Pray to Satan

From the forum:

Satan is dead. At this point it’s clear that you either go full Nietzschean with materialism, and try to find inspiration from aesthetics, or try to find a religion outside the humbling dualism of Christianity. People are choosing religion, demographically, and religion is getting more scientific because it must to not get blown away by changes in attitudes. At the same time people are also getting more conservative because the modern disaster has finally started to show. We’re totally out of control of this society because everyone is equal, so you can tell no one that what they’re doing is bad (unless it’s really obvious, like murder or mass orphan rape). All religious people with brains are starting to adopt a Blake/Emerson transcendentalist view which refutes dualism, although the dumb masses are always going to need some kind of absurd promises. This means the point in being Watain is not there anymore, since they’re fighting against a phantom from the 1980s, when we all thought Christian conservatism was going to destroy us all. It turns out the Christian conservatives saved us from the Soviets, and now we’re seeing that the hippie way of life just leads to more pollution, hatred, racism, misery and despair.

Futurist metal is going to take a Marshall McLuhan/Voivod approach. Like the best of sentimental mysticism in metal, it will probably embrace the idea of a world beyond this one, although not a dualistic one, more likely one in whatever n-space “m theory” or quantum entanglement proposes. Instead of being humanistic, it will focus on exploration, conquest and discovery. This will be how it transcends the Christian dualism and Jewish guilt-based morality that is inherent to all Abrahamic religions including Islam (and at this point, Judaism has been too Christianized to survive the onslaught, which is sad as it was the last hardcore literalist religion). Nietzscheans in space, exploring micro-organisms, finding ways to tie occultism and Platonic forms to our new knowledge of sub-atomic particles, string theory and emergent patterns. When you think about it, all prog bands want to be Voivod without the candy parts anyway. – Pray for Satan

Satanism in metal is so 1980s. Back then, a revolution: discover the occult under the slick modern skin that was really only three decades (one generation) old. So when people head for the safe, you remind them of death, mutation, disease, suffering, defecation, sodomy, and occult insistence that Evil is as important as Good, and that’s another way of saying both are human perspectives only. Nature doesn’t care whether it does evil or good, it just does what it must. But now, in the 2000s, everything is permitted. We need a new mythology, not a negation. If you have Satan, you need God; if you have God, you need Satan. Now, we all know that Jesus Christ is a liberal, a Communist and probably a free-market anarchist or at least free-love hippie. But he’s sort of immaterial, he’s a popularization of the Old Testament message. Whatever God we have, it’s the same God, much as we say the word God in many different languages; every religion describes the same world, the same God, and struggles with the anthrocentric concepts of Good and Evil. If you have Evil, however, you must have Good and vice versa. So it’s time to reinvent the mythology from within. If you want to destroy Christianity, take it back to its Pagan (Greek) roots and admit the archetype for Jesus Christ was Socrates. If you want to destroy modern soulless Judaism, embrace the original demi-gnostic hermetic Judaism. We are all together in each of our nations fighting for the same world, and different interpretations of the same truth. Metal needs to embrace the futurist aspects of science joined with a mysticism of logic that doesn’t depend on a dualistic god or inherent meaning.

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How to get that Malevolent Creation 1987 CD

Use this handy form to order the Malevolent Creation Unreleased 1987 CD, which may not stay in print forever:


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This hooks you up with Jim Nickles/Shredly Studios.

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Malevolent Creation – Unreleased 1987 Album

Malevolent Creation – Unreleased 1987 Album

Production: The first three tracks showcase the studio work of Jim Nickles, and make the latter three, which are awful tape-grade garage production, sound like a middling 1990s studio with moderate volume, good tone, and reasonable bass. For the most part, he’s album to separate the instruments, which avoids the kind of washout frequent in recordings of this era.

Review: Before they were a thunderous death metal band, Malevolent Creation started out as a late speed metal band in the style of Slayer’s “Aggressive Perfector” matured a few years with influences from Metallica, Massacra and Sepultura. Unlike most early death metal bands who sound like primitive chromatic punk making warrior metal, this three-song 1987 garage recording shows us a sound comparable to Artillery, Devastation and Nuclear Assault or any other second-tier bands that lacked the rock sensibilities of Metallica but borrowed their technique to mix into a Slayer/GBH fueled frenzy. Riffs are short and use rhythm more than phrase in the death metal style, and like other speed metal bands, Malevolent Creation use catchy bouncy choruses which repeat the song title multiple times. Their verse riffs are more in the Slayer school, and their choruses more the Metallica style of broad intervals permitting harmonization, which creates space for lead guitar and vocal melody. Had they continued in this direction, Malevolent Creation would be a promising power metal band today. The first track, “Sacrificial Annihilation,” is a pure speed blur that calls to mind early Nuclear Assault; “The Traitor Must Pay” follows with familiar pieces of music from Malevolent Creation’s first album, and sounds like Slayer crashing into Massacra; finally, “Confirmed Kill” borrows a Metallica chord progression and puts it to good use. It’s good to see this historical document riding again so the rest of us can explore the genesis of Malevolent Creation.

