The Living Was Food and Others

That damned robot told me I should begin this post like this:

"For twenty years I've been releasing experimental music and noise recordings. Looking back through the liner notes, I realized they form a strange autobiographical record of ghosts, dreams, folklore, death, true crime, philosophy, and the underground noise scene itself."

I've been an experimental musician, industrial/"noise" artist for twenty years. I've also occasionally done actual music, music mash-ups of noise, rock, punk, noisy free jazz, what-have-you. "Experimental industrial/ noise artist is how I'm listed at Discogs. And you can get a fuller descript from the AI usually.

Below are a few releases witht their liner notes--which I found interesting as stand-alone pieces of writing.

Love and napalm.

Unknown - "The Living Was Food"

1.

I have known in my life Two Tragic Jasons.

One, a man murdered twenty years ago, was a thin, smallish scruffy character with long hair and a moustache. If I said I met him in a youth mental institution, I wouldn't be lying.

I have written about him before.

I live with his ghost.

These days, I live with a lot of ghosts.

The second Tragic Jason was a cousin that OD'd a couple of years ago. They told me, at first, that he died of cancer.

I didn't buy it, really. Must have come on awful sudden. Like the medieval pox.

Later, I found out he OD'd. Maybe it was heroin. I suppose it was. He cheated the dope money out of a relative. Quite a substantial amount, I was told.

Then he blew his consciousness into the afterlife.

A few weeks ago, I turned on my computer to find that I had outlived a kid I hadn't seen in twenty years.

But I can see her still.

Maybe if I were truly psychic I could have told her, in 1994, the very last day she would be alive. You don't look at a face like that, though, and see suicide.

I live with a lot of ghosts, as I've said.

Not the first OD I've encountered, nor the first suicide. I can still see all of these ghosts, shuffling along. I remember the empty moments when first we met, and the moments in between. I can still see so many of you in the rose-tinted bloom of human animation; wasting your precious minutes, not knowing that, not many years hence, I would still be here, and you would not.

I've known suicides.

Drug casualties.

Murder victims.

And those that gave out through cancer, heart disease, the infirmities of age.

And the pale shadow of yesterday hangs over me in the morning and evening. And I know my own death waits out there for me, some day,

somewhere, by some as-yet-unforseen set of circumstances. I'd never do anything to hasten it along; life is for the survivors, the intrepid and the death-defiant.

As I write this, I'm listening to singer Glenn Danzig tell me it's a long way back from Hell.

You better believe it.

2.

I won't pretend these recordings, the bulk of them, constitute actual "music." If you follow anything I do, I have been recording a lot of actual music lately, and you're sure to run across some of it either here or elsewhere online.

Actual music isn't what these particular projects are about.

3.

I found this anonymous, ancient poem in the book "Food for the Dead" by folklorist MIchael Bell.

She bloom'd, though the shroud was around her, locks o'er her cold bosom wave,

As if the stern monarch had crowned her,

The fair speechless queen of the grave,

But what lends the grave such lustre?

O'er her cheeks what such beauty shed?

His life blood, who bent there, had nurs'd her,

The living was food for the dead!

--Author Unknown. Published May 4, 1822

album credits

released October 8, 2014

All sounds and production by Tom B.

Unknown - "The Living Was Food"

Extreme Volume Pop - Give Me Your Head and I'll Give You My Hand

Liner Notes:

I was carrying a grocery sack through the aisles of one of those violent, all-male institutions that pass as a reform school.

I was headed to the lavatory, wherein the boys, unbeknownst to the teachers and principle, smoked continually behind the yawning doors of so many filthy stalls. The stall doors were opened against detection, covering the entrance. But who could not smell the smoke, or see it as it wafted out the restroom entrance.

I mention this in passing. The important point is that that I was carrying a head an an arm in the sack. This is significant.

It was either a plaster head, and a plaster death mask (ala the plaster arm and death mask of JOSEPH CAREY MERRICK, the hideously deformed Victorian “Elephant Man,” whose death date just passed yesterday. [his death date, coincidentally, coincides with the birth date of Anton Szandor LaVey, who was born April 11th, 1930, and founded the Church of Satan]), or it may have very well been the genuine article, in which case it is reminiscent of the various killings committed by famed serial murderer Ed Kemper, who I just drew for the second time (I’ve actually done artwork based on all three individuals).

