Hopefully not with each other yet but with a virus. Our medical professionals, remaining retail outlets, national guard, truckers are all on the front lines.
The rest of us.
We are their support structure.
What does that mean for us the artists?
We do our jobs.
We work in the entertainment industry. Show biz. We are all in the USO now (or wherever you are, insert country as appropriate.)
After Katrina one of the first and most important things rebuilt was the Superdome. For which the city got a ton of flack. But during times like this, identity and moral matter.
Because we, artists, this thing we do?
While generally from a societal standpoint it’s important, but from a “surviving the apocalypse” (this isn’t but it’s a good dry rub) what we make are luxury items. In the wasteland, the main use for my art will be making walls for your shack.
We are at the bottom of the pyramid of need as far as real world horror goes from a practical stand point.
We are krill. We are ubiquitous.
But krill drive the entire food chain.
Not as individuals but as a group.
*Before someone gets needlessly pedantic this metaphors only works so far, unlike krill we hopefully won’t end up being eaten.
Many of us are setting up methods for streaming which is awesome.
But a GLUT of this will be coming down the pipe. You think there’s competition now with bands in the same genre? Just wait until everyone with a guitar or a laptop starts consuming bandwidth to try to make a buck.
But I digress.
The point I’m trying to make is this. We, krill, down here at the bottom keep doing what we have to do, because it’s what we are built to do. We have to send that energy (not in a woo woo spiritual sense, but it’s a convenient word) up.
To quote a magnificent bastard “you’ve got to reach down and pick the crowd up.”
Well… the crowd is now the entire world.
We need to do what we can to keep people stuck at home At home. So that they don’t go out, pick up the disease and bring it home to others. So that EMTS, nurses, doctors, truckers etc all have music to get lost in. Stories to read when they are home.
All of us will need escapism more than ever before.
And that’s our job.
All of us.
And as the Internet clogs with “competition,” try to remember that those people need money just as much as you do. And more to the point, we are all working towards the goal of keeping the wheels moving.
You need to say humble, artists.
You aren’t owed an audience.
You can’t sit back and put music out, expect someone else to promote it, and then go out on tour expecting an audience to be waiting for you.
Those days are on hold.
You’re going to have to work your ass off if you want to make money doing the thing. You’re going to have to sing for your supper.
I’m not saying sell out. Because there’s an audience for whatever brand of single note drone death metal folk trap you write. But you’re going to have to bust ass to find em, and once you do, you’re going to have to bust ass to keep em around.
Use this time. Because if you can create things that matter to others in the darkest times, they will remember what got them through. And when shit gets rolling again that audience will still be there.
It’s not a zero sum game. Look around, help your fellow artists out. Give what you can to the world in whatever way makes sense. Teach. Get online and bullshit and talk to people. Do whatever you can do.
Or don’t.
That’s cool too.
Because that makes just a bit more room for those of us who bleed for the things we create. For those of us who have spent our lives learning to do what we do.
And for you non artists, the “we’re all in this together,” thing applies to you also. Do what you can to help feed us krill.
And if you see someone giving an artist shit because the are “begging for money,” shut them down. Because without the krill the entire food chain withers.
Once upon a time we had a guitar player. They brought their new guitar to practice which of course they were all kinds of excited about. Part of the way through practice her guitar stops making noise. She hit the strings, nothing. This particular guitar was fancy and had all kinds of dials for the pickups…so she starts fucking with it… I look over at my keyboard player, catch his eye, and direct it down to her volume pedal now in the off position. I mouth “let’s see how long…” Five minutes go by… Nothing. Eventually she figured it out. I was talking to my keyboard player later and he said something very succinct about it “you can’t troubleshoot a system unless you know how the system works.” A friend of mine has recently been starting up her own thing. In the past I have had others come to me hold all the parts up and say “make it work.” I guess forgetting that I have a thousand pans on a thousand fires all the time. And I look at the mess and say ,”No. not my circus not my monkeys.” Anyway my friend, on the other hand involved me in exactly the right way. She would text me and say “Hey, X thing Is a problem, how do I solve it.” And I would say more or less “here is how you find the answer to that problem.” I wasn’t withholding information, everyone’s setup is different, but often the methods used to troubleshoot are the same…. teach a man to fish and all that. As another example of the kind of problems that comes with not understanding your shit, one time we were on stage and the same guitarist had some sort of problem, and she walks over to me in the middle of the show and asks me to help her fix it. Obviously that kind of behavior in a pro setting is just unacceptable. That was a long time ago and wouldn’t happen now. I won’t have anyone in the bands or work with someone who doesn’t know their kit inside and out. Because THATS YOUR GODDAMN JOB. The shows, the crowd, anyone giving a shit about what you do? It’s all contingent on you actually being able to do the thing. TL;DR no one will take you seriously if you don’t take what you do seriously enough to put the time into learning every aspect of it. Go and do likewise.
