Thou’s new album, Heathen, has range, but it’s something like the range between the horror of death and an almost peaceful acceptance of its inevitability, between the looming cataclysm and a halting spiritual perception of something that will outlast it — or at least the lesson learned that the finite minutes we have now are worth seizing for all they are worth, and that it is pain which grounds us in what is important.
Heathen is this Louisiana band’s fourth full album and the first since 2010′s Summit. They haven’t been idle during the years in between, producing an assortment of EPs and splits along the way. But Heathen is a monolithic effort — an hour and fifteen minutes of music. It’s a lot to take in, and not simply because of the time required. It taxes your well-being. It drags you down. It’s so crushingly dark, so heavy, and so wholly engulfing in its doomed atmospherics that it ought to come with a warning to the emotionally fragile.
And yet just when you think you’re going to sink beneath the waves, Thou throw you a life preserver, a little something to lighten the load, if only briefly. The immaculate weaving together of those two strands — the sense of drowning and the grasp of a lifeline to the surface — that’s what makes Heathen such a compelling experience.
You could listen to individual songs from the album in isolation, and most of them would stand alone pretty well, but you would be missing so much. The staggering effect produced by listening to Heathen straight through is unmistakably an example of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts. Over the course of those 10 songs (four of which are longer than 10 minutes and one of which exceeds 9), Thou pull the listener into a trance. It’s like a ritual designed to purge the mind of shallow, fleeting thoughts, and open it to the message of grim new truths. In the words of “Feral Faun”, “We have been recruited in blood. And the blood sings.”
Through much of the album, Thou employ slow, warping, fuzz-bombed chords massive enough to bend space-time like a black hole at the bottom of a gravity well. The riffs lumber, they lurch, they pound, the effect magnified by concrete-busting percussion. They moan, groan, and ooze like blood gradually congealing in a bitter cold. Occasionally, they chug like a giant gear-grinding tank. Often dissonant and discomfiting, the music is bent on breaking you down. The vocalist sings of “sinking into the truest bogs and quicksand of urbanity” (“Into the Marshlands”) or proclaims “I am diminished in the presence of vastness” (“At the Foot of Mount Driskill”), and you feel it.
I use “sing” in only the most general sense, by the way, because the vocals come in a cracked, nerve-abrading snarl — a translation of agony, fury, and contempt.
The effect of those mammoth, static-shrouded riffs and the music’s despondent melodies is most powerful in the longest songs, and more powerful still when heard over the course of the album’s full length — but even the shorter songs are obliterating. Listening to “In Defiance of the Sages” (at “only” five and a half minutes) is like being caught in the middle of a demolition project, your lungs clogged with splinters and dry wall dust. The riffs are thick and ropey, like gristle in a tough piece of meat, and the vocals sound positively demonic. He sings: “The past is lost, the future unknowable. Only the present can be truly experienced, can be truly known.”
Those life preservers, when they come, are sublime — but not because they’re cheery. There is no joy on this album, but there are moments of peace: the soft, meditative acoustic melody at the beginning of “Feral Faun”; the reverberating solo guitar in the 46-second track named “Clarity”; the ethereal guitar notes, echoing and esoteric, in “Take Off Your Skin and Dance In Your Bones” (awesome name); the slow, shimmering ambience at the beginning and end of the long closing track, “Ode To Physical Pain”.
But if there is a synthesis of the album’s divergent strands — the physically pulverizing and the eerily dreamlike — it comes in “Immorality Dictates”. The song is a hybrid of hypnotic tones and alien melody, ghostly female vocals that come like the soft breath of sleep, and some very heavy fuzzed-out riffs that carry the music into post-metal territory. If this song were all you heard from the album, it might be a mis-direction, but it’s probably the one that could best serve as a stand-alone track. I’m really stuck on it.
“Agony, blessed Agony, your ever-present ache identifies unyielding vitality…. Seek comfort in endurance. Be consumed by struggle.” And so go the words in the album’s final song, but they might do as a message from the album as a whole. For all its demoralizing power, Heathen is unforgettable. For all the pain it delivers, it will pull doom fans back into the abyss again and again.
********
The Heathen CD will be available from Gilead Media on March 25; pre-order here. A vinyl edition (from Howling Mine) and a limited run of cassettes (from Robotic Empire) should be available at about the same time. There will be digital distribution as well.
I don’t have any Heathen music I can stream for you at the moment, but NPR will be streaming the entire album the week before, March 17-25. That’s the way to hear it.
