cord storage medallion (vortex against fascism 3)

King Woman - Created In The Image Of Suffering (2017)

The deep hurt from wounds so long ago they are indistinguishable from identity. I've listened to this a lot these days. Hail King Woman. <3 <3 <3 nathaxn

Pissed Jeans - Why Love Now (2017)

I have been into Pissed Jean's noise punk rooted in the basic awfulness of quotidian white male cis mediocrity and how much it sucks to live within pretty much since they have been up to it. Their latest album seems especially like life reduced to an endless stream of big pharma commercials as preferable to loneliness which is something i know more about than i wish i did. the only thing worse than embodying aging white male cis capitalist supremacy is having to put up with it, and thankfully Why Love Now is aware of this state of affairs. Also being produced by Lydia Lunch helps with the punk-into-blues blare and overall ethos. Heart Lydia! <3 nathaxn

blossom furl (vortex against fascism 2)

Sunless - Urraca (2017)

Gorgeous, complex, chiming and monstrous death metal resounding and folding into and out of crevices of its own making. Quite lovely! <3 nathaxn

early spring blizzard (vortex against fascism 1)

Coven - 'To The Devil A Daughter' from Jinx (2013)

I am way late to the party, but I am here to say that the 2013 Coven/Jinx Dawson comeback album is COMPLETELY AMAZING!!! I had no doubt, but it has all the darkness and intensity that one could hope for from such an event. This track has some extra industrial psych elements which are all to the good! Hail Satan!!! Hail Coven! Hail Jinx!!! I am in awe. <3 nathaxn

reindeer lich 1

Power Trip - Nightmare Logic (2017)

I love Power Trip with all of my heart. I played their last album so loud in the Subaru! Now four years later, Nightmare Logic comes to destroy and destroy it does, fully and completely. This is musick that makes me want to not just survive, but to live, which is the highest compliment I can give. Thrash Beyond Death. Hail!!! <3 nathaxn

heated sky flow lich 1

Bambara - Dreamviolence (2013)

I dig the deathrock/noisegaze impulse at work here for sure. The unfocused/out-of-focus vibe is something I can relate to. <3 nathaxn

Arcadia - 'Election Day - Long Version' from So Red The Rose (1985)

I was such a huge Duran Duran dork that I was even more obsessed with the Duran Duran offshoot Arcadia, which promised even more art-rock pretense and mostly delivered. It might be my favorite Duran Duran related anything because it really does capture a mid-80's pseudo-goth-decadence-into-fascism vibe that is actually truly unhealthy-seeming. This is all very explicitly presented in the 'Election Day' video. The only thing wrong with this video is that Grace Jones does not personally appear in it, which was greatly disappointing in 1985 and remains so today. This album is really great and worth hearing if you have not. <3 nathaxn Bonus Arcadia: 'Missing' is exquisite chamber psych-pop, closer to later 80's Talk Talk than anything I can immediately think of. Absolutely ravishingly beautiful. Bonus Bonus Arcadia! 'The Promise' is maybe my favorite, because it has Sting And Herbie Hancock and David Gilmour and Andy Mackay all on the same song, which is completely insane, and totally works.

Duran Duran's Rio: The Hunger For Alchemickal Union And Early Pursuit Of Transfeminine Nonbinary Identity

