A few months ago I did a little mini-review of Bloodbath’s The Fathomless Mastery. I expressed a bit of reservation about the quality of the record, but, as time passes and I’ve had the chance to give it repeated listenings, it’s fucking awesome. The album is now breaking any new ground, but that’s not the point at all. Bloodbath have created a massive, heavy as fuck, brutal death metal record of the old school style that I find so heartwarming. Totally awesome. Check it out.
This is a video for their first single (do death metal bands have singles?) called “Hades Rising”. It’s rad. Watch it.
I am fascinated by the composition of electronic music. There’s something about creating something that can move people from nothing at all. And I really mean nothing. That is, music created from instructions sent by electricity to a piece of metal and plastic that performs calculations and then stored as chunks of magnetically charged bits on a circular piece of plastic. It’s like magic, man.
But, I think it’s important to make a differentiation here. There’s electronic music and then there’s electronic music. The former type is the type you hear on a daily basis, that is regular old music made with electronic instruments and hardware and software synthesizers. That stuff is fine, and I listen to a lot of it. However, that music tends to just be music we’re used to (disco, pop, whatever) made with electronic instrumentation. Nothing wrong with it, but not all that fascinating. There are parts of it that are interesting, little bits of electronic music leaking in, but overall it’s very normal, in the way that Rock and Roll is normal, in the way that Jazz or the Blues or Reggae is normal.
The latter, electronic music, is typically much less listenable fare, but much more artful in its deconstruction of what makes music music. Here the composer plays with a variety of different sounds, sometimes purely synthetic, sometimes real sounds culled from the everyday world. The emphasis is always on pushing what can be done with this relatively new medium of electronically created music, on exploring the boundaries of what can be created. And the technology is here so that the artist is not limited in his ability to create lush, unheard of synthetic soundscapes or sparse, technical droning. That said, these aren’t the types of records you’re putting on your iPod when you go to the gym to do 30 minutes on the elliptical. No one is jamming out in their cars to this stuff. I can think of a few crossover records—Art is a Technology by Anthony Rother, Foley Room by Amon Tobin, some others—and those stand out as prime examples of art-electro, yet still totally jam-out-able.
Curtis Roads is a pioneer in granular synthesis, a type of synthesis involving incredibly tiny chunks of sound. In the videos below, he discusses the current Golden Age of electronic music production, microsound composition, and a bunch of other pretty heady, pretty geeky things that you might or might not enjoy, but that I think is excellent. You don’t have to be a synthesis geek to get something out of what Curtis is saying here. I think there’s plenty of inspiration—musician, painter, writer, whatever—to go around.
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Sometimes I think back on the days when all I really worried about was where and how I was going to get enough cans of beer to last me through the weekend and I wonder if that might have been as good as it is ever going to get. It’s very depressing to think that, perhaps, I’ve already peaked. At least there are certain things that will always bring me back, no matter how annoyed I am with myself. Here is one.
There is a reason I still love heavy metal so much when most of my friends who were into it with me have outgrown it.
I, Monarch was my first Hate Eternal record. I bought it on a whim and never regretted it. I recommended it to my brother Charlie, and even sent him a copy, but it took two years and another Hate Eternal record for him to finally get into them.
He’s an idiot.* They’re too awesome for words.
I’ve posted a Hate Eternal video here before, but it can’t hurt to do it again.
If you haven’t yet heard or own I, Monarch, now is the perfect time to pick it up since it’s been reissued with a second disc with live versions of the record on DVD. Pretty rad. Everything Erik Rutan touches these days turns to gold and it’s pretty easy to see (hear?) why. I mean, listen to this band. They are fucking awesome. And when you are done with I, Monarch, go out and pick up their most recent record, the superior Fury & Flames. Rutan is also responsible for the production of countless other solid metal records in the last few years. I bet if you spend a little time reading through the liner notes of your metal collection, you’ll be surprised how often you find his name in there.
You DO have the liner notes, don’t you? If not, here’s a more or less complete list of his credits.
Hate Eternal I, Monarch @ Amazon.com
*Not really. He’s good.