Here is Thou’s official page, where you’ll find all the lyrics (they’re worth reading):
Cheers Roleplaying Game, (a character sheet example)
I’d really like this to be a real game.
I saw this a few days ago and have been thinking of it since. Do you follow Steve? He is a good friend and his work has the ultimate charm. He and his wife Leslie also are board game PROS.
"Our libraries spend more on electronic publications than paper. We reach large numbers of students online using increasingly significant digital media. But while bandwidth is now as basic a need as electricity and parking, there are critical choices ahead.
Central to these is openness – the extent to which those working and studying within the university and college system can get access to any digitally-based information they need without encountering a virtual gateway: a password, subscription requirement or payment. Paywalls and passwords are an irritating but natural consequence of the privatisation of the web; they are also essential for online security. For the future of research, though, the need for openness is far more than a convenience. It arises because the volume and rate of production of online publications and digital data sets has now outgrown the limits of conventional research methods and is changing the ways in which new knowledge is created. Without openness across global digital networks, it is doubtful that large and complex problems in areas such as economics, climate change and health can be solved. There are two primary reasons why these changes to research are taking place: 1) The sheer volume of new, peer-reviewed publications is already too great for manual review in many fields of study. In medicine for example, more than two new papers are published every minute. The volume of research outputs is accentuated by China and India, the emerging giants in university-based research. Thirty years ago, when today's senior researchers were in their early careers, big university and copyright libraries could claim to stock printed copies of everything published in a discipline; today, many researchers never need to enter the library building at all. 2) The sharply declining unit cost of bandwidth, digital storage and processing capacity, combined with the breathtaking pace of technical innovation, is allowing massive, almost instantaneous flows of digital data across the world. In many cases, these flows are being constantly fed by devices linked together as the "internet of things". Some of these devices are highly sophisticated – for example, real-time seismic measurements used to predict tsunamis and terrestrial earthquakes. Others are commonplace – citizen journalists using smart phones to upload images or the millions of daily financial transactions that track economic trends. These massive digital data flows are the new raw materials for research. For highly complex problems such as climate change, epidemiology, financial stability and space exploration, access to global big data is already a basic condition for research to take place at all ..."
A strong entry into the Transit MapsHall of Shame from Brownsville, Texas, with this map that depicts the Brownsville Urban System (or “BUS” — I see what they did there).
Where to start with this awfulness? Probably with the graduated blue background that causes visual dissonance (that shimmering edge when colours clash horribly) with just about everything else on the map, especially the red street name labels! It also makes the underlying grey road network almost impossible to make out.
How about the myriad different dashes, dots, and line thicknesses used to denote the different routes? Because so many different line types are used, the Brownsville city limits (also depicted with a dashed line) ends up looking like another route that encircles the city!
The inset that shows the location of stops at “NSTS” is absolutely impossible to make out. There’s an enormous and ugly compass rose that dominates the entire map and a whole other north pointer, just in case. There’s some absolutely appalling typography across the entire map. There’s a very precise scale (1:19,500) that would only apply if you printed the map out at its full 30” x 36” poster size, but also a warning that the “map is not to scale”. I could go on, but I won’t.
Our rating: If I actually had an icon for negative stars, I’d probably use it. Zero.
"The ‘data explosion’ of the past 20 years undermines a basic scientific principle, argues Geoffrey Boulton.
Open data and open science are not new concepts. Arguably they were introduced by Henry Oldenburg, the first secretary of the United Kingdom’s newly created Royal Society in the 1660s. Oldenburg frequently corresponded on scientific matters and persuaded the new society to publish the ‘letters’ he received — provided that a novel concept was accompanied by the evidence (the data) on which it depended.
Oldenburg’s innovation ushered in an era of ‘open science’, meaning the concurrent publication of both concept and evidence. This allowed scientists to scrutinise each other’s logic, and replicate or refute observations or experiments. It ensured that science was ‘self-correcting’ and therefore cumulative, which was the foundation for the scientific revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Self-correction was recently exemplified when a beam of neutrinos fired from CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) to a laboratory 730 kilometres away seemed to travel faster than the speed of light. The detailed results were made openly available, resulting in the discovery of a timing error and a repeat experiment that respected the universal speed limit.
But the ‘data explosion’ of the past 20 years poses severe challenges to the principle of self-correction.
The volume and complexity of the data that can be acquired, stored and manipulated, coupled with ubiquitous technologies for instant communication, have created a flood of data — 90 per cent of all data were generated in the last two years. [1]
Conventional, printed journals can no longer contain the data on which a paper they publish is based, which means losing the vital link between concept and evidence.