Hey… You… Goin online and tellin your friends how inspired you are… Sit your ass down… You haven’t finished your last “project.” Don’t fuckin start the next one… You haven’t earned that yet. You don’t get to do that until your ratio of finished art is orders of magnitude higher then the potential pieces you want to start… Making good art isn’t about working when you feel “inspired.” (Side note, fuck your “inspiration” coming up with ideas is your job if you’re gonna do it, learn to come up with ideas… I’ll give you a simple trick after this rant.) Where was I? Right, stepping the fuck up… Here’s the thing, you’re not finishing that piece, song, story, whatever… because you’re fuckin scared. Full stop. You’re scared that it won’t be as good as what you’ve got, that you’re going to ruin it, that someone is going to come along and say “you don’t know what you’re doing,” or “you shouldn’t be doing this,” or any number of bullshit fears your psyche is conjuring up. Stop that shit. Being an artist is work. Being “inspired” is a skill, like any other, it’s really just another world for “feeling creative, motivated and horny for the potential that comes with a blank canvas,” you will find the more you work and exercise it the easier it is to find it when you are looking. Eventually you will get into a routine where it’s time to work, you sit down at your space and say “ok, go!” And the shit will just come when called. Need ideas? Take advantage of your wetware… Your brain is a connection machine. It’s evolved to connect A and C via B… Now, here’s a stupid simple trick. Pick up a book, any book, a dictionary is good, or a tarot deck, whatever… Open it up to a pair of random pages, pick two words, figure out how those words, cards, picture connect. Play “what if,” with the ideas. If it doesn’t work the first time, do it again. There’s literally no reason it won’t work eventually. Unless you are stupid or don’t want it to. If you’re stupid, I can’t help you, but I’m sure you can find something good on TV to watch. And if you don’t want to, why are you here reading this? Figure out what you want to do and stop asking me questions… Get off my back.. Oh, you wanna throw down?! I see how it is… SHOW ME WHAT YOU GOOOOOOT!!!’
Steven, tell them about the cookie
I knew a dude who lived on potential. He would do a piece of art up to maybe 75% and then show his work off to everyone. And everyone would say “that’s so good! I look forward to seeing it finished! You’re so talented!” And he would take that cookie and eat it, and move on to the next piece so he could get that cookie again. He wouldn’t bother finishing them because he had already eaten the cookie that he wanted. Because he didn’t want to make good art, he wanted attention for being an artist. And if he finished it, he might get judged or may not be as good as people thought he was. Don’t be that guy. Side note: we owned an art gallery at the time. In the hope of motivating him to finish a project, I said to him “ok, you are showing here in three months I want 10 5×5 inch pieces for it.” When the time came he gave me 10 pieces, all of which were half assed sketches he had cut out of his sketchbook. They were half assed garbage and frankly I didn’t want to show them because they were of such low quality. But we did, and they didn’t sell, and no one cared… Because he hadn’t focused on doing his best when a legit opportunity presented itself. He hadn’t learned how to finish his work. That shit matters. Assuming you are doing it because the art is more important than “being a talented artist.” As a side note, that dude went on to get a job teaching art to kids, and he’s very good at it. Sometimes the path you think is the path is not what you need to be doing.
Yo, people who are just starting down this “electronic music path.”
You’re gonna play your shit for people and they will nitpick bullshit production stuff. Like…”oh, well your snare sucks or if you cut X frequency on this fuckin thing than I will like it more until I figure out another thing to take personally and bitch about.”
