THE SCURVY DEEPS

Arrr, and welcome to the Scurvy Deeps, mates.  Today we're listening to some LEVIATHAN on the turn-table, that's right.


 


in particular their I mean his
uber rare vinyl-only (at the time)
2005 release A SILHOUETTE
IN SPLINTERS, LP album cover
depicted above (with a die hard
candy red vinyl that looks like
blood if it were suspended
beneath ocean waves while 
transfixed by a shaft of sunlight). 

The music itself delves far deeper
than that until it's descended to 
a highly pressurized realm of
sonic pings and distant echoes
crashing off the shores of mad
ness buried under old sand
driven dunes occupied by
chromataphore lit cephalopods
undulating their tentacles slow
as the funereal and dirge like
dark ambient music unfolds
around you like a diver's bell
dropping beneath the plates of hell.   

I've always enjoyed listening to this album regardless of the time of day or month or season.  I've come to appreciate its subtle dynamics all the more over the years as I begin to hear more emerge from its lightless configurations in a gradual gyrational mutation twisting into new flowering shapes budding up out of the inky darkness of the soul and out pouring through our eyes and mouths as we're taken down to the ultimate conclusion remaining: that of our burial at sea. 

 

Just push PLAY on the YouTube video above featuring all forty-eight minutes of this luscious masterwork of ambient music.  An album even Brian Eno would appreciate, for all its dark evocations as well as for the instrumentation provided, even the simplest bass lines add a dimension of haunting space which helps coalesce the bigger picture the songs on this album sonically depict.

The label Moribund Cult reissued this on CD in 2008, I'd wager even that item remains rare today. For three years at least I enjoyed my vinyl-only album rendering it for a brief spell one of the truly kvlt items from my catalog of blackened wax.   Until next time, I bid you not to drown in adieu ~

People, Hell, and Angels

 by roving reporter  shaun lawton   for the roving oculus 

 

I've been spinning my 2LP  2013   debut release posthumous album from Jimi Hendrix, People, Hell, and Angels.   Hearing the rich sounds of immaculate blues rock and roll music emerge from my speakers has me amazed at the thought this may have been the very best release that year but for the life of most of us, who would get the opportunity to find out?  Those who deserve it (must be the only reasonable answer in a world gone mad from disproportional memefication to the point of proliferating its circumstantial virus through every lock and keyhole in the land).  Who's Jimi Hendrix, some of you submillenials may ask?  He's the mythic lead singer of the band Jimi Eat World.  Did you know he owned the largest occult book collection in the world, before his Lord and Master took his soul in good standing as per the deal at the crossroads.   It's true he lived in Anton Levay's castle, out on the fringes of Northampton.  He was also the folk singer (as they referred to his type back in the day) who turned the Beatles on to acid and taught Bob Dylan how to sing and play the guitar.  Not many people know this, today.  That's why I'm here to tell you, straight up, how it all went down, my friends. Back when Jimi Eat World were at the height of their popularity--in the early 90's--when Sinead O'Connor was the uncrowned Queen of Scotland and no one even knew who Forrest Whitaker was.   Those were the days some of us still around who survived them recall dimly through a haze induced by smoking powdered Kool-Aid, I'm afraid.  Very afraid, to tell you the truth, because I don't see how anything beautiful's going to survive intact as we traipse our way forward from here.  Hey Gypsy Boy, why'd you shoot your woman down?  It's alright, Ma, I'm Only Bleeding.   And if you want to bleed, just bleed.   Speaking of Skeleton Tree--that's the other magnificent release of these late lost years quickly being pulled along a gravitational conveyor belt only to disappear into an expanding black hole.


From Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds comes the sixteenth album, this year's Skeleton Tree, as desolate and stripped down sounding foray into lonely madness as I've ever had the consolation to listen to. The entire fucking album is available to listen to for free on YouTube, right here.

  

This album arrived in its pristine vinyl format to my household just the other day like a scared and lonely crow swept down wings upraised having given up to alight on the flat wrought iron hand rail on my front porch.  It seemed to regard me balefully from within it's high sheen exterior packaging. I've invited it in since to join up with its other vinyl  friends and together we often throw a party.  Turn out all the lights in the house once night falls and light a solitary candle in honor of the dead.   ★

EVERYTHING BLEEDS

by  yonder reporter   thorns of the wrathdom

Do you know my name? Do you know what I've shared? Do you think I'm lost? 
Do you think I care? Everything bleeds. 
Everything bleeds, Gary Numan sings on his twenty-thirteen album, 
SPLINTER, Songs From A Broken Mind.  

