Tuesday, January 30, 2018
Tribulation - 'The Lament' from Down Below (2018)
I listened to the new Tribulation album Down Below while drawing the below draculoid and then decided to watch the video for the first single 'The Lament' afterwards as I hadn't seen it yet and happily it features one of my favorite ubiquitous gothic horror tropes of wearing a white nightgown, getting up out of bed and carrying a lit candelabra down some steps in a spooky mansion so that is awesome and even better the new Tribulation album feels like a big old fashioned rock release which it totally is. Hopefully this will inspire kids to buy Tribulation hoodies from Hot Topic and wear them while being sullen in the mall and later at convenience stores. Watching this video reminds me of what it was like to be 11 years old and watching the Heart video for 'These Dreams' which permanently altered me and although Tribulation is not really 80's Heart they are like 80's Heart because they have transformed into something appropriate to wander through misty interiors in diaphanous gowns to which is something we can all aspire to but not always achieve. I really wish there was a cable television station that did nothing but play cool videos from new and old albums because that would be pretty awesome. It would also be neat if there was like a 24-hour news station too that reported stuff that happened at all hours. Maybe someday. For now we have the new Tribulation album and it is really good. <3
Suffering Hour - In Passing Ascension (2017)
I didn't draw anything while listening to In Passing Ascension. I just listened and I am extremely pleased that I did so. Suffering Hour hail from Minnesota, where I lived for many years and I am glad to see it supports a thriving black/death metal scene in addition to its long-standing crust/hxcx community. Suffering Hour love tremolo and love to use it and this is endlessly gratifying because riffs bend and flux inside of very solid if rather eldritch architectures. For sure this is cosmic blackened death arrived at through thrash praxis and I feel very strongly that it is this grounding in thrash which makes In Passing Ascension hold together so well. Hail To Thee Suffering Hour! <3 PS - bonus appreciation granted due to Suffering Hour also being fans of The Chasm because The Chasm are awesome and deserve all the love they can absorb! <3 <3
Abigor - Hollenzwang (Chronicles Of Perdition) [2018]
If you are into Satanic Black Metal with additional samples about Satan and moaning and cackling and mild industrial frippery around the edges and a real eagerness to feel the freezing breath of Satan themselves on the back of your neck as you plunge further and further into the darkness, then you should probably listen to the new Abigor album because it totally fulfills those urges and then some. <3
Monday, January 29, 2018
Incantation - Dirges Of Elysium (2014)
When things look bleak, which is often enough these days, I like to cocoon myself within death metal and amplify negative bliss to fight the darkness with a greater darkness. Incantation have a lot of albums which ooze and stank and envelop and drip and smear and they have for a long time. Things have looked awfully bleak for a long time and in my life Incantation albums have been there to help. Thank You Incantation! <3
Update To Everything
Dear Readers & Viewers:
I wanted to update all to my general situation. After my car died, I managed to get help to get a rental car and I found a car I wanted to purchase even though it was out of my price range but a snowstorm came and I wasn't able to get to drive the car and the day after the snowstorm I gave myself (another) brain injury by whacking my skull on the rental car doorframe which put me out of commission for days and days and is still having an immediate (and cumulative) impact. I had to keep going to work with the additional brain injury and my performance and demeanor really suffered from it but I have tried to hang in there with work. Being barely adequate to cashier at a big box store has weighed upon me because in all of my employment I try and be professional and competent and polite no matter what job it is and having neurological issues impinge upon my ability to conduct myself properly in employment weighs heavily upon me. By the time I was feeling I could look at the car I wanted to purchase it had been sold and I have been searching carfax every day for cars many of which might work despite expense. I call about some of them but they usually sell right away and in between calls I am seized with panic attacks and worse. That is how I spend my time not at work. I am in my third week of renting a car which I also cannot afford to do. I think about just quitting my job but even if I did that I would still need a car because where I am staying now, an off-interstate weekly motel, is not within walking distance to any place with food or medicine. I have been homeless now since the summer of 2016 and I have been living here for almost 10 months. I have been driving 100 miles a day to go to work around the corner where I used to live. I am so scared to go to a car lot by myself and make some kind of horrible deal that I cannot afford anyway. I literally do not have the cognitive capacity to understand car financing and can't even really make monthly payments but I am going to have to try. I am frightened of being taken advantage of, even as I know it is unavoidable. I wish I knew someone personally who I trusted to either sell or donate a car to me. Instead I freak out over and over and over while listening to the Fall's Peel Sessions in 20-minute installments online. Sometimes I try to make art as a means of meditative reflection and calming. I am worthless at life. I keep hoping if I get the flu it will kill me outright. Once I get a car I have to get new housing right away and that will also require at least first and security which I don't have as well as (generally) 3x rent = monthly income which I got the job in order to secure but that also has not come to pass. I only work 16-20 hours a week. Now it is possible that I will lose my disability due to taking a job. I am having panic attacks about that also. I am supposed to go see a doctor in February to have an appointment to be evaluated for state-ok'd medical marijuana but the appointment itself costs $275 dollars plus another like hundred-or-two dollars for a medical marijuana 'card' let alone the medicine itself. Although I have desperately needed it, I haven't used marijuana regularly since 2010 and at all since once in 2011. Living in the aftermath of multiple (or complex?) traumatic brain injuries it is the one thing I think I can count on to slow the progressive elements of the damage as well as help me in day-to-day functioning with chronic arthritis pain and migraines. I feel like I am just rambling at this point and I apologize. I just wanted to give a sense of what is going on in my life and how crushing all of this feels. I have been living with unendurable, unending stress for years and years now and I just want it to end. I am tired of being in a constant state of panic and dread and material collapse. To be quite honest I am ashamed to be alive like this. Much Love To Anyone Who Read This Far. Sorry Again! <3 nathaxnne
PS - do you think carfax is in honor of dracula? I keep hoping so!
