“Heavy Metal in Baghdad is a feature film documentary that follows the Iraqi heavy metal band Acrassicauda from the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003 to the present day. Playing heavy metal in a Muslim country has always been a difficult (if not impossible) proposition but after Saddam’s regime was toppled, there was a brief moment for the band in which real freedom seemed possible. That hope was quickly dashed as their country fell into a bloody insurgency. From 2003-2006, Iraq disintegrated around them while Acrassicauda struggled to stay together and stay alive, always refusing to let their heavy metal dreams die. Their story echoes the unspoken hopes of an entire generation of young Iraqis.”
“I’ve always been both a metalhead and a total fantasy geek—possibly the two most powerful formative influences on my teen years were Metallica and J.R.R. Tolkien. There exists a deep and occult connection between heavy metal and fantasy fiction, one that surfaces both obliquely—Spiked wristbands! Album covers that could double as Wheel of Time book jackets! Fire!—and overtly, as in the legacy of metal songs explicitly inspired by fantastical literary sources.
After the jump, check out a few of my favorite heavy metal songs inspired by fantasy novels. And I know I’ve forgotten a few, so add them in the comments!
Iron Maiden - “To Tame a Land”
Pretty much the entire Iron Maiden catalogue of powerfully narrative songs could be considered part of the classic fantasy canon. But special mention has to be made of “To Tame a Land,” off Piece of Mind, based on the Dune novels. And they’re really not kidding with these Dune references, which are serious and deep—this is Bruce Dickinson singing, as a fan, to other fans:
It is a land that’s rich in spice
The sandriders and the “mice”
That they call the Muad’Dib.
He is the Kwisatz Haderach.
He is born of Caladan
And will take the Gom Jabbar.”
“It could only happen in New York. Where else in the world would people queue around the block for a seedy-looking jazz club, to hear the performance of a man best remembered for having invented the musical broomstick, whose fingers are so arthritic they can hardly move, and who is still pumping it out every Monday night at the age of 93?
But then, the weekly Les Paul show at the Iridium Club, a basement joint on Broadway that looks as though it was set in aspic some time in the 1950s, is more than just a performance. It’s a pilgrimage, where fans of 20th-century American music and lovers of the electric guitar - Paul McCartney, Jeff Beck, and Keith Richards among them - come to pay homage to the great man. Richards bluntly summed up the aura of the man when he said: “We must all own up that without Les Paul, generations of flash little punks like us would be in jail or cleaning toilets.”
Like his close collaborator, Leo Fender, Les Paul is best known for the electric guitar he created. If the Fender Stratocaster is the edgy workhorse of the rock industry, the Gibson Les Paul was and remains its elegant rival, its richly varnished mahogany body and oyster-shell fingerboard adding a touch of class to a rough-hewn affair. But there’s much more to Paul than a lump of wood with a cherry-burst finish: he’s also a consummate musician who, despite the arthritis which has reduced him to the use of just two fingers, is still able to spark a flame in much younger performers.”
Radar has a great long article Genesis P. Orridge up:
He and Breyer wouldn’t actually get to talk to each other until the next evening, when they accompanied Sellers to a party at the S&M club Paddles, jabbering away like kids while Jackie ground the heel of her motorcycle boot into some guy’s testicles. On the morning in question, though, there wasn’t time. Jackie had to go to work, and Gen was on his way out. He hadn’t really come to Terence’s dungeon for punishment, anyway; he’d already had more than enough of that in his life.
Update: I had only read the first 3/4s of this article last night. The last 1/4 is even more amazing. It contains the first public statements I know of by Gen since Lady Jaye’s death.
This is the best piece of writing I’ve read in a long time.
We’re happy to announce the latest additions to our schedule:
Orryelle Defenestrate-Bascule Orryelle Defenestrate-Bascule is a ChaOrder Magician and Baphometic avatar somewhat obsessed with physical reification and Malkuthian manifestation. While s/he does enjoy shamanic and astral journeys via various trance techniques (occasionally inc. extreme entheogens such as Ayahuasca or fly agarics), s/he is not content to just travel to other dimensions, rather enjoying bringing back aspects of them to the physical plane.
S/he is thus constantly reburbishing hir Temple, that is the physical form seen as a malleable tool: Physical mutations as magickal acts (chakra piercing and weaving, Tattoo Tarot Tantra, etc.), Body Art in extremis, Sex Magick and Environment Sculpting.
As a vessel for these processes and others, hir Metamorphic Ritual Theatre Company presents public rituals aiming to transform rather than merely entertain the audiences - who thus be-come the initiates, sometimes being led through environmental installations (such as Labyrinths woven through the woods) while interacting directly with other characters.
Such ritual theatre is infused with universal symbology gleaned from Orryelle’s studies of alchemy and comparative mythologies (especially Norse, Egyptian, Hindu, Mayan and Greek).