 

Today at the 9th & 9th St. Fair, we stumbled into a Barber Shop where Graywhale had set up a booth selling vinyl records for up to 70% off.  Sure enough, I scored this latest Gary Numan album, which came out three years ago and I never sprang for.  Today for just ten dollars I couldn't pass it up, and it's playing now on my turntable.  I'd heard a few of the songs on mp3s and was digging the style and feel of the approach this latest incarnation of Numan takes down it's own dark and twisted little  alleway.  Now that the profound anguished beats of this record are having their opportunity to escape from my speakers into the house, I'm really pleased with the sound of this record.  This is some kind of post -everything album, merging such a wide disarray of post -Industrial gothic sounds together that all you gotta do is turn out all the lights, sit back and enjoy.  It's a sort of desolate crumbling underground apocalyptic opera detailing the disintegration of a life, or something along those lines. I can tell I'm going to like getting to know this sick and twisted concept album from Gary Numan. I can't believe three years have already passed since it was released.  We're reeling around the Sun still and it's beginning to feel like we're losing control and going to crash.  

from Early to Born: the legacy of Faun Fables

by thornswrath 

Of all the bands and musical acts I've had the good fortune or luck to witness, none match the underlying kinetic intensity present in the township of Oakland's Faun Fables, which appeared on the scene around 1997 despite Dawn "the faun" McCarthy, the breathing lungs and beating heart of the band, having begun writing and singing some of these songs since 1994.  (That's always the year I can't help but think of both KoRn and Acid Bath: est. '94).   

2016 sees this duo, famed to the underground network of bubbling & steaming passages interlaced through a labyrinthine kingdom hidden right out in the open yet eluding detection by the forces that oppose it, continuing on like the wandering band of nomadic gypsies they appear as, on into that network of dates pinpointed into the late evening in small, scarcely attended bars and venues where only the defiant & lonely dreamers of a darker twilight may drift ashore to; our heroes in Faun Fables now release their seventh album BORN OF THE SUN:  it's nothing short of a sort of rebirth for them, but not because they ever died out or went anywhere but rather because it marks a sudden transformation of themselves into a hundred thousand times brighter magnitude, considering their three lovely young girls they have given unto the light of our Sun together, and who travel with them on their new musical tour of the United States.  The new album features songs they've been carrying with them for several years now, along with freshly seasoned items from a diverse arc of the spectrum. In some ways this album shines with such freshness, it's as if it were their new 1st album.
Yet as any fan of this troupe-de-force  already knows, you can add it to the stack of six that preceded it and it glimmers like the next perfect card in a tarot deck.

Interestingly enough (I was about to post their 2016 tour dates) -- tonight is the final night of their BORN OF THE SUN tour, check it out!

Fr 19 Berkeley, CA @ The Starry Plough
starryploughbooking@yahoo.com

**Go to http://www.faunfables.com/ for more show updates, our newsletter.. and more !

So if you're anywhere near the Berkely area -- get yourself over to the Starry Plough for a great evening of powerful music from Dawn McCarthy and Nils Frykdahl, they will be sure to please the crowd gathered regardless of how young or large, old or small.   

Below I"ve posted the seven Faun Fables album covers in order of appearance, and also the rare cassette edition of Dawn McCarthy's debut solo release,  last year's Traveller Returning.   

I've posted one song from each release, so listen to and/or watch all eight YouTube Faun Fables songs I've selected below.  They're not necessarily the best from each album--they're just what I was able to pull from YT--but regardless, they will give you an extraordinary sense of what the mysterious Faun Fables sonic webwork sounds like over the past twenty years.  

Welcome my friends, welcome to the Mountain under the Sun.

1994 ~ 1999

 

2001

2004

2006

2008

2010

2015

 

 

2016

~

Eno's THE SHIP

by  shaun lawton 

As The Ship began streaming from my PC speakers the first thing I thought of was glass. A filament beneath fogged glass. A filament beneath fogged glass lighting up slowly. The light going from warm yellow toward white and then blending through the spectrum. The glass clarifies then liquefies then disappears altogether, leaving just the light to wallow in the vacuum. Pin pricks allow echoes to flower in the darkness. Deep below decks an engine switches on, muffled by steam engines behind sound proofed glass. The lights dance through the bricks of green glass slowly as more sounds come alive.  A symphony wakes up from its coma to gradually stretch out and yawn. The Ship was sprung from a willing land. Echoes of gaseous vapors steam off the surface of a crystal sea. And there's a globe of powdered sand. We live in clothes we wore. Air bubbles elongate as they plummet and drown. The Time is still. The Sky is young. Drawn on towards the gulf of stars whispering. And we are as the undescribed. Reverberations coalesce into an uprising. A voice through a vibraphone speaks. Distant percussion keeps time. My desert in a grain of sand. My life within a day. So stew the storms that some tied. The black plague is sitting. But we are as the undefined. Reeking of the wind. Whispers begin emanating underneath the skin. Shimmering Cymbeline trapped beneath quiet ice. The sail is down the wind is gone. The sky is black with mold. A slave to hope and destiny. Illusion of control. And we are as the unrefined. The waves about us roll. Spearheaded echos of crystal arrowheads repeatedly diminish triggering smaller fishes of their reflections. Awash in ambient protocols diffused in all directions. Sonar tones arise and sink. Submersibles arrive guided by phosphorescent headlamps. Deeper we go while more voices grow, probing our innermost thoughts. Penetrating the sunken canyons in our little dreadnoughts. The spotlights search left and right, revealing all the whispers in bone. The water is more like marrow here. Our thoughts are all we own. Memories ping and rebound off the inner rubber of our skulls. The pressure stretches these interlocking seams. Even deeper we fall further into fissures transformed to trenches. Microorganisms streaming by our windshield. The vibrations of our tectonic crust. Submerged under wave after wave after wave after wave. The last gossip gradually drowns in our skulls as the final light arrives to wink completely out. 

