About pay-what-you-want

Just a very quick statement for clarification.

All of my releases will, eventually (when i get around to it), be pay what you want via Bandcamp (currently, who knows what the future of music streaming will be?).

I say eventually for two reasons.

1. Not everything is actually up there
2. Not everything will be immediately pay what you want from now on

About point 2, i figure that either a month, or when the release is sold out - whichever happens first - is a fair time to wait before you can pay nothing if you want, and you can pay nothing, i really don't care. 

A month is not long to wait, if you want it ASAP it's not going to be expensive.

Regarding pay what you want, my suggestion is pay a minimum of $2 or don't pay anything; less than $2 and you're mostly giving PayPal and Bandcamp a donation and PayPal certainly don't need it.

And for those who might like to know where their money is going (for our tapes and digital sales), this band is as self-sufficient as possible, we only record ourselves and we releases everything ourselves on cassette before it is re-released on vinyl by another label. We consider all releases not on Survivalist to be re-issues or licensed, this is why we do not consistently release music on the same label/s and never will.

So far money from all digital sales has gone back into buying things like microphones and upgrading recording equipment. I do everything on my own, mostly at home, the only part i don't have a hand in is the mastering.

Money from tapes/ merch goes to similar things, and occasionally gets us a night in a fancy beer emporium entirely on the band's dime or a meal on tour/ after a show.

Failures/ Romance

Earlier this year Column of Heaven quietly released two tapes. We didn't announce them for three main reasons:

1. I don't do mail order, endless "where can i buy...?" e mails don't thrill me.
2. We wanted to force people to buy from Analog Worship, Iron Lung Records, and Absurd Exposition and to pay attention to their distros more.
3. They were short run experiments on cassette (Failures 150, Romance 100), and not meant to be held to the same standard as our more widely available releases.

Up until now they weren't going to go online for reason number 3; in the internet age everything is levelled and rehearsal tapes become weighted as the same as albums. But thanks to inevitable uploaders here they are, if you're going to listen to it it may as well be a direct copy and not some terrible rip.

One track from Romance was on bandcamp for about ten minutes, if you downloaded that, be aware that one reason it was pulled was because i made significant changes to it.

The material on both cassettes was culled from  the hours of discarded demos, experiments, audio sigils, unused versions of material that ended up elsewhere, rehearsals, bad ideas, broken equipment, broken thinking, and trans-dimensional communications that i have sitting around on my hard drive.

Art work for both was by the horribly talented Chelsea Watt

If it's important to you then the order of listening goes: Failures, Holy Things 7", Romance. The three releases form a somewhat related narrative, mostly related in my own brain and chaotic stabs at a personalised magickal practices and represent a chapter that has been firmly closed forever. There's some vague information about it all here. 

Expect advance peeks into the Column of Heaven side of the Suffering Luna split LP and the debut Wolves of Heaven LP, Unconditional, within the next few weeks. Both records will be out at the end of the winter.

Aubade

The much delayed Radioactive Vomit split is out now, Analog Worship has them for North America, Feast of Tentacles for Europe, if you're somewhere else in the world pick your king.

I think it might have been out a while, but i just received our band copies so here's my announcement post now.

One of our two songs has been on bandcamp for about a year, i'll upload the other one some time before the end of the year. Finishing up the next Column of Heaven release and the debut Wolves of Heaven release -- more on info on both of those around April time i guess -- has been taking most of my mental energy of late, so sitting about waiting for a file to upload to bandcamp hasn't been my priority.

Our two songs are about the short-reigning, sun-worshipping, sexually "interesting", gender fluid, teenage, Roman emperor Heliogabalus/ Elagabalus.

There's a lot of utter crap out there on the subject, particularly the book Divine Carnage which is possibly the single most spurious nonsense i've ever read (and i have read a lot of spurious nonsense).

It's hard to really get a good sense of what was going on with Heliogabalus, particularly as he was assassinated and undoubtedly rewritten as far more deranged than he actually was, but his continued legacy is in his after-life as a figurehead of decadence, amorality, apostasy, and anti-nomianism.

