Happy Halloween!

Hello all.

It's still not too late to grab (or just listen to) some cool Halloween or creepy-themed music.
Scar Stuff is still your one-stop shopping place for Novelty Halloween records and spooky stuff.
Right now he's featuring a few albums I've wanted for some time. One is the great Horrific Child "L'Étrange Monsieur Whinster" that is on Stephen Stapleton's infamous NWW list. It's a wonderfully creepy Frog-Rock horror masterpiece. Another is the Creed Taylor series (Shock!, Panic!) and Kenyon Hopkins (Nightmare!) - a couple of incredibly strange selections that have been in and out of print for eons, but another great schlocky find is Forry Ackerman's Music For Robots. Nice. I think he was still selling this 1950's robot themed album in 1970's issues of Famous Monsters of Filmland.
Go visit Scar Stuff soon as he's about to go into post-Halloween hibernation.

Kathy of the amazing KBOO radio program The Autonomy Hour (alternating Thursday evenings at 12:00 AM on 90.7 FM in the Portland area) wants to let us know that SomaFM is streaming scary, dark-themed music for our holiday. I listened to it for most of my otherwise dreary workday and it really was great. It darkened my end of the quad and lifted my spirits simultaneously. Safe for most players.

Ninah has pointed out a cool mix of Halloween music that you may either download or play via Flash. I did a little of both. From our fine friends at Oddio Overplay. Check it out here.

Black Lung

Depopulation Bomb
Iridium/Polygram Australia



Creepy, crypto dark ambient from Aussie David Thrussell (Ex-Snog) under his nom de plume Black Lung.
Like a much of this genre, a lot is implied by song titles and associations and thus a very Philip K. Dickesian paranoia vibe is derived therein. Black Lung's hook is an X-File-ish conspiratorial narrative woven into some very appropriately doomy electronic music. It's a perfect soundtrack to the Alex Jones horror show that serves as our current, collective reality.

Joyful Slaughter (Of The Capitalist Swine)

Kill Ugly Radio Presents

All Hallow's Eve/Samhain Podcast

As promised earlier this month, here's my offering in hopes of a bountiful music harvest in the year to come.

Death and Rebirth.

Download:
Kill Ugly Samhain Sacrifice.mp3 ( 66.6 minutes, megs)

Playlist in Comments

Laibach

Kapital
Mute



Laibach's 1992 album was its greatest departure from the industrial path and its most experimental in the pop medium.
It utilizes many techno styles such as Jungle, House and even Hip-Hop. There's very little of the elements one comes to expect from a Laibach album. There's no ironic cover songs as such, unless you count those that served as ready-mades for their sonic sculpting. There's a DJ turntable and sample throwdown, with significant bits lifted from George Lucas's THX1138 among other things. Even Milan Fras' distinctive voice is scarcely heard here. But don't worry, it's all idiosyncratically melded with Teutonic, Wagnerian Gottendammerung and Slavic and German singing. Stylistically, this is a very retro-futuristic album, with the melding of classical and traditional music styles with electronica and many recycled lyrics and samples recur. Les Privileges Des Mort sounds like a remake/remodel of songs from the reissues of Slovenska Akropola and their debut Laibach. Some of the lyrics from Hunter's Funeral Procession sound an awful lot like lyrics that would turn up in 2003's WAT. This album takes a lot of chances and it pays off; it is one of the most consistent albums of their ouvre and offers one of the most rewarding listening experiences.

BONUS: The vinyl-only track Steel Trust, by Laibach sub-group Germania (and sung by Anja Rupel), which sounds like a theme for some retro-futuristic soap opera.

Wirtschaft ist Tot megaupload

300,000 V.K.

Peter Paracelsus
Ropot



Satanic techno from Laibach sub-group Dreihunderttausend Verschiedene Krawalle (300,000 Different Riots) and philosopher/poet Peter Mlakar, filtered through his weird amalgam of Marxist and Luciferian principles:

"Satanic Techno is that state when the pain or pleasure [of human experience] are no longer submitted to a process of their own natural determination, but are a matter of the will of the scientific mind, which is able solely for its own enjoyment to manage the psychological structure and has an effect on it independently of the subject's will, and which also abolishes a cast-iron law of nature.
In a manner not dissimilar from Laibach, Peter Paracelsus subverts a pop genre to his own ends, injecting it with an overt ideology, in contrast to the insidious but covert commodity fetishizing of most music industry output."

