11 hours of loosely curated synthwave – probably the best genre of music to ever exist.
The Day The World Went Away
Following on from the previous post:
I remember waking up one morning as this song playing from my phone – just one song in a playlist generated by Spotify’s algorithms. It infested my dreams with an incredible feeling of bereft need for SOMETHING. Tears in eyes as they finally opened to the total absence of resolution to the void “inherent in human existence”. This is not to say this hadn’t occurred to me previously, or been accepted (what self-reflecting millennial doesn’t have an intimate relationship with the void?), just that the morning is usually polluted with an unconsciously animated façade of normal animal existence – wake up, find food, do the things to make sure you can do that again. Accidentally make babies if you absolutely have to/can’t not.
And the need for that “SOMETHING” wasn’t god, or love, or anything so easy to define and brush aside as mere trappings of a weak intellect hobbled by conventional norms. It was… UNDEFINED THING I NEED. Meaning? But sure, there is no meaning. Like god or love. Just another social-psychological imprint on the neural pathways. Of course, being something of a melancholic chap, it went on to infect my whole day. It was a beautiful and horrible kind of day I have no real memory of years later except that this song was its soundtrack.
Suicide, You, and I – Synthwave at It’s Best
Glass Apple Bonzai’s song, “Suicide, You, and I” has been a frequent play for me. It doesn’t matter how suicidal I feel – completely, somewhat or not at all. It’s an absurd, camp, and entirely over the top staring into the eye of the subject. It’s everything that’s good about synthwave.
Sure, it’s about a couple of people carrying out a suicide pact, but the synthwave sound and tongue in cheek sampling and lyrics invert the subject into an absurd caricature of the situation, mocking the way society views suicide – it’s a coping mechanism. I think CBT therapists would approve of dealing with such thoughts by creating a work like this. I certainly do, and even just listening to it has help hose down suicidal thoughts.
I don’t think it’s meant to be making fun of suicide, or at least, not in a belittling way. It’s more like an acknowledgement of those feelings and saying, well what can I do with this? And thus the song was born. The Artist also has a song titled “A Synthwave Song About Suicide”, so it’s a topic that has some meaning for the artist, but really in this age, who hasn’t considered ending it all.
I couldn’t find the lyrics anywhere, so decided to attempt to transcribe.
And so the end is near
I see it all so clear
We hear the darkness call
It’s time to end it all
Your blood a sacrifice
The holy gift of life
Walk in defiled light
And give it all tonight
Last time we knew it was two of us
And we just have to believe (we just have to believe)
Breakdown a suicide, you and I
Envision how it should be
Forced hands and you and I do it right
With the knife on the floor (with the knife on the floor)
Breakdown a suicide, you and I
And We can’t take any more
On the darkest night
We’re paralysied with fright
But when I take your hand
I know you’ll understand
Our blood a sacrifice
The holy gift of life
Into the fire light
Until the end of time
Last time we knew it was two of us
And we just had to believe (we just had to believe)
Break a down suicide, you and I
Envision how it should be
Forced hands and you and I and we do it right
With the knife on the floor (with the knife on the floor)
Breakdown a suicide, you and I
And we can’t take any more
Last time we knew it was two of us
And we just had to believe (we just had to believe)
Break down a suicide, you and I
Envision how it should be
Forced hands and you and I do it right
With the knife on the floor (with the knife on the floor)
Breakdown a suicide, you and I
And we can’t take any more
We just had to believe
We Just had to believe
END SONG LYRICS
Anyway, I’m sure the joke isn’t for everyone and some will see it as crass, tasteless, or exploitative, but I for one, love the shit out of the song and reject any negative analysis of it.
Music: The Great Love of Life
Still feeling good. What the what? Right now I’m sipping on wine and about to dish up one of the finest chillis to ever grace the planet.
My All The Stuff playlist on Spotify has swollen to over 111 hours of music (111 hours and 1 mins to be precise). The idea has always been to dump anything I remotely like to this list then make themed playlists. This has not really happened. I’ve been burning my way down from top to bottom and am currently at 27th of August 2017 (Sins of The Flesh – Sister Machine Gun). Given that I haven’t added much in 2019, to date, and almost half of all the tracks were added in 2016, I have a long journey ahead.