A consequence of this was highlighted in 2012 when attempts to replicate the findings of 50 benchmark papers in preclinical oncology were only possible in 11 per cent of cases. [2] This was mainly because of missing data, in addition to the common cause of erroneous analysis ... But to seize the opportunities and address the problems created by the data explosion, scientists need to recognise the essential attributes of scientific openness. This is because openness in itself has no value unless it is, as a 2012 Royal Society report calls it, 'intelligent openness'. [3] This means that published data should be accessible (can they be readily located?), intelligible (can they be understood?), assessable (can their source and reliability be evaluated?) and reusable (do the data have all the associated information required for reuse?). Scientific claims and concepts that are published without access to the data on which they are based in ways that satisfy these norms are the equivalents of adverts for the product rather than the product itself ... Publicly funded scientists need to regard the data that they acquire as held in trust on behalf of society and abandon the view that the data are theirs. Funders of public research need to mandate open data as a condition of funding. Scientific publishers need to require concurrent publication of the data on which articles are based in electronic databases. And universities and research institutes need to recognise the importance of intelligent openness to the future of science. This form of open science has benefits other than efficiency. Increasing numbers of citizens are no longer willing to accept scientists’ conclusions about important issues that affect them or society. They should be able to scrutinise the evidence behind scientific claims ..."
"Drug companies like operating in the shadows, but a recent move by Johnson and Johnson may change all that. In collaboration with Yale University's Open Data Access Project (YODA), the pharmaceutical giant will now share its clinical trial data with researchers. Joanne Waldstreicher, chief medical officer for Johnson and Johnson, said her company chose to make its clinical trial data available because there's a lot to be learned from things like unpublished research, or failed drug trials. 'For example,' she said, 'a medicine might work better in men than in women, or vice versa. Or there might be some racial differences in the way that drugs are metabolized. Those are the really important things you can see when you have the power of looking at data across many different studies.' Here's how Waldstreicher said YODA's plan works. A researcher submits a request for data. Johnson and Johnson will post that data to a third-party server, and YODA (itself an independent body of medical professionals) will review the merits of the research request. All data is kept anonymous ..."
The other day, in my “self-publishing truism bingo” post, I said:
‘I can literally write the word “fart” 100,000 times and slap [on] a cover of baboon urinating into his own mouth, then upload that cool motherfucker right to Amazon. Nobody would stop me. Whereas, at the Kept Gates, a dozen editors and agents would slap my Baboon Fart Story to the ground like an errant badminton birdie.’
That book, Baboon Fart Story, now exists on Amazon.
"I'M THE ELECTRIC LADY, AND I'VE COME TO FUCK SHIT UP!" (6:50)
JANELLE MONAE (AGE 28) - ATLANTA, GA - SINGER Trombone Shorty wants this year's halftime show to be "a big party, the way we do here in the Big Easy." While Pharrell Williams is headlining the NBA All-Star Game Entertainment Series this year, with a performance during the player introductions on Sunday night (Feb. 16), the halftime show -- featuring Earth, Wind & Fire, Janelle Monae, Trombone Shorty & Orleans Avenue, Dr. John and Gary Clark Jr. -- is the evening's event that promises to synthesize the vibrant musical culture of this year's All-Star Weekend host city, New Orleans. Earth, Wind & Fire's soul classic "Shining Star" and Monae's "The Electric Lady" title track will be among the songs performed, and everything will be played live at the New Orleans Arena. "It's been a great process, and... I'm blessed to be a representative for my city," Shorty, the city's most high-profile brass musician, told Billboard on Sunday, hours before the performance is broadcast live on TNT. Shorty has acted as a musical ambassador for the NBA, personally contacting other artists to see if they would be interested in collaborating on the halftime extravaganza. "I was like, 'This would be great, but I think it should be bigger,'" says Shorty, who recent made his GRAMMYs ceremony debut by performing alongside Macklemore & Ryan Lewis and Madonna last month. "I'm in my city, and I could have done something by myself, but I was like, 'No, we need some other people with us.'" Monae, who was honored as the Rising Star at last year's Billboard Women in Music event, was one of the first people Shorty contacted. "I'm really great friends with Trombone Shorty, who's like the king of New Orleans in terms of live music," says Monae. "He played on [my song] 'The Electric Lady,' and we just thought it was fitting. He was like, 'There are no other females performing -- I want it to be you.'" Despite having a gig on Saturday night in Tampa, the guys of Earth, Wind & Fire took an early plane out to New Orleans, after Shorty gave them a ring a few weeks ago. "They were actually going to use 'Shining Star' in the piece that they were doing," says the legendary funk group's Verdine White, "and an idea came to them to reach out to them and see if we could do it live." Original Airdate: Sunday February 16, 2014 (ICE SPORTS)
We carry a variety of brands and models at GouletPens.com, but there are so many more we don't yet have available right now. Pelikan is one of those lines that we've actually been authorized retailers of for a few years (we love their ink!), but we haven't dipped our toes into the high-end fountain pen line... until now.
