NEWS: World-Famous Surrealist Writes Me Lovely Review For "Dank Themes"

My old buddy and ultra-brilliant moustachioed collagey surrealist Xtian finally finished my book of horrible short stories "Dank Themes", and wrote me this very lovely review.  Was so nice to read it!  We can spend days, weeks, months, trapped down the well of our own experiences, so it was reassuring to read that, YES, some of the concepts and people and stories that I hurl out of my own well are making it over the edge and splashing down into others'.  Thank fuck!  

Here, this is what he said:    

"Mat Blackwell is a friend and collaborator, so it breaks my heart to say, that THIS BOOK HAS NO SPACESHIPS IN IT. If there is one criteria I need in a good book, it's a spaceship. His previous work, the "romance-for-blokes-but-with-a-twist" novel "BEEF", was in fact a sci-fi of sorts - with no spaceships. His multi-award winning work for TV and the internationally acclaimed (and awarded) comedy series "Bruce" has no spaceships. How long can this go on, Mat?

So let's take a look at the damage instead - and damage it is. These are not your highbrow literary stories, a lot of these are covered in mud and blood and even shit - and they sit on your top shelf. These are provocations from the bowels of the brain - some of the scenarios will make you frown or even pinch your nose. (The book comes not with an introduction by Paul McDermott [DAAS], but a WARNING). But you persevere - why? Because none of it is for cheap laughs or just to be the Dennis the Menace of literature. From the get-go you find that Mat has something to say with each story, and not only to say, but to get you thinking about it. I'm not spoiling things here by revealing that every story is followed by a "Page left blank for purposes of introspection/ consideration" - and you don't feel like he's being pretentious. Every story is visceral enough to leave you with your head-spinning - not necessarily disgusted or shocked, but definitely pondering. And might I add a lot of these stories are very short, so to hit that hard that quick - that's a fecking artform.

The highlight of the entire work is the level of obscenity-meets-philosophy, delivered so well in a world so easily offended and distracted by taking offence. It's not that Mat is not worried about offending, but like all provocative philosophers he "goes there", and worries more about being misunderstood, or even ignored for all the wrong reasons.

This collection also contains two of the most heart-breaking stories I've ever read, but then there are those that make you laugh out loud and spew a little and then ponder the inescapable logic of it all. How does a man who shuns spaceships in a book (even though he's actually into that stuff) do that?!

Just be glad he does. An absolutely splendid collection of stories - not one I could fault - and highly recommend. Well done, Mat."

 

REVIEW: Amalgamated - Solvé et Coagula

Weirdness abounds, in my favourite Amalgmated release so far.  Review written for Heathen Harvest, meticulously monitored by Sage Weatherford.

"Rather than striving to capture a particular nostalgic vibe, these pieces are busy using old tools to explore new ground. Each side is a seamless flow of sections and subsections without any clear divisions, so I honestly have no idea what bit goes by what name. Indeed, because neither side is clearly labelled, I can’t even say precisely which names refer to which stuff on which side. Which is fine, of course, because an experience like this isn’t about the labels, is it? It’s about the vibes, daddy-o—the vibes."

Read the whole review here! 

 

REVIEW: Little Songs of the Mutilated!

This is not an album review, but a review of a series of albums.   It's the old Exquisite Corpse surrealist game, but musical rather than visual.  This was a series that I loved so much that, after I wrote the article, I wrote to the honcho running the series and asked him if I could join in on the fun.  And he said yes!  So now, even though I was completely unassociated with the collective at the time of writing, now I've actually played a live gig with them and am featured on the next album to be released (but still unreleased at this stage).  Cool and exciting world!

Review written for Heathen Harvest, and probably edited by the tireless and unflagging Sage Weatherford.

