And another year ends... (the metal way)

My contribution to Exclaim's Aggressive Tendencies Best of 2012 list has been up for a couple of weeks:

• Metal and Hardcore 2012: The Year of Doom
• Exclaim!'s Best Albums of 2012: Metal and Hardcore

And my words for Hellbound's best of the year lists should be online tomorrow.

But today is the day to reprise a KEEW holiday tradition: Best Metal (and other stuff I like) of Ten Years Ago (ie. 2002)!

It gets harder to remember 10 years ago each new year that goes by, but to the best of my knowledge, this is what I was digging in 2002:

1. Rapture - Songs for the Withering
2. Green Carnation - Light of Day, Day of Darkness
3. Opeth - Deliverance
4. Soilwork - Natural Born Chaos
5. Sentenced - The Cold White Light
6. Immortal - Sons of Northern Darkness
7. Dark Tranquillity - Damage Done
8. Lacuna Coil - Comalies
9. Agalloch - The Mantle
10. Arcturus - The Sham Mirrors
11. Bloodbath - Resurrection Through Carnage
12. Daylight Dies - No Reply
13. Amon Amarth - Versus the World
14. In Flames - Reroute to Remain
15. Star One - Space Metal 
16. Pain - Nothing Remains the Same
17. Halford - Crucible
18. Into Eternity - Dead or Dreaming
19. Insomnium - In the Halls of Awaiting
20. Antimatter - Saviour
21. Porcupine Tree - In Absentia
22. Killswitch Engage - Alive or Just Breathing
23. Mastodon - Remission
24. Blind Guardian - A Night at the Opera
25. Covenant - Northern Light

Many apologies to any amazing releases I may have forgotten...

easing toward middle age with classic rock radio

My alarm clock has an old school analog radio dial. On days when I don't have to jump straight out of bed to take on the world, I like to ease into consciousness to the sounds of a radio soundtrack. Normally campus radio is my preferred format. But the diversity of campus programming suits my waking brain better than my awakening brain, so my alarm clock is tuned to the more predictable playlist of commercial rock radio.

I enjoy (and have a scholarly interest) in the local aspects of radio so for the past few years I've been waking up, when I can, to my local rock station. But after sleepily hitting the FM dial instead of the volume one groggy morning, I ended up tuned in to Toronto's classic rock station Q107. And for the most part, that has been suiting me just fine.

There's something (oddly? unsurprisingly?) comforting in listening to the station I woke up to in my teens and finding that not much has changed. Something guiltily pleasurable in erasing the past couple of decades of popular music history. And maybe smoothing over the discontinuities of youth and adulthood (to whatever extent I can be said to be 'adult') and the experiences that transformed one state to the other.

When I switch the radio off I come back to the present. I can revel in the virtual and physical stacks of new (mostly underground, mostly metal) music I accumulate on a weekly basis. And I can deal with/enjoy the experience of living my current (mostly grown-up) life. But in the mornings time blurs and elides for a little while as the frequencies of radio modulate the frequencies of my brain into a rock and roll fantasy.

office goth: two interpretations

Several years ago I discovered a Toronto clothing maker called Gloomth, and own a few of their pieces (they used to have an affordable line of one-offs, often made from repurposed materials). I haven't shopped there in a while but still see their Facebook posts. This week a link to a blog post on their interpretation of "Office Goth" caught my eye.

Also several years ago, I invited a band called Organical to guest on my radio show. Our conversation on and off the era was often led us to laughter, and though the guys were serious about their music they were less-so about themselves. While chatting about aging and subcultures, music and fashion, they (or we, perhaps) decided the term "Office Goth" might best describe where they were at. I'm not sure the tongue-in-cheekness came across when I wrote up the story for Echo, but the interview ranks among some of my most memorable.

Somehow these two interpretations of "office goth" don't quite seem to gel.

music from space (what does the universe sound like?)

A couple of weeks ago, as a good friend and I were leaving McMaster's planetarium (thanks to her, now a frequent attraction) we discussed the new age-y music that usually plays in the background while we listen to budding physicists and astronomers tell us about the universe and its wonders.

Apparently planetarium soundtracks represent a musical genre of sorts. And – something else I didn't realize – space is not entirely silent. So how do these synth-drenched planetarium sounds actually compare to the music of the cosmos? This short Discovery article, with links to audio/video clips offers a glimpse.

