#the article title just sounded like a bizarre band name

[blandalibi]

pitchfork

#lols #the article title just sounded like a bizarre band name #who the f is fat white family anyway #and more importantly who the f even cares #shitpost #pitchfork #shitfork

[thestylesindependent]

The following is an excerpt from A Field Guide to Internet Boyfriends: Meme-Worthy Celebrity Crushes From A to Z (Running Press) by Esther Zuckerman, senior entertainment writer at Thrillist. Opinions expressed are those of the author.

It’s virtually impossible to dig into the history of celebrity crushes without discussing boy bands. Stemming back to the days of the Beatles, boy bands have been crush incubators, known as much for their music as for their ability to pose on posters that hang on teenage bedroom walls. While the modern idea of boy bands existed before the ’90s, the decade turned boy bands into an industry with the likes of Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC eliciting mobs of screaming fans. For the first decade of the 2000s—after the leftovers from the ’90s faded from relevance—it seemed like the era of the boy band was over. And then a couple of lads from England—and one from Ireland—came along.

One Direction was not born organically. Each member of the fivesome auditioned for The X Factor as a solo act. Then Simon Cowell had a genius idea: Individually, they would probably generate some amount of buzz. Together, they would be unstoppable. Cowell was right. One Direction mania jumped across the pond and initiated a new era of boy band worship. This group was different from its ’90s predecessors. They were shaggy and didn’t really dance. But their fans were also different. These were kids raised by the internet, and they expressed their love for Harry Styles, Louis Tomlinson, Zayn Malik, Liam Payne, and Niall Horan as such. Stanning for One Direction involved slash fiction and Tumblr.

But when the time came, One Direction faced an age-old boy band question: What happens when they break up? Who becomes famous? For years, the pinnacle of post–boy band success had always been Justin Timberlake, crying a river all over the radio. (He also found controversy along the way. No, we will never forgive him for throwing Janet Jackson under the bus at the Super Bowl.) But who becomes the Joey Fatone? One thing was always certain: Harry Styles was a goddamn star. Styles had always been the likeliest candidate for post-One D fame. He was the most rambunctious of the group, as at home palling around on talk shows as he was crooning on the stage.

Still, no one could have predicted what he was about to unleash. Styles, on his own, somehow surpassed the prom¬ise of his early career. The individual that emerged was like the love child of David Bowie and Stevie Nicks, all flowing blouses, wide-legged pants, and funky vibes. He occupies a space in between the masculine and the feminine and is an ally without being obnoxious about it.

When he left the womb of One Direction, his goal was to write his own material. The sound that emerged was not Timberlake’s white boy soul or the radio-ready pop of his bandmate Zayn Malik. Instead, it was a throwback hybrid of folk rock and pop—not a complete copy of an era that was not his own, but more indebted to his predecessors than his contemporaries.

The narrative around Harry Styles is that he is a Very Good Boy. It starts with his devotion to his mother, with whom he is reportedly very close. More proof of his sweet¬heart status can be found in the story about how he ended up being a polite houseguest to his friend The Late Late Show with James Corden producer Ben Winston for twenty months. As his star was rising in One Direction, he was crashing with an Orthodox Jewish family. “That period of time, he was living with us in the most mundane suburban situation,” Winston once explained. “No one ever found out, really. Even when we went out for a meal, it’s such a sweet family neighborhood, no one dreamed it was actually him. But he made our house a home. And when he moved out, we were gutted.”

It’s anecdotes like this—revealed in the singer’s first Rolling Stone cover story, written by none other than Almost Famous director Cameron Crowe—that frame Styles as a superstar who is relatively down to earth, a nice person who cares about being good to those around him. I mean, one of the songs on his recent album Fine Line is titled “Treat People with Kindness.” Styles once said: “There are others. People who are successful, and still nice. It’s when you meet the people who are successful and aren’t nice, you think: What’s yer excuse? Cos I’ve met the other sort.”

Styles gives off the impression that if you were to hang out with him you’d probably have a pretty pleasant and slightly wild time. Profiles of Styles tend to include stories about parties on beaches where nudity or clothes swapping is involved. He’s spoken about how doing mushrooms influenced his latest record, Fine Line, and once led him to bite off the tip of his tongue. But even though that detail sounds like it might belong in an outtake from a seedier history of rock ’n’ roll—think: Mötley Crüe—it’s bizarrely wholesome coming from Styles, who has gone out of his way to promote a message of inclusion.

Though he’s publicly only been linked to women, he’s never exactly declared himself straight, either, and has alluded to bisexuality in his lyrics. One time, he declared, “We’re all a little bit gay, aren’t we?” Regardless of how he himself identifies, he’s made it a mission to promote a safe-for-all environment at his shows. On one tour stop, he took note of a girl in the crowd’s sign which declared she was going to come out to her parents because of him. He asked her mom’s name, quieted the room, and shouted, “Tina, she’s gay,” triumphantly. It’s an especially welcome development for someone whose early celebrity was defined by slash fiction with which some of his bandmates were openly uncomfortable.

His style started to evolve with his own fluidity as well. He took to wearing ruffles and low-cut shirts with wide-legged trousers. The effect was circus ringmaster mixed with ’70s Laurel Canyon chic. There’s a cheekiness to the look, evidenced by photo shoots in which he affects like he just told a dirty joke. He has said he dresses this way not because he’s trying to allude to anything, just because he thinks it looks cool. And, the thing is, it does.

Harry Styles may have been made in the confines of the boy band universe, but when he struck out on his own, his message became freedom. He makes the music he wants, wears the clothes he wants, and encourages everyone around him to love who they want—even if that’s just Harry Styles.

#harry styles #a field guide to internet boyfriends #nov2020 #billboard

[covtocov]

Cornflake Girl

Let’s talk about Cornflake Girl, shall we? This was the song that started it all and inspired this blog and we're gonna get into WHY (kind of, don't expect anything too deep, this is gonna get goofy).

If you don't know this song, it's fuckin great.

Cornflake Girl - Tori Amos (1994)

Tori Amos, a legend out of North Carolina (and somewhat honorary citizen of the UK), released the song "Cornflake Girl" in 1994. The song was released as a single, then later featured as the eighth track on her second studio album, Under the Pink.

Influenced in part by a recent exposure to reggae music, discussions of female genital mutilation, and Alice Walker's novel, Possessing the Secret of Joy, this song addresses the concept of the "cornflake girl," women who would hurt other women despite a close personal relationship, often to appease some patriarchal construct. This referred, in part, to the fact that the ratio of raisins to cornflakes in breakfast cereal is much lower, making "raisin girls" harder to find - "Thought it was a good solution/Hanging with the raisin girls."

(Fun bonus fact, she is not saying "rabbi," but "Rabbit," the name of her friend, a "fantastic, magical creature" who lives in the woods with their partner, Fox.)

"Cornflake Girl" reached #4 on the UK singles charts, paving the way for later hits off Under the Pink including "God," "Pretty Good Year," and "Past the Mission." A lovely video discussing more about these ideas can be found here. Amos released both an American and a UK version of the music videos, both which are definitely worth seeing if you haven't.

Now...let's talk about some covers.

Cornflake Girl - Florence and the Machine (2018)

This is the cover I heard this radio on the morning. The intro came on and, not seeing what the song was, I was like '...uh...who stole the intro to Cornflake Girl?"

The answer to that question would be Florence Welch, who covered the song in September 2018 as an exclusive release for Spotify.

So let's get into the nitty gritty.

(All of these qualities are being measured in comparison to the original song, and are my opinions, so with that disclaimer out of the way, come with me and we'll be in a land of PURE IMAGINATION.)

Listenability: 4/5

It's a good cover. This version is much smoother and less choppy than the original...though whether that's a plus or a minus is completely up to the listener's discretion. As a fan of Tori's ability to really fuck you up mid-song (wait, this was just in a fucking 4/4 and now it's in 3/4?! Or maybe it's 2/3, I don't know shit about time keeping, I just know I'm distressed), I would say...not quite as good as the original. Sorry, Flo.

Originality: 2/5

Ahhhhhhh it's just pretty much a nice, safe homage to Tori. The instruments are all pretty evocative of the original song, Florence's vocals are absolutely beautiful, but she really does follow the same cadences as Amos does. Nice use of the occasional drum, though.

Integrity to Original: 4/5

I mean, it's hard to say anything else when this is almost a direct copy of the original. To my knowledge, Welch hasn't gone on the record saying anything about this particular cover, but as an artist who was almost certainly influenced by Amos (this is a total uninformed claim on my part, but like...fuck, they are both redheaded indie mythical wood deities in their own right, so they've probably consorted in the moonlight at least once), I would say she was probably well aware of the intention of this song. What I really appreciate about this version is the clarity of the lyrics - Amos is notoriously tricksy with her pronounciations - which allows this truly haunting song to be brought home even more.

Does this Cover Not Bum Me Out: 5/5

Not bummed out. Love Florence. Love Tori. They are both magical. This cover did make me want to make this blog to explicitly talk about covers that had more theoretical potential, so ironically, it got me more hyped.

Overall: 4/5

Good cover. Good Song. Could have done more with it, but only because we've come to expect so much more from you, Florence.

Cornflake Girl - Jawbox (1996)

In 1996, Jawbox, an alternative rock band from Washington, D.C., released their cover of "Cornflake Girl" on their fourth and final self-titled album, Jawbox.

Originally, the band didn't take the song particularly seriously in their repertoire. In an 2015 article from AV club, frontman J. Robbins admitted that the cover had started as a goof, but became serious enough that the group made a music video of the cover (see above).

Listenability: 3.5/5

I actually like this cover a lot. It's got some of the 90s/2000s grunge rock, wall-of-sound element, while still being recognizable as the song we know and love. It's a jam (a slow-jam, but a jam nonetheless). I do feel as though it lose a bit of the fun instrumentality of the original in the cover, but overall, would definitely make the roadtrip mix.

Originality: 4/5

Jawbox does a lot of very cool things with this. It definitely leans more alt-rock than indie-pop, which I think gives those drops in the song a real kick. The stutter-step rhythm is a really good addition, and I think it makes a nice homage to Tori's style, which often plays around with rhythm in similar ways.

Integrity to Original: 3/5

I'm gonna play this card: I don't think it has quite the same impact coming from a dude. He does not know what it means to be a cornflake, nor a raisin girl. The music video mostly seems like a series of bizarre images that seem to - probably jokingly - take the "cornflake" imagery pretty literally, with someone being force-fed milk from a tube and someone's soft tummy being poked with a spoon (also, a dude with his mouth full of pennies, so who the fuck knows). Not all covers have to say the same thing the original was saying, or anything at all for that matter, but for this one, I'm gonna land right in the middle for ?????

Does this Cover Not Bum Me Out: 4/5

Nah, not really! Besides the fact men are involved (always a bummer) (jk) (or am I?), I enjoyed the change of pace.

Overall: 3.5/5

Solid cover. Loud. Wall of music. Still couldn't dance to it. Nice level of angst. Too many men involved.

Cornflake Girl - Imogen Heap (2010)

A one time, live performance! In 2010, Imogen Heap covered "Cornflake Girl" in Melbourne, Australia. The performance was an auction item for the charity Concern Worldwide; the winning bidder got a chance to meet Heap and receive "A Song Just for You." Heap offers her own unique interpretation of the song, which can be seen in the video aboce.

Listenability: 2/5

This is due MAINLY to the fact that this is a live performance. A more polished, recorded version would probably actually be pretty killer. Still probably not a 'have it on in the background, good for the party mix' kind of song, but definitely a get kinda stoned and listen to it on repeat a couple times song.

Originality: 5/5

Amazing range of sounds and instruments she's able to play with since she's performing electronically/has an array of instruments on stage. Fantastic use of double tracking and creating her own vocal loops on the spot. She really makes the song her own in this performance.

Integrity to Original: 3/5

I do really think this is in the spirit of the original, and she plays with an similar set of instruments that Amos herself uses while incorperating her own flair. The lyrics feel a little bit throwaway, which is kind of a shame, because honestly, Tori Amos is nothing if not an incredible lyricist. That being said, most electoric music (in my experience) is more about the instrumentation/sampling, so this makes some sense from Heap, I think.

Does this Cover Not Bum Me Out: 4/5

Yeah, it's cool. She takes some real risks with this cover, and I think for the most part, they pay off.

Overall: 4/5

You do you, Imogen. It's a cool cover. It's neat. I dig it. Do your dance. Do some fun looping things. Wear your hair like Bart from Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (jk, she wears her hair like you). Dig it.

Cornflake Girl - Noah Hawley & Jeff Russo (2018)

Legion, an FX series based on the Marvel character David Haller (aka Legion) (surprise surprise) first debuted in February 2017. The show revolves around David, who is diagnosed with schizophrenia at a young age, only to find out in his thirties that there may be much more to his mental illness than he'd previously thought.

This cover of "Cornflake Girl" was featured in the finale of Legion Season 2. I have not personally gotten this far in the show yet (it's good, but a little exhausting and hard to binge for me, so much withholding information), but I watched the clip and it makes no sense to me, so that's a start!

Listenability: 3/5

It pretty much sounds exactly like a Coldplay song, so depending on how you feel about Coldplay, this could go either way. I'm mid-road.

Originality: 2/5

I mean, eh. They make the chorus a minor key and put in some synths. It would play well over the trailer. I bet it will in the future.

Integrity to Original: 2/5

I feel like this is one of those many cases where people just take the lines This is not real/This is not really happening/You bet your life it is and they're like THAT COULD APPLY TO THIS FUCKED UP SITUATION and you know what you're right it does well done gold star for you.

Does this Cover Not Bum Me Out: 1/5

Definitely a bummer. Bumming hard listening to this on repeat.

Overall: 2/5

Is it BAD? No. You know what it is? Meh. Just meh.

#cornflake girl #tori amos #florence + the machine #florence welch #imogen heap #jawbox #under the pink #noah hawley #jeff russo #legion #ctc #review

[kvlt-ov-romance-blog]

