Monday, December 10, 2007  12:01 am 

Keep dipping your toes in the inscrutable well of the unknown

Why are we such adepts of the arts of the dark and the sounds of the macabre?

Is it perhaps because, as Howard Phillips Lovecraft, the creator of a cosmogony in which the universe expands dipping its big toes into abysses beyond, where the unnamable lurks, pointed out in his Supernatural Horror in Literature,

The appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow and demands from the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for detachment from every-day life. Relatively few are free enough from the spell of the daily routine to respond to rappings from outside, and tales of ordinary feelings and events, or of common sentimental distortions of such feelings and events, will always take first place in the taste of the majority; rightly, perhaps, since of course these ordinary matters make up the greater part of human experience

And we are but morally squalid weirdoes trying to escape from reality by concocting a Frankenstein universe full of people who wear masks and robes and engage in unspeakable acts of sonic depravity?

Or is it because, as the man who has designed the conceptual paradigm according to which we perceive things, David Shrigley, said in ‘Why we got the sack from the museum’

The world is not a beautiful place. Mickey Mouse shits in his nest and eats his own babies

Maybe we are just telling the truth and all those cute lolkittens roaming around the neighbourhood are patiently waiting for you to get close to their claws so they can tear your eyes off and offer your blood to Gorgo Momo, the thousand faced moon.

Anyway, if you feel what we saying and the gospel of darkness plays a part in your daily routine, you will no doubt attend the Zombie Zombie gig we are putting on at the Greenhouse Effect on Tuesday. You know how they roll, a motorik behemoth harvesting souls and sending them to Hades so they can dance feverish to the tune of a blind piper while the demons poke their rotting bodies with acid-spiked tridents, in the alternate universe we live in Hyeronimus Bosch does the artwork for DFA, and the Omen won the Oscar to best documentary in 1976, fun times.

Get tickets in Resident, Rounder of Edgeworld.

The drawing above was made by Chris Pell for the zine we have put together for such event, a most frightful and ‘eminently collectable’ document, written by the voices of the underworld with 98% pure virgin blood (hard to get these days, and henceforth limited edition).

The tunes below are small morsels of eerie power you should revel in if you are a true believer,

As far as I can remember the Exorcist II: The Heretic wasn’t such a great horror film, but a bit of New-Age wank about a bunch of mischievous locusts, the real star is the awesome soundtrack by the master of the ghostly Ennio Morricone, the vertiginous Magic and Ecstasy is the blood-curdling highlight, drums beat like merciless mallets driving nails into coffins trapping inside damned souls which are drawn to Hell by a barbed wire net of epic strings, Satan had a good catch tonight and a chorus of succubi are celebrating.

Ennio Morricone- Magic and Ecstasy

Check out the snarling sounds which creep throughout at a subliminal level bringing to mind Pickman style hallucinations where a conclave of ghouls feast on freshly unearthed corpses, gosh, if my mama found out how much of my random access memory I devote to thinking about these things she would send me to talk with the special doctor for special people who end up in special houses.

Reading our zine must have made you aware of one fact at least, this is, that Jonny Trunk is our shepherd, a teacher of the old school kind who goes for cigarette breaks outside the room while the pupils take their exam on the secrets of life as revealed through crooked lines in a dusty blackboard, or a string of awesome releases in Trunk records, which is a labour of love if there ever was one. Jonny Trunk shows us not what we should like, we don’t care for those people, but what we WILL like through some bizarre process of spiritual synchronisation that sends eerie pleasure waves through our wimpy bodies, here he comes now with Marc Wilkinson’s soundtrack for Blood on Satan’s Claw, a film about ‘a village in 17th Century Great Britain which is overcome by a Satanic plague, manifesting itself as a dark, hairy patch on the skin‘, totally up our alley as you would expect.

We haven’t watched the film but we shall, just on account of the otherworldly nefarious vibe of the gloriously atmospheric soundtrack about which you can read in wonderful nerdy detail here, we would like to highlight how, according to Mr. Wilkinson,

‘the descending chromatic scale which features throughout the music omits the perfect fifth (the only true consonant in the chromatic scale) and therefore highlights the diminished fifth, which ever since the middle ages in Europe has been known as the Devil’s Interval!!’

Marc Wilkinson- Fiend Discovered and Titles

And if you listen closely and you are one of those able to respond to the ‘rappings of the outside’, you will indeed know in your heart that this does indeed sound like Devil music, it brings to your 20JFG’s heads images straight off Arthur Machen’s ‘The White People’,

So when once everybody had come, there was no door at all for anybody else to pass in by. And when they were all inside, round in a ring, touching each other, some one began to sing in the darkness, and some one else would make a noise like thunder with a thing they had on purpose, and on still nights people would hear the thundering noise far, far away beyond the wild land, and some of them, who thought they knew what it was, used to make a sign on their breasts when they woke up in their beds at dead of night and heard that terrible deep noise, like thunder on the mountains. And the noise and the singing would go on and on for a long time, and the people who were in a ring swayed a little to and fro; and the song was in an old, old language that nobody knows now, and the tune was queer.

Perhaps this is the reason why, as we said to begin with, we are we such adepts of the arts of the dark and the sounds of the macabre, maybe it is because the tune the Devil plays is a queer and strange one, but also the most beautiful, it hangs from the tree of life like a forbidden fruit bristling with mystery and secret knowledge, we shall keep reaching for it oblivious to the dangers of damnation.

labels >> Horror, Jonny Trunk, ennio morricone