Space Music: Sounds of the Universe

I wonder who choses Mac's planetarium soundtrack and what motivates the choice...

killing joke: music, technoscience, politics (and more)

Killing Joke's new album, Absolute Dissent, is out today. As I listen to it one more time to turn my thoughts into review words on the page (for exclaim!), I decided to surf over to Hellbound.ca and Kyle Harcott's interview with Killing Joke frontman Jaz Coleman.

Not everyone likes politics mixed up with their music, and you may not necessarily agree with Coleman's strong opinions on things like world government and technoscientific development. But if you're in the mood for an interesting and stimulating read (about and shooting off of the work of a tremendously significant band), I highly recommend it.

end of march events: for the music and for the animals

Of potential interest to the Southern Ontario folks...

For the animals:

OPIRG and BARC (Brock Animal Rights) are hosting a poetry reading / film screening event on March 29, 6-9 pm at OPIRG's downtown info shop, 10 Summer Street, St. Catharines. Poet James Strecker will be reading from his collection Beside the Hemlock Garden: On Life and Rights followed by a screening of the film Peaceable Kingdom by Tribe of Heart. Free event, everyone welcome, free vegan snacks provided.

Cats for convicts: not pet cats in the jail but a feral cat colony on Bath correctional institute property. Apparently the human–cat relationships involved here may be good for the inmates and for the cats. Read more (and/or sign a petition to keep the cats there).

And for the music:

In the mood for some theatrical, humorous but very frostbitten and grim black metal this weekend? The Iron Maiden of black metal - Immortal - hit the Opera House in Toronto on Saturday night, March 27.

And a pre-party of sorts: A FISTFUL OF METAL w/ DJ Miss Barbrafisch spinning all extreme metal all night, Friday, March 26 at Disgraceland, 965 Bloor St W of Ossington – "9pm till they kick us out!"

And if you want to start your weekend partying on Thursday, Nunslaughter and a bunch of other bands take over Sneaky Dee's Thursday night, March 25.

Plus Unearth close out the month at the Opera House on March 31.

If Hamilton's more your scene and you want to engage in a little community support, checkout Deathpoint, Subliminal Hate Machine, Aarsonist, and Rigorous Obliteration at Club Absinthe on March 26. The show (in collaboration with Social Service Worker students from Mohawk College) is a fundraiser for the It's My Dream scholarship program run through the Schizophrenia Society of Ontario.

And two more for my list (but far from the only events packed into the last week of March):

SONS OF BUTCHER CD Release Party with Paradox Hotel at Casbah in Hamilton, March 26 at 9 pm.

THE CREEPSHOW with The Barettas, Super Villains Exhumed, Die Standing, also at Casbah, March 31 starting at 8 pm.

virtual musicians: bringing back musical personalities from the dead

From Wired... this is a little neat and a little creepy – re-creations of a dead musician's distinctive performance style through computer technology:

Virtual Musicians, Real Performances: How Artificial Intelligence Is Changing Music

My tech geek side likes the idea of re-performances, the possibilities for hearing things that should have been performed and recorded, and so on. But the cynic (and paranoiac) in me cringes at the use of dead musicians' style as a cheesy gimmick or advertising hook, and the idea of copyrighting and licensing a performance flavour is really distasteful. If you read the Wired story, you'll see I'm not alone here. On top of it all, the dystopian sf fan in me imagines musicians being kept semi-/digitally alive like Dixie Flatline in Neuromancer and feels a little ill at the prospect.

So how do we use this technological potential without turning it into another tool for corporate control over creativity? Or use it respectfully without turning dead artists into caricatures of themselves? Any ideas?

---

side note: If you share your life with a pet or six, unless it's as long-lived as a tortoise, you're going to have to deal with animal mortality sooner or later – preferably later. I was hoping our next encounter with later was still a long ways away, but these things always loom sooner than you'd ever want.

If this blog is inspired, in part, by the seven cats I have shared my life with – four living with us now, two passed on, and one moved on to another family – this post is dedicated to one sick little cat who is very close to my heart. This AI stuff makes me wonder, would I hang onto him as a virtual kitty if I could? And I think no, that wouldn't be hanging on but starting a new relationship with a new different kind of cat, however closely he was related to the furry critter that was.

xmas and holiday music: the (sort of) metal version

Exclaim!'s rundown of the Top Ten Worst Metal Christmas Albums.

