Well, wee ones, I must once again take a brief sabbatical from the Swamp, but as is tradition I leave you with a favorite to tide you over. Moss has appeared here before, and this split with similar-minded funeral doom purveyors Torture Wheel is among the best of their catalog. Here's what you're in for: crushing slowness, echoed wailing from the next dimension over, deeply occult and deliberately opaque themes, and a primordial moaning that seems to suggest continental drift more than the rhythm section of a band. Listen to this on repeat until I rejoin you upon Sunday and we shall discuss what you have learned.
Here's another album of unlikely collaborators - Nikki Sudden, front man of the wildly underrated post-punks Swell Maps, and Rowland S. Howard, guitar player of The Birthday Party. Come to think of it, can you call a band post punk when they started in the early 70's? Proto-post-punk, does that work?
Plagued with a series of strange dreams and awakening to find my tap water running brown and odorous, it seems appropriate to go ahead and post this nasty little bit of weirdness, as surely my day will only get odder from here on out. The Leather Nun, from future metal hotspot Gothenburg way back in the seventies, played a primitive version of post-punk industrial comparable but not exactly similar to acts like Psychic TV and Throbbing Gristle. This is a seven inch record, with the first song being an anarchic, almost bluesy stomper; the second being a Suicide/Pere Ubu noise scrape; the third being a bass-driven sinister sort of cabaret; and then some primitive drum machine thuds. Fuck, what happens now?
I'm posting on a quick break from other realms with but precious minutes to spare, which is probably what made me think of this, the pinnacle achievement of powerviolence-mongers Slap-A-Ham. 84 songs in 12 minutes: grind, noise, sludge, poop.
There's a bit of a tangled history behind this one, so bear with me. Southern Death Cult was a predecessor of 80's "hard rock" combo The Cult, and featured leather-piped front man Ian Astbury; they existed for only a few brief years and released only one seven inch record ("Fatman") and twelve inch EP ("Maya") of the same songs, both of which were also nominally titled "Southern Death Cult." This album, also called "Southern Death Cult," contains demos and unreleased songs culled from Peel Sessions and live shows and such. Musically, they are quite distinct from The Cult - spidery bass lines, post-punk guitar squeaks and stabs, Bauhaus-style wailing, tribal tom tom rhythms inspired by their naive Native American fetish, etc. Interestingly, when the band split and Astbury formed his rock star group, other members went on to projects as diverse and unfortunate as horny new wave wizard-pop Into a Circle and militant Islamist hip-hop outfit Fun-da-Mental.
It is gratifying to see the tentacles of cthonic influence spread throughout the world, and in keeping with that sentiment today's special is from distant Syria. Blackspell is a one-man project, presumably the only kvlt and grimm figure in the country, as his numerous projects listen in the Encyclopedia Metallum are, with few exceptions, solo works. This an odd one, too: the first track, "I Summon Cthulhu," is a fairly standard black metal blast of whirring guitars, cardboard drums, and raspy wails. The second is a lengthy ambient keyboard piece. This pattern repeats for the second half of the album, with the closing epic clocking in at a bloated half hour and punctuated by an overdriven drum machine and what sounds like sizzling bacon. One would hope for some future releases to be a bit more focused or distinct, but main man Demon of Darkness seems content to indiscriminately crank out the tapes in praise of Dread Cthulhu, and I certainly shan't fault him for that.
We've got a doozy for you today, little ones, so take a seat and perhaps do some breathing exercises to steel yourself against this onslaught on your earholes. Short-lived German prog band Payne's Gray (tellingly named after a muddy bluish-gray pigment) seemingly only ever managed to self-release two cassettes and this album before vanishing off the face of the earth, but they certainly left a...memorable epitaph. Certainly Lovecraft's crowning epic The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath is prime material for an overblown concept album, ripe as it is with bizarre detail, episodic travelogue anecdotes, and sprawling geography, and surely Germany is as good as any place for pretentious puffy-shirted doofuses to make such an album, but when it's all said and done, how the hell does it end up sounding like this, especially in 1995? Far beyond your typical flute-happy technical pomposity (although there is by no means a lack of flute playing at any point), Payne's Gray is a virtual bubbling fondue pot in which the myriad concepts and styles are dipped and gummed together into one heart-attack inducing cheese-coated unidentifiable blob. Cheap synths, electronic drums, baroque acoustic guitar runs, wildly off-key wailing from not one but two mustachioed singers, impenetrable syncopated rhythms seemingly created to stifle foot-tapping or head-nodding, and a baffling central theme somehow all add up to create something even larger than the sum of its parts. Oh, my kingdom for a lyric sheet! The mind whirls.
