THE INNER WORKINGS OF NO CLEAN SINGING

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Mar 152012
 

I’ve been peppered with requests from our vast legion of fanatic fans to provide details about what goes on behind the scenes at NO CLEAN SINGING, begging for insights into how we’re able to produce such consistently amazing content on a daily basis. So, in this post I’m going to tell you.

Okay, “peppered” may be a slight exaggeration. Actually, to be brutally honest, no one asked for this post. I just wasn’t able to listen to any new music in time to write about music this morning, and I usually try to listen to the music I write about (on average, I’ve listened to what I’m reviewing approximately 75% of the time). So I’m doing this instead.

In a nutshell, NCS runs with the precision of a fine Swiss watch — one that went down with The Titanic and has been lying in an ocean trench for 100 years. (And did you know that April 15 will be the 100th anniversary of the sinking of The Titanic?) We have a “staff” of regular writers (Andy Synn, BadWolf, and The MadIsraeli) who send in pieces on a schedule, the schedule being defined as whenever they feel like it. Usually, I don’t know what they’re doing (because I don’t “assign” reviews) or when they will send in a piece. Sometimes they tell me they’re working on a review of XYZ. Most of the time, an article just shows up in my e-mail.

Take yesterday, for example. Yesterday, I found out that Andy Synn is working on a review of Naglfar’s new album, Teras. How did I find out? I happened to see an exchange between Andy and one of his friends on Facebook. That was good timing, since I was only about 90% finished with my own review of Teras. I printed mine and used it for toilet paper. I think it reads better now, but I’ll probably use Andy’s anyway.

Last night I also happened to engage in a brief FB chat with TheMadIsraeli and found out that he was just about finished with a review of the new Ovid’s Withering EP. That was good, because I hadn’t written anything for our first post this morning. It showed up in my e-mail not long after — along with four other reviews. Continue reading »

LIKE TEARS IN RAIN

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Mar 102012
 

Blade Runner is not a perfect movie. Among its flaws, Harrison Ford, playing the lead role of Deckard, was the weakest link in a cadre of actors who were otherwise everything you could have wanted. But it’s a movie that makes a deep impression, or at least it does if you’re at the right age, at the right time of your life when you see it. At the right time, it seems profound.

How long do we have? We don’t know. No one knows. It’s a shame we won’t live . . . but who does? A blade runner, a hunter of rogue replicants, of skinjobs, realizes too late that life is precious, even artificial life. He realizes, as we all will eventually, the ultimate tragedy in the loss of a lifetime of unique experiences as all those moments pass away and doves fly off in the rain. Maybe he realizes that he, too, is a replicant. But does it really matter? They’re only accelerated versions of us, their energy draining away to the vanishing point before they’re ready. And who is ever ready?

A video artist named Francois Vautier extracted 167,819 frames from Blade Runner‘s final-cut version and assembled them into a gigantic virtual wall of images — a square of approximately 60,000 pixels on one side alone. He then created a virtual camera as a roving observer of the mosaic, passing over the frames in a compressed version of the movie itself. If you’re a Blade Runner worshipper, as I am, it’s a cool thing to see. Continue reading »

SHAMISEN ROCK

 Off Topic, Phro's Posts, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  26 Responses »
Mar 052012
 

(You can’t say we don’t try to broaden your musical horizons here at NCS, but today’s guest post by Phro may push them farther than we ever have before.)

Well, there’s been a lot of talk recently about Celtic/bagpipe metal around these here parts. Which is pretty fucking awesome, if I may be so bold as to force my opinion on you like a political advertisement. Nothing wrong with a little sack in your metal, right? (Yeah, that’s the best I have right now…don’t expect anything too funny from this.)

Anyway, all this “traditional instruments doing dirty things with my metal behind closed doors and having babies that clearly are far more awesome than simply genetics should allow” got me thinking about a traditional instrument that I love: the shamisen. (Click here to get some Wikiknowledge dropped on your ass.)

Now, I know every FrownyFaceTrveCvltMetalHeadOfDoom out there thinks his or her favorite thing is the most metal thing of all, so that’s not what I’m going to say. However, if you don’t find yourself rocking (at least just a little) to some good tsugaru-jamisen, I’d say. . . well, I’d say this music probably isn’t for you and that’s tots cool. Seriously. Tots. Cool.