"The diversity of sounds here is amazing, ranging from synth-driven electroscapes to percussion-heavy abstract neo-shamanism, and from full-on noise to cut-up media shenanigans to reverb-drenched plink-plonkiness, and everything in between. Yet, this breadth of palette is restrained—and made even more powerful—by the game-structure, which sees ten or fifteen seconds of one fragment directly influence and inspire the next, meaning that these pieces each flow with a beautiful fluidity. Tonal washes rise up out of beds of clanking, noise sections erupt up like lava from landscapes of tinkling, acoustic sounds emerge from a fog of synthetic ones, and all of it is perfectly natural. The Game framework of these pieces means that every sound that occurs makes sense in the context of the previous ones, as players take the sounds of the artists before them and warp them into something new–and, because of the strict time limits placed on each piece, this all happens in the space of a fucking pop-song." 

Read the actual full review here!

 

REVIEW: The Cray Twins - The Pier

If you dig distorted field recordings (and who doesn't?), this may be the project for you. Review written for the staunchly diverse Heathen Harvest, and lovingly edited by the sleep-deprived Sage Weatherford.

"Honestly, it’s hard to go wrong with a combination of dark-ambient drones and field-recording textures ... and the Cray Twins do everything right on this release. There’s a great sense of restraint here, with everything given the room it requires for maximum evocation, and there’s never too much going on at once. It’s full when it needs to be full, but it’s empty when that’s what it needs; when focus is required to notice the textures in their fullest detail; when the ear zooms in like some kind of aural microscope to properly sense the small changes in tone or grain that the Cray Twins want us to appreciate. Like they say in the press release, ‘we make instruments out of the landscape’. But it’s not like this is all tiny sounds and minimal ‘sound art’ stuff:  The Cray Twins also know when to crush us beneath the weight of distortion."

Read the full review here!

REVIEW: Hattifnatter - Barometrizm

 

Review written, as all of them have been so far, for the increasingly eclectic Heathen Harvest, and meticulously edited by the tireless (and perhaps superhuman) Sage Weatherford.

"Crackling, dripping, pulsing, rippling, burbling, creaking, whooshing: this album has it all, layered with distant chiming, granulated voice noises, bowed things, and tidal ebbs and flows of tones, both warm and cold. It’s not quite ‘dark ambient’ or its hippy cousin ‘meditation music’, but it definitely sits (strangely, ghostly, mysteriously) in that same spectral ballpark."

Read the full review here!

REVIEW: Twilight Circus and Edward Ka-Spel - 800 Saints in a Day

A review for Heathen Harvest, about the strange pop-weirdness of Twilight Circus and Edward Ka-Spel.  Really not sure where this music should live.  Edited by Sage "Overworked But Happy" Weatherford.

"You never know exactly what the next track will bring, nor what direction a single piece will go in. The starts are rarely like the ends, and there are few signposts along the way to guide you. A piece might start with a tribal-style bongo loop, travel along a path that seems almost Krautrockish, and end with a noise that is somewhere between a deflating balloon and a saxophone solo. ... In nearly every piece on this album, I found myself making assumptions about ‘what kind of song this was’, only to have my assumptions completely pissed on, and found myself going from self-assured critical superiority to slack-jawed awe in the space of minutes, again and again."

Read the whole review here:

Twilight Circus and Edward Ka-Spel - 800 Saints in a Day

REVIEW: Lustmord - Things That Were

A review for Heathen Harvest, about the perhaps-better-forgotten release of Lustmord's early works, "Things That Were".  Neatly edited by Sage Weatherford.

"Perhaps I should be trying to contextualise it all properly by pointing out that, at the time, this music was probably quite influential and powerful and worth listening to. But at the same time, here we are in 2017, and saying ‘hey, listen to this, it probably sounded awesome in the eighties’ isn’t really much use to anybody."

Read the whole review here:

Lustmord - Things That Were

REVIEW: Andrew Liles - Animal Magick

 

Animal Magick!

A review for Heathen Harvest, about the wacky magickal misadventures of Andrew Liles.  Animal sounds meet Dadaist vaudeville meets Subgenius-style chaos magick.  Unlike much else I've ever heard.  Precisely edited by Sage Weatherford.