Ed was born in 1948. He was famously christened the co-ed killer for his penchant for killing co-eds. When he was a tender lad of fifteen, after being sent from his abusive, alcoholic bitch of a mother to live with his grandparents (his grandmother apparently wrote children’s books), Ed got in a tussle with grandma one day and promptly dispatched her to that Big Valley in the sky. He then killed grandpa, and went and meditated under the mountain sky, after calling police and telling them he just wanted to see “what it felt like to kill grandma.”

After spending a wee bit of time at Atascadero mental asylum and developing into a literal six ten three hundred plus pound giant, the amiable Ed against medical advice, was sent by a judge to live with his mother (same one that use to accuse Ed of trying to rape his sister before locking him in a basement hole). Ma was her ever lovable self and continued her verbally abusive and belittling habits post haste. Lucky for Ed, he found some new ways to release his pent-up frustrations.

We could go into the boring litany of cat-and-mouse games played by Ed at this time in furtherance of securing victims, but, suffice it to say, he dispatched five college females and one high school girl. His unique habit of beheading the victims and then sodomizing the severed craniums brings us to the next sordid part of our story.

Six victims–nary a peep of suspicion from anyone. Everything cold and icy as a trip through the city morgue.

Then, Mom drove Ed to the breaking point. I guess guys like Ed are pretty much always to the breaking point.

(Now, here it gets strange. We’ve just realized Ed committed his final murders on April 20th, which is not only the birth date of Hitler, but also a celebration for pot smokers worldwide; also, it kicks off that “April 20th-April 30th corridor” that gives us the “Shot Heard Round the World,” the Fall of Saigon, the first LSD trip by Dr. Hoffman, the Oklahoma City Bombing [actually happened on the 19th, but what’s a single day?] the suicide of the Branch Davidian cult at Waco, Hitler’s suicide on April 30th 1945, the founding of the Church of Satan in 1966, Walpurgisnacht [the high holy day, traditionally, of those who practice black witchcraft] the Virginia Tech Massacre [okay, we’re stretching the dates again here, but still, close enough] and the birth date of Adam Lanza (April 22), the Sandy Hook Elementary school shooter…and we’re positive there are things were forgetting, but we can’t be bothered at the moment to hunt them all down; and, if we did, we’re sure this little essay would stretch into volumes.)

The hulking ogre with the genius-level IQ was waiting for Mommy to come home. When she did, and retired to bed with a paperback, he passed by the door menacingly–one supposes breathing fire.

After berating him with a suspicion that he would want to stay up all night “talking” (did they often do this, one wonders) Ed assured her this was not the case. Then, he beat her to death with a claw hammer, sodomized her severed head, put it up on the mantle and used it as a dart board, and took her vocal chords, stuffing them down the garbage disposal (which just would not take them). Ed liked this last bit of irony, as “she was always bitching at me…” One is left speechless.

After this round of slaughter, Ed called up Clarnell Kemper’s good female friend, invited her over, and strangled her.

Fleeing, Ed called from a few states over to turn himself in. The rest of the story is as dully predictable as one of those episodes from a television police show. Anyway, he’s serving life at Vacaville without parole.

The special point of this essay is his predilection for sodomizing severed heads–a practice that, in 1973, was likewise depicted in the notorious cult film Bloodsucking Freaks (aka The Incredible Torture Show) by the demented dwarf porn actor Louis De Jesus (whose last role was as an Ewok in Return of the Jedi. He died shortly thereafter.) The coincidence between our own dream of carrying a severed head (as well as an arm), and then commencing to depict Ed Kemper one morning in a very poor sketch cannot be overlooked, seeing as how it coincides with so many other significant dates in this turbulent month of April, going into the “black corridor” of April 20th- April 30th.

Of course, the head is the seat of human consciousness the arm representing reach and action and physicality. Maybe. What metaphor am I to read into this?

