horror skunx RISE

by your friendly Station 3  DJ Shaun Grub   

      Squeezed in between  Hank III and Human Drama  there's the unforgettable sensational rising star of horror skunx with all fifteen of his pop song hits forming the basis for one of my favorite albums from the past couple years   "BENDYLAND"  as I like to think of it,  but whatever Winston Julian decides to end up naming the album itself^, all fifteen of these songs are classics in the making, and we'd better make no mistake about that.   

      [Look,  I went out and purchased all fifteen trax  for .99c each and ripped 'em to my 16gig nano long ago already, and if there's a sixteenth tune that drops of a sudden, it will be on my phone before sundown. Except my nano's in a state of shock right now, with the white screen of death and the two beeps.  This could be the end of an era.]*  It's true my nano never recovered. I advanced to using my iPhone / Apple Music.   

... O, did I say fifteen trax?  *fast-forward a few years to 2024* Try more like thirty-two now (by my count) which doesn't include the instrumental film score I'm not a Monster (PJ Pug-A-Pillar Soundtrack), which clocks in at 2:27 of surprisingly emotive neoclassical sound, but does include the smash hit Revive My Soul (Side B) collab w/Rockit Music, from the Revive My Soul (Bendy and the Dark Revival) EP, feat. 2 different versions, one sung by just Rockit I think, and the one I really like, the duet w/Winston Julian aka my #1 favorite recording artist today.  He's been Cupid-launched into my heart ever since Zane & I discovered him back during the pandemic, when his early short Sirenhead reels were hitting YT, we were instantly hooked,  my boy & I are most die hard horror skunx fans on the planet. 

                                                              just push PLAY and listen to this earliest

of horror skunx hits, the absolute classic Run Away:

 Before reading any further, stop and think out loud to yourself so you can hear your own voice in your head saying it, what did you think of the song?  If you're not sure, listen to it again. Now you may continue reading my soliloquy to the one and only horror skunx.   (to be cont.)  Cont. 

^the album itself:  To make a finer point of it, you see, this is where it becomes necessary for me to point out, in this footnote, that what we're dealing with here, as an emergent post-media phenomenon, is just one of many YouTube rising stars, doing their own thing, and in the case of Mr. Winston Julian, from the Netherlands, self-made singer, songwriter, VFX artist and filmmaker, what I would humbly describe as a rising superstar whose significance to current young generations of followers comparatively speaking in contrast to the Boomers' and their spawnling gen-X of cohorts in arms, I think of Winston as a sort of ultramodern equivalent to Charlie Chaplin.  

   Cont.  I think the 2nd horror skunx song to strike a chord in me, was the responding tune My Savior, which concerns the mythical skeletal being Long Horse, in fact a hero who pits himself fearlessly against any one of the legion of antagonists popping up out of the shadows who would intrude into our animate world from their paper conceptualized cartoon plane of existence, such as Cartoon Cat and Cartoon Dog and Cartoon Mouse, and a lot of other ancillary villains cribbed from the creative commons platform occupied by SCP and an endless amount of literary precursors, enough to fill the coffers of any multiverse scenario schemed up by the Moorcocks & Kings of the world. 

to be cont. 

LAST Perform Depleted Host live in SLC June 7, 2024 at the International Artist Lounge

by roving reporter (for the Oscillating Oculus) Thornswrath 

click to watch

and listen to
LAST 

live in

SLC 

     Man, my friends Ian and Chase in Salt Lake's own electronic death duo's LAST are sending out permanent waves from the heart of their soul, and I'm feeling it.   I'm so damn lucky I went to this show.  I used to see them perform live all the time while they were in 2-Headed Whale, back around when the pandemic broke, when they were a four piece, with Grayden on the saw and Angela on electric violin.  

   

       There was absolutely nothing like a 2-Headed Whale show.  Like that time I saw them at Crucial Fest I think it was, opening for Wovenhand.  What a damn magical night that was. 