"Animal Magick feels utterly deliberate and complete, which honestly makes it all the stranger. The whole album flows together beautifully:  with each short piece being made of strange isolated ideas smashed together, it’s often impossible to know where one track has ended and the next begun. To give you an idea, the second track alone (‘Pink Toed Ungulates’) includes:  no-holds-barred goose honks; a one-man-band calliope-style section, overlaid with guttural bestial grunting; a section of minimal keyboard meets bird calls; a few bursts of snarling growls, forward and/or backwards; completely asynchronous hand drums; various unrelated peeps and poops; a frenzied tribal section; weird moments of Indian or African stringed drone instruments; maybe two seconds of flute; rising and falling synth noises; and one small moment of classic mountain-peak yodeling."

Read the whole review here:

Andrew Liles - Animal Magick

REVIEW: Todd Anderson-Kunert - Almost There

 

A review of Australian sound-artist Todd Anderson-Kunert's piece made from musical vibrators and the moaning of people who listened to them with bodyparts other than their ears.  A fascinating idea, perfectly performed, that brings to mind a world of ponderings.  Reviewed for Heathen Harvest and tenderly edited by Sage Weatherford.

"On one hand, there’s the ear experience, but I found myself constantly re-evaluating the quality of the music in terms of how the vibrations themselves, divorced from the hearing of them, might feel when applied to very different organs. A high tone might be painful, but transferred away from the act of hearing has entirely different qualities; a low tone might sound ominous, but feel amazing. Given that this piece was created with the physical feelings in mind, rather than simply to be heard, it kind of has to be judged in a different way to a regular musical release. But, of course, at the same time, it has been released as a musical release to be listened to, and not as a series of specialised art dildos to be felt..."

Read the review here:

Todd Anderson-Kunert - Almost There

 

REVIEW: Merzbow - Life Performance

A review of Merzbow's rerelease from 198fucking5, when I was still in primary school.  It's Merzbow.  And it's interesting.  Written for Heathen Harvest, and precisely edited by Mr Sage Weatherford.

"This music has not aged one moment, while everything around it has shifted and slid through cold wars and cocaine, wrinkle cream and botox. When these clanking and crunching monstrosities (all entitled ‘Nil Vagina Mail Action’, for no reason that is clear to anyone but Masami Akita) burst through one’s speakers, they have absolutely no idea what year it is, and really don’t care about context; these things live in their own universe, with their own timeline, and only ever intersect with our cosmology if and when their demented creator deems it appropriate."

Full review HERE.

Nice Review of 'Beef" by K.L. Allendoerfer

You've gotta love it when someone describes your book with phrases like "I don’t think I’ve ever read a book quite like this before, and I doubt I will again" and "the best of what science fiction and eco fiction have to offer".   At least, I gotta love it.  Woohoo!

Read the full review HERE:

'BEEF' REVIEWED BY K.L. ALLENDOERFER 

REVIEW: Stephen Palke - Evolutionary Exploration Sequence

Strange songless pieces of art-noise that completely tickled my phant'sy.  Review artisanally crafted for Heathen Harvest periodical, editorially embetterised by Sage Weatherford.

"Each track here takes a singular theme—a particularly nice series of synth sounds, for instance, or an aurally pleasing set of strange effects—and lets them play out until the theme is comprehensively dealt with.  Then it ends, and we’re on to the next piece.  All in all, this CD has the feel of a display cabinet filled with scientific curiosities or a table of lab results more than an ‘album’ or collection of songs.  Each piece has its own interesting set of experimental rules which are allowed to dictate each piece without frills, without ‘beginnings’, ‘endings’, ‘growth’, ‘codas’, or any fancy musical concepts like that, and each piece is completely self-contained, clear, simple, unexplained, and just about perfect."

