FatherAlabaster

Banned for repeated misunderstandings.

Finished the music for a brand new track! Time to record more vocals. I'd love to be all "fuck yeah \m/ vocals!!!!!" but it's honestly always a daunting proposition the first time through a song. I'll be back in a few hours...

Those are some good choices. I've had all the bigger names you mentioned, and I really liked Affligem and Kwak particularly. We don't call them "white" or "life" beer, though! We usually call them by their style names, even here in the states, so a German wheat beer would be a "Weissbier" or "weizen" and a Belgian wheat beer would be a "wit". The Affligem that I've had would be considered a "dubbel". From the same region, I also recall liking Orval and Corsendonk. I'd love to try some of your local beers! One of my favorite things is to find unique flavors and beer styles. I feel pretty lucky to have several good breweries here in NYC, although there are some great West Coast beers that I'd love to be closer to. And I agree, Heineken is pretty terrible.

Alright. First, I'll point out that you're changing the subject. Before, we were talking about things that "couldn't be measured". Now you're talking about things that, you claim, have been measured. Then you're saying that those measurements have been rejected by the scientific community out of fear. To respond to that, I'll say that the "scientific community" as such isn't subject to any form of central control. It's not some big global conspiracy. In certain fields (like drug or weapons research) you can find situations where money or governmental controls override actual results, or common decency, but I don't think that's the norm. Also, you'll find many believers of different stripes within the scientific community. it's not a monolith by any means, and I think you would find a significant number of people who would jump at real evidence of what you're calling the "paranormal". The catholic church, on the other hand, is a global conspiracy, which I don't think they've ever denied; but I have to say that I honestly don't know what you mean by bringing them into it. Do you mean that they have an interest in the status quo, and are using their power to suppress the evidence? I'm sure that if there was proof of an afterlife, they'd love that to pieces, unless it proved the Hindus were right after all:D. If, on the other hand, you're saying that fear of catholic ascendancy is keeping researchers from admitting the truth about this evidence, eh... I think you'd find plenty of catholic researchers that would be very happy to trumpet that stuff to the skies. Then, you're talking about "elementals" (by whatever name - "demons" works for me too!). Not sure if you mean beings that inhabit physical bodies, or things made out of "energy" that aren't supposed to have a corporeal form. Given that I think there's plenty that we don't understand, I could accept either idea, in principle, but I'd give it the same credence I'd give the concept of a soul, which is to say, not much: in the former case, you say that there's a little person of some sort, that is somehow acting on my brain to produce those physical effects which turn into thoughts, actions, etc. If that's my soul, then I suppose that little person is the real me; if it's an "elemental" I guess you'd call it possession! although I'm not sure I see a practical distinction between the two. In the latter case, I mean, sure, what physical effects have they had? Feelings count - feelings are physical occurrences within the body. Thoughts, dreams, somnambulism, dead babies, and broken windows all count too. Then I'd be curious to see what it is about those events that leads you (or these researchers) to believe that they were caused by active agents, which is to say, thinking beings of some description. The basic point here is that the burden of proof is on you. If the best explanation that someone can give for a phenomenon is that it must have been caused by a thinking being that can't be reliably detected by any instrument or sense that we possess, and yet manifests physically in some way, yet at the same time manages to act with complete disregard for whatever physical limitations the universe seems to impose on everything else... well. To me it sounds like a failure of imagination, in the same way that farmers might have used to think bad crops were a direct result of something they'd done to anger their gods, rather than, say, potato blight. Last, to show evidence - for the sake of argument let's call it compelling evidence! - of thinking beings that don't fit within our usual physical parameters (and let me digress for a moment and say that I'm a big Star Trek dork and I think something like that would be really cool)... anyway... to show evidence of these beings has nothing to do with whether or not there is an "afterlife". They are two separate issues. It's possible to conflate them by talking about a soul that somehow exists outside of the body, and claiming (hoping) that, if it can exist outside of the body, then there's a chance it could continue to exist after the body is gone, to which I'd say: not a foregone conclusion! And yet, most people the world over believe in something like this, including a lot of scientists and philosophers, and they've brought their instruments and their logic and reason and poetry and all their other intellectual faculties to bear on it for millenia, and they haven't shown it to be true. At this point in the conversation, some people throw up their hands and say, "it's just not knowable by science!" (Gould's idea of "non-overlapping magisteria", for instance.) My original point when I got into this was that that whole attitude is science, just science with limits. It was science when the Greeks thought testicles acted as weights on the male vocals cords, making our voices lower, and it was science when doctors believed in humors and vapors, or formulated the principles of Ayurvedic medicine. They believed these things for reasons. Those were later shown to be invalid reasons for incorrect beliefs, and there's a lesson in humility to take away from that, because we don't know everything. We might be talking past one another because you misunderstand what I mean by science. What I mean is nothing more or less than the attempt to understand the world around us. I am an atheist because that's where my attempt has led me. I can't call something "supernatural" or "paranormal", because I think that implies that we have a full understanding of the natural and normal, so much so that we can just say something isn't "of our realm" or "doesn't conform to known laws", when to me that sounds like ignorant arrogance in the face of a problem we haven't figured out. It's like failing to match up the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, refusing to count them, saying that they're not all there, and throwing the box away. The people who can usually be counted on to say they have all the answers (or that their god does, which isn't much of a difference as far as I'm concerned) are religious people like the guy that prompted Viking to start this thread. So, I don't usually get into these conversations, even online, because they're long and typically unsatisfying! You and I aren't researchers, and at the end of the conversation we can agree to disagree, and hang out on the forum and talk about music and have a good time. But in principle, that's not good enough. I'd like to know more. Blake called the body "the chief immanence of soul in this age". I think it's a nice metaphor, and that he got it backwards.

