Its kind of a strange feeling. This is what I was originally going to post. I've told next to no one I know in person, because people freak out over this kind of thing. As anyone here would know, with all the underground publishers specializing in all manner of media, operating out of sight in the dark corners of the internet, it is no big deal whatsoever to have one's pictures included in a publication of some kind. This release being a CD from a one-man band called Serpent Ascending, to be released in September on the I-Voidhanger record label. I simply contributed the artwork for the album. Luciano and his graphic designer, and Jarno, the musician for the band, obviously did most of the work.
Here is the cover. I may show interior shots sooner-or-later, but as of now I've been politely asked not to.
If you're into 80's style death metal you may find something in this band you really dig. The label is still very small, but has already put out some very strong releases. I recommend Urna's and Umbah's releases especially. At this rate, after some growth, they may be able to hold their own some of the larger Avante-Guard/Heavy/Abrasive/Weird music labels out there like Crucial Blast.
Here is the album page, followed by a link to the label itself.
Well, I was going to post something else Robert. When I saw your new post starting with a French band, I thought what the hell. I am not even sure if it will be anyone's cup of tea, but they're weird by popular terms, so certainly not as inappropriate as posting Enya tracks here. Some of my favorite violent French bands (many of which have very weird album covers as well, excellent).
On the off-chance any of you liked any of these. Try and track down CYT-Confessions of a Yearned Twilight. Hard to find, and relatively unknown and therefore usually not overpriced. Well-worth it.
Rise And Fall Of A Decade are my favourite French band of all. They did immensely elegant ethereal music with synthesized classical sounds and had a very light gothic touch. For great ethereal/dreampop sounds they deserve to be spoken of in the same breath as Cocteau Twins, Slowdive, This Mortal Coil, Chapterhouse, Cranes, Alison’s Halo, Lycia and Trance To The Sun. Sadly the singer died several years ago. The first 3 albums are pure gold. Not a very great selection of their works on youtube but this is the best thing I could find to represent them...
My favourite King Of Fighters tune, from KOF2001.
My favourite Tiny Tim song.
I just discovered Vajra, a Keiji Haino band with a fascinating vocalist called Kan Mikami.
Ruins made a series of medleys. Firstly this their Prog Rock Medley which contains distinctive parts of 39 prog songs, including some slightly obscure stuff. Check the original page for details on each song referenced.
This is their Classical Medley.
...They also did medleys for Hard Rock, Black Sabbath and Mahavishnu Orchestra.
The first time I ever heard of Art Zoyd is when they did a soundtrack to Nosferatu on the first and only version of the film I have seen. It sounded almost too bizarre but the more I watched, the more the madness started to make sense. They did one for Faust that I have not heard. They are prog/rock in opposition. I think the song below is one of the most irresistible things I’ve ever heard, gorgeous video but it has been cut short, it looks like it was made for something bigger than a regular music video.
It pleases me to see that people have been kinder to Yes in recent years, I’ve heard nice words from Battles(who have an obvious influence in their first album), Sonic Youth, Mark Eitzel (American Music Club), Keith Levene (Public Image Limited), Todd Rundgren, Ariel Pink and Nobuo Uematsu. Mark Kozelek did a cover in his Red House Painters days.
Stephen Thrower did a really lovely defence of them in an issue of Wire and on his blog he posts a slightly longer version. Some may know him as an alternative film journalist, others may know him from his Cyclobe and Coil music... Thrower's short Yes tribute
A fragment of a piece with Feral Men exhibiting effeminate behaviour.
And here is the finished drawing (without colours):
Lately I have been poking fun at the Black Metal thing, because corpsepaint seems to become my medieval feral men. This does not mean that I don't like the music. On the contrary, and the history about the early days of the phenomenon is particularly fascinating. There is a certain mystique around it that is rare in pop music. But then, mysticism goes well with a sense of humour (unlike dogmatism). The combination of the homophobia within the BM scene and applying make-up before every gig is just too good.
The inspiration for this piece comes from Donna Kossy's Strange Creations, to be more precise the chapter on Oscar Kiss-Maerth (yes, that sounds dangerously close to 'kiss my ass', but that was his real name) and DEVO (who took a lot of nuttiness from him). Kiss-Maerth was a morosoph who argued in his book The Beginning was the End that humans had become smarter in the course of evolution by eating the brains of slain enemies. So here my canibal feral men are eating the poor nuns' brains, but that comes with certain unexpected side effects.
For Josh Bayer's Two Panel Nancy Anthology. He sent out a pile of Nancy panels to a bunch of artists and asked them to pick two, put one as the first panel of the comic, and one as the last panel of the comic, and then fill in the story in between! A lot of fun to do!!!
This is just one portion of the movie Incubus directed by Leslie Stevens in 1965. William Shatner's inclusion does not make it interesting, but the fact that it is the only full-length film ever made in the language of Esperanto is.
Some of his more recent art has been largely withheld from the public eye for a book release. Here are a few links to examples of this extraordinarily strange artist.
Working on the colours of a saint's story of eight pages. Here, Saint Teresa is bravely challenging five enemies of the faith for a game of chess: the wild man, the monkey, death, the devil and the Blemmyean. There will be captions (in Dutch, which hardly anyone on the planet could understand anyway) in the two top corners.
Every now and then I realise how long I have stuck to the same tools, most artists seem to stick to the same tools judging by their pictures or maybe they just strive for the same results with whatever they use. You get comfortable and stop thinking about how you could expand. The thing that encourages me to change is I think you often surprise yourself with what you can do when you try new tools and it feels great getting to know new tools with that confidence.
I used to love charcoal and graphite but it's difficult to get extreme precision with them. I used to be all about ink wash but I havent bothered with them for so long because I now have the patience to use bic pens to do the lighting that I used washes for, washes were often used as a lazy shortcut.
Right now I'm just a bic pen, watercolour, acrylic and gouache guy. I hate buying new tools only to find I cant use them very well, trying them out in the shop isnt a good test, you really need to create a picture before you know if you can work with them. I once used wax crayons and they were so much fun, but you have to wash your hands forever to get the colour out your skin after fingerpainting and smudging with them. I've been advised to do etching but I'm a bit reluctant to go into that whole process when pens are simpler. Although I hate making mistakes I like learning the discipline of making no mistakes and accepting consequences of a stupid mistake, instead of switching to tools that can erase any mistake.
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