Acquiring the Taste : A Tour Through Progressive Rock, Part I

Since progressive rock first arose out of British and North American psychedelia, it has crossed every boundary that it could identify, which makes it like metal more a question of a spirit than a concrete set of musical or extra-musical traits. We can identify a few aspects of this spirit: a desire to make unique song forms which fit the shifting demands of their content, a passion for exploring melody and harmony, an obsession with the unconventional, and a chameleon-like ability to explore other styles and adopt them as its own.

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Sterilizer – II (2017)

For decades, musicians have sought the holy grail of combining metal with industrial, but the problem is one of space. Industrial uses space more like rock or jazz, to separate notes, where metal focuses on the continuity of power chord riffs. If the hybrid goes too far to one extreme, it sounds like industrial with fragmented metal riffs; on the other extreme, it loses the machine-like sound of industrial. (more…)

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Disciples of Mockery – Prelude to Apocalypse (1999)


Review contributed to Death Metal Underground by Kyle.

Hey bruh you wouldn’t believe what just happened to me. Ive been squatting in Venice Beach for a few days playing the first Disciples of Mockery record to my crystals. Twenty minutes ago they started projecting all kinds of imagery on the walls warping reality around me. I was having Kaleidoscopic autistic blood visions dude. One of them was the vocalist Craig Pillard and he opened his mouth like he was going to eat my face but he didn’t man he spoke to me.

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Impermanent Self

Life as a test is absurd. It depends upon there being something to judge after death, namely a self or a soul. But what we are is a heap: consciousness, form, perceptions, mental formulations, sensations. There is a sixth, in Eastern thought considered to be the soul or self – awareness (subject, first person perspective, watcher). The first five are given the adjective empty to denote their lack of intrinsic properties as they stand in conjunctive relationships. The sixth, citta in Pali or nous in Greek, deserves the adjective empty as well.

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