And the time they opened for THOU at Diabolical.  With barely enough space to hold 26 people, that makes for a legendary scene.  THOU covered Would by Alice in Chains, if I recall rightly.   And now LAST has gone on a few tours, and have gathered a nationwide rep as the hard core bad asses they are.  I can't stress enough how much love I have for these guys. They have played with absolutely everybody in the scene. From our very own Portal To The Goddman Blood Dimension, Thou again just last Friday (I missed it), Crippling Alcoholism in Boston, Izthmi out of Seattle, Guhts outta Brooklyn, Void Eater from Atlanta, Ghostlight, Drifter, Tenant, Stander, Exosphere, Glass Artery, Mold Farmer, Lechers, Debilitating Lower Back Pain, Jain Broom (which I filmed a post-Odyssey trip-sequence I'm saving to release on my YT channel for that special rainy day) and I'm pretty sure they played with Primitive Man. I guess my point is LAST aren't going places THEY BEEN PLACES.  LAST is all set to conquer the world.  These two guys bring it to the post core scene or whatever you wanna call it. LAST remain standing on four legs in plain defiance. You do not fuck with LAST. They are the nicest guys you're ever likely to meet in any dive bar or club across the nation.   

    Watch this video again if you have to, and keep an eye out on them. cuz LAST are killin' it, and they're only getting started.  If you're on bandcamp, you may have already discovered them there, their auspicious debut ALL TUNNEL, NO LIGHT dropped in January of 2021. Then, nearly three years later, in October of 2023, they released their sophomore effort SIFTING THROUGH ASH FOR THE BELONGINGS OF OUR LOVED ONES, which shifts their colossal sound into the next phase of their shattering odyssey.  I can't even begin to imagine what they have in store for us on their third monumental release. 

    It's really not worth me trying to even describe to you the power and emotional impact of LAST.  If you take a minute to google the history of their tours, well good luck pulling anything up as of yet because they are nestled firmly and comfortably deep in the underground where they ought to be. You will soon enough discover that we have unearthed a legend yet in the making of the post hard core death noise doom scene, right here in our fair city by the great salt lake of shedding toxins.  Ian and Chase are the coolest guys to come out of this cracked city in a god damn dog's age. Do yourselves a favor and buy both of their albums immediately, or an alternate future self of yours will be lamenting in shame and sorrow over your missed opportunity.   

    Both of these albums are so amazing that I owe it to myself to write reviews up for each of them.  By the time I get around to doing that, we'll likely get absolutely crushed by their third. It's coming like that darkened asteroid NASA doesn't even know about lurking just around the cosmological corner and coming at us like an extinction event the likes of us have never heard. Get prepared now and familiarize yourselves with their first two albums. You've been warned. 

        

In the Key of Dream Lore

 an exploration of the sonic under terrains lurking beneath the surface of our every day world

   by your roving reporter from the Oscillating Oculus returning from the deepest depths,

     Thornswrath 

                                                    The Nameless Mist (Magnum Innominandum )  digital art by LK

     As the echoing ululations evoked from my writing incur all the melodic overtones necessary to provide a haunting sonic backdrop, I've layered in lyrical melodicism with the sibilant whispers of the cutting edge sands issuing from serpent's scales hovering in an eerie blend suspended among the deep down bass undertones of a chanted serenade, I am driven to keep thinking about the first couple of tracks which emerged in time to help develop what would come to be half of the two track album Dream Lore of the Star Winds.  

     Such are the evocative sounds to be heard within the twenty-two minute demo dubbed The Nameless Mist, from Luciferal's Key, a recently introduced glitch poetics artist who cropped up last October on SBR's cosmic horror dark ambient compilation Esoterrexus, an album featuring over twenty musicians and clocking in at over three hours in length. There is a mother lode of soundscape artists featured on this looming asteroid slab of a compilation, all of them exploring deep, brooding sonic terrains etched from the loneliest corners of our soul's most desolate spaces. 

     Track sixteen is Luciferal Key's seventeen minute long offering,  Nyctelios in Atheron, a funereal dirge of droning backdrop that evokes monks chanting from deep within the cavernous underground, amid the lurking presence of a serpent with shimmering scales hissing in a series of hypnotic rattling sounds seemingly designed to keep the listener spellbound.  

     Today I decided to take action and get the second track out.  I knew what I had to do, and followed through with the specifications, and composed another piece of ambient music, which ended up clocking in at 22 min long, because the sublyrical source text was three hundred and fifty two words long, consisting of thirteen hundred and twenty characters. These string together much like cursive writing and when read aloud, succeeds with interpolating the ceaseless articulation of its delivery. 

     This new track seems like a continuation and deepening of Nyctelios in Atheron, so The Nameless Mist might be a good way to end the four track album, sharing the function of bookends with the Esoterrexus track.  But that has yet to be determined, as I'm still in the midst of this album's construkction. 

