2022.08.24 - links

Links

Barbara Eden born 23 August 1931 [fromthevaults.boppinbob.blogspot.com]
Includes a link to her 1967 album in the comments.

Skull Study May Offer Insights Into Hominin Interbreeding [archaeology.org]
“Neanderthals had big faces,” Churchill explained.

NUFC

League Cup Round 2
Tranmere 1 Newcastle 2 [youtube highlights]
Not that impressive from the NUFC B team. Wood finally scores. The lads are going to be at home to Crystal Palace in the 3rd round.

Audio

Some of the stuff I heard today.

I'll Be With Thee - Jerry Garcia Band [youtube]

The History of Byzantium ep109 - Leo the Wise? [thehistoryofbyzantium.com]

Old music I desire

I was pleased to note that a google search for Radley Clack (original bassist for VOD) brought a guy to this page. It invoked memories of listening to some really good music in Cape Town when I was around 18-21. The venue of choice at that time was a club called Subjects, which was usually a goth club, but also had heavy metal afternoons every Saturday. They went through many incarnations, and I forget their later names.

The internets has lead me to some wonderful old rare stuff through bittorrent, music blogs, and the like, but I still have not been able to get hold of much from that time period. Damn good stuff it was too. I'm going to list my most desired bands and albums below. Perhaps some other bloke stumbling on this via a google search will be able to give me a lead on where to download or purchase one or more of 'em.

Alternative compilations from the 80s: In From The Cold, Flying Circus I and II.
Prophets of the City (Cape Town hiphop)
Carnage Visors (Cape Town electronic, think they only produced one demo)
Psychopathic Fairies (punk \ metal. Not sure if these guys even did a demo)
Psycho Reptiles - Have Beans Will Travel
Penguins in Bondage
VOD (original lineup, not later heavy metal oriented stuff)
Lords of Gehenna (again, not sure if these guys ever did a demo)
Powerage
Artvark

A couple of recommendations

• If you need to mail order any of the excellent South African punk or industrial CDs that are only available in that country, and that would be pretty much all of them, I highly recommend Rhythm Online. My most recent purchase from them was the recent Van Coke Cartel album. It cost only R100 (divide by around 7 for USD amount) plus postage, and got to me in around a week. Excellent!
• If you never get around to writing postal letters anymore because either writing or printign the letter out, then addressing an envelope and having to find a stamp is too much hassle, I highly recommend Postful. You can send the letter to them as an email, ad they will do the rest of the mailing process. And they're very reasonably priced.
  

Brief: Iraqi metal and tapirs

• Stop Smiling has a brief report on what looks to be Iraq's only heavy metal band, Acrassicauda. At present they are in exile in Syria.
• From the sad to the cutesy, which I usually hate. But Curious Animals is an interesting blog to play around in. Here is there entry on the tapir.
  

Darkest of the Hillside Thickets CD release party

The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets is a pop punk (maybe) band that sings about Lovecraftian themes. I think that in some respects they were a bit ahead of their time, and deserve greater respect among Science Fiction fandom. Anyway, they are still going strong, and here is a press release for their CD release party.
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Saturday, September 1st I.M.U. presents THOR & The DARKEST OF THE HILLSIDE THICKETS Double CD Release Party @ The Media Club, 695 Cambie. Doors 8pm / $12 Advance @ Zulu, Scratch, Scrape, Neptoon Records & online @ http://www.imuproductions.com/tix . $15 Cover at the door

PLEASE NOTE: Presale tickets purchased at Record Stores and online for originally scheduled Aug 18th show @ The Lamplighter will be honored at the door this evening or you can redeem tickets at point of purchase.

The Rock Warrior THOR is about to take you on a thunderous, epic quest where he and his band journey to the center of the mind on his new concept album 'INTO THE NOISE' (SDR Records). With a live show set to showcase a new look with new costumes, the mighty Asgardian THOR will be unleashing metal to the masses with an all digital release and a limited edition collector's CD, available at his CD release show this evening! Joined by fellow masters of fantasy The Darkest Of The Hillside Thickets, who are celebrating the release of their new CD 'THE SHADOW OF TIM', it's a fantastical double header come to life!

THOR is an enduring icon of glam rock/metal and one of the true originators of rock theatre. His enviable career got off the ground with an appearance on the Merv Griffin Show and he's maintained a steady pace ever since, selling hundreds of thousands of records. Starting out in Vancouver, THOR first made waves in the bodybuilding world, becoming Mr. Canada and Mr. USA, always using heavy music as an intensive training tool. He has become a movie actor and producer, turning out collectible cult classics like "Rock & Roll Nightmare", "Zombie Nightmare", "Graveyard" and others. Most recently, THOR appeared in the USA Network movie "Murder At The Presidio" and stars in "The Intercessor" (both are available on DVD), and appeared in the Lifetime Network movie, "A Family Lost" to rave reviews. Long a champion of environmental causes, Thor is proud to be associated with Smog Veil Records, a label which has embraced an all-Green, environmentally friendly office HQ. With videos being filmed for the title track and the song "Evil Twin", stay tuned to Thor's adventures on YouTube and download free tracks from the album on myspace.com/thorrockwarrior! http://thorcentral.com