Oryelle’s appearance at Esozone is courtesy of R6XX.
Freeman Freeman was arguably the breakout star of last year’s Esozone, wowing our Friday night audience with tales of corporate logo hypnotism, illuminated factions of hollow-earth dwelling reptiles, and the relationship between trauma-based mind control and Britney Spears. Back for a second round, Freeman promises to take Esozone participants even deeper down the rabbit hole.
In 2007, Burial’s last album was a hot topic in certain areas of the blog world, with Burial, as an entity, often bracketed with kode9, many thinking the two producers were one and the same — hence the photo heading this post. People really were straining to find the appropriate terms to describe this strange, otherworldly music, and often the conclusion reached was: it’s Ballardian. I became interested in tracking this meme because, as Steve suggests, Crash would invariably be the book that got referenced, yet I couldn’t really hear Crash’s themes in the music of either kode9 or Burial. It seemed that Crash was beginning to function as a default Ballardian reference, like 1984 standing in for ‘Orwellian’. […]
Regarding ‘The Sound-Sweep’, I too have been very influenced by the musique concrete aspects of this story, and I have to thank Paul Williams for turning me onto the noise in Ballard’s work. Once I looked for it I found it was everywhere in his writing, and Goodman’s views on this have inspired me also. Given Goodman’s interest in this story of Ballard’s, and the fact that in the Rupture interview he said he is also listening to lots of non-dance music, I also wonder if one day he will produce work in beatless, psychoacoustic, macrocosmic, musique concrete idioms. I think those results would be very interesting indeed.
“At first glance, Cesare Bonizzi looks like the archetypal Capuchin monk - round-faced, stout, with twinkling eyes and a long flowing white beard. But beneath his robes beats a heart of metal. Brother Cesare is the lead singer in a heavy metal band which has just released its second album. A former missionary in the Ivory Coast, he lives in a small friary in the Milan hinterland.
The 62-year-old monk’s love affair with heavy metal began when he attended a Metallica concert some 15 years ago. “I was overwhelmed and amazed by the sheer energy of it” he says. Hard rock and heavy metal have, over the years, been criticised as the work of the devil. It’s a claim which Brother Cesare, also known as Brother Metal, says is nonsense. He started playing and recording cassettes, firstly with “lighter” metal music, but gradually he realised that what really moved him was the hard core.”
“A blind five-year-old pianist from South Korea has stunned the music world after a video of her performance received more than 27million hits. Yoo Ye-eun, who was born blind and adopted in 2002, has never had a formal piano lesson but can play any song after just one listen.
And now her remarkable talent is set to propel her to stardom as clips of her amazing performance have attracted millions of viewers to Korean website Pandora TV. A similar clip on YouTube has so far received two million hits. Her display on ‘Star King’, a Korean talent show, earned the youngster £500 in prize money and moved the studio audience to tears.”
“Cassette tapes are near extinction, considering CDs, DVDs, Blue Ray and other innovative disk coming along. And the following skeleton is one wacky creation for this statement. The creation belongs to Brian Dettmer, I guy famous for altering common media such as old books, maps, record albums, and cassette tapes and transforming them into works of art. The following skeleton is currently on display at the International Museum of Surgical Science.”
“Over the last two months, Nature has published a series of essays about the latest scientific research into music, and now that the series is complete, it has been made available as a free PDF.
Among the authors of the essays are Aniruddh D. Patel, a theoretical neurobiologist at the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, who discusses the brain’s response to different varieties of music, and Laurel Trainor, director of the McMaster Institute for Music and the Mind, who explains the neural basis of music perception. Nature also has a special podcast featuring a discussion between science writer Philip Ball and music psychologist John Sloboda, both of whom contribute essays to the series.”
“This article will cover a few bizarre musical instruments, and oddities used by musicians to convey that special feeling or a melody. Some of the uniquely crafted items may cost a fortune, others are very simple and can be easily assembled from parts found in your kitchen. All of them have loads of character, and that special sound that no other instrument can make.”
What do you think should be the role of the artist in society? Should art disgust people, should it be a critical mirror, an escape, entertainment…?
I think art should be all those things. I think in a world where everything human is denigrated, art becomes more crucial and more important for people making it through their life. I think that art should be your muse, what inspires you; it can help guide you.
How would your visual art guide people? What would it guide them to do?
To make good choices in their daily life. I think that the best art is inspirational.
[…]
Oswald Spengler, the quasi-fascist German philosopher of history wrote in The Decline of the West that “optimism is cowardice.” Do you agree?
I don’t think that optimism is cowardice. In some ways, I think that Devo was optimistic. We talked about De-evolution, but we always encouraged people to be anti-stupidity and to try and make a difference. We were never praising de-evolution. We were musical reporters, saying, “Wait a minute. Do you see what’s going on? Do you see what you are a part of?”