Our good friends Radioactive Vomit offer up two litanies to filth and garbage on the other side, and are one of the few contemporary "bestial" bands that we as a band can all agree on as having merit. That scene has basically become to the world of metal what power violence has been in hardcore for a long time, ie full of half baked, musically bankrupt, dim-wits releasing sub-par music under the guise of unquestionable authenticity.

Ouroborus endlessly consumes its own tail and complains it has shit in its mouth.

We Have Seen the True Light

I didn't have the time to post about this before now and apparently it's sold out, there will be a second and final pressing coming soon, then it's gone forever.

Iron Lung records store

As i've said in the past, somewhere on this blog, and probably on tumblr as well, this isn't a power violence related record, i don't know - or particularly care - what genre it fits into. Jensen Ward referred to it as "cultish outsider industrial", take that as whatever you want it to mean.

When i assembled the 7", and assembled really does describe the compositional process here, i was listening to a lot of Terminal Cheesecake, Loop, Head of David, Sonic Violence, Comonauts Hail Satan, Headbutt, God, Splintered, and a whole host of other weirdo UK acts i immersed myself in as a teenager.

Thematically it's another step down the road marked "why i don't think the concept of catharsis is useful " (you empty yourself, you fill yourself up again, and you never break the binging and purging nature of the problem)

At the core the two songs are about accepting that we all have shit headed sides to our personalities, naming those sides as physical presences, and periodically letting them out in controlled situations for short periods of time so that they don't eat us alive from within. Contemporary devil worship if you will.

The release of the records - purely coincidentally - marks the end of a year long experiment i was throwing myself into. The release of Holy Things... is that door being closed once again.



We're waiting for test presses for the Radioactive Vomit split, and the split LP with Suffering Luna goes off to press at the end of the year

first public Wolves of Heaven material

I recently scored a 3 minute film for Justin Oakey (who has previously made videos for Column of Heaven, Slaughter Strike, and Death Agonies) called Motherland.

It's an entry for consideration for the next ABCs of Death anthology collection, if you're into it please use your Facebook page to like it and thus cast a vote. Though i suspect something involving a vampire or a corpse will win over a tale of sectarian revenge.

Go here to vote

M is for Motherland from Oak & Arrow on Vimeo.

Mike from Column of Heaven plays the role of the guy getting decapitated and also the guy filming the event.

The soundtrack is part of a longer piece that will see the light of day in some format or another next year once i've got it to place i'm largely happy with.

shirts and stuff

Anthems of the Undesirable are selling two Column of Heaven shirts and two resurrected Blockade shirts via mail order

here

Badskulls still has two Blockade shirts for sale on their site

here

Money from shirts goes directly back into boring things like buying microphones and recording equipment so we can remain self sufficient. We record ourselves exclusively (like so many bands do and many more should) and we self-release all Column of Heaven material on cassette first; we consider all CoH releases to be licensed from us and do not consider ourselves as being attached to any specific label beyond a mutual friendship.

There are three Column of Heaven records currently at various pressing plants

• split 7" with Radioactive Vomit
• Holy Things are for the Holy 7"
• Ecstatically Embracing all that we Habitually Suppress 12"

We're currently working relatively quickly on our side of the Suffering Luna split LP which will go to press at the end of this year.

In other news i recently quit my job and told my boss to stand aside (my girl, as special as she is, is not even close to 16 though) and went back to school (to a program that will last longer than Column of Heaven), which mostly means i will be occasionally unable to respond to e mails, and news will sometimes be sparse. By the end of this year we'll have played a paltry three local shows anyway, so it's unlikely that our unimpressive amount of live excursions is going to be affected.

