Also, it might not be a bad idea to break things up into a team rather than one man handling each part of one show.

• writers compose a given weekly or bi-weekly topic and suggest fitting song selections
• narrators with good equipment create the voice recordings
• editors modify for quality control, assemble the media and upload

I can pitch in at the writer stage but the narrator and editor part is less of a fit at this time.

Thats the plan.

Good to hear, send me any script ideas you have and between us all we can start tweaking things and building up a backlog.


I'm not on any of the mailing lists. If theres still an internal/staff mailing list that might be useful to organise through; otherwise i'm not fond of the idea of organising via a public mailing list.

The solution is to apply the old adage of many hands makes light work. In other words, more people, like, doing stuff. Like a society, as in the fourth letter of the acronym.

I've proposed this already to a few people. Hopefully something comes of it.

what it needs:
- writers
- hosts (two or three alternating every other week, makes life miles easier. must have a decent mic at least)
- promoters (people who post links on forums, reddit, facebook etc. if everyone who read this thread at least posted the link to a new show on their facebook profile it would be something)
 - an editor to piece the audio and songs together. i can handle this and write material.

any takers?

comparison #1:
- machaut - gloria from the nostre dame mass
- timeghoul - boiling in the hourglass

comparison #2:
kyrie from the templar's chant
black sabbath - sabbath bloody sabbath

After this, […] present the Kyrie chant, whose liturgical function, at the beginning of the Mass, is to exalt divine majesty, the only force capable of remedying the weaknesses and imperfections of the human soul. Once a year, the Kyrie was sung outside the Mass, to open Vespers for Easter Day. […] But the Kyrie could also be employed to fortify the souls of the combatants when an army deployed in order of battle.

http://musicologicus.blogspot.com/2009/03/chant-of-templars.html


There are superficial reasons why metal compares so much to medieval music, to do with the lineage of the musical language it uses (metal started when Sabbath starting imitating horror movie music clichés - which themselves relied on a lot of 'medievally' sounding devices, because they sound 'creepy' to modern ears). More fundamentally, metal shares a dark but reverent worldview and mythic/allegoric way of describing life which is much more at home in the ancient world than it is modernity.

Quote from: scourge on April 21, 2011, 02:58:02 AM

Quote from: Cargést on April 20, 2011, 02:07:31 PM

I could do this in the summer.  How long does each show have to be?

For radio nihil, probably about like the others. Forty or fifty minutes isn't bad. I like the format they had. A couple songs then some esoterica commentary then back to music again.

What's the process, then?  Is each show recorded before broadcasting/release, or is it "live"?

sent you a pm.

burning skies. really not very exciting. the first 2 minutes are chaff, 2.10 until that verse riff comes back is kinda cool. the nocturnus style transition riff is nice, but it doesnt relate to what follows. 3.42 sounds like a decent enough riff but its hard to make out and its clearly under utilised.
the good parts are underused and the shite parts are overused, theres not enough journey/development.

keeping the same riff playing and changing the drum pattern is an irritating and overused cliché in post-vital period death/black metal - especially going from something rocking to a blast  (it underscores the pointlessness of the speed and the essentially rock derived nature of the content). general rule is unless something meaningful in the riff-work is changing with the drum beat dont make a pointless change to the drum beat.

its mostly too square cut to maintain interest and theres not enough of a fundamental interrelationship between the riffs.

i suggest stripping 90% of the material from this track, just taking the stuff thats awesome and making a track out of that. i suggest also going away and working with a real drummer, in order to get a more natural feel for rhythmic transitions, emphasises and shapes.

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ancient summons - nice opening riffs, better sense of journey and little less square cut but still a bit overdone. 1.05 and 1.46, there are some serious issues with the harmony being employed. the implications of key change are awkward,  not particularly pleasant and don't add anything to the journey. loses its way for all of the end section stuff.

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Breaching the walls of sylph - not a bad start. the new riff at 0.38 doesnt relate enough to what came before.  i can pick out a relationship between some of the riffs by the way you repeat verbatim one particular ending phrase in different riff contexts; this is nice but alone it does not give a sense of expanding experience - not without some more integral variations in the material its framing (nb. the riff at the end i can hear relates to the one before it, but its not great idea to begin with). theres some nice stuff in here, but theres problems still with the architecture of the song.

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Omnis - nice opening riff, reminds me of Loke by Enslaved, but then you piss all over it with that ARE YOU TALKIN TO ME?-ish counter-riff. thereafter has good and bad with similar problems and positives to the other tracks. the last two/three minutes of this are quite good. more work on the transitional material.

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some very cool riffs but there are some problems with knowing how to string them together. sometimes the changes are arbitrary, sometimes they're insufficient, sometimes they're unrelated, sometimes they just don't impart anything particularly enlightening to the experience. problems also at one or two points with the harmony, its just not functioning properly; a few problems too with rhythm/drums, but that can be fixed by working with a real drummer and just learning to loosen it up a bit. overall i'd say learn to stick with a handful of ideas and draw variations out of them rather than creating new material. real potential here though.


do some homework listening to this album: learn a couple of tracks, figure out what makes it work.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O176hufoFq8

I believe this also brings about the ultimate point as we age. Most musicians fade away when it comes to retaining the power of the music

Tell Beethoven that. Metal musicians need to stop being flakes.

I'm with Andrew, theres nothing much for me in it. Its clearly not complete and just judging what is there it lacks whats needed to make it a worthwhile listening experience. I dont know what Cargést is talking about in terms of counterpoint, as strictly speaking there isn't really much in there (the one instance there is a vague sense of the implied counterpoint that Slayer do), there is a separation of voices at times but it's fleeting and they still feel like they're essentially parts of the same riff/cell/idea rather than diverging into separate lines with separate rhythm and melodic direction. all the riffs are of pretty much the same length and cadence as you expect, theres no dramatic arc, no transitionary riffs and the drum-loops constant emphasis on beats 1 and 3 kind of gives it a vaguely tough-guy rock feel, but even that falls kind of flat.

Positively theres some cool riff ideas in there, so rather than throw it out, work on it. Now you know what doesnt work about it, fix that up and come back with the piece.
Sit and really listen with a critical ear to some death metal masterpieces for a while and try to get a handle of what it is that makes them work the way they do (Immolation, Morbid Angel, Obituary would be a good place to start). Complete the piece, work on it, don't keep starting pieces, not finishing them and posting them on here without any strong idea why you're doing so. Consider whats in it for your listeners - what can they get communicated to them by listening to your work.