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#i like. metal mostly. classic metal little bit of black metal death metal sometimes speed metal.
butchviking · 1 year
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somebody recommend me a band PLEASE my music taste is narrowing by the day its getting dire
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bluetapes · 7 years
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pre-order here: https://bluetapes.bandcamp.com/album/x-ray-five-the-sparrow-12
Deluxe ultra-clear 12" vinyl screenprinted with ‘moth’ artwork
The post-genre sounds Blue Tapes and X-Ray Records has mined and curated over the past couple of years might not immediately code as metal, but as early as our home-dubbed tape days we were exploring death metal’s potential as vocal-only music with blue ten: EyeSea.
Jute Gyte is unambiguously metal music and I genuinely believe that Adam Kalmbach, the sole musician and producer behind the project, is the most important musician in metal since Death’s Chuck Schuldiner, himself the most important metal musician since Tony Iommi, the man whose fingers created metal.
As a teenager into the Mortal Kombat soundtrack and Nine Inch Nails, Adam learnt metal guitar. Later, he studied composition at university, and had his brain nuked by early and baroque music, serialism and Sibelius, and the universes of potentials opening like wormholes in his head created Jute Gyte.
Jute Gyte applies microtonality and modernist compositional approaches to black metal. This isn’t in itself what makes Jute Gyte’s music great, though it does explode one thing that has slowly narrowed into a conservative musical tradition out into something new, that no one has heard before. New sounds and new feelings.
This is not dry, academic music. It is scientific, exploratory, but as physical as the most brutal splatters of 1991-era death metal, which - despite using gore as a convenient if slightly-knuckleheaded shorthand for the abstract, lurching new riff forms of the genre - had a transdimensional element even then.
Jute Gyte’s orchestra of microtonal guitars sounds as though it is vomiting blackholes. But maybe what initially scans as occult horror in Jute Gyte’s music is just seasickness caused by the unfamiliarity of this new terrain.
“I understand how stuff I've done sounds ugly to people,” Adam concedes, “but it doesn't sound ugly to me. Or, it doesn't sound exclusively ugly. It's just a different kind of language. If you haven't internalised that language, then you're going to hear a lot of things that sound like 'wrong' notes. I hear little musical jokes, I hear happy parts and sad parts, and I hear a lot of parts that don't seem to have any emotive content at all. It's not just uniformly ugly, just as Schoenberg's work is not intended to be uniformly ugly.”
For x-ray five, Adam has crafted two side-long pieces. The first of these, The Sparrow, is a kind of modernist black metal symphony that might share some signifiers with the despair-loaded blizzard hymns familiar to fans of Norwegian BM. But those beautiful flocks of guitars - sometimes they sound like they’re hovering, or scrolling back and forth, rather than ‘riffing’. A dazzling murmuration. And it wasn’t some grimoire that provided the lyrical inspiration for the piece, but Stoner author John Edward Williams’ 1965 poetry collection, The Necessary Lie.
The second piece, Monadanom, is from a suite of ambient microtonal guitar pieces that Adam began developing for us in early 2014. It is oceanic, not in the usual new age-y sense most often applied to ambient music, but in that it is raging with life and detail; unfathomable.
Self-released Jute Gyte albums like Perdurance, Ship of Theseus and Ressentiment are acknowledged as modern classics not only of metal or experimental music, but of any genre.
Adam doesn’t self-promote or use social media, play live or collaborate with other artists, but a fiercely loyal fanbase has already swarmed around him. This is his first full release with a label and I consider it to be one of the most important releases for Blue Tapes and X-Ray Records.
This is a metal record, but for me, it makes total sense that Jute Gyte would be on the same label as Katie Gately and Tashi Dorji, rather than Roadrunner or even Relapse. These humans are his peers - artists who are changing people’s perceptions of the possibilities of modern music at a cellular level.
Adam Kalmbach is influenced by Harry Partch, Xenakis, Penderecki, Gloria Coates, Mahler and Brahms; he regards Jute Gyte as belonging to a continuum of ‘late Romantic’ music.