I’ve always had a bit of a love-hate when it comes to Sister Machine Gun. A little too much NIN, but with a few decent tracks in their own right.
This list really is a rambling mass of genres and artists. Sometimes an artist appears only once, a song cherry picked from the Discovery Weekly or a suggested playlist. Some tracks I don’t even recall hearing. It has become an infinitely renewing source of stuff to listen to.
Music is one of the greatest joys in life. Don’t let it become part of the background noise of living.
Dark Horizons (Radio/Podcast)
I drank coffee and now I feel better, so I came back to do a proper post about one of my favourite podcasts.
I’ve been listening to Dark Horizons’ “Darkcast” (it’s really a podcast, but it’s a pun ^_^) on and off since October 2012, and started up again October last year. I came back to it with a nostalgic pang, seeking out all the glorious industrial podcasts I’ve missed. Most of the other podcasts seem to be dead, on hiatus, or posting sporadically.
Dark Horizons’, on the other hand, has been broadcasting weekly out of Tampa, via radio, literally forever (literally as in 25 years). Luckily for me they package up their show into the Darkcast. The show plays lots of industrial, synthpop, and related genres with the occasional oddball track thrown in. Theresa and Edd, the show’s presenters, are obviously comfortable in their roles as they banter away and don’t sweat the little mistakes. The show is always entertaining and fun, and with Theresa’s silly question of the week there is a chance for listener interaction on FB, or through their forum.
I introduced my lovely lady to the show, and now we regularly listen on date nights as we play Words With Friends and drink wine. So come join us for a drink and some music. Not literally, of course; that’s our date night.
More Kool Albums – Thrill Kill Kult: Confessions Of A Knife
Time for a post, but I dunno what to post about, so I’m just going to share another album I think is the absolute stank.
My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult’s (usually shortened to TKK – because fuck that!) Confessions Of A Knife, is a good album – the critics knew this, the people knew it, and that’s why it went on to be one of Wax Trax!’s biggest selling albums of all time, eclipsed only by TKK’s followup, Sexplosion!. I don’t like that album as much, so I’m not going to talk about it. Not today anyway.
The bands ability to bring in the big bucks subsequently landed them a deal with Interscope, which was a bit of a big deal at the time (but now defunct). The deal only survived a few years, and as the rise and fall of industrial music went, TKK went back to independent labels. Anyway, there is nothing here you won’t find on Wikipedia, so I’ma shudup and leave you with the choice to play this seminal piece of later-days industrial history, or not.
Play it!
Highlights:
A Daisy Chain 4 Satan
The Days of Swine & Roses
Kooler Than Jesus
Burning Dirt
It’s all pretty good though.
Thrill Kill Kult links:
Spotify
Official Website (including store)
Wax Trax! store includes some rare and out of print TTK stuff.
Babyland, bb
So, here we are at another post about me being a big music necro. If you like noise, improvised drums, harsh vocals, and synths then you will probably like Babyland. Labeled junk punk, it fits closely enough with industrial that I’d heard the name several times, but never had the chance to hear the music. I finally got around to chasing them down on Spotify, and now I’m a fan. Of course the band has been dead since 2009, but that’s not going to stop me from enjoying them alongside all my favourite long deceased bands.
I also stumbled upon the Babyland’s Bandcamp page while looking for their last album, Cavecraft, which was released by Metropolis records. I feel kinda honored to currently be the first “supporter” of the “Decade One” complication (also a little WTF!?). Of course, if I want to get Cavecraft in Australia, I have to buy it off fucking iTunes or get a physical CD sent out. I could rage about the absurdity of this and a hundred other similar incidents but I’ll leave that for another day. I don’t know if it’s Metropolis that deserves the “fuck you” or some budget two-shits domestic partner. Ok, leaving it alone for realz now.
And finally, there’s Continues, the project by the singer of the defunct, Babyland. Mostly its sort of cheesy synthpop stuff (maybe that’s your bag) but there are some tracks I don’t mind.