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Transcending “metal” as it is now

Black metal is in the process of being legitimized. This is what Until the Light Takes Us and Hideous Gnosis represent. This is not inherently bad, as long as we remain critical of these outsiders. Its growth will allow for us to split off again and continue down the dark path. Black metal’s path to transcendence is in leaving metal behind.

Black metal’s real problem originates in its desire to stay true to its roots. The reason for this is that the roots transcended metal, but bands are over and over again attempting to recreate that by following the exact same musical structure. This is absolutely the wrong way to approach it. What made black metal great was not distorted guitars and gremlin vocals, but the spirit that led to those musical choices.

I think the problem isn’t too much black metal, but too much metal. The “metal” that most people know is bought and paid for, an image sold to them by Hollywood movies, satellite radio, and record labels. With the existence of the internet and file-sharing we are now able to reach a whole new niche with music, the ordinary educated middle-class person. Let this new crowd reject the leather jackets, drug dependency, and zero social mobility of the metalhead primate.

If we want for metal to transcend what metalness means in the hands of those groups, we need to take two steps:

First, the music itself needs to change. This is not nearly as complex as it may seem. All the arts are simply sets of limitations; the artist works within the limitations to create something profound. The limitations of the art-forms drastically change the potential of the works within. These limitations are referred to as structures, such as the verse-chorus structure of rock, or the strict syllable rules of a haiku. A simple enough change will completely alter the genre of black metal. Let us remove percussion entirely. This is not a superficial fix. In fact, its tendency to take away the value of vocals and percussion is what originally gave black metal its power. This was the path Darkthrone took in the simplification of its percussion in Transylvanian Hunger. Let’s continue down this road and remove the drums entirely. Listen to Burzum’s Dominus Sathanas or Judas Iscariot’s The Clear Moon, and the Glory of the Darkness. Both songs greatly transcend most of the other works of the artists. By removing drums, artists are forced to compensate by improving the other elements of the songwriting and make them more complex, and in this way this kind of music will further focus upon and emphasize where it shines in the first place and that is in melodies and atmospheres. Alongside this it will clearly distinguish itself from those metal artists who are not capable of creating powerful music without the use of drums. This will distinguish the fans since most of the meatheads in the metal crowd wouldn’t be able to appreciate such music.

The next step is to create a backing mythos. This is absolutely necessary to allow the genre to gain steam and helps the artist to enter into the transcendental creative state. What I mean by backing mythos, is something, anything that can exist behind the work itself, giving it depth. Dante had the cosmology and widespread acceptance of the Bible. Tolkien had history, maps, and languages behind the adventures of his characters in Middle Earth. Lovecraft had the hostile cosmic worldview that allowed for entities infinitely different from us, of which nature equipped us with no means of comprehension. Black metal has a rich mythos of crimes and political statements backing the music. It doesn’t matter what it is, but there needs to be something behind the music if it’s going to really stick. I personally feel that the best backing mythos for this new transcendent offshoot of black metal should be intense philosophical discussion of some sort. With the internet we now have a platform for giving and receiving enormous amounts of information. This could allow the artists to explain and discuss their works and the works of others to try and penetrate the meaning and discover which works have real power and which don’t. Also this sort of discussion will captivate the imagination of the audience who wants something real. If they see that the artists actually care enough to participate in philosophical observation of their art-form, then they will be much more inclined to take it in at a deeper level.