The History of American Black Metal

[I wrote this article out of pure passion for the genre in July of 2012. It can be read on my deviantART page, Fatal-Nostalgia]. Black metal has a rich history, primarily one of European descent. Although it was Venom who coined the genre's name with their 1982 release "Black Metal," it was not for awhile until the genre became what it is known for: Darkness, hatred, aggression, atmosphere, forests and nature worship, and all that frostbitten stuff. The earliest black metal releases date back to 1983, when Hellhammer released their album "Death Fiend." They released a rehearsal demo in 1982, and a total of three albums in 1983, but the previously mentioned is held with the highest regards, as it came first. Influence then came from bands such as Sodom, Outrage and Nasty Savage. It was in 1984 when Bathory released their first album, "Bathory." It was primitive, aggressive, and thrashy. In my opinion, this is where black metal was truly birthed. We can see though that black metal in Europe was growing in the eighties, but black metal in America was quite scarce. The only American artists releasing albums in the vein of black metal were rather short lived bands who generally only made demos. NME were at the forefront of the proto-USBM movement, but a few lesser known bands were around too. Angel Death and Hatred were among the first couple of artists to release material vaguely reminiscent of black metal. Angel Death released a demo in 1986 "Death to Christianity," incredibly amateur and with more elements of eighties thrash than black metal. Hatred, who formed in New Jersey in 1984, released a demo in 1985, but it was their 1986 demo "Drowning in Afterbirth" that got more attention, at least among truly hardcore metal fans. Though more focused on a grindcore like sound, and undeniably amateur, it at least had the spirit of typical "demo metal bands," which have always been prevalent in the genre. Majesty, Bestial War, Goatlord, and a very small selection of virtually unheard of bands continued to make virtually unheard of demos between 1986 and 1987. A lot of these American metal bands were playing death or thrash at this time, not so much influenced by Norwegian scenes either. By the nineties, black metal in America wasn't necessarily as huge as in Scandinavia and Europe, obviously, but black metal bands actually worthy of carrying the title (rather than being thrash or death metal with some somewhat vague similarities) started to emerge. There was no one band or label that really started American black metal, more like various groups in general, who influenced each other greatly. The most obvious were Judias Iscariot, Inquisition, Absu, and Grand Belial's Key. Bands like I Shalt Become, Averse Sefira, and Demoncy gained more attention in later years, but their influence on early American black metal was important nonetheless. The nineties bands were starting to sound very similar to the Scandinavian second-wave bands. 1990 was a great year for black metal internationally. Canada's Blasphemy made their debut album "Fallen Angel of Doom," which now has a cult following. This was a definite turning point for black metal, which now had even more reason to be dark, aggressive, and black, white, and red in visual themes. As a result, New York band Profanatica were probably the first Americans to release a "trve" black metal demo in 1990, two actually.They clearly showed visual, aesthetic and especially lyrical influence of Scandinavian black metal, and were a truly blasphemous band for their time. The band was very outrageous too, and their antics as well as their music helped set them apart from other emerging bands. By 1992, demo tapes were starting to gain circulation among the metal community. Not just of Profanatica of course, but fresh new bands like Von, who released "Satanic Blood" that year. It was repetitive, hypnotic, raw, and maybe even not necessarily meant to be taken with total seriousness. Nonetheless, it became incredibly influential to early American black metal. It got reissued in 1999 and 2001 as a matter of fact, and Von's 2003 compilation album of the same name is now highly sought after. I would say "A Blaze in the Northern Sky" by Darkthrone, released in 1992, was the earliest turning point for black metal as we know it. It gained a wide ranging audience, and overtime has become considered a masterpiece by many. Raw aggression was now key to black metal. Judas Iscariot, the one man band of Akhenaten, came out with a demo in 1992 as well, taking cues from bands like Darkthrone and Von, but it was too rough to gain much appreciation in comparison to later work such as 1999's "Heaven in Flames." By 1993, more bands than ever were getting into American black metal, probably due to the emergence of Burzum, who released "Aske" that year. Tape trading American black metal now became international, proof that the scene was growing. In my own opinion, it was in 1994 when the first landmark of American black metal was released. "Barathrum: V.I.T.R.I.O.L" by Absu. Although Absu are now primarily known for being blackened thrashers, their debut is a stunning mixture of black and death metal, with especially competent drumming. The timing was perfect for Absu, considering Darkthrone, Mayhem, Emperor, and of course Burzum all made masterpieces that year, solidifying black metal as a reputable and important genre in the global metal community. Absu must have realized their early success because the following year they released "The Sun of Tiphareth," a major improvement on their part. This was where the band began experimenting with black and thrash combinations. Three vocalists were used on the album for various parts, creating a very diverse and intense mix. I would say that Usurper, who formed in Chicago, were the most influenced by Absu at the time. They upped the thrash and death metal influences and created "Diabolosis," and though it wasn't necessarily as black of an album as it could have been, the sound was there. Equinox, Naked Whipper, Black Funeral, Ritual, and others took inspiration from these early black metal bands such as Absu, and it was clear that by 1995, black metal was here to stay in America. 1996 was a good year for American black metal as well, with Judas Iscariot finally releasing more competent material, and new bands emerging. Hell,1994-1996 had to have been the most important couple of years for early black metal as a whole. Burzum, Sacramentum, Blut Aus Nord, Kvist, Forgotten Woods, and virtually every early champion of the second wave were all releasing albums those years; it was like a worldwide black metal festival, and America was finally being invited. 1998 saw America start to take on more independence and uniqueness from Scandinavian black metal. Likewise, black metal in Europe was spreading beyond the birthplaces such as Norway. Although Inquisition formed in 1988 in Colombia, Dragon was born in the US, and the band moved back to the US by 1996 anyway. They focused a lot on thrash and did not release their first acclaimed album until 1998. But because of that album, they were the proof in the pudding that American black metal bands could be different and successful without undermining black metal's true form. Inquisition were most noted for their croaky, bizarre vocal styling mixed with a highly occultish, doom and thrash laced black metal atmosphere. It was unexpected, and certainly polarized fans more used to vocals like Darkthrone's, but most eventually recognized the individuality of the style. It seems to me that between 1998 and 1999, American black metal bands finally mastered combining the Scandinavian style with their own unique twists. Demoncy for example took a major influence from Beherit, but added more death-doom elements to the sound on "Joined in Darkness." Averse Sefira took a slightly more technical approach to black metal. Symphonic black metal was also growing slowly but surely in the country as well. But what would the future hold for American black metal? The new styles of sound being practiced by bands was welcome by many, but others wanted to retain a more traditional approach and worried that the future of black metal would be compromised by "impurities" such as genre mixing. Unfortunately for those purists, by 2000, black metal was definitely changing. Artists like Craft, Gorgoroth, and Paysage d'Hiver were still keeping almost completely true to the pure origins of the genre, but many bands were now interested in developing their sound further. Enslaved started to experiment with progressive metal, and bands like Abyssic Hate began to develop depressive black metal. New horizons were just up ahead for black metal. In post-nineties America, no band took more advantage of this than Weakling. Their only album "Dead as Dreams" was a masterpiece of atmospheric black metal, with long playing tracks, technical skill, and screeching vocals, it was an album that many reacted to with awe, but also with confusion. To this day it still polarizes many; some see no American bands having managed to capture the sound, and others still see it as over-hyped. Regardless, Weakling's influences quickly spread and many saw Weakling as the most maturely developed black metal band America had to offer at the time, even if they did technically disband quickly. Partially owed to Weakling, 2002 onwards saw a rise in kvltists worst nightmare: Bands that were no longer focusing on the "pure themes" of early black metal. California even started to become interested in the black metal scene; those hippies and Indie kids, oh dear Satan, no! Xasthur, an artist who would soon, for better or worse be the artist many Europeans pictured when thinking of American black metal, released his first album at this time, focusing more on themes of depression than traditional hatred and Satanism. Ludicra released their debut album "Hollow Pslams," a very progressive album, lacking a whole lot of raw, frostbitten elements that originally made black metal what it was. Before they became so controversial for being "hipsters," bands such as Velvet Cacoon and Nachtmystium also started to churn out albums. American black metal was progressing, moving away from stagnant traditionalism and purism. 2003 even saw more influence from punk rock in some black metal artists like Bone Awl, and the esoteric VLE started producing what can only be described as rather uplifting black metal and ambiance of sorts. In 2004, Velvet Cacoon then released "Genevieve." The Portland based band still hadn't broken out into controversy among the black metal community, but now they were getting some attention for sounding more unique. This was arguably the first "blackgaze" album as it was made even before Alcest's major albums. In other words, it combined a strong, fuzzy, almost shoegaze like influence into a watery black metal sound. The same year, Krieg released "The Black House," and covered The Velvet Underground's song "Venus in Furs;" even sixties pop music was starting to have an influence on black metal now.  Wolves in the Throne Room released their first album. They had yet to find their trademark "Cascadian" sound, but were obviously inspired by Weakling on this album. The Cascadian black metal scene is a style of American black metal with from the Cascade region, with a strong emphasis on nature. More than that, it is generally less Satanic and individualist. Many Cascadian bands have adopted leftist beliefs such as anarchism, environmentalism and socialism, and many refrain from wearing corpse paint. Clearly, this set off a lot of purists who saw black metal being misrepresented and weakened. And although Wolves in the Throne Room are considered the originators of Cascadian black metal, 2004 also saw Echtra's debut album "Burn it All Away," a more subdued, sludge-pace-like style of black metal that would surely influence the likes of future Cascadian bands; of course Echtra themselves are now considered one of the main Cascadian bands as well. At any rate, the rise of Cascadian black metal should have been anticipated as a logical progression of the genre. Between the hypnotic nature of Weakling's style, the increasing prevalence of progressive and ambient influences, and even the geographical spread of black metal more west toward California, where genres like post-rock were so influential at the time, it was only natural. Despite generally not being Pagan black metal, the Cascadian bands do share similar lyrical themes and ideas with some of the nature worshiping Pagan bands of Europe. They are often also influenced by various forms of folk music, one of the most organic genres. And speaking of organic, they still sing of deeply emotional themes such as isolationism and rejection of modern society. All of these themes of Cascadian black metal, mixed with the fact the bands are clearly competent and forward thinking, should prove they are in actuality, fully aligned with black metal, not "hipster offshoots" as some believe. 2005 was another important year for American black metal. American musicians finally started gaining more attention as individuals as well. Twilight was formed as a supergroup with members from Leviathan (Wrest released "Lurker of Chalice" that year as well, a stunning mixture of ambiance and black metal that has become critically acclaimed), Nachtmystium, Krieg, and Isis. Bands were of course developing more as well. Cobalt took an influence from Southern sludge and war, Leech emerged as another important Cascadian styled band, and Frost Like Ashes even became a semi-successful Christian metal band. Dominick Fernow's sideproject Vegas Martyrs was one of the first mixtures of noise and black metal in America as well. By 2006, Wolves in the Throne Room developed their trademark, shimmering, nature inspired sound on "Diadem of 12 Stars," Nachtmystium developed a mixture of psychedelics and black metal, Wrath of the Weak mixed noisy drone and shoegaze like sound with harsh black metal, Fauna released "Rain," one of the most ambient and nature inspired black metal albums in America at that point, and Pagan black metal was starting to gain more attention in America at this time as well with artists such as Wolfhetan. I would say that it was 2007 however where America became truly remarkable and unique for it's modern black metal. Globally, 2007 was a year of great releases from artists like Deathspell Omega, Shining, Gris, and Drudkh. There were essentially more influences for Americans to cite than ever before. "Two Hunters" by Wolves in the Throne Room was released that year, and it became perhaps the most influential, and one of the most important American black metal albums the last few years. It's long, swirling ambient passages with nearly operatic female singing and transcendentalistic themes went on to inspire the Cascadian scene in full force. Krohm took on more influence from that scene, Fauna released another album "The Hunt," and other bands such as Velnias took note. Ash Pool, another project from Fernow, made noise music and black metal even more important at the time too, and that showed in artists such as The Mausoleums. But for the small rise in noise inspired black metal, an even larger rise of ambient and drone inspired black metal began too. Servile Sect and the prolific Njiqahdda were among the most important ambient black metal releases of the year in America, as they mixed hazy, psychedelic drone with hypnotic black metal to create their own unique style. Still, for all the innovations of American black metal, it wasn't reaching a wide American audience at the time. 2007 saw bands like WITTR gain more critical acclaim, but 2008 saw even more diversity thanks to last years various efforts from other bands as well as "Two Hunters." Krallice released their self-titled album, a shimmering, technical display of black metal and progressive power. The Weakling influences were still coming through, and now, even influences from bands like Sonic Youth, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, and other Indie favorites were showing more clearly in many modern American black metal acts. Falls of Rauros took influence from neofolk, Panopticon took a more radical leftist stance, Somnolence took a post-punk influence, and Pyramids took an incredibly obvious influence from shoegaze that year. Depressive black metal was also on the rise. Once again, American black metal was no longer "trve black metal," but less people seemed to care, aside from mainly Europeans. There were still plenty of older, more purely black metal bands releasing material those years as well, but the majority of attention was focused on the young bands like WITTR, who released "Black Cascade" as well the following year; 2009 was definitely the year Cascadian black metal set itself out to be huge. Alda, L'Acephale, Fell Voices, Ash Borer, Panopticon, Aldrag, a myriad of new Cascadian releases for 2009. Their nature loving and left leaning philosophy went on to influence Oaks of Bethel, a sideproject from members of Njiqahdda, and other artists such as Deafest, who took a post-rock approach to the genre. Cascadian black metal wasn't as obvious in it's shoegaze influences, but the "blackgaze" style was also gaining a strong emergence this year as well. Velvet Cacoon, Draugadróttinn, Lonesummer, Benighted in Sodom, and other American artists took a strong cue from a "blackgaze" like sound. Technically speaking, many never necessarily took direct influences from shoegaze, though; such is the case for Niege of Alcest, who said the similarities were somewhat of a coincidence (even if he is a fan of the style and of artists such as Sigur Ros). Regardless, American black metal was starting to now reach a somewhat more mainstream audience, appealing to the Indie crowd especially, at least in terms of Cascadian and "blackgaze" style, perhaps a little bit of the noise style of black metal. The Indie crowd never embraced "trve" black metal, nor claimed to for that matter, however, so the hatred they have received is unjust in those regards. At any rate, artists such as Abigail Williams, who combined symphonic black metal with metalcore influences, and Eyes of Noctum (featuring Nicholas Cage's son of all people) were starting to make black metal somewhat more accessible to the average metal fans of the time as well. Although bands of this nature are scorned by purists, their influences should be noted nonetheless. But of course, not all American black metal fans were happy with accessibility, or nature loving music. Many still wanted the hateful, Satanic style of the early black metal acts to once again reign supreme. Enter the Black Twilight Circle, a group of American black metal artists, inspired by earlier circles such as the original Black Circle of Norway, Les Legions Noires of France, and to some extent, Blazebirth Hall and The Temple of Fullmoon, national socialist circles of Russia; the Black Twilight Circle are not a national socialist group, however (a few bands have some somewhat prideful lyrics, but nothing overly violent like the Russian circles). Many of the bands in the circle originated in the early 2000s, but it wasn't until 2009 when the Black Twilight Circle released a compilation album under the Crepúsculo Negro label. Volahn, Axeman, Arzimenda, Kallathon, Ashdautas, and Kuxan Suum were all featured on the compilation. Dark, mysterious and utterly hateful black metal, a true return to form while still being innovative. Each band offers something unique, such as influences from thrash and crust in Axeman, fast shredding beats and guitars in Volahn, psychedelics in Kuxan Suum, lengthy and hateful atmospheres in Arzimenda, and so forth. The Black Twilight Circle has supposedly grown to include other artists such as Tukaaria, Shataan, Odz Manouk, Mata Mata, Glossolalia, The Haunting Presence, Dolorvotre, Absum, and Blue Hummingbird on the Left, all truly unique. Being a highly exclusive black metal circle, it's unclear what other information there is on the bands and labels associated, but nonetheless, they have gained some worldwide attention for successfully rejuvenating raw black metal in America. Ten years after Weakling's debut influenced a wide variety of American black metal acts, American black metal has still continued to develop beyond belief. For those wondering why Portland based band Agalloch wasn't mentioned yet, it's primarily because everything since "Pale Folklore" hadn't really been "black metal enough." I am not one of those people who denies Agalloch a spot in the black metal community of course, but their earlier work was more folk metal, doom metal, and a mixture of other genres than purely black metal. At any rate, 2010 marked Agalloch's highly acclaimed album album "Marrow of the Spirit." Up until that point, Agalloch had been at the forefront of modern American metal in general, receiving copious amounts of praise. Many of the Cascadian bands took a strong influence from Agalloch's folk and doom styled music, and seasonally appropriate themed lyrics. In turn, Agalloch took a slight hint at "blackgaze" on "Marrow of the Spirit," as well as some more post-rock influences. Of course they kept parts of their neofolk and folk metal influences, but there was less doom and progressive metal influences. The reason this album is so important is because it shows how influential American black metal had become, especially on a band that had already established itself with such highly acclaimed status. The drumming on the album was done by Ludicra member, Aesop Dekker, partially accounting for a more blackened sound to Agalloch. Nonetheless, Agalloch still didn't sound like any raw black metal, but instead a good mixture between clean production and atmospheric, emotional rawness; they thus proved once and for all - not that it hadn't been proved before - that black metal does not have to be extremely lo-fi to be successful in capturing mood and atmosphere. Our recurring sweethearts of Inquisition also made an album in 2010, their first in three years. But 2010 was really the year of "blackgaze," especially when Alcest released another gem of the genre. This heavily inspired America especially, as artists such as Woe, Castevet, Finnr's Cane, Westering, Airs, and others started to release some "blackgaze" of their own. By this point, it should be evident that American black metal is an adapter of sorts; it finds something interesting happening overseas and makes it it's own. Yet at the same time, it's also a trendsetter of it's own, having developed Cascadian black metal and had a long time history of unique acts like Weakling. Just a personal note, 2010 also saw Darkwor release their first album, which I take some pride in because they are a band located really close to my hometown. Their album was a chaotic and hateful black metal masterpiece, unique for New England based black metal which is generally more nature and folk inspired. Anyway, 2010 also saw an increase in "war metal" or "bestial metal," which is heavily aggressive blackened death metal. Nightbringer, Von Goat, Nocturnal Blood, Black Witchery, and many others took strong cues from the style, and labels such as Nuclear War Now! Productions therefore gained more attention. Velvet Cacoon, who had disbanded in 2009, formed a new project called Clair Cassis in 2009 and finally released a full length in 2010. It sounded quite similar to their original project. But this is still significant. Velvet Cacoon are now famous for essentially fooling the black metal scene. People were initially skeptical of any bands from Portland claiming to be black metal (just go watch Portlandia and you'll see why), but Velvet Cacoon were different. They were mysterious, claiming to be inspired by drugs and decadence, and they had a unique, hazy sound. They started rumors about themselves, such as that they played a "diesel harp," and there were various incidents related to the band. They stole material from an ambient producer, Korouva, and sold it off as their own. When they finally came clean, they claimed almost all of it was done in the name of obtaining drugs. They also claimed they often didn't even really try when they made their music. Fans were divided. Many saw it as an act of borderline dadaist genius; fool the uptight black metal elitists into liking everything they hated and prove how easy it is for the black metal scene to fall into deceit and image worship. Others just saw the band as assholes of course. Either way, Velvet Cacoon remain talked about by plenty of international black metal fans. America has been lacking in a series of newsworthy events related to black metal. There were, as far as I know, no church burnings, and acts of violence have been more randomized, and certainly not between legendary people either. Wrest of Leviathan was recently charged for abusing his girlfriend, but otherwise, you never hear the same level of gossip and speculation as with Varg or Euronymous with American black metal artists. 2011 was for many purists, the year black metal truly died. Or at least died again. Who knows how many deaths black metal has had with those purists, right? The most famous incident was with Liturgy's frontman, Hunter Hunt-Hendrix. They released "Aesthetica" in 2011. Liturgy is a chaotic, energetic black metal band who plays with a strong influence from noise rock. The band claims to play a style of black metal known as "transcendental black metal," based on writings from Hunter. Liturgy were initially criticized for not being "metal enough" based not just on their music, but also on their image; they look like average Indie kids to some extent. But that wasn't what made people talk. It was when Hunter gave an interview during the Scion festival attempting to talk about his philosophy of "transcendental black metal" that people became polarized. He said how the band doesn't like negativity, and how they are actually rather optimistic people. He rambled on about his philosophy, but it really didn't come out in a coherent manner. In other words, Liturgy became the definition of a hipster black metal band. Although Hunter has said he is embarrassed by the interview, his and Liturgy's influence is still far reaching, or at least still heavily talked about. Indie darlings at Pitchfork have taken to praising him and Liturgy, and it has become interesting to see a black metal band in the same category, even attending concerts with artists like Sleigh Bells. But Pitchfork's love of Liturgy proves a positive point in my opinion, and that is that black metal performed by people not normally associated with the scene, or with different ideas than just Satanism and hatred, can make for some interesting discussion and of course, some interesting music. By this time, "post-black metal" was being thrown around to apply to bands like Liturgy, Alcest, and Deafheaven. It was especially used among American bands, but even bands like Drudkh had started taking cues from "post" styled metal. The Liturgy incident overshadowed much of 2011's black metal releases, even with artists like Wolves in the Throne Room, who were previously one of the most hated modern black metal artists among the purists. Ultimately, if black metal wishes to continue to thrive, it cannot be so close minded. It is entirely possible to retain the initial rawness and hatred of the second-wave styled black metal while utilizing elements from other sources. Based on the development of American black metal in the last ten years, I foresee that the genre will split into various categories. Many bands will continue to make "pure" black metal, while many more will continue to make "post" black metal. Regardless of what happens, and regardless of the average opinion, American black metal has come a long way since the early demos of the eighties. It has gained massive attention from the European community. To think that American music has influenced early black metal legends is an amazing thing, and it shows just how fast the times change. The media has finally begun to pay attention to black metal as a whole, and so we must make sure we represent ourselves well. People have also realized that black metal is not necessarily a genre of elitism and stagnation, but of great beauty and creative potential. If we as fans and musicians can harness creativity and development, we can make black metal, American and worldwide, even more of a truly great genre than it already is. The history of black metal is rich, but it can only get richer as time marches forward.        