I only agree with the "top ten worst" designation because xmas albums really can't be much other than bad, nostalgic, or both. But as far nostalgic holiday travesties go, some of the records on the Exclaim list are pretty alright.

Space in Your Face on CKMS always did a great Metal Christmas show. SIYF's online playlists are horribly out of date, but here's an example of "Christmas in Your Face" 2002.

My xmas playlist tended to have a slightly different flavour. So before xmas eve turns to xmas day, here's a little KEEW holiday nostalgia:

Type O Negative - "Red Water (Christmas Mourning)"

Extreme - "Christmas Time Again"

Trans-Siberian Orchestra - "Christmas Eve Sarajevo 12/24"

King Diamond - "No Presents for Christmas"

Korn - 'Twas the Night Before Christmas" (x-rated version)

London After Midnight - "Sally's Song"

Jim Reeves - "Dear Senor Santa Claus"

Elvis Presley - "Blue Christmas"

Roger Whittaker - "Darcy the Dragon"

"Santa Jaws" (I can't find the music online!)

Happy holidays (if you get any).

things to do in december

Of the many things you might do with your time in December, here are two possibilities...

I highly suggest you drop by Lens Factory Gallery to check out Mark Coatsworth's ABANDON: BAFFIN ISLAND photography exhibit. Here's a short excerpt from what the artist has to say about his own work:

ABANDON: BAFFIN ISLAND is a story of politics, culture and ecology in the furthest reaches of Canada's far North. It is also a continuation of my previous ABANDON exhibit, examining the successes and struggles of a society in connection with the loss and destruction of their natural environment.

You already missed the opening reception, but the exhibition continues December 9 to 31 at Lens Factory Gallery, 1040 Queen Street West, Toronto (Wed-Sat, 11am - 6pm).

If you're at home wrapping gifts, baking goodies, or engaging in other holiday activities and need a little festive soundtrack music, you can check out xo for the holidays: volume II for free. The compilation features xmas music by a range of artists, including Caravan of Thieves and The Backsliders among others.

remembrance day music

Remembrance Day seems like a good day to play war metal. If I was still deejaying I'd definitely host a war metal show today, probably starting out with Bolt Thrower. There's even a poppy of sorts on the band's website today.

Here are some possible song choices (all from the Bolt Thrower discography):

"When Cannons Fade"

"Honour"

"Valour"

"Pride"

"As the World Burns"

"Cenotaph"

"All that Remains"

and heck, probably the entire ...For Victory record.

And as a counter-point, I might play some Anathema, maybe

"The Silent Enigma"

"Inner Silence"

leading into a moment of actual silence...

...

music & science (and moonspell)

If you recall, a few posts ago I brought up a connection between metal and phyics - specifically through Somn from Forest Stream, who is both musician and physicist.

Well, here's another parallel: I just clued in that the latest Epica album, Design Your Universe, is "directly influenced from quantum physics" (to quote the promo blip). To be honest, I'm not quite sure how yet. It doesn't sound anymore quantum than their other records (what does quantum even sound like?), but a neat idea nonetheless.

One more timely connection between music and science:

Quantifying Goethe, by the Penderecki Quartet at Waterloo's Quantum to Cosmos Festival.

And, in case you were wondering, Moonspell completely rocked the Mod Club in Toronto Tuesday night. Great and extremely intimate set all the way from Wolfheart to Night Eternal. It amazes me how that band manages to sound as ferocious as they ever did without losing the subtleties or falling into dated nostalgia. Too bad it's been such a busy concert week, keeping some people away who might otherwise have shown up. (for the record, I'm not a jot sorry I chose Moonspell over Satyricon)

metal and physics

When prepping for my interview with Russian doom metal band Forest Stream I discovered that vocalist Somn is a physicist. I couldn't resist asking him about potential links between his music and his physics.

keew: You were working on your physics PhD while trying to write and record Tears of Mortal Solitude... Do you keep your academic and musical lives completely separate or do they overlap in some ways? Is there a relationship between your love of a certain kind of music and your interest in physics?

Sonm: Yes, call me Dr. Sonm please, I deserve that! Actually I should have started with these officials from the very first question! ROFL. I think that music and science are of the same origin, so to speak. Both are knowledge and emotional experience. In both cases you discover and make research. I made the cover art for the front page of my thesis showing the interference between music and science, which has resulted in some deep-blue light intensity distribution as a symbol of new discoveries and failures as well. Both are dares and falls, excitements and disappointments. Both are some artificial entities, yet our knowledge of them is a purely philosophical question.

