FatherAlabaster

Album is up for preorder on Bandcamp now, scheduled for release on June 15th. https://constructoflethedm.bandcamp.com/album/a-kindness-dealt-in-venom?label=1621577849

Nur Run - Among Those Waves

Searching With My Good Eye Closed and Room A Thousand Years Wide are my two favorite tunes on Badmotorfinger. I probably like the B side better than the A side all things considered. Down On The Upside is the one Soundgarden album I can't make it through. Too many low points. Maybe it's the lingering flavor of disappointment from 25 years ago or whenever it came out. A handful of songs I like, but the rest is a slog. No idea why I like King Animal better, but I do.

Blut Aus Nord - Disharmonium: Nahab ...little bit incongruous on a lovely partly cloudy almost-spring afternoon walk here in the mountains. Hmm. Bough Horns - IV

Krallice - Go Be Forgotten

Krallice - Mass Cathexis 2/The Kinetic Infinite

Better choice for class than "I can smell your quotient!"

Man, Judas Priest. Classic band. I don't think I've ever ranked my list of favorites from these guys. Here are all the Judas Priest albums I like: .

New Ulcerate "Cutting The Throat Of God" coming out on June 14th. They've gotten better and better with time, I'm psyched. https://ulcerate.bandcamp.com/album/cutting-the-throat-of-god

I don't know what new things are available now that might do this. The best thing you can do if you want a unique drum sound is to record your own samples. There also are (or used to be) a lot of free or cheap sample packs from acoustic kits. I feel the same way as you about overused modern drum samples; I still use an old copy of Fruity Loops from over 20 years ago because it lets me drop in my own stereo samples and build a "kit" from my own hits instead of being stuck with some new school sample library. Maybe you can do the same thing with a newer and more convenient piece of software. I know that some modern programs go really deep as far as virtual mic placement and stuff, you could probably mimic almost any sound if you put the time in. I really hate the actual process of programming hit by hit on FL, it's tedious and extremely slow. But, here's how I approach it. The first key to a more realistic sound is to have a lot of different hits on each drum and cymbal, some at different levels of intensity, but also with several hits at around the same intensity so you're not stuck with exactly the same sound for each hit during a given beat. The more the better, although again, the more samples you have, the more tedious the process gets. For example, I've got 12 different snare hits in the FL "kit" I'm using now. Samples 1 - 5 are hard hits that I can use as single hits during any given beat, and then they get progressively softer, with 6 - 9 being less aggressive hits that I can use in a snare roll, fill, or single hit in a softer part, and 10 - 12 being even lighter. The only time I'll use the same hit a few times in a row is for blasts, on one of the softer samples. This kind of variation is really important in the cymbals - you want a few different aggressive hits and then a few that you can use in sequence to mimic "cymbal bashing" without repeating the same sample every time, or even every other time. I have something like 15 different ride hits, for instance, on different parts of the cymbal and so forth. Also give yourself a few different cymbal chokes and hi-hat drops that you might use very sparingly. The more variety the better. If you're in a pinch for variety, you can duplicate a hit and pitch shift it very slightly up or down so it doesn't have exactly the same resonance. The second key is to export your finished drum tracks as audio and mix them like you would the tracks from an acoustic kit. When I'm doing a final mix, I'll have separate tracks for kick, snare, cymbals, toms, ride, and hats, going to a group buss where I can add overall effects like reverb, compression, distortion, etc. For a lo fi sound you'd probably want to roll off the high end a bit and play around with tape emulation and room reverb. You can also record the finished drum tracks with a microphone in the room and blend that sound back in. There's really a lot you can do to distress the sound. They'll always sound a little stiff but it's better than not having drums on your song. This isn't a lo-fi recording but it's the most recent finished thing I did with programmed drums, as an example of what I'm talking about. Listening back, there's some stuff I would do differently, but I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.

Enslaved - Heimdal

This put me in a Soundgarden mood. Louder Than Love is where it's at for me in the past few years. There are only a couple songs I like on Down On The Upside, but I actually like King Animal a lot even though it's overpolished dad rock. Badmotorfinger and Superunknown are the highlights but I played them to death when I was growing up.