“If the contemporary struggle for a better world has a soundtrack, it surely features the music of Michael Franti. To Franti, music and activism are one and the same — his albums, the last three of which have sold over 100,000 copies combined, are truth-telling manifestos you can dance to. While touring constantly, he tirelessly promotes peace, sustainability and human rights. His annual Power to the Peaceful festival raises money for different causes each year — from Mumia Abul Jamal’s legal case to bringing American troops home from Iraq. Last year, 60,000 people attended in San Francisco and 4,000 in São Paulo, Brazil.
He has been named an Ambassador of Peace by the World Health Organization, and performs benefit concerts for Iraq Veterans Against the War, grassroots workers in New Orleans, as well as free concerts in prisons. In his personal life he is a vegan and yogi, and if you find yourself behind his hybrid or his biodiesel tour bus, follow him: he’ll pay your bridge toll. Last month we visited Franti in his San Francisco studio as he was putting the finishing touches on his new release, “All Rebel Rockers,” due out in September.”
“Many people are uncomfortable with the march of the surveillance state – but a Manchester band has used it to their advantage.
Unable to afford a proper camera crew and equipment, The Get Out Clause, an unsigned band from the city, decided to make use of the cameras seen all over British streets. With an estimated 13 million CCTV cameras in Britain, suitable locations were not hard to come by.
They set up their equipment, drum kit and all, in eighty locations around Manchester – including on a bus – and proceeded to play to the cameras. Afterwards they wrote to the companies or organisations involved and asked for the footage under the Freedom of Information Act.”
“The anti-Vietnam war demonstration of March 1968 was a turning point in post-war politics: it turned violent right in front of the world’s media; the police were shown throwing punches into the faces of already arrested students, and in general losing control. The police files from that event are considered too sensitive to release. But Newsnight has obtained, under Freedom of Information, a stack of police files relating to the much bigger anti-war demonstration of October that year. Watch tonight: they tell a story of rising panic in the establishment: the creation of Britain’s first bomb squad; an intelligence feedback loop between Special Branchand the press that ramped up the tension; and, farcically, the rock group The Doors being mistaken for a group of foreign revolutionaries…”
Above: Vera Meyer performs various songs on a glass armonica.
The glass armonica’s ghostly notes will cause insanity in its musicians and listeners! At least this is what was thought to be true in the 18th century. People were frightened by the armonica’s sound due to it’s strange interactions with the human brain and ears (more on this later). Benjamin Franklin invented the glass armonica (above) in 1761 after being profoundly moved by the sounds of the glass harp (below).
[…]
The glass armonica’s sound is perceived by human ears differently than other instruments because its range is between 1,000 and 4,000 hertz. When sounds are below 4,000 hertz, the human brain compares “phase differences” between the left and right ears to triangulate the origin of the sound rather than comparing volumes. This causes hearing disorientation and a “not quite sure” feeling about where the sound is coming from.
“If you are male and a Led Zeppelin fan, chances are you may be leaning toward voting Republican in the U.S. presidential election, according to a survey of rock radio fans released on Wednesday.The Jacobs Media’s Media/Technology Web Poll IV of more than 27,000 respondents cited stronger than expected interest in the November 2008 election among fans of rock, classic rock, and alternative radio stations.
It also found that John McCain, the Republican candidate for U.S. president, was the top pick for the Oval Office for men and classic rock partisans — those people who tune in to stations playing music from the “original classic rock era” of 1964 to 1975, comprised of bands like Led Zeppelin, The Who and Pink Floyd. Jacobs Media said the survey, conducted among 69 U.S. rock-formatted stations in markets as diverse as Los Angeles and Knoxville to Buffalo, found 84 percent of the respondents planned to vote in the November election.”
“Heavy metal is the ideal soundtrack to the bloody conflict raging in Baghdad right now. The city boasts a macho crowd—guns for hire, thrill-seeking journalists, war profiteers, kamikaze insurgents—and metal holds machismo in very high regard. Of course, Acrassicauda, the band at the center of the documentary Heavy Metal in Baghdad, which opens the New York Underground Film Festival April 2 (a DVD release comes later this year), was not born of war-torn, modern-day Iraq, but rather a much less openly violent society.
Baghdad’s metal scene grew from a small community of teenagers with a shared love of American music—many of the most accomplished and well-known Iraqi groups got their start covering Metallica and Ozzy Osbourne. In the late 1980s, bands like Scarecrew performed regularly to sold-out crowds of headbangers and moshers, albeit in small halls and with almost no commercial backing. By the late ’90s, the scene had cooled slightly, though a few bands, like Converse and Passage, still played regularly for packs of fans numbering in the low hundreds.”