Texas (1983) by Patrick Nagel 

The first LP i purchased was the Raiders Of The Lost Ark soundtrack, but the first cassette i purchased was Duran Duran's Seven And The Ragged Tiger, which is a wonderfully cryptic album, but not quite their greatest work. Their greatest album was and is Rio, at least for me (despite my personal feelings that the Wild Boys video is their most powerful moment). That was the second (or third?) cassette I ever purchased. I was and am a huge Duran Duran fan, to the point of having Duran Duran posters in my tween bedroom, much to the delight of my older cousin, who was the sort of Duran Duran fan who had a Major Crush on Simon Le Bon and who would regale me on a daily basis with Tiger Beat Facts about the likes and dislikes and biographical data of members of Duran Duran. While it is true that Simon Le Bon and the Taylors and Non-Taylors (heart Nick Rhodes!) of Duran Duran were and are cute, that was not my interest in Duran Duran. What I liked about them was their opacity, their fusion of art-rock impenetrability to whatever concentrated development arose from their purported fusion of the Sex Pistols and Chic. I loved the glamour and the cinematicism of Duran Duran, the endless deferral of a desire forever unmet. This is where things become really important. Within Rio by Duran Duran, there is a subnarrative about the pursuit of the feminine and a unification with that feminine principle. This was a quest sought out of great longing and frustration and pursued in the same mode. Weirdly, to tween and later me, this never felt like sexual desire, but about something unmanifest or missing within. I would have dreams about girls dancing to Rio and I always thought that one day we would me, but not to kiss. The girl was the girl living within me, alive and distant. In Rio, the feminine is a destination, a place, a river bringing life to a dusty land on its way to the ocean, someone to be uncovered, to shine and reveal itself in its brilliance only after being sought and found and met on its own terms. Meaning so much to me like a Birthday. Knowing over Understanding. This is an alchemical relationship, a Chemical Wedding. Self-determination, High Fashion, Disco Strings. The performativity of desire, layers of artifice which were more true than what truth could be shallowly represented as. The transition from the first Duran Duran album to Rio is the transition from New Wave Disco to New Romanticism Synth Rock, an airy open sound which embraces flatness and negative space only to flood them with saxophone or guitar solo. The feeling of being trapped in a dream which needs to experience rupture in order to undergo elemental change is an overpowering one. To be singular, to be occult and hidden, to have made a protected magick circle within oneself to survive oneself but which cannot remain without transformation and (re)union. The hunger in 'Hungry Like The Wolf' is ultimately this sort of hunger, a universe unbalanced with desire, seeking the lost aspects of itself, of heat, of aliveness, an end to lostness, to fragmentary being. It is a joyous chase, a ritualized one, which ends not in death, but in union and rebirth. I never identified with Simon Le Bon's neocolonial suit, nor did I identify with the purported object of his affections, what I DID identify with is the frustration of the quest, the hunger itself, the all-consuming discord. This night I had a dream, and it was a dream about the overturned table in the 'Hungry Like The Wolf' video, and i realized that that freeze-framed overturned table was the dialectical slash, which separates and enjoins the male and the female in this alchemical gender quest narrative, that I identify with that table, frozen, /, like so, which divides and mediates and transforms, a barrier yet also a gate to pass through. This video, like the video for 'Rio' and other Duran Duran song/image texts, trafficks in a symbolist version of feminine imagery which would have been essentialist, imperialist, racist and uselessly binary in the 19th Century, yet also serves as the uncovering of those binary divisions and ultimately the possibility of their undoing. 8-12 year old me felt intuitively all of this was less about female experience and more about policed masculinity, the limits of gender, and how that could ultimately be dissolved. The hunger in 'Hungry Like The Wolf' was the hunger for the dissolution of these categories and barriers. It was rad that Duran Duran could wear makeup and scarves, but like Motely Crue or Poison, they ultimately reinforced a gender binary in what was desired and what was desired for the self. This is why Duran Duran's underground river of alchemical remaking was so important. Here a subtext repeatedly overcame manifest content, to ultimately blot out in Seven And The Ragged Tiger. It is worth noting, also, that 'Hungry Like The Wolf', in video form, is also a werewolf story, that the pursuit and encounter with the sought alters one ultimately through sacrificial violence and surrender to becoming. Fire left to its own devices will overcome and extinguish itself, but rain will also extinguish fire. The union of fire and water must be accomplished via magickal means. The prospect of a new way of being, of knowing, is fleetingly present all over and within Rio. Missed connections, near-misses, flirting with elemental forces which cannot be domesticated nor reduced to the level of human experience. Purposefully delayed salvation, which would be an end to the seeking, a choice made to remain in indeterminate states, in confusion and unknowing, but suffused with desire and with want, without resolution. At the end of Rio, union is not achieved, although togetherness is, but a togetherness riven by unspoken need and nearly unbridgeable chasms. I wanted to wear the dresses at sunset, where the shadows would increase, to want and to be wanted, a sustained ache irresolvable in all of the terms knowable to us at the time. It is not coincidental that the very next musick I would become obsessed with was Prince, who, while addressing this ache and hunger, was both more explicitly sexual and more explicitly at war with gender division and convention, especially in the first half of the 1980's.
My own efforts to overcome gender binary lived deep within me, underground until the very late 1980's and early 1990's, flourished for a time and then retreated again underground until now. I have Duran Duran to thank for keeping me company early on, to helping me see, to know without understanding. Hail. <3 nathaxn

