One of our users, Devolved, has launched his own radio show called Are You Morbid? It’s old school underground metal (OSUM) with dark ambient. He will be on again tonight. We recorded the show last week, but this week, we need some help. Can any of you record this live stream from 6-8 PM PST tonight?

Here are some basic instructions. All you need to do is

• Go to your audio controls (double-click on speaker in system tray), select File->Properties, then select Recording from the radio buttons. Make sure Line In is represented and not muted.
• Go to your audio program (Audacity, Soundforge) and in your recording options, select Line In or Stereo Mix.

This will record whatever is playing on your computer. Save the file as an MP3 and upload.

The re-issue of Hekate’s “Sonnentanz” album in Digipak format with revised artwork and a limited printrun of 700 copies is out now!

Originally released in 2000 by Well of Urd, “Sonnentanz” became something of a cornerstone of German Neofolk. Conceptionally dedicated to the free spirit of the ‘Bündische Jugend’ (German youth movement) and the ‘Edelweißpiraten’ (Edelweiss pirates), Germany’s “lost youth” of the 1930s, Hekate’s music here is marked by a folkloric acoustic style that sets the standards for the years to come.

Hekate Sonnetanz re-issue

For hilarity’s sake:

The members of death metal bands are not usually accused of tolerance of homosexuals. It’s just not easy to pronounce LGBT in a screech, a grunt or a scream. The two groups don’t usually coexist, so when Samwise Didier played a video of the lead singer from Cannibal Corpse ranting of his hatred of “Night Elf faggots,” many WoW-players and Blizzard fans were stunned. Sure, most of the offensive words were bleeped out, and when George “Corpsegrinder” Fisher took the stage to play with the all-Blizzard employee band Level 90 Epic Tauren Chieftain, only normal non-offensive metal ensued.

Cannibal Corpse is blockhead metal that sold out the percussive sound back in the 1990s, but Corpsegrinder is a really good fellow. It is a sad truth of being a metalhead that there are a lot of interesting and/or good people who make shitty music.

Old school death metal from Paradise Lost, Extinction of Mankind, My Dying Bride and Doom members:

Adrian, the drummer of Vallenfyre, is also the drummer for the band Paradise Lost. I’ve known him for quite a long time, because the European death metal scene a long time ago was quite small and everyone knew each other and traded tapes. It was a little bit incestuous at times because everyone knew each other. Scoot, the bass player, he played in Doom and Extinction of Mankind. He was my roommate back 20 years ago, he shared a house with me. We’ve remained friends since then and I couldn’t think of anyone else to do it when the idea to do this band came up. Hamish, the lead guitarist, he’s another old friend and he’s in My Dying Bride, which was kind of the same genre as Paradise Lost. He’s my drinking buddy and we go out drinking. Mully, the other guitarist in the band, every Thursday night we go listen to old metal and get drunk and we’re all friends so it kind of easy to choose these people.

{snip}

The main subject is that we’re trying to play it like a proper old school death metal band in the production and the song writing and most elements of it. We also incorporate a lot of other elements we grew up with like the crust punk scene, the doom scene, and like the grind scene. We wanted to make it something that instantly transports us back to ’86 or ’87. Apart from that there wasn’t really a big plan behind it, it was just to get that sound really. – Metal Funderground

You probably missed the show tonight. That’s understandable — if you haven’t heard it already.

Click below to download the 107mb 128k mp3 capture from this week’s show.

Maybe next week, you’ll choose to tune in. Oldschool metal and dark ambient, with acerbic yet cosmic commentary.

• Devolved “Are You Morbid?” (107mb)

Updated link.

From the Times of Malta:

The note, which parish priest Fr Kalċidon Vassallo confirmed was the parish’s doing, comes replete with a hand-drawn skull and pumpkin and warns readers that Halloween “celebrates a culture of death” and “attacks that which is holy”.

In boxed, bolded text, it says: “As a Church, we are warning parents of Halloween’s serious dangers. This feast is a dangerous celebration of fear and the macabre.”

It concludes with a motley list of “other things which draw children towards the occult”. The list includes heavy metal music, negative and fantastical role-playing, sadistic pornography and reading about the occult and Satan.

If you wonder why people distrust religions, it’s because of stuff like this.

You want to find evil? There’s real evil everywhere.

And then some grandstanding idiot, who spends his days comfortably blowing off the actual problems, worries about halloween.

You want evil? How about the toxic waste dumped in the mediterranean sea, the organized crime, the corrupt leaders, the people who walk among us and daily lie cheat and steal, or even Fr. Buttfinger who’s violating young boys down the hall?

That’s evil… but it’s harder to face and harder to win against, where bashing halloween is easy and provides cheap karma points on the social network of do-nothings.

A culture detached from youth culture, ten year (18-28) a/k/a product marathon:

Dr Paul Hodkinson, deputy head of Surrey University’s sociology department and an expert in youth music subcultures, has been re-interviewing a group of goths he first studied in the late 1990s to find out. “They were teenagers and in their early 20s then, and I thought it would be interesting to go back because a number of people do stay involved in the goth scene,” he explains.

Though many people who belong to youth subcultures such as punk and rave tend to drift away in their 20s, Hodkinson says it’s more likely that older goths will want to remain involved in the scene, even though it may become harder to combine with the responsibilities that come with age.

To outsiders, it’s the visual markers of being a goth – long, dyed-black hair, black clothes, pale faces contrasted with dark, dramatic eye make-up –that stand out. Taken on their own, these characteristics might be reasonably easy to cast off. However, Hodkinson says that although the aesthetic and clothing are important, the primary tenets of involvement in this subculture mean being “thoroughly passionate about goth music and style, and some goths would tell you they have an interest in the dark side of life, and a natural tendency towards a degree of angst”.

This means a level of commitment to the goth scene, and friendship groups and identity that develop around being a goth, which result in social lives that “are so intertwined that it would feel very odd to leave it,” he says. – The Guardian

Next time you see some guy in a Pantera shirt, tell him it’s all his fault. Or an Opeth shirted guy. Whichever. They’re the same, when you really think about it: music more like rock music which panders to the assimilators.

Documentary which looks at how a radical generation of musicians created a new German musical identity out of the cultural ruins of war.

Between 1968 and 1977 bands like Neu!, Can, Faust and Kraftwerk would look beyond western rock and roll to create some of the most original and uncompromising music ever heard.

They shared one common goal – a forward-looking desire to transcend Germany’s gruesome past – but that didn’t stop the music press in war-obsessed Britain from calling them Krautrock.

• Krautrock: The Rebirth of Germany