While a piece of music remains great independent of production, great execution can bring out the best in it.

It’s kind of like how you are born with intelligence, and can either develop it, or sabotage it. What you cannot do is change the amount you are born with.

This is why classical people are diehards about not just composer, but conductor and orchestra. All of these influence the interpretation of the music.

Since it’s Sunday and you’re high/drunk/covered in whale semen already, check these out and appreciate their differences:

Beethoven Symphony 7, movement II, conducted by Leonard Bernstein

Beethoven Symphony 7, movement II, conducted by Herbert von Karajan

Beethoven Symphony 7, movement II, conducted by Wilhelm Furtwangler

Beethoven Symphony 7, movement II, conducted by Bernard Haitink

Daniel Mee over at Non-Alignment Pact had this to say about the hipster metal binge:

But one thing that I do not hold against The Sword is that they are a “hipster metal” band. Now, that’s not because I think that the tag is inaccurate. On the contrary, I think that it describes a real stylistic phenomenon in hard rock- music that has some superficial resemblance to metal, but actually has roots in some other kind of music. The “hipster metal” epithet emphasizes the “superficial” part of this formulation, implying that the music is intended for dilettantes who get their ideas about underground music from mainstream culture (i.e. think all metal is guys that look like KISS playing Sabbath songs) and basically don’t know actual heavy metal from a hole in the ground.

I don’t think this is necessarily the case, although music critics certainly have a tendency to turn into those idiots when they try to write about metal. I think that it’s possible to make non-metal music that sounds like metal for some reason, either intentional or unintentional, without having the end result be something that is itself superficial. Instead of “hipster metal,” call it “false metal.” – Non-Alignment Pact

I guess my question is this:

Why pretend to be something you are not?

You change on the surface, but not inside. It’s a costume.

While it might be an interesting experiment, once, it seems more like infiltration.

However, he raises an interesting point.

Hipster metal is not just a regular band making a metal or metal-ish record. Enough have done that successfully that the process should be viewed as metal influencing the wider spectrum of music.

Hipster metal is insincere metal. It’s hipsters — surface > form — creating metal, ironically, so they have some new and unique/different combination to show off.

It is whore, at its heart and in its soul, even if its skin is metal.

We have long said on this site that aesthetics and composition, while they can aid each other (particularly aesthetics enhancing presentation of composition), are not the same and aesthetics — on the whole — is disposable. A great symphony played by a metal band would still be good music, and a great metal song played on kazoo would still be a great song.

Exhibit 1: Angel of Death (Soft Rock Version)

Although this is sacrilege and the person who committed it should be raped to death by pigs, it’s not only hilarious but, in comparison to all other soft rock ever created, total genius.

Exhibit 2: Hipster music

Note how brilliantly contrived the aesthetic is — and how empty, pointless, binary and unexceptional the underlying composition is. If you played this on an acoustic guitar, it would put you to sleep.

Like all hipster music, it’s a surface treatment. Death to all hipsters — well, that’s true, but the bigger point is: the song is not the production, the imagery, the performance or the weird little artists statements these grebo queerballs make in their album liners. It’s the composition.

If you get stuck in an ivory tower then you’re kind of lost, and that’s what happens with some of the older bands; they sort of lose touch with what actually is reality. – Phil Cullen, Def Leppard

With a few exceptions like BEHERIT and ASPHYX, the nearly-universal rule is that metal (and other popular genres like rock, techno, etc) artists/bands get worse over time.

Usually, there’s an inspired but semi-incompetent first album.

Then an ambitious but half-complete second album.

Finally, the dreaded third album, which either makes the band or breaks them. They’re at their technical peak but losing vision.

After that, they’re re-interpreting their influences, being influenced by other bands they’ve toured with, etc.

They don’t seem to ever get it back.

Why is this?

Much like modern society itself, the music industry is a process of detachment. You detach into thinking about sales figures, being on tour all the time, trying to manage your money, wasting time with women and drugs/alcohol, etc.

Eventually, you’re living in a new place, practicing less like a passion and more like a job, and thinking about how to be popular.

Whatever inspiration you had is gone.

The tantalizingly-named Blasphemy Day International is basically a thinly-veiled excuse to troll Muslims who were offended by cartoon caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed (PBUH); if you ask me, it’s kind of a shitty passive-aggressive way of going about this.

However, it’s also a good excuse for blasphemy, and we need more of that.

The holiday is on September 30. This year, why not:

I. Increase the Traditional Blasphemy

Our tribute to this is the Internet Altar of Unholy Blasphemy and The Christian Holocaust.

