Dec 222015
 

Misantrof 8th Antichristmas cover

 

I got far enough ahead on readying today’s year-end lists and album premiere for posting that I actually found some time to go surfing through the interhole and the NCS in-box in search of new things. Here are a few of the items I found. I’m saving some others for Christmas Day, because I feel a personal obligation to ruin the holiday as best I can.

MISANTROF ANTI-CHRISTMAS

Speaking of ruining the holiday, Misantrof ANTIRecords, the (intentionally) non-profit label masterminded by Carpathian Forest’s Daniel Vrangsinn) is once again giving us a hellish present. For the 8th year in a row, the label is releasing the Holy Fucking Antichristmas Compilation. And day by day, they’ve been adding fragments to the cover art for the comp. What you see above is the nearly complete picture as it appears today on Misantrof’s Facebook page (here). Continue reading »

Jan 232014
 

(Our Denver-based friend and writer Mike Yost, who remains our friend despite that sportzball thingie that’s being played on Feb 2, wrote the following piece, which I should have posted 6 weeks ago. It originally appeared at Mike’s own blog here. Do you listen to music when you write?)

As an author, I listen to a wide variety of music while I write — from metal to electronic ambient  to classical music.  Camille Saint-Saëns’ Danse Macabre (Dance of Death) is one of my favorites.  The composition was inspired by one of Saint-Saëns’ own poems where death plays a violin at the stroke of midnight surrounded by skeletons dancing in their shrouds.  Pretty damn metal.

Chuck Palahniuk (author of Fight Club) once said in an interview that he prefers to draft novels in the waiting areas of emergency rooms, feeding off the noise and drama unfolding all around him.  Hemingway is often attributed with the quote: “Write drunk; edit sober,” which I often do in noisy bars downing pint after pint of fermented liquid happiness.  But several authors I work with can only pen the future great American masterpiece in complete silence.

For me, silence stifles my ability to write.  It’s deafening.  In truth, silence is really fucking distracting.  It opens the black iron gates to that cacophony of shrill voices in my mind that come crawling out of the obsidian that is my subconscious—their pointed fangs and claws flashing white in the darkness just before sinking deep into my trembling eyeballs.

And it’s not easy to write with bleeding eyeballs. Continue reading »