It's a nice blend of Laibach's Euro-techno aspects and dark, ominous disco. If you enjoy some of the electronic elements of Laibach albums such as NATO and Kapital, then this will fit the bill.

Venite Lucifer Rapidshare

Totally Fuzzy ist Tot

The sharrity blogoshpere is in a panic spiral over the disappearance of Herr K., who hasn't posted since the 12th.
Perhaps he was taken away to the Castle.*
Perhaps he just plain hit the wall of way too damn many blog posts and too much real life going on.
But despite that, TF blogs on. They have taken the fall back position of posting open dexes.
Mmmmm...    ..open dexes.
Brings me back in a good way.
I remember surfing around for them, and discovering some real jems amongst the drek (for me, Limp Bizkit or Papa Roach or Death Cab for Cutie in a dex are a good indicator that you're not going to find anything interesting here.). Surfing open dexes is really the sport for the hunter with loads of spare time and the patience of a saint.
Here's hoping he returns, or finds happiness elsewhere. Either way, TF has been such a great resource. It's been our periscope in these murky waters of filesharing. I remember jumping around with idiot glee the day Totally Fuzzy found my meager blog.
We'll push on somehow.

* Bad, incorrect Kafka reference.

Kill Ugly Radio Annex

Welcome to the Kill Ugly Radio Podcast depository.
This is a collection of all my radio mixes to date.

Chariots Of The Gods?		1996			Download
Nazis in Space pt. 1 (Yma Sumac vs Heino in space) Nazis in Space pt. 2 (Church with Anne Thraks) Nazis in Space pt. 3 (You can be a third Uncle in space, this time around)		1999 " "			Download Download Download
Kill Ugly Thanksgiving		Nov. 2005			Download
Old Sounds For New Flesh		Jan. 2006			Download
Edge of Nowhere Mix		Unknown date			Download
An Ugly All Hallow's Eve		Oct. 2005			Download
Godcast (playlist)		April 2006			Download

Francis Dhomont

Frankenstein Symphony
Asphodel/Sombient

French-born, Canadian composer Francis Dhomont has a long, impressive career and a lengthy discography, but this is his best known work in avant-music circles. It's a wonderful assemblage of other people's musique concrete and electro-acoustic pieces, rendered all the more bizarre by Dhomont's recontextualization and deft use of spatial effects. Some bits of it sound like a soundtrack to some un-named horror movie.

Here's some notes on it by the composer himself:

A hybrid thing in four movements, made of cut-up pieces, pasted, assembled, sowed parts that are alike and contrasted, and that I have named, for obvious reasons, the Frankenstein Symphony: an unusual electroacoustic adventure.

Armed with a scalpel and a splicing (operational) block, I sampled several morphological organs from the the works of 22 composers and friends (many of whom were students of mine), and with their imprudent blessings (on a stormy night?), brought to life this little acoustic monster which I hold particularly close to my heart. —Francis Dhomont

Download

Negativland

Points
Seeland Records



Followup to 1980's debut S/T album (which I blogged here). Again, less focus on thematic material and more homespun audio mayhem. This one seems more family oriented - somewhat like sitting in on someone else's family barbeque while on some kind of low-grade psychedelic drug. There's an old lady singing and playing an accordion, a lovely little organ tune (with sample of like-minded Doug Kahn's Reagan cut-up), and lots of ambient tv and household noises. And there's also less emphasis on songs or attempts at musicality and more glorious noise. But it was just a sample of the chaos to come.