Don’t fuckin worry about that shit. Like. AT ALL.
Learn to write songs that matter to you. That’s the only important thing.
Because if they matter to you, you will be satisfied and keep going.
I’m not saying they have to make you happy. There are always going to be things you want to make better. But if they don’t resonate with you, they sure as shit won’t resonate with an audience.
And your audience is there.
It may not be huge. Who the fuck knows? But it is there. I mean, shit, 311 still has a fan base, right?
Don’t worry if your gear isn’t the best. Hell, we wrote our demos on a four track, our first full length was run through a 16 channel boss mixer to a stereo pair and recorded over. It wasn’t until our second record that we were able to sync our gear with our computer.
Our computer was one of the original pentium one laptops. I used a sound blaster usb Soundcard with $60 hacked drivers that I got from some dude in Germany, that allowed me to get my latency down to a reasonable size.
We recorded vocals in our kitchen and most of the strings were from a Casio keyboard with speakers in it.
By contrast now, I have a shit ton of gear and still write almost everything on my laptop.
Point being that these days you are far more likely to have someone come at you about some sort of bullshit production thing than you are about song writing.
But here’s the kicker. That demo? And that first record? They are still in print (along with the rest of our catalog) from our record label Metropolis records. And I don’t mean still as in they have always been. I mean still as they were rereleased as special sets.
Meaning they think they can make money on them. Because they will sell, because we have an audience, because we wrote good songs.
Am I a better songwriter now? Probably. But I learned to be one because of all of the material I wrote back then. And even now when I go back to, it still functions. It sounds the way it was supposed to sound.
So, just remember the following three words when that comes up ,”fuck that guy.”
Say it with me ,”fuck that guy.”
No, I’m not saying ignore a legit critique and advice. But seriously, fuck that guy on the industrial darkwave bullshit wave forum that’s bitching about your frequencies.
Steven Archer is a Stoneburner, one half of Ego Likeness, a visual artist, and has several published works. For more information try:
Industrial music is having a resurgence for me. Sometimes I have to put something on the shelf for a while and let a form of art grow on it’s own until I am ready to jump back in. This year in particular I have fallen so deep in the hole of new releases I couldn’t keep up. So I am going to fire through several reviews at once to try and touch on the wondrous new movement happening in this genre. This piece is a bit of the throwing several things in the blender and doesn’t have my usual formatting. It’s also two authors because Adrian Kjøsnes did the review for Moris Black.
Industrial music has generally been something nostalgic for me. The music of my jaded youth. My aggression, my frustration, a remembrance of a young man lashing out with fire at the world. Then like many things from my youth I put aside that fire and found myself drawn in new directions. Maybe I felt I had outgrown Industrial. this year that changed for me with Stoneburner’s “Technology Implies Belligerence”. This was an album that kindled that fire and chaos once again. This time with an intelligence and focus that made Industrial feel mature. When Steven told me he had a new EP already I will admit I was skeptical. How do you follow an album I thought of as groundbreaking so soon? “Massdriver” to my amazement and excitement has done just that.
Currently out on a US tour Stoneburner is bringing to life this throwback to old school rhythms and noise with modern production and lyrics that matter. With “Technology Implies Belligerence” we were assaulted with abstract concepts of progressive thinking persons blends of sound and image. Drawing on world beat drums and samples. “Massdriver” takes this idea, but clarifies it. Pushes the poetry and emotion of the vocals to the front where Industrial has been afraid to go. To create a psychic assault so powerful that a piece of the artist is left resonating in your mind after the show.
Live at Smalls in Detroit
I had a chance to discuss this tour and record with Steven a bit and here are some insights.
(Ken) Why is this album and tour special for You?
(Steven) The album and tour are special because they are the culmination of 35+ years of listening to electronic music. When I sat down to write this record, well these records, wanted to address the lack or originality and grit that seeing to have pervaded their genre.
(Ken) How has your stage setup changed for this tour?
(Steven) The stage setup has grown. My drummer Hemlock is playing my old hand drum rig and I’ve built a new one out of sheet metal and triggers. Which frees up, or at least changes the performance dynamic.
(Ken) What material (books) (music) were you drawing from when you composed this album?
