Audioccult Vol. 19: The Beat of The Law

Light a candle. Draw the required sigils. Now, raise your arms above your head and slowly, gently, exhale your soul. You won’t need it here. This is Audioccult, and it’s time to get low.

With no PURGE to bend my thoughts to, and freely entombed by rising heat, I find myself withdrawing into a realm of icy sounds, icy smoke, and icy chains (for my icy game). The newest CVLT Nation mixtape Blackened Everything vol. VII, for example, is keeping my mind grimly frosted with raw black metal and crust via Black Breath, Church Whip, and a bunch of other shit I haven’t really heard before (just got fixated on Gnaw Their Tongues and Bone Awl and kinda hung out there) but am furiously downloading/tape-finding. Perhaps they’ll pop up in a future mixtape from myself, although hey, I just dropped one. Collecting the intensity of PURGE with my other collaborative post-goth party #gHashtag, it’s a combination of culturally contrasting sounds and blendings of old and new: Virgin Prunes meet Sinister Souls, Dead Can Dance and Rihanna sit side by side, and Sunn O))) is twerked into dance music. You’ll like it, maybe… play what thou wilt.

In a slightly more calmer vein is the soundtrack to the 1970 Czech film Valerie a týden divů, which a friend recently passed me and which I subsequently became obsessed with. Composed by Luboš Fišer, it’s at times soothing, but more often spellbindingly eerie, if somewhat less subtle than other favored soundtracks (but really, what can compare with Suspiria?). You can play the entire soundtrack here.

My boy Triple Six Sound Club just dropped his debut EP The War to Own The Internet, and you should be picking that up any second now. Sinister club is extremely my shit, nobody’s owning my ears right now more than Triple Six. Well….maybe Total Freedom, actually. Ashland doesn’t release nearly as often as I wish he would, but whenever he does it’s a day for celebration. Even when it’s a collection of older tracks, seven of which he just posted on his Soundcloud. They’re all worth a download but the Bok Bok remix is my favorite. This dude and House of LaDosha need to get on those debuts already. I’m dying.

There were an excessive amount of good videos as well recently, including ones from Clams Casino, U.S. Girls (her poppiest yet; haven’t decided if I like it), and SpaceGhostPurrp. My favorite, however, is a new discovery: Skumstar, who is also apparently the sound guy for LA party Lil Death. The video is actually a film with three songs tying it together, and it’s very aesthetically pleasing. When the bass kicked in I painted my bong black and named it Rick Blowens.

A few days ago, some construction men came into the EB office. They set up a huge drill, and warned everyone that they would be making some extremely loud sounds. As they penetrated and hammered the concrete floor, my colleagues put on headphones or held their hands over their ears, expressing annoyance and discomfort. I had to restrain myself from standing nearby and rocking back and forth with my arms crossed. I do wish I could book them for a party, though. They sounded a bit like SHIFT, who I found via my friend Andy Black Forest. ‘Hope & Massacre part 1’ comes off a cassette titled Nyrkki & Kyrpä Vol. III, a series of noise and power electronics releases that are making me very happy and those sitting nearest to me very annoyed. I suppose I’m kind of a bad ass rebel, huh? Sorry, gramps, me and my noise and my new Ash Borer LP are going to sit on this side of the train, so I can see how freaked out and messed up you are by my weird music and skinny jeans and hyper-sexual libido. What’s that, old man? You’re a human being with thoughts and ideas and general sense of being just as relevant as mine and I actually avoid mirrors so I can’t see how insufferable I usually look? Fucked up if true. Macbook Pro.

Published August 20, 2012.