Wednesday, January 27, 2010

uuuh?


apparently we're playing a radio show with hatred surge and GZA, march 18th, Austin

Sunday, January 24, 2010

The Rita Vs The Endless Blockade

The Second CD bonus track comes from Vancouvers The Rita (as seen in Rue Morgue magazine recently, the only regularly published magazine i read these days).

The Rita has been plugging away at his brand of obsessive, borderline motionless aesthetic for years now and over the last few years is finally starting to get some of the recognition he deserves.

Anyway, if Noah Creshevsky's track was a hyper kinetic reduction of Primitive then The Rita's track is the complete opposite.

The track Model Rebreather 49 is the sound of complete ego annihilation. There is almost NOTHING to grab onto here and most people aren't going to be interested in it at all. Use it as a meditation tool if nothing else i suppose.

God, i fucking love this track. A lot of harsh noise works best when you're close to the speakers so you can check the stereo seperation and lose yourself in the sound; i find this track works best if you play it super loud and go sit in another room.




Noah Creshevsky Vs The Endless Blockade

First bonus track on the CD version of The Red List is a re-working of Primitive by composer Noah Creshevsky

Noah came to see us at ABC No Rio with Coffins, he spent a lot of time sleeping on a chair in the middle of the room whilst teenagers with ratty hair and patches wondered whose grandfather he was.

Trust a sixty five year old classical musician to have mosh pit ettiquette figured out instantly:

"this punk freak was doing beavis dueling hair duets with another guy, who was supposed to be the performer. at first i thought i was going to get hit and seriously mauled by the offstage freak, but then he ran into a girl first. that made it clear that i was sort of safe. i figured out how this act worked. when he bumped into me i would shove him into the middle. i guess that's how it goes. that was very good."

The old when going "crazy" push a girl over first, ignore anyone bigger or older than you thing. And as an aside none of us ever need to witness the "crazy" singer of some band or other pushing his friends about, if you're that disturbed just go and belt someone you've never seen before square in the jaw...


Anyway, i love Noah's track and i'm constantly hearing new aspects in it. Listening to it i can hear that he's written a piece of classical music and replaced the notes with tiny fragments of our songs.


Is this our answer to Metallica's daliances with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra?


Categorically, yes.


We're now taking applications for our in-band therapist.

The Red List

OK, it finally came out and unbelievably (to me) The Endless Blockade are still a band.

I think every member of the band privately decided to quit playing music altogether at least twice in the duration it took to finish this.

Originally we had planned to do a one song 7" for Fatalist and doing something terribly clever (sarcasm) like include a bonus CD with the full 60 minute version of the song. We were basically intending on writing a ten minute mid-section with a lot of burly noise on either side and the 7" would contain the musical aspect and the CD the full unedited glory.

Anyway, this hideously self-indulgent streak probably lasted about a week, then we organised a show for Bastard Noise and talked about doing a full collaboration together, so we scrapped the original idea and our discography is better off for it.

At the time we were writing Primitive and anything that we felt didn't fit was shelved and put towards the Bastard Noise collaboration.

Eventually we'd written a lot of different material for the collaboration and i'd planned out how we'd switch between the two artists; some sections with just Blockade, some with just Bastard Noise, some together and a bunch of transition points. What Bastard Noise would do in their solo sections would be up to them, but i wanted it to be a cohesive whole, not just some oscillations over the top of our slow parts which would be the easy approach.

Enter Bastard Noise dusting off the four shaking cables and acquiring a drummer and the idea of the release as a collaboration was no longer viable so we started again.

Lyrically i totally failed with my first plan; a completely ridiculous idea about a man having a panic attack on a plane and reaching a new state of mental evolution at the end. The lyrics would move through the different aspects involved in the Descent of Power and anyone with any familiarity with this way of thinking will instantly know i bit off more than i could chew. If i was a smarter man and prone to writing a 3 hour prog rock opera i'd try again.



Instead i settled on a very brief look at the relationships between eschatology, time, monotheism, politics and violence; starting with the confusion of tongues and ending with 9/11



Anyway, it's out now, thank fuck and you should be more stoked than Max Ward getting a huge envelope of shitty South American grindcore tapes in the mail over the return of the four shaking cables.


Reading:


Turning Back the Clock - Umberto Eco
Flowers of Evil - Charles Baudelaire
Maldoror - Comte de Lautremont


Listening:


BT. HN. - Retrospective (buy it here)
Disorder - Complete Disorder
Severed Tongue - demo (download it here)

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

"it sounds like everything falling apart at the same time"

Thanks to everyone that made BC a blast, especially to our close friends in Mudlark, The Rita and Haggatha.

Getting to see The Rita play on a large stage through a huge PA on friday was perfect.

Victoria managed to prove to me that time doesn't exist and everything is happening all the time. Last time we were there Ben's guitar broke and this time the crowd broke it for him mid-set. Both times we've been there we got no sleep due to dance parties at the place we stayed at and Ron from Griefer was wearing his Vomir shirt both times. Maybe he only has one shirt though?

Because we're gentlemen we did not fight the teenagers drinking cough syrup all night that were bitching about getting punched in the head when we played.

These are the next shows we're playing this year:

Feb 27th at Roboto in Pittsburgh, partying like it's 2005 with Warzone Womyn, xbrainax and Tumour Feast

The dates with Hatred Surge are:

Mar 12th Austin
Mar 13th The Valley
Mar 14th Houston
Mar 15th Dallas
Mar 16th Oklahoma City
Mar 17th San Antonio

Sometime after that (March 18th, 19th, 20th or 21st) we're playing a 20 Buck Spin/ Profound Lore label showcase as part of SXSW. I hear the other bands on the bill are Liturgy, White Mice, Coffin Worm, Salome and some band that has a member of Cobalt in and sounds like Tom Waits (this may be a lie but i'm buying it for now)

July 2nd and 3rd we're playing with Bastard Noise in Montreal and Toronto.

After that who knows?

Most shows will be with our new and unimproved five piece line up; 25% more anxiety disorders, 50% less clarity.

The Bastard Noise split is out and probably leaked all over the place by now. I expect some less than favourable opinions about our CD bonus tracks from some quarters.

I'll post the as-promised unecessary information about the release before the end of the week.



And in other news the Slaughter Strike 12", At Lifes End will be out in April

Play list:

Drainland - advance material for various releases
The Rita - The Voyage of the Decima Mas
Nekrasov - Cognition of Splendid Oblivion
Piss Horn - advance tracks for Pinnacle of Spirituality 7"

Friday, January 8, 2010

new survivalist shit

tapes available next weekend when Blockade plays in BC and available to mailorder when we get back (e mail theendlessblockade@gmail.com)

Gack - Mask
Joshua Norton Cabal/ Nekrasov - Primordial Transmissions
Slaughter Strike - A Litany of Vileness (back in print again until april then i'm giving up on it)

hopefully before march:

Black Paintings
Masculinity - A Little Something for the Ladies
Pisshorn/ Windscale
The Endless Blockade vs Bloomer

Thursday, January 7, 2010

Bastard Noise split out now

CD is definitely here LP is apparently out, try here.

I'll post more about it later.

In the meantime there's always this if you have six minutes to kill



Listening:

HHH - Intellectual Punks
Daphne Oram - Oramics
Slugathor - Echoes From Beneath

Reading:

Thomas Bernhardt - Frost
Jorge Luis Borges - Seven Nights