If you dwell in the Pacific Northwest, your attendance is MANDATORY at any of the three "heavy metal concerts" listed above. Mention the code word "Mantlers" and be bought a drink by our extremely wealthy drummer! Don't miss out! We are surprisingly genial and well-mannered dudes!
Let's rock and/or roll!
Really?
Well over 3 and a half years of Illogical Contraption and no one has ever posted Fabio Frizzi's brilliant score to Lucio Fulci's (right) 1981 weirdo/gore/zombie/WTF/chiller The Beyond? This is inexcusable. Nigh unto treason. I scorn the entire writing staff for their oversight and laziness.
I found myself revisiting this film during a late-night bender just recently, and found myself once again blown away by a) the way everything in this movie happens for no apparent reason and applies to no real storyline (It's Italian, for fuck's sake! These flicks never make any sense.) b) that scene with the blind chick and her dog on the bridge (still super creepy), and c) THE FUCKING SOUNDTRACK, MAN! SO GOOD!!!
Despite the quality of Frizzi's compositions (past IC posts have explored the droning, minimalist genius of
City of the Living Dead/Gates of Hell and Zombi 2), he is far from "profilic" or "well known", recording just a handful of popular scores between the late 60's and today. Sure, his work on the first Zombie, Manhattan Baby, Argento's A Cat In The Brain, The Psychic, and Kill Bill Part 1 (known as Kiru Biru in Japan) have assured him his fair spot in the pantheon of great Italian film composers, but his renown remains mostly in his home country. Frizzi remains nestled comfortably within his own private Brozone Layer, pumping out the ill jams at a consistent--but not megalomaniacal--rate, always keeping it creepy, always keeping it gnar. Sick jams.
Like most people, I work a pretty shitty job that takes up far too much of my time. Unless your one of the very small ( and depending on your opinion, either lucky or annoyingly smug ) minority that loves your chosen vocation, I can pretty much guarantee that we all think about losing control from time to time.
One such person that did lose control was a man named Travis Bickle. He was a fictional character in the 1976, Martin Scorsese directed motion picture, Taxi Driver. You should all know about it.
The musical score to this great film was handled by this man......
Bernard Herrmann was a highly respected composer within Hollywood. Racking up a stupidly impressive body of work that included much radio work and live orchestration.. He scored nearly all of Hitchcock's films ( including The Birds, which doesn't feature any music. just electronically generated bird sounds) as well as creating the signature music for other classics such as The Day The Earth Stood Still, Fahrenheit 451, Cape Fear and The Bride Wore Black. He worked with Ray Harryhausen on Jason And The Argonauts and The Seventh Voyage Of Sinbad. Composed and conducted the music for Orson Welles original radio broadcast of War Of The Worlds and the stirring and dynamic score for today's post, Taxi Driver. His final work before his death in 1975.
The score for Taxi Driver perfectly compliments Robert De Niro's portrayal of Vietnam vet turned New York cabby, Travis Bickle. The combination of traditional jazz instrumentation and discordant bursts of brass perfectly underpin his slide into psychosis and eventual vigilantism while painting a very dark and grimy view of 1970's New York.
I used to listen to this on a regular basis before work. Now, I don't know if that was really a good thing or not and I am pretty sure a lot of people would argue that it was. The version below is the 1998 reissue. It features all of the music Herrmann recorded for the film as well as a few extra pieces of background music. It also features this little number.......
This is the one I used to listen to the most before work. I hate working.
So hopefully you should enjoy this. Maybe it will help bring change into your work life or work environment, maybe it will just help you scare a few people. Hopefully you will just enjoy it.
So it's been a while since I've put
anything up here. I know I've been forsaking my Illcon
responsibilities (Illcon-sibilities?) but I wanted to make
sure whatever I came back with was solid. And nothing seemed to jump
out at me. Yeah, there are some good metal albums and weird
conspiracies out there, but I wanted something really cool.
I was at the thrift store a while ago
and something presented itself to me. It's not the cool thing I was
looking for at all, the opposite really. A book so shitty looking
that I couldn't not buy it. I was struck at first by the title -
“Devil In The Metal” - along with a pentagram (though not
inverted as most Satanists would have it) and the ever-popular 666.
It bills itself as a tale of “murder, insanity, and terror in the
music business” which basically makes it sound like a fictionalized
extrapolation of every scare-tactic talk show from the late 80s that
set out to convince the good, upstanding people of middle America
that Twisted Sister existed to reap their childrens' immortal souls.
