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zkom

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Posts posted by zkom

    Now Reading

    in General Banter

    Posted

    I've read Lot 49 and Inherent Vice and loved both, so I guess I'll probably like Vineland too. :smile:

     

    I've also read Gravity's Rainbow and V and enjoyed them too but they are quite a bit harder reads.. For example Inherent Vice seemed just to flow so smoothly that I could hardly put the book down. In comparison Gravity's Rainbow took some work to digest and I could only read it in short segments.

    Now Reading

    in General Banter

    Posted

    speaking of covers, one of my pet peeves are books that have NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE STARRING XYZ plastered all over the front. I hate that shit. I've been trying to find a copy of Fight Club that doesn't have that but it's pretty much impossible here.

     

    I almost fell to pieces when I saw Jonathan Swift's original Gulliver's Travels with a cover picture from the Jack Black movie. :cisfor:

     

    Imagine some kid buying the book thinking it will be like the movie with Jack's goofy comedy and then getting 300 pages of commentary on 18th century British society. Mind you, it's a good book but that kind of marketing is way misleading. Well, maybe some kid is going to get educated by accident..

    draft 7.30

    in Autechre

    Posted

    I found Draft 7.30 the hardest Ae album to get into, maybe followed Quaristice. I don't know what is it, but there's something almost impenetrable for me in some of the beats that is not present in the other Ae albums.

    Now Reading

    in General Banter

    Posted

    i've never tried reading all of Lovecraft's stuff in chronological order, i bet that was an interesting undertaking. did you include the poetry? i don't think he did much poetry at all once he started writing short stories regularly, but i'm not 100% sure on that.

     

    i've only dabbled in Poe's works, but i've enjoyed the little i've read. i've also been getting into Machen and Blackwood. Blackwood's 'The Willows' is a good starting place i'd say. it's a very well written creepy tale.

     

    I only read the stories and the Fungi from Yuggoth which is pretty bad-ass poetry. :biggrin: You can read it in full in here for example.

     

    My favorite Poe story is probably the Tell-tale Heart. The mood and the insanity are just perfect. :spiteful:

    Now Reading

    in General Banter

    Posted

    Borges, Dunsany, Blackwood, Poe and Lovecraft.

     

    Yeah, I read through the complete works of both Poe and Lovecraft a few years ago. Also I've been reading a lot of Arthur Machen lately, which is kind of similar. But I have to check Borges and Blackwood. Thanks for the recommendation. :beer:

     

    Anyway, I've been a Lovecraft fan since age 13 so I had already read about 95% of the stories he had written before I started my project, but it was fun to read the whole body of work in a chronological order. You can see him developing as a writer because to be honest the early stuff is pretty bad but the good stuff starts to appear slowly at first around the time of The Music of Erich Zann and then after Herbert West it just kicks up a notch and from Call of Cthulhu forward it's just pure gold.

    Anyone else into trekking, scrambling etc?

    in General Banter

    Posted

    My gf and I are going to be in Portugal and Northern Spain for a couple of weeks soon. We're flying to Lisbon and returning from Bilbao, otherwise the trip is pretty much open so we'll be heading to whatever looks like a nice place. I'm not going to be carrying a lot of gear so I won't be having tent etc, but I could use some nice day trail suggestions in that area if anybody has any?

     

    Though most likely we'll be just chilling with beer or wine and see some occasional attraction.

    Anyone else into trekking, scrambling etc?

    in General Banter

    Posted

    I've been trekking/hiking/whatever a few times in Finland and once in Thailand. I'd like to do it more but never seem to have time or the weather is against the whole thing.

     

    First time I was hiking was with my mates who were also first timers. We decided that an 80km trail would be a good start. I went with cheap ass gear, rubber boots for wet weather, running shoes for dry, cheapo tent, etc. We all had been through army service so we weren't completely new to staying overnight in forest but we learned a bit about hiking there.. My feet were fucked up for a couple of weeks afterwards.

