Journalist Nathan Birk went in investigation of the Blasphemy phenomenon, and was able to wrest an interview from these guys 20+ years past their original works of hateful, apostatic skinhead black metal/grindcore crossover. Excerpts from the interview are published on the Zero Tolerance blog. Some insights:

Both Blasphemy albums are equally classic in my opinion, but why do you think Fallen Angel Of Doom resounds so powerfully with so many people over a number of generations?

DeathLord: Blasphemy were focused only on Blasphemy during the Fallen Angel Of Doom era. Soon after that, even as early as the Gods Of War era, their energies were spread to other interests.

Black Winds: Let me put it to you this way – I wrote the song ‘Blood Upon The Altar’ from Gods Of War after a bottle and a half of tequila!

Maybe… because Fallen Angel of Doom is the far better album.

While Blasphemy have certainly wielded a global influence on new generations of black/death metal, it seems the biggest pockets of influence are situated in the US, Canada, Australia, and parts of South America and South East Asia – to what do you attribute this to? That Blasphemy wield influence on countries that are…well, less purely ‘white’?

DeathLord: Where do you get this information?! I can find you 25 Burzum clones from Brazil and another 10 from Australia! Also, Burzum record sales are better than Blasphemy record sales in every country you mentioned, so explain why these “less purely white” people are into that style? All metal, all genres, is a worldwide phenomenon. You are obviously speaking about Europe in this question, yet we get the most requests to bring our live ritual out there and I get the most orders for Blasphemy merchandise from there, too. And to add to this, it doesn’t get more ‘white’ than Finland, yet I hear Beherit, Satanic Evil, early Impaled Nazarene, Archgoat, and newer bands like OfDoom and Black Feast, etc, that have a distinct bestial sound with a Blasphemy influence. Blasphemy are indeed “global” and equally listened to, per capita, in all regions of the world. I know this firsthand through my distro and contacts.

Black Winds: The South Americans are probably the biggest black metallers in the world. If we played a show down there with Mystifier or Impurity or someone, there would be thousands there! Traditional Sodomizer’s band Tyrants Blood just played down there, and it was crazy! We don’t notice skin colour, only how black metal people are.

He ducked the question with a false comparison.

So, how would you address charges of Blasphemy ‘resting on your laurels’? Meaning, playing those reunion shows but without any new material in almost two decades…?

Black Winds: Tough. If you don’t like it, don’t come and see it.

DeathLord: Have you ever noticed that people go crazy at a show when the band plays their old songs and are bored to tears when they do a set of newer material? Well, we don’t only hype up the crowd with a few old tunes, we play them ALL! They are eaten up with total frenzy for the entire duration of the live ritual! But, to answer your question, we’re Blasphemy and we do whatever the fuck we want! We don’t answer to any “charges” against us.

Well, it’s sensible. If you’re not going to be able to write newer material that’s better than the old stuff, you should just play the old stuff.

Interesting how bands like BEHERIT continued improving, BURZUM sold out worse than Metallica after peaking late, and ENSLAVED have become something entirely different, namely a hard rock/jam band. BLASPHEMY have stayed true to their roots, even if their answers in this interview aren’t entirely logical. Birk asks the right questions; he could ask all the old stuff, but instead he asked them about their place in the metal canon, and got some intriguing answers.

Read the interview here: Crime (and Powerlifting) Pays — An Interview with Blasphemy

We were sad to hear of the passing of Seth Putnam, vocalist/guitarist for Anal Cunt and Vaginal Jesus, recently. Mr. Putnam was a top-notch troll who poked fun at the parts of life we were afraid to bring to light.

In honor of his life, here are some interesting quotations of his from the interview we did with him a few years back in Heidenlarm Zine #4:

there is no “cut and dry” approach to what i like and dislike. a lot of bands i originally hated end up being some of my favorite bands (village people,culture club,morbid angel,etc). i tend to not like too much after 1985 though.

i don’t really pay attention to what goes on in the world very much. i’m not that interested. i’ve had times when i had some interest here and there, but not in a long time. i think the worst thing going on is forced multiculturalism and wiggers. if you compare t.v. and popular things now to even as short as 20 years ago, everything is completely different.

it’s a miracle if i see anyone at an “underground” show that i’d see in the early 80’s. whether you like it or not, underground music is a fad for most people. the ones who stick with it are the ones that i will usually talk to (if i am friends with them). getting upset about people not “being into it” anymore is useless, because i know most of these people will be lawyers in a couple of years.

i hate people and i try to be not involved with society as much as possible. just about everything anyone says makes me angry. the world has gotten so much gayer in the last few years. i try my best to have no idea what’s going on in the world. – Heidenlarm Zine #4

We’ll miss you, and that famed acerbic wit, Seth.