Open Up And Bleed

review'd by yr roving reporter Thornswrath 

Music for deeply scarred people.  
Burn out my eyes.  I don't want to see. 
The things that you have are not what I need. 
If you want to understand this rock'n'roll band
I suggest familiarizing yourselves with
their very first album from 1999. 
Otherwise, you're entering into a world
that will tackle you head over heels
into a mosh-pit of bewilderment and dismay. 
Take it back to the beginning and listen.

Understand this band represents
an anthem for the champion as well as
a paean for the downtrodden, ravaged
disgraced and tortured to the point of death
laughed at and spat in the face by an outcome
that seems to disregard us in favor of chaos
transformation and pain but along the way
our empty eyes are filled with the flickering
flame of renewal and rebirth as we're urged
to fight back for every last scrap of our lives
we can still hang onto for all that its worth
and to defend as our final shred of integrity
smiling through bloodstained lips 
at your apocalypse.  

Death is my only love, we are as one.
Death is our only love, there can be no other.
Together in harmony, sister and brother
and friend alike we wear our damaged armor 
woven from the fabric of electromagnetic
energy pulsing through the plasma beating
in our hearts to the current rhythms
manifesting from the harmonic choir
of demons and angels orchestrating our lives.  

The story takes us down to where the judgment
is over because the singer's ripped himself bare
and dared to fight back at a senseless world
bent on predatory attack so we say fuck that.

If you will only hold me tight then I know
everything's gonna be alright. The message
behind every album, every song, every lyric
this band ever released is the same one
any single one of us are entitled to by birth
in this nation and on this Earth. Its the personal
freedom to be your own thing and not suffer
the judgment of others.  If they don't get
the brilliant passion and love at the heart
of this expression against the hypocrisy
of our own fellow man, then they can just
fuck off and never mind what happens 
to their sorry asses later on down the line 
when each and every one of our own 
self-fulfilled destinies comes to fruition 
based on the karma we ourselves generate.

I just want to give a holler out to the boss
and up front Story-teller for grabbing on
to the mic and not letting go until
the greatest rock and roll band in the world
(since Motorhead and the Supersuckers) 
rolled into town destroying everything
in their path taking no prisoners holding
no quarter giving no apologies just
straight up slaying it from day one 
with the core of the soul on the killing 
floor like no one's ever gone and done 
before with quite as much boldness as this
so from me and every last one of the slugs
we salute you with a Thank You and hugs.
I love this feeling don't ever let me land
I never want this to end.
Burn out our eyes. 
Slugcult Rise!



~thoRnswrAth 

I'm a Blackstar!

notes scratch'd down

  in a hurry by shaun 

Here's the original version of David Bowie's song 'Tis a Pity She Was a Whore, which appears as the 1st track on the 10" single of Sue (In A Season of Crime).  The b-side is a 7 minute plus version of Sue.  I'm lucky I scored the vinyl on RSD last year.  Now the version on the LP Blackstar which I just acquired and listened to has really been amped up for prime time FM radio bandwidth and mp3 download.  Vinyl's resurgence is real because even Randy's Records in downtown SLC have gotten rid of their CDs entirely. I asked the clerk there and he said "CDs don't sell."  Lucky for me I preordered db's clear die hard edition of Blackstar because little did I or anyone else know that he knew all along he was going to die and had carefully prepared his final album as a swang song love letter to his fanbase, which turns out to be pretty much the entire planet Earth.

Now this second track is the official LP version of 'Tis a Pity She Was a Whore, off Blackstar.  This is a great song that has morphed into a full blown contemporary avant garde track which easily shatters all present commercial airwave expectations with an inescapable defiance. It sets the mark and draws the line for an entire new generation of artists and musicians to springboard from. It clears the field and resets the playing ground to zero. And it does it with such an air of casual finesse, setting a bar high enough to reach for and only dream of aspiring to touch the stars.  The entire album Blackstar comprised of just seven songs acquires a new watermark for the legendary performer and as far as I'm concerned he's aimed for the moon and somehow achieved the impossible dream.

I bravely shout out to the crowd "I'm a Blackstar!" and I think you should to. It's what David Bowie would want us all to do.   Rest in peace you crazy diamond dreamer singer songwriter poet actor painter rocker super star! Not to mention grade-A gentleman and human being. You tore down all the fucking walls there are to be had in this insane world!


(to be cont.)