The Column of Heaven tumblr is the place for periodic short brain farts that may or may not be relevant to anything. Anything longer/ more in depth will go here. Anything really fucking useless goes on our various instagram accounts (do you like looking at pictures of dogs? beer? dogs in the background of pictures of beer? limited appeal noise releases? limited appeal noise release with dogs sniffing them? limited appeal noise releases next to beer and dogs sniffing one or both items? Then feel free to follow wolfagram and be stunned by the simple minded idiocy of my life).

If there's a Column of Heaven (or Blockade) facebook page in existence then feel free to flood it with requests for mail order and shows in your Slovenian fishing village, hell, i insist...

noise/ listening/ composition/ the future

It's a question I've been asked a lot in the two years Column of Heaven has been playing sporadic live show (we may have played 20 times at this point, possibly less, certainly not much more); "why don't you do the noise stuff live?"

One answer is that I didn't want this band to be seen as exactly the same as The Endless Blockade – the line up is 50% different after all and despite the fact that I'm an unrepentant tyrant and control freak I don't want to diminish Dave and Mike's valuable role in the band.

The main answer is that I want to purposefully move away from the contemporary wisdom that the public performance of a composition somehow has to measure up to or mirror exactly to the recorded version.

The noise in Column of Heaven manifests differently than it did in Blockade. Blockade's records were slightly noisy; but because we were always at the mercy of other people recording us we never really developed it in a way that we wanted. Our live performances, particularly in the last year of the band when we added Bloomer to the line up, were pretty noisy though. In the last five years of the band we had zero silence live; we'd play a block of three to six songs and then we'd use noise to fill the space whilst we retuned. Sometimes I felt the audience didn't really know how to react as we never gave them a space to do something as simple as applaud (or yell "you're a bunch of dicks, fuck off") and the vibe would often seem strained. Or maybe we were just horrible.

In Column of Heaven we don't allow anyone to record us; two of our unbreakable rules are we release everything ourselves on cassette first, and no one outside of the band is allowed to record us for a release. Because of this I get to spend as much time as I want sandblasting everything in noise and generally making releases flow exactly how I want them to flow. My recording skills are not particularly great, but hey, if someone's going to not do full justice to your intent, it may as well be you.

Music and Where it's Consumed

In Blockade I was using the noise primarily to accentuate the dissonance already present in hardcore. It was used to push to breaking point the implied chaos present in the music I'm influenced by.

In Column of Heaven it's used for those purposes as well, but something I've been interested in of late is how the mechanics of consuming music influence the production of it. Stadium rock sounds like it's meant for stadiums, certain types of hardcore sounds like it's only meant to be played in basements with kids piling on top of the band as they play.

The venue of music consumption I've been interested in is related to the ever onward advancement of downloaded music. A quick look at my Mediafire and Bandcamp stats tells me that Column of Heaven has been downloaded around 3-400% more times than we've sold records and tapes, and those are just the stats I have access to. In terms of where people consume music I suspect most people listen to a significant amount on their phones as they're travelling during the day.

In my own listening experiences – there was a span of close to two decades between my last walkman and my first iPod – the leaking through of environmental sounds into my "private" listening has made me reassess how I make music. Walking past a construction site and having the sounds blend with what I'm listening to at the time has made me think in different ways about non-musical sound, which was something I was always interested in anyway. I've lost count of the amount of times I've paused something to figure out if that sound (frequently sirens or a strangely sonorous subway train) was an intentional part of the music I was listening to or not.

Old Punks Don't Die (They Just Record at Home)

When I see a band I don't want a perfect transcription of their records. If they're a hardcore band I want it to be in someone's packed and broken basement and I'd rather the bass player got pushed through the drums mid-song, or I have to duck as the singer throws a mic stand at me than hear a perfect recreation of their 7". 

Most Column of Heaven is not consumed by people seeing us play live, we don't play live very often and that isn't going to change. I'm a 40 year old with a mortgage working towards my PhD, employed in a management job in the social services industry. I don't have the time or energy levels to be touring much or playing 90% of the shows I'm offered, even the local ones.