#writing #essay #journalism #culture #underground #style #music #indie #aesthetic #black metal #war metal #thrash metal #heavy metal #death metal #doom metal #drone #sludge metal #post-rock #ambient #noise #blackgaze #shoegaze #occult #dark #kvlt ov romance

[lifeonashelf]

COBAIN, KURT

Dying was definitely the worst thing that ever happened to Kurt Cobain.

That may not read like a particularly brilliant statement. You’re saying: “Taylor, I’m sure if you solicited any random sampling of people to compile a list of the worst things they could imagine happening to them, dying would end up at the top of most of those lists” (although, it would land below “being married to Courtney Love” on mine). However, the reasons I’m positing this in regards to Cobain are only tangentially related to the most common side effect of death being an immediate cessation of one’s mortal presence on this earth. Explanation: Cobain’s too-short life was characterized by profound and abiding existential pain, so in his specific instance I presume ending that life at least came with the not-unwelcome corollary of providing a respite from his suffering. Besides, the manner of his death left ample evidence that he sincerely did not want to be alive anymore, so it’s unlikely he was overly concerned with side effects. In case there’s any misconception that I’m somehow endorsing Kurt Cobain’s suicide, please feel free to text me and I’ll gladly forward you a selfie so you can see the tears that are filling my eyes right now as I revisit the devastating final chapter of a man whose music means the world to me. Yet, somehow, the strip-mining of his memory that began the very day his body was found strikes me as a tragedy which nearly equals what was done to that body.

Tucked away on one of my shelves, you will find a bootleg box set entitled Into the Black (I mean that figuratively; you will not find it—if you really want to see it, I will get it down for you; seriously, don’t start touching my shit). I procured this anthology upon its release in 1994, and back then it had the distinction of being the richest available source of previously-unreleased Nirvana live performances and songs that were never included on any of their albums. Such a find would be largely meaningless today, when a quick internet search can immediately unearth all of those tracks within seconds. But for a distraught fan to whom the prospect of facing a world where there would never be any new Nirvana music again seemed unbearable, Into the Black was an immensely cathartic salve for me at a time when I desperately needed it. The scope of the compendium remains impressive—I think it’s a way better collection than the official With the Lights Out box set that came out 10 years later—and by presenting the included material in chronological order, all the way from Nirvana’s first demo cassette to a complete recording of their final North American concert, the seven hours of tunes on Into the Black provide about the most fitting and comprehensive Kurt Cobain encomium ever delivered.

Which is part of what makes the final track on the anthology arrive like a dagger to the soul and the ears. There really isn’t a name for this closing selection—after all, it isn’t even a song. But the creators of Into the Black had to call it something in the track listing. So they called it exactly what it is: “Courtney Love’s Complete Eulogy For Kurt Cobain.”

This recording was played for a crowd of several thousand despondent fans who gathered in Seattle for a public memorial on April 10, 1994, two days after Cobain’s body was found. Its manifestation occupies a limbo unique to itself, half significant historical document, half ghoulish tabloid spectacle. Though the song “Miss World” was released on March 28, in a very real sense, it was this Courtney Love recital that served as the first proper single from Hole’s Live Through This, which would be released forty-eight hours later and subsequently propel her music career to previously unthinkable heights—a result that arguably stemmed as much from Love’s deft public navigation of her grief process as it did from the fact that Live Through This is a fucking incredible record.

Reactions to “Eulogy” (for lack of a better title) will inevitably vary by listener. If you view Courtney Love as an unfortunate casualty of Kurt Cobain’s war against himself, you will probably hear a shell-shocked widow valiantly facing her worst nightmare. If you view Courtney Love as one of the likely reasons Cobain loaded his shotgun on April 5, 1994, you will probably hear an unhinged harpy using the most intimate words her late husband ever wrote against him in a monstrously demeaning fashion. Over time, I’ve come to rest somewhere in the middle of those two poles, so I don’t quite know what to make of the recording now. What I do know is that I never want to listen to it again, and don’t really need to since it’s still vividly burned into my brain from past spins—I couldn’t bring myself to revisit it while authoring this segment about it. Because even in 1994 when I was playing Into the Black endlessly, even when I was struggling to make sense of something that seemed utterly senseless, and even when the message Love was delivering was allegedly intended for anguished fans just like me, my reaction to that audio was exactly the same as I assume it would be today: I shouldn’t be hearing this.

“Eulogy” essentially features Courtney Love narrating Cobain’s suicide note in its entirety. Since photographs of the document have subsequently surfaced in numerous places, a cursory review plainly reveals that despite Love’s proclamation on the tape that she elected to omit parts of the letter about herself and their daughter Frances “because they’re none of your fucking business”, she does in fact share nearly everything that appears on the page. Irrespective of that, her rationalization is a bizarre one—after all, it can be sensibly argued that nothing in that epistle was really the “fucking business” of anyone outside Cobain’s immediate circle. The mere reading itself denotes a sort of indecent invasion, but it is the peculiar spin the author’s self-appointed spokeswoman put on the broadcast that truly makes it astonishing. Love didn’t simply orate Cobain’s note, she annotated it, interjecting frequently to pose her own biting counterpoints to his words, sometimes leveling these ripostes directly at him, sometimes addressing her running commentary to the royal listening we. Her delivery veers between naked tear-choked agony that will move you no matter how you feel about her, and primal hissing vitriol—at one point on the recording she instructs the entire crowd to call the man they came to mourn “asshole.” It is the sound of a woman purging an entire spectrum of very private emotions in a very public way, it is an unseemly peek under the mortuary drape of a man who had just shot a gaping hole in the hearts of millions, and it is extremely uncomfortable to listen to.

I do not know Courtney Love. I have no desire to know Courtney Love. Only she could tell you how actively she calculated the channeling of her deceased husband’s musical legacy into the birth of her own. I cannot definitively state that Courtney Love exploited Kurt Cobain’s death to make herself famous; it’s not nearly that simple. I can state this again, because it’s true: Live Through This is a fucking amazing record, and it probably would have been a next-level hit even without the supernatural timing of its arrival and the uncanny way several of its key tracks seemed to capture what all of us who were shattered by Cobain’s suicide were feeling at that moment in time. But regardless of her intentions, the transmission she delivered at the Seattle Center on April 10, 1994 was undeniably indecorous. The very circumstance of it feels wrong, and witnessing it via that recording feels even worse. I didn’t want to know what that note said. I wish I didn’t know what that note said. And I wish I could listen to Live Through This—which is, to reiterate, SUCH A FUCKING GREAT RECORD—without inescapably pinpointing it as the moment Courtney Love became the first person to strike gold at Kurt Cobain’s gravesite.

Unfortunately, that was only the beginning of the excavation.

Elsewhere in my apartment, on the bookcase directly to the right of the desk at which I’m sitting, you will also find no fewer than six biographies about Nirvana. In relation to the sum of available material, my library isn’t even close to complete; after a while, I stopped buying every associated text as they were published (once you read a half-dozen volumes about a band that only existed for a half-dozen years, redundancy becomes an issue—also, reading about Nirvana is always a dispiriting experience because no matter how good the book is, you’re inevitably going to reach THAT chapter eventually). Filed next to those is Cobain, a coffee table book which assembles almost every Nirvana-related article that appeared in Rolling Stone during their career. And directly beside that rests an even larger coffee table book entitled Journals. Kurt Cobain is the credited author, which I suppose makes sense, since nearly every word therein is in his handwriting. Nevertheless, that attribution becomes difficult to digest when you consider that the tome was released in 2002—given that Cobain had been dead for 8 years when Journals came out, I’m naturally skeptical about the scope of his involvement in the project.

I have a hard time accepting that this book exists. On one hand, the drawings, correspondence, and scribbled musings which comprise its pages offer a rare and informal glimpse into the mind of one of my favorite songwriters of all time. Yet a much larger part of me can’t discount my impression that by glimpsing these things I have in essence sneaked into Kurt Cobain’s room and picked the lock on his diary. It seems highly improbable he would have ever published this material in this form of his own volition; actually, I suspect he would have been mortified if these logs were leaked while he was alive. The justification, one would suppose, is that Cobain is a singularly iconic figure and remains an object of fascination, therefore any piece of himself he took the time to immortalize in writing has intrinsic value (even a dip recipe he got from his mom, evidently). Except the absence of his agency over this particular venture indicates that the significance of the content showcased in Journals was determined solely by outside agents. Cobain was actually fairly prolific given the brevity of his career—it would take a book roughly the same size as Journals to assemble all of the lyrics he wrote for Nirvana’s catalog. Yet, like any artist, he put most of his work through rigorous internal scrutiny and editorial refinement before he unveiled it to an audience; he was the only person who decided if and when it had value. A lot of the poetry featured in Journals was eventually funneled into Nirvana compositions; those are the pieces we can presume he was ready to share with the world—because he, you know, did share them. But when it comes to the numerous drafts of personal letters that appear throughout the tome, it seems innately obvious he did not want those to be read; if he did, he would have fucking sent them to the people they were addressed to and they wouldn’t still be present in his notebooks to be pilfered.

When the release of this relic was announced, the rabid fan in me was of course curious, and I knew this was an item I wanted in my library. But the altruistic side of me always grappled with that desire; I could never quite concur that Cobain’s inability to object constituted a license for me to read work that he chose to keep to himself. Obviously, Journals was a guaranteed best-seller, which is precisely why it was published (oh, I was never snowed by that “a way for his fans to better understand him” bullshit; I have no doubt “a way for his fans to spend money” was the primary purpose this tome was meant to serve). It certainly has intriguing bits, particularly the sections that show sketches Cobain made for early Nirvana t-shirt designs that were never produced and the numerous mixtape track-listings he itemized (sadly, due to his fondness for bands so deeply obscure they are outside the scope of even a collection as large as mine, I don’t have all the listed tunes to faithfully reproduce any of them for my own listening pleasure).

Other articles such as a grossly-gushy sweethearts note to Courtney Love and a childish screed addressed to MTV are far less interesting to me, since the only parts of Cobain they help me “better understand” are parts I already know far more about than I care to. Good and bad are basically negligible designations here anyway, since the revelatory bits and the patently trivial snippets are all culled from the same invasive pedigree. It certainly didn’t assuage my conflicted feelings about reading Journals when I opened the book and saw that the very first sentence printed in it is, “Don’t read my diary when I’m gone”… a request that becomes somewhat clouded by what Cobain wrote two lines later: “please read my diary… look through my things, and figure me out.” I did look—I looked cover to cover—but since I listened to all of Nirvana’s records long before that, I already had Kurt Cobain figured out about as much as I imagine he wanted myself or any of his fans to. A photocopy that confirms he did ordinary things like pay his phone bill doesn’t do much to augment my appreciation of all the extraordinary things he did.

By exhibiting monumental developments like Cobain’s first stab at the lyrics to “Smells Like Teen Spirit” alongside snippets of humdrum humanity like his jotting down of the 1-800 number for NordikTrack, a chronicle like Journals is ostensibly meant to show that even a man who was exalted as a demigod used to put on his Daniel Johnston shirts one sleeve at a time just like the rest of us. If so, the very existence of Journals negates its own premise, since none of its content would be considered even remotely noteworthy if said content wasn’t scribed by Kurt Cobain—which only advances the misguided hero-worship that plagued his quintessence and encumbered a future suicide victim with spiritual baggage he never welcomed nor desired. Even with my limited understanding of what Kurt Cobain’s art meant to him, I am certain he would never have wanted a book like Journals to happen. Just as I am equally certain that the inflation of his esteem to such excessive heights that his admirers would be itching to read the undisclosed documents he kept in his underwear drawer played a large part in the events of April 5, 1994.

I guess this is as good a time as any to explain why a songwriter who was never a solo artist is the subject of his own entry here—especially since I just chastised the publishers of Journals for giving him special treatment. It’s true that nearly every piece of music Cobain had his hand in was issued under the Nirvana masthead (except for that collaboration with William Burroughs I wrote about a long time ago… but I’m trying to forget that ever came out since it’s not much more enjoyable to listen to than “Eulogy”). Yet, thanks to the same vulturous machinations I’ve been recapping throughout this piece, the Kurt Cobain discography does indeed include one solo album to date. There is an itty-bitty asterisk next to that item, though:

* Kurt Cobain’s solo album came out twenty-one years after Kurt Cobain died.

Oh, and * Kurt Cobain did not participate in the making of Kurt Cobain’s solo album.

Oh, and * Kurt Cobain’s solo album is not technically an album.

Oh, also * Most of the songs on Kurt Cobain’s solo album are not actually songs.

Oh, and lastly * When Kurt Cobain recorded this solo not-album of mostly not-songs, he had no idea that anyone was ever going to hear it.

The sort-of record I’m referring to was assigned the title Montage of Heck, which is needlessly confusing for anyone familiar with Nirvana’s history, since Montage of Heck was originally the title Cobain bestowed upon one of his earliest demo cassettes. The Montage I’m examining in this essay bears no relation to that one; rather, Montage of Heck: The Home Recordings is an ill-considered compilation that was released in conjunction with a congruently-monikered and congruently ill-considered 2015 documentary. Licentiously-hyped as one of the most profound musical portraits ever unveiled, Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck was directed by filmmaker Brett Morgen, who was granted unprecedented access to Cobain’s personal archives and shaped that material into an allegedly insightful study of the artist’s epigrammatic life and shocking death. Since she had already exhausted the potential for monetizing her late husband’s sketchpads, Courtney Love upped the ante for this project by allowing Morgen to use the family’s personal home videos as the film’s major selling point—evidently, neither party gave a shit that two decades earlier Cobain expressed how violated he felt when strangers invaded his private life in a song bluntly entitled “Rape Me”.

I’ll keep my review of the biopic Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck brief—mostly because I didn’t enjoy it at all and the overriding emotion I was left with after watching it was anger. But it is worth mentioning here, since it was similarly levied with the purported intention of making its viewers “better understand” its subject. Strange, then, that the two most memorable moments in the movie are unabashedly salacious, and both are focused on candid glimpses of Courtney Love’s behind-the-scenes comportment rather than her husband’s. If you’re wondering what Love’s breasts looked like in the early-‘90s, or if you relish the notion of watching her toddle around the couple’s apartment in a state of opiated incoherence in the presence of their baby daughter… then, brothers and sisters, this film is the Casablanca of that specific genre. But anyone seeking a meaningful exploration of what kind of person Cobain was outside the limelight is bound for disappointment since Montage mostly underscores his least appealing traits, the unpleasant facets of his humanity that we as fans have trained ourselves to banish from our thoughts as we continue applauding his inimitable artistic contributions. Aspects which, of course, Courtney Love is central to. Her odious presence throughout the documentary, and indeed in Cobain’s orbit, serves as a manifest reminder that a man we lionize for writing some of the most exquisite songs of all time was also deeply in love with a vulgar, revolting succubus. And perhaps this is a key reason why revisiting him via panegyrics like Montage of Heck and Journals always leaves a sour aftertaste—as long as Courtney Love has stewardship over his legacy, the worst thing Kurt Cobain ever did will be always be a principal figure in each new celebration of the best things he did.

In addition to her boobie videos, Love also turned over a box of cassette tapes to Brett Morgen (if memory serves, this batch of recordings was dutifully referred to as a “treasure trove” in every press release about the project I read). Morgen cherry-picked a few bits of music from this lot for usage in his movie, which were naturally cobbled into a soundtrack that was touted to fans as a cache of “previously-unheard music by Kurt Cobain.” Since the filmmaker was ostensibly the one who decided what portions of the tapes to appropriate, he is recognized in Montage of Heck’s liner notes as its “Executive Producer”—a dubious acknowledgement that gives Brett Morgen the distinction of being the only person in the history of audio engineering credited with producing an album whose recording he wasn’t actually present for, by an artist he never even met.    

Morgen’s pastiche job doesn’t merely form the basis of Montage of Heck: The Home Recordings, it is the disc’s entirety. Stripped of any historical provenance generous listeners may feel obligated to apply, what the proffered material basically amounts to is a half-hour of Kurt Cobain getting stoned in his living room and fucking around on a series of out-of-tune guitars. I wasn’t present for Morgen’s listening party, so I can only speculate on how much music was available for him to sift through, or what the stuff he rejected as inadequate sounded like. But this much is clear: the pieces he chose to disseminate on Montage of Heck range from drearily frivolous to blatantly insulting. The disc offers no real insights (unless you didn’t already know Kurt Cobain got high or played guitar, I suppose), and fans searching the conclave for Nirvana songs that might-have-been will merely discover that Cobain was sensible enough not to pursue an inane number called “Burn My Britches” any further than the two-minute segment he toyed with on his couch here.

