while producing last week’s project 52 photo (which i did in fact today), i threw together a few collages. the first one is a collection of flames:
the second one shows the process of breaking a heart. from a full, nice, unused wonderful heart to broken pieces:
the third one is chocolate related: a chocolate heart being eaten. piece for piece.
as you might or might not have noticed, my project blackness moved to a new address and now requires to log on before showing anything. (the rss feed is still available without logging on, though.) the main reason for this is the german jugendmedienschutz-staatsvertrag; i do not want to risk any problems due to people interpreting things the wrong way. a new revision of that thing cased a lot of protest and shutdown of blogs; see for example here and here.
it is still not exactly clear what kind of implications this new revision will have. i still decided to move blackness, since i don’t want to endanger it in any way. in case you still want to see it, ask me for an account.
while browsing around in my favorite music store in town some time ago, i stumbled across several very good albums. one of them, about whom i want to write today, is ashes against the grain by the american folk/black/doom metal band agalloch.
a stream of dark, intense music. full of beautiful, sad melodies. doomy. somehow, catchy, too. creating mental images.
the first track, limbs, is a very good example for this. i feel beauty and despair, going hand in hand.
also a very beautiful song is this mountain on which you will die, with eyes closed, i feel like through a foggy, snow-white landscape in the mountains. a gloomy atmosphere is building up. staying, while the music fades out…
another beauty is not unlike the waves, beginning with the sound of waves. powerful; full of energy, pushing forward, almost no rest. clean vocals mixing with screaming. beautiful.
the album ends with the three-parter our fortress is burning…. the first part is more quiet, slow. at the end, distorted guitars are lightening up in the background, like flames starting to lick, trying to spread. in part two, they gain more intense, spreading over the fortress, while in the more drony part three, they eat up everything. destruction. death. the end has begun.
she didn’t say it. never ever.
a cloud of dust, debris, arises. so majestic, somehow beautiful, but deadly. ripping apart the two bodies, parting them forever, leaving emtpyness. blackness wins, once again.
dil se.. (imdb), another bollywood movie, does not features a happy end in the classical sense, with blowing the lovers to dust. still, the beauty which can be found in particular in the last moments of the movie, is amazing. even though she didn’t say it, she accepts it and, somehow, expresses the yes, in her deep look into his eyes. if this isn’t, then what’s love after all?
then, in another glimpse of time, all is gone, shattered.
sounds familiar.
three years after releasing ghost reveries, opeth released their 9th observation, called watershed.
it is opened by the beautiful, instrumental coil, sung by mikael akerfeld and nathalie lorichs. this is followed by the intense, heavy tune heir apparent, which i already have been able to listen to live two times. after that, the lotus eater follows, another heavy track with lots of proggy interludes which was already available for download some time ago. track #4 is burden, a melodious, more mellow, proggy track, the first half of it being sung by mikael, the second part being instrumental, with an accoustic guitar finally shifting downwards, until an abrupt strange ending. then, porcelain heart, which was already released as a video before, starts. again, alternativing between loud and quiet, beauty and wildness. after that, hessian peel, starting mellow, beautiful. then, after a small piano solo phase, the brutality returns, in its beautiful complexity, and complex beauty, the end reminding me a bit of the end of sentenced‘s no one there. finally, hex omega launches, beginning heavy, though slow, turning more mellow, changing back to heavy, alternating. pure beauty, floating through the air, crawling down my ears.
i hate making such statements, but for me, this is the best release for this year. definitely. even though the year’s just half gone. watershed is simply ingenious, such a beautiful mix of death metal brutality, progressive rock; this is audible aesthetics. so damn beautiful.
after five (long) years of silence, tiamat released a new album, amanethes. when i listened to a few samples around one month ago, i didn’t like it too much. i still bought it (hey, it’s a tiamat album!) and, after listening to it a few times, the ice melted, turned into fire. this album is amazing. heavy, dark, gothic. probably one of the best releases this year.
ever seen such advertisements?
“start making money entering data online!
work from home at your own time. anyone from any where in the world can do this job. available worldwide.
easily make $250+ per day!
fill out simple web forms at home
sign up here >>>>”
sometimes, i really wonder what people got to do if they sign up. my guess is that they are signing up to work as little spam bees: sit at home, surf the web, spam peoples forums, guestbooks, blog comments, … with spam!
let’s face it. during its lifespan, spielwiese got 310 spam comments so far, and blackness got 34 spam comments. and none of them ever got published; i never let them pass through. one would think that they’d maybe give up after some time, but it seems they don’t want to. maybe because they get paid for entering the spam over and over again?
as spielwiese is based on wordpress, which is a rather common blog software, it’s not surprising that there exists programs which feed wordpress based blogs with spam. so maybe the spam for spielwiese is automatically generated. but the software for blackness is completely self-brewn, so either someone is entering the spam manually, or someone adjusted their program to post spam there, too. or someone wrote a program which puts spam in basically everything which looks like a comment form. i’d guess it’s the latter, or some poor fellow gets paid to do it.
anyway.
spam is freaking annoying, both email spam, guestbook spam, forum spam, blog spam, and hopefully once our governments unite and will really try to do something against it. but then, i’d guess that won’t happen during my life…
today i stumbled about a song called gloomy sunday, originally composed by the hungarian pianist rezső seress. there are probably as many urban myths about this song, which is also known as the hungarian suicide song, as there are cover versions… i like the original lyrics the most; you can read them here (both the original hungarian version and a literal translation). reads like a typical doom song, just written around 50 years too early…
for me, it seems like a really strange idea to kill yourself because of listening to a song, and in particular, it seems really strange to blame a song for making people commit suicide. for me, it sounds like an excuse for not having to search for other reaons… maybe it was the last straw to tip people off, or suicideers decided to listen to it on or shortly before their suicide because it expresses their feelings.
but anyway. i’m somehow wondering whether a doom metal band has covered this one, too; the only metal band i found who did this is a german black metal act called negator; a video of a life performance can be seen at their homepage (don’t watch it if you don’t like black metal); they are performing sam m. lewis‘ english version of the song. i didn’t like it too much, first of all because i don’t think black metal fits here and, secondly, i’d prefer something more close to the original lyrics.
it is autumn and the leaves are falling
all love has died on earth
the wind is weeping with sorrowful tears
my heart will never hope for a new spring again
my tears and my sorrows are all in vain
people are heartless, greedy and wicked…literal translation of the first stanza taken from phespirit.info.