Jute Gyte will appeal to any fans of Stockhausen, Morbid Angel, Sonic Youth, Gojira, Autechre, Blut Aus Nord, Deathspell Omega, Slayer, Tim Hecker, Daniel Lopatin, Khanate, Ulver, Anaal Nathrakh, Liturgy, Mahavishnu Orchestra, King Crimson or Godflesh.
A FEW WORDS FROM JOHN DORAN, EDITOR OF THE QUIETUS:
"A house sparrow beats its elliptical wings up to fifteen times per second. This may seem paltry compared to the ruby-throated hummingbird which can flap 200 times per second but it simply isn’t. The beats are just slow enough for us to be able to discern the highly focussed power of passer domesticus - the most widespread wild bird in the world. No floating gracefully by on an invisible blur of feathers for the common sparrow just the powerful little upstroke, the powerful little downstroke and all of the other (half and quarter) positions that join them. One sparrow takes wing; then another; then another. Common, ungainly birds? Spiteful little pests? Not a bit of it. If you spent your life watching them perhaps you could frame the astonishing lattice of a meinie of these tiny creatures. Perhaps you could figure the calculus of a tribe of sparrows taking flight. A host that breaks apart on the ground and reassembles on the wing.
"The music of Jute Gyte, made by the visionary musician Adam Kalmbach, makes me feel sick. I hope there has been a distant civilisation somewhere along the way who have paid emetic tribute to their most revered cultural producers, as I do mean this as the highest of compliments to the chef. Because while the harsh, fiercely avant garde, black metal of microtonal progressions and complex time signatures he produces does genuinely make me feel quite queasy, I’d like to think any genuine regurgitation suffered by me would be the kind that precedes the ayahuasca vision or the state of satori triggered by a pure dose of MDMA. The churning thunder of albums such as Ship Of Theseus and Perdurance - and now this genuinely awesome 12”, The Sparrow, on X-Ray Records - is equally matched by a nagging aesthetic of pessimism. While this may well by umami to a depressive realist’s palate, as with The Silence Of Animals by John Gray, this music contains the very real possibility of transcendence. (This being the rare transformative state often promised by modern black metal, yet the most conspicuous by its absence.)
"There is a bird sanctuary on the West Lancashire Coastal Plain, near Burscough, called Martin Mere. In the foyer of the visitor centre there is a charity coin spinner, a large money collection device, sometimes also known as a coin vortex donation box. The device is essentially a large, smooth, downward-curving funnel, protected by a semi-spherical clear plastic dome. There is a slot into which you press a coin. Now sometimes, but not often, the coins don’t take and they slide, flat side down straight into the funnel and immediately out of sight into the collection box. Mostly however they circle. This happens slowly at first; a large graceful loop of the shallower edge of the funnel but because of gravity they never make a complete circumference, instead they always travel in a concentric circle, down the funnel, picking up speed as the spiral shrinks inwards. Each pass round the funnel becomes shorter and shorter until it essentially becomes a tube, round which the coin travels horizontally at great speed. It moves so quickly it is hard to tell what is happening.
"Whump, whump, whump, whump. The coin becomes more absence than presence. And then, just for a fraction of a second before disappearing into the dark for good, the coin is no longer touching the funnel wall.