(Steven) The recent full length from this summer, “technology implies belligerence,” is based in large part on the book “Blindsight” by Peter Watts. Essentially I wanted to write a record with footnotes.
I was lucky enough to see the kick off show of this tour. The emotional and visual offering put on display in an intimate setting. Here is something I haven’t witnessed in a long time. Every aspect of what you see and hear is painstakingly constructed by hand and with extreme meaning. Also the live show features percussionist Hemlock MacNamara, who throws so much intensity into smashing mic’d up pieces of sheet metal I am tired just thinking about it. She is a force of nature. Steven is truly bringing fresh artisanal farm to table locally sourced sonic explosion right to your doorstep. Don’t miss this tour.
Sun
Nov 10 KC MO @ The Riot Room Mon
Nov 11 St. Louis MO @ The Crack Fox Wed
Nov 13 Houston TX@ Super happy Funland Thurs
Nov 14 Austin TX @ Texas Mist Fri
Nov 15 San Antonio TX @ The Amp Room Sun
Nov 17 New Orleans LA @ The Goat Mon
Nov 18 Tallahassee FL @ 926 Bar & Grill Wed
Nov 20 Knoxville TN @ The Concourse Fri
Nov 22 Nashville TN @ The East Room Sat
Nov 23 Chattanooga TN @ ziggys music box Thurs
Nov 28 West Palm Beach FL @ Respectable street Fri
Nov 29 Jacksonville FL Bay Street bash Mon
Dec 2 Raleigh NC @ Legends Fri
Dec 6 Richmond VA @ Fallout Sat
Dec 7 Charlottesville VA @ Holly’s Diner Sun
8 DC @ The Pie Shop
Top Tracks:
All The Wells Are Poison Now – Fierce and dangerous in it’s pacing with a lovely echo chant. “You will always curse the ones you love”. It is an infectious hook with building intensity. Goddamn this made me dance hard live.
First World Murderer – Breakneck attack right out the gate. This track really shows Stevens love of east coast intellectual rap like Public Enemy. They lyrics strike forth in a rhythmic cadence assault. It really reminds me of the common ground between well done rap and well done industrial.
The name Jim Marcus is such an integral part of Industrial music. For me personally seeing Die Warsaw in my formative years opened my mind to how wide the range of Industrial music could be. Go Fight also put out an amazing album last year Tokyo Sexwale. The follow up Anthem was fairly uncharted ground for Jim in that it is an album of covers. One of the powers of great industrial music has always been to take something old and wonderful. Run it through machines, effects, and sludge and make it new and glorious again. This is what Jim achieved by taking his most influential songs of the 80’s. Showing you the music that fueled him in his art and feeding that energy through a giant battlemech. You recognize these “Anthems” but they are dancing towards you with cybernetic tank tread power.
I was lucky enough to be at the CD release party and hearing this album blasting over club speakers was experience that fueled me with hope. There is still more ground to explore in Industrial, and GoFight is paving the way.
Top Tracks:
My Spine is the Bass Line (Shreikback) – Ok, Shreikback is one of my favorite things in this life. To hear GoFight add its filthy, sexy, dance groove to it left me speechless. Honestly I am not sure how to even process how excited this makes me.
Right Wing Pigeons (Dead Milkmen) – The Dead Milkmen are one of the most underrated bands of all time. They are a huge influence of mine and their versatility to flow between political punk and humor was so unique in a time desperate for satire. This cover is an almost unrecognizable re-imagining which GoFight truly made its own. It’s still so poignant, maybe even more so all these years later.
Here I get a two for one. I Ya Toyah remixed by Joy Thieves. These are two of the hottest new bands coming out of the Chicago Industrial scene. I had the amazing pleasure of sharing a stage with Ania last Saturday. I can’t remember the last time I faced that much terror having to follow someone on a stage. The amount of sound, emotion, and precision she achieves all by herself is nothing short of staggering. Having Dan of Joy Thieves who are amazing in their own right do this remix creates an absolute burner single. She is about to go on tour with Pigface and if you miss her live performance you have done a disservice to yourself.
I Ya Toyah leads well into the amazing new release from superband Joy Thieves from Chicago which features here. I just did a review of this release but it is putting the hard rock edge back into Industrial and music be checked out.
