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