What started as an amusing satire of the “National Day of Prayer” (an ostentatious activity, since prayer is by definition personal) has bloomed into a civil rights campaign.

The International Day of Slayer came and went this year on June 6, and was celebrated worldwide by all metalheads wise enough to realize this is their chance at political, social and academic recognition.

With each passing year, and more International Day of Slayer celebration, people outside the metal community have been taking note of it — as an identity, as a culture and as a way of life.

Interview with the creators of the International Day of Slayer

No review of the new Morbid Angel is enclosed here; by the time you read to the end, you’ll know why.

First supposition: there’s no point wallowing in what you hate.

Second supposition: if a linear trend toward worse is in existence, it is most likely that the most recent products are bad.

Combine those two.

Morbid Angel was a great and promising band for the first three albums because they were cruising on the strength of material they wrote in their lean and hungry days. By lean and hungry days, I mean their time in Tampa, working in a car wash, living together in the same house, doing an assload of drugs and most importantly, writing and playing the material that would be on the first album. As in, playing it over and over again until they got it right. This is a lot like what Slayer did in the early days.

Abominations of Desolation was a great album, but a bit disorganized. Mike Browning offered creative and prescient material; David Vincent acted like an MBA or business manager, cutting it down to the bare essence. As a result, Altars of Madness and the non-frufru parts of Blessed Are the Sick are pure power and come across without any fat on them. Having reached a degree of musical maturity, they knocked out Covenant …but just barely. The instrumental was convenient, many of the other tracks were ideas capitalized on from rejected earlier songs, they threw in an incongruous cover of “Angel of Disease” and wrote a few new songs that were powerful but not connected as a unit like those on the first two albums.

That was their great creative output.

Do you really need someone to bash the albums after that?

Let’s try this: once you enter the music industry, someone else owns your rectum. They own the right to open it up and put something into it. The reason for this is that musicians are as a whole sloppy people who don’t read contracts, refuse to understand business, and pretend that this stuff doesn’t matter in order to compensate.

As a result, they’re ripe for picking by the music industry. There’s no point blaming the music industry; in fact, they’re the heroes here because they are taking the output of dramatic, over-self-indulgent, narcissistic perpetual adolescents and shaping it into a product so those same quasi-functional people can continue existing. However, as a result, they take over the role of parent… and have to remind the musicians to make output.

In the meantime, the musicians are looking at the market. Death metal sells fifty thousand records; Pantera, Slayer, Marilyn Manson, Metallica, Megadeth, Tool, Primus, Rage Against the Machine, Nirvana, Mudhoney and Sonic Youth sell millions of records. That’s what the market looked like in 1995. So with some urging from the record label, bands change. Here they make a fatal mistake: their fans like them because they’re not Nirvana/Pantera, and trying to be something you’re not is a good way to become an inferior copy of it. (The correct response at this point is to make your albums more technical, more passionate and more realistic, but that’s difficult and requires you to NOT buy the comfy townhouse, but go back to the shitty day job at the car wash and living in a house together, making music. You have to give your life to it, for the most part. Sure, maybe you could live elsewhere in a townhouse, but each step into comfort puts you further from being able to knock off work and race home, looking forward to jamming all night and getting the music really right. Not the product — the music. But I digress.)

A lot of death metal bands, about 1994, realized they were kissing cousins of the Nirvana/Pantera/Tool crowd, and that if those guys were making an assload of money, maybe the death metal bands could too, if they just changed a bit. They changed, became inferior copies of the others, and promptly stepped out of the history books. Had they just kept making quality music, they would have lived in shitty housing for another seven years, then suddenly had an Introduction to Microeconomics moment: when you have seven albums out, and they’re all really good, you don’t sell as many records as Pantera does with one album, but you have a constant stream of fans who see you as “the real deal” and while they buy fewer albums, they buy consistently. And they buy all of the albums, so your first album charts about the same as your most recent. (This was proven by Metallica, before they went fluff, having all four of their albums and one EP in the top 200.)

With all that in mind, you know what happened to Morbid Angel. It must’ve been ugly: lots of fighting over trivial stuff, lots of negotiating about contracts they never read before they signed them, lots of hatred between band members blaming each other for the failure. And almost no time spent thinking about the music, about making music that they (Morbid Angel) would be really excited to hear, not think was on par with whatever Tool or Pantera were puking out at the time.