I go into the Boys’s room, with a bunch of wet, nasty, beastly boys in towels, getting ready for a communal dip in a porcelain tub of filthy water (mental patients in the Victorian period and later were often subjected to “hydrotherapy” that was perfectly useless in alleviating their psychological sufferings)

I pull the head and the arm from the sack.

“Feels like flesh. But it’s awfully white,” I say. “Through and through. Could just as easily be rubber. I touched a corpse once. Felt the same way.”

“No, I don’t think so,” said one of the boys, dropping his cigarette on the floor, were it dissolved in a puddle of filthy shower water. “look, you can see the veins and muscles and ligaments and all that shit.”

I don’t remember how it all ended. I don’t suppose it matters. This is not a scholarly essay, nor does it attempt to be definite or thorough in regards to Ed Kemper, April 30th, or dreams of severed heads.

Note: The last time I dreamt of carrying around a mysterious package, I went into dismal, filthy trailer, laid it down on a coffee table, and realized it looked like a package of Chinese take-out. I supposed there was a dead baby inside, but I never did get it opened before I awoke.

credits

released April 13, 2015

All instrumentation and production by Tom B. 2015.

Extreme Volume Pop - Give Me Your Head and I'll Give You My Hand

V/A - Oral Disease: Noise Artists Talk About Noise

Album Notes: By JLIAT

The word or logos is that arbitrary container of meaning, a play of differences, trace, hymen, parole of metaphysic horizons and stratification that should be anathema to devotees of noise. Not even a “il n'y a pas de hors-texte” should save us from this play. Well we could plead knowledge of Monsieur Meillassoux’s attack on fideism by a contingency which can bring forth deities! We might even indicate that Opera is the fate of all Avant Garde. But we have not yet withdrawn behind the balconies… rather the attack now is on the logocenticism and the écriture itself. Our poison is the empty bottle of the khora itself, and these voices as rightly maintained are all in dead languages. Make what you will, or make nothing. The cosmic logos of order that called light into the world was stolen by the demiurge – not from Pleroma or Laruelle’s ONE, but from the many, the many voices which sound like water. Venus, Christ, Lucifer, one and the same, loses its meaning as does difference.

"Cum ipsi (majores homines) appellabant rem aliquam, et cum secundum earn vocem corpus ad aliquid movebant, videbam, et tenebam hoc ab eis vocari rem illam, quod sonabant, cum earn vellent ostendere. Hoc autem eos veile ex motu corporis aperiebatur: tamquam verbis naturalibus omnium gentium, quae fiunt vultu et nutu oculorum, ceterorumque membrorum actu, et sonitu vocis indicante affectionem animi in petendis, habendis, rejiciendis, fugiendisve rebus. Ita verba in variis sententiis locis suis posita, et crebro audita, quarum rerum signa essent, paulatim colligebam, measque jam voluntates, edomito in eis signis ore, per haec enuntiabam." (Augustine, Confessions, I. 8.)

Now think of the following use of language: I send someone shopping.

I give him a slip marked "five red apples". He takes the slip to the shopkeeper, who opens the drawer marked "apples"; then he looks up the word "red" in a table and finds a colour sample opposite it; then he says the series of cardinal numbers—I assume that he knows them by heart—up to the word "five" and for each number he takes an apple of the same colour as the sample out of the drawer.——It is in this and similar ways that one operates with words.——"But how does he know where and how he is to look up the word 'red' and what he is to do with the word 'five'?"——Well, I assume that he acts as I have described. Explanations come to an end somewhere.—But what is the meaning of the word "five"? — No such thing was in question here, only how the word "five" is used.” - PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS.

credits

released February 21, 2013

Compilation by Anon Pop. Liner Notes by Jliat. Artists (In Order of Appearance): FAP, The Smudge, Seven1878, Bonehole, Sleep of Ages, Extreme Volume Pop, Fecalove, Carl Kruger, Meat Glue. Released Feb. 2013. Special thanx to Jliat, and special mention for Luke. Kinda miss ya, ya' crazy limey. Shout outs to all the NGrs: if you supported in any way, thanxs and best wishes for the new year.

V/A - Oral Disease: Noise Artists Talk About Noise (Note: NSFW)

Extreme Volume Pop - Bandcamp

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