"And at that moment, there is take-off. "
PRAISE FOR JUTE GYTE:
"Lurching, ascending, descending – ever moving in a time that doesn’t seem to resemble time at all. Sometimes the music of Jute Gyte sounds as though it is crawling around inside you, threatening to escape. Whether it is slowing up or speeding down sometimes seems not only subjective, but actually kind of irrelevant. This is genuinely transdimensional music. It obeys the rules of little other sound in our universe. In an era where the ‘psychedelic’ is much fetishized, but oft-misunderstood, Jute Gyte is making music that is beyond cosmic. It looks where space rock has taken us and laughs. Why waste time on sailing a backdraft of flanger up to the moon when you can wrench open reality itself and slide a rotten tentacle through the cracks? This isn’t for people who find black metal cute. And it isn’t for people who find black metal extreme. Microtonal metal might never inspire memeworthy fandom, but right now it sounds like the future. And the past. And the whole ugly present – all knotted together in a vipers nest of ouroboros." - 20 Jazz Funk Greats
"Jute Gyte's Perdurance is a modern classical black metal masterwork" - Noisey
"It's tempting to focus on this album's otherworldly guitar sound and various other unusual technical components, but its emotional charge is its most compelling feature. Many black metal acts address the idea that we're on our own in a blind, hostile cosmos, but rarely does the horror feel so real." - Stereogum
"If you can sit through it, you will be rewarded by relentlessly entertaining cacophony shot through with a warped sense of humour. If you don’t believe me, take my roommate’s word for it: “Could you never play that skronk album again? I really hate it.” So fire up the coals, put some brews on ice, then lock yourself in the basement and twitch to the summer sounds of Jute Gyte." - The Quietus
"Few recent artists have made such inimitable music as Missourian Adam Kalmbach, architect behind the protean madness of Jute Gyte" - Metal Sucks
"Adam Kalmbach has produced vast quantities of what is hands down the most forward-thinking and complex music metal has to offer" - Angry Metal Guy
"Jute Gyte is music for people who don’t necessarily want what they take in to make them feel better, or even good." - Heavy Blog Is Heavy
"Though not a “pretty” or “pleasant” album by any means, Kalmbach’s genuinely alien approach to harmony and composition coupled with a greater emotional weight than much of his previous work makes Ressentiment one of his best albums yet, and one of the best this year." - Toilet ov Hell
"We are hearing a truly original artist completely at ease with his medium" - Heathen Harvest
"Swirling, chaotic, virulent, black and maddening" - Cvlt Nation
"The guitar sounds like it’s being played by an alien" - Nine Circles
"Robin Thicke is a human. Jute Gyte could eat him." - Decoder Magazine
"The music Kalmbach writes is now top notch covering all the bases of brittle, spiteful black metal, creepy atmospherics and a contrasting, unique style that makes his music stand out above much of the like minded one man black metal out there today." - Teeth of the Divine
"Jute Gyte remains one of our most creative and challenging American black metal extracts." - From the Dust Returned
"Jute Gyte’s now signature hyperdissonance meets the ever-shifting polyrhythms of IDM, Gamelan’s chiming bells, and the shifting dread of early electronic music. Perdurance is a strange album whose penchant for the impenetrable verges on Dadaism" - Invisible Oranges
"Ears accustomed to Western 12-tone polyphony can barely process these sounds—they sink into your skull like red-hot stones into ice. It's like you're listening to a tape at the wrong speed, or to music warped by a black hole's gravitational lens on its way here from several galaxies away." - Chicago Reader
"cracked decrepit guitar tones creak against the maelstrom of drone swelling and spilling in harmonious fury, with buried drum machine marching through the void and anguished vocals recounting an ancient war of mass slaughter. electronics and treatments figure more prominently than on other BM projects, sure to piss off purists and blurring the divide between metal and noise: overwhelming buzzing distortion and delay" - KFJC
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jansegers · 7 years
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Simple English Word List
SIMPLE1540 : a simple English wikipedia word list based on the XML export of all articles related to the nine major groups: Everyday life, Geography, History, Knowledge, Language, Literature, People, Religion, and Science and retaining all word forms appearing 7 times or more in this corpus. 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China, March and May made this list because china, march and may are on it and I didn't want to decide in favor of the common noun or the proper noun; all other proper nouns have been omitted (even the ten other months that met the criterium of appearing more then 6 times). #SimpleWikipedia #SimpleEnglish #wordlist #English #words #level1540 #Inli #nimi #selo1540
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mutoidman · 7 years
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Interview with Ben Koller // Invisible Oranges
Ben Koller is one of the most prolific drummers in heavy music. In each of his bands—Mutoid Man, Converge, All Pigs Must Die, and Killer Be Killed—he’s a Swiss Army knife, playing a variety of styles with panache. One moment he’ll be blasting on par with Dave Witte, and then he’ll smoothly change to the lurching heaviness of Jason Roeder. Koller’s drumming has a feel that’s undeniably his own, which is rare in a world with so many mechanical players. 
