Atrax Morgue – "In Search Of Death" (Slaughter Productions – SPT01) 1993

Another Ed Gein reference, another photo of a botched suicide victim on the slab, the word vaginal,...it's all adding up to another interchangeable Industrial/Power Electronics cassette.Especially popular in Italy.

Italians like Prog Rock and Industrial culture...rather too much it seems....like me; but I can see the tiresome sameness of 110% of the participants in this genre. Anyone can make a tape like this everyday if they were so inclined,whereas its not so easy to be a punk band.You may require 2 or three chords to write a Punk Rock song,which qualifies as an actual bone-fide song rather than a throbbing noise passing itself off as a tribute to some obscure mass murderer in Siberia(no talent required);but for the Industrial Genre as a whole you only need zero chords to be included. This is Prog Rock for the kids who felt excluded at a Yes Concert,and a far more inclusive experience than Punk Rock pretended to be......"You are Us,but stay down there" (Jimmy Pursey,"Tell us the truth" LP live side 1978)

So it gets to the point where everyone is on the stage and no-one is in the mosh pit. Ultimately making music irrelevant ,we can all do this at home,never bother going out. Do It Yourself,or DIY,....a position heavily promoted by this blog.The trouble with that noble philosophy is that if everyone did it themselves we'd end up with something like 'Bandcamp', a seething morass,mess, of  every genre of the past 70 years turned into a haystack with no needles in.......and there's no way out.DON'T DO IT YOURSELF

If i heard this in 1980 i would have enjoyed it as much as watching The Damned live in 1977.

Don't misunderstand me, this is a great tape,but,what's the point?...and the Damned are still touring.

I Envy those unattainable days, when Pop Stars were the closest we were ever gonna get to having a God......sorry ladies, there were no goddesses back then,although I don't think we are allowed to use the word in these trans-gendered days.....we are ALL Gods.Rather like the problem with relevance modern musicians find themselves nudged off the track by.In a world of Gods,and heaven and Hell are also full of Gods, the one who rejects his God status becomes the God for the Gods,for where there is a need to invent him,he ceases to exist.

...Hmmmm I think i've wrote something like this before?....with a link to the Monty Python Sketch of "Bicycle Repairman";which sums up this quandary very nicely indeed.

Also i may be running out of vaguely unoriginal things to say.....like a literary Bandcamp.

Basically,the best Rock Star on your street, where everyone and his cat has a album out,is the one who has no interest in being a Star in the slightest.....and doesn't even bother making an old school Industrial tape like this one.

What a Guy!? 

Tracklist:

Scum A
A1 Intro (The Next Door) 2:27
A2 Lonely 5:31
A3 RapeTime 3:42
A4 In Search Of Death 5:01
A5 Vaginal Speculum 3:58
Scum B
B1 Gein Blessed 4:42
B2 Death Come 4:43
B3 Necrolessia 5:51
B4 MurderBeat 5:19

DOWNLOAD in search of the death of pop music HERE!

Peter Sotos – "Buyer's Market" (AWB Recording – AWB 016) 1992

Hmmmm,Rolf Harris died yesterday....so I thought....this....?!

Perhaps the only album on this blog that has been made by a person convicted for the possession of child pornography....(no.not Steve Albini!!!!). The Putrid Voyeurism collected on this brutal compilation of  victims accounts of sexual violence, would be explained away as a grim portrait of the Human capacity for ...for want of a better word...Evil?.....were it not made by a geezer who blatantly gets off on stuff like this. No-one called the Moors Murderers 'Artists' did they. And i'm sure Sotos would go to any lengths to get his grubby little hands on the Lesley Anne Downey tape made by Brady and Hindley back in the day,an obvious  obsession of his, as Lesley appears on the front cover of this CD,and even appears as the main subject in one of his books, "Selfish,Little...".

As aural Pornography goes, this is a far less subtle,but equally disturbing,honest, version of "Come on Baby One More Time" by Britney Spears, and other similar Aural sex Pop Vehicles for corporate satanic abuse rings.

When I first heard this collage ,I inexplicably played it straight through,and disturbingly felt precisely nothing, except a modicum of boredom. Was I a Monster, Am I a Monster?

Repeating this process some 30 years later, I got quite effortlessly upset at several points in this thoroughly unwholesome experience.........the boredom was still there,but It seems I am no longer a monster? Why is this? Is it that we are protected from truths such as these in this modern age,or are we more emotionally empathetic ......very trendy.Or am I depressed enough to allow the real effect of this exploration into the darker side of human nature penetrate,what i previously thought, was my desensitized black heart.

During the height of Grunge, Nirvana's producer somehow thought it was a jolly good idea to edit Soto's tapes into the collage we pretend not to know and love today. Our Steven would have had to play and listen to these harrowing accounts hundreds of times before his job was finished;then the poor sod had to go and produce Nirvana after this?Including the tasteless "Rape Me" tune........recorded(not produced) by the four-eyed grunge psychopath himself? Albini was in a band called Rapeman after all I suppose?

What Sotos, the Artist,not the Perv, examines here is the Culture of the Victim– how family members left behind are manipulated by the media, and ultimately, how their identity is redefined in the process.

Perhaps one of the starkest documents, assembled for maximum impact, accounting the darkest side of human nature on the booming industrial culture 'Buyers Market'.I feel Dirty....as in unclean rather than 'Got the 'orn!?' in the Derek and Clive sense.Although i rather suspect Peter Sotos likely got 'The 'Orn',and knocked one,if not several out frequently during the process of acquiring the recordings for this dubious piece of 'Art'. 

