Leopold Bloom's Skittish Approach

Cemetery tunes are ornery to execute, and often aren’t as difficult to digest as they should be, but even a cursory listen to Sunn O)))’s "Candlegoat” from their 2005 release, Black One, should do the death trick for us nicely. Lyrics from Mayhem are quoted as a summons: Mayhem's singer Euronymous was killed in 1993 by Varg Vikernes of Burzum. Low-end manifestations in this piece are likely to invoke uneasy funereal postures and the incoherence of mortality. At the least they’ll inspire intestinal loosening. The gaseous intro to “Candlegoat” is faux ambient when sonic waves begin to alter the chemistry of the listening space and black wooly worms as long as hairbrushes appear outside the door. If you find yourself taking the ritual seriously, make sure your loved ones are out of town and any hatchets are locked away in the garage or woodshed. However, in actual swine life, you know these guys would be fun to eat corn dogs with while watching Barry Lyndon, and this is probably superb music to fly a small engine plane to as you soar above a fried desert landscape, hollering into the wind the law of Austin Osman Spare, looking for “that party” at a Caliph’s palace. Choronzon awaits.

Next we encounter the devilish Serbian trumpets of Boban Marković Orkestar doing "Vlasinka", from 2000’s Srce Cigansko (Heart of Gypsy). I think the underlying thump juice on this tune is as unbelievably organ shifting as Sunn O))), but swarthy fuckers getting ready to embark on a midnight vodka run (deer blades in belts) while their gals pile out of the house onto the porch to watch them go, waving silk handkerchiefs, is the Shiznit. Don’t drink too much coffee!

This cut will definitely inspire grafts of wood needed to sculpt human stumps, and it refuses to allow a handhold to escape the cliffs of sedentary thought...from 1930-1933, Harry Partch recorded the text from Shigeyoshi Obata: The Works of Li Po, the Chinese Poet, and who knows how many celestial trains he had to ride before he finished. As a composer, Partch catapulted microtonal branches after early emanations (also laden with the Book of Psalms). “A Dream” is taken from The Seventeen Lyrics of Li Po, released in 1995 on Tzadik, and was recorded on February 29, 1932. All is One on the climb to the mountains of the sky: “How can I stoop obsequiously and serve the Mighty Ones? It stifles my soul.” Shadoobie. I often pander to the slopes of my raising on the Appalachian starvation diet.

“For Today I Am a Boy” is from Antony and the Johnsons’ 2005 album I Am a Bird Now and suffices for the song we knew we needed when life was blessed with goodness and there was nowhere to turn but the skies, and mortal rains didn’t come like we thought they should. What is delicate is in us all and favors no one: Molly.

Hasil Adkins is the maestro of rocking thighs, and we only need to sample one of his early grumplets to ascertain how jelly things can go. For summertime moves, “Teeny Weenie Waddy Kiss” is from his mid-50s LP Out to Hunch and will get any Southern girl you know to confess belief in some ulterior and baneful type of ‘crunk’—just don’t get her too privy to his tunes about cut-off heads. A good buddy of mine always tells a story about Hasil waiting out in his car until it was his time to go on stage, so stacked up on the winds of fate that nothing mattered to him. With patience be blessed.

While we thumb back through Ulysses (June 16!), in the elder regions there is this scrap of mental porridge (Psychic TV): “Base Metal (remix).” Let us cable Leopold the Jew as we thunkingstock our days. We can be all cock-a-hoop about our modern craze for sound. And then there’s also Pollard’s way, the fever of the routine, our snake that hides: “How’s My Drinking.” If we weren’t guided somehow who would forgive us anyway? What is the word of days that might transmogrify our beings? Feeling, I tell you.

And finally we reach the end of this garble wheel, the black action that we started, but with a warrior’s amplifier set in our hearts. High on Fire recorded Blessed Black Wings very yesterday but I have poured over “Brothers in the Wind.” As it pertains to our burnt norbs, the energy is palpable as a battleaxe turd. For lost brothers we are now able, through an axis of perpetual slaughter, to contact and beat them to death with our lamb love...on and on and on and on. Played in decibels reserved for an evening of blue inebriation, it’s almost summer. Ain't James Joyce coming for some golf shirts, sumbitch? Tighten up.