Stephen Palke - Evolutionary Exploration Sequence 

REVIEW: Plasmodium - Entheognosis

An incredible Melbourne band, combining atonal riffs, furious bursts of energy, dissonant textures, sexnoises, and wacky surreal lyrics about tantra, drugs, and consciousness.  Review scribbled for Heathen Harvest, editorial refining by the ever-industrious Sage Weatherford.

"So, what do I think of Entheognosis?  It’s great. It’s overwhelming, it’s all over the place, and it’s extremely confusing in almost every way.  Like the act of entheognosis itself (which means something like ‘knowing the divine within‘), it’s full of twists and turns, dead ends, and traps for the unwary, and the (albeit annoying/funny) lyrics are rich with references to both psychoactive substances and tantric sex acts, both of which are renowned for their entheogenic properties.  Even the fact that I found myself laughing at the dubious thesaurus-poetry of the lyrics made me actually enjoy the album in a different way than what I was expecting, and who knows—that laughter could very well have been intentional as well.  After all, the perilous Chapel of the Entheogene has always been filled with as much mirth as fear."

Plasmodium - Entheognosis

REVIEW: Golgotha Communications Limited - Gatha Yasna

A review in which I dissed the band for spelling their own name wrong on the front cover of the record.  

 ...but all copies on the internets seem to have fixed that mistake, so when I rant and rave about it in the review, and then all the pictures accompanying the review are spelled correctly, I do look like a complete cockwomble.  But look at that picture - proof!

Review written for Heathen Harvest, editorial kindnesses by Sage Weatherford.

"There are a bunch of tracks here that the album would definitely be better without, or with a tighter edit, or with another layer.  There’s amazing stuff here; Gatha Yasna is really quite great in a whole lot of ways, but it’s kind of let down by the amount of unmoving and/or unfinished material sharing space with it on the album.  And the stuff that is really great more often than not just sort of drifts away without going anywhere, or is way, way too short."

Golgotha Communications Limited - Gatha Yasna

NEWS: "Bruce" featured on new webseries "Watch This"!

Much excitement and delight were experienced at discovering our little black comedy series Bruce being featured stark raving first on C J Johnson's and Jim Flanagan's new movie-based webseries "Watch This".  Woohoo!  Although Jim thinks our dialogue is both a) mostly improvised (it wasn't) and b) mostly shit (well, that's a matter of taste, innit), I think we won him over in the end.  And C J seems like a true fan.  Huzzah!  

Watch other people talk about Bruce here.

Or just bingewatch the whole series yourself here!

REVIEW: Todd Anderson-Kunert - When There Is Nothing Left To Say

High tones meet white noise washes meet laser-pointer sinewaves in blocks of articulated precision, courtesy of Todd Anderson-Kunert.   Review scribbled for Heathen Harvest, editorial assistance by Sage Weatherford.

"The changes between one segment and the next are sometimes gradual as one set of textures sinks away and is gently replaced by another, but more often than not, the changes are abrupt, like the flipping of a switch, one ultra-minimal section of almost unhearable, low subwoofer tones suddenly replaced with a buzz of warm hiss, or a tonal bath of purified sine waves, or a set of super-high frequencies that are so beyond normal hearing that they are almost like a taste in the air, a three-dimensional flavour in the air that can only be tasted by the ear.  And, bugger me, I actually like it."

Todd Anderson-Kunert - When There Is Nothing Left To Say

NEWS: Xtian dedicates entire post to Beef!

Now, in the spirit of full disclosure here, let me just firstly say that Xtian and I have known each other for many years, and continue to make strange art together (see here, here, and here for examples), both in physical forms and in an ongoing digital Exquisite-Corpse-style mysterious-swapsies-type-art-piece/game/distraction known as the Infinite Collage (or "With Uninhibited Fingers for the Unfathomable", to give it its proper title), which is perhaps the longest piece of art in the known universe, and is viewable here.  So, point is, he's no stranger - in fact, we like each other quite a lot.  So you can take that as meaning that this review of his is meaningless or whatever, but I don't see it that way at all: after all, I never asked him for a review, and even if I did (which I didn't) he didn't have to do it, and even if he did do it (which he did), it didn't have to go into as much detail as it does, nor did it have to be so wonderfully positive and/or expressive about the coolness of my novel.  