I wanted to update all to my general situation. After my car died, I managed to get help to get a rental car and I found a car I wanted to purchase even though it was out of my price range but a snowstorm came and I wasn't able to get to drive the car and the day after the snowstorm I gave myself (another) brain injury by whacking my skull on the rental car doorframe which put me out of commission for days and days and is still having an immediate (and cumulative) impact. I had to keep going to work with the additional brain injury and my performance and demeanor really suffered from it but I have tried to hang in there with work. Being barely adequate to cashier at a big box store has weighed upon me because in all of my employment I try and be professional and competent and polite no matter what job it is and having neurological issues impinge upon my ability to conduct myself properly in employment weighs heavily upon me. By the time I was feeling I could look at the car I wanted to purchase it had been sold and I have been searching carfax every day for cars many of which might work despite expense. I call about some of them but they usually sell right away and in between calls I am seized with panic attacks and worse. That is how I spend my time not at work. I am in my third week of renting a car which I also cannot afford to do. I think about just quitting my job but even if I did that I would still need a car because where I am staying now, an off-interstate weekly motel, is not within walking distance to any place with food or medicine. I have been homeless now since the summer of 2016 and I have been living here for almost 10 months. I have been driving 100 miles a day to go to work around the corner where I used to live. I am so scared to go to a car lot by myself and make some kind of horrible deal that I cannot afford anyway. I literally do not have the cognitive capacity to understand car financing and can't even really make monthly payments but I am going to have to try. I am frightened of being taken advantage of, even as I know it is unavoidable. I wish I knew someone personally who I trusted to either sell or donate a car to me. Instead I freak out over and over and over while listening to the Fall's Peel Sessions in 20-minute installments online. Sometimes I try to make art as a means of meditative reflection and calming. I am worthless at life. I keep hoping if I get the flu it will kill me outright. Once I get a car I have to get new housing right away and that will also require at least first and security which I don't have as well as (generally) 3x rent = monthly income which I got the job in order to secure but that also has not come to pass. I only work 16-20 hours a week. Now it is possible that I will lose my disability due to taking a job. I am having panic attacks about that also. I am supposed to go see a doctor in February to have an appointment to be evaluated for state-ok'd medical marijuana but the appointment itself costs $275 dollars plus another like hundred-or-two dollars for a medical marijuana 'card' let alone the medicine itself. Although I have desperately needed it, I haven't used marijuana regularly since 2010 and at all since once in 2011. Living in the aftermath of multiple (or complex?) traumatic brain injuries it is the one thing I think I can count on to slow the progressive elements of the damage as well as help me in day-to-day functioning with chronic arthritis pain and migraines. I feel like I am just rambling at this point and I apologize. I just wanted to give a sense of what is going on in my life and how crushing all of this feels. I have been living with unendurable, unending stress for years and years now and I just want it to end. I am tired of being in a constant state of panic and dread and material collapse. To be quite honest I am ashamed to be alive like this. Much Love To Anyone Who Read This Far. Sorry Again! <3 nathaxnne
PS - do you think carfax is in honor of dracula? I keep hoping so!
