The Old Ones - Manfred

I've been sifting through the archives this week, spurred on by sickness and cabin fever,  eventually arriving at a pile of poorly tagged, low quality mp3's of The Old Ones. Downloaded years ago from the baffling 9 Productions website ( seemingly a relic from 1994 but sporadically updated with new information, despite being 90% perpetually "under construction"), The Old Ones are a classic example of a one-man project driven by sheer love and madness, content to languish in obscurity and bereft of shame or self-awareness.  Existing for years on the same fringes of doom populated by Aarni or Brown Jenkins, this anonymous Czech fellow continues to make music under this moniker - there is another album and multiple singles, and a sequel to this semi-full length is promised sometime this year.  This one is a bit of a mess - I corrected the incoherent tags as best I could, but the volume is wildly erratic, the guitars are tinny and muffled except for the occasional solo, the vocals are too loud, and the drum machine is laughable.  Still, crazy-eyed ambition and enthusiasm go a long way in bands like this, and The Old Ones have no shortage of either.  

I Remember

Diamond Plate - Mountains of Madness

Today I bring you a short-but-sweet Ep from Chicago's teenage thrash savants Diamond Plate. Free of the irony and jokiness that characterize most modern thrash, this savage little record is pure headbanging havoc. Startlingly the average age of the members on this recording was fifteen, and they're better and more sincere than bands twice their age. Good stuff - I recommend the new album as well.
Maelstrom

Magic Lantern - At the Mountains of Madness

Remember way back when I was debating making a weekly feature of concept albums based upon At the Mountains of Madness? Well, it's probably a good thing I didn't, as I would have run out of material in a few months and my ability to consistently post anything has waxed and waned with the seasons to the point where I would have forgotten or given up before long anyway. So, in the spirit of keeping it loose-limbed and addle-brained, here's a wild one by psych rock ensemble Magic Lantern. I really know nothing about these guys other than the fact that they're from California, they sound sorta like Hawkwind, and they're probably hipsters but since they don't pretend to play heavy metal nobody gives a shit. This is two ten-plus minute songs that reverberate like the tiny army of UFOs buzzing around inside my skull, futilely attempting to escape back into their own parallel universe.
skreeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

Oh, and presumably you're aware of this situation, but are prepared to wait strange aeons...

Atlantean Kodex - The Pnakotic Demos

One of my most played albums of 2010 was Atlantean Kodex's ambitious album The Golden Bough, one of those rare records to which the word "epic" can be applied without just meaning "long songs" and "attention-span challenging." This demo recording, released a handful of years earlier, showed them honing their chosen methods to a fine point with which to pierce dimensional boundaries. It's named for the pre-human manuscripts recording the secret history of the universe, having been added to and modified over many millenia, much like the human Bible, albeit on a much larger scale.
Similar perspective-shattering broadmindedness is a key factor here, and I must warn you that the depth and breadth do not begin to emerge until careful study is made. The devoted student will find much to absorb, however.
'neath shadow green and standing stone
Far from the rule of modern throne

Blood Ritual - At the Mountains of Madness

Portland's meat-and-potatoes death metal group Blood Ritual releases an album about every ten years, which means the next one will probably arrive after the Apocalypse. This, their solitary long player from the 90's, is a solid Deicide-influenced blast of filthy riffs, doubled growl/wail vocals, and occult lyrics that betray a slight black metal influence as well. These lyrics tend to be of the more traditional Jesus vs Satan school rather than the more esoteric matters promised by the title, but there's enough talk of strange rites and forbidden tomes of horrible truth to satisfy the Lovecraftian as well. This is stolidly neither of the "brutal" nor "progressive" wings of modern death metal - just straightforward blurry Florida worship whipped up into a bloody froth and poured down the front of your pants.
Sweet Suffering

Celestiial - Desolate North

One thing among few that the farthest, bleakest extreme reaches of heavy metal has in common with the string of balmy islands off of our continent's western coast: the double I. Maledictiih, Mortiis, Mütiilation, Celestiial, Hawaii... What I'm getting at is that it's freezing here in the Swamp, and I'm trying to think warm thoughts. Celestiial plays funereal doom of the sparsest, most glacial variety. Distant, doppler-effected drums crash aimlessly in isolation, whilst whole notes ring out and blend into swirling Aurora Boreali, enchanting but difficult to focus on. The sound of tweeting birdies is merely an hallucination of your frost-bitten mind; it's actually the sound of ice forming inside your ear canals. Your only hope is that whiskey bottle, and it's looking awfully low...
Lamentations in the Citadel of God