We haven't completely taken the plunge to regularly stock the full line in our warehouse just yet, as it is incredibly extensive. So in the meantime, we've set up the most popular Souverän series up on our website as special order items, including the M600, M800, and M1000. This means you can add one to your cart and check out as normal, but instead of shipping your order immediately, we'll be placing an order in to the Pelikan distributor to order your specific pen. Once it arrives to us about a week or two later, we'll inspect it to make sure it looks good, even ink it up and test it per your request, and ship out your order in full at that time.
There are still many more Pelikan models available to us, as well as individual nibs units. We're happy to special order any of those as well - just shoot us an email and we'll be happy to get you a price quote. If you have any other questions, just email us or drop a note in the comments below.
Are you excited to see us expanding our Pelikan line? What's your favorite Pelikan pen?
Last couple tracks are well worth listening, and feature an artist I would not have expected to see here.
Saturnian Mist (photo by K. Lehto)
Happy fucking Monday. Here’s a random assortment of music I discovered over the last 24 hours. The key word here is “random”, but all of this suits me quite well. Mayhap it will suit you, too.
SATURNIAN MIST
Saturnian Mist are from Tampere, Finland. Because they are from Finland, I figured the odds were high they would be worth hearing. Candlelight Records thinks so, because they just signed them and will be releasing the band’s second album, Chaos Magick, later this year. When I saw that news this morning, I went in search of recent music and found a demo version of one of the songs that will appear on the album — “The Heart of Shiva”.
It’s thumping and grinding, bone-scraping and body-moving, ugly but hooky. I’m now thoroughly infected by that jumping repeating riff, my head bouncing like a bobble-head. Digging the unexpected drum fills, too, which sound almost like congas. Listen:
Brymir are also from Finland. I last wrote about them (here) almost three years ago after coming across an official video for their first album that caught my fancy. They have a second album coming, and yesterday (thanks to yet another winning Facebook tip from our supporter Brimberloo) I checked out a lyric video for the first single from the album, ”The Black Hammer”.
It got my blood pumping. It’s thundering, symphonic melodic death metal, with pulsing riffs, sweeping orchestration, double-bass that will ride you down, a combo of cracked howls and soaring cleans, and some Latin lyrics. I also enjoyed the pencil drawings in the video by Claudio Bergamin and Jouko Alapartanen. It’s below.
I really, really like that album cover. I have to find out who did it. It’s for The Parasitic Survival of the Human Race, which is the latest album by a Greek metal band named Dodsferd. The album has recently become available for order on Bandcamp. Only one song is streaming there at the moment, but I sure as hell like it.
“Breeding Chaos” begins with the sounds of a riot in progress and then moves right into a wrecking romp that matches black metal and punk and sounds like… a riot in progress. D-beat and double bass, stomping riffs and tremolo storms, throat-shredding screams and… rioting: You can’t sit still to this one.
There’s another track from the album — a cover of the Misfits’ We Are 138 — now streaming over at DECIBEL. That’s well worth hearing, too.
Heretoir are a band from Augsberg, Germany. Their most recent release was a 2012 compilation entitled Substanz. Northern Silence Productions recently released a vinyl edition of Substanz, and it comes with a bonus track that was recommended by one of my Facebook friends. The bonus is a Heretoir cover of a song named “Just For A Moment” by the late lamented Austere.
I can’t get the song out of my head. It’s performed almost entirely with acoustic guitar, bass, and synthesized strings (except for the ghostly post-metal guitar instrumental that comes at the end). Yes, the impassioned, high-range vocals are clean, but they’re emotionally piercing (there’s also one harsh howl that will catch you by surprise), and the music is entrancing.
Squarepusher is the pseudonym of a long-running UK recording artist named Tom Jenkinson, whose work appears to be primarily in the field of drum and bass, jazz, and electronica. Thanks to a link to this page from our supporter Old Man Windbreaker, I discovered that Squarepusher developed music to be performed by a robotic music-performing system named Z-Machines, which was developed by Japanese engineers under the direction of Kenjiro Matsuo.