Perhaps fittingly, the disc opens with the unmistakable bubbling of a bong, which effectively sets the tone for what follows: Cobain yodeling to warm his pipes up before launching into a rudimentary power chord sequence and yodeling over that for a little while for no apparent purpose (at least Morgen gave the cut a suitable title—it’s called “The Yodel Song”). Elsewhere, attempts are made to tie this cycle of doodles into the songwriter’s established canon, such as the inclusion of the promisingly-dubbed “Scoff (Early Demo)”. Yet, while the prospect of hearing a preliminary version of the 7th-best number on Bleach may seem like cause for celebration, the actual track lands like a slap to the face once you hear that this extract which Morgen judged as precious enough for commercial immortality merely consists of Cobain scat-growling gibberish lyrics over the tune’s main riff until the tape unceremoniously cuts off 38-seconds later; identifying this nothing-morsel as a rough draft of the song “Scoff” is akin to calling a piece of paper with the word “It” typed on it a rough draft of A Tale of Two Cities. Such is the caliber of material spotlighted on Montage of Heck: The Home Recordings, a “treasure trove” that would have been better left buried.    

One of the few genuine items of interest among the detritus is “Reverb Experiment”, which consists of three minutes of droning throwaway instrumental noodling, but still sounds kind of cool since a lot of it sounds like the refrain of Slayer’s “Dead Skin Mask”. There’s also a fairly well-formed idea called “Desire” that might have been turned into something striking if its author had chosen to develop it, and the closing number “She Only Lies” is noteworthy since it features Cobain working out an idea on bass guitar instead. Regardless, nothing on Montage of Heck justifies the ballyhoo that accompanied its release, and even the marginally decent pieces are unworthy of mention on their composer’s resume—although, Brett Morgen certainly got a great resume item out of the deal; now he can call himself a “filmmaker / record producer.”

However, this was Kurt Cobain who documented these scraps on the battery-operated boombox in his apartment. And he’s an icon, remember? So—said Brett Morgen and Courtney Love and everyone at Universal Music who had their dollar-bill-mounted fishhooks in the water of this endeavor—Montage of Heck: The Home Recordings shouldn’t be treated like some gratuitous cash-grab collation of idle time-killers which Cobain thought so little of he didn’t bother revisiting most of them again. No, no, no. This is an Event. Try this: Montage captures a peerlessly illustrious artist as his fans have never heard him before, in his rawest, most intimate form, no studio, no audience, just a man and his guitar seizing inspiration out of the ether and channeling it into his instrument as he explores new incarnations of the sound that made Nirvana the band that launched a revolution. Well, hey, that sounds pretty good; we can really shift some units with an idea like that. The only problem is, if we’re going to treat this thing like a legitimate album, it has to have a legitimate hit single we can sell it with. And how do you dig a unicorn out of a pile of lo-fi cassette tapes that live in a shoebox?

Luckily, Brett Morgen found just the solution for this quandary inside that shoebox.

“And I Love Her” was issued with all the buzz of an actual lost Nirvana song—it was even pressed on 7” vinyl like a proper single. It didn’t really matter that the sound quality was wispy, nor that the performance wasn’t particularly polished. This was a recording of Kurt Cobain playing a fucking Beatles tune, dude, and not only was it previously-unavailable, no one even knew it fucking existed. And the internet went apeshit. The cosmic synchronicity of this find couldn’t have been scripted any better: the architect of the band who electrified the zeitgeist in the 1990’s covering the band who electrified the zeitgeist 30 years earlier, arguably the only other rock group in history whose rapid ascension to immortality Nirvana’s was comparable to. The concept alone was glorious, and it wasn’t merely some music nerd’s wetdream—this Moment in musical mythology Actually Happened.

Here’s the thing, though: Kurt Cobain’s rendition of “And I Love Her” only has significance because people desperately wanted it to, NEEDED it to. It was still just a lark the dude recorded in his living room one lazy night, and it still sounds just as slapdash as every other fragmentary living room lark featured on Montage of Heck: The Home Recordings. There isn’t anything especially revelatory about Cobain esteeming The Beatles so highly that he learned to play one of their songs—both his backstory and his discography are liberally sprinkled with evidence he appreciated the Fab Four’s work, and in case you missed the homages there, nearly every piece of literature ever written about Kurt Cobain has helpfully cited the “Beatle-esque hooks” in songs like “About A Girl” and “In Bloom” to underline his unambiguous approbation. Even casual Nirvana fans were surely already well aware that Cobain enjoyed playing songs by musicians he admired—the dozen-or-so covers in the band’s repertoire and the fact that nearly half the tunes which comprised their legendary MTV Unplugged performance weren’t written by Nirvana provided some telling clues on that front.

The level of hype which heralded the arrival of “And I Love Her” (and Montage of Heck as a whole) intimated that a vital missing piece of the Kurt Cobain puzzle had finally been unearthed. Yet the disc supplies nothing more than a disenchanting anticlimax once you actually listen to it and ascertain that the venerated songwriter’s busy-work wasn’t all that impressive. Perhaps this is more a result of a faulty selection process—I’m willing to imagine there is some truly fantastic material on those tapes which Brett Morgen overlooked for whatever reason—but whether or not Cobain’s archives are ripe with undiscovered gems, the resounding impact of The Home Recordings is much the same as that of Journals: nearly everything in that time capsule would be appraised as inconsequential nonsense if it wasn’t Kurt Cobain’s nonsense. Which takes us right back to the pitfalls of deifying any musician to such a degree that every note they ever played is assigned an implied indispensability, even the botched ones that actually make them sound like a less gifted musician than they were.

Besides, we Nirvana fans already got our missing piece. That happened in 2002, with the release of the band’s self-titled greatest hits package. The one I bought despite owning every record which sourced that compilation, solely because there were three minutes and thirty-eight seconds of music on there I had never heard—the one and only known completed and previously-unreleased Nirvana song: “You Know You’re Right”. (Although, Courtney Love had the audacity to debut that tune way back in 1995 when she performed it as part of Hole’s MTV Unplugged set—seriously, sometimes I wonder if every single thing she’s done in the past 25 years has been predicated on a willful and concerted effort to make everyone who loves Nirvana hate her; although, her campaign of terror has made it nearly impossible to even mention Nirvana without also mentioning her, so maybe she’s a fucking genius).

In stark contrast with the nebulous scribbles on Montage of Heck or the interesting but inessential rehearsal tracks which dominated With the Lights Out, “You Know You’re Right” is indeed a revelation of almost religious proportions, a roaring burst of dynamism that is as powerful as anything else in Nirvana’s catalog—the lone tantalizing taste of a fourth record the band would never get to make, a frozen moment of fragile optimism captured just before the world as we knew it ended. “You Know You’re Right” is fucking AWESOME, and its explosive potency is all the more impressive considering that the lone recording of it which exists was essentially the group’s first stab at it. It is one of my absolute favorite songs in a catalog bursting with favorites. And I cried the first time I heard it. And I cried the second time I heard it. And the third… And, 17 years onward, I cried when I listened to it moments ago.

Plenty of Cobain’s tunes have this effect on me. Still, “You Know You’re Right” is a singular case. And I know exactly why that song, above all others, devastates me the most. It’s not because the lyrics are especially poignant, even though they are. It’s not because the track’s intoxicating promise reminds me of precisely how much all of us lost on April 5, 1994, even though it does. The reason “You Know You’re Right” tears my fucking guts out every time I hear it… is because that was it. That was the final song Nirvana recorded. And after it came out, there would never be any more. “You Know You’re Right” was the moment I had to say goodbye to Kurt Cobain forever.

I did that. And I think it’s time for the rest of the world to let him sleep, too.

Over the years, I have accumulated bootlegs of more than 200 Nirvana concerts. Roughly 150 of those shows are phenomenal, and plenty of them are of strong enough audio quality to warrant an official disclosure. That is the true “treasure trove,” a nearly limitless stockpile of unreleased Kurt Cobain recordings that could fuel a supplementary Nirvana release every single year for the rest of human history. And we already know he wanted an audience to hear that music, because he stepped onto the stage and played it for them. Since the continued fracking of his legacy is inevitable, by all means, the Cobain estate should absolutely tap into that wellspring whenever the marketplace is clamoring for fresh product or Courtney Love is clamoring for further cosmetic augmentation. I’ll buy every goddamn disc they put out, and I’ll probably buy them all on vinyl, too. And if you, personally, feel the need to explore the more obscure corners of Cobain’s discography, there are already plenty of places you can look—start with the single for “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, where you’ll find the tremendous B-side “Even In His Youth” and a killer alternate recording of “Aneurysm” that blows the version on Incesticide out of the water.

Hey, I’m a fan first and a snarky asshole second; I get it. I can surely identify with the sustained hysteria enveloping his heritage. Cobain’s suicide was the single most traumatic event of my teen-hood, and all these years later I can still tell you where I was, what I was wearing, and even what I was eating when I first heard the horrifying news of his departure (my family’s comic book store in Anaheim Hills, a Groo the Wanderer t-shirt, and a foot-long tuna on white from Subway). Still, even then, I had a firm pragmatic grasp on my grief. Kurt Cobain wasn’t my mentor, my hero, someone who embodied the man I hoped to eventually be when I reached his epoch of then-unimaginable elder statesmanship (hey, when you’re fifteen, 27 seems like an eternity away—at the time I assumed when I was Cobain’s age I’d probably be doing all sorts of old-people shit like buying a house and raising babies… or at least finally having sex). He wasn’t deity to me, he was simply someone responsible for some of the most imperative music in my life; unfortunately, since music has always been a lot more imperative in my life than deities, his abrupt absence was crushing nonetheless.

But the nature of Cobain’s subsequent beatification seems to suggest that many of his fans choose to remember him as something more, a shooting star that painted a tapestry of light across the heavens before inexorably crashing down to earth, “the grunge-poet voice of a generation” and all that. Hell, to many people, he was. But despite his canonization by the masses, Kurt Cobain was not a messiah and never strived to be. He was flawed and beautiful and complex, and a mystery even to himself—in other words: he was just as fucked-up and human as any of us. Kurt Cobain is not some riddle to be solved; we will never decode him because he didn’t stay the course of his journey long enough to find out who “him” really was or would become. And his awful conclusion will never make sense, because there’s ultimately nothing sensible about putting a shotgun in your mouth and ending a life that meant so much to so many when it had barely just begun.

As we near the 25th anniversary of Cobain’s death, let’s resolve to (finally) allow him his humanity again, and to allow the still-buried pieces of his spirit he chose to keep solely for himself to remain interred with him. Because we’re only paying disservice to the topsoil of his legacy by continuing to dig. And besides, we have Bleach, we have Nevermind, we have In Utero, we have Unplugged, we have a few-dozen additional non-album tracks, and we have “You Know You’re Right”—Kurt Cobain already gave far more of himself to the world than any of us were entitled to ask for.

So if you want to “better understand” him, you won’t achieve that by reading his diary, or seeing his widow’s areolae, or hearing him offhandedly strum some ditty from his childhood to amuse himself. The best avenue available for those of us who never met Cobain to look through his things and figure him out is lighting a candle, putting on a set of headphones, and letting the breathtaking majesty of “All Apologies” surge out of those speakers and into our souls. There is no more intimate way to honor him than that. Nor should there be. Understanding Kurt Cobain isn’t necessary. As long as we understand his music, and we understand what it means to us.

We don’t need his secrets. We have his songs. And for anyone who truly holds the memory of Kurt Cobain in their heart, that’s enough.

 March 25, 2019

[wallpaperpainting]

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Lyle Denniston, a acknowledged announcer who began accoutrement the Supreme Cloister in 1958 for the Wall Street Journal, is not blessed about how the Supreme Cloister is administering its business during quarantine, insisting that the accepted turn-taking adjustment “harms according cachet of anniversary justice, gives the [chief justice] approximate power, diminishes cross-bench exchanges, promotes wool-gathering by lawyers, prizes adjustment over depth, lets technology triumph, [and] looks amateurish. If it is anticipation that this is the beachcomber of the future, I’ll booty decisions based alone on the briefs. To alarm this ‘argument’ is to blackmail the word.”

Each annual on that allegation is annual considering, but one is of authentic interest: the allegation that the procedures put in abode to acquiesce the justices to assignment accidentally — the acceptable accessible architecture has been supplanted by a arrangement in which the justices ask their questions one at a time in adjustment of advantage — “looks amateurish.” (It absolutely is not a celebration of technology; technology actuality has won by default.) The admittance of that absolutely artful archetype amid the absolute political and procedural complaints is not by any agency trivializing. The actualization of amateurism may be the best consequential access on Denniston’s list.

Part of our political agitation is over about aboveboard things such as who gets burdened how abundant and what the money is acclimated for. Some of our political abode is artlessly the babble generated by the bookish abandon of circuitous issues actuality forcibly oversimplified. But abundant of our altercation is about things we rarely allege to directly, including the cultural actualization of the state, what it looks like and feels like, how it sounds back it talks, what its amenities are like. Amid the abounding abundant accountability curve in American activity is the one that runs amid small-r republicans such as myself who, for example, see the Accompaniment of the Union abode as a abhorrent pseudo-monarchical comedy base of a chargeless people, and those on the added side, including associates of both parties, who admiration majesty in government, who can’t brainstorm a chargeless bodies managing their own diplomacy afterwards a abundant accord of “oo ee oo aa aa, ting, tang, walla walla bing bang.”

This is a agitation as old as the United States: Poor John Adams was berserk ridiculed for his often-caricatured acceptance that the admiral of the United States should be addressed by some astral title. Adams had entertained “His Highness, Admiral of the United States and Protector of Their Liberties.” His preferences afterwards escalated to “His Majesty.” (On this and abundant more, I acclaim Richard Brookhiser’s abundant America’s Aboriginal Dynasty: The Adamses, 1735–1918 and the actual absorbing The Botheration of Democracy: The Presidents Adams Confront the Band of Personality, by Nancy Isenberg and Andrew Burstein.) Adams’s anguish seems bizarre in retrospect: That the admiral

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#Painting Sunset

[com346-fall2019]

Carley Gomes 

15 December 2019 

Music’s Greatest Conspiracy: Is Paul McCartney Dead? 

Perhaps one of the most widely known conspiracy theories to exist involves one of the world’s most popular bands The Beatles. The urban legend became a massively spread rumor, with fans of the band closely analyzing Beatles photos and music to come to the conclusion that member Paul McCartney was actually a lookalike. The rumor, famously known as “Paul is Dead” states that in November of 1966, McCartney got in an argument with his bandmates, and angrily left a recording session at Abbey Road. His rage caused him to crash his car, leaving him decapitated. In order to spare the public from the grief of losing a Beatle, the band quietly buried the real McCartney and quickly replaced him with the winner of a lookalike contest. It is believed that the replacement was an orphan named William Campbell, which was later abbreviated to Bill Campbell. Supporters of the theory believe that the replacement was also instigated by Britain’s MI5, as the feared that the news of the dead Beatle would wreak havoc in England due to the distress of mourning fans. The band coached the lookalike to act and present himself the way McCartney would, in order to convincingly sell the hoax to the public. It is believed that the original Beatles began to feel guilty for covering up the death of their bandmate and lying to the public, so they soon began leaving messages in their music and their artwork to try and secretly communicate the truth with their fans. 

The rumor began to expand in 1969 when Detroit DJ Russ Gibbs received a phone call from a lister that told him to put on the Beatles’ White Album, and spin the intro from “Revolution 9” backwards. The intro, which originally repeats the words “number nine, number nine” revealed the words “turn me on, dead man” when spun backwards. From there, the vicious cycle of news caused the rumor to explode, and it began being discussed on major airwaves with more and more clues pointing to McCartney’s death. Although the allegations were incredibly farfetched, people were fascinated by the facts being presented to them and ate up each new theory that was presented to them. Fans believe the Beatles hid these clues in their music and began picking apart the band’s song roster and artwork. In the song “I Am The Walrus,” songs point out that the lyrics “stupid bloody Tuesday,” are sung, which points to the fact that McCartney alleged car crash happened on a Tuesday. He was officially pronounced dead (O.D.P), which is why in the album cover art for Sgt. Pepper, McCartney wears an O.D.P patch on his sleeve. Fans were also quick to point out at the end of “Strawberry Fields Forever” it appears that John Lennon says the words “I buried Paul,” and “I’m So Tired” played backwards reveals the words “Paul is dead, man, miss him, miss him,” and the blatant lyrics of “he blew his mind out in a car” on the track “A Day in the Life.” 

Perhaps the most talked about piece of evidence to support the conspiracy involves the widely known album Abbey Road. The album artwork featured the band walking in step one behind the other, with supporters believing the band was attempting to depict a funeral procession to honor McCartney. Lennon, dressed in white, is said to symbolize the heavenly figure; Starr, dressed in black, symbolizes the undertaker; George Harrison, in denim, represents the gravedigger; and McCartney, barefoot and out of step with the others, symbolizes the corpse. Fans were also quick to point out that McCartney is holding a cigarette in his right hand in the photo, while everyone knows that the real Paul was actually a lefty. Further evidence to support the Abbey Road theory pointed to the license plate of the VW Beetle behind them, which featured “28IF,” which fans took to be a homage to the fact that McCartney would have been 28 for the release of the album if he had not died. The Abbey Road theory was publicized widely, creating more and more conversations about McCartney’s death among the public. With the media continuing to promote the rumors, it imposed on the public that this story was relevant, and it should be talked about. It was soft news, but the constant promotion of it by the media caused it to be incredibly relevant to society. 