Do you really want a review of the new Morbid Angel? Formulas Fatal to the Flesh was good; everything else has been a failure. Domination tried to combine grunge, Pantera and death metal; Heretic was pure Pantera-doing-Tool; the live album was decent but everyone wanted to hear Brunelle solos on the older stuff; Gateways to Annihilation was just confused between styles, and now there’ s a new one, which most likely continues this progression.

We’re not looking at a musical entity called Morbid Angel anymore; we’re looking at a business. This business succeeds by hoodwinking teenage morons into buying trendy crap. This is a workable business model only because our society values morons, protects them, and wants to ensure that we’re all equal so the morons drown out the smart people. The guys in Morbid Angel agree with this. However, right now, they either puke out another commercialish album and capitalism on the raped necrophile whore of their good name, or they go back to working at the car wash.

What would you do?

Yeah, I thought so.

by Steve Brettens, Lontinuak, Pijay Vrozak and L.M. Hencken

[b]Timeghoul[/b]

Progressive death metal band that offers a mixed bag of doom, avantgarde, death and grind.

Celebrate the Inter-National Day of Slayer on June 6, 2011.

Slayer is an emblem of metal: fast, powerful, still alien to the mainstream after 28 years.

If every other religious, ethnic and political group gets their own holiday, we deserve one too.

How to Celebrate

* Listen to Slayer at full blast in your car.
* Listen to Slayer at full blast in your home.
* Listen to Slayer at full blast at your place of employment.
* Listen to Slayer at full blast in any public place you prefer.

DO NOT use headphones! The objective of this day is for everyone within earshot to understand that it is the National Day of Slayer. National holidays in America aren’t just about celebrating; they’re about forcing it upon non-participants.

Taking that participation to a problematic level

* Stage a “Slay-out.” Don’t go to work. Listen to Slayer.
* Have a huge block party that clogs up a street in your neighborhood. Blast Slayer albums all evening. Get police cruisers and helicopters on the scene. Finish with a full-scale riot.
* Spray paint Slayer logos on churches, synagogues, or cemeteries.
* Play Slayer covers with your own band (since 99% of your riffs are stolen from Slayer anyway).
* Kill the neighbor’s dog and blame it on Slayer.

Inter-National Day of Slayer Task Force

Morbus 666 is a project of Imprecation vocalist and Bahimiron multi-instrumentalist Dave Herrera, who has a number of projects of note and clearly understands underground metal as the living, untameable thing it is. The band have just releases Mortuus Cultus on Graveless Slumber Records, and you can now hear a track from it:

Morbus 666- Baphe Metis (Absorption into Wisdom)

Label release:

GSR is now taking preorders on the debut material from one of the newest and in my opinion best Texas black metal bands, Morbus 666! Comprised of members of Bahimiron, Adumus, Imprecation, and Thornspawn, Morbus delivers venomous vile black metal in the old ways! This album unleashes 5 tracks of morbidly twisted black metal in the Behexen meets early Enthroned vein, all for the glory of the Horned One! All preorders and an unspecified number of first editions will come with 7″ bonus artwork outer sleeve as well as stickers and possibly more!

Track List-

1) Summon the Cult of Pentagram
2) Baphe Metis (Absorption into Wisdom)
3) Possessed by the Glory of Lucifer
4) Those of the Devil’s Flesh
5) Poisonous Blood

Yosuke Konishi (NWN) returned to KFJC radio to do another six hours of radio madness. If you like old school and new-underground metal mixed in about equal proportions, this show is filthy loud and fast, and evil.

• Playlist
• Audio (380mb)

KDVS has its long-running “Raise the Dead” show which played the same night, and can be found at the archive page:

• Playlist
• Audio

HOMOSEXUAL-THEMED PUNK BAND seeks guitarist and drummer

Bassist and rhythm guitarist seek second guitarist and
drummer for punk band heavily influenced by DISCHARGE
and ASSUCK. Must be reliable, no hard drugs, no police
records (we want to tour). Band name is
ASSCHARGE. Contact us Box 211

OLD SCHOOL DEATH METAL BAND seeks chumps

Hey you, remember when death metal was huge?
So do we! We bought the same gear, have the
classic sound, and we write songs like drug
addled teenagers. If nostalgia has you by the
balls, call us. Box 644.

BREADMAKER FOR SALE

If you remember the trends of the past, you know
these were hot little items in the late 1990s. Everyone
I know had one. Now I’ve got them all. Make an offer…
any offer. Box 665.