Sunday, January 28, 2018
Saturday, January 27, 2018
Eye Of Nix - Black Somnia (2017)
This album is perfect for when you want to twirl in black skirts before a full-length mirror with only candles for illumination, which, you know, is almost all the time <3
Bell Witch - Mirror Reaper (2017)
This album means so so much to me. I listen to it again and again. It is more a companion or a weather pattern than a piece of music. I am glad to have Mirror Reaper in my life. Thank You Bell Witch. <3 <3 <3
Beldam - Pasung (2018)
Something at the bottom of the hole is coiling and uncoiling and maybe the bottom of the hole isn't the bottom of the hole but is something that is waking up or reflexively moving in its sleep and what kind of dreams are there at the bottom of the hole that move through like peristalsis or a clenching and unclenching of mandibular in practice for that which will consume whatever whole. <3
Thursday, January 25, 2018
Wednesday, January 24, 2018
The Fall - 'Spector Vs. Rector' Live December 11th 1980?
My favorite Fall song ever. I can't enumerate how many times I have listened to this in its many forms. Considering I used to drive through Delray Beach, FL with my Toyota Corolla blasting Our Nation's Saving Grace more times than any other cassette (even more than Motley Crue's Too Fast For Love!) nearly to the end of the first decade of the 21st Century that is saying a lot. I think about the battle between the spectre and the rector and the inspector, the ruin in their respective wakes, so so often. I also think of Mark E Smith in terms of the haunted gothick otherworldly vibes of M.R. James and other great short-form authors of the fantastickal more than within the history of post-punk or anything like that. I wish Mark E Smith recorded more fireside ghost stories to listen to on chilly nights but I love love love what we have and will cherish forever and ever. Love To Thee Always <3 nathaxnne
Tuesday, January 23, 2018
Pillorian - Obsidian Arc (2017)
I love love love Agalloch and was very forlorn when they broke up, so forlorn that it took me a long time to listen to Obsidian Arc by Pillorian, which is the band John Haughm founded with other PNW black metal folks in the aftermath of Agalloch's foundering and to be honest, it was really dumb of me to wait that long. Pillorian does not sound much like Agalloch really, leaning into a melodic folk-tinged black metal that has more in common with mid-90's exponents of that style than anything contemporary really but with the bone-deep melancholy so immediately present in much Agalloch. This album is to me as comforting as a knit throw atop whilst drinking a favorite warm beverage or staring into video fireplace. Obsidian Arc sounds like a home I can never return to but which is home nonetheless. I didn't even draw anything while listening to this. I mostly just listened and messed around on the internet. A beautiful album. <3
'
Monday, January 22, 2018
Disrotted - Divination (2016)
What today feels like. At least I do not feel alone while listening to Disrotted. After all hope is gone there is only acceptance. <3
Sunday, January 21, 2018
Evil Warriors - Fall From Reality (2018)
as longtime readers of this blog will undoubtedly recognize, blackened thrash metal or thrashened black metal or blackthrash or whatever is just the thing to get one going if going is needed, at least if you are me and for this I blame, like, Celtic Frost and Kreator and Sodom and stuff. Hailing from Leipzig, Germany, Evil Warriors keep the negative flame lit and burning. This album is awesome. <3
Tetragrammacide - Primal Incinerators Of Moral Matrix (2017)
This album totally slays. Overdriven, blown-out, heavy psychedelic grind-death <3
Primitive Man - Caustic (2017)
I hope that listening to Caustic by Primitive Man is helping heal my most recent and historical brain injuries. I choose to believe it is. Even if it doesn't or can't it totally rules. <3
Wednesday, January 17, 2018
Tuesday, January 16, 2018
Spectral Voice - Eroded Corridors Of Unbeing (2017)
Aetheric Dissolution. Waiting To Be Reborn. Incarnation Slowly Destroyed Is The Process Of Incarnation. What Remains. What Never Came To Be. What Haunts Just Beyond The Limits Of Sight.
