Blockade/ Unearthly Trance split LP

It feels like this has been on our plate forever (and the delays were all on our end); anyway, it's finally available.

Unearthly Trance offer up one side long track about submission to animistic guidance when under extreme duress and we have nine tracks that (as ever) mainly use a backdrop of esoteric thought to explore misanthropy and a willful seperation from the rotten modern era.

Most of the music for this one was written via automatic writing techniques; I basically wrote music in the same way i've been 'writing' noise for the last fifteen years.

And speaking of noise, the first track is a vague nod from us to some of the noisecore greats we grew up listening to and the track "I Just Kill" was written by Slogun which was something we had planned to do for a long time. Originally we were going to do it quite differently and write it in a more musical fashion but it didn't really work and time was not on our side so we took the Death Agonies approach to it. Part of me feels that the casual listener will be easier going with a track on one of our records that sounds like that if it's under the guise of being a 'cover' as opposed to a Blockade track.

Our material on this record gets pretty harsh in places and i'm expecting our overall world ranking on "recommend me some power violence" on tedious message boards from here to rural Honshu to drop dramtically. "In before Ceremony and Trash Talk LOL". More on that later this month.

Our friend Joce did the artwork and layout; you've no doubt seen his work on various Portal releases recently. A dead guy with his pineal gland/ Ajna chakra/ Chokmah/ third eye opening fits both the lyrics of the Unearthly Trance side and the composition of our side perfectly.

Next releases are:

Blockade/ Pig Heart Transplant 7" (Super Fi)
Blockade/ Wadge 7" (Regurgitated Semen Records) - this should have been out before Primitive...
Blockade/ Death Agonies 12" (SNSE)

see how much of a liar i was when i said no more splits?

for anyone traveling this saturday

venue change



all ages, no BYOB (bar at the show), order on the flier does not reflect the playing order

home is where the heart is

The Rita - Womankind

New release on Survivalist in celebration of Blockade bringing The Rita back to Toronto (and Montreal for the first time.)

Low end crunch and decay with ghostly formants fighting for recognition. The sound of a dying species yelling into the roar of the universe.

Due to the wonderful G20 i'm unable to get to my tape duplication place until after the world conference of worthless parasites leaves my city.

(I'm also assuming that some misguided soul isn't going to burn down random businesses on the southern part of Bathurst during the inevitable rioting that will occur.)

Thus this tape will be first available at the two Bastard Noise/ Blockade/ The Rita shows on july 2nd and 3rd. E mail (it's in my profile) after then for availability. Tapes are $5 plus postage (which is hideously expensive in Canada)

One from the vaults

Bastardizer was a short lived band i played in from (i think) 2003-2004. We probably only played six or seven shows before dissolving into nothing.

We managed to cough out a five song tape. The keen eyed among you will note that i clearly redrew the art for the film Le Notti Del Terrore for the cover.

I've uploaded all eight songs we managed to finish. I can't remember why the tape had three less than we actually recorded and i have absolutely zero recollection of what any of these songs are even called.

The Repulsion cover is obviously Slaughter of the Innocents (shame we never recorded our Autopsy or Celtic Frost covers) and the song that has a part lifted dirtectly from Motley Crue's Live Wire was called Thown to the Wolves. Other than that feel free to make them up.

We broke up because the band was pretty much evenly split between a faction that wanted to fit in with Tragedy and From Ashes Rise scene that was about to become huge and the other half (that i was firmly in) that wanted to sound like Dismember meets Discharge.

We had several posthumous offers to release this material on an LP. Some of the others seemed keen but i steadfastly refused to have any of this material be released in any form other than the original demo tape. I didn't feel the material was particularly essential; i wasn't all that enthused about the band in general to be honest and once i'd moved on i felt everyone should move on.

I can listen to this material now and i'm ok with it but for years i hated this stuff. Too frustrated that it didn't go more in the direction i was interested in following i guess.

After we broke up Dave concentrated on Rammer and now sings in Slaughter Strike. Ben and myself carried on with The Endless Blockade full time (both bands existed concurrently) and we both ended up in Slaughter Strike (though Ben has since left). Josh formed Dirty Black Summer and they put out at least two 7"s on Slasher Records. Prior to Bastardizer Keith played drums in Ire and The Black Hand. I don't believe he's played drums sinced we broke up, but he frequently tours as the pyrotechnician for underground old school thrash revivalists Metallica and some guy called Paul McCartney.

Anyway, download it here and if you don't like it i pretty much agree with you

wrong time to be going on extended hiatus i guess

I'm torn between being extremely flattered and a semi-parental desire to asking leading questions in a vaguely disapproving tone.

Apparently there's someone out there with the Fenrir design tattooed on their skin as well.

the relevance of analogue media in the digital age

I was recently involved in a huge (as in more than two hours huge) discussion on the relevance of analogue media in the digital age for Crustcake. You can hear the edited version here, before the important part is some news and general bullshit about Isis, Nachtmystium, MDF and other stuff.

It's hard for me to say anything else about the subject after that much discussion, but essentially i don't actually feel that analogue media is all that important. I think what's important is what analogue media represents, which as i've talked about before in this blog is the cultural aspect. And when making money is not the central point of your artistic output, then it's usually born out of some kind of (intentionally not defined here) cultural aspiration.

In essence we use analogue media to connect to greater cultural influences; fanzines and vinyl as atavism if you will.

When people talk about a fetish for vinyl they often unconsciously mean "an object regarded with awe as being the embodiment or habitation of a potent spirit or as having magical potency" instead of "any object or nongenital part of the body that causes a habitual erotic response or fixation."

I think it was Douglas Rushkoff that said he was less enamoured with mp3 downloading not because the music industry lost money but because he fondly remembers that listening to a new LP was a communal experience where you invited your friends over to listen with you. I'm not really interested in the olde tyme nostalgic aspect of that point (and my own childhood listening experiences are the same), but the idea of coming together to experience music as a group is definitely something that seem's largely to have been lost. Outside of getting drunk (or not getting drunk) at concerts of course.

Anyway, if you have a two hour attention span for four people bullshitting it's there for you.

Reading:

The Butt - Will Self
The Art of the Nasty - Nigel Wingrove and Marc Morris
How the World was Made; the story of creation according to sacred geometry - John Michell and Allen Brown

Watching:

[rec 2]
A Bookshelf on top of the Sky: 12 stories about John Zorn

Listening:

The Vomit Arsonist - Wretch
Rammer - one sided 12"
Complications - s/t