Juke-Joint Jezebel: the track that began it all
As a kid I was a big fan of the Mortal Kombat games. I was technically barred from playing violent video games by my parents. BUT I PLAYED THEM ANYWAY! Of course, when the movie adaptation came out, I (successfully) pestered my parents into letting me see it. The movie was dumb. Some cool effects and some reasonable action sequences wasn’t enough to convince 11 year-old Jim. The soundtrack, however, was a revelation!
For me, KMFDM’s Juke Joint Jezebel was the highlight of the album. It was different to just about anything I had heard at the time. It was heavy, it was dark, it had guitars and electronic stuff, but it was curiously different from everything else. I liked it!
So this track was in the background for years to come, but I never cottoned onto this stuff called industrial music. To me, it was too close to the mainstream genres to strongly indicate the wealth I was missing out on. Even if I had chanced onto other stuff, unlikely given my sheltered childhood, and limited music distribution of the time (living in the sticks ‘n all that jazz), I might not even have known what to make of it.
Finally finding love
A whole decade it was until the name KMFDM lead me down the industrial rabbit hole. It might have been sooner if I hadn’t taken a detoure down a neo hippie dead-end. Anyway, it was a decade, and it has been love ever since. At first I stayed with bands that were on the rock/metal side of the equation, but here I am, another decade on, with a full-blown love of not just the digestible, dancable, but also of the avant-garde roots.
The Mortal Kombat movie may have been a huge disappointment to me (what could I have expected?) but I dug most of the OST, which heavily influenced the development of my music tastes.
Other highlights from the Mortal Kombat OST
The super cheesy, sample heavy, theme song by Utah Saints, even back then, was a guilty indulgence.
Orbital’s Halcyon +On +On – what is a track this beautiful even doing in a movie about fighting in a tournament to save Earth from trans-dimensional invaders?
Fear Factory’s Zero Signal, along with GZR’s The Invisible were too heavy for my sensitive tastes, but would later become favourites.
Sister Machine Gun’s Burn, probably one of the band’s best tracks, was a safe favourite of young Jim’s.
Type O Negative’s Blood & Fire (Out of the Ashes Mix) was another track that pushed me along in developing an interest in metal.
Killing Joke – Killing Joke – Best Album Ever
Perhaps an overstatement to call Killing Joke’s debut self-titled album (1980) the best ever, but it is certainly a post-punk classic. I’m not going to music on about it much. I suck at talking about music, except for pointing out what i like and don’t like.
It’s good. It’s full of delicious droning and throbbing, interesting (doom-heavy) lyrics and Jaz Coleman’s vocal stylings are good.
- Requiem – a gorgeously constructed piece. Gives me chills, man.
- Wardance – good too
- Tomorrow’s World – chilling, throbbing, good
- Bloodsport – The album picks up the pace here. It’s pretty good
- The Wait – pretty good too
- Complications – pretty good also
- S.O.36 – slow and brooding. I like it
- Primitive – good track. Cool droning guitars
- Change – pretty decent track to close with – nuff said
For a review by someone who knows how to talk music, check out the review on Sputnikmusic.com. It’s pretty good.
Close to the post
I’m working on a longer than usual comic strip, which might run over a couple of installments, so I don’t have much to say on the topic of nothing today. I do, however, have a song to share, Closer (To The Edit) by Art of Noise. I’m sure everyone, except me, has herd the track, but since I stumbled upon this gem from my birth year (84) it has been getting a lot of play on my lists.
Sure, there are more popular songs by the band such as Peter Gunn, Kiss (with Tom Jones), and Moments in Love (admittedly a beautiful track), but screw that stuff! For me, the meat of the band is in the more experimental avant-garde gravy!
Close to the edit is a delightfully quirky electronic track from the early days of sampling technology (something the band made heavy use of). They used a nifty machine called the Farlight CMI Sampler, which was invented right here in my homeland, Australia. As a fan of old-skool electronic tunes, this track has become a favorite.
Enjoy