something for blue borg's summer

The color blue blended in paintings is brushed across a psychopathic person in quantum space physically. A color palette for operations involves less thinking. The gas mask will breath blue soldiers inside out and send the officers into a digital math death. Blue to flatten bullets and implode missiles. Threats always outward. Rare earth minerals alienate in personal radiation. Blue wants to meet and be associated with others. Four centuries ago a crater was formed and blue stored things in it. This is a calculation. A phone. A gun. Those are both there. A digital blue passively hating object programmed only to consume. A blue fossil hates better than a time-sensitive organism that pretends to still be alive.

something about David Sedaris’s "Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk"

Animals play all the parts in David Sedaris’s Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk, published in 2010. The characters are skillfully anthropomorphized and often find themselves jammed up in ways most humans can recognize.

 

But these animals are not just substitutes for people. They are nameless as strays and stock, and the reader rarely forgets these characters face animal fates—the farmer’s axe, the researcher’s hypodermic needle, the law of the jungle.

 

I have read several Sedaris collections and had decided I much preferred his autobiographical pieces, so I was surprised at how much I liked these sixteen shorts of humor and heart worms—and the accompanying animal illustrations by Ian Falconer.

 

I enjoyed a 2010 Little, Brown, and Company hardcover copy with patient, spacious type and thick-stock pages.

 

regrets about sound quality in 2024

Getting great picture quality is easy and affordable in 2024, but how does one get great audio?

 

Audio—music, especially—should always sound live, as if the musicians are playing right there in front of you on good equipment. But most TVs and computers have tinny little built-in speakers that face backwards. And people stream music now—shitty, compressed audio through Spotify or whatever.

 

People used to have big stereos in their homes, 12-inch woofers paired with clear tweeters. Now we have sound bars, which are okay, but still limited in comparison.

Note: CDs were good. Tapes sucked because of the hiss. People fetishize vinyl now, but I the audio quality is worse than CDs.

a review of a decent hardcore band that has some screamo and post-rock stripes

Demersal tries to capture the sound of everything happening to us

Demersal’s charged brush casts multicolor strokes of hardcore, post-rock, and screamo in all directions. Abrasiveness and harmony occupy background and foreground on the band’s new self-titled sophomore album.

It captures the turbulence of a world steeped in crisis and inequality, a world needing relief. With ideals and aggression, the band rebukes dominant ideologies—and with cloudy eyes, signals empathy for the disheartened. The band says, “It serves as a counterpoint to modern capitalist ideals of self-sufficiency—the notion that one should be a strong individual who’s able to stand up for oneself and one's own values alone—and it encourages to share one’s vulnerability with caring people and to reach out when the world feels the most incomprehensible.”

"Demersal" opens with vulnerability—the song “Flakkende Som Tusind Lys” approaches quietly, adding piano notes and synthy atmospherics to an anxious guitar and vocal.

But most of what follows is metal ricocheting around avalanches of sound—scream-singing, layered guitars, and fueled drums and bass. It’s dynamic and vivid.

Arpeggios open album single “Lys I Natten” and chime into a tight cadence. The song gets mathy, then melodic, with layers of low- and high-end guitar. From moment to moment, this band soars or menaces.

 

“Something” is a journey. A tension-shaping bass follows a subdued opening, then the volume swells into a hardcore onslaught succeeded by a shoulder-bruising breakdown at 1:40. Next, everything hushes and rebuilds with modest orchestration that pushes and draws air shapes.

I also like screamo song “Vakuum” and its fevered drumming and dream-captured bass guitar. Demersal comes up with some fantastic guitar arrangements, but those would be greatly diminished without the strong bass and drum performances.

Demersal, from Denmark, released its debut EP, “To Mend a Yellow Wound,” in 2017 and its first full-length album, “Less,” in 2020. The band’s new release, "Demersal," was released just May 10, 2024.

 

an album review and interview with a punk-metal band

The Norwegian band creates a positive-negative charge

In electrostatics, unlike charges attract each other. But on “Negative Music,” you get the sense Haust is repulsed by everything.

The Norwegian band’s new album is a negative charge forced against every direction.

The band debuted in 2008 with “Ride the Relapse.” After a couple albums and a several-year hiatus, the original lineup returns to release “Negative Music.”