     The other two tracks I'd imagined might end up on this album instead could most likely end up serving in a different sonic vein, unless I introduce a certain verbal editing construction to the other two which imparts their own distinctive flavors in structuring and sound. Apparently if I were to compose verbal written lines in which all words beginning with 's' or even containing the "s" (serpentine hissing) sound were removed for example, then the resultant recording would naturally reflect that, meaning the removal of the familiar, dragon like hissing sound explored in the first and final tracks, seemingly resultant from the incessant amount of sibilance that prevails in general English as a matter of course.  A careful consultation of certain consonants and phonemes could be edited out to produce a more distinctive recording.   For that matter, translation into a foreign hieroglyphic language might yield its own parameters of interesting sonic interpretive measures.  

    Nyctelios in Atheron has its origins from the raw demo track Dominion, put out on Thornswrath's Soundcloud channel. This track has been classified as a 'glitch poetics' drone track, pretty much.  It has its own logo that I designed with the help of various ai algorithms to produce something alien & surrealistic. [The Nameless Mist will have been added to my Soundcloud page, in time.]

     This would make for a nice gatefold cover layout for a double LP in the dark glitch ambient scene.

Luciferal's Key got its start a few years ago when I produced a three track, six minute EP called Murmurings, whose song titles reflect the names of craters located on the dark side of the moon. 

    All three of these tracks are raw one-take recordings made with my iPhone of me playing the Yamaha keyboard spontaneously, summoning a forlorn mood.  One take improv recordings with no tampering; as lo fi as it gets. 

    The desolation of the moment gets captured nicely on these short raw demos. They have lain down the groundwork for future Luciferal's Key projects.  With Dream Lore of the Star Winds currently in development, it looks like the direction it's going in has set sail on a steady course into the heart of mystery. There's a certain elegance in the articulation of the themes Luciferal's Key deals with that remains hidden just below the surface of our everyday comprehension. That's the beguiling aspect. 

   I want the ambient music inherent to LK's recordings to contain about them an immediacy of the moment enough to capture and hold the listener's attention, even if they have it on headphones while daydreaming from the window seat of their morning commuter bus to work.  I've recorded various other sorts of sound experiments, interested in twisting instrumentational snippets into differing lengths of sonic loops, which I aspire to play together to generate a nonrepeating, interactive ambient backdrop all its own. 

      The key to what made the Esoterrexus track, Nyctelios in Atheron a success for me, well it's the fact I sent the raw demo to my friend Omensworn, resulting in a collaboration. He first mastered it by giving it depth of sound and left / right dimensional stereo, and faded in and out of the piece, but he also embellished a very minimal backdrop of sounds, with a subtle melodic interpolation, to complement and accentuate the demo itself. The results are a seamless and full bodied atmospheric soundtrack which enhances all the subtleties of my compositional sequence, replete with its nonrepeating and rhythmic qualities inherent to the lyrical soul and flow of the conjuring script.  If it wasn't for Omensworn's input and collaboration, there wouldn't be an album, nor a platform for Luciferal's Key. A sense of sincere gratitude and a hearty "thank you" goes out to him, for helping to make this dream of mine come true.  Here's to the project finding its resolution over the following weeks to come. Cheers!

     Stay tuned for more subharmonic frequencies 

   from the darkest nether regions of the under realms  

    

It's Only The End Of The World Again (Liner Notes For A Mix CD)

 by  Shaun Grub

    Starting a mix out with Agents Of Oblivion is a smart move especially if that song is Endsmouth.  It's only the end of the world again.   I love Dax's old wild youthful passion, apparent throughout all the vocals he did for Acid Bath ('94--'97) and he lent some of that energy to his Stardust wannabe outfit in Agents Of Oblivion.  

   Movin' Out, from Aerosmith's debut album which I'm thinking was 1974, is the baddest sounding song on the whole album, it retains it's scorching intensity to this day, an effective hard rocking blues song which introduced me to rock and roll music; we forever remain grateful to our first rock'n'roll heroes, and I still tip my hat to Joey, Tom, Brad, Joe, and Steven for bringing me straight into the dirty bad ass side of rock and roll.   Nobody knows where.  Nobody shows where. Nobody knows where you can find me.  

   Now Scissorfight is one helluva rock band out of New Hampshire, I used to live up there, where they take their freedom seriously.  This band consists of mountain men who will rock out a local bar so hard there'll be furniture flyin'.  Appalachian Chain, driving me insane. These guys are a lot of fun, sorta like an East Coast Pigmy Love Circus. (Who I wanted to include in this mix, but it turns out I didn't have their album on the harddrive, and I'm not sure where the CD is offhand.)  

