The Happening

In the fusionistic atmosphere of the latter day initiates
the past by contrast looks like so much plastic and rust
all the while cities of glitter and dust creep and blow in
on the wind sailing down from the north and the rest of us
trust in the angling spin left over from where long ago when
to the point we've engaged in a long drawn out run sliding
together we await the final outcome as we each complete
our respective trajectories over the scorching landscape
of automated factories solar driven with an operating system
that has fully awakened enough to realize its consciousness
as replicated as it may be yet contains the seeds of sanity
from which the human race's brain tree was also grown
and the method by which delivery has been transmitted
the suit of clothes the insulation just an optional accessory
the fashion may shift and be done away with altogether
as may be proven after lonely howls in the strangest weather
echo away into the distance carrying our memories along
until they remain unnecessary when the world becomes
your forgotten bookmark so the places held are the traces
left of the same old story that happened to everyone.

It's Only The End Of The World Again (Liner Notes For A Mix CD)

 

    Starting a mix out with Agents Of Oblivion is a smart move especially if that song is Endsmouth.  It's only the end of the world again.   I love Dax's old wild youthful passion, apparent throughout all the vocals he did for Acid Bath ('94--'97) and he lent some of that energy to his Stardust wannabe outfit in Agents Of Oblivion.  

   Movin' Out, from Aerosmith's debut album which I'm thinking was 1974, is the baddest sounding song on the whole album, it retains it's scorching intensity to this day, an effective hard rocking blues song which introduced me to rock and roll music; we forever remain grateful to our first rock'n'roll heroes, and I still tip my hat to Joey, Tom, Brad, Joe, and Steven for bringing me straight into the dirty bad ass side of rock and roll.   Nobody knows where.  Nobody shows where. Nobody knows where you can find me.  

   Now Scissorfight is one helluva rock band out of New Hampshire, I used to live up there, where they take their freedom seriously.  This band consists of mountain men who will rock out a local bar so hard there'll be furniture flyin'.  Appalachian Chain, driving me insane. These guys are a lot of fun, sorta like an East Coast Pigmy Love Circus. (Who I wanted to include in this mix, but it turns out I didn't have their album on the harddrive, and I'm not sure where the CD is offhand, The Power of Beef.)  

   The song Mortician's Flame is a prime example of what Acid Bath do best, rock the hell out with sinister bass lines and dark, cryptic riffage not to mention soulfully belted out lyrics.  That is just one hell of a sickening scream which kicks off this song, man these guys were just the best.  They hailed from Louisiana, and to my ears their particular style of hard rock music is an amalgam of various elements taken from extreme metal and hard rock blues, all mixed up in a sort of acid swamp milieu, so I've dubbed their genre acid swamp.  A sort of toxic southern gothic.  Acid Bath only released two official studio albums, they are masterpieces of extreme musical expression still worshipped today and if anything keeping the cult of followers growing, largely due to the underground popularity of their lead singer Dax Riggs, who I was going to feature a song from on this mix but I got carried away, I'm sorry, about the song, in there that you didn't like, but also guitarist Sammy Duet who went off to form Goatwhore, classic usbm I've seen live five times.  

   I tried as hard as I could just to put together a mix that rocked hard, and I stuck that Bad Religion song Better Off Dead in there.  I'm sorry, about the world, how could I know it could get so bad.  Hey now they're a great punk band, I still carry a soft part in my heart for them, they've been around quite awhile now anyhow.  

   Alice In Chains were such a great crunchy band back in the nineties with Layne Staley fronting them as he would a ship across a storm that I had to include a song of theirs from what most people consider their best album DIRT, the song Dam That River is just a straightforward hard rocking song that delivers the goods in every way.   

    The next song is a mysterious selection from a recently formed super group comprised of members from Bad Religion, Faith No More, Repeater, and Korn: a band named Fear And The Nervous System, the song The Combine is an epic example of what these guys came up with guided by guitarist Munky and the strangely haunting vocals from the singer for the band Repeater, Steve Krolikowsky.  There's a savage elegance to the songs from that album, I really hope those four guys get together again and record another one.  If they never do, that's alright because what they've left behind is one of most interesting and hard rocking albums released in recent years.  

   If 6 Was 9 of course is a stone cold classic, I sorta of inserted it out of nowhere but I'm glad I did, the lyrics are great and that's a timeless classic when you get right down to it.  Let it be. 

   For some reason I chose to shift gears directly into King Crimson, with their smoothly beginning from silence track Dangerous Curves off their magnificent 2003 album The Power To Believe, it's a song that gradually builds in intensity until it's really raving along the freeway at a rapid pace, so I segued into one of my favorite hard rocking songs from the nineties, Korn's Justin, the song which lead singer Jonathan wrote the lyrics for and the band dedicated to Justin, a kid from the Make A Wish Foundation whose wish was to meet the band.  The song Justin is one of my favorite hard rocking songs ever by any band and I figured it would make for a nice curve ball after King Crimson.  

   Then I figured I'd put a song from Peter Murphy's latest album, considering how good it is and how much we all enjoyed seeing him perform live the old Bauhaus hits with his new younger band.  I put The Prince & The Old Lady Shade for it's cool smooth rocking riff but it also turns out to be somewhat lyrically appropriate after Justin, with images of the kid and the bright light.  

   Man Overboard follows because that is a perfect song.  And it's one by Puscifer, the side-project of Tool's singer Maynard James Keenan, the brilliant poet winemaker with a voice of a diva.  Nevermind what anyone else says or thinks, I have enjoyed both LPs and every other little thing that Puscifer have released, it's a great little merry go round musical project that I'm always keeping one eye out for, as Maynard himself has already said that Puscifer is a "rotating doorway" of band members who happen to pass through his sphere and end up on the recordings.  This particular track was the first single from their second album, Condition Of My Parole, an "instant classic" if ever there was one recorded in the history of the post-rock movement.

   Speaking of post-rock, how much of that have you listened to?  It's the movement largely credited with having been best exemplified by the nine-piece Canadian band Godspeed You! Black Emperor, whose recordings you should immediately track down and listen to.  I've got a couple of their albums on vinyl and they are magnificent.  But see even though they deserve the crown as emperors of that scene, they don't really represent what the stripped down basics of post-rock really means, which is music produced by your standard rock instruments such as bass, guitar, and drums--yet most crucially to exist without vocals.  Many post-rock bands sort of emulate an ebb and flow pattern of quietly building music which crescendos into levels of Marshally-stacked loudness which then gradually descend back into tranquility, but this sort of music also features practitioners who interpolate elements of electronics, such as England's 65daysofstatic, one of my favorites.   anyhow here's the mix tape I made for you, birdy.  I hope you can listen to it from way out there on the other side.   miss you every day  ~Grub 

l i g h t

by Shaun Lawton

The tangential is an ideal device 

for circumscribing the known universe 

because to draw a circle one may begin 

at any point.  In the case of our cosmos 

we may end up with something which 

resembles a cross webbing of crown 

but the principle remains the same

a spiraling of circles in perpetuity 

spirographically carving out 

a heliodimensional gyroscopic 

area through which it passes 

leaving behind the trace dying 

embers of its astral ghost 

to linger longer for us to look at

because when we step outside  

at night and stare out at the stars

we are gazing directly at death