Really, lost in the “should we wait until after Remembrance Day to start hyping Christmas?” debate is whether Hallowe'en should be allowed to drag on. Me, I come down firmly in the extended Hallowe'en camp. And now, my final post on the seasonal and spooky contents of our new Oct 31st-released artpack MIST1015! We open with the only track that wasn’t also mirrored elsewhere, Cthulu’s unused (but don’t worry, they used his other tunes) overture for the gothic (and itself very Hallowe'eny) mobile collectible card game Afterland (available for free now in the Google Play and iOS App Stores!), performed by his “jug band of the damned” (eek!) The Creaking Planks.
This was engineered to satisfy a demanding criterion from the developers at Imaginary Games, namely that the in-game music be simultaneously happy and sad. Well, can it take turns? This live off-the-floor take of the five musicians huddled around a single microphone is a good shot at the New Orleans Dixieland voodoo concept he had rattling around in his head, but to the good folks at Imaginary Games it was a little bit too much like sitting in a club listening to live music and stroking your chin, and not enough like … holding your mobile device and tapping at a screen. Oh well, as the wide varieties of Hallowe'en costumes testify, there are many paths to gloom!
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I don’t know much about Brad Dunn’s composition practice, but if I had to guess based on my experiences producing concerts for him on prepared guitars a decade ago, my suspicion would be that he experiments to see what works or doesn’t – either way, then does it again, like he means it. Dissonance? Yes, that’s a dissonance – a big, satisfying dissonance. Let’s do it again! What do you mean, you don’t like my new Christmas carol?
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Melodia of Empress Play, on the other hand, has achieved a supreme calculated mastery of genre. I’ll never forget, back in the ‘90s, how an aimless experimentation proceeding at a glacial pace transformed overnight into the fully realized “Spaghetti Western” as soon as it crossed her desk. Her triumph is in sussing out before she gets there just what kind of song a given song is trying to be, and then making it live up to those specific aspirations, hitting the nail on the head squarely and repeatedly. I jokingly describe us as drag factor on, her slumming it by hanging out with this weird group of retro computer art weirdos, but her canny piggybacking of holiday seasonality means that this song, Horror on Channel 3, has been enjoyed an order of magnitude beyond how many times the Mist artpack has been served up.
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Theorica, conversely, explicitly describes his approach as “If sound were colour, I’d be what you’d call a finger painter. I do what feels and sounds right.” And so what if “Dark Charlie” sounds like an uninspired Stephen King bugaboo, the man has his finger on the pulse!
http://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=1207596880/size=small/bgcol=ffffff/linkcol=0687f5/track=2484575138/transparent=true/
One final grim piece of audio, this is a positively ancient guest poem by performance poet RC Weslowski, pointing at the eternal horror far more frightening than ghosts and werewolves – state militarism, endless war against an endless series of evil axes… in this case, earthworms. It brings to mind how of the two camps name-checked in the opening of Black Sabbath’s sludgy anthem “War Pigs”, “generals gathered in their masses / just like witches at black masses”, it is the generals who are scarier. (Also scary: rhyming “masses” with “masses”.)
Oh yes, and while we’re on the subject of poetry, I forgot our poem of terrifying implications by Prince George’s Jeremy Stewart:
CLOTHES HAIKUToo bad I didn’t think to throw it in while we were showing off all the skeletons! Actually, it’s kind of a perfect lead-in to, again, the crazy ANSI music video Whazzit made for the song Dead Man’s Pants. (Sure, I can keep linking it, but can I just make a post dedicated to it? Darned sure I can! Stay tuned…)
your skin is clothes for
your blood & bones & your clothes
are skin for your skin
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