That feel has its stink all over Mutoid Man’s War Moans. The LP keeps the hair-metal- party-gone-wrong vibe of previous LP Bleeder intact, but it also delves into ballad and even pseudo-dance territory, creating an unshakable urge to headbang while doing the running man. 
Koller sat down with Invisible Oranges to discuss War Moans and the things that have shaped him into the drummer he is today. 
-J.J. Anselmi 
<a data-cke-saved-href="http://mutoidman.bandcamp.com/album/bleeder" href="http://mutoidman.bandcamp.com/album/bleeder">Bleeder by Mutoid Man</a>
How do you see War Moans in comparison to Bleeder? 
It’s probably a little more comfortable, as in being comfortable doing what we want and not having any guidelines. We wrote a wide range of songs on this one, and the production is definitely better. We allotted more time in the studio to make sure we were totally happy with the way it sounds. On Bleeder, we felt a bit rushed. We did the whole thing — tracking, mixing, everything — in about 10 days. That record came out great, and I’m really happy with it, but it almost felt like a second demo with better production. War Moans sounds more like a fully realized band. 
From balls-out rock and thrash to the dance groove in “Kiss of Death,” it’s clear that Mutoid Man has a wide range of influences. But War Moans also has a cohesive feel. 
I’d like to think that now we just sound like us — like Steve, Nick, and Ben — so no matter what styles we venture into on the record, we still sound like Mutoid Man, which is what I admire about bands like Dillinger, Mastodon and Baroness. It’s always unmistakably them. That’s what makes a band really special: you can immediately tell who it is when they start playing. 
We didn’t have any boundaries when we were writing. When we were joking around about writing a ballad, we were like, “Fuck it, let’s do it.” We were listening to a lot of Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s “Lucky Man” and Mötley Crüe’s “Without You” at the time and just decided to do a ballad. Steve [Brodsky] busted one out pretty much in the next breath, which became “Bandages,” the last song on the record with Chelsea Wolfe and Ben Chisholm adding a little extra magic to it. 
I like to say that Mutoid Man is a culmination of everything we’ve ever listened to since were 12-years-old: from the classic Metallica to our peers in Mastodon, Dillinger and Baroness, and just about everything else — punk, hardcore, pop punk, metal, and thrash. It’s all in there in one big soup. 
When I think of Mutoid Man, I also think of Torche and Old Man Gloom, who make heavy music with a sense of humor. 
It just naturally happens that we like to have fun onstage, and we like to joke around off-stage. We’re all big fans of stand-up comedy and good friends with Torche and Old Man Gloom. We have fun and like to show it, and I think it’s good for the audience. It’s not fun to see a band when they’re super uncomfortable and just plant their feet, stare at the ground, and try to play their songs as perfectly as possible. We like to improv, and Mutoid Man shows are a bit different every night because we take liberties here and there with songs. We try to keep it loose and fun and put on a good show for people. 
How different is the writing process for Mutoid Man compared to Converge? 
There are actually a lot of similarities. You just start with basic riffs and build from there: jam a little, demo those jams, and then listen back and fine-tune. Most of it starts with guitar riff ideas that Brodsky will send to Nick and me in a text message. He wakes up in the morning, plays guitar in his underwear, sends us riffs, and asks what we think. When we get together, we jam on those ideas and the songs evolve from there. 
What’s one of your favorite songs to play from 
Probably “Kiss of Death” because it’s a slow creeper. There’s not a whole lot of super fast stuff on it, so you can really lay into it. That song and “Date with the Devil” are similar in that way. It’s more pocket playing rather than overplaying, which is more of what I’m used to. Venturing into pocket playing is getting fun for me, which I wasn’t that into in the past. I love the songs where I can just find a groove and use the Chuck Biscuits and John Bonham caveman approach—but where it’s a caveman that’s pretty good at geometry and algebra. A metrosexual caveman. 
youtube
When did you start playing drums, and did you take lessons? 