Metal turned away from the conventional path of music. It decided to be adventurous instead of entertaining, and that led it to some strange places. Then black metal took hold, and it was no longer about adventuring in the fun, dangerous places; it was now about stepping into the cold, dark, and hostile unknown. We can continue on that path if we’d like. We must now reject the comforting foundation of percussion and see where that takes us. It will undoubtedly touch upon even more powerful extremes of horror and beauty than black metal ever did, but will also take more effort from us to comprehend and integrate (not to mention for the artists to create). Transcending black metal will only happen by our own effort and bravery.

by Andrew

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Why an underground

So there’s a bit of a flap because Scion/Toyota has sponsored a number of metal shows over the years, and because corporate sponsors have to be careful, they’ve rejected a number of bands on grounds of content. One metal musician opined:

So the other day I was on the phone with my buddy Wood of MITB/Bastard Noise and no sooner does he make a comment about INTEGRITY having a lack of… w/ their recent Scion showcase at the ROXY, I just happen to stumble upon Murder Construct’s new EP on Relapse coming packed with a “Scion presents” free MAGRUDERGRIND record! I was like dude what the fuck is going on here? MAGRUDERGRIND! Here’s a band that was too “punk” to give Relapse a record but is down to float a fuckin’ “SCION” logo on the front of their album cover. WTF?- Agoraphobic Nosebleed

Indeed it is painful, but not unexpected. After all, the underground is dead. When record distributors embraced the indie around 1996 or so, the small labels began appearing in record stores. They were often available on Amazon anyway. Where it used to be that Roadrunner was available in stores, but Earache, Century Media, Olympic and Peaceville were special issue, now all were present. This continued for about a decade before record stores collapsed.

Even more important is that the golden years of underground metal occurred in a little pocket. The cost of producing CDs fell, with desktop publishing and disc-pressing technology converging. The DIY labels of the seventies graduated from tapes and cassettes to CDs of a quality that could be sold in stores. Industry had none of the distribution channels ready, but thanks to the rising power of databases and automated ordering, soon the middlemen took over.

The underground disappeared in the 1995-1997 era as industry accepted it, and the rising interest in black metal propelled more fans to seek it out. The money opened new doors.

They offered us a deal, but what happened was they decided to sack the two main metal guys in the company who actually signed metal bands. It turned out they said “I’m sorry we don’t do this sort of music anymore.” Roadrunner not doing metal anymore is like my mom showing up at a show. Towards the end of our contract, all they were concentrating on were the bands that sold albums like Nickelback
. We were seriously suffering from them not paying any attention toward us. – The Gauntlet

Someone needs to explain the industry to the musicians. Use small words.

Industry operates on trends. This is because, all people being equal, few people have any idea what to do and nothing to seek except social approval.

As a result, they gather like grains of sand in the waves of time, eddying in currents — they do not move independently. They react, rather than act.

Industry as a result likes trends. Catch a trend early, and you buy it low and sell it high, and make a ton of profit. Then you’re the Christ genius individualist superstar.

The new metal audience wants the “cred” of metal, but they don’t want to leave what they know. So they want industry to take the same mainstream/indie/alternative/post-rock and dress it up as “extreme” metal. That’s how you get metalcore and nu-metal, which from a distance are one and the same.

And now that metal is “aboveground,” it’s no longer competing on quality. It’s competing on trend status. So alternative metal was big in 1997-2000, metalcore has been big 2001-2008, and now sludge, drone and indie-metal are huge for about another 18 months. Then what?

They don’t know.

If you make yourself a commodity, you will be bought and sold and the whims of the market — that is to say, the whims of the majority, a kind of economic democracy — will determine whether you succeed or fail.

If metal is to thrive on its own, it needs to step out of that rat race. Bring back the underground, where we aren’t cool, aren’t hip and make no one any money. We can do that simply by being true elitists and rejecting music that is of low quality, doesn’t understand the spirit of the metal art, is of compromised style or integrity, or simply is whoring pandering crap like Cradle of Filth.

What’s killing metal is the trend factor. People want to appear extreme, but they want it all delivered in a momentary burst. They don’t want a lead-in, or to have an attention span, or the kind of epic composition that truly makes epic music. They just want the same old crap with whatever sound seems “epic” this week. Last year it was Braveheart, maybe next year it will be the tribal thing Sepultura does again.

The underground was more than a place where we “could” get our music published. It was a place where we could publish music without the corruption of the world getting in the way. The happiest underground musicians made their art, then left it behind and went on to other careers, or made their art and stayed satisfied with a small but loyal fan-following. Metal can provide this like no other genre.

Instead of trying to be like everyone else and go for the gold, we should stay in the underground, and destroy anything that threatens it. That includes the false underground of people who reject any band that more than ten people have heard, or anything that does not rigidly conform to what they have heard before. All of these are dead paths as well.

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Glorious Times: A Pictorial of the Death Metal Scene (1984-1991)

Click on the cover picture above to see the flyer featuring Chris Reifert for the new edition of “Glorious Times”.

We reviewed Glorious Times: A Pictorial History of the Death Metal Scene 1984-1991 before, describing how it is a collection of first-hand retrospectives on the formative years of the underground metal scene that is motivating people to restore these older values in newer metal music.