Potty Air

The Cramps

Lucky 13
Drug Fiend Records (Bootleg)



Great early concert by The Cramps recorded on Friday the 13th, 1978, at CBGB's (r.i.p.).
This one has Lux introducing themselves as Frank Furter and the Hot Dogs and whoever made this boot touts them as such on the cover. Indeed - the printing on the actual CD itself makes no mention of The Cramps, just the Frank Furter name and the date and venue. Perhaps this is how they were able to get a decent pressing plant to make it on the sly in the pre-CDR era. I don't know.
What I do know is that this is a great set. The sound is so clear that you can hear the cash register ringing and someone not too infrequently throwing beer bottles against a back wall. It features most of what would become their first LP and EP, and Bryan Gregory sounds like he's playing the same songs as Ivy, which was reportedly rare. Lux's between song banter is quite amusing, as well. This has recently been released as the last third of the multi-disc, odds n' ends compilation How To Make a Monster.
A fine document of The Cramps early days, a eulogy of sorts for CBGBs and what's Halloween without The Cramps?

I'm Cramped

The Misfits

Beware: The Complete Singles (77 - 82)
Destroy Fascism Records (Germany - Bootleg)



A really nice little compilation that gathers all the early Misfits singles in one place.
It's a little scratchy - sounding like everything comes from someone's well-loved collection (plus some sloppy queing), and many of these tracks have been remastered elsewhere and released on quite a few legit comps, the best being the wonderful Static Age.
The earliest single, 1977's Cough Cool B/W She - with Glenn Danzig on keyboards ala The Stranglers - sounds like it was cut on one of those old carnival make-your-own-record machines, but it's an interesting glimpse of this band's genesis. There's some swell highlights represented by their subsequent singles and the Beware EP, terminating in the horrid Evillive EP, the band's nadir, where they play faster and sloppier and the horrendous recording doesn't help much.
It's all redeemed by an outtake that was never released until long after the band called it quits, The Return of the Fly, and Last Caress (from Beware), the band's finest song.

The Misfits and Halloween go together like candy-apples and razorblades.

Link and playlist in comments.

NON

Receive the Flame
Mute



An album of ambient noise from the self-proclaimed King of Noise Music and martini swilling misanthrope Boyd Rice.
This should serve as proof of his aforementioned title. It's a wonderful suite of disturbing loops and dissonances, all rendered into a blur of white noise. Some take a the tack of taking a very short loop of otherwise innocuous music and letting it play into infinity, till you submit to the mega-cyclic mind-rape. The effect of most songs is not unlike subjecting your eyelids to a flashing strobe light - only done to your ears. While some of the tracks are rather abrasive at first - and the overall theme is rather dark, the culminative effect is somewhat soothing.

Receive the Flame (Mega)

Death in June

Wall of Sacrifice
Tesco



I've avoided Death in June for years, but have long been intrigued by singer/guitarist Douglas P.'s contributions to other people's work and his taste in music via a podcast he did a while back for Brainwashed.com. I'd always written DiJ off as another dark industrial band that flirted with fascistic imagery and had a misanthropic lyrical bent. Whereas bands like Test Dept. and Laibach openly displayed aesthetics of fascism or nationalistic motifs, they - for the most part - are doing it in a sort of political and artistic detournment and have aspects to their art and music (Futurism, Deconstructivism, Surrealism, etc.) that would never have been tolerated by a genuine fascist government such as Nazi Germany. Death in June, complete with creepy WWII Fallschirmjager jumpsuits and scary looking gargoyle masks, have a tougher go of shaking Nazi allegations. It doesn't help that frequent collaborator (and often similarly attired) Boyd Rice makes an appearance, a spoken word piece where he intones about destruction being an essential part of the wheel of life (Bring on the Night). That little ray of sunshine aside, the rest runs the gamut from smooth death folk (Fall Apart, Giddy Giddy Carousel), industrial loop melt downs (Wall of Sacrifice, Death is a Drummer) and death drones (Heilige Leben) for an alternately beautiful and desolate listening experience.

MegaUpload
Yeah, I ain't too happy about it, either.

Re-Ups and Downs

Hi kids.
By request, I have re-upped the following:

• Return of the Living Dead OST
• Big Black - Hammer Party
• Flipper -Blowin' Chunks (missing track replaced - thanks David!)
• Laibach - Slovenska Akropola (not really a re-up, but an up)
• Laibach - Tanz Mit Laibach single
• Greg Sage -Sacrifice
  

I will try to keep up with requests, but with the shortening of RS, I may use another method.
Update; Uh.. this is a little embarassing, but I've somehow locked myself out of my RS account.
Update 2: I will upload to Megaupload until further notice. I hope this doesn't end up excluding anyone. I am unable to use rapidshare any longer due to some password, login problems.