So I was gonna take one for the team,
read this thing, describe it. But I just can't. It just looks so
shitty. And I have a consistently growing pile of great books I need to get around to that I don't
have enough time for. But I don't think it matters. You don't need
to really read this book at all. All that's necessary are a few quotes to know the general gist of the
thing. I genuinely
feel that a fairly fleshed-out impression of the book's overall plot
can be gleaned from a handful of these lines.
-"'Joo guys are the rock group,
right?' the short, cute Brazilian prostitute asked."
-"'I'M A SLUT KILLER FOR SATAN!'
Monty yelled, his voice cracking."
-"Porn queen, Satan's slut, get
on your knees and fuck. Suck and moan and show your cunt and let
the jiz run down your butt."
-"'What's
'Bloody Hell' mean?' Bobby Shapiro asked, smiling. 'Is that the
English version of 'Oh
Fuck' or something?'"
-"'Who's
Norman Mailer?' one of the record company executives asked.
'Guy
who wrote All In The Family,
I think,' Bobby Shapiro said."
-"It
was the type of hood an executioner would wear, except that it had
white lines on it. It took Gil
only a second to realize that the white lines on the hood Monty was
wearing formed an upside-down
cross."
-"He
walked over to the homeless man and, with his back to the street,
pulled out his gun. He had
screwed a silencer on it. This was his chance to get another soul to
serve him in Hell."
-"Della
was looking into the barrel of the pistol, helplessly knowing that at
any second a bullet would
spew from the gun and rip her open like a cantaloupe."
-"Greg,
could you please fuck me? I'm so excited from watching you pee I
think I'm going to explode."
And
so on. And from my willfully ignorant standpoint, I maintain that
those quotes are enough, that not even reading the entirety of the
text would answer the lingering questions. Is this book designed as
some sort of weird Christian propaganda? Even skimming it turned up
far too much anal sex and too many golden showers to make that likely. And if
that's not the point, then who is the intended audience? It's
far too ignorant of metal and Satanism to appeal to many fans of
either, and far too lurid for the more moralistic of readers. Were
the clumsy metaphors just the product of a bad writer, or does the
author actually rip open cantaloupes? Who is the author? His or her
website features only a cover image of this book with no further
information. It's a thoroughly confounding work, one I'm glad I
purchased and perused but happier still that I didn't spend more than
about twenty minutes skimming and summing up.
(What I imagine the author thinks metal sounds like)
Also,
if anybody wishes to read this modern masterpiece, I'll mail it to
you for the cost of postage (and considering that there's one on
Amazon for $131.65 right now, this may be the deal of a lifetime.)
Holy bat shit biscuits! It's been a while since I have graced the mighty IllCon halls with my presence. My deepest of apologies! Scheiße! This month has flown by. Really it has. A lot, I mean A LOT of shit has gone down in the last month: finals, The Legendary Boonville Beerfest, family memorials, visiting my old man, random drunken excursions in the City, brewing adult beverages, and getting back on air...
Yes, you heard correctly! I recently got accepted into the ranks of local pirate-radio station 99.9 FM HFRA! I am now a genuine pirate it appears and I intend to sail the seas of cheese without abandon. It has been several years since I have been on air. Some of those out there may remember my stint at KHSU-FM (90.5) here in Arcata and if so, you'll remember the ridiculousness of that endeavor: staying up Friday night, consuming massive amounts of coffee and snickers bars, cueing up my show, hitting the air waves at 3am Saturday morning, and then making the arduous journey back "home" at the break of dawn only to officially go to bed at 7:30am and waking up at 1pm for band practice... Ah! Those were the days! How I miss them (minus the 3am part). Nothing is set in stone yet for when my show will be but it will undoubtedly be great. I intend to play a little bit of everything, focusing mainly on metal, classic rock, and the occasional blues album or two. Barring that I can figure out how to, I will try to set up a podcast or record it somehow so y'all can listen for yourselves. Seeing as my last time on air via IllCon Radio was a drunken disaster, I have some redeeming to do on my end... So stay tuned, and don't touch that dial!