It's official: the Swamp computing machine, always stubborn and ornery, has croaked its last ululation. Whilst I search for a replacement, have some crap! Icarus was a short lived prog group who chanced upon the brilliant idea of recording an album of odes to comic book heroes and (supposedly) brought this proposition to Marvel Comics. Depending on which version of the story you want to believe, either Marvel at first supported them and then quickly sqaushed the record when they heard how unlistenably awful it was, or had no knowledge all along and killed it for copyright reasons. Either way, this album was never released and Icarus vanished immediately thereafter. For prog rock, the music itself is extremely straightforward and uncerebral - each song is named after a specific character and proceeds to list his attributes and quirks and then the album moves on to the next song. Alarmingly, there is a persistent flute high in the mix that tootles away throughout the entire record without pause, making it extremely difficult to slog through. Lest you think this thematically inappropriate for the Swamp, there is a song about Conan as well.
Widely brushed off as a novelty act, late 80's preteen punk band Old Skull occupies a unique niche in music history, like some sort of Reaganomics-era Jackson 5. It's easy to dismiss this echoey noise as the work of malleable children under the thumb of a controlling parental figure, or as the adolescent and aimless squealings of little kids with unformed musical abilities and little self-awareness. I, on the other hand, am of the opinion that it holds up purely on its own merits, legitimately and without irony or qualification. It's ugly, strange, and a bit daffy at times, but so were the 80s and everything that's followed. A couple of years of living next door to a certain member of Old Skull in the oos gave me a particularly affectionate perspective on the band, I feel, but so has pouring through reams and piles of bizarre music in the course of shaping the Swamp. Listening to this next to the vast legions of twisted bedroom black metal out in the cosmos, all the subnormal doom bands and weird inept punk, I can't help but smile. Black metal bands rarely sing about pizza these days.
Tasty Polish black metal monikered after the yellow toad demon crucial to the Necronomicon's spell for summoning Yog-Sothoth. Specifics aside, this is some truly mysterious muffled noise, as if the band was being suffocated by a pillow, or playing from beyond some dimensional threshold. Primitively and hatefully played, surely unintelligible to even native Poles, and devoid of hope and air.
Primitive garage recordings of the Waits/Burroughs/Wilson collaboration The Black Rider, even creakier and stranger than the final LP released the same year. This bootleg was quickly suppressed at the time but thanks to the magic of the internet it resurfaces to air out its stinky blow-holes in the sweltering sun. A morbid carnival of tuneless horns, hard drugs, and stomping armies of dwarves.
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.
Leafing back through the previous weeks, my attempts at posting daily grow weaker and sparser. In an attempt to balance loquaciousness with punctuality and spread the gospel of Armageddon, please accept this primitive, apocalyptic-themed black metal album by the lovable Finnish misanthropes in Bloodhammer. Let's fore-go the usual hyperbole and enjoy some hateful ugliness. I promise not to neglect the Swamp so much, my little dears, my seedlings. The Swamp must thrive.
Unlike many similar blogs of this ilk, your dreamlike navigator relies on anonymity rather than name recognition. Granted, several blogs operate under this same pretense. However, they tend to be thinly-veiled self-reflective puff pieces at best and glorified (read: boring) fanzines that one doesn't even have to fold and staple (or, y'know, fill with content) at worst. As a non-converstionalist and a constant rider of the sub-par public transit system here in the parallel universe that jostles up next to yours, I understand the stony silence of most Swamp residents (or transients) as the end result of either serious scholarship or skull-crushing fear and tend to proceed without feedback one way or another. However, here's some more Doom Metal and if you have a hard time understanding it you just come talking to Uncle Abdul - don't be shy, but don't speak up if you sleep well.
Well, that might be a tiny jpg but left to right: Lydia Lunch, David Johansen, William S. Burroughs, Jim Carroll, and presumably label impresario John Giorno. Giorno's one of those winguts you'd expect to to see over-analyzed on the Illogical Contraption, a failed poet who started his own hip label and ended up releasing many quality-variable LPs of much more interesting artists and wormed his own obnoxious tracks in with the rest of them. Without him many fascinating records of this stripe would not exist and yet he manages to shit all over them and consitently be the most obnoxious part of the collective, which might be strong words considering that he funded the most grating unfiltered gibbering from Diamonda Galas and Einstürzende Neubauten! Nonetheless, Uncle Abdul's favorites on this album are "Uh Oh, Plutonium," a Cold War dance-party meditation by Anne Waldeman, and Richard Hell's self-parody/self-aggrandizement "The Reverend Hell Gets Confused." Not merely poetry, most of this is weird self-conscious "jokes" and typical drug-addict narcissism, exemplified by Jim Carroll's hilarious spoken word sparring match with a blind kimono-clad hunchback chick who mistook him for Iggy Pop.
In lieu of an intelligent and articulate post allow me to join in the Carpenter party and just suggest you listen to this. Your boss might be some Jewish carpenter but mine's secular and shares the same initials, and yours was a one-hit wonder.
Speaking of Rudimentary Peni, they are generally regarded as existing more-or-less in their own continuum, among the Crass Records peace punks but not of them. One of the few bands who operated on similar wavelengths and was considered friends with RP was the un-Googleable band Part 1, who shared a taste for the eldritch and macabre. Unlike RP, Part 1 favored long songs and seems to have absorbed some crustier influences from Amebix and the like as well. We are fortunate that Pusmort records had the foresight to release this important LP in 1985 before Part 1 vanished from the face of the earth forever.