Of course, the band became well aware of the rumors surrounding the story and commented on it in several interviews, with John Lennon replying to the idea that he hid coded messages in songs by saying “I don’t know what a Beatles record sounds like backwards; I never play them backwards.” It was also determined that he was saying the words “cranberry sauce” at the end of “Strawberry Fields Forever.” The rumor began to be debunked, but regardless of the insistence of the band and McCartney himself, many still believed in the hoax. Even a Life magazine interview titled “Paul is Still With Us” with McCartney could not convince the hardcore believers. The story remained to be widely popular and circulated despite Lennon’s insistence on its ridiculousness, and it has become over time a major point of fan culture for fans to check out the clues for themselves. Believers refused to acknowledge the attempts to refute the rumors, falling into a post-truth. Those who were strong supporters of Paul is Dead believed in the evidence so strongly, that despite the facts and despite how ridiculous the beliefs may be, they will always believe that Paul McCartney died and was replaced. 

So why did Paul is Dead become such a major topic of interest? It became appealing to the public to believe that there was a secret being hidden from them and that they were elite to the rest of society because they had figured it out and were now in on the secret. They soon began to take this idea, and fabricate it into a way that they could pass off as an explanation. The Beatles were a cultural phenomenon with massive success, and people wanted to believe there was more to them than just their musical accomplishments and were determined to unveil the truth behind this seemingly perfect band. The evidence the theorists provided were far fetched and were all debunked theories, however, even today when an individual hears the evidence, curiosity causes them to look into each piece of evidence themselves. Although the idea of McCartney being dead is widely unrealistic, the idea of becoming apart of a community who have experienced these strange pieces of information, such as hearing the secret message in songs played backwards, is too tempting. It is the timeless practice in modern day fan culture of wanting to check out the story for yourself, and in this case, experience the truth for yourself. You then become of a conversation and apart of a community of people who have all experienced these clues firsthand. 

(Works Cited) “Conspiracy Theories.” Time, Time Inc., 20 Nov. 2008, http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1860871_1860876_1860997,00.html. 

Sheffield, Rob. “'Paul Is Dead': The Bizarre Story of Music's Most Notorious Conspiracy Theory.” Rolling Stone, 11 Oct. 2019, https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/paul- mccartney-is-dead-conspiracy-897189/. 

#paul mccartney #conspiracy theory

[jonjost]

House in Butte, Montana

  Cara Clara

A bit of travel, again. Now in Butte, one of my many “homes”, a place where I have friends, a small history, and which I like. Here to try to do some work for an exhibition, titled Extraction, coming up in 2021, which seems far away but will soon be here. And hopefully I’ll also run to Yellowstone park to shoot a landscape film there.

Meantime I am almost finished with Pequenos Milagres, needing only to do some final touches on the sound and a little color correction. I have sent it to 10 or so people – filmmakers I know, friends, and some simply people I know from Facebook, asking for a critique. The response has been very mixed, as is normal for my work, though all seem to say it is “powerful”, whatever their complaints about this or that aspect of it. So now I wait for word from the festivals to which I sent it – Locarno, Doc Lisboa, Yamagata, Firenze. Their responses will in some measure decide my autumn.  (Writing a bit later, yesterday I received news that Yamagata is not inviting the film.)

Below I will print the text of an article a friend sent to me – it has nothing knew in it which I did not know, but perhaps sees similar information from another angle. It is about Parental Alienators. I will include the URL for it.  I think you should read it.

Since you were kidnapped, I have had almost no information about you.  Friends in Lisboa, who were also Teresa’s friends, all ceased any contact with me, so they have provided nothing – Vasco Pimental, Sérgio Tréfaut, Vera Mantero, Inez and Maria Madeiros, João Pedro Rodrigues, and a few others, and of course your aunt Joana, uncle Manuel, and grandmother, Marília.  They were my friends, or so it seemed, until Nov. 2, 2000.

It was only in 2009, when I was told by someone in Lisboa that you had a Facebook page, that I obtained any information: the picture you had chosen for it, and if I recall well just a handful of innocuous messages between you and your aunt’s daughter, Costanza. The picture you chose for yourself was that of a sad young girl – the image you sent to the world. As, at that time knowing nothing about Facebook (I did not have a page for myself), I “friended” you. Your page was taken down within 24 hours, I am rather certain by your mother.

Your Facebook profile image, 2009

It was another few years until you made another Facebook page, and someone in Lisboa saw it and informed me and I was able see it, and see new photographs of you as a young teen-aged woman.

  And to see some posts from which I could glean a little information: that you played guitar, were in a band, had friends from school, and that you had a boyfriend, Tiago.

Tiago & Clara, some years ago

I did not “friend” you, and for a while I had access to this Facebook page, and so was able to obtain little bits of information, and collect some photographs of you as you grew. I was thankful for this sliver of information. At some point my access to this page was blocked, though I was able by other means to continue to see it. Though it seemed you didn’t use Facebook so much, so what I was able to learn was limited.

How might one interpret Vasco’s hand on you – controlling?

Since then it appears you ceased to use Facebook, though I am not sure when.

And this photograph of your mother?

The few pieces of information I was able to secure left very little to go on, though a few things seemed to emerge.

One was that your second Facebook page was under the name “Clara Jost” which, given that it would be normal for a Portuguese person to have used “Clara Villaverde Jost” or “Clara Villaverde Cabral Jost”, seemed to me to suggest something, a kind of quiet message to me. Perhaps that reading was wishful thinking on my part. At minimum it told me that you use my name, which all things considered, I had wondered since your mother could have found a way to delete it.

As time passed I noticed that Tiago remained your boyfriend and is so now, so I am told. This is a bit unusual as normally a teenage girl might have a boyfriend a little while, and then change, perhaps many times. To remain with the same boyfriend from 14 to 22 is certainly not usual. To me this suggests that at the very young age of 14 you needed something which was not available at home. That something was love. And this has led to a strong bond between you and Tiago. Such, with almost nothing to go on, is what I would think explains this not usual relationship. Of course I could be wrong.

Tiago & Clara, recently

The other information I have is that you continue to live in your mother’s house. At 22, and in the current world, perhaps this is an economic matter, that you cannot afford to rent a place of your own. Of this I do not know. On the other hand I do know that your mother is a very controlling person, and otherwise fits all the characteristics of a “parental alienator”, so perhaps she in effect controls you, and wants to control you, and is able psychologically to keep you dependent on her. Or perhaps it is both the economic matter and Teresa’s control over you. Or perhaps you simply want to live there, though in a sense your “wants” have been strongly determined by what your mother has done to you, as is common in cases of victims of parental alienators. Again, the small bit of information I have doesn’t give me much to go on.

You in Agua & Sal, your head held firmly by your film mother, a seemingly forced smile

Curiously the other day I spoke with a man who is a friend of the mother of Alice Albergaria Borges, who tells me that you two are friends in real life. I know you both acted in Teresa’s last feature, Colo, the summary of which in some senses seemed to paint a partial picture of Teresa’s own family’s life – particularly her relationship with her mother and father.   The reality that Teresa chose you to be in her film again suggests an intent to control you, to, as it were, “direct” you, just as she did with Agua e Sal, in which she directed you to be kidnapped ! I have not seen the new film. (For a dreadful review of the film see this from the Hollywood Reporter.)

From the student film you were in.

Of other new information, some is quite old now, though I only recently found out what it meant. There is a shot in Pequenos Milagres, right towards the end, which was taken when I went to Lisbon about a month after you had been kidnapped and had been under the full control of your mother. I had several weeks before spoken on the telephone with you, and you had said you wanted to return to your home in Rome, which of course was my desire as well. In the same conversation you also said, at the age of 3 and a half years, “would you like me to drink you?” The first time you said this I did not think I understood you, and you repeated it, and I instantly understood what had happened. I asked you if your mother had told you to say this, and you said “yes.” The parental alienator’s process had begun in full. At that time I wrote to and informed all of Teresa’s family and friends what had happened and Teresa’s promptly denied it.

In the shot in Pequenos Milagres you are crying heavily and repeating again and again, “but I want” and then you say,

“pai, mas eu quero/daddy, but I want to” “ó pai, mas achas que é bem uma pessoa querer fazer uma coisa e o pai não deixar, achas? Eu não acho!/but dad, do you think it’s right to want to do something and their dad doesn’t let them [you don’t let me], do you? I don’t!”

To see the actual shot, go here.

So in that month, while she had total control over you, your mother had told you, obviously repeatedly, that though you wanted to go back to your house in Rome (and to your father), that, so she said, your father did not want you there. Of course this was a complete inversion of the truth: it was your mother who did not want you there. Perfectly normal behavior from a parental alienator, who does such things doubtless out of pure selfishness, with no regard for what her actions do to her own child. It is admittedly a bizarre behavior, from the perpetrator’s view surely seen as an act of love, when it is the opposite.

Teresa Villaverde at the Berlin Festival, 2017

I have no doubt that you have been subjected to this in the 18 and a half years since this happened. And if, as happens with many such children subjected to this kind of treatment, you have been severely damaged, I will not be surprised. If that includes believing whatever your mother taught you (“brainwashed” is a common description for this), and that you in turn have bad feelings towards me, again, that is a common result of what children subjected to parental alienation experience. Sometimes they realize later in life what has occurred to them and they are able to rebuild a relationship with the parent who had been cut out of their lives. Sometimes they never recover and are unable to have a relationship again.

As I have said, I know directly very little of what occurred to you after Nov 2, 2000, though I have some little fragments. And I did know your mother and what she was like in the years I lived with her, and thus I imagine you were subjected to very harsh treatment, as was visible in the handful of times I did see you, and as indicated in the juvenile court filings done by the authorities there. Unrestrained by myself, or by the courts, and aided and abetted by your grandmother and aunt and other friends of Teresa’s, I cannot say that I think you were treated well or honestly.  I am utterly sure that you were simply lied to by all of them, as they were eager to support your mother, regardless of the truth, or of the obvious damage inflicted on you.  I hope this is not so, but there is little clinical reason to expect otherwise.  And I did live with your mother some years and had ample time to observe and come to know her.

I describe this more fully in the sequence of letters beginning here.

Here is something I just read, from the American writer William Kittredge, who lives in Montana.  The book is an autobiographical essay titled Who Owns the West.  Very nice book.  Here he is speaking of writers, but I think what he says here can be applied to any artist (or perhaps just anyone who is convinced they are very important and that what they do justifies anything they do).  On reading it I immediately thought of your mother.

Curiously the friend whom I am now staying with here in Butte underwent a similar situation as you have undergone – being taught to hate your own father, and told whatever would support the reasons for imposing such a thing on a child.  She sadly did not see her father before he died, though she wishes she had been able to do so.  Today, talking with her, she said she would like to write Teresa about this.  I will give her the address, though I doubt your mother will read it.

In the next few weeks I will go to Yellowstone Park to take a one-day shot of the Yellowstone Falls and its canyon.  And quickly coming together is to make a sequel of my 1986 film, shot here in Butte, Bell Diamond.  Many of those who were in it are still here and still alive, though not all.  It was their idea, and since I have camera and time, seems a fun and interesting thing to do.  So appears I will be here for much of the summer.

I’ll continue the things I began to write here over the summer and send them along to you.

I hope you are well and summer in Portugal has evaded the heat wave which much of Europe has been in.  Of course I would love to hear from you and know more of your life. That is up to you.

Amo-te,

Teu pai

jon

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/inside-the-criminal-mind/201902/crime-not-arrestable-act-parental-alienation

Roland Thomas was the victim of a crime.* Yet the perpetrator of that offense was not arrestable. When Roland and Amy, his wife, decided to end their marriage, Mr. Thomas had no idea that nearly four years would pass until he could spend time with Mindy, his daughter. Roland would miss all that parents treasure while watching their children grow up.

Although Amy and Roland were not getting along, both adored four-year-old Mindy. With plenty of advance preparation and without giving notice, Amy spirited Mindy away and took up residence with Barbara, a close friend. Roland had no idea of where they were living for many months even though they remained in the vicinity. Long divorced, Barbara enjoyed having Amy and Mindy as housemates while sharing living expenses. In fact, they created a family of their own. Amy had decided that she and Mindy would be better off without Roland’s presence or interference, although Amy certainly wanted to collect his child support. She and Barbara schemed to remove Roland from Mindy’s life.

Taken to a psychologist by her mother and coached in advance, Mindy told the therapist that she did not want to see her father because he screamed at her, hit her, and called her names. The psychologist notified Child Protective Services whereupon Amy sought a protective order from the court. Knowing the allegations against him were false, Roland thought he could represent himself at the protective order hearing. Although the judge guided him, Roland had not the slightest idea of legal procedures. Presented with the CPS investigation results, equivocal though they were, and the mother’s assertions, the judge acted to protect the child. Roland was at a loss as to how to prove a negative—to demonstrate that he had not done what he had been accused of. The judge ordered Roland to have no contact with the child and to commit no more acts of “family abuse.”

Roland’s world had collapsed. People who knew him were stunned at the preposterous allegations. Family and friends had personally observed how close he and Mindy had been. Moreover, Roland had home movies of Mindy at different ages affectionately crawling all over him while they played.

The issuance of the protective order was Roland’s wake-up call. He embarked upon what was to turn into a three-year process. He hired an attorney who filed a motion with the court for Roland to undergo an independent psychological evaluation. It took six months for that to occur and for a report to be filed with the court. The result was the elimination of the protective order, but Roland still had no contact with Mindy. The court then ordered an independent child custody evaluation, a lengthy and expensive process, during which the parents and Amy would be examined to determine what was in Mindy’s best interest. By this time, Mindy had not seen her father in more than two years. She was nearly seven and wanted nothing to do with him. By the time the custody evaluator completed her report and a custody hearing was scheduled, Roland had become a stranger to his daughter.

Mindy had remained in therapy, and the therapist thought it inadvisable to force the child to spend time with her father because she expressed terror just at the prospect of seeing him. Throughout this period, Amy had been able to influence Mindy so that a “parentectomy” occurred—one parent was removed from the child’s life. Mindy recognized only one person as her parent.

The court then recommended a process of “reunification therapy.” Another year passed during which, against her will, Mindy spent brief periods with her father while a third party approved by the court-supervised.

Some parents abandon hope and walk away in comparable situations. This occurs when reunification fails or the relationship is too damaged to be resurrected. A parent may be destroyed financially and unable to afford legal and other professional fees.

Roland’s situation and others like it reflect the outcome of a malicious process known as “parental alienation.” It occurs when one parent takes steps to remove the other from a child’s life. It is a deliberate effort to influence a son or daughter so that he or she comes to fear and hate the maligned parent. Put more simply, the child is “brainwashed”.

One might think in Roland’s case that there must have been something really wrong with him and thus more to the story. Ultimately, the mental health and custody evaluators did not find this to be true. It had taken years and tens of thousands of dollars for Roland to be vindicated. No independent professional found him to be abusive or psychologically impaired. But the damage had been done.

“Parental alienation” is a “crime.” However, it is a matter dealt with not in a criminal court but in lengthy civil proceedings.

The thinking patterns that give rise to parental alienation, more often than not, result in massive emotional and financial harm to a parent and severe damage to a child who loses a parent in the process.

The alienating parent weaves a web of lies while gaining total control over a child. The boy or girl who is dependent on the alienating parent internalizes that parent’s view that the other parent is to be feared and detested. For the alienator, it is about winning and losing while employing any means to an end. Ultimately, a parent-child relationship is irrevocably harmed if not totally destroyed.

Amo-te, Clarinha !

  Summer, 2019: A letter for Clara House in Butte, Montana Cara Clara A bit of travel, again. Now in Butte, one of my many "homes", a place where I have friends, a small history, and which I like.

#Alice Albergaria Borges #Butte #Colo #Parental Alienation Syndrome #Pequenos Milagres #Teresa Villaverde #Vasco Pimental #William Kittredge #Yellowstone Paark

[definitelynotalibrary]

This is my Nightwish (long, under the cut)

It started with four songs.

Over the Hills and Far Away, Wanderlust, Nemo, and Sleeping Sun, mistakenly titled “Eclipse” on the file I had.

I cannot tell you exactly when I received them, or the name of the person who gave them to me. All I remember is that it was 2005 (possibly 2004), and it was a friend of a friend I met on Neopets.

Wanderlust especially intrigued me because I was deeply into Dragonlance and it reminded me of kender. Over the Hills and Far Away was cool. I have always wanted to write a short story about the plot of that song. I want to say my version of Sleeping Sun was the 2005 version, but I am not sure. Either way, I adored it. I still think of it as “Eclipse” sometimes because for the longest time, that is what I thought it was called.

But of course, Nemo is what won my heart. How many of us say the same? There is just something about that song that draws you in. You get lost in it, enfolded in its haunting beauty. It is easily Tarja’s best song and one that each of the subsequent singers has rocked in their own unique style. There are many excellent and gorgeous songs in Nightwish’s repertoire, but Nemo is the most famous and it is the song I am sure many of us use to get our friends into the band.

So the reason I know that I was introduced to the band in 2005 is because it is the year my uncle got married to his second wife. They were married in Vegas, and this was before I had an MP3 device, so I was still rocking the CD player. I burned all four of those songs onto a CD and played it on repeat. During the plane ride, while we walked around the Strip…I was solidly hooked. (Fun side fact: The real reason I know it was 2005 is because I got sick on that trip and had to stay in the hotel while my family went and saw the fourth Harry Potter movie. That was the only one I never saw in theaters, which was fine by me. I got to hang out by myself in a hotel room and watch The Mummy for the first time.)

“Woah. He looks EVIL!” <- My mother’s first reaction to Marco in the MV for Wish I Had an Angel. Again, my memory is bad, so I do not know when I started looking up music videos. But I remember that one moment very clearly. I mean…she’s not wrong.

My parents never disapproved of Nightwish though, despite their rather quiet fourteen year old anime and fantasy nerd suddenly obsessing over heavy metal. Sorry; symphonic power metal. Actually, the more I listened, the more it grew on them to the point where they were willing to drive six hours from Raleigh to Atlanta to see their show in 2007. But that is getting ahead of myself.