In other news, I've been drinking a fair amount. I have tried many a new brew in the past month including my own, which is still fermenting, and I'll have a couple posts coming soon in relation to brew-reviews, hopefully... Also, there's several shows coming up! Namely, Shelby and Co. are making a return to E-town for a show and the bros from MIASMIC are opening! APOCRYPHON slayed the last time they were up here so I'm definitely looking forward to this show. Last I checked, MIASMIC's CD was still at Amoeba Records in SF, and I've been told it was at the store in Los Angeles as well. So go pick yourself up a copy of their debut or contact the band directly. Also, legendary stalwarts LOCUST FURNACE are opening for PHALGERON this Friday, June 22nd. LOCUST FURNACE are pretty reliable. They have been around for the better part of 15 years now and I'm told they have new material (for once!). PHALGERON were solid the last time I saw them play here. So if you're in the Humboldt area this Friday, you can check them out alongside MADHAMMER (another local band) at the 'Lil Red Lion in Eureka... Lastly, I recently got a email from MediaFire saying that one of the files I have uploaded via the site has been pulled due to copyright issues. The file "Almost Heathen.zip" has been suspended. Sorry for the inconvenience but I'm glad a few hundred of you out there got the chance to check it out before they pulled it. It took me years to locate a copy of it in replacement for my original and my intentions with my contributions here at IllCon are simply to give readers the chance to hear new and rare tunes. I do not intend to violate any applicable laws nor try to attract the wrong kind of attention. I'm still not sure on all the details but I may have to begin posting more obscure, less-available stuff on here...
So as a token of my apologies, and with the aforementioned, I present you with this somewhat rare slab of maggot-infested metempsukhosis (or whatever that is).
We're back, motherfuckers.
IllCon Radio, Episode 37. Our guest is Oxbow frontman and author Eugene Robinson, the twisted mind behind such staggering works of literary genius as Fight and A Long Slow Screw. Eugene will discuss the finer points of post-modern French Expressionist poetry with us, and then punch us in the face.
There's also this guy Aesop who keeps showing up to the studio and hanging out during taping, we've tried repeatedly to shoo him away but the dude keeps coming back like a fucking cockroach. Unless our attempts are successful this evening, he will appear on the show as well. Apologies in advance.
There is a bunch of other shit coming up too. Like THIS, for instance (if you live in or around Half Moon Bay, tomorrow is going to be some crazy stuff--DO NOT MISS IT). In related news, if you live anywhere in the Pacific Northwest, I am coming to visit you soon. I may or may not need your floor/alcohol/women/food/WiFi connection/emotional support. Stay tuned, ass clowns.
Hey gang, just a quick note to let you know that a PayPal donation account has been set up to help out our friend Nikki Davis in her recovery process. Last I heard, Nikki is stabilizing, and communicating with her family via writing. This is excellent news, but the hospital bills are mounting, and, as Nikki is a full-time student (Jeff was their sole source of income), any help is welcome and appreciated. If you've got nothing to give, please just continue sending good vibes and psychic support.
Donation email is help_jeff_n_nikki_d@yahoo.com.
If you do choose to send something, please make sure you mark it as a "gift" or PayPal takes a cut. Thanks.
I'm writing to you guys with heavy heart today, as I have just learned of the passing of my close friend and co-worker Jeff Davis, known also as Jef Leppard to his bros and colleagues. Jeff and his wife Nikki were involved in a motorcycle accident at Ocean Beach in San Francisco last night, and at the time of this writing, Nikki is struggling for survival as well. I can honestly say that it is impossible for me to imagine two people less deserving of a fate like this one--in the recent years that I've come to know these two beautiful people, I never heard either of them express any sort of anger or negativity, and experienced only love and support whenever I was in their presence. Jeff was an audio engineer, and through the countless hours that me and my bands sat in his back room, incessantly looping through eons of top-volume double bass rolls, Nikki never showed any hint of annoyance at our general rowdiness and thuggery--on the contrary, she has always been the picture of generosity and kindness, offering us home-cooked meals, beverages, and support. Their marriage was by all accounts a happy and fulfilling one, and these events have put an end to something that has always inspired and impressed me.
Jeff was a guy that, through everything he did--be it music (outside of engineering he was also a ripping guitarist, playing with bands such as STFU and Voetsek), work (I hired him at my "real job", and he was always staunchly professional and dependable), or friendship (those who counted him as a good friend are legion)--left an impression of realness, goodness, and solidity in his wake, and as a man who has experienced loss many times in the past, I can truly say that Jeff's passing cuts deeper than almost any other. I have friends who I know "better" than I knew Jeff, or longer, but the ease I had in conversing with him, in discussing deep, meaningful (to me, at least) topics, surpassed most of those friendships by far. In a recent recording session, me and Jeff were left alone in his studio to track guitar for an hour or two, but rather than getting any "real" work done, we ended up quickly shirking duty and falling into a lengthy discussion about relationships, motivation, positivity, and life in general. At the time I was going through a difficult break-up, and that extended trip into Jeff's mind will always stay with me as an ultimate moment of revelation and meaning. It put me on a permanent path to becoming a better person and sorting out my own life, yet to Jeff I'm sure it was just another passing conversation with a friend. He radiated intelligence and caring in a way that was wholly unquestioned and instinctual--he was just a great fucking guy, and he never asked for credit or acknowledgment. People like Jeff simply don't exist in this world, and it is an extremely painful undertaking to let him go.