With that in mind I don't actually want to only compose and release music that's suitable for live replication; it just doesn't matter at this point. The original goal of the band was to be a two piece and not even playing anything remotely grind sounding anyway. Somehow I got tricked into doing another band…

The Holy Things are for the Holy 7" due out on Iron Lung Records pretty soon (I mean it) is an example of a record that's not meant to be played live (we couldn't if we wanted to because it wasn't written or recorded that way) and is influenced by my experiences of hearing other sounds filter through into my private listening experiences.

some wolves and some religious shit, AKA Column of Heaven artwork 101

The Future

We aren't going to stop playing live, well, I hope not, I actually quite enjoy the experience, we play so selectively that it's not something I feel is a burden or an unwelcome necessity. But we are going to be releasing more records and tapes that aren't really for live consumption. This does not mean we will release a bunch of noise records with vocals over the top under the banner of Column of Heaven, we're conscious of the fact that we're first and foremost related to hardcore and grindcore and getting too far away from that for too many records is going to make us an inconsistent experience for most people.

Some future releases will be under the name Wolves of Heaven; I have a release under that title I've been slowly picking away at for a while now that's too removed from Column of Heaven to be released under that name, despite it being the exact same four people involved. That being said there are going to be more releases that don't fit as grindcore records.

As for touring we're currently committed to heading to the eastern US next spring to drink fine beers and meet interesting new canines at house shows.

shows and the lack of them

We have had to cancel our show on June 8th in Toronto. Nyodene D, Thantifaxath, Ride at Dawn and the other bands on the bill will still be appearing.

The vague plans of doing another tour this year have also been crushed, steel your nerves and remember the good times. Please accept our humble apologies.

The only other show we are guaranteed to be playing this year is Montreal on August 2nd as part of a fest. Illness, death, famine, apocalypse, legal issues, magickal combat, and death threats may make a liar out of me.

We might play Not Dead Yet in November. If there's a suitable local house show or if, oh i dunno, Unholy Majesty or The Rita for example pass within 100km we'll play those.

Playlist:

Sink - The Holy Testament 2 LP
Broken Cross - Anti-Human Life 7"
Minotaur - Obsession CD
Vile Intent - Skin in the Game 7"
Full of Hell - Rudiments of Mutilation LP
Wilt/ En Nihil - split CD
Kremlin - Drunk in the Gulag 12"
The Body - Master, we Perish 12"
Trepaneringsritualen ‎– Ritualer, Blot & Botgöring LP

shows/ blah

Thanks to anyone who gave Column of Heaven floor space, wi-fi passwords, rides from airports, booked shows and generally went out of their way to be stand up human beings to us earlier this month.

Particular thanks for anyone that brought us fancy beers, food, or gave us books to read. You are all wonderful people and we don't deserve such kindness.

Photo by Jackie

Next shows:

April 4th, Montreal @ Death Church w/ Iron Lung, SHIT, Vile Intent, Burrow Owl
April 5th, Ottawa @ The Legion w/ Iron Lung, SHIT, Rough House
April 6th, Toronto @ Soybomb w/ Iron Lung, SHIT, Farang

Photo by Jackie

June 8th, Toronto, w/ Nyodene D, Thantifaxath, and 8,000,000 black metal bands
August 3rd, Montreal, w/ Ames Sanglantes, Raspberry Bulbs, Verglas, etc etc etc.

After that there's some vague talk about going to the US east coast and mid-west anytime between august and november, depending on various boring employment situations for every single member of the band.

Nothing guaranteed.

e mail me at theendlessblockade at g mail dots coms if you can set up a show and won't drop the ball. Preferences for all ages/ DIY spaces.

Nothing guaranteed, we might decide to never leave the house again.

Update: maybe next year.

useless trinkets and baubles

shit that we'll have on tour with us:

art by Vrugarth

Long sleeve, art by Szymon

Shirt by Szymon

Coloniser - Macaulayism. Four song tape.

The first noise release i haven't sacrificed to Column of Heaven in a few years now. Though it did start life as a potential CoH recording.