Learning about Tarja leaving was devastating. During the interim though, I was able to get deeper and deeper into the band. Once was my first album, and the others very quickly followed. It didn’t take me long to realize exactly why I loved this band so much.

Tuomas.

Tuomas was, and is, the heart of the band to me. The more I read about him, the more I loved him. He has such an obvious passion for his work. I love the music of the band, but it was the lyrics that sold me. I have always been a voracious reader of fantasy novels, and here he was creating these stories in song. English was my favorite subject in school (I now have a BA in Creative Writing), and I often had fun trying to decipher the symbolic and hidden meaning of his work. The songs are so full of literary allusions and metaphors…I still want to sit down and create an in-depth analysis of Song of Myself just for giggles. In fact, I DID use The Escapist in lieu of a poem in a college freshman English class. That was awesome.

As was everyone, I was apprehensive at the idea of a new singer. They announced Anette and she seemed fine. If I remember correctly, they released small previews of some of the songs and they were different, but not bad. I bought Dark Passion Play the moment it came out. I was so excited. I immediately played it when my mom and I got to the car.

That first time was breathtaking. Poet and the Pendulum regularly is cited as my favorite song of theirs. My mom immediately fell in love with 7 Days to the Wolves and Jukka’s drumming. She’s always had a thing for percussion. To this day, when we are in the car together and playing DPP, we will belt out most of the songs together in perfect time. My mom doesn’t often blast music, but Nightwish is an exception.

The concert in 2007 was a revelation. I had only ever been to one concert before, and it was an Aerosmith outdoors concert that I kind of appreciated, but we were all the way in the last row of an outdoor stadium, so it was difficult to get into it.

This one though…it was held in a small club that someone said was just waiting to fall down because the owner’s didn’t really repair it much. We were two or three rows from the front standing to the left in front of Tuomas’ pianos. Yes, I said "we." My mother stood right next to me the whole time. My dad, who it turned out was a bit of an introvert (and also was 6’6” tall), stayed in the back.

Y’all, nothing prepared me for this experience. The opening act was Paradise Lost, whom I honestly cannot remember. The sound was loud and the mics were fuzzy. Nightwish shined. The floor shook, the crowd surged behind me, I almost got kicked in the face by an attempted crowd surfer, my mom was a trooper, and I got to shake Marco’s hand. Poet and the Pendulum brought me to tears and gave me chills all over. We went home the next day with shirts and (to my surprise at Christmas), hoodies. That hoodie became my favorite article of clothing. I still have it. I wore it almost daily when it was cool enough.

The years went on. I learned to never read YouTube comments on Nightwish videos, I gained a deeper appreciation for the more “classic” albums (Century Child is my jam), and I phased in and out of my obsession.

Imaginaerum came out when I was in college. The preorder slip was one of my Christmas gifts in December 2011. I strong-armed a couple of my friends into agreeing to go to the concert in Salt Lake City with me on Sepetember 29th, 2012. Our college was in Idaho, and we did not have (reliable) cars to drive down, or the money for a hotel, but we made it. Found a ride on a rideshare board, stayed with my friend’s aunt(?), and begged a ride from a local friend two and from the concert. It was an unpleasant trip filled with too much junk food (I still cannot eat Cadbury eggs. Don’t ask; it was a bad idea).

As before, the concert was great. Kamelot was their opening act, and though I had heard some of their stuff before, I definitely fell in love with Tommy that night. I did notice Anette wasn’t quite as engaged with the audience and their whole show felt a little muted, but I attributed that to her having just been ill in Denver a day or so before.

My friends had a fun time, too. One of my friends is rather small, and we were concerned she would get swallowed by the crowd, but she was a champ. Pushed people who pushed her back. She was great. There was this annoying teenage girl in a corset or something that pushed her boobs into everyone’s faces and she was trying to brag about how her daddy paid for her ticket. We just deadpanned her and talked about how we three grown-ass college students paid for our own tickets and drove 4+ hours to get here.

The highlight of that concert was that the people behind us, more Kamelot fans than Nightwish, proved to be really cool people. We talked a bit and I expressed my love for Tuomas and later the girl caught a towel he threw into the audience. And she gave it to me. I was over the moon.

Once again, shock when it was announced Anette was leaving not TWO DAYS LATER. I was at her last concert and had no idea.

I’d grown very attached to Anette, so I was slow to warm up to Floor. She was this tall, Amazonian woman with a nose ring who headbanged like I had never seen before. I wasn’t totally sold on Elan when the music video came out.

To be honest, I didn’t WANT to like her. There was too much change. First Troy was added and I was like “OK, not surprising, he has been touring with them,” and THEN my mother’s dear Jukka announced he was stepping back and someone else was replacing him. It was all just too much change! I almost tentatively purchased Endless Forms Most Beautiful, hesitant and almost afraid. And I learned how wrong I was.

Floor was perfect. She combined what I loved about the other two singers and added her own flair on top of it. The songs were as epic and grand as any of the others, and above all, it just felt like Nightwish. I still loved Tarja and Anette, but I found that I had room in my heart for Floor, too.

So when I found out they were going to be in my town (which was now Kansas City), I of course had to go. My mom came too, though my dad passed. Standing in line, people went through and asked if anyone wanted to upgrade to VIP. I worked up my nerve and did it! I figured, why not. Third time’s the charm.

I was nervous as anything and shyer than I have ever been. And, of course, woefully unprepared. I had them sign my ticket and my phone case. Over a year later and they are mostly faded, but I had put a little clear nail polish over them, so some of them really aren’t TOO bad. I met everyone except Marco, who was bizarrely absent.

The concert started, and for the third time I was almost front row, but off to the left. Delain and Sonata Arctica were fantastic. Nightwish came on and Marco looked PISSED. He ended up throwing his guitar and walking off stage midway through the first song. He reappeared with another guitar, but still looked angry. I guess there was something wrong with his sound. After another song, he apologized and everything was alright again. They shone, the energy was intoxicating, and they left everyone wanting more.

I do not think I can adequately describe what Nightwish means to me honestly. They were my first band, really. I had liked some music before them, but not quite the same. They elevated my taste and changed me forever. I taught myself to sing by listening to Tarja (was devastated to learn I am not an actual soprano ahah), and their music has consistently helped me write when blocked. I fall asleep like a baby when listening to their music, it pumps me up when I am excited, it helps me vent when I am angry, and it calms me down when I am depressed. It helped me when we moved across states after my freshman year in high school. It was there during the worst roommates of my college time. It’s helped me get through my dad’s death. Any time I need to, I can sink into their sound, letting it envelop me once more and carry me off to a peaceful place. In so many ways, it feels like this band was MEANT for me.

#nightwish #music #tarja turunen #anette olzon #floor jansen #Tuomas Holopainen #marco hietala #jukka nevalainen #emppu vuorinen #troy donockley #kai hahto

[brendonurinal]

Greek Life

Hi guys I’m just starting a Travel blog RIGHT NOW bc I’m studying abroad in Berlin this semester and this past weekend has an INTERESTING weekend in Greece to say the very least and wanted to document this for posterity. Its long but I promise u theres a lot, from concerts to city-wide evacuations.

An important part of context here is that the Patriots just won the Superbowl and some friends from school back in New York were throwing a party and decided to /sarcastically/ name it a Pats Victory celebration and of course, invite all of us abroad kids. Of course I RSVP’d to this party halfway across the world, I’m no stick in the mud. But alas, realistically my roommates and I knew we couldn’t fly back to the states just for one night, as such an endeavor would not even come close to being in our maximum joke budget of $200.

Obviously the next closest thing to celebrating a Patriots win in NYC is going to see the Dropkick Murphy’s live in concert, if not only to hear “Shipping Up To Boston” (which you may not be able to identify by title alone but will certainly be able to identify by the distinguished bagpipe and accordion undertones). And it was just our luck that they happened to be touring in Europe at present, and would be performing in Thessaloniki Greece the following night, and tickets to Thessaloniki were only 50 euro round trip, and we found an Airbnb for $16. It was God’s will for us to see this band, so we booked our tickets for a flight that left in 8 hours.

Maybe this is just a RyanAir thing, or maybe its a European thing, but the most notable aspect of the flight itself were the increasingly bizarre onboard sales. It started normal enough, with croissants and coffee. Then it moved to paninis, somewhat odd for 6 in the morning but hey, to each their own. Then they moved on to perfumes, boasting the lowest prices for designer names on all of european flights, which is a lot of qualifiers that raise suspicion that they may simply be the ONLY European airline that sells discounted designer perfumes. Finally, they started pushing lottery scratch cards on us, which felt shady but maybe Europe or the skies have different gambling laws, I’m no airplane lawyer. But they were REALLY pushing the scratch cards. They even offered a “one time deal” of giving two for the price of one (which was interestingly the exact same deal they offered on the return flight).

After we landed our first real hurdle was trying to get into the city as two American assholes who spoke literally no Greek whatsoever. If you’re thinking of that “It’s all greek to me” joke right now we not only beat you to the punchline but we beat that dead horse innumerable times over the rest of the weekend. Luckily there was a line of cabs outside the airport and I happened to have a screenshot of the location of the house on my phone. I handed it to the driver, he looks at it, shakes his head, takes it from me, looks at it closer, says something in Greek, gets out of the car with it, and walks to the next taxi in line. Soon the ordeal becomes every taxi driver’s business as about five Greek men stand behind this cab arguing over my phone. We just kind of watched them, doe-eyed from the back of the cab, not sure what to do. At the same time, a man behind them carrying a crate of oranges trips and spills the whole crate of oranges out into the street. This has no relevance on anything that happened, it was just some of the funniest imagery we’ve ever seen in real life. Eventually the cabbies sorted it out I guess because we were on our way.

The first thing we noticed about Thessaloniki is that there are stray cats just everywhere. They mind their own business when it comes to humans, but at night you fall asleep to the not-so-distant sound of cats screeching and hissing as they fight with one another in the streets below. The second thing we noticed was that the whole city is a designated smoking area. Maybe I’ve lived a privileged life in the states where indoor smoking has been outlawed for most of my life but I swear I ingested more smoke over those two days in Thessaloniki than I have in my entire life. The third and last thing we noticed was that at literally every restaurant, you got more food than you asked for. And I’m not talking about big portions, I’m talking about a full extra course (usually a dessert or appetizer, but still). The best was the waiter in a relatively empty cafe who spoke very little English and who set down two little pastry/pie/ things for us and explained “Ehh... my grandmother...” It was just disgustingly adorable stuff right there.

Less adorable were the very intimidating punk Greek kids at the concert that night. Theres something about understanding exactly none of what everyone else is saying that makes you feel incredibly vulnerable. Take that situation but add more leather jackets and mohawks and you’ve got yourself a Friday night concert in Greece. We did meet one guy there named Costas (I apologize for spelling errors but I think I’ve already demonstrated my astounding ignorance to Greek culture). He asked where we were from and we told him Boston and New York (Is it condescending that I assume Europeans might not know where Morris County, New Jersey is? Most New Jersey people don’t even know where it is). He responds with a “What the fuck... why are you guys here?” I chose to take Costas’s inquiry literally, and not even bother to venture down the rather existential and metaphorical question of why am I really here? Why are any of us here?

To be fair, I didn’t have a definitive answer to either the metaphorical or literal interpretations.

The concert itself was disappointingly good. When you go to see a band sarcastically you’re ready to stick it out to get a recording of the one song you came there to see, which in our case was “Shipping Up To Boston”. But Dropkick Murphys are surprisingly good live, and have a surprisingly large following in Thessaloniki Greece. We thought everyone there was just college kids that wanted to go to a random concert, but they all knew all the words. Even the people that didn’t speak English.I’m not even sure The Dropkick Murphys could draw a crowd that large in America, even in Boston. 

Some instruments used in their live performances include (but are not limited to): bagpipes, a banjo, an accordion, a flute (played by the same man as the banjo). At one point the audience rushed the stage and all of the girls were all over the banjo/flute guy.

But the most distinct memory I have of this concert is the lead singer yelling “The state of Massachusetts!” before one of the songs and the crowd going absolutely nuts. A whole crowd of 20-something year old Greek kids were losing their minds over the concept of the entire state of Massachusetts as a whole.

On our walk back to the Airbnb after the concert we met a stray dog under a streetlamp who began to walk at our side for several blocks. It felt like we just got a video game sidekick, or that he was giving us directions or something. He was very old and calm and we decided to name him Murphy. After about five blocks Murphy decided we must know where we’re going and just turned around and walked back off into the night. Even though I’ll probably never see him again, I’ll never forget you, Murphy.

We fell asleep to the sound of a cat fight.

We woke to the sound of someone yelling through a megaphone in Greek from probably a few blocks away. I have no idea what this man was yelling about but it sounded like some kind of propaganda or protest. We never actually saw this man though we heard him twice. He only every existed as an angry disembodied voice with some kind of goal.

We got brunch and looked at a bunch of really old buildings. I don’t know what they were because all of the plaques and descriptions were in Greek, but I’m sure they were very important buildings.

The rest of our trip was pretty normal. We had dinner and walked back to the house. We went to bed because we had to get up early to catch a bus to the airport (we got insider info that there was actually a 2 euro bus to the airport from the owner of the Airbnb). 

As I write this I have been back in Berlin for almost 12 hours now and I just saw a BBC article written 10 hours ago with the headline “Greek WW2 bomb deactivated after mass Thessaloniki evacuation”. At this point in bizarre experiences for the trip it seems to be just about par for the course, the cherry on top even. We missed a large scale city evacuation by the thinnest of margins and I honestly don’t know what we would have done if we had been in the city during it. I have class tomorrow. I know travel doesn’t count as an excused absence but what about WWII bomb evacuation absences?

I’m splitting hairs here. The point is, I hope my two wonderful Airbnb renters Otar and Maria, Murphy the stray dog, and our boy Costas are all ok and safe. And I hope that you, dear reader, will some day get to party with the Greeks or at least with the Dropkick Murphys. #KeepThessalonikiWeird.

#greece #thessaloniki #travel #personal #mine

[vdmeganlawsontei]

Sh*t Coin of the Week: Sky

Sh*t Coin of the Week: Sky

It was another tense editorial meeting in the CoinStaker newsroom, and we were brainstorming article titles that would take everyone’s minds off the plummeting markets. “I’ve got an idea,” someone said. “What if we have a weekly column, where we pick out a good cryptocurrency and introduce it to the readers in a short profile?”

“Good idea,” our editor said, “but you’ll run out of topics in a month. Why don’t you write about one of the awful coins instead? You’ll never run out of material.”

With that sage advice,  we now embark upon the first installment of our approximately-1500-article series “Sh*tcoin of the Week.”

What do we mean by a Sh*tcoin?

Most readers have a pretty specific idea of what the word shitcoin means. It’s like the cryptocurrency equivalent of buying a lemon–you just spent  fifty grand on a Maseratti, but you opened the hood and it’s held together by rubber bands and gum.

But there’s another kind of lemon out there–a car which has nothing objectively wrong with it, but has no other purpose than to be useless and make you look stupid. The kind of vehicle that, even though the engineering is brilliant and the execution impeccable, is unable to answer an elemental question:“Why the fuck would you do that?”

With that in mind, we give you Sky: the Segway of Cryptocurrency.

Meet the New Internet

The Sky project has one big advantage: it doesn’t suffer from excess modesty. Here’s what we learn from first glance:

The Sky project has two components: Skycoin, a new cryptocurrency with “Fast transactions and no transaction fees,” and Skywire, described as

Sky: the Segway of cryptos.

An incentivized mesh network poised to become the privacy protocol of the future. Skywire’s goal is to make corporate internet service providers a thing of the past by giving the internet back to the people with its revolutionary privacy protocol. Peer-to-peer technology with a grassroots ethos, Skywire’s new networking protocol promotes net neutrality and sharing without blocking, slowdowns or censorship.

So, in summary: Skycoin is going to restore net neutrality and abolish your ISP, replacing it with….you. The new Internet will be peer-to-peer, and maybe even house-to-house. Users will pay each other in Skycoin for network traffic, and earn Skycoin by passing data along. Deeper down the rabbithole(at least I hope this is just a rabbit hole) you’ll find elaborate plans for miners, wireless antennas, video games, application languages, new consensus algorithms, and a new version of cryptokitties.  

Sky is one of the oldest altcoin projects, imagined up by Bitcoin and Ethereum veterans to fix  the problems that had emerged from the first round of cryptocurrencies. With that much proven talent and boundless imagination, it’s not hard to see why people have high expectations.

We’ve done the smelly work of sniffing through Sky’s underpants for bad signs. Here’s what we found.

Brown Flag No. 1: Terrible Marketing.

Most bad cryptocurrencies have good marketing and bad programming.  Sky is the other way around.

Let’s start with the lowest-hanging fruit: the website is awful. It looks like it was coded in FORTRAN for a server that runs on vacuum tubes. This may seem like a tiny nit to pick, but in a marketplace full of sleek, elegant websites pushing absolute garbage, it’s a pretty bad sign that the “new internet” can’t put together an attractive homepage. Couldn’t someone sell a few SKY for a subscription to Wix?

Of all the possible names, they chose the one most similar to an AI supervillain.

Unfortunately, the rest of the marketing department isn’t any better. Sky’s own marketing team has screwed itself into several PR blunders–including one where they bizarrely disowned their own COO.  Heck, just look at the name–they are literally trying to create SkyNet. 

The branding, or lack thereof, is painfully reflected in the marketplace, where it somehow lags behind doge turds like Dentacoin and EOS. “Skycoin developers have put all of their effort into making some of the most amazing technology in all of the crypto world, and have not put much effort into getting the word out,” the developers admit in their reddit FAQ. “So right now it is still relatively unknown.” Synth, the lead developer, has acknowledged the same in several interviews: Sky was largely left behind in the 2017 Gold Rush, mostly because it hasn’t bothered getting listed on reputable exchanges.