Poison Idea

Pig's Last Stand
Sub Pop



Portland's Poison Idea was my first ever punk show. I saw them shortly after the released Record Collector's Are Pretentious Assholes (still my favorite record by them). PI had the heaviest, most blistering sound, thanks to some amazing guitarwork and singer Jerry A's powerful bellowing. They managed to retain the nihilism of punk without succumbing to it's limitations and pitfalls - musically, that is. Earlier this year, guitarist Tom "Pig Champion" Roberts succumbed to a lifestyle that was hedonistic to the extreme. When not ingesting drugs and alcohol, Roberts managed to pack away enough calories to amount to nearly 500 pounds. He died of kidney failure just as PI were about to release a new album, ironically titled Last Will and Testament. I have to say that I wasn't particularly surprised. I had run into Tom and Jerry at shows back in the day, and even talked to Tom (about some damn movie), and a friend once had a very drunk Jerry threaten to beat him up over a shirt he was wearing. Tom also hosted a great radio show in the early-to-mid eighties which was my only lifeline to the world of hardcore punk. Sometimes I used to wish that I'd gotten to know him better, but when I hear tales from friends who did, I'm kind of glad I never had the opportunity.
This album - Pig's Last Stand - was recorded in 1993, the first of PI's many 'farewell concerts'. It's an amazing document to the power and fury of Poison Idea and a fitting epitaph for someone who lived and died for excess.

Death, Agony And Screams

Yeah, I've kinda lost interest in most punk.
I don't really like it much anymore, except for some exceptional bands who managed to transcend the genre's orthodoxy.
Most of my punk LP's and CDs have gone to my oldest son Zack, who turns eighteen today!

Happy Birthday. Love ya, kid!

Samhain Approaches...

The trees are turning orange and the shadows lengthen...
I might be busy for a spell.
I am knitting you all a new Halloween podcast.

Here is a link to last year's offering.

Kill Ugly Halloween 2005 (mp3 - 58 meg)

I was happy to hear that the muse of that particular show (Kathy Fors of The Autonomy Hour) found it, as it was a stitched together attempt to recreate the spookiness of her shows. I am also delighted to hear that she will do another on Thursday, Oct 26, 2006 on www.kboo.fm, (90.7fm in the Portland metro area).

This made me spray coffee all over my keyboard

Music Site Race

Which of these three popular music sites is the slowest?

• All Music Guide
• Pitchfork
• Brainwashed

My contender is Allmusic.

Discuss...

U.S. pushes Russia in WTO talks to close MP3 site

Russia should shut down a pirate music Web site that is robbing U.S. recording companies of sales if it wants to become a member of the World Trade Organization, the top U.S. trade official said on Wednesday.

"I have a hard time imagining Russia becoming a member of the WTO and having a Web site like that up and running that is so clearly a violation of everyone's intellectual property rights," U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab told reporters after a speech to a services industry organization.

Schwab's call for the allofmp3.com Web site to be closed came as the United States and Russia are trying once again to reach a deal on Moscow's 13-year-old bid to join the WTO.

Read whole story.
Found at The Bulldada Newsblog

Laibach

Nova Akropola
Cherry Red



One of the darkest, most frightening album of this band's Slovene-sung era (1986).
Most of the tracks sound like demonic rituals or exorcisms (depending on your perspective), albiet with a strident, martial beat or hunter's horns. Krvava Gruda - Plodna Zemlja (Bloody Ground - Fertile Soil) is especially frightening when one considers what transpired in the Balkans less than a decade later. Vojna Poema (War Poem) sounds like a folk song from another time, but somehow gone horribly wrong. Many of these songs end up in different forms or versions on later Laibach albums around this era, where their discography can be somewhat baffling.
Highly recommended.