Before we really get started, I’d just like to explain very briefly what the fuck a shamisen is. A lot of people describe it as a Japanese guitar, which is just stupid. I think “Japanese lute” is the most commonly accepted description, but I prefer to think of it like a banjo. (They sound pretty similar to me.) Anyway, they have three strings, a long, thin neck, and a small box body.

Depending on the kind of shamisen, the form and size will be different.The Okinawan shamisen is smaller and the body is usually round and made of snake skin. The “standard” shamisen is about a 3 or 4 feet long with a body of about 10 inches which looks like a box. (It is a box, but the top and bottom are covered with animal skin.) The tsugaru-jamisen is basically a bigger version of the standard one.

Important note: there are no frets and the damn things go out of tune like a drunken sailor, so players are often re-tuning between songs. The largest string also has a natural reverb to it, so it’s the only acoustic instrument I know of that has built-in distortion. (I could just be stupid. Let us know how stupid in the comments below!)

Alright, so, today, for your totally-not-really-all-that-metal-but-kinda-metal entertainment, I’m going to be presenting some shamisen rocking. Pull on your hakama, throw some sen in your wallet, and let’s get this matsuri going. Continue reading »

HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY MOTHERFUCKERS

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Feb 142012
 

Love is grand and all that, but you still need to keep your priorities straight.

Women need to keep their priorities straight, too. More about that after the jump.

Here we are, with another highly commercialized holiday, the principle object of which is to get you to show your love by spending money. And of course, nothing says “love” like spending money, and nothing measures the depth of your love more accurately than the amount of money you spend.

Being tolerant, being willing to sacrifice to the needs of someone else, shutting your yap and listening for a change, biting down on your temper when you’d selfishly like to have a good explosion, admiring and appreciating the person you’re closest to, remembering how much life would probably suck if you were alone again (and showing it) — that’s all shit. Buying gifts is where it’s at.

Apart from giving retailers yet another excuse to sell you their wares, Valentine’s Day has lots of other pluses and minuses. In the minus column, instead of providing an excuse for being more than usually romantic, it can become a brutal downer if you’re alone, especially if you’re still hurting from the pain of a recent break-up (or even an old one that just won’t leave your memories alone).

So your buddy Islander has some advice for you lonely hearts out there. In fact, I’m taking this occasion to answer some of the many e-mails I receive from people seeking advice in matters of the heart. Continue reading »

MEGAUPLOAD’S SHUT-DOWN: THE FALLOUT BEGINS

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Jan 232012
 


Last week, U.S. law enforcement authorities convinced a federal judge in Virginia to shut down the Megaupload file-sharing site pending a criminal trial of its owner, “Kim Dotcom”, and other employees on charges of criminal copyright infringement. Working in cooperation with the U.S. Department of Justice, New Zealand police arrested Dotcom at his Auckland mansion, seized millions of dollars worth of expensive cars, and froze bank accounts holding $11 million in cash. The U.S. will now try to extradite Dotcom to the U.S. to stand trial.

A couple days ago, I wrote an article for NCS trying to set out the facts about why the government went after Megaupload so aggressively and what laws the government has charged Doctom with violating — they didn’t need SOPA or PIPA to do it. I also offered some opinions, the main one being that the Megaupload shutdown really doesn’t have anything to do with freedom of speech or censorship and instead has a lot more to do with temporarily impairing our ability to get something for nothing. I also made this prediction:

“If this case is successful, we will likely see a severe short-term restriction on our ability to download albums for free — because other file-hosting companies will be taking more aggressive steps to prevent the uploading and downloading of copyrighted content. In fact, they’re probably taking steps to do that right now.”

Well, sho’ nuff. Today, the FileSonic on-line file storage site has terminated the ability of users to share files among themselves. The site now sports a banner on its home page stating: “All sharing functionality on FileSonic is now disabled.  Our service can only be used to upload and retrieve files that you have uploaded personally.” Continue reading »

THE MEGAUPLOAD SHUT-DOWN: FACT AND FICTION

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Jan 212012
 

Kim Dotcom and his pink cadillac.