Brown Flag No. 2: The Lead Developer is A Comic Book Villain

Perusing the “Team” page, we come across the following snippet:

Synth, one of the earliest developers behind Bitcoin, started Skycoin 8 years ago with a vision of creating a new, decentralized Internet. He sits on the advisory boards of several cryptocurrency projects. Synth has a background in mathematics, distributed systems, and symbolic logic.

Now, I don’t want to be old-fashioned, but there are only two circumstances in which a fake name makes you look professional:

If you are a magician, a rapper, a cult leader, or otherwise require a more imposing persona than you’d get from a real, normal-person-sounding name like “Jacob Finkelbaum.”

If you are a drug dealer, Bond henchman or otherwise engaged in illegal activity.

Since SkyNet doesn’t have a Silk Road (yet) there’s no grown-up reason for “Synth” to keep using his WoW handle.

And he’s not the only question mark. We also meet “Sam,” who somehow gets by without a last name.  The White Paper on  Obelisk, the distributed consensus algorithm of the new internet, is a joint collaboration between “johnstuartmill” and “an anonymous user.” While it’s no surprise that the author of On Liberty would weigh in on cryptocurrencies, we were expecting him to capitalize his own name correctly.

“Bitcoins and Lambos are the only things desirable as ends.” –John Stuart Mill, Utilitarian philosopher and blockchain architect

I don’t mean to labor the point, but these things matter, at least if you’re thinking in terms of investment. It’s much harder to run or abandon a project if it’s got your real name attached—and it also gives the rest of us a chance to stalk your LinkedIn. Satoshi Nakomoto might be a pseudonym, but at least it’s a grown-up name that can be treated seriously. How are we supposed to treat the Obelisk algorithm seriously,  if we can’t even be sure that “johnstuartmill” doesn’t have a history of nude conspiracy theories?

Brown Flag No. 3: The Sky Miner—erm, I mean Node

Let’s learn about the  “backbone for the new Internet:” the SkyMiner. The Skywire miner is ”meticulously designed and configured to provide a backbone for the new internet.”  It “ functions as a “miner” for Skycoins” and “acts as a specialized VPN.” Nevermind the fact that Skycoins are premined. Here’s what you get, if you make it to the front of the waiting list:

• 8 CPU boards

• 2 GB of RAM per board

• 4 CPU cores per board

• 64 GB of storage per board

• 64-bit Linux (Alpine Linux)

• Gigabit ethernet, 8+1 port switch

At least Yoko likes the Skyminer. Picture via @strophy

At $600, Skyminers aren’t cheap, but you can get yours for the low, low price of $8500:

The price will be 1 BTC for 1 unit. Purchasers will receive:

• Skywire miner

• An amount of Skycoin equal to 1 BTC minus the hardware cost (estimated to be around $600), based on market rates at the time of purchase.

This reminds me of one of those late-night infomercials where they sell you a factory-surplus salad chopper for $40. But they add on enough cleaning sprays, Shamwows and plastic potholders that it starts to look like a good deal. Sure, it only costs a Bitcoin, but you get extra vouchers!

I spent a long time trying to think of a non-scammy rationale for the SkyMiners’ pricing. One would think that the best way to secure the future of Skynet would be selling as many nodes as possible, which isn’t going to happen when the price is 1 BTC. While we won’t begrudge anyone the right to make a profit, charging a price in Bitcoin and giving change in Sky only really makes sense if you think that Bitcoin has a more secure future than Skycoin.

After more digging, we found a half-cheeked explanation that SKY wants people who are committed to the cryptocurrency space. In other words: there’s no sipping allowed. if you want a taste of our kool-aid, you have to drink the whole cup.

(Note: You can build your own SkyMiner for three hundred bucks. It’s just a bunch of Orange Pi’s plugged together.)

Brown Flag No. 4: The Ever-Lengthening Roadmap

It’s not hard to see why people are impressed by the SkyNet project, because they really have done a lot. They’ve got white papers, a Skycoins, a Messenger, a coding language, miners, kitties, —ooh, so businessy. What’s missing? That’s right—no product. That’s like a metaphor for cryptocurrency right there.

Per the FAQs:

“A private testnet of Skywire has been operating for the past year. The public testnet will occur in Q1 2017 when the first wave of Skynodes go online. The first wave of Skynodes are shipping out as of mid February 2018. (boldface mine)

The SkyNet Roadmap, hopefully

In other words, they’re just about to roll out that testnet, once the sky nodes go out a year later. The official roadmap pushed the testnet back to Q4 in 2017. Its now March, 2018, with the practice Skynetnet still “just” around the corner.

Final Grade:

It’s hard to give Sky a hard time  when it’s one of the few cryptos whose programmers have done this before. At least it’s not an obvious fraud like Bitcoiin.

But that doesn’t mean it’s a safe bet. Skycoin is  what happens when smart brains get a whole lot of dumb money.The project reeks of business inexperience, and after six years of “development”  has nothing to show for itself except a lot of unused code and a non-network of very expensive nodes.

If it is a scam, they’re definitely doing it the hard way. The more likely outcome is that the project turns into a parade of white elephants—which, given the scale of their promises, is probably halfway true already.

On a scale of one to Bitconnect, we give Sky a score of three out of ten Carloses. Prove me wrong, Skynet.

Love Skycoin? Want to recommend a  Shitcoin for next week? Let us know at @Coinstaker.

Bother the author: @cryptosexuality

http://ift.tt/2IDEcWG

[iowamusicshowcase]

One year ago... http://ift.tt/2bSSdBq Monday, September 5, 2016 Other Sources: Four Recent Iowa Compilation Albums Iowa has a pretty good history of supporting its music. Could obviously be better and could have been better. But we've always had people who were strong supporters of our state's music, and did their best to promote it! In this regards, Iowa has quite the history of compilations albums, The earliest one I can remember is "The Iowa Compilation Album" from 1987 featuring alternative artists from across the state. I have no doubt that there were earlier ones. (And if you know about them, feel free to write to me about them at [email protected]!) So for this article, we look at three recent examples: the brand new recently released Iowa Music Project, plus from 2012, The Iowa City Song Project and Sonic Harvest. Other IMSC articles and podcasts featuring compilation albums: http://ift.tt/28TRCKT IOWA MUSIC PROJECT This is an album put together by The Iowa Music Project, "a James Gang endeavor that supports music produced throughout Iowa and increases access to instruments and music education among low-income families in the state". "The Iowa Music Project (IMP) is a 501©3 nonprofit organization that supports live music and musicians in the state of Iowa. IMP is currently running a songwriting showcase to promote new and unique Iowa voices. IMP also has plans to provide free instruments and music education to low-income youth, and is developing a podcast series to highlight music venues and venue owners throughout the state." (from their website) This release "is the debut album of Iowa Music Project (IMP) and a statewide compilation album inclusive of all genres of music. Featuring 20 different Iowa artists who were given an opportunity to record their original songs at Flat Black Studios in Lone Tree, Iowa, the IMP album offers a small window into the diverse genres of music being made in our state, ranging from folk, hip hop, international, experimental jazz, and more." (from the album's website) "After fielding more than 200 submissions, curators at the Iowa Music Project have narrowed their list down to 25 finalists (plus two bonus tracks from Halfloves and Middle Western...). The 25 finalists ... (received) one half-day recording session at Flat Black Studios. A selection of these 25 tracks (are also) included in a vinyl pressing released by Maximum Ames Records. The compilation includes two Listeners’ Choice honorees, Matt Van and Mason Greve & the Pork Tornadoes. Music aficionados across Iowa cast more than 14,000 votes in the poll, which featured hundreds of submissions by Iowa-based artists." (from the Little Village website) https://youtu.be/C_UxXo1pUqI?list=PLAy_OxanQN_JZnG0r9kE6buJCiBX-GQ8N Album website: http://ift.tt/2bzy9BY Digital download with 7 bonus tracks: http://ift.tt/2bSgCtC Iowa Music Project's (the organization) home page: http://ift.tt/1K3n3i7 Iowa Music Project's (the organization) Facebook page: http://ift.tt/1UsNOCp Iowa Public Radio's "Talk of Iowa" on the album: http://ift.tt/2bSfiHb Live sets from album artists from Studio One: http://ift.tt/2c6EyX2 IOWA CITY SONG PROJECT Maximum Ames Records has done it again. Perhaps Maximum Ames’s most ambitious LP release to date, the Iowa City Song Project has taken 31 musically disparate tracks and woven them into a single beautiful fabric of Iowa music history. The Iowa City Song Project was commissioned by the historic Englert Theater, which has hosted American and Iowa legends alike in its 100-year history. Performers on the record include folk legends Greg Brown and Bo Ramsey, who both hail from Iowa City, and twenty-nine other acts ranging from soul to punk-pop to experimental. Mumford’s, the Poison Control Center, Pieta Brown, Christopher the Conquered, William Elliot Whitmore, Brooks Strause, and the Emperor’s Club are some current Iowa staples who recorded a track for the album. Although simply growing familiar with this album takes time (it’s over 2 hours long with the eleven bonus tracks) and careful listening, it is well worth the effort. For those who have lived in Iowa City, it’s a priceless snapshot of one of the most vibrant cultures in the Midwest commissioned by its foremost performance space. For listeners like me who are less familiar with Iowa City, it’s yet another manifestation of the unusually collaborative and multifaceted Iowa music scene. Though Iowa City is the record’s common thread, the album isn’t a cheesy, tasteless tribute. In fact, Iowa City isn’t even directly mentioned in some of the songs (although there are some explicit references in a few of the song titles; “Iowa City, Make Love To Me” probably wins). But you know it’s there, watching, a constant in an ever-changing musical landscape that continues to raise and inspire those who live and perform there. Some tracks reflect the quintessential Iowa City experience (“Old Capital City”), while others are delightfully introspective, as though the artist was in the process of unraveling his complex relationship with the city (“Summer Sun”). At times exhilarating, moving, and even bizarre, the Iowa City Song Project seems to contain all the ingredients of artistic life, from disappointment to passion to joy. (from a DMMC {Des Moines Music Coalition] review by Zoey Miller) I try to collect as much Iowa City music as I possibly can. When I can’t buy a record at a show, I scour Bandcamp pages for the ones I don’t have yet. I spend hours creating and editing mixes of my favorite songs for my friends and family—people who aren’t familiar with the Iowa City music scene, but should be. Everyone should be. That’s my attitude, and apparently the Englert Theatre feels the same way. Instead of dragging songs into an iTunes playlist, the Englert commissioned 31 artists to write songs for a compilation album about Iowa City. The appropriately named Iowa City Song Project features an eclectic track listing of original music by some of the most respected Iowa-rooted talent, including William Elliott Whitmore, Greg Brown, Pieta Brown, The Poison Control Center, Wet Hair, Brooks Strause and many more. (from Steve Crowley's On The Beat column on the Little Village website) The Englert Theatre, Iowa City’s 100-year-old performing arts venue took it upon itself to craft a sonic tribute celebrating one of the most diverse and culturally vibrant communities in the Midwest. By commissioning 31 musicians and bands and handing them the task of creating songs inspired by experiences or impressions of Iowa City, the result is the sprawling Iowa City Song Project, an all-encompassing artistic reaction to the influential community constantly on the frontline of musical expression. The album strikingly matches the diverse selection of musical tastes that can be found in Iowa City on a day-to-day basis. Perhaps appropriately, a strong selection of grass roots Americana is present here while its oppositions fall more toward the avant-garde side of the spectrum that fit perfectly with the numerous forms of experimentation and forward thinking that springs from a college town. With a CD/LP release consisting of twenty stand-alone tracks in addition to eleven more digitally downloadable tunes, the Englert has successfully managed to turn a potentially daunting task into a seamless assembly of songs that merge into a comprehensive representation worthy of this great city. (from a Kelli Sutterman review on the Hoopla website) A video about the album... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1IX1xjwBko http://ift.tt/2gHnCvr https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvWeWX_0n-BiR-TEdVWeNHg5mruhtIYPV The album doesn't have a website of its own anymore. Maximum Ames no longer seems to be selling it. But I did find it for sale on a few sites... Itunes: http://ift.tt/2bSg9rp CD Universe: http://ift.tt/2c6EI0p Microsoft: http://ift.tt/2bSfm9Y IOWA COMPILATION: FOR HENRYVILLE Found this album just from googling for Iowa compilation albums. All I could find out about this album is what it says on its BandCamp page. It features bands from the eastern half of Iowa, mostly along the indie, alternative, and folk genres. It's a charity album to help the victims of a tornado in Henryville, Indiana. http://ift.tt/2gHnDzv The BandCamp website for the album: http://ift.tt/2c6DToB SONIC HARVEST This albums seems to have vanished off the face of the earth... and the internet! I coundn't even find it on Spotify anymore! I have asked around at Maximum Ames, but they just said it's out of print and they no longer sell it. And I couldn't get a hold of the Sound Farm studios, who were the ones who put the album together. So your best bet, if you want it, is to find it secondhand or burn and download it from a friend! There are a few tracks on some of the artists' BandCamp sites. I've included those below. And I made a YouTube playlists of the songs I could find on YouTube. Though I don't guarantee they are the same version as the album's. "As great as I think I am at giving focus to Iowa artists, there is no better way to discover new music than to actually listen to them. well the good folks at Sonic Harvest has given you all a chance to do that in one nice neat little package. Featuring 1 track from 30 different bands, all recorded at the now world famous Sound Farm in Jamaica, IA. "The album features lots of my favorites like Christopher the Conquered, Poison Control Center, Why Make Clocks and Mumford’s to name a few. But luckily for me it features acts I’m not as familiar with like Sean Huston and Pocket Aristotle. So there really is something for everyone." (from the Iowaves website) "Aside from representing the sounds of 30 Iowa bands, the compilation also represents the work of seven engineers: Ryan Martin, head engineer at Sound Farm, Logan Christian, owner of Midday Studios, Isaac Norman, engineer and owner at Righteous Dog Recording, Phil Young, engineer and owner at Liberty House Studios, Tyler Held, engineer at Sound Farm, R.B. Brummond and Alex Evans. "Patrick Tape Fleming, guitarist and vocalist of The Poison Control Center, said working on the compilation was a great experience and PCC’s track 'Looking Back' is one of his favorite recordings the band has done. He said the fact that Sound Farm gave artists the opportunity to record for free really shows the connection the studio has to the music community and how passionate they are about promoting it. “'It’s amazing that they invited all these bands to come that would probably never have the chance to record at that facility. For your everyday average rock-n-roll band, or even for a band like us that has toured a lot and released a bunch of albums, it was a really big deal to record in such a good studio where Grammy-award winning bands have recorded,' Fleming said." (from the DMMC [Des Moines Music Coalition] website) https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAy_OxanQN_JohNBcEVcaMEWbHq_fN3hH http://ift.tt/2gHQVxQ http://ift.tt/2eYi0Jg http://ift.tt/2gI8SMQ http://ift.tt/2eZ3pxe The album's Facebook page: http://ift.tt/2c6GwGG The album's Twitter page: https://twitter.com/sonicharvestia Labels: Bandcamp, compilation albums, folk (genre), folk music, Indie (genre), indie music, Iowa City Song Project,Iowa Compilation: For Henryville, Iowa Music Project, Other Sources, Sonic Harvest, various artists http://ift.tt/2bSSdBq

#IFTTT #FacebookPages #Iowa #Iowa Music #Iowa Bands #Iowa Artists #Midwest #Midwest Music

[iowamusicshowcase]