Kiki Hitomi - Karma No Kusari (2016)

This album is an absolutely bewitching fusion of video game sounds, dub reggae, enka melancholy and 70's kosmische anime. Hail Kiki Hitomi!!! Exactly what I needed on the lonely friday nights/early saturday ams! <3! nathaxn

Lana Del Rey - 'Love' (2017)

LDR's most recent song reminds me of mid-80's Springsteen and Journey and Mellencamp anthems lotusized and blissed-out which is of course rad as heck. That is a sound I am always craving and this works so much for me. The near-ambient synth drops are also so lovely. As someone who used to get dressed up to just drive around or go to Denny's or Perkins or sitting outside at Arby's. The sky seemed so much larger then. <3 <3 <3 nathaxn ps: Love the flower's in Lana's hair!!!

Girl Werewolf - This Is Fun I Hope We Don't Die (2017)

I am honored to share this the first 'official' output of Girl Werewolf, occult-garage-swamp-psych overload! sharpened claws and teeths for hi-fi! Girl Werewolf rules so much and not just because output of beloved covenmate Claire Diane! Hail Girl Werewolf! Don't Die!!! <3 nathaxn

the surveillance state crushed in the jaws of the mighty serpent - its on now (xtra necro)

SUNN O))) - LA REH 012 (2014)

I needed something fucking crushing today and this was it. HAIL!!!! <3 nathaxn

spiked bough 2.5

spiked bough 1.2

Unearthly Trance - Stalking The Ghost (2017)

I am so glad to be listening to a new Unearthly Trance album in 2017. The doom feels good. An overall aura of humans doing human things, a real immediate live presence which is good. I also dig the cover which reminds me of Sabbath's Born Again. Hail! <3 nathaxn

Fall Of Night, 2/23/17, Lancaster Pennsylvania, Outside Days Inn

dry heaves mag wheels

Tad - God's Balls (1989)

I love Tad. The most grunge of all grunge. PNW Satan Chainsaw Massacre!!!! Hail!! <3 nathaxn

FARBERWARE ANNIHILATION

FARBERWARE ANNIHILATION   

DJT u want carnage? I have more carnage inside of me than u have ever seen. Every day and night i sit in this Days Inn thinking about opening up this 3 pack of kitchen knives i got from big lots so i would have a weapon against myself that might be fatal quickly or more quickly than the slow death of vascular dementia, cte, multiple chemical sensitivity, self-hatred, total fear, sleep apnea, homelessness that i am now living. i bought them when i could not live in the home i had signed a lease for because i can't live with gas appliances and foolishly didn't ask about the gas water heater and then my family and i parted ways and i went back to the days inn. i have been living at the days inn since last summer, the summer before, because i am a terrible partner and even more terrible parent. all last summer i couldn't sleep because of you. i went weeks and weeks without sleep, the fear coruscating through my body like an ungrounded uninsulated wire going haywire in the street that they route cars around. i was hoping to sleep after the election. that is seriously what i thought, that no matter what, after this was over with, i would be able to sleep finally and not have panic attacks on a near-continual basis. i was naive. after the election i wouldn't go outside for days even for food. i was worried they could see through me, see that i was disabled, lame, trans, homeless. i came out as transfeminine nonbinary just before the election because i had to for myself, to acknowledge all those wasted years in sadness and in lostness and to refuse them. i still havent worn a dress since the early 1990's. i feel like a fraud, like a loser. i am alone in winter. what good would a dress be anyway but i choke back something every time i put on pants. like a man-suit, to be called sir, which is half-hearted at best because my social station doesn't befit a sir, when i am just gutter trash anyway. i keep thinking what would it matter if i opened myself up and bled out, or stabbed myself over and over and over until pain or blood loss made me stop.


djt ur flag of hate waves and waves and never goes off the air. there is no conclusion to ur broadcast day. u r up sometimes i can feel it, and u are anxious too i can tell, never able to rest or feel at home, always attentive to threat from inside or out, real or imagined. i wish u would know some peace, some tranquility, but i know u never have. i know if i opened myself up to you u wouldn't understand, that u would feel attacked by a terrorist, even though i would be losing organs, losing an eye, a tongue, a hand, a penis or testicles, all interdeterminate in a wash of blood and viscera before ur motorcade. just a mess to clean up and disappear. not a constituent part of amerikkka.