a mashup: Assuck - Anticapital and Jerry Cantrell - Degradation Trip

Wow, I actually really liked that. Great gloomy lo-fi mood. 8.5/10 Funny - right in the middle of the song, my kid pressed a button on his toy keyboard and it started playing a little tune in exactly the same key. It fit really well. I had to walk over to the computer and double check it wasn't part of the track. Reminded me a lot of this - released the same year: Frf3hhNIwLs

Again - I'd call that evidence of something peculiar about our way of thinking. A tendency, throughout history, to attribute events that we don't understand to the working of an active intellect. Having evolved as social creatures, it makes sense that we'd look for personal motives behind every occurrence. I grew up with the Hindu pantheon, but even as a child I started to see it as a metaphor. At some point it wasn't a useful metaphor anymore.

Cheers! I was never huge on thrash, but a standout for me is that Forced Entry album, "As Above, So Below" - ever get into them?

Excellent. I'll check out Negative Plane. Castevet is like black metal with an Isis twist - I'll have to find the CD again, my hard drive died a while back and I'm still rebuilding my collection. I agree with everything you said about Ulver. Bergtatt has been one of the prides of my physical CD collection for at least 15 years at this point. Rotting Christ's "Triarchy" was an accidental discovery of mine in 1996 and became one of my biggest influences as a musician for a while, so that'll always be my favorite, and I apologize, my mistake - Non Serviam is the one with the out of tune guitars! And still, some really great songs. I have to say that "Triarchy" is the last one of theirs that I liked. I wouldn't call it black metal, more "dark metal"... but I can't be going too far down that subgenre-label-rabbithole. I hear what you're saying about North From Here, which is why it's a tough one to categorize. Easier to categorize is Disfear - definitely NOT black metal - but listen to the track "Det Sista Kriget" and see if you can't hear some Darkthrone or Bathory. Darkthrone, by the way, I liked all the way up through "Sardonic Wrath", but I have to say that, by a slim margin, "Transilvanian Hunger" tops my Darkthrone list. I hate to have to admit this, but I never liked "De Mysteriis". I couldn't get behind the vocals. I wanted to like it. I tried really hard. I prefer Maniac. What can I say... And to say that a lot of these bands hit their stride later on isn't to say their albums belong on a black metal list! A lot of Bethlehem's later material sounds more like Rammstein. I like some of Ihsahn's solo stuff but it's not black metal either. For troo kvlt laughs, have you heard Ulver's split with Immortal? It sucks, it's worse than "Goatlord" in terms of production, but fun to hear anyway.