I know that in the months leading up to his death, Jeff had become a reader of Illogical Contraption, and was always a dweller in the same sphere of weirdness that we all inhabit here. As such, all corny platitudes aside, I feel like the IllCon family has lost a Brother, and even those who never had the honor of meeting him in person just experienced a devastating blow as well. It's hard not to wax poetic and regurgitate cliches in difficult times like these, but Jeff was one of the good ones, and he will be deeply and sorely missed. There are very, very few people I respect as much as I did Jeff, and the unfairness of his departure leaves me full of confusion, grief, and rage.
If you believe in some sort of "higher power", please petition them to grant Nikki a full recovery, and if you don't, please just take some time to send positive thoughts. Through all the pain and sadness, it is difficult to remember that there is goodness in the world. But today, I am reminded of just how lucky I am to be surrounded by such amazing people, and even when they're gone, their memories will always encourage and inspire me. Do yourself a favor today, and give a big, stupid hug to the people that you care about. Tell them how important they are to you. We're nothing without each other, and every second we get is a fucking gift. Remember that.
You would think that after such a long absence, I might return bearing worthwhile gifts for my beloved readership, but alas, no such luck on this sunny Thursday afternoon--today I present you with naught but pure, undiluted garbage, in the form of the mighty Black Sabbath's final studio embarassment, Forbidden.
What constituted "Black Sabbath" in 1995 was a sad diminishment from even their lineup in 1992, much less the Dio years, much much less their heyday in the early-to-mid-seventies. What we have here is a broken, limping, generic-riff machine fronted by terminal no-name Tony "The Cat" Martin (above right), who even with the omnipresent Tony Iommi (no Geezer at this point--he was busy with GZR. LOL!) in tow couldn't muster an ounce of thunder on this resounding fart of an attempt at "hard rock". The handsome and talented Cozy Powell (who was later replaced by Blue Oyster Cult's Bobby Rondinelli, a dude that subsequently attempted to steal my girlfriend in the mid-00's--true story) rounded out the squadron on skins, but his servicable thumping is piss in an ocean to the utter, anachronistic misstep that is this album.
Did I mention that Ernie C from Body Count (left) was hired to produce this album? Or that esteemed thespian Ice T himself makes an appearance on the opening track? It's all true, which, in a way, is the only selling point to this album. It's pure novelty/curiosity, this ill-fated pairing of British rock legends and talentless urban street toughs, and really the only reason I brought it up today is that I find Tony Iommi's idea of what was "hip" and "edgy" in 1995 just about the most hilarious thing imaginable. His "go-to" was Body Count. Think about that shit.
Anyways, sorry to drop this turd in your proverbial punch bowl today, but hey, you can't win 'em all. Keep your head up, and just remember: RUSTY ANGELS, THEY CAN'T FLY.
Apologies.
Although its roots remained firmly planted in the buddy-comedy genre of previous decades, the offshoot emergence of the buddy-cop subgenre in the mid 1960’s began posing a challenge to post-war American society. Despite some tentative steps that decade, it wasn’t until the 1970’s that the buddy cop movie first began testing the limits of traditional social norms. It was in 1976, when the unthinkable happened; a woman became the buddy to the cop. While the foundations of the status quo were surely shaken to their roots by this and other ruptures, it wasn’t until almost a decade later that the genre really began to come into its own.
The 80’s proved to be the heyday of the buddy-cope genre, a time when the form truly crossed a threshold and, dare I say it, forever changed the face of American cinema. This is thanks to the release of Beverly Hills Cop in 1984, a film which pushed the envelope for African American characters in American cinema. That year, the floodgates weren’t just opened, they were swept from their very hinges. Buddy-Cop films became the leading edge of a social revolution, recasting conventional stereotypes with greater subtlety and nuance and daring us as individual citizens and as a nation to question long held assumptions about workplace integration and traditional ways of combining comedy and action. By the end of the ‘80’s, new and more daring buddy-cop entries arrived monthly, addressing complex social issues each time. Women buddy-cops reappeared, Soviet/American buddy cops, Japanese/American buddy cops, dog/human buddy cops (it’s own sub-sub-genre!) human/alien buddy cops, and even federal/municipal buddy cops. The 80’s was a cultural and political minefield, but Buddy Cops were ready for the challenge.