II. Force People to Accept the Genius of Paul Ledney

Not enough people know the sacred words:

Rip the sacred flesh
Sodomize the holy asshole
Drink the red blood of the mother of earth
Masturbation on the dead body of christ
The king of Jews is dead
and so are the lies
Vomit on the host of Heaven
Masturbate on the throne of God
Break the seals of angels
Drink the sweet blood of Christ
Taste the flesh of the priest
Sodomize holy nuns
The king of Jews is a liar
The Heavens will burn
Dethrone the son of God
God is dead
Holyness is gone
Purity is gone
Prayers are burned
Covered in black shit
Rape the holy ghost
Unclean birth of Jesus Christ
Heaven will fall
Fuck the church
Fuck Christ
Fuck the Virgin
Fuck the gods of Heaven
Fuck the name of Jesus

III. Extend this humanism, the secular form of populist religion

If we can blaspheme Islam and Christianity for being ignorant, how about humanism?

Humanism is the idea that humans are more important than reality, and that they’re all equal, and that their feelings matter.

The fact is that most humans are shitheads, and we want to celebrate the few good ones.

Spread this blasphemy:

• Use the R-word. Mock the retarded, kick cripples out of wheelchairs, rape the cowering, sodomize the meek, etc.
• Make fun of stupidity. It’s not polite to do this. Blaspheme! Do it.
• Mention overpopulation. People hate to hear about this. There’s too many of us, and not everyone can be special!
• Mock TMPR. Too Much Positive Reinforcement (TMPR) is “the belief, against all available evidence, that one is meant for Special Things.”

People hate it when you rape sacred cows, then cut their heads off and make them into burgers. Do it. With extra ketchup.

You may have wondered what Kam Lee was up to between Massacre and Kauldron, Bone Gnawer, The Skeletal and his other current musical projects (and one horror film appearance, in Deep Seeded).

The answer is that back in 1998, he released a demo by his one-man black metal project, PHLEGETHON RISING:

Master of Plagues

Legends Advent

He claims a BATHORY influence in addition to the HELLHAMMER-ish parts, but in many ways, it’s reminiscent of early DEMONCY and PROFANATICA. Good to see this reach the light of day.

Other Kam Lee projects:

Bone Gnawer – Anthropophagus Beast

The Grotesquery – Nightmares Made Flesh

The Skeletal – Vengeance Sewn

I’ll never understand why places like Amazon, where kids can hitch a few items onto their parents’ orders and get away with it, don’t put greater emphasis on works like the following:

• Havohej Dethrone the Son of God

In fact, they seem to almost want to hide it, as if they’re afraid of the controversy that might come from encouraging citizens to blasphemy. That’s ridiculous, given that our current regime would love nothing more.

Maybe it would be fun to coerce these opposing forces into revealing themselves. Are you pro-blasphemy, or anti-blasphemy?

Here’s the review posted today:

Paul Ledney, the primary composer on this CD, spent some years in INCANTATION and REVENANT trying to make the ideal of music to him: stripping of all meaning, pure nihilism and primal id expressed through sonic violence.

On this CD, he came close. In the vein of early BLASPHEMY or BEHERIT, this is primitive chromatic riffing with unusual, almost hasty song structures, using his odd method of picking three-note “modal stripes” and repeating them at different positions in the chromatic scale.

Surrounding this are the cavernous vocals of Ledney himself, which like a whisper made into a roar surge around the music, carrying it like a rhythm instrument of deviant intent.

Sounding very much like the results of a weekend of apostate demons camping in the countryside and, in the midst of their blasphemy, picking up guitars to make unholy music, “Dethrone the Son of God” exemplifies the feral and nihilistic spirit of black metal.

I’m not telling anyone what to do, but if a horde of people showed up and started discussing this in the amazon forums, commenting on it and otherwise encouraging it to become more popular, the results might be telling. -|-

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, this was a regular metal magazine that you could get for free at record stores in Houston.

Every concert and new record release was in it. Not only that, but it covered ANUSian topics — much like the Metal AE — such as the history of metal, music theory, what defined metal, genrology, the spirit of metal and the clash between metal and the counter-culture as well as the pop-culture above it.

[[image:rivethead-houston_metal_magazine.jpg]]

The website has a comprehensive archive of their late 1980s and early 1990s issues, which focus on a mixture of heavy metal, speed metal and the birthing of death metal. The approach is professional even if the methods are homebrew:

• Rivethead Magazine Homepage
• Rivethead Magazine on Twitter
• Rivethead Magazine on Facebook
• Rivethead Magazine on last.fm

Also see our article on Examiner.com.

The arch-wizards over at DEATHMETAL.ORG summon forth an article covering the breadth of Finnish underground metal, and cap it off with a hour of music in a compilation of Finnish bands both well-known, and totally unknown.

We are proud to present a sequence of tracks collected by Fenno-American Death Metal connoisseur Benjamin Tianen in tribute to Finland and its strain of artists and conjurers. This compilation of obscure quality Finnish Death Metal is recommended for listening in the twilit hours of day, preferably in rather uninhabited locations as most of Finland is. If there is one teaching one must bring home from Finnish artists and Finnish school of mental exploration, it is that one must not love happiness as much as one loves truth.

Forgotten Death Cults from Finland: an Overview

Includes all the classics: Demigod, Abhorrence, Beherit, Adramelech, Sentenced, Cartilage, Belial, Necropsy, Unholy, Phlegethon, and more.