"Die Liebe ist die Grosste Kraft"

Nature and Organisation

Beauty Reaps The Blood Of Solitude
Durtro



A Neo-Folk project by Current 93 member Michael Cashmore released in 1994.
It's also a (dark) star-studded affair, with Death in June's Douglas P., Rose McDowall, David Tibet and our favorite wounded nurse, Stephen Stapleton.
It's a very mellow, folky outing; perfect for the time of the year when the leaves turn orange and the sun dips low in the sky. It's considerably mellower than most of the constituent contributor's bands and even includes a lovely string section. I actually ran across this album because it contains a cover version of The Wicker Man Song, sung beautifully by Rose McDowall. Proof that Neo/Death-Folk can be both dark and beautiful.

Beauty Reaps The Blood Of Solitude

Bring me the Head of the Wicker Man

Jim from Gimmie Back My Head (the blog formerly known as Bring Me the Head ) has beat me to the punch and posted the wonderful soundtrack to the original (please!) of The Wicker Man. I was about ten minutes away from uploading it and doing a meager write-up, honestly.

Visit him here.

I agree with his sentiment regarding the remake. I think just based on the trailers that it looks insipid. I also think that changing the Summerisle character into a Wiccan-ish woman shifts the dynamic and metaphor of the movie (or my perception thereof). I liked the paradox of the idyllic pagan cult and Summerisle's apparent deception of his flock. It seemed to me to be a metaphor for the domination by either patriarchal religion or a modern political state. And in the end, Howie lives out the ultimate Christian destiny; that of a martyred saint.
The fact that the studio chose not to screen the movie for the press says scads about how well they think they did this ill-advised remake.

Anyway, this soundtrack has been unavailable for years in this form, and I highly recommend it.

Negativland

Guns!
New American Radio Series



From the same source as the previously posted Advertising Secrets, comes this lengthy piece all about this nation's obsession with firearms, which aired in 1989. A reworked and drastically edited version of this ended up as the last EP that they rolled out on SST Records. This version (which has also never had a formal release) runs nearly ten minutes longer than the record and includes bit's and pieces that ended up in 1993's Free and a slightly different sequence and mix. In this series, Don Joyce's razor tapes dominate the mix, but these tracks are also a much more successful amalgam of the aformentioned element and the band's musical creations - than their dabbles in three to four minute song structures. Another great piece by Negativland.

"The Motorcade Sped on..."

Negativland

Advertising Secrets
New American Radio Series



A commission for this long running radio series done in 1991. This is a half hour long piece by Negativland that resulted in the 7" single (on Eerie Records) of the same name, but is a mere fragment of this total work.
From New American Radio's blurb:

A dynamic blend of rhythmic elements and original audio constructs—actual ad jingles, lines and phrases—commentary by and about advertisers—books on tape materials about how commercials are conceived and created—plus various out-takes from commercial productions which depict the sophisticated process (and elaborate cynicism) of the professionals involved.

All sounds - save for some ambient noodlings by the band - are made entirey of book-on-tape sales motivational material and related sources. Much of this ended up on subsequent Negativland albums and singles, but I don't believe that this complete piece has been released in any legitimate form.
This is Negativland in their creative peak.

"Stick 'em on a big piece of tape..."

Robert Anton Wilson

Robert Anton Wilson Explains Everything!
Audio Book



From this report on Douglas Rushkoff's blog, things aren't going so well healthwise for our favorite stand-up philosopher/mind-fucker Robert Anton Wilson. He is dying of Post-Polio Syndrome. Wilson turned our minds upside down with The Illuminatus Trilogy and The Cosmic Trigger. Efforts are being made to raise funds so that he may live out the remainder of his life in his apartment, without being evicted. Here's a link to a Boing Boing post with info on a Paypal fund for him, which in just one day managed to pay his rent! Or you can buy this guy's swell T-shirt (proceeds go to RAW) and become a Pope in the process!

Here's a taste of RAW's 9 hour CD set Robert Anton Wilson Explains Everything! - Or, Old Bob Exposes His Ignorance, which you can buy here.

Tracks:
1.Religion for the Hell of it
2.The New Inquisition

I have seen the Fnords!

Reposting: Don Joyce -Mort Aux Vaches

This rarity has been re-upped by request, but will expire soon.

Write-up here.

http://rapidshare.de/files/35032264/joyce_mort.zip