One year ago... http://ift.tt/2bSSdBq Monday, September 5, 2016 Other Sources: Four Recent Iowa Compilation Albums Iowa has a pretty good history of supporting its music. Could obviously be better and could have been better. But we've always had people who were strong supporters of our state's music, and did their best to promote it! In this regards, Iowa has quite the history of compilations albums, The earliest one I can remember is "The Iowa Compilation Album" from 1987 featuring alternative artists from across the state. I have no doubt that there were earlier ones. (And if you know about them, feel free to write to me about them at [email protected]!) So for this article, we look at three recent examples: the brand new recently released Iowa Music Project, plus from 2012, The Iowa City Song Project and Sonic Harvest. Other IMSC articles and podcasts featuring compilation albums: http://ift.tt/28TRCKT IOWA MUSIC PROJECT This is an album put together by The Iowa Music Project, "a James Gang endeavor that supports music produced throughout Iowa and increases access to instruments and music education among low-income families in the state". "The Iowa Music Project (IMP) is a 501©3 nonprofit organization that supports live music and musicians in the state of Iowa. IMP is currently running a songwriting showcase to promote new and unique Iowa voices. IMP also has plans to provide free instruments and music education to low-income youth, and is developing a podcast series to highlight music venues and venue owners throughout the state." (from their website) This release "is the debut album of Iowa Music Project (IMP) and a statewide compilation album inclusive of all genres of music. Featuring 20 different Iowa artists who were given an opportunity to record their original songs at Flat Black Studios in Lone Tree, Iowa, the IMP album offers a small window into the diverse genres of music being made in our state, ranging from folk, hip hop, international, experimental jazz, and more." (from the album's website) "After fielding more than 200 submissions, curators at the Iowa Music Project have narrowed their list down to 25 finalists (plus two bonus tracks from Halfloves and Middle Western...). The 25 finalists ... (received) one half-day recording session at Flat Black Studios. A selection of these 25 tracks (are also) included in a vinyl pressing released by Maximum Ames Records. The compilation includes two Listeners’ Choice honorees, Matt Van and Mason Greve & the Pork Tornadoes. Music aficionados across Iowa cast more than 14,000 votes in the poll, which featured hundreds of submissions by Iowa-based artists." (from the Little Village website) https://youtu.be/C_UxXo1pUqI?list=PLAy_OxanQN_JZnG0r9kE6buJCiBX-GQ8N Album website: http://ift.tt/2bzy9BY Digital download with 7 bonus tracks: http://ift.tt/2bSgCtC Iowa Music Project's (the organization) home page: http://ift.tt/1K3n3i7 Iowa Music Project's (the organization) Facebook page: http://ift.tt/1UsNOCp Iowa Public Radio's "Talk of Iowa" on the album: http://ift.tt/2bSfiHb Live sets from album artists from Studio One: http://ift.tt/2c6EyX2 IOWA CITY SONG PROJECT Maximum Ames Records has done it again. Perhaps Maximum Ames’s most ambitious LP release to date, the Iowa City Song Project has taken 31 musically disparate tracks and woven them into a single beautiful fabric of Iowa music history. The Iowa City Song Project was commissioned by the historic Englert Theater, which has hosted American and Iowa legends alike in its 100-year history. Performers on the record include folk legends Greg Brown and Bo Ramsey, who both hail from Iowa City, and twenty-nine other acts ranging from soul to punk-pop to experimental. Mumford’s, the Poison Control Center, Pieta Brown, Christopher the Conquered, William Elliot Whitmore, Brooks Strause, and the Emperor’s Club are some current Iowa staples who recorded a track for the album. Although simply growing familiar with this album takes time (it’s over 2 hours long with the eleven bonus tracks) and careful listening, it is well worth the effort. For those who have lived in Iowa City, it’s a priceless snapshot of one of the most vibrant cultures in the Midwest commissioned by its foremost performance space. For listeners like me who are less familiar with Iowa City, it’s yet another manifestation of the unusually collaborative and multifaceted Iowa music scene. Though Iowa City is the record’s common thread, the album isn’t a cheesy, tasteless tribute. In fact, Iowa City isn’t even directly mentioned in some of the songs (although there are some explicit references in a few of the song titles; “Iowa City, Make Love To Me” probably wins). But you know it’s there, watching, a constant in an ever-changing musical landscape that continues to raise and inspire those who live and perform there. Some tracks reflect the quintessential Iowa City experience (“Old Capital City”), while others are delightfully introspective, as though the artist was in the process of unraveling his complex relationship with the city (“Summer Sun”). At times exhilarating, moving, and even bizarre, the Iowa City Song Project seems to contain all the ingredients of artistic life, from disappointment to passion to joy. (from a DMMC {Des Moines Music Coalition] review by Zoey Miller) I try to collect as much Iowa City music as I possibly can. When I can’t buy a record at a show, I scour Bandcamp pages for the ones I don’t have yet. I spend hours creating and editing mixes of my favorite songs for my friends and family—people who aren’t familiar with the Iowa City music scene, but should be. Everyone should be. That’s my attitude, and apparently the Englert Theatre feels the same way. Instead of dragging songs into an iTunes playlist, the Englert commissioned 31 artists to write songs for a compilation album about Iowa City. The appropriately named Iowa City Song Project features an eclectic track listing of original music by some of the most respected Iowa-rooted talent, including William Elliott Whitmore, Greg Brown, Pieta Brown, The Poison Control Center, Wet Hair, Brooks Strause and many more. (from Steve Crowley's On The Beat column on the Little Village website) The Englert Theatre, Iowa City’s 100-year-old performing arts venue took it upon itself to craft a sonic tribute celebrating one of the most diverse and culturally vibrant communities in the Midwest. By commissioning 31 musicians and bands and handing them the task of creating songs inspired by experiences or impressions of Iowa City, the result is the sprawling Iowa City Song Project, an all-encompassing artistic reaction to the influential community constantly on the frontline of musical expression. The album strikingly matches the diverse selection of musical tastes that can be found in Iowa City on a day-to-day basis. Perhaps appropriately, a strong selection of grass roots Americana is present here while its oppositions fall more toward the avant-garde side of the spectrum that fit perfectly with the numerous forms of experimentation and forward thinking that springs from a college town. With a CD/LP release consisting of twenty stand-alone tracks in addition to eleven more digitally downloadable tunes, the Englert has successfully managed to turn a potentially daunting task into a seamless assembly of songs that merge into a comprehensive representation worthy of this great city. (from a Kelli Sutterman review on the Hoopla website) A video about the album... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1IX1xjwBko http://ift.tt/2gHnCvr https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvWeWX_0n-BiR-TEdVWeNHg5mruhtIYPV The album doesn't have a website of its own anymore. Maximum Ames no longer seems to be selling it. But I did find it for sale on a few sites... Itunes: http://ift.tt/2bSg9rp CD Universe: http://ift.tt/2c6EI0p Microsoft: http://ift.tt/2bSfm9Y IOWA COMPILATION: FOR HENRYVILLE Found this album just from googling for Iowa compilation albums. All I could find out about this album is what it says on its BandCamp page. It features bands from the eastern half of Iowa, mostly along the indie, alternative, and folk genres. It's a charity album to help the victims of a tornado in Henryville, Indiana. http://ift.tt/2gHnDzv The BandCamp website for the album: http://ift.tt/2c6DToB SONIC HARVEST This albums seems to have vanished off the face of the earth... and the internet! I coundn't even find it on Spotify anymore! I have asked around at Maximum Ames, but they just said it's out of print and they no longer sell it. And I couldn't get a hold of the Sound Farm studios, who were the ones who put the album together. So your best bet, if you want it, is to find it secondhand or burn and download it from a friend! There are a few tracks on some of the artists' BandCamp sites. I've included those below. And I made a YouTube playlists of the songs I could find on YouTube. Though I don't guarantee they are the same version as the album's. "As great as I think I am at giving focus to Iowa artists, there is no better way to discover new music than to actually listen to them. well the good folks at Sonic Harvest has given you all a chance to do that in one nice neat little package. Featuring 1 track from 30 different bands, all recorded at the now world famous Sound Farm in Jamaica, IA. "The album features lots of my favorites like Christopher the Conquered, Poison Control Center, Why Make Clocks and Mumford’s to name a few. But luckily for me it features acts I’m not as familiar with like Sean Huston and Pocket Aristotle. So there really is something for everyone." (from the Iowaves website) "Aside from representing the sounds of 30 Iowa bands, the compilation also represents the work of seven engineers: Ryan Martin, head engineer at Sound Farm, Logan Christian, owner of Midday Studios, Isaac Norman, engineer and owner at Righteous Dog Recording, Phil Young, engineer and owner at Liberty House Studios, Tyler Held, engineer at Sound Farm, R.B. Brummond and Alex Evans. "Patrick Tape Fleming, guitarist and vocalist of The Poison Control Center, said working on the compilation was a great experience and PCC’s track 'Looking Back' is one of his favorite recordings the band has done. He said the fact that Sound Farm gave artists the opportunity to record for free really shows the connection the studio has to the music community and how passionate they are about promoting it. “'It’s amazing that they invited all these bands to come that would probably never have the chance to record at that facility. For your everyday average rock-n-roll band, or even for a band like us that has toured a lot and released a bunch of albums, it was a really big deal to record in such a good studio where Grammy-award winning bands have recorded,' Fleming said." (from the DMMC [Des Moines Music Coalition] website) https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAy_OxanQN_JohNBcEVcaMEWbHq_fN3hH http://ift.tt/2gHQVxQ http://ift.tt/2eYi0Jg http://ift.tt/2gI8SMQ http://ift.tt/2eZ3pxe The album's Facebook page: http://ift.tt/2c6GwGG The album's Twitter page: https://twitter.com/sonicharvestia Labels: Bandcamp, compilation albums, folk (genre), folk music, Indie (genre), indie music, Iowa City Song Project,Iowa Compilation: For Henryville, Iowa Music Project, Other Sources, Sonic Harvest, various artists http://ift.tt/2bSSdBq

#IFTTT #FacebookPages #Iowa #Iowa Music #Iowa Bands #Iowa Artists #Midwest #Midwest Music

[iowamusicshowcase]

One year ago... http://ift.tt/2bSSdBq Monday, September 5, 2016 Other Sources: Four Recent Iowa Compilation Albums Iowa has a pretty good history of supporting its music. Could obviously be better and could have been better. But we've always had people who were strong supporters of our state's music, and did their best to promote it! In this regards, Iowa has quite the history of compilations albums, The earliest one I can remember is "The Iowa Compilation Album" from 1987 featuring alternative artists from across the state. I have no doubt that there were earlier ones. (And if you know about them, feel free to write to me about them at [email protected]!) So for this article, we look at three recent examples: the brand new recently released Iowa Music Project, plus from 2012, The Iowa City Song Project and Sonic Harvest. Other IMSC articles and podcasts featuring compilation albums: http://ift.tt/28TRCKT IOWA MUSIC PROJECT This is an album put together by The Iowa Music Project, "a James Gang endeavor that supports music produced throughout Iowa and increases access to instruments and music education among low-income families in the state". "The Iowa Music Project (IMP) is a 501©3 nonprofit organization that supports live music and musicians in the state of Iowa. IMP is currently running a songwriting showcase to promote new and unique Iowa voices. IMP also has plans to provide free instruments and music education to low-income youth, and is developing a podcast series to highlight music venues and venue owners throughout the state." (from their website) This release "is the debut album of Iowa Music Project (IMP) and a statewide compilation album inclusive of all genres of music. Featuring 20 different Iowa artists who were given an opportunity to record their original songs at Flat Black Studios in Lone Tree, Iowa, the IMP album offers a small window into the diverse genres of music being made in our state, ranging from folk, hip hop, international, experimental jazz, and more." (from the album's website) "After fielding more than 200 submissions, curators at the Iowa Music Project have narrowed their list down to 25 finalists (plus two bonus tracks from Halfloves and Middle Western...). The 25 finalists ... (received) one half-day recording session at Flat Black Studios. A selection of these 25 tracks (are also) included in a vinyl pressing released by Maximum Ames Records. The compilation includes two Listeners’ Choice honorees, Matt Van and Mason Greve & the Pork Tornadoes. Music aficionados across Iowa cast more than 14,000 votes in the poll, which featured hundreds of submissions by Iowa-based artists." (from the Little Village website) https://youtu.be/C_UxXo1pUqI?list=PLAy_OxanQN_JZnG0r9kE6buJCiBX-GQ8N Album website: http://ift.tt/2bzy9BY Digital download with 7 bonus tracks: http://ift.tt/2bSgCtC Iowa Music Project's (the organization) home page: http://ift.tt/1K3n3i7 Iowa Music Project's (the organization) Facebook page: http://ift.tt/1UsNOCp Iowa Public Radio's "Talk of Iowa" on the album: http://ift.tt/2bSfiHb Live sets from album artists from Studio One: http://ift.tt/2c6EyX2 IOWA CITY SONG PROJECT Maximum Ames Records has done it again. Perhaps Maximum Ames’s most ambitious LP release to date, the Iowa City Song Project has taken 31 musically disparate tracks and woven them into a single beautiful fabric of Iowa music history. The Iowa City Song Project was commissioned by the historic Englert Theater, which has hosted American and Iowa legends alike in its 100-year history. Performers on the record include folk legends Greg Brown and Bo Ramsey, who both hail from Iowa City, and twenty-nine other acts ranging from soul to punk-pop to experimental. Mumford’s, the Poison Control Center, Pieta Brown, Christopher the Conquered, William Elliot Whitmore, Brooks Strause, and the Emperor’s Club are some current Iowa staples who recorded a track for the album. Although simply growing familiar with this album takes time (it’s over 2 hours long with the eleven bonus tracks) and careful listening, it is well worth the effort. For those who have lived in Iowa City, it’s a priceless snapshot of one of the most vibrant cultures in the Midwest commissioned by its foremost performance space. For listeners like me who are less familiar with Iowa City, it’s yet another manifestation of the unusually collaborative and multifaceted Iowa music scene. Though Iowa City is the record’s common thread, the album isn’t a cheesy, tasteless tribute. In fact, Iowa City isn’t even directly mentioned in some of the songs (although there are some explicit references in a few of the song titles; “Iowa City, Make Love To Me” probably wins). But you know it’s there, watching, a constant in an ever-changing musical landscape that continues to raise and inspire those who live and perform there. Some tracks reflect the quintessential Iowa City experience (“Old Capital City”), while others are delightfully introspective, as though the artist was in the process of unraveling his complex relationship with the city (“Summer Sun”). At times exhilarating, moving, and even bizarre, the Iowa City Song Project seems to contain all the ingredients of artistic life, from disappointment to passion to joy. (from a DMMC {Des Moines Music Coalition] review by Zoey Miller) I try to collect as much Iowa City music as I possibly can. When I can’t buy a record at a show, I scour Bandcamp pages for the ones I don’t have yet. I spend hours creating and editing mixes of my favorite songs for my friends and family—people who aren’t familiar with the Iowa City music scene, but should be. Everyone should be. That’s my attitude, and apparently the Englert Theatre feels the same way. Instead of dragging songs into an iTunes playlist, the Englert commissioned 31 artists to write songs for a compilation album about Iowa City. The appropriately named Iowa City Song Project features an eclectic track listing of original music by some of the most respected Iowa-rooted talent, including William Elliott Whitmore, Greg Brown, Pieta Brown, The Poison Control Center, Wet Hair, Brooks Strause and many more. (from Steve Crowley's On The Beat column on the Little Village website) The Englert Theatre, Iowa City’s 100-year-old performing arts venue took it upon itself to craft a sonic tribute celebrating one of the most diverse and culturally vibrant communities in the Midwest. By commissioning 31 musicians and bands and handing them the task of creating songs inspired by experiences or impressions of Iowa City, the result is the sprawling Iowa City Song Project, an all-encompassing artistic reaction to the influential community constantly on the frontline of musical expression. The album strikingly matches the diverse selection of musical tastes that can be found in Iowa City on a day-to-day basis. Perhaps appropriately, a strong selection of grass roots Americana is present here while its oppositions fall more toward the avant-garde side of the spectrum that fit perfectly with the numerous forms of experimentation and forward thinking that springs from a college town. With a CD/LP release consisting of twenty stand-alone tracks in addition to eleven more digitally downloadable tunes, the Englert has successfully managed to turn a potentially daunting task into a seamless assembly of songs that merge into a comprehensive representation worthy of this great city. (from a Kelli Sutterman review on the Hoopla website) A video about the album... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1IX1xjwBko http://ift.tt/2gHnCvr https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvWeWX_0n-BiR-TEdVWeNHg5mruhtIYPV The album doesn't have a website of its own anymore. Maximum Ames no longer seems to be selling it. But I did find it for sale on a few sites... Itunes: http://ift.tt/2bSg9rp CD Universe: http://ift.tt/2c6EI0p Microsoft: http://ift.tt/2bSfm9Y IOWA COMPILATION: FOR HENRYVILLE Found this album just from googling for Iowa compilation albums. All I could find out about this album is what it says on its BandCamp page. It features bands from the eastern half of Iowa, mostly along the indie, alternative, and folk genres. It's a charity album to help the victims of a tornado in Henryville, Indiana. http://ift.tt/2gHnDzv The BandCamp website for the album: http://ift.tt/2c6DToB SONIC HARVEST This albums seems to have vanished off the face of the earth... and the internet! I coundn't even find it on Spotify anymore! I have asked around at Maximum Ames, but they just said it's out of print and they no longer sell it. And I couldn't get a hold of the Sound Farm studios, who were the ones who put the album together. So your best bet, if you want it, is to find it secondhand or burn and download it from a friend! There are a few tracks on some of the artists' BandCamp sites. I've included those below. And I made a YouTube playlists of the songs I could find on YouTube. Though I don't guarantee they are the same version as the album's. "As great as I think I am at giving focus to Iowa artists, there is no better way to discover new music than to actually listen to them. well the good folks at Sonic Harvest has given you all a chance to do that in one nice neat little package. Featuring 1 track from 30 different bands, all recorded at the now world famous Sound Farm in Jamaica, IA. "The album features lots of my favorites like Christopher the Conquered, Poison Control Center, Why Make Clocks and Mumford’s to name a few. But luckily for me it features acts I’m not as familiar with like Sean Huston and Pocket Aristotle. So there really is something for everyone." (from the Iowaves website) "Aside from representing the sounds of 30 Iowa bands, the compilation also represents the work of seven engineers: Ryan Martin, head engineer at Sound Farm, Logan Christian, owner of Midday Studios, Isaac Norman, engineer and owner at Righteous Dog Recording, Phil Young, engineer and owner at Liberty House Studios, Tyler Held, engineer at Sound Farm, R.B. Brummond and Alex Evans. "Patrick Tape Fleming, guitarist and vocalist of The Poison Control Center, said working on the compilation was a great experience and PCC’s track 'Looking Back' is one of his favorite recordings the band has done. He said the fact that Sound Farm gave artists the opportunity to record for free really shows the connection the studio has to the music community and how passionate they are about promoting it. “'It’s amazing that they invited all these bands to come that would probably never have the chance to record at that facility. For your everyday average rock-n-roll band, or even for a band like us that has toured a lot and released a bunch of albums, it was a really big deal to record in such a good studio where Grammy-award winning bands have recorded,' Fleming said." (from the DMMC [Des Moines Music Coalition] website) https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAy_OxanQN_JohNBcEVcaMEWbHq_fN3hH http://ift.tt/2gHQVxQ http://ift.tt/2eYi0Jg http://ift.tt/2gI8SMQ http://ift.tt/2eZ3pxe The album's Facebook page: http://ift.tt/2c6GwGG The album's Twitter page: https://twitter.com/sonicharvestia Labels: Bandcamp, compilation albums, folk (genre), folk music, Indie (genre), indie music, Iowa City Song Project,Iowa Compilation: For Henryville, Iowa Music Project, Other Sources, Sonic Harvest, various artists http://ift.tt/2bSSdBq

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