My life while doing my Ph.D. was… It wasn’t easy, honestly, yet my memories of that time fill me with pleasant warmth and sometime bring tears to my eyes. Once, when I got back to Russia for my summer vacation, I had a dream: I wake up in my bed in Russia and discover that I am late for work in Holland! Damn, I got nervous, but was encouraging myself at the same time: “Come on! The flight to Amsterdam takes only 3.5 hours plus the time difference. So if I take the back stairs, nobody’s gonna notice I am late!”. A month later, in reality, I discovered that I’ve lost this “abroad” feeling once and for all. So, I wasn’t really trying to write music. And actually I never do. It comes to my mind in a form of some celestial choirs, which makes me shiver and causes fear of not hearing that again. That time it was the same; I was just playing it, trying to repeat. Therefore, I think I was not able to separate my academic and musical lives due to the fact that… evil dreams and evil waking were blended into a long tunnel of misery, with hope growing ever fainter behind (c), although overall it was okay and even entertaining from time to time. So it goes.

Forest Stream's latest record, The Crown of Winter (Candlelight), came out this past August. You can find the rest of the interview at hellbound.ca.

monkeys and metallica

What do you get when you combine a cellist/composer, a psychology professor, and monkeys? Monkey music, and research into the relationship between certain types of music and the emotional responses they provoke.

Music to Monkeys' Ears? Try Metallica, or the Metro

Making Music for Monkey Minds

The research is geared toward understanding human responses to music and the possibility of manipulating emotions through music. But the researchers needed test subjects who didn't already have emotional associations with particular kinds of tunes. So they turned to monkeys.

Twist two is that monkeys apparently don't think much of human music, so our composer/cellist/researcher had to write music just for monkeys, derived from the tones and tempos of their calls to each other. According to one Scientific American report, this monkey music sounded like a subway car in need of a tune-up or speed metal on speed.

As it turns out, of all the human music the monkeys were exposed to, they seemed to prefer Tool's "The Grudge" and Metallica's "Of Wolf and Man". I wonder if anyone tried playing blast beats for the monkeys?

see new american mind

http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/60-second-science/post.cfm?id=when-it-comes-to-monkey-music-try-m-2009-09-02

academia meets music: Rush and the suburban middle class

After writing a master's thesis on Voïvod, Fear Factory, and dystopian sf, the combination of academia and music has become almost inevitable to me. So while Greg Pratt reports (in exclaim!) on a scholarly book about Rush with a tone of surprise, I'm kind of surprised it hasn't happened sooner.

The book in question is Rush, Rock Music, and the Middle Class: Dreaming in Middletown by Chris McDonald, an ethnomusicologist at Cape Breton University. The premise sounds plausible: that Rush's career and music embodies middle class anxieties and aspirations. Call me intrigued.

If you're a Rush fan with an appreciation for academic analysis, there are a few other pieces of scholarly writing on the band that I can recommend:

• Durrell S. Bowman: “‘Let Them All Make Their Own Music’: Individualism, Rush, and the Progressive / Hard Rock Alloy, 1976-77.” In Progressive Rock Reconsidered. Ed. Kevin Holm-Hudson. New York and London: Routledge, 2002. 183-218.

Bowman is also working on putting together a book on Rush and Philosophy.

• Deena Weinstein. Serious Rock: Bruce Springsteen / Rush / Pink Floyd. Montreal: CultureTexts, 1985.

Weinstein also discusses Rush briefly in her book-length sociological study of heavy metal culture: Heavy Metal: The Music And Its Culture, New York: Dacapo 2000.

metal events for the scholarly-inclined

For world travelling metal fans and scholars, this fall could be a busy time, with events taking place in Germany, Austria, and the US. None of this is in my budget or schedule, but perhaps some of you other folks have the money, interest and time.

The international congress "Heavy Metal and Gender" will take place at
the University of Music Cologne, 8 to 10 October 2009, with 'celeb' guests Robert Walser, Deena Weinstein, Doro Pesch, Angela Gossow (Arch Enemy), Sabina Classen joining a slew of academic presenters.

A month later, things move south a bit with Heavy Fundamentalisms: Music, Metal and Politics (part 2) in Salzburg, Austria, 10 to 12 November 2009.