I started playing in about 1992, when I was 12. I had a drum pad first, and that was a drag, so I had to figure out how to get a kit. Then I got a really crappy drum kit with mismatched brands, but I didn’t care because it was something to bash on. I took lessons from a couple guys for a few years, like this little Italian guy named Philip Vitale, who was a Latin and orchestral player in the Cape Cod Symphony Orchestra. He had a huge impact on me. He was kind of a nut, as a lot of drummers are. He would coach me on rudiments, and, to get me to play faster, he’d smack my hands with a drumstick, trying to motivate me in a funny but painful way. 
I played all I could in high school. I was in concert band, jazz band, and elite jazz band. I also played in the pep band at basketball and hockey games, a Blues Brothers cover band, and three or so bands with my friends. I did everything I could to play as much as possible, because that’s all I wanted to do. 
Who are some of the drummers who have influenced you the most, and what have you taken from them? 
John Bonham and Dave Lombardo are two of the biggest ones. Bill Stevenson had a huge impact on me, because The Descendents and Black Flag were the first punk bands I listened to. I definitely incorporated that super-fast right hand surf style when I started playing in punk and hardcore bands. 
Drummers from my first local shows probably had more of an influence on me than anyone. When I was first learning, I was going to a ton of shows and playing as much music as I could. I was in awe of every drummer I saw, even the ones who turned out to be not so good in the end. Nick Branigan from Bane was the first drummer I ever saw play a blastbeat when he was in Rise Again a million years ago. I had never seen a blastbeat before, and I was just in shock. I immediately went home and tried to figure it out. And again, I’m a huge fan of that Chuck Biscuits, chopping-wood style, but then combining that with the finesse of Keith Moon and John Bonham. 
What was the first real band you were in? 
That would be a band called Where’s Ben? We went to an open mic night at Cape Cod Community College to play our first show. When we were supposed to go on, I was at Taco Bell and didn’t make it, so we called the band Where’s Ben? We were a pretty bad pop punk/hardcore band. We had a song called “The STD Song” about chlamydia and gonorrhea. We listened to a lot of bands that mixed pop punk with hardcore, like Good Riddance, Suicide Machines, Strung Out and The Descendants—bands who played blazing metal riffs but were mostly pop punk. 
Can you describe one of the worst shows you’ve ever played? 
The first one that comes to mind is this festival that Converge played called Zwarte Cross in Holland in 2010. It was a huge extreme sports festival with dirt bikes and crazy stunts. We were basically the side show, and it was us and Papa Roach. Around 200,000 people were at the festival, but only a couple hundred people decided that we were worth their time. We got lots of sideways looks, and it was just really weird. Sometimes you take an offer for a festival and wonder why the hell you’re there. You just get up, punch the clock, do your job, and get off the stage. But sometimes those shows are the most fun because it can make you try harder to get a reaction out of people. You can get a little more loose because you think it doesn’t really matter, and sometimes it makes the show more energetic. 
If you could do a collaboration with any active drummer, who would it be and why? 
Probably my friend Chris Maggio, who was in Trap Them, Coliseum and Sleigh Bells, because he’s as much of a kook as me. We could start a band called Ludicrous Speed and just face each other’s drums and try to blastbeat each other to death. 
I’ve always wanted to start a drummer podcast and just shoot the shit with all my drummer friends. Maybe one of these days I’ll get it together. 
You’re one of the rare metal drummers who has a totally distinct style. Do you have any advice for drummers when it comes to developing their own feel? 
I was never a sit-in-your-bedroom-and-practice-double-paradiddles-with-a-metronome-until-your-hands-fall-off-kind of drummer. I always went and played with other people. If I tried to count the number of bands I’ve been in, it would probably take me 24 hours, because I’ve been in dozens of random bands, side projects, and short-lived collaborations. That definitely affected the feel of how I play, because you absorb the musical vibe of whoever you jam with. Playing with Converge is totally different from playing with Mutoid Man, which is totally different from All Pigs Must Die, which is totally different from Killer Be Killed, because it’s all different musical personalities. That’s made me pretty adaptable. 
I think it’s important to play what you love and play a lot, and not necessarily practice to a metronome in your bedroom for a million hours, unless that’s what you love. For me, I was always just into jamming with my friends as much as possible and keeping my chops up that way—being a band drummer and not a clinical drummer. 
Via Invisible Oranges
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