The DARKEST OF THE HILLSIDE THICKETS - When is an H.P. Lovecraft story not a book? When it's an album by The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets, of course! Following their seven year tour of outer space in support of "Spaceship Zero: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack", The Thickets return to Earth and the waters off New Zealand in a very special operatic adaptation of Lovecraft's "The Shadow Out of Time." In HPL's original tale set in 1913, Professor Peaslee of Massachusetts has his mental faculties swapped by an alien mind and learns terrible truths about life on Earth and beyond. The latest full-length Thickets CD "The Shadow Out of Tim" features modern marine biologist Dr. Timothy Vess' descent into madness brought on by similar circumstances. The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets, a cult mainstay since 1992, take you on a rock'n'roll tour through space and time, painting sonic pictures of the ocean deep, mysterious ruin-covered islands, and Paleocene jungles. Five out of five Cthulhu scholars agree - "The Shadow Out of Tim" is the perfect soundtrack to occult investigation! The single 'A Marine Biologist' was recently released as a free download on MySpace and thickets.net. http://www.thickets.net

Houdini and Scaterd Few

• Houdini died 81 years ago, but his family are requesting an autopsy, in the belief that his death was suspicious:
  ...rumors that he was murdered have persisted for decades. Eighty-one years after Houdini's death, his great-nephew wants the escape artist's body exhumed to determine if enemies poisoned him for debunking their bogus claims of contact with the dead.
• I was lucky enough to buy a copy of the brilliant Scaterd Few CD 'Sin Disease.' A hell of a lot of good stuff came out of the Christian music scene in the 80s, mostly in southern California. The hardcore punk band The Crucified, for example, the death metal band Vengeance Rising, Mortal on the industrial side. But Scaterd Few was my favourite. They pushed the limit of what was acceptable in Christian music. As Terry Taylor wrote at the time:
  Listen again to that lucid chameleon voice conjuring up the smoggy hot drudgery of L.A. street hassle. There's more angst here in these two lines than you'll find in an entire Club 88 all night battle of the bands.
  Is the Christian community ready for 'scaterd-few'? I certainly hope so. How many truly great bands can we with pride claim as our own? To put the icing on the cake, the live show is guaranteed to peel your grapes. The band won't be without controversy - you can bet your bible belt on that...
  But, as it turned out, the Christian community wasn't ready for Ramald Domkus, dress, dreads and all. I understand that they are still producing music, but there'll never be anything like 'Sin Disease.'

Heavy Metal, creative commons, Rio DiAngelo

• The Telegraph reports that, as slashdot puts it, gifted children find heavy metal comforting:
  "Participants said they appreciated the complex and sometimes political themes of heavy metal music more than perhaps the average pop song. It has a tendency to worry adults a bit but I think it is just a cathartic thing. It does not indicate problems."
  I certainly found heavy metal a great solace in the confusing years of adolescence. Heavy Metal and Punk bands sang about topics as disparate as social justice, military history, classical themes, alienation, and the like. I could relate to that much more than the vapid pop of the day. (It's only now that I am an old sod that I can appreciate vapid pop.)
• A highly recommended blog entry on Creative Commons copyright licensing by Jason Scott.
• The LA Times has an excellent interview with Rio DiAngelo, a member of the Heaven's Gate group.
  

Library in Mogadishu, UFO music

• The Washington Post has a short article on the Mogadishu City library entitled 'In the Heat of War, a literary refuge' After reading it I found myself wondering if there was a way to get donations to them. A little googling found that indeed there is, via the Zaylai Foundation.
• Take me to your leader! Over at UFOmystic, Greg has been bringing us UFO-related music from his personal collection (which is pretty impressive, and I bet it has even grown apace since I last saw it.) They're available for download.
  

Latin, brains, funny church signs, non-english music

It's Sunday. And here is today's top 5:

The BBC reports the view of the Vatican's 'chief Latinist' that the future of that language at the Holy See is in trouble. Among other things
...more junior members of the Catholic hierarchy are less enthusiastic about Latin than the recent Popes.
At the Vatican, bishops appointments are still written on papyrus in Latin as are letters of congratulations from the pope, but many bishops and cardinals write back asking for translations.
When I was at the UCT, introductory Latin was very well attended, because it was required for all law students. I was one of the very few that took Latin because I was really interested in the language.
I remember too that the memory of the lecturer was absolutely amazing. There were at least a couple of hundred people in the class, and she soon had everybody's name memorized.

The older I get, the less dogmatic I get. When I was a spiritual young oke I was convinced that consciousness was independent of the body. Now, I'm not so sure and am actually swinging the other way. This story, about a bloke that "forgot the urge to smoke" after suffering damage brain damage after a stroke, is tangentially related to this observation.

To make it easier to maintain a US postal address while I am out of the country, I signed up for an account with Remote Control Mail. With this service, any postal mail received is viewable over the WWW.

Funny church signs from Ship of Fools, 'the magazine of Christian unrest.'

Blog recommendation: 'We promote non-english language music' is pretty much what it sounds like. For music you may not hear about elsewhere, check them out. I found them through a search for fokofpolisiekar, but they are fairly diverse in their offerings. For instance, the last few entries profile Slovak punk, traditional Ladino, Turkish rock, French pop, Klezmer, Afropop. Most of the links seem to be to Youtube - I wish there were more mp3 downloads.