if i had access to medical marijuana i could slow down or reverse the dementia, the cte, the sleep apnea. i could try and summon myself from leaking out into the aether slowly, lessening daily. if i could wear a dress, even a shitty dress or a nylon skirt, i could partially retrieve what was lost. the other day i said fuck it i am going to wear this nail polish that says it is nontoxic for pregnant women and toddlers and so i put it on regardless of danger but it made me so sick for over a day i couldn't get out of bed. really i knew better but it was just a little thing i wanted so much. fyi u can make a pretty good henna/olive oil nail stain which is actually nontoxic but i didn't wait for that because i am supposed to be a functional figure to get a home even though my income is too low to even be considered income by landlords or rental agencies or property managers. i worked and worked and worked for years, with a tie and gap shirt, gap pants, short hair, stupid goatee. i worked longer hours in devotion to an organization that cast me aside with contempt once i got sick and could no longer perform my duties because of sick building, chronic fatigue, floxin antibiotics, financial collapse, workplace conflict, heavy metal exposure, separation from love, etc. Too many proximate causes. That is before there was ever a concussion or two concussions or more that never healed. I am supposed to be a neoliberal subject who can fend for myself, gather appropriate resources, find food and medicine and shelter and clothing. I can't even sleep without choking and waking up in hypoxia with my hands numb in panic after surviving another series of apneas. I can't even watch a stupid news tv program or a movie. everyone says not to die, but they can't offer me a way to live. i have always been my own problem. my very incarnateness has been too much to cope with, a constant trauma, and ongoing crisis.

i want to step in front of ur limousine, open and bleeding, intestines hanging out, everything severed, until i collapse in the street where an immediate flock of bald eagles descends on my twitching body to take the best parts, fighting with each other and blocking traffic, causing you momentary delay on the way to some stupid event you don't even want to go to but being late for will trigger your anxiety or not, and maybe you will pull out your phone to see what is really going on or turn up the fox news that hopefully ur limousine has until the delay is swept away or carried off and peace can steal, however fitfully, a false dawn.

Kreator - Flag Of Hate EP (1986)

I love Kreator so so so much. Hail Kreator!!!! <3 nathaxn

hellbat lich 1.2

Blasphemy - Fallen Angel Of Doom (1990)

I love Blasphemy. Listening to this brings up so much emotion in my heart. A storm of chaos. <3 nathaxn

satanic witch sigil 1.1

Skullflower - The Wisdom Of Venom (2017)

I for one dig this stumbling pastoral quasi-folk and/or Barrett-era Floyd vibe in 2017 Skullflower so far. Skullflower has been a part of my life since the late 1980's and I know I wouldn't be the same person without it. Hail Skullflower Hail!!!

recursive fork 2

Skullflower - bayou perfume advert (2017)

I might just be hypersusceptible to Skullflower ad copy, but this totally sounds like Kenneth Anger to me. That I have been fortunate to have been alive during the reign of Skullflower is something I will be endlessly thankful for always. This is more on the mellow, pack-your-bong, chat with your friends, drift off with your eyes closed end of Skullflower spectrum which is always to the good I say. Hail! <3 nathaxn

recursive fork 1.3

recursive fork 1.2

recursive fork 1.1

lich - {circle} (2016)

In today's predawn hours unable to sleep after a bad night of cable news and obstructive sleep apnea and futile tears, lich's electro-organ drone is so comforting to me. Thank You for making this so I could listen and be with the sounds and the feelings for a while. It was something I really needed. <3 nathaxn

INVERTS - The Repulsion Is Mutual (2016)

Droning, pissed-off, yelling trans queercore punk noise that wants to be left alone to watch the sun burn out and to read their X-Men comics in peace. Yes to all of that! <3 nathaxn

Sapien - Sapien (2016)

This is an awesome bass-heavy tunnel of noise. It sounds like it might be a live recording? I dig the pummeling for sure. D.I.Y.S.R.S!!! <3 nathaxn

Sick Nurse - Your Heaven Is My Hell (2017)

Ottawa's Sick Nurse bring the trans punk fury, specifically composing songs about life under white cishet christian dominion. They have an oldschool hxcx sound with deathrock/postpunk highlights which befits their approach. I was glad to come across this album. Thanks Sick Nurse! I am feeling you today. <3 nathaxn

Between Days Inn And Walgreens, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, 2/20/17