Moris Blak is an industrial artist based in Boston,MA who after the release of their “Dead Summer” EP began gaining a cult following within the scene of dark electronic based music.
November 8th saw the release of the debut album “The Irregularity Of Being” and that is what we will be dissecting here…
So, let the ceremony begin.
We begin with the intro track, just a few seconds over a minute long “Every Limb Into The Bottomless Pit” . I myself honestly tend to skip intro tracks as they`re often just not all that interesting but this one escapes the trap most intro/outros fall into. Big, chiming bell like sounds combined with the spoken word and sizzling electronics draws you in and anyone who chooses to not discover what follows would be just plain wrong to put it very lightly.
The intro leads us directly into “Druglicker” where we begin with a catchy sequence, a Silent Hill-esque siren sounds comes crawling in before the first punch of the beloved industrial beat. I do have to say that I myself do not always the most positive view or words regarding the current state of the industrial scene but Moris Blak quickly dispels any expectations I may have had by breaking the traditional and quite simplistic 4/4 kick drum over a series of arpeggios and/or sequences by giving us something more akin to glitched out industrial madness.
So far so good. After a glitchfest of an ever evolving buffet of sounds, bleeps, bloops and squeals regularly breaking into a sequenced bass synth the track slows down and enters noise tinged ambient realms for a moment before we enter back into industrial territory.
track number three is entitled “Pain” and features Angel Metro.
Here we begin by entering the church of synth, in fact, we`re crashing in right in the middle of choir practice. Ominous, choirs layered over samples, with a sequenced bass creeping in all slowly evolving into a slower paced beat.
And then come the sirens…
Female, and quite interestingly produced vocals is a pleasure to hear rather than your usual balding dude in camo pants screaming into a mic processed by the Boss SE 50 as with so many other bands within the genre….Moris Blak offers a great variety of vocals styles ranging from whispers to broken up, glitched out and pitch shifted . There`s even a small piano sample at one point for extra creep factor 😉 This track looks like it`ll be on my top three list when we reach the end but with how well this is going who knows? Maybe I`ll find something even better..
Next we got “Erase Displace” featuring Pete Crane of Australian electro act Shiv-R. There`s an element of horror score to the intro, which of course, is no complaint. Clean vocals draw you further in before the drums, which stay consistently big , punchy and bass heavy appears. Atmospheric melodies comes and goes before the drums speed up and drops us down into ambiance. A soft yet dark and beautiful pad accompanied by the vocals slithers around us…And then comes the drum attack, broken by what sounds like reversed and crushed samples before the vocals reappear and brings us to the end of the track.
It`s hard not to want to put this on the that top three list as well but I must resist in order to keep the space open for anything that may come next…
When I looked at the title of the next track I couldn`t help but smirk a little as I saw it features Amelia Arsenic of Angelspit. A band I was introduced to in my early teenage years by one of what must have been the only four (including myself) alternative people in the middle of nowhere town I grew up in… I`m a bit surprised to find out this track seems to, at least to start of, be more of a ballad.
I also want to point out the production quality overall, the sound design of this release is interesting and fun in all the right ways, Moris Blak definitely has his “sound” I think it`ll be interesting to see what the future brings.
The ballad esque aspect leaves and introduce vocals reminiscent of Skinny Puppy nicely sprinkled around Amelia`s voice while the drums seemingly builds up towards something big only to drop us back down with high pitched piano sounds tricking us into that this is all nice and soft then hitting us with driving, pulsing synths beneath floating almost dreamy vocals. This track in particular seamlessly incorporates elements from a wide array of genre. Something not everyone can pull off and even less can make you want to listen to.Beat changes, style switches, every color of the proverbial crayon kit is used.
“Strange Eternal” features the trademarks of the 90s and early 2000s industrial scene, four to the floor and cut up vocal sample galore. Not my preferred form of the genre but MB hasn`t let me down thus far and so my hopes remain..
What I will point out however is that while Moris Blak does have his own style and ways of things it`s never predictable, each track serves you something new which keeps things interesting yet recognizable which can`t be said for that many.