The Body & Full Of Hell - Ascending A Mountain Of Heavy Light (2017)
Let the mountain fall on you it won't hurt or the hurt you feel will feel right in all the right ways and leave you with nothing you do not want to be left with <3
Yoko Ono - 'Looking Over From My Hotel Window' from Approximately Infinite Universe (1973)
Yoko <3 <3 <3
(I love this song. It makes me feel better because there were songs after this song)
Saturday, January 13, 2018
Today
Today has been one of the worst days of my entire life. Due to poverty I didn't take the car into a mechanic earlier this week when a check engine light began flashing and and oil light began flickering. Because I am so poor and so stupid today when I went to the grocery store the car began shuddering and smoking on the highway and then died in the grocery store parking lot. It got towed, leaving a pool of oil where it had been in the middle of the parking lot. The mechanic it was towed to verified that the engine was destroyed and it would cost $2000 to replace the engine. While I was at the mechanic for many many hours I broke the zipper on my only winter coat. This past week my big box store cashier job decided to hire me permanently but now I am going to lose that job. It is over an hour away each way by highway. I am staying at a weekly motel by the highway. I am supposed to work tomorrow evening and then the following day in the morning. I am going to lose my job because now I have no car. I cannot afford to get a new car nor can I afford to get a new engine. Even if I could afford these things I would still lose my job because what my job cares about is me getting there which I can no longer do. I am honestly considering killing myself tonight with whatever means I have at hand. I cannot do this anymore. Someone who was supposed to be alive these things would not happen to. I would not be such a failure at everything that I was completely alone in a motel hours from anyone I know without even walking access to food and medicine. I honestly don't know what to do. Since I have been 7 years old God has been telling me to kill myself because that is what will make the world better. Always I go on not killing myself but I feel like that has been a mistake. Whenever things look like they might be tenable something catastrophic happens which leads to terrible outcome. Most of these things are my fault. I am too stupid to live. Especially with a brain injury on top of existing developmental disabilities. I should listen to God and kill myself I know I should. That is what They want. The world would be a better place with me not in it. I am tired of being homeless and alone. I feel like at least if I killed myself I might be able to see my cat again but she won't be in hell probably where I will be forever and ever. I will probably delete this post unless I delete myself first. I hate myself and I want to die.
Update:
PS
I feel strongly I should delete this post. I am sorry to have caused
concern or upset among any readers. That is never my intent and I
apologize. <3
On Sunday I was able to get a rental car for a week and therefore able
to get to work. I had to take a Lyft a long way to the rental car place
and then rent the car which was a lot but for this coming week I have
secured transportation. I will have to reckon with attaining closer
and/or permanent housing as well as a new used car which is terrifying
to contemplate but it must occur.
Update 2 (1/18/18)
Today when I went into the rental car at my job to sit there and eat something, I hit my head very hard on the car door frame. I have a brain injury. I have sustained multiple concussions since 2010 and probably before that point. Every time I hit my head I have a resumption of severe concussion symptoms. I haven't hit my head this hard for many years. It could mean weeks or months of sustained difficulty where thinking, feeling, doing become agonizingly difficult and painful. When recovery happens it is less a recovery than adaptation to a new homeostasis, one where the person you were before the reinjury is gone forever and what is left has an even greater burden and less of a self, less of a person, to drag into the future. I am beyond upset about this. I barely have words.
Update 2 (1/18/18)
Today when I went into the rental car at my job to sit there and eat something, I hit my head very hard on the car door frame. I have a brain injury. I have sustained multiple concussions since 2010 and probably before that point. Every time I hit my head I have a resumption of severe concussion symptoms. I haven't hit my head this hard for many years. It could mean weeks or months of sustained difficulty where thinking, feeling, doing become agonizingly difficult and painful. When recovery happens it is less a recovery than adaptation to a new homeostasis, one where the person you were before the reinjury is gone forever and what is left has an even greater burden and less of a self, less of a person, to drag into the future. I am beyond upset about this. I barely have words.
Friday, January 12, 2018
Wednesday, January 10, 2018
Akercocke - 'Disappear' from Renaissance In Extremis (2017)
I love Akercocke so much! They are one of my favorite prog-goth-death-thrash-death bands ever and I am so happy their new album rules as hard as it does! Their first in a decade! Right On! <3 <3 <3
Tuesday, January 9, 2018
Saturday, January 6, 2018
SubRosa - Subdued: Live At Roadburn 2017 (2017)
SubRosa are one of my most favorite bands ever. The one and only time I saw them live I went into a legit trance state and this live set at Roadburn sure does show why. Love from all of my heart. <3 <3 <3
Friday, January 5, 2018
Wednesday, January 3, 2018
Herbie Hancock - 'Vibe Alive (Extended Dance Mix)' from Perfect Machine (1988)
Kind of the ultimate 1988 Herbie Hancock Roller Disco Experience??? I wish this song wasn't so boy -> girl focused but I can picture the lazers and the dry ice and the mirrored reflections so perfectly. Electro Hancock is so great always. This is by far not my favorite song on the album but the obvious brutality of Laswell's sample placements work to disorient so heavy. 1988 was the year I WORE OUT my M/A/R/R/S Cassingle too!!! <3
PS - I think THIS is my favorite song on Perfect Machine because of its lyrical-yet-synthetic vibe despite not featuring the vocoder as much as I dream:
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