Inaudible garbage

Shows won't be a regular thing for this band, will happen at least twice a year

and as i said in reply to a comment on this blog elsewhere (regarding the Blockade tape) "there are copies of the tape left, not many, but enough for anyone with a keen eye to grab one. Probably won't be able to get to the post office until next week though."

Twitch of the Death Nerve

Last ever release for The Endless Blockade, an 11 minute cassette of the only recording of the final line up of Bloomer, Carroll, Edgar, King and Nolan. Recorded in our practice space the week before we dissolved the band this cassette represents the set list we played at pretty much every show in 2010; though it lacks the extended noise and closing song of either Do Not Resuscitate or Qabalistic Zero.

Bloomer was a long time friend of the band and joined us as an extra blast of noise for our final year. His solo works since around 2007 or so have mostly explored noise as a unified field of integrated textures rather than explorations of volume as a tool or juxtaposing clashing dynamics; his approach is pretty much HNW without really being HNW.

His presence on this recording is understated; emphasising the distortion overload and mirroring the intent of the music rather than putting new sounds into old places, which is frequently the approach i take when adding noise to music.

This is available at Column of Heaven's debut performance in Toronto tonight, any left over copies will go to 20 Buck Spin and Absurd Exposition. I'll be going back into my academic swamp after tonight - only coming up for air in December to attend Rites of Darkness - so please contact those guys for mail order.

This exists in the form of 100 cassettes because this isn't some precious work of art that needs to be left as a monument to a seven year period of our lives. This exists in the form of 100 cassettes because an outdated, fragile, hated, disposable, easily dismissed and largely dead format is the most fitting carrier of the last recording we ever did.

Consider it fertiliser for everything the five of us intend to do next.

Pisshorn, RIP



Bloomer finishes one of the dumbest nights Blockade was at the centre of

this weekend

just a reminder:

Column of Heaven will be playing on saturday, sometime around 8 i think, thrill to our new line up of King, Kristiansen, Nolan and Simpson AKA now more ex-Slaughter Strike than ex-Endless Blockade. Owl Eyes are before us, their demo is great, they have a new 7" for this weekend, you should buy one or at least google search the interweb for a download of their demo.

The final Blockade release in the form of the piss raw tape i've been talking about for ever will be available at the show, 100 copies, with leftovers going to Absurd Expostion and 20 Buck Spin for mail order.

There'll also be Column of Heaven shirts with art by the lovely Sin-Eater, you can either buy one at the show or wait until we play your small Romanian fishing village on whatever ill-advised tour i talk myself into doing next year. As ever i must remind you, if you paypal me money for a shirt i'll just go and spend it on Mexican food and you'll never get your shirt, so let's just save all of us a headache.

I will gladly take your money off you if you're attending the thursday night show at Poor Alex Theatre as i will be doing the door and having a rubbish old man mosh later on to Double Negative.

Anytime a band plays a Siege cover this weekend i will be drinking a shot, feel free to join me.

Blockade/ Pig Heart Transplant

Blockade/ PHT split 7" out now on SuperFi records. SuperFi released our first piece of vinyl and it's only fitting that he's releasing our last.

I'm told that these are the places you can get it from in North America:

Warm Bath
Rescued From Life
Iron Lung
Malokul
Give Praise
16OH
Feeble Minds
Vinyl Rites
Feral Ward
To Live A Lie
Katorga Works
Anthems Of The Undesirable

google that shit.

Locals can find this at Hits and Misses in about an hour and potentially at Not Dead Yet fest, though they may not last that long.

500 pressed and they look fantastic, Feeding did the artwork and someone i don't know - i'm sure they're lovely and kind to animals - in the UK screened them. Six panels of meat baby action.

These represent the final two Blockade tracks ever written and other than alternate versions of previously recorded material that's coming out on cassette later this month this is the official last rites of that part of my life.

Both songs deal with loss, one being a desire for escape from the cultural noise of the world; an embracement of a deliberate loss of social connection. The other is a scream into the void over the death of my seventeen year old cousin Alasdair. RIP wee man.

Joshua Norton Cabal/ Disgust

After around 18 months of delays the Norton/ Disgust split is out on Small Doses.

Disgust's tracks are predictably great and there's an unexpected xbrainiax cover. I did three tracks (in one), recorded around the same time as Between Two Fires.

You can listen to samples and buy it here

In the layout it looks like i'm crediting myself with the quote that comes from The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell. My fault entirely.

Reading:

The Dominion of the Dead - Robert Pogue Harrison
Chips and Beer - issue 1
Culture and Materialism - Raymond Williams
History of Sexuality vol 1 - Michel Foucault
The Immortalization Commision: Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death - John Gray

Listening:

Wasteoids - demo
Owl Eyes - demo
Morbosidad/ Pseudogod 12"
Sutekh Hexen - Luciform 12"

Some Random Thoughts of Relatively Little Consequence

Being the old guy at the show sometimes gets a little irritating, mostly it just adds to the distance i already perceive between myself and a lot of the human race.

My tour journals are frequently filled with references to the Peter Pan like nature of some local scenes; in parts of the US you are perpetually playing to a different group of under 20 year olds, no matter how often you go back over a period of years.

The biggest drawback of this level of transience is that discussions are sometimes perpetually stuck at entry level, see for example any internet discussion of power violence, something that everyone over the age of 30 was bored of ten years ago. It's hard to build on ideas and concepts if everything has to cycle back to the beginning.

Sometimes on tour i feel like i'm the man that time forgot, every year i get older than my audience. There's definitely something that reminds you of your own mortality to be found in touring in an underground band when you get over 30.

I've Been Looking at Everything Backwards Until Recently

The success of the international underground is one of a strange consistency and permenance despite the almost ever changing audience.

The audiences change, but the form of DIY shows stays the same; cram as many of your friends as you can into a small room with no adult supervision and go fucking nuts to a band. There's an undeniable beauty to that kind of simplicity.

The core values and approaches remain consistent despite the transient nature of the audience. It's almost like some kind of tenuous proof that the path many of us in the life have followed and are still following is a vital aspect of existence that's embedded into a wider consciousness. It's music and specifically the culture of music as an atavistic urge. I loosely verbalised an aspect of this eternal nature of ideas in the Blockade song Irrationalism Uber Alles.

Fellow old guy in a band, Sean from Suffering Luna,  sees shows in terms of Victor Turner's concept of Liminality. I'm just going to be lazy and pull a quote from Wikipedia here: Liminality refers "to in-between situations and conditions that are characterized by the dislocation of established structures, the reversal of hierarchies, and uncertainty regarding the continuity of tradition and future outcomes".

There isn't much of a conclusion to be had here other than to say that the comfort i find in underground culture is not to be found in the consistency of the audience (because it isn't consistent), but in the consistency of ideas and approaches.

Shank, 2003, a show that happened a life time ago by hardcore standards

a small follow up

Buy tickets for Not Dead Yet here

the shows will sell out

for out of towners who don't know, Poor Alex Theatre and Hard Luck Bar are practically next door to each other, so if you're feeling flush you can catch bands at shows on at both venues, it looks like the line ups are set up so people can go between shows, but you should check first.

this place is cheap if you need somewhere to stay