    Psybient

    in Music Discussion

    Posted

    I never enjoyed suomisaundi and I thought all those that did were all too much into who could be the weirdest and most fucked up on the parties, that became more important than the music and dancing. Suomisaundi is weird for weirdness sake, not so much because the music needed it. At least that's how I felt. Squaremeat and Haltya were alright, but Texas Faggot was poo.

     

    I think some of the Texas Faggot stuff is pretty cool. Also I like Tekniset and Huopatossu Mononen with especially Huopatossu having some great game music like elements. But yeah,there are some fucked up elements and the scene is even more insular than the regular psy-trance scene with some people dissing everything that's coming outside of Finland as monotonous tube trance. Anyway, I have had some great times at the parties dancing through the night in a forest.

     

    There is also a tendency in the psy scene to look at IDM and related genres as too "artsy" and not enough focused on the party and the more poppy stuff is considered too commercial. That might explain why there is not that much cross breeding between psybient and other forms of ambient and chill out music.

    Psybient

    in Music Discussion

    Posted

    People look for the music that trips them out. From what I can tell as an outsider (except for listening to some of Simon Posford's work), this is a fairly large scene, so it makes sense that people who are looking for new music by searching "psychedelic" "psytrance" "psybient" etc. are going to stay within this niche. The same applies to ambient techno from the 90s

     

    Yeah, it's a fairly large scene with it's own huge festivals with maybe Boom being biggest in Europe. It also overlaps somewhat with the backpacker scene and people go to places like Thailand to join full moon parties. Even in the country the size of Finland we have at least one psy festival a year and I remember that some people even tried to launch a psy magazine at some point. But there's Finland specific peculiarities in the scene, like the Finnish underground hip hop scene is connected with the psy festivals and there's a Finnish version of psytrance called suomisaundi or spugedelic trance which is more melodic and acid influenced than the mainstream psy.

    Psybient

    in Music Discussion

    Posted

    OK, this isn't psybient actually but I think this is one of the hidden gems in that kind of the Orbesque, FSOL-like genre: Voices of Kwah - Silver Bowl Transmission , released in 1996. :wub:

     

    I can only find their more poppy stuff on youtube, so I can't give any examples but the Silver Bowl Transmission is a trippy mixture of FSOL kind of stuff and glossolalia singing. Good luck finding it though.. :rolleyes:

    Psybient

    in Music Discussion

    Posted

    Anyone heard of Mystical Sun?

     

    Ah, I used to listen to his stuff back in the days of mp3.com. He had a bunch of free tracks available there that I think still have stashed somewhere.

    Psybient

    in Music Discussion

    Posted

    I think there are audiowise differences between "normal" chill out and psybient. Like for example psybient uses time stretching similar to psytrance to give the music a trippy feel. Also the sound is more compressed and dance music like than regular chill out (well, anyway what I've been listening).

     

    Also there is a pretty clear thematic undercurrent in psybient: psychedelics, DMT, LSD, ayahuasca and all things related to them when it's not at least so upfront in other electronic music except for psytrance. That's what has been really putting me off from psybient lately. It sometimes sounds like a fucking brainwash attempt by some weird drug addled cult. :crazy: I still enjoy listening to Divine Moments of Truth though.. makes chills run down my spine.

    Psybient

    in Music Discussion

    Posted

    Haven't really listened to psybient lately. Kind of drifted away from that psy-trance thing. Anyway, Shpongle is pretty much essential, but you probably know that. If you don't then grab the first two Shpongle albums. Simon Posford is pretty much THE psybient producer (also in Shpongle) so you might want to look what he's been up to. He has a shitload of aliases. I have heard the psy-hippies praise Younger Brother but haven't bothered with it myself.

     

    Ott's Blumenkraft is also quite good.

    Now Reading

    in General Banter

    Posted

    the-dervish-house-by-ian-mcdonald.jpg

     

    So far it's been great. It's set in near future Istanbul. I've read the River of Gods, Cyberabad Days and Brasyl from him before and this has been the best so far. They're all sort of 3rd world cyberpunk, set in India and Brazil respectively.

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