Since the late 1980s, all culture has been crypto: it hides in plain sight, it uses its own language and symbols, and it builds itself against the dominant contrarianism that took over in the 1960s and turned rock into propaganda and advertising.
32 CommentsTags: degeneration, lyrics, melody, metal, music
Yet another week passes as we watch the cope-hope reach maximum intensity through a form of frustrated and impotent rage. The narrative has failed; those who have staked their futures and wasted their pasts on the system find themselves both enraged and possessed of a furor to suppress those who step out of line. If this system fails, they will all feel as if they have made the wrong choices in life, so they are going to patch it up again to see if they can keep it kicking long enough to make it into the comforting sleep of Alzheimers or fentanyl.
17 CommentsTags: mainstream media, melodic metal, music, smr
This seems as good a time as any to note that the music industry, which peaked in 1996, has since died from a lack of ideas.
9 Comments
Some months ago, a good friend asked for advice on pipe smoking. It was clear at that moment that no top-level guide existed, mainly because most got stuck in a muddle of gear and preferences, but few mentioned the core of the practice: technique.
17 CommentsTags: listening, music, stochastic resonance
From Scientific American, an interesting theory of the mass of sound:
4 CommentsTags: collective excitations, music, photons, sound waves
A trio of Australian PhD researchers recently shared the results of an ambitious case study on death metal listeners. The project, titled “Who Enjoys Listening to Violent Music and Why?” (Thompson et al., 2018), aimed to determine if there were personality differences in fans who enjoyed death metal and if lyrical content that involved inducing harm or death to individuals had any effect on the listener’s experience. Examined were possible differences in emotional stimuli between death metal fans and non fans, genders, and participants who either were or weren’t given a lyric sheet. The publication indicates findings similar to earlier studies that measured emotional reaction of music and personality bias as stated:
20 CommentsThese findings are consistent with evidence that personality mediates preferences for music (Rentfrow & Gosling, 2003; Vuoskoski & Eerola, 2011a, 2011b) and that, conversely, music preferences communicate information about one’s personality (Rentfrow & Gosling, 2006). Rentfrow and Gosling (2003) examined the structure of music preferences, as well as the association between personality and music preferences. They used exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis to reveal that music preferences revolved around four major types of music: Reflective and complex (classical, jazz, blues); intense and rebellious (alternative, rock, heavy metal), upbeat and conventional (country, pop, religious), and energetic and rhythmic (hip-hop, rap, soul, funk, electronic, dance). Preferences were also dependent on personality variables. For example, people who preferred intense and rebellious music – including heavy metal – tended to be open to new experiences, considered themselves to be intelligent and athletic, and showed no signs of neuroticism or disagreeableness.
Tags: cannibal corpse, clinical research, cryptopsy, death metal, emotion, empathy, entombed, hellhammer, intelligence, morbid angel, music, psychology, Researchgate, William Forde Thompson
There are many well cultured intellectuals who, when presented with metal music, will immediately be tuned out by the vocals. This results in much of the metal collective being comprised of hold-my-beer normies and most of the world’s high IQ population never grasping a music genre that has both the depth and the complexity they yearn for. Moreover, vocals in metal have not progressed AT ALL since the 1990s and therefore vocalists have been rendered indistinguishable from one another. Through this understanding comes the ultimate revelation: metal vocals, more than any other factor, are hindering the next great wave of metal.
47 CommentsTags: 2018, Black Metal, culture, death metal, Doom Metal, Heavy Metal, innovation, Instrumental, metal, music, Philosophy, trends
Trendkillers #1- Death to List Culture!
29 CommentsIn Trendkillers, we will engage the unseen and/or uncontested trends that have permeated metal culture. Death to false idols!
Tags: 2017, Album of the Year, Best Metal, music, narcissism, Top 10, Top 20, Trendkillers, Year end lists
by Andreas Languetus
Music serves many roles in our lives, but the one closest to our sense of well-being is a rediscovery of beauty and purpose in the world. While neither is universal, or experienced by all people, the former is closer to the objective, meaning that it concerns the world itself, and the latter is closer to subjective, in that we each find our own path and so our purpose — while a descendant of broader purpose like adaptation, excellence, or knowledge — reflects our discernment and choice of that path in the moment.
24 CommentsTags: art, article, artistry, crypto-indie, ick, lame metal, music, music quality, musick, o9a, occult, Occultism, order of nine angles, richard moult, Satanism, the mutilator, wallpaper music
Music critics eat brains for the same reason that zombies do, but are selective in what they eat. Zombies feast indiscriminately on central nervous systems out of pure need. But music critics eat brains by promoting the mindless and tearing down the good in order to promote themselves at the expense of the music.
32 CommentsTags: music, music critics, music writing, reviews, writing