Thanks to the rising interest in the book, what was once a limited edition has returned as what we hope is a regular product. Check it out:

After MUCH tenuous effort, we are extremely proud to announce that our revised and extended edition of ‘Glorious Times’ is currently finished, and now in the hands of our new printer.

Bigger and better than before! 160 pages of massively rare and mostly unseen photographs, tied together with sentiment and reflections from the very people who lived the era – the GLORIOUS TIMES.

Bands featured: Acheron, Autopsy, Baphomet, Brutality, Cannibal Corpse, Cryptic Slaughter, Dark Angel, Death, Deceased, Deicide, Derketa, Disharmonic Orchestra, Exmortis, Groovy Aardvark, Hellwitch, Hideous Mangleus, Immolation, Impetigo, Incantation, Incubus, Insanity, Lethal Aggression, Malevolent Creation, Massacre, Massappeal, Master, Morbid Angel, Napalm Death, Nocturnus, Nokturnel, Nuclear Death, Overthrow, Paineater, Possessed, Prime Evil, Revenant, Righteous Pigs, Ripping Corpse, Sacrifice, Slaughter, Soothsayer, Terrorain, Tirant Sin, Unseen Terror, Vomit, Wehrmacht and Where’s The Pope?

Price per copy is $30 plus $3 shipping and handling.
Payment can be made by PayPal to glorioustimesdeathbook@gmail.com

Full story at the Glorious Times blog and Mobile Metal Examiner’s recent article.

This book is not designed to be perfect or even convenient armchair reading for the detached casual audience. It’s for the diehards. It’s power is in the content; not all of it, because some metal bands cannot even be edited into coherence, and the coverage of the evolution of the first generation of death metal. After this, death metal picked up steam, became a known style and had a different set of challenges. But if you want to watch it emerging from the primordial soup of speed metal, punk, thrash and extra-musical influences (Lovecraft) here’s a good chance.

I find it interesting — and I mean this in a good way — how nerdly and awesome these early founders are. Some are partying/mayhem types, but most of the rest strike me as intelligent, curious, introspective people who got failed by modern society because it’s a dying shroud of a pleasant illusion. These people aren’t hipsters and literati, but they think about life, and find meaning in concepts and art. That puts them ahead of most of this moribund species.

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Metal: a holdout against temporary culture

The mainstream media stumbles up against everything, so it’s no surprise they hit on valid ideas sometimes:

With the Beatles finally on iTunes, Garth Brooks and AC/DC are among the few notable acts that continue to staunchly hold out, unwilling to agree to Apple’s restrictive pricing schemes and loath to see their albums chopped into singles.

Angus Young of AC/DC, another act with an exceptionally lucrative catalog of music, once insisted that AC/DC doesn’t make singles, “we make albums.”

“If we were on iTunes, we know a certain percentage of people would only download two or three songs from the album,” Young told The Daily Telegraph in 2008. “We don’t think that represents us musically.”

Young has said AC/DC’s sales haven’t suffered as a result. The band’s last studio album, “Black Ice,” released in 2008, sold more than 6 million copies worldwide. – AP

The problem with digital music is that it’s licensed content, not something you control. If their DRM goes down, or their download site goes away, what do you have? A license to download — but only from them, in the formats specified.

If we find something better than MP3/MP4(AAC) to compress music, what happens? You buy it again.

If Apple goes bankrupt, which it has come close to many times, what happens? You buy it all again.

CDs may not be ideal, but for a certain segment of the market, they’re perfect. We don’t want to muck around with an account on Apple.com. We want a physical object, we enjoy purchasing it and taking it home, and we can do that because we’re selective about what we buy.

You can’t say that about Lady Gaga or whatever other trivial crap most people listen to.

Metal is one of the few genres that is holding out in this way. Instead of making purchasing easier, we argue, make it harder and more expensive. Make the choice count for more as a result. Make people think harder about what they buy. Make them touch a physical representation of it, and keep it around the house.

Sure, I hate the mountains of landfill produced by CDs going into the dumpster. But for the most part, these are CDs for terrible music that should have never been signed, or CDs of trivial music that people “got tired of” a month later.

AC/DC and heavy metal represent the opposite principle: buy a few things you’ll want to hear for a lifetime.