As the decade came to a close however, it seemed that the Buddy-Cop had reached its apex. It was a heady and inspiring time in America, daily forging a new nation of comedic multicultural camaraderie on the screen. Yet, at the same time the very maturity of this groundbreaking genre prevented it from fully remaking society in its own revolutionary image. The Buddy-Cop could apparently go no further. They may have been a symbol of all that was right with America, but the genre’s aesthetic complexity remained out of reach of the very beneficiaries of the new America that the buddy-cop was carving; children under ten.
In the early years of the 1990’s the genre was foundering, seemingly unable to carry through its promise of a greater society. In the bowels of Hollywood however, a chance encounter between two screen-powerhouses was brewing the formula of a new Buddy Cop that would very nearly achieve the status of its progenitors. With almost half a century of collective experience in the television industry, Henry Winkler and Burt Reynolds had a bone-deep understanding of the American intellect. But how do you translate all the complex socio-cultural commentary of Buddy Cops into an ageless cypher?
The answer turned out to be deceptively simple. By taking the touchstone of modern buddy cop cinema, Axel Foley, and effectively shrinking him into an 8 year old child, the genre became palatable to even the most sensitive of American tastes. While Foley had been a comedic loose-cannon, albeit a “good guy”, he was still a ‘black-man’ and this represented a traditional threat to whiteness that his goofy smile could never quite temper. All the imminent sexuality, violence and anger that black men represent in the white American mythos vanished and was replaced by a cute, well scrubbed and innocuous child that needed to be protected from his own naivete. With Burt Reynolds as the cigar-smoking excessive-force-using bitter old man rougue-Cop to this new incarnation of the Buddy, it was a miraculous reconception of paternalism that transcended metaphor entirely.
Cop and a Half is streaming right now on NutFlex, so go and see the the film that made the 90's the 'cool' decade.
Apocryphon will also be playing in Santa Rosa Saturday, June 23rd. Details forthcoming. And let's not forget:
ILLCON RADIO RETURNS TO THE AIRWAVES AT 10PM TONIGHT RIGHT HERE. WE HAVE IMPORTANT THINGS TO DISCUSS. WE MIGHT HAVE A GUEST OR TWO. WE WILL EAT CHIPS AND AL WILL GET DRUNK. SUBSCRIBE ON ITUNES PLEASE. ALSO CALL US AT 415-829-2980. THANK YOU.
I am going to put it out there and say that it was pretty sweet seeing the level of response to the previous bad artwork post. Then the remedial prison, rehabilitation art ball rolled into the MS Paint album covers post, which we all agree was beyond awesome. To quote the head honcho, " we have the best goddamn motherfucking readers on the entire Internet, you guys rule."
On that slushy note, here is another selection of some of my favourite "bad art" album covers. Once again. Despite a complete lack of art skill and in some cases complete lack of human anatomy, I do hold a certain level of respect for these awesome images.
Pretty obvious what these guys think about all the time isn't it? I can wager it isn't being in a band.
God bless the Scorpions for consistently proving themselves to be guitar wielding numb skulls of the highest order. I have a slight bit of respect for the German chumps over the fact that when it comes to making some sort of statement, The Scorpions are always going to express it at a unbelievably low level of both class and awareness. With Animal Magnetism they surpassed themselves and wouldn't manage to beat it until 1996 when they hit us with this guy.....
See what I mean, deep stuff.
Future barbarian, biker, outlaw judge? Who knows but Battle Axe. They charged into the art the same way they approach they're sweet metal jams. With more enthusiasm than skill.
I really dig this one. Its just an awesome image. Plain and simple. Of course maybe the artist wasn't exactly up to the job but I am letting it slide.
It was mentioned last time so here it is. I never thought I would say this but Metal Magic really was a step up for these guys after Projects In The Jungle.
Karisma with a "K". Pretty sure that's a rabid walrus either escaping from some kind of imprisonment or just hanging out. Awesome.
Yes, that is a skull faced nudist raising a severed penis above its head atop a volcano. Thanks for noticing.
Everyones favourite NWOBHM never was's prove that you shouldn't fear evil. Fear death and badly drawn skulls instead.
Some evil, Christ baiting black metal? No? Oh sorry my mistake. You look like your having far to much fun at camp to be actual black metallers. She most certainly is having far to much fun streaking for Satan.
You shouldn't really expect too much when diving into the putrid trough of goregrind/pornogrind nonsense, its meant to be offensive. But this certainly plumbs some stinky depths.
Another one mentioned last time and its a cracker. Really what can you say about this?
Once again, Any of you guys want to throw some more into the ring? We are open to suggestions for any you can think of to top these.
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