Satanic Verses

1. Tech N9ne - What’s Yo Psycho?
2. Jedi Mind Tricks - Suicide
3. Geto Boys - Chuckie
4. Insane Poetry - In The Mouth Of Maddness
5. Gravediggaz - Graveyard Chamber
6. Esham - 666
7. Jay-Z - Lucifer
8. Brotha Lynch Hung - Dead Man Walking
9. Cage - The Soundtrack...
10. Bone - Hell Sent
11. Canibus - Layered Prayers
12. Ganksta N-I-P - Horror Movie Rap
13. Flatlinerz - Satanic Verses
14. NATAS - Like A Spirit
15. Big L - Da Graveyard
16. Ras Kass - Interview With A Vampire

Obligatory Halloween Mix

Insane Poetry - Blacc Plague

Here's another fine example of early horrorcore from L.A. hip-hop ensemble Insane Poetry, although they called their particular sound "The Terrifying Style" and distanced themselves from that already waning sub-genre. Full of strange pitch-shifted samples (a decade before Kanye West), crunchy junkyard percussion, layered vocalizations, and horror movie references, particularly "Angel Heart" and John Carpenter's "In the Mouth of Madness," the album is further distinguished from its horrorcore brethren by a G-Funk organ vibe and a merciful minimum of stupid skits. Frontman Cyco (hey, it's L.A.) vividly and hilariously paints himself as a more verbose Jason Voorhees, stalking the streets, picking off wack MCs who have wandered stupidly into "the wrong neck of the woods." Also of note is the Steven Seagal-themed "On Deadly Ground," a real treat for the careful listener. After some squabbling in '96 with Nastymix, the label home to Sir-Mix-A-Lot and The Accused, this album was suppressed and only properly released twelve years later. Fortunately Insane Poetry, unlike virtually all of their peers, continue to record and release Juggalo-free horror-themed rap, like the recent collaboration with DJ Sutter Kane and the upcoming "Dead Sea Scrolls".
I hang nerds from they scrote sacs

Fenriz AKA D.J.K.V.O.M. - "At the Mountains of Madness" Mixtape

In celebration of this news, have at this mixtape by Fenriz of Darkthrone, alias "DJ Vast Knowledge of Music." Originally made for some online magazine, it's a freeform exploration of, well, madness, I suppose, but it really just sounds like a random string of various songs he likes, from Alan Parsons to Christian Death and far beyond. Yet another album loosely inspired by At the Mountains of Madness - I could almost make this a weekly feature.
Imagination could conceive almost anything in connexion with this place.

Blackfeather - At the Mountains of Madness

There certainly are quite a few albums entitled "At the Mountains of Madness," aren't there? One of the perks of this sort of research is discovering strange new records simply out of curiosity and the fear of running out of material. Fortunately for all of us, that seems unimaginable at this point, given the sheer amount of bizarre music that exists on this plane. For example, I might not have ever heard this wild Australian psych band were it not for my obsessive pack-rat nature and and experimental whiskey-fueled Googling. The stars align, though, and I must admit I've been listening to it repeatedly over the last week. I shan't waste words describing it, but it should be noted that it features a young, pre-AC/DC Bon Scott playing recorder and tambourine.
On This Day That I Die

Electric Masada - At the Mountains of Madness

John Zorn's bizarre Masada project stretches over more than 500 songs and several different musical combos. This particular iteration, including Tom Waits alumni Marc Ribot and Greg Cohen, along with Japanese drum guru Ikue Mori, pushes the concept further into noise territory than the other, slightly more musical, variations. Masada concerns itself with explorations of Jewish Classical music from the perspective of a modern and radical member of the community; the songs are intentionally short and playable by small groups. This live recording is from Moscow and Ljubljana.
"Idalah-Abal" and "Metal Tov"

Khoral - Uniforms of Snow

Arcane and pleasingly atavistic instrumental music composed on primitive rhythm machines decades past their prime and sound-wave bending synthesizers from the remotest plateau of Moog, this is a concept album based on At the Mountains of Madness, a soundtrack to a movie remembered but never made. Eerie signals from another time, inscrutable hieroglyphics carved by an alien hand, widely shunned as somehow namelessly evil.
On the other hand, for the hoarder of bizarre materials...