And to put you in the Christmas spirit... Hideous Gnosis †: Black Metal Theory Symposium (Metal. Theory. Mutual Blackening.) December 12, 2009 in Brooklyn, NY. Expect papers, art, and ideas.

manipulative cats and music-loving chimps

You might have seen the stories about this a couple of weeks ago... Scientific American and a few other news venues reported on research telling us what most cat owners already know: that cats manipulate us with their purrs and their meows. Here's two SA podcast transcripts on the subject:

• manipulative cats
• coercive cats

This other tidbit is newer - research involving a young chimp suggests we may be biologically inclined to prefer consonance over dissonance in musical sounds. The chimp repeatedly chose to listen to consonant passages in preference to dissonance, and because of her lack of previous exposure to music, researchers feel this demonstrates that musical taste is not a uniquely human trait. It's not universal though - related tests with birds and monkeys have shown their ability to differentiate between consonance and dissonance, but no preference one way or the other.

The article mentions finding similar preferences to the chimp's in human babies - many years ago I unintentionally discovered babies' discriminating musical ears... I was trying to distract a crying baby by playing guitar and singing to her but I was on edge (she had powerful lungs) and though the music seemed to help, if I hit a sour note she just wailed all the louder. No surprise that she's gone on to be a musician herself (and producing much fewer sour notes than me).

music & the body

That mysterious perfect pitch. We all may have it when we're born. A few of us seem to retain it. Perhaps those with a particular mutation on chromosome eight. Apparently it's also a European thing. Wonder if that has anything to do with the fact that the scale the researchers are using is probably Western European?

More universal is the correlation between music and bodily responses. Our appreciation of music is not simply emotional or aesthetic. Tempo and volume changes produce coinciding changes in listeners' heart rate, blood pressure, breathing... Most of this is just affirmation of what the avid music listener already knows, feels, but researchers are trying to understand the 'why' of our responses to music.

apparently we've been into music for a very long time

Today I came across a headline that reads "Stone Age jams: Humans playing the flute for at least 35,000 years, no word yet on sax." Following the link led me to Scientific American and a short report on the find of paleolithic flutes in southwestern Germany. Seems like us human folks got into the arts relatively early in our development. Not so easy to tell when we learned how to sing though...

Judas Priest may really be the Painkiller

The CBC recently reported that people have a higher tolerance for pain when listening to their favourite music. Comes as no surprise to me. I've been using music as a pain killer for years, Judas Priest included. In fact, every time I've been inked I've gone equipped with ear phones and a portable music device loaded with some of my favourites. Singing is also effective relief for a variety of ailments (for me at least) - hiccups, for example. I wonder if pain management is part of Wilfrid Laurier University's Music Therapy program...

music and technology to feed the tech junkie habit

I saw Nine Inch Nails for the second time last night, the first time in an arena setting. I wasn't especially pumped. I love a few NIN songs and appreciate many more, but I haven't really been following them lately and the Kool Haus show I saw a few years back (despite my relatively enthusiastic review) was nowhere near mindblowing. Not that I didn't want to go, but $80 seemed a bit expensive for a night out with a good friend. The openers from Georgia, whose name I failed to catch, didn't do much to increase my excitement.

Apparently it doesn't take that much to captivate me if you've got the right tools: a few synths and samplers, digital projection, computer graphics, fancy lights, good songs, and a strong performance. The integration of lights, graphics and music was beyond remarkable. It was also ultra-contemporary (and I'm sure, very expensive), making old school light and stage shows look just plain lame. At times the effects were subtle, creating space for the band to literally take the spotlight and rock out. Other songs pushed synthesized sound and digital image to the foreground, presenting Nine Inch Nails as an artistic entity rather than a man and his hired musical guns. Some of these pictures from the appropriately named Lights In the Sky: Over North America tour should give you an idea what this all looked like. If only you could see how well these visuals meshed with what I heard...
(I think I need to re-evaluate my knowledge of NIN. Reznor's recent activities in free music offerings only underline that even further.)

Since I'm talking about technology and music (and free music) it seems like a good time to bring up some recent D-Trash Records activities. [actually, it seems like a good opportunity to talk about Death to Music Productions as well, but I'll save that for another day] Keith Carman beat me to the punch reviewing Matamachete for exclaim!; while I take issue with his slur against Mindless Self Indulgence, I support his appreciation for Tanin No Kao. I also recommend checking out some D-Trash artist videos and investing in the label's first DVD compilation.