Alas,be it far more offensive and disturbing than anything any of those snowflake Death Metal/Grindcore bands could ever possibly come up with.They're just playing with it,silly boys.Which is in fact worse than Britney Spears and her awful daddy.

If you're not moved by this profoundly disturbing record in any way,except,of course, turned on sexually (turn yourself into the nearest police station if this is the case), you probably are the fucking monster I no longer am and Fuck you.

Tracklisting:

1 Children 17:52
2 McMartin 9:03
3 Trash 11:24
4 Bundy 10:04
5 Victims 13:23

DOWNLOAD and tear yourself a new soul HERE!

King Crimson – "Earthbound" (Island Records – HELP 6) 1972

Dreadfully lacking in inspiration,one has resorted to making topical references to that rather weird Coronation event of King Charles the third. So i typed "King" into the search box on my iTunes and out of the hundreds of replies from what i assume is some kind of artificial intelligence, I have selected King Crimson's "Earthbound" as a medium to air various bitter observations about celebrity status and how a constitutional monarch is way preferable to the awful heads of state that other systems provide,even if they don't have sausage fingers.

Yes Chuck the Third has crimson sausage fingers,or King Crimson Sausage Fingers, not dissimilar to Doctor Zoidberg of Futurama's facial arrangement. Is our King......yes i say 'Our',... really an intelligent crustacean from a planet in the goldilocks zone orbiting a near-by star, or ,as other more dubious members of the so-called counter-culture would have it....a Lizard. He was anointed with the Holy-Oil(????),ironically all while 'Just Stop Oil protesters were being dragged away as if they were in Moscow;all this behind a screen to prevent us seeing his lizard form, or his pink exoskeleton.

I'll put myself out on a limb by claiming that he is 'Probably' Human,.....possibly?

Doctor Zoidberg

King Charles III

Not only was it a vast TV audience that were allowed inside The Court of the Crimson King to witness lots of inexplicable christian nuttiness from millennia ago.There oozed also, a scraping,if that's the correct collective noun,of Celebrities made up the majority of the witless witnesses.We used to have Sir Lancelot,but now we got Sir Kier Starmer. In a thousand years time ,when we will all look like Dr Zoidberg and live in undersea caves cowering from the lethal solar winds and Third World War era half-life plutonium deposits; Our ancestors will decipher what records remain, using a charred copy of Hello magazine as their rosetta stone,to gleefully discover that Lionel Ritchie was actually there and not a myth, and tales of altruistic folk heroes who gave their own blood to the poor,Ant and Dec,will be proved to be possibly true.

There's more!?.....Dame Joan Armatrading was there, as was professional royal turd fly Stephen Fry...but wait...here's the best one.....Nick Cave?????.....What was he gonna do there?.....croon Junkyard King on the Stone of Scone? Yep Punk is certainly dead.

He desperately explains himself here...if you're interested.

It gets worse....the patronising Woke by numbers flavour of the proceedings tended to stick in one's cynical throat like the inescapable glotal stop in my east midlands accent.

They Don't mean it.....of course they don't mean it....but they feel they have to mean it.....so we get Woke by numbers in words and song.Its what psychopaths do...imitate the emotions thay don't have,then carry on killing, or being the CEO of a multinational.

There was the obligatory "we're not Racist us ,Gospel choir, representatives of even sillier relgions than Christianity, with Humanism and Atheism notable by their absence,as was, indeed...GOD?

It certainly wasn't 'Starless' but it was certainly "Bible Black".......I'm soooo clever ain't I ?

I still found myself watching it though.

However, the 1972 version of King Crimson seemed to fit the bill.Similarities with the Crimson King, in a place stuffed with 21st Century Schiziod men,a 21st century Zoidberg man,....not to mention that Charles, Camilla and Diana were "Three of a Perfect Pair"......the British army,instead of preparing for the looming war,marched perfectly to the "Beat", and showed great "Discipline"..something we rarely see in these "Islands"......leaving the guests to enjoy their "Larks Tongues In Aspic" with chips and mushy peas...see where I'm going with this? Yup, king Crimson album wordplay,...play it with your mates when you're reeeeeaaaaallllly bored.. They did an album called "Lizard" as well,featuring some peerless Mellotron play,referencing the royals' Lizard DNA. Something that Harry Hewitt isn't burdened with,because his real sperm donor wasn't a royal, and his mother a Spencer of good English stock.

Despite Charles being anointed as a living God,he will have to come to terms with being Earthbound.

And we will have to come to terms with Crimson's second best official live album,that wasn't accepted for release in the "USA" because it was too raw and noisy.

There's plenty of ferocious Sax abuse, recorded well into the "Red" by Mel Collins on this one,and none of those nice gentle tunes from their early days.It seems Fripp and the chaps may have been exposed to post-1970 Soft Machine,before Bruford and Wetton joined to create the classic prog power trio they became.

God Save the King...Crimson!?

This is Fun isn't it?...which classic period Crimson album did I NOT mention in the shite I wrote above?.....answers on a postcard addressed to Mad Vlad,number 1X, Secret Siberian Bunker (The one the CIA knows allll about),unoccupied Russia.Must be postmarked before the end of the world.

TRACKLIST:

21st Century Schizoid Man 11:45
Peoria 7:30
The Sailor's Tale 4:45
Earthbound 7:08
Groon 15:30

DOWNLOAD from the court of the crimson sausages HERE!