacking overall.

(Possible) Conclusions:
I need to step back, stop making music for awhile.
I need to start recording vocals.
I need some new gear.
I need to stop forcing myself to create demos that don't do anything for me.
I need to join a band.
I need to produce a band's record. (maybe the same thing)


As you can see by the previous post, I am trying my hand at creating poetry. These writings will likely play a big part in my next musical incarnation.

Stay tuned.

Poetry. III

Within the past 6 months I've taken to writing poetry - it is less time consuming than creating music, and fits more readily into my schedule. The only gear necessary is a pen and paper. However, coming from a musical background, I tend to create these poems expecting them to be set to some kind of sound, if not exactly "sung", but at least spoken-word style over ambience.

Some big influences (off the top of my head):
Edward Ka-Spel (the Legendary Pink Dots, the Tear Garden)
Nivek Ogre (Skinny Puppy, ohGr)
David Tibet (Current 93)
H.P. Lovecraft
Thomas Ligotti

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Some recent unfinished works.
.

.

.
the unfunctional corner

A wasteland

Discarded names, numbers, concepts

A hair, a string, a desert

A man, a briefcase

. . . . . .

Walking existence

Perambulating

A cane, poking non-static

Giant red “A” and white zeros on sand

. . . . . .

A black hat

Garbage heap of phonetics and pre-algebraic equations

Leftovers of mind

Long gathered dust

. . . . . .

The unfunctional corner

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test pattern

Static white blood from TV

Eyes swollen shut but open

Staring maybe lifeless

/ / / / / ///

Pupils shot through with red

Red and sea blue

Eyes shot

/ / / / / ///

Noise shock / electric shock

Knocked off the table

Knocked off the world

/ / / / / ///

A face a number a name

White noise composed

Shouts the same thing

/ / / / / ///

Listening with no ears

No face or anything at all

Absorbing test pattern

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it must be time

Tip back the lid and share a swig

Under Blackmoon

She smiles

Suggestive curves, the room spins

Flicks the wrist and

Leads the way

-

Unlock the gate with practiced hands

A decadent hymn sings doom

Nothing touches us

-

Bodies hardly capable of containing our souls

We escape and fluctuate

And float into that emptiness

-

Falling so long so far so fast we no longer realize

We are falling at all

She reaches for my hand once more

We share the hollow

-

The nihil becomes something else entirely

Shapes and patterns and pillars and fire

As that decadent hymn emerges again

A carnival theme for organ in B-flat minor

-

We have reached the festival of night

The merrygoround of anti-matter and the anti-gods

We manifest as orbs with no defined edges

-

We perform black rites

And smile and nod and embrace among the symbols of ruine

She kisses me with black lips

Decadence I cannot resist

-

We dance and play in darkened corridors

We curl and arch our backs and watch our cats

We clutch and envelop

We watch nothing become something

-

She overlaps me and we contrast and spark and glow and bind

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Suggestions welcome - these are still rather undeveloped.

Nap-time ambience.

For the past few weeks I've been experimenting with sleeping to music. The most pleasant and bizarre experiences often stem from drone oriented music. Here are some of my recent favorites, all of them chosen for sleeping because of my enjoyment of them during the waking hours.

Frozen Rabbit - 26,000

After hearing this album praised to no end by fans of Download, platEAU and Phil Western's solo work, I finally had to check this out.

It lives up to the hype.

Sometimes Coil-esque, sometimes reminiscent of Mark Spybey's excellent Dead Voices on Air, at times close to some of the Kranky label noise manipulations, and very near to the synthetic backbone of Download's excellent "III", this album is all I could ask for (and more) from a beatless Western / Hill collaboration.


Dead Voices on Air - From Labrador to Madagascar

Mark Spybey is back after a few years of silence from his central project, Dead Voices on Air. FLtM sees Spybey pulling back a bit from the more "band" oriented DVOA releases of the late '90s, early '00s. Here he recalls the musical imagery and tonal palette of early releases like Shap and New Words Machine, while maintaining an updated sound - this album doesn't sound like it was recorded over a weekend on a 4-track (not to belittle the genius of the first three albums, but Spybey definitely seems to have embraced some new studio techniques - this material sounds much more crisp than the early material).


Loscil - Stases

I have a love hate relationship with Loscil. I quite enjoy the drones present on many of his releases, but in most cases the rhythm section dulls the effect of the beautiful drones - Sumbers suffers from Monolake-wannabe tech-dub drum kit overuse. Here, Scott Morgan devotes the sound to (extremely) minimalistic sine-wave drones that float pleasantly in the surrounding air, and are not tied down to any repetitive "dance" rhythms - leave that to the aforementioned Monolake and platEAU.



I don't often listen to music during the night as I sleep, but during short naps I often have the stereo cranked to something either droney or minimalistic.

What do you sleep to?