“Strange Eternal” trudges along as what seems to be the more club oriented track this far, I may not be a clubgoer myself but I can easily envision the hordes of darkly inclined youth (and elders) enjoyment of this track on the dance floor of any given industrial night.
“The Violence” follows and features Slighter.
An instant improvement from the previous.
Clean, soft vocals always interest me in a genre riddled with screaming.
Musically it quickly changes from slow paced and atmosphere filled to drum driven and interestingly broken by glitchy sound design. The drum work in itself is interesting, yet another element that so often lacks in this genre. To hear something where you can`t always so easily predict the next hit of the drum, or the sound even, is definitely refreshing.
About three minutes and twelve seconds in is where for me at least this really shines. I`m loving the layering of the near seductive vocals as well. The track ends in a glory of ambiance and piano and leads us to the second to last track “Velvet Coil” which features Noire Antidote and Johnny E. Veil, the latter being a member of fellow industrial band MAN1K1N who I absolutely would recommend.
What sounds like lost souls screaming in despair greet us at the gate here with a melodic bass line almost hollow but the good kind. Trust and believe , I`m not happy about making this comparison but my immediate thought regarding certain aspects of the first seconds of vocals brings Marilyn Manson to my head.
I`ll see myself to the door…
Anyway, this track is a serpent slithering through each and every crack leaving a trail of reverberated melody before entering into a more danceable territory featuring cut up samples of the aforementioned choir of lost souls in despair.
We`re lead towards the end by drums and melody galore and enter the last track, being the albums title track clocking in at ten minutes and 49 minutes.
A drone greets us.
It presents us with malicious piano melodies, air raid siren esque synth sounds and heavy, slow ,draggin drums that quickly picks up it`s pace.
Full stop and only remains of ambiance and a fractured piano remains until we go back where we came from but this time there`s the sound of reversed samples to accompany us along the way.
Glitchy sound design, a steady beat that stops up here and there but not for more than a second at a time to keep dragging us into itself as a softer style synth sound floats over, witnessing our arrival at the end of days, or at least this album.
An array of sound comes in after a nicely timed build up, not too long, not too short, just right there at the sweet spot. At least for those of us with SASD (Short Attention Span Disorder)
Five minutes in and halfway to the end it`s clear that this track could only be described with one word: Grandiose. In fact, we could sum up the album as a whole using that very word.
Six minutes and six seconds in comes one of my favourite moments of this album.
The beat slow its pace, a haunting melody crawls ever near…Can you tell I`m a sucker for ballads yet?
It doesn`t last as long as I`d want it to but what follows isn`t bad so I won`t bitch too much about that..
Back to what I can`t help but describe as a more club oriented pace I`m a little surprised to see we`ve only got a couple minutes left `till it`s over. Longer tracks tend to bore me quite rapidly (see the aforementioned SASD) I`ll take this as a positive sign of that Moris Blak has managed to keep me interested, my attention has been firmly pointed towards the music rather than drifting off into thoughts of well, anything else really.
The album closes with large, atmospheric pads floating through a piano as the album title suggest this album is indeed an “Irregularity Of Being” in that it doesn`t lean and rely on old, trite genre tropes , it keeps itself exciting with its ever changing soundscape yet retains it`s identity for the full 45 minutes of running time.
Overall I would say this is definitely one of the better releases to come out of the current industrial scene yet it operates within the confines of the genre, the modern take on it that is…
Helvete Inc. – Raunchy loud Electonic corruption from Baltimore flung at terminal velocity and exploding on your face. This project is unapologetically changing the landscape.
Ratio Strain – California based percussion terror from Vanessa Saw (W.A.S.T.E) is an organized assault from chaotic angles. Rather you are in the club or doing building demotion this is a beat to get broke to.
RED MEAT – Manchester UK Industrial Destruction keeping it queer and furious like Industrial music was meant to be. Every time I hear this I feel like I just went through a fight club and lived to tell the tale.
HAEX – California Industrial Void metal will transport you to a vapor hellscape where you fight a sabretooth tiger with a stone knife. Primal on a circulatory level.
We are just scratching the surface here of the exciting things happening in Industrial. If you are ready to take a dive back in with us these bands will give you the right starting point. What bands did I miss you are excited about? Leave a comment below. KM