The new album pounds mid-tempo, concrete-crushing sounds. The production is solid, and the vocal performance is all in. The music knocks down your eardrums with rhythmic change-ups and syncopation.

Haust vocalist and lyricist Vebjørn Guttormsgaard Møllberg talked to me about negativity, inspiration, and reckoning with dominant economic and social forces.

 

D: I really enjoyed listening to “Negative Music.” This was my first time hearing the band. The album title and press release center on negativity. What is the attraction of negativity?

VGM: For me, this is what attracted me to punk and black metal in the first place. This music is about saying No to harmony both in a musical and social sense. You don’t listen to a band like Darkthrone or Rudimentary Peni to meditate and become Zen. Still, while I am saying this, I realize that maybe some people, including myself, become a more balanced human being by releasing and acting out negativity through music.

 
D: How much of the negativity is social and how much is personal?

VGM: I wish I could say that it’s all social, but it’s definitely not. A lot of the lyrics are about personal issues that also of course are connected to social issues. I hope our audience can see through the I-hate-myself-and-I-want-to-die part and see that at least 80 percent of their depression is caused by capitalism and our neoliberalist, technology-positive, and war-mongering society
 

D: I’ve heard Haust’s debut was inspired in part by the “destructive car-culture” of Notodden. What is the car culture in Notodden? And what was bad about it?

VGM: Three of us grew up in the small town Notodden, two hours from Oslo. It is an old industrial town that was built around factories. In the 80s, most of the factories were shut down, and there has been a growing unemployment rate since then. Around the same time, a lot of people started driving up and down the street of the city center and, slowly, some kind of car-driving milieu developed around this activity. They all have huge sound systems in their cars and play techno and country music so loud that the cars are shaking, making a lot of noise.

I don’t know about how it is today, but when we were teenagers, they were dating girls as young as us (14-17), and we really hated them, and they hated us.

So I wouldn’t say that our debut was inspired by them as much as inspired by our hate against them. We were skater freaks with long hair, and they always shouted “cut your hair and get a job” out of their windows—ironic, since probably a lot of them were unemployed.

Decades later, when I am visiting my hometown, these guys still throw stuff at me out of their windows when I am walking in the city center street.
 

D: The songs on “Negative Music” sound consistently loud and heavy. Do you have to resist including an acoustic or some other style of song?

VGM: This is the music we want to play. If we would play other styles of music, we would start another band.
 

D: “Where Evil Dwells” and “The Vanishing” sound like interludes. What is the intention of these songs and their placement in the album?

VGM: You are right, they are interludes, and the intention is to have some breathing space in between the songs and still maintain the dark, creepy mood.

 
D: How does Norway play into your music? And what kinds of things do you think people around the world should know about Norway?

VGM: We have a love/hate relationship towards our country. We love the nature, and to some extent the values of the social democratic society, but we hate the spoiled holier-than-thou attitude that a lot of Norwegians have. Our small society has gained too much capital in a really short time (since we found oil in the 70s), and there are a lot of newly rich people with really bad attitudes towards the rest of the world.

There is a lot of good music from our country that has inspired us, and some of the best are Emperor, Darkthrone, A-ha, Noxagt, Arne Nordheim, Maja Ratkje, Kafka Prosess, and Biosphere.

Also make sure to check out the new hardcore band Accelerator and the death metal band Nithe that both will be supporting us on our release show in Oslo.

Vebjørn Guttormsgaard Møllberg generously promotes other bands.

 

Meanwhile, his own band opens “Negative Music” with the screeching guitars, damning drums, and abrasive vocal of “Left to Die.” The sound is a howling catharsis caving in with thick distortion and anguished lyrics that reject you—"No room here, no room, no room! There is no room for losers ‘round here! No room, no room!"

The equally unwelcoming and committed vocal on “Dead Ringer” howls “I’m slipping into darkness, I’m slipping into nightmares; I hear a sound, and I wake up—my blood runs cold!” There is an affect in the pronunciations, rolling Rs like something vaguely Hungarian and wrung straight from the lungs. The song even has a burning little guitar lead at 2:20.

Maybe you can become a more balanced human being by releasing “Negative Music.”