Slow Light - Demo tape 2013.

Eric explores what crasher d beat bands sound like in his cracked brain. All drums and vocals. All noise made by some stupid drum sleight of mind.

Influences: Gloom, Cherry Point, D-Clone, The Rita, weird IPAs, SCIENCE!

Godstopper volume one. It's a zine/ comic. God knows what Mike has come up with.

Chromium Dioxide issue 5.

Ride at Dawn - Blast Cage. New tape/ LP. 18 minutes of fuck off. New line up, best material yet.

A new Abyss tape in some form or another.


Absolut - Demo tape 2013.

Three of Slaughter Strike are in Column of Heaven. The other main guy from Slaughter Strike that isn't in CoH is Joel, this is his band. Ex Midnight, Left for Dead, and whatever else Joel has done.

Possibly my favourite new band. Better than the last fake Burning Spirits/ Raw Noise Anime Hiking Furry Punk 4 Life bullshit you were recommended by someone from New York on the VLV board.

shows and news and whatever

Column of Heaven and Iron Lung shows

  

March

Fri 1 - Vancouver, BC @ Zoo Zhop w/ Osk, Cooked and Eaten

Sat 2 - Seattle, WA @ Black Lodge [secret address] w/ Mutant Video & Nudes

Sun 3 - Portland, OR @ Black Water Records w/  Gag

M 4 - Olympia, WA @ Joey House

Tu 5 - Sacramento, CA @ The Colony w/ Rat Damage, Alarms & Rad 7pm

W 6 - San Jose, CA @ Finca Mission w/ Replica, Permanent Ruin & Caged Animal 5:30pm

Th 7 - San Francisco, CA @ Knockout (21+) w/ Neon Piss & No Love 10pm

F 8 - Oakland, CA @ First Church of the Buzzard w/ Vaccuum, Miscreant, Permanent Ruin & Striations

Sa 9 - Santa Ana, CA @ Unit B w/ Boston Strangler,Rival Mob, Despise You & Hordes

Su 10 - Los Angeles, CA @ Lethal Amounts w/ Boston Strangler, Rival Mob & Knife Fight

April

Th 4 - Montreal, QC @ Death Church w/ Burrow Owl, SHIT & Vile Intent, over by 11pm

F 5 - Ottawa, QC @ Montgomery Legion [330 Kent St.] w/ SHIT & Rough House 8:30pm

Sa 6 - Toronto, ON @ Soy Bomb w/ Farang & SHIT.

Portland is Eric's birthday, San Francisco is Mike's birthday.

Bring barely drinkable IPAs that we are unable to buy in the puritanical province of Ontario for us to sample in the parking lot under cover of darkness.

Next three Survivalist releases

March

Ride at Dawn as yet untitled new tape, their best yet, my opinion is not to be trusted though.

Coloniser - Macaulayism C20. Screech thud yell. 70% finished at time of writing, out in March unless i get hit with a massive dose of self criticism again. I have been failing to get this project off the ground for about two years now.

April

Grief Tourist zine. Alas this won't be ready in time for the shows we're playing in the US. No music talk. Limited copies, of limited interest. Self indulgence at its most crass. An elaborate and totally base level sigil written in zine format.

As ever, all of this will only available at shows, left over copies will eventually go to Analog Worship, Scream/ Writhe, and Crucial Blast after the usual protracted procrastination on my behalf.

Shirts

To answer the inevitable, why won't you let me send you money for a shirt question, badskulls will be making them available to you shortly.

About all those Column of Heaven records that aren't out

I dunno, spring for both of them? It's out of my hands now.

Next record mostly written.

Playlist

Grunt - World Draped in a Camouflage LP
Purity Control - Coping 7"
Hatred Surge - Purgatory 7"
Propergol - Paradise Land CD
The Communion - A Desired Level of Unease one sided 12"
Drive - OST 2xLP
Kickback - No Surrender LP
Raw Radar War - Double Equals LP