TLDR: it's still unbiased, and still totally awesome, and I'm very very stoked about it.

Read the full excellence right here!  And then buy all of his artworks and books and so on to help him save up for his moon-home, he'd really appreciate it.

Left to right: Tim Harris, Xtian, Mat Blackwell, and Dan Kelly, at our four-way collage exhibition a few years ago: "The Wrong Head: 4 Men, 100 Collages".

REVIEW: Gnaw Their Tongues - Hymns for the Broken, Swollen and Silent

 
Filthy disturbing sludgey blackened depressive metal atrocities from my favourite Netherlander, the mighty Gnaw Their Tongues.  Sorry, I gush a bit in this one, but I do so love Mr Tongues' horrifying aural vistas.  Review scribbled for Heathen Harvest, and not very edited by the everloving Sage Weatherford.

"The art I love most of all comes embedded with a very specific kind of unavoidable challenge, namely:  The art I love most of all is art that surprises and/or shocks me in some way, giving me something that I have never experienced before.  The unavoidable challenge of such art is, once I’ve been surprised and/or shocked by a project, how can it ever do that again?  When a huge part of a band’s appeal is its ability to pioneer new ground, can it still do that for a second release—or a third?  Or, in Gnaw Their Tongues’s case, a fortieth?  Well, gosh darn it and blast me to heck, but I do believe it can."

Gnaw Their Tongues - Hymns for the Broken, Swollen and Silent

NEWS: Tanya Loos writes amazing in-depth review of Beef!

I can't believe it's taken me so long to mention this!  Clearly, I am a bit lame when it comes to promotional stuff.  Eep!  

In August, the wonderful naturalist and nature-writer and all-round Aussie treasure Tanya Loos dedicated an entire post to writing about Beef, delving deeply into the story itself, but also discussing the power of literature as activism.   It's great for me to see just what people get out of it, which particular aspects of the book touch people and what they think I'm saying, and what resonates and what doesn't.   And I really think Tanya gets it.  

Regarding the activism at the novel's core, she mentions that "our modern civilisation’s dirty secret is the true cost of cheap meat", and goes on to say "[b]ut Beef explores an alternate reality, the sort of world where the treatment of animals in this way is morally repugnant, and it reflects on the past in a very light-hearted and easy to read way. Without lecturing!"  Exactly what I was after! 

Her review includes lovely little summations like this:

"Royston is going through the motions of life in his eccentric family, and happy with his wife Lena and his daughter River. Until BAM! Gene enters his life. Royston falls head over heels for this luscious embodiment of womanhood and the two strike up a very close friendship that oozes with sexual tension and causes a fuckload of consternation for Royston. I say fuckload because if you don’t like swearing you are in for a challenging read."

(I do love a good swear.  In fact, I have an in-depth piece about swearing on this very blog.) 

"I think it works equally well as a love story or as science fiction, or speculative fiction, indeed Beef reminds me very much of one of my favourite authors, Margaret Atwood, just with more swearing!"

High praise indeed! :)

Thanks Tanya!  The entire review can be read on Tanya's website, here.

REVIEW: Drohtnung - In Dolorous Sights

Filthy disturbing sludgey blackened depressive metal atrocities from Western Australian band Drohtnung, who my ritual noise projects Grist and Haraam played with when they toured Melbourrne last year.  Review penned for Heathen Harvest, and minimally edited by the inexhaustible Mr Sage Weatherford.

"It’s a complete fucking mess, and it’s awesome.  A lot of the time, it’s nigh on impossible to discern the actual riffs and rhythms here, hidden and warped as they are behind grandly flat-lined drums and willfully anguished vocal screeches, the whole thing thoroughly abused into a solid crushing square-wave of hopeless texture and utter cacophony."

Drohtnung - In Dolorous Sights