   The song Mortician's Flame is a prime example of what Acid Bath do best, rock the hell out with sinister bass lines and dark, cryptic riffage not to mention soulfully belted out lyrics.  That is just one hell of a sickening scream which kicks off this song, man these guys were just the best.  They hailed from Louisiana, and to my ears their particular style of hard rock music is an amalgam of various elements taken from extreme metal and hard rock blues, all mixed up in a sort of acid swamp milieu, so I've dubbed their genre acid swamp.  A sort of toxic southern gothic.  Acid Bath only released two official studio albums, they are masterpieces of extreme musical expression still worshipped today and if anything keeping the cult of followers growing, largely due to the underground popularity of their lead singer Dax Riggs, who I was going to feature a song from on this mix but I got carried away, I'm sorry, about the song, in there that you didn't like.  

   I tried as hard as I could just to put together a mix that rocked hard, and I stuck that Bad Religion song Better Off Dead in there.  I'm sorry, about the world, how could I know it could get so bad.  Hey now they're a great punk band, I still carry a soft part in my heart for them, they've been around quite awhile now anyhow.  

   Alice In Chains were such a great crunchy band back in the nineties with Layne Staley fronting them as he would a ship across a storm that I had to include a song of theirs from what most people consider their best album DIRT, the song Dam That River is just a straightforward hard rocking song that delivers the goods in every way.   

    The next song is a mysterious selection from a recently formed super group comprised of members from Bad Religion, Faith No More, Repeater, and Korn: a band named Fear And The Nervous System, the song The Combine is an epic example of what these guys came up with guided by guitarist Munky and the strangely haunting vocals from the singer for the band Repeater, Steve Krolikowsky.  There's a savage elegance to the songs from that album, I really hope those four guys get together again and record another one.  If they never do, that's alright because what they've left behind is one of most interesting and hard rocking albums released in recent years.  

   If 6 Was 9 of course is a stone cold classic, I sorta of inserted it out of nowhere but I'm glad I did, the lyrics are great and that's a timeless classic when you get right down to it.  Let it be. 

   For some reason I chose to shift gears directly into King Crimson, with their smoothly beginning from silence track Dangerous Curves off their magnificent 2003 album The Power To Believe, it's a song that gradually builds in intensity until it's really raving along the freeway at a rapid pace, so I segued into one of my favorite hard rocking songs from the nineties, Korn's Justin, the song which lead singer Jonathan wrote the lyrics for and the band dedicated to Justin, a kid from the Make A Wish Foundation whose wish was to meet the band.  The song Justin is one of my favorite hard rocking songs ever by any band and I figured it would make for a nice curve ball after King Crimson.  

   Then I figured I'd put a song from Peter Murphy's latest album, considering how good it is and how much we all enjoyed seeing him perform live the old Bauhaus hits with his new younger band.  I put The Prince & The Old Lady Shade for it's cool smooth rocking riff but it also turns out to be somewhat lyrically appropriate after Justin, with images of the kid and the bright light.  

   Man Overboard follows because that is a perfect song.  And it's one by Puscifer, the side-project of Tool's singer Maynard James Keenan, the brilliant poet winemaker with a voice of a diva.  Nevermind what anyone else says or thinks, I have enjoyed both LPs and every other little thing that Puscifer have released, it's a great little merry go round musical project that I'm always keeping one eye out for, as Maynard himself has already said that Puscifer is a "rotating doorway" of band members who happen to pass through his sphere and end up on the recordings.  This particular track was the first single from their second album, Condition Of My Parole, an "instant classic" if ever there was one recorded in the history of the post-rock movement.

   Speaking of post-rock, how much of that have you listened to?  It's the movement largely credited with having been best exemplified by the nine-piece Canadian band Godspeed You! Black Emperor, whose recordings you should immediately track down and listen to.  I've got a couple of their albums on vinyl and they are magnificent.  But see even though they deserve the crown as emperors of that scene, they don't really represent what the stripped down basics of post-rock really means, which is music produced by your standard rock instruments such as bass, guitar, and drums--yet most crucially to exist without vocals.  Many post-rock bands sort of emulate an ebb and flow pattern of quietly building music which crescendos into levels of Marshally-stacked loudness which then gradually descend back into tranquility, but this sort of music also features practitioners who interpolate elements of electronics, such as England's 65daysofstatic, one of my favorites.   {Anyhow here's the mix tape I made for you, Birdy.  I hope you can listen to it from way out there on the Other Side.  I miss you every day.} ~Grub