Lots of people I know, including some of the people who write for NCS, are up in arms over the U.S. government’s shutdown of the Megaupload file-sharing site earlier this week. It’s being condemned by lots of metalheads as a clampdown on the freedom of the internet, a violation of free speech, a virulent form of censorship, and a sign of worse things to come. I’m sure part of the reason why the reaction has been so intense is because of simultaneous efforts by fuckheads in Congress to pass those SOPA and PIPA bills we wrote about a few days ago.

Does it suck that Megaupload has been shut down? If you’re a downloader, hell yes it sucks. If you’re an artist who uses the site as a convenient way to freely spread your art to reviewers and fans, hell yes it sucks. If you’re someone who is doing legitimate file sharing, and your uploaded files on Megaupload are now in limbo, fucken-A, it blows.

But is the shutdown really some kind of tyrannical trampling on freedom of speech? Nah, I don’t think so. But before we get to opinions, let’s start with some facts. I could be wrong, but it seems like it’s better to develop opinions after you have some facts instead of just taking someone else’s word for it. At the end of this post, I’ll give you the sources of the facts as I understand them, along with a copy of the government’s indictment of Megaupload so you can see exactly the basis of this prosecution. Continue reading »

HAPPY NEW YEAR MOTHERFUCKERS

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Dec 312011
 

I was going to wait ’til after midnight here in Cascadia to post this, but what the fuck. It’s already after midnight everywhere in the world except the Americas. So, on behalf of all your embarrassing friends at NCS, I want to wish everyone out there a Happy New Year. May 2012 be better for you than the year just ended. Take care of yourself, look after your friends, and don’t let the bastards get you down.

And yeah, I know what that photo looks like. We do like our massive ejaculations here in Seattle. If you’d prefer a less ejaculatory photo, I like the one after the jump, too. It has pretty colors. There are also three  songs after the jump, including a brand new version of the New Year’s traditional featuring lead guitars by Jeff Loomis. Rock on. Continue reading »

LOVE & THEFT

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Dec 162011
 


An e-mail to me from Ben C. yesterday afternoon that I didn’t see until this morning: “If you haven’t tripped balls yet today, this should do the trick.”

Indeed, it did.  Just too amazing not to share.

WELL SHIT. THE WORLD MAY END IN 2012 BUT WE’LL GET TO SEE MIB-3 FIRST.

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Dec 122011
 

Hot buttered damn! Until this morning, I had no idea this was on the way.  I may smile the whole rest of this day. I figured you could use a big fuckin’ smile on your face, too.

So many good moments from this franchise, and so many good lines. E.g.: “People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it. Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you’ll know tomorrow.”

That is all.

K3LOID (AND OTHER MEANDERINGS)

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Dec 102011
 

Last weekend I departed from our usual focus on metal with a piece on a forthcoming movie (“John Carter”) based on Edgar Rice Burroughs’ classic series of sci-fi books set on Barsoom (the Martian word for Mars). That seemed to generate a fair amount of interest, and although I don’t plan to post about movies or books on any kind of regular basis, I got an e-mail about something else sci-fi-related that has set me off again. So here we go.

The e-mail (from a reader named Ben) pointed me to a web site about something called K3LOID. K3LOID is a sci-fi short film by a Spanish outfit called Big Lazy Robot VFX (“BLR”), based on Eliezer S. Yudkowsky’s Artificial Intelligence Box Experiment (more about that later). Coincidentally, BLR did the visual effects for an amazing short film called “The Gift” that we featured in a THAT’S METAL! post almost a year ago (and if you haven’t seen that, definitely go here and watch it).

All that’s available about K3LOID at the moment is a trailer, which you can see after the jump (and I’m actually not positive that there will ever be anything but this trailer, though I hope a film itself will come to fruition, because both the visuals in the trailer and the concept behind the film are cool).

Based on the trailer, and before I found out about BLR’s involvement, I thought this was a Russian sci-fi film (you’ll see why). That got me thinking about both Russian sci-fi movies and Russian sci-fi novels. I’m certainly no expert in either of those genres, but I remembered really liking a book called Solaris by Stanislaw Lem and the 1972 Russian movie made from that novel (directed by Andrey Tarkovskiy), which captured the sense of solitude, profound mystery, and utter strangeness of the mood and the events captured in the book. If you look, you’ll find Solaris on plenty of internet lists as one of the best sci-fi films ever made. Continue reading »

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