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Rodrigo D: No Futuro

Metal audiences and listeners, aficionados of a genre that is well known for it’s enthusiasm towards the macabre will always have the generalization of being attached to the horror genre. A very recent review of Cannibal Holocaust on here is testament to the leanings that many metallers and Hessians would have towards gore, science fiction and the supernatural, occult side of cinema. Seeing as Cannibal Holocaust did ‘realism’ to a certain extent,  reviewing Rodrigo D: No Futuro intends to further this. This drama film, about an aspiring drummer is a brilliant narrative about survival amidst the harshest and roughest of environments captures a realism not present in most forms of dramatic cinema, but also possesses the same punk nihilism that would easily appeal to anybody who enjoyed Alex Cox’s brilliant ‘Repo Man’ and Tim Hunter’s ‘Rivers Edge’, stripped towards a far more coherent realism that is totally at odds with commercial  ‘glossy’ film-making.

The fact that the film was shot in the same neighborhood where many of the main actors lived, within a city known to have the world’s highest murder rate at the time, only gives light to the fact as to how these young people would have gone about their daily lives, for which reason the writer feels rather little need to offer intricate details towards the plot of the film. It’s backdrop revolves around a day to day existence under the constant plethora of violence, crime, strife and nothingness for it’s young protagonists, amidst a musical backdrop that is a myriad of punk hardcore, thrash and early death/black metal, an indicator that if Europe were home to romanticism and North America a hotbed for nihilism, then surely in it’s earlier days the South American metal scene was the land where a brutal realism, born from poverty and societal decay, made itself clear.

Musically the soundtrack is one of the most compatible, suitable and cohesive to be heard in any underground flick. The fact that the bands featured on here are so distinctly similar to one another yet retaining their own character is perhaps indicative of a thriving yet incestuous underground scene in Medellin at the time, the savage and raw tonal quality having much in common, but perhaps a much more chaotic, ambient, stripped down take on what the Brazilian underground acts (Sepultura, Sarcofago, MutilatorVulcano, Sextrash) had done in a similar era. The remaining soundtrack is permeated with punk rock and hardcore that although not on the same level of corrosive aggression still oozes the same depravity and oblivion that makes the film all the more worthwhile and excellent.

An additional bonus to this is the presence of members of seminal Columbian act Parabellum in the film, the scene in which they are featured being poignant and insightful enough to merit that parts of the film were as good as being documentary footage. The scene featuring another local act, Blasfemia is excellent and iconic, with the band playing a rooftop gig/rehearsal, in the backdrop of idyllic mountains in the distance of decrepit, violent shanties.This is a highly recommended film for anyone fond of exploring realism within cinema, and also for those who want insight into South American underground music of the 80′s, getting hold of the soundtrack would be highly recommended. A gripping film, and both watcher or listener is entitled to take that opinion in either direction.

Written by Pearson

 

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Judas Priest – Stained Class

Stylistically and in terms of execution, this is perhaps the most important album that Judas Priest made. Some will argue that the Sad Wings Of Destiny album from 1976 was the record that encapsulated this, though the reviewer picks Stained Class on the basis that it shapes and crafts the periphery of what was yet to come from a still young musical form. The origins of extreme metal are hinted at in pieces such as ‘Exciter’, which elaborates further on the quintet’s advancement towards more aggressive techniques and motifs, heavy on palm muted rhythmic guitar riffs and rapid fire double bass pedals, overlaid with Rob Halford’s banshee-like falsetto and lead guitars which although in terms of patterns and scales are not yet free of the restraints of rock music from previous decades, clearly set a benchmark for the revival of neoclassical technique in the metal genre. This is additionally showcased in both the follow up piece ‘White Heat, Red Hot’  the title track and ‘Saints In Hell’, more adherent to mid-paced tempos though in terms of form, the same development is obvious.

‘Invader’, ‘Savage’, and ‘Better By You, Better Than Me’ are all anthemic, semi-melodic numbers that are more standardized than anything else on this album, and is easily of the quality of the best material that permeated the disappointing predecessor Sin After Sin. As is with much work within earlier NWOBHM, this creates a solid base that allows for the most joyous segments of this album to thrive so well. ‘Beyond The Realms Of Death’ which is by many seen to be a seminal piece for this band, is an excellent piece of balladry, to which a clear lineage of the more subtle, ‘slow burning’ work of Iron Maiden (“Children Of The Damned”), Manowar (“Valhalla”, “Bridge Of Death”), Bathory (“One Rode To Asa Bay”, “Twilight Of The Gods”), Metallica (“Sanitarium”, “Fade To Black”) can trace a root. With the exception of perhaps their triumphant Painkiller opus, this remains their most consistent and advanced work, and shows an act at their most vital and relentless. Metal was forged here.

 -Pearson-

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