2026.05.26
Since I skipped the Maryland Deathfest this year (too few bands of interest, scattered through too many days), I've found myself watching more concerts online than usual, including clips from the MDF (great work to That Goat Metal Show, btw!). Yesterday I found an Obituary show from Dynamo Open Air on Youtube and it was fucking awesome to say the least. Tardy is one of the most unique vocalists and frontman in death metal, the drumming is awesome, the guitarists are superb. I have a special relationship with Obituary since the first death metal album I ever bought was The End Complete from 1992 (still one of my favorites). That night I had dreams that the band visited me and stayed overnight at my parents' house and I had the mission of getting food for the band. Tardy wanted Indian food, so I was desperately going around town (in some weird car with a narrow front window) trying to find a place nearby and as I was searching, it was getting dark and I somehow lost track of what I was even doing. In addition, like in many of my dreams, suddenly my phone did not work and no clocks around me were in sync, all showed different times, so I had no idea if I was late. After sitting in some restaurant for what seemed like hours, I stepped outside at one point into a blurry black mess of dusk my eyes could not adjust to the darkness. When I finally got back I found out that Tardy was eating my mother's soup and I couldn't believe it. I failed in my mission. Then I woke up... some 9+ hours later. What a dream...
2026.05.25
Damn, over a month of no updates! Unusual for me... but there has truly been little to talk about. Just a few albums of any worth coming out these days... for death metal, the latest Fleshcrawl and Funebrarum are recommended, for black metal I was surprisingly impressed with the new A Forest of Stars, very original and evocative... and of doom I am not aware of anything except maybe Lone Wanderer and In Ruins both of which I'm yet to hear in full. As usual, there is more going on in the past, like the recent discovery I made of Sanguine Myst's "Upon Sylvan Thrones", an excellent release for everyone who loves black metal the classic way. I also was able to complete my collection of Whispering Gallery by lucking on a copy of the rare Lost As One on discogs, a fantastic album like all of their rest! Truly one of the best melodic doom/death bands from Europe.
Somewhat related to this thread and my posts, recently I finished reading the mathematician Leonard Mlodinow's "The Drunkards Walk", a book on randomness and probability theory, and the last eponymous chapter really spoke to me, illustrating actually what I've been thinking for the last 30 or so years. In the last chapter he dives into an analysis of how expectation colors perception and how randomness and not any kind of determinism rules common threads of thought among popular systems or products. There is a good analogy in an experiment done with some 15,000 people listening to music with visible data on download popularity (or, since the book was written in the 00s, you can say streaming today). A separate insulated group evaluated the music without these data as "the instrinsic quality" marker, while the other groups were evaluating the music conscious of the stats. If there was any deterministic element to the music evaluation, Mlodinow says, the outcomes would have converged, but what happened is that the popularity of the songs varied widely. There was no set principle of one song achieving universal status as previous conceptions directly influenced present conceptions - in other words, a confirmation of the sheep effect, which in my opinion is now more relevant and worthy of consideration than ever before under social media. There was another point also made interestingly about success and preconception, also as an illustration of randomness over linearity or determinism. Stephen King at one period published a series of books under a pseudonym, Richard Bachman. When publishing under that name, his sales plunged, although obviously the quality of his works was identical. Only when it became clear that Bachman was King, did sales increase. We all know this, but the point is: are we truly honest about this when evaluating what we read or hear or watch, and how much are even the most independent-minded of us unaffected by these factors?
2026.04.25
Everyone interested in technical, sci-fi themed death metal needs to check out Starseed from Germany, great stuff! The Cosmic Conspiracy EP was released back in 1997 and has some parallels to Nocturnus and Timeghoul, a forgotten treasure for sure.