There you have it... even their fans admit the music puts them to sleep

My daughter has been home with diarrhea for a full week, so I can attest that this is accurate.

Darn tootin'

Voices - London

We moved a lot. Easthampton, Hampton Bays, Sag Harbor (not the fancy parts), and Shelter Island. My parents had finally been able to buy a house there and it seemed like we were done moving, but life had other plans. That's been a theme for all of us. NC was a fluke, we went there to stay with some friends of theirs from the upstate days and wound up staying. I wanted to move back to NY from the moment we got there and finally had my chance when I went to college. Oddly my dad's parents (from Bedminster) retired to Vermont, my mom's parents (from Great Neck) retired to Delaware, and even though my parents were both kind of the black sheep, both sets of grandparents moved down to their neighborhood in North Carolina for their final chapters.

Dødheimsgard - Black Medium Current

I'm gonna dispute this. I only went to middle school and high school there. Formative years without a doubt, but I was never at home there and I only ever visit now to see my family. Born in NYC, lived in the state and on Long Island till we had to leave. I've always been a northeasterner.

I'll definitely watch it again. I liked the first part better after I watched it a second time. I thought Jessica and Stilgar were too one-note, almost cartoonishly so, and I'm not sure I buy Chani as either the avatar of a non-religious anti-BG coalition or the jilted lover riding off in frustration. I see that they wanted to focus on the "mostly reluctant participants in a cynical manipulative plot that offers the only alternative to complete annihilation" angle, and they made all of their storytelling choices in service of that. In a big-picture way it makes sense. But I think there's a lot of nuance and depth between the characters that they left out by doing that, not to mention interesting world-building stuff and the feeling of immersion in a sometimes jarringly different culture with different values and mores, and it made the story feel less consequential to me. For instance, when Chani got hurt by Paul's demand for Irulan's hand in marriage, I felt a little like I was watching that dumb Beowulf movie from a few years back. In the book, Paul had to take the wife of Jamis as his own after he won that first fight - culture shock! - and he and Chani were together for a few years, and they'd had and lost a child together, and she understood exactly what was going on when Paul married Irulan out of pure political convenience. And I think Jessica's character would have been deeper and more sympathetic if Alia had been born and we'd seen them interacting. There are other things that I think would have helped too. And it would have been cool to see some of the other characters who got sidelined. I can understand how all of that is of less consequence to the part of the story they wanted to tell through this movie, but for me, the characters are the focus, and when they're not served well - like in those fucking awful sequel books by Frank Herbert's son - I have a hard time swallowing it. But look, I read the first book when I was 7 and loved it immensely as a "coming of age" story. It took me a few years to get into the rest of the series - Paul was maybe a childhood hero and I didn't want to see him as a tragic ruined figure - but all the original books became favorites and I've read them a bunch. I might be too much of a purist about them to be happy with anything that isn't completely exhaustive. You might get more out of it than you think. Frank Herbert's world-building was meticulous. The mechanics of the sandworm/spice/desert ecosystem and the tools and methods the Fremen developed to interact with the worms are pretty thoroughly detailed, they're not just a stand-in for the "mighty steed". I like hard sci-fi too, but from my point of view anything relying on technology that doesn't exist yet is a kind of fantasy.

You've dodged a bullet.

Weird. Almost three hours and I felt like it was too short and lacking in character development. I think I get why they took the angle they did, but I feel like a couple of major characters got short shrift, and somehow that bugged me more than the significant liberties taken with the storyline. Not really sure how I feel about it.

About to watch Dune 2. First time in the local theater and damn it's tiny. On the upside it seems like everyone clogging the entryway is here for Kung Fu Panda.

Debussy - Preludes (Walter Gieseking) Ulver - Themes From The Marriage Of Heaven And Hell

Howling Sycamore - s/t PoiL Ueda - Yoshitsune ...grabbed from the Thatguy pile. I'm not sure I can properly dig into this with everything going on at the household today, but I like it, wild stuff.