k-punk

1. Ha ha
2. Wolves Evolve takes up and runs with the Robbie thing. (My quoting of Liam Gallagher, naturally, shouldn’t be taken as any kind of endorsement of Oasis, perish the thought. But Gallagher has a sledgehammer way with invective, and his relentless pillorying of Robbie is certainly to his credit.
3. A tremendous run of posts by Dominic on Xasthur/ black metal/ generic misanthropy, partly in dialogue with Documents. Fascinating as Documents’ take on Xasthur-as-metal-hauntology is, I’m inclined to agree with Dominic that Xasthur are better described as ‘Doomgazer’. Xasthur are like Loveless-era My Bloody Valentine with all the oestrogen removed – nihilism as jouissance. As Dominic suggests, there is no temporal discrepancy in Xasthur. Xasthur may have ‘blackened buzz … wrapped in huge swaths of fuzzy sonic fog’ but their textures aren’t slices of time, if only because time has ended in their run-down cosmos: ‘Black metal is relentlessly entropic, committed to a one-way temporality in which intensities run inexorably down to zero and stay there, forever’. It is like the fantasy of being present at your own funeral, but on a much grander, more epic, scale. ‘The state of mind suggested by Subliminal Genocide is one of trancelike contemplation of the ashes of the cosmos – the logical end-point of Xasthur’s misanthropic individualism.’ Dominic argue that Xasthur’s ‘is a universe of perpetual suspension, in which resolution can never arrive’ but it might almost be the reverse: a universe in which resolution has been finally achieved, and the tension that accompanies all vital processes – or rather, the tension that is all vital processes – has been extinguished. Death, but no death drive.
4. I’m glad that Simon drew my attention to You need a Mess of Help. Who could resist a site whose links bar includes the following: Entrances To Hell, Sub-Urban, Derelict Places, Nobody There, Subterranea Britannica, UK Cold War, Kelvedon Hatch, English Heretic, Geograph British Isles, Haunted TV, Delia Derbyshire, TV ARK, British Horror Films, Quatermass, Outpost Gallifrey? I found myself nodding along to this post on Boards of Canada. I must admit, until recently I wasn’t able to see the appeal of BoC at all, and that was largely because of the indifferent beats. I also agreed with pretty much all of this. (I say pretty much, because Mess is nowhere near hard enough on Love & Monsters, which was the worst. Dr. Who. eva.)