That's exactly why it's worth real study. Dennett explains his concept far better than I could. "Consciousness Explained" is worth reading for argument's sake if you're into thick wordy stuff' date=' even if you wind up thinking it's either wrong or irrelevant at the end (I think neither; I love that book). But the point, which you've taken, is that individuals' perceptions can be different, their interpretations of those perceptions can be different, and their memories of them can vary wildly in accuracy, strength, etc. - so the individual's reports of their own experiences are treated as [i']one set of data. There can, and should, be others, like "what brain events took place while subject A was reporting feeling X? What about subject B?" It's a lot like classic experiments in neuroscience. (I imagine that as a law student, you're used to dealing with adversarial subjects; we'd want to assume they weren't lying, but if they were, the question would become "why did A choose to lie about X?") Self-reporting is widely used in experiments to begin with, and it's not worth disregarding in this one special case - in fact it might be eminently useful. To establish a library of these reactions, to really map it out with a lot of people instead of just saying "we're all different, end of story", would be a worthy undertaking. To come at it from a different angle - the question of the "soul". The brain is a physical object, and physical, chemical/electrical things happen in it that precede our actions and respond to stimuli, and those things comprise our thoughts (unless you follow someone like Sheldrake, who is A) guilty of wishful thinking and full of shit, IMHO). In any case it follows that the "soul," however immeasurable or indescribable it might be, must have some physical ramification, some point of contact - if it exists, it's our tether to the metaphysical. They have been looking for this point of contact for centuries with no success (the pineal gland, anyone?). Not to say it won't be found - the odds aren't very good - but the basic point of both of my little arguments here is that we're not up against things that are unknowable in principle. We're up against things we haven't figured out; we're up against things we haven't figured out how to figure out. I don't think that evolution has gifted us with the miraculous ability to comprehend the totality of existence, but there are a lot of easy questions in here, and I'm betting the hard questions will get broken down into easier ones, and eventually disappear. It's far more interesting/illuminating to me to wonder why we as humans are susceptible to metaphysical thinking, than to just accept A) the fact of metaphysical thinking, and some people's insistence on their interpretation of things they may or may not have actually experienced, as actual evidence of a metaphysical plane. All it's evidence of, really, is that a lot of people think a certain way. And not too much light has been shed on that. Saying it's "unknowable" is a copout. Saying it's "non-linear" is semantics. We have to try harder.

Hedningarna - Hippjokk not metal - semi-traditional Scandinavian music with some electronic elements, late 90s era. If you dig trad music, check this album out. Good for dancing around bonfires.

Gotcha, no worries. Send me a PM and we'll get the email/dropbox thing sorted out. Working on my new album at the moment, so recording time is a bit limited, but I'm happy to give it a listen and see if I have anything to offer.

Guitars too sharp. Too much compression on vocals. Must redo the mix with my tin ears and cheap equipment. Keep plugging away. Ancient samurai say: Cry in the dojo, laugh on the battlefield.

I prefer the Lionheart (NYC based medieval a capella group!!!) version from their album "Paris 1200". But this song. Despite being non-religious. S7Ax2yl2f6U

Wasn't sure what to expect from this, but I liked it. A little too simplistic for my taste, but quirky enough to be interesting. 7/10 Looks like there's a linked ad in this video, annoying, don't know what's up with that. But: YepbZ90amLY

Chris Cornell, Grutle Kjellson from Enslaved, Mikael Akerfeldt, Jonas Renske, Garm (Ulver), Michael Gira (Swans), Phil Anselmo, Maynard from Tool. Hansi Kursch has an amazing voice but I really can't stand Blind Guardian. Pasi Koskinen for his singing on Amorphis albums Elegy and Tuonela and his screams on the Ajattara stuff - the music is a bit bland but his screams are intense. For even harsher stuff, I love Jeppe Lerjerud (old Disfear frontman), Jon Chang (Discordance Axis), Edgy 59 (Burning Witch) and Alan Dubin (Khanate). At the moment I'm really diggin Cedric Bixler-Zavala on ATDI's "Relationship of Command" and Mars Volta's first two albums. My fuck but he can sing. Bit of an acquired taste.

Odd to see so many shout-outs for Hammett and none for Hetfield. Oh, let me add: Chris DeGarmo (from Queensryche, kids). I didn't like "Hear In The Now Frontier" AT ALL but they really 100% shat the bed after he left. His solos still inspire me to come up with guitar parts.

I don't know what you mean by "awesome vocals" but if you like sort of gruff, dark screaming and kinda doomy guitars, October Tide's first two albums are amazing. "Rain Without End" and "Grey Dawn". It's Jonas and Fred from Katatonia, BITD. No clean vox but a surprisingly mellow vibe. I really don't like the new album they came out with but those two are pure gold. 86avke300zg

^I think they drove that car off the cliff together. I can't even listen to more than four songs on the black album. In a word, ugh. Unhear? Anything by Despised Icon, Whitechapel, or Job For A Cowboy. Machine Head. Coal Chamber. Music is better off without you.

I don't know if I put Type O in the doom category. They're too gothed out for that. Definitely in my top ten bands of any genre. Doom for me is Burning Witch and Khanate. The self-titled Khanate is harrowing. And another shout-out for Swans - Body To Body era prefigured a lot of doom metal.

I'm not a pagan, but I used to hang out with a bunch of pagans when I lived in Raleigh. Some of my favorite people. I have a Mjollnir on my keychain, probably had it for about 15 years now - the one thing that hasn't changed. And yes, I still have an impulse to offend people when I get accosted by their opinions about god. Growing up in the South, if nothing else, made me hate sappy-ass passive-aggressive christian pandering. Trying to keep it cool now that I'm all over the neighborhood with my kid, but sometimes nothing but "Fuck Off" seems to work.