Z-Machines includes the equivalent of a guitarist with 78 fingers and a drummer with 22 arms, both of which can play at speeds and with dexterity beyond human capability. Squarepusher’s first composition for Z-Machines was named “Sad Robot Goes Funny”, and director Daito Manabe made a video of the performance that came out last year. The music isn’t metal — although the performers are — but it’s a cool piece, and the performers eventually do get going really fast.
This proved to be such a success that Squarepusher has created more music for Z-Machines, which will be released via iTunes on April 7 (April 8 in North America) under the title Music For Robots. Pre-orders will come with a download of “Sad Robot Goes Funny”. Here’s the video:
When we think of a nest, we think simply of a natural piece of construction. A bird gathers together twigs and stems and leaves and assembles them into a shelter for its eggs. We don’t think much about the plants it uses. They’re just building material.
But in at least some cases, there may be more to a nest than meets the eye. It may be a cooperative breeding project, produced by two partners–animals and plants.
Firecrown hummingbird in nest. Copyright Felipe Rabanal
Francisco Fonturbel, an ecologist at the University of Chile, and his colleagues study the green-backed firecrown hummingbird, the range of which stretches across the forests of Chile and Argentina. As you can see from this picture, it builds a peculiar nest that looks as if it’s made of green, glistening noodles.
It turns out that the hummingbird builds its nests mainly out of ferns and mosses. This might seem rather fussy on the part of the bird. In reality, it’s even fussier. When Fonturbel and his colleagues examined 30 nests, they found that the birds had selected material from just a handful of species of ferns and mosses, while passing over other species growing on the trees in their forests.
And when the hummingbirds visit their favorite fern or moss, Fonturbel and his colleagues found, they don’t just pick any random piece of the plants.
Ferns and mosses evolved before the emergence of seeds. To reproduce, they produce male and female sex cells that act like animal sperm and eggs. The sperm fertilize the eggs, which then develop into structures (called sporangia or sporophytes) that produce spores. The ferns and mosses then release the spores, which can then float away in the wind or in water to produce new plants.
Fonturbel and his colleagues found that the firecrown hummingbird prefers to take the spore-filled structures from particular species of ferns and moss to build their nests. These pieces of the plants stayed alive after the bird made them part of its nest. When the scientists revisited 21 of the nests a year later, the plant fragments were still making new spores.
The scientists propose that the firecrown hummingbird and the ferns and mosses it prefers are entwined in an intimate give and take. The ferns and mosses supply the birds with the material they need to build their nests. But this is not a botanical act of altruism. The ferns and mosses may be benefiting because the birds are selecting the parts of their anatomy that contain their genetic legacy.
A bird picking up a piece of a fern or moss can potentially transport it further than it could on its own. It may be especially valuable for the plants to end up in nests that sit high in trees. Their spores can then rain down on a wide patch of the forest floor. Spreading across a bigger range, the plants may be able to mate with a wider range of other plants, and become more resistant to becoming extinct.
Plants depend on animals to spread their seeds in many ways. Some plants, for example, grow fleshy structures on their seeds that attract ants. The ants take the seeds to their nests and eat the fleshy parts, leaving the seeds to sprout. Other plants produce big fruits that mammals or birds can feed on. The seeds survive the journey through the gut and get spread out in the droppings of the animals.
The hypothesis that birds can also spread plants by building living nests will need to be tested. Are the plants better off with the birds picking their reproductive anatomy than if there were no birds? Have the plants evolved any strategies to make their spore-bearing structures better material for nests? Do they lure the hummingbirds with special odors?
If these investigations bear out, it might be worth checking out other species of birds. Perhaps there are more nests out there that are producing not just new birds, but new plants.
"International mapping software supplier Esri has announced a new policy regarding open data, allowing its government customers around the United States to release data stored on its ArcGIS platform to the public. With the company’s cloud server open to the public, federal, state and local agencies have the option of allowing the public to view the geospatial data they use to make decisions.
The Environmental Protection Agency will be the first Esri user to take advantage of the new feature. Harvey Simon, the agency’s geographic information officer emphasized how important open data is to the EPA at Esri’s Federal GIS Conference on Monday ..."
E-mail is old and complex. It's the oldest still-recognizable component of the Internet, with its modern incarnation having coalesced out of several different decades-old messaging technologies including ARPANET node-to-node messaging in the early 1970s. And though it remains a cornerstone of the Internet—the original killer app, really—it's also extraordinarily hard to do right.
We most often interact with e-mail servers through friendly Web-based front-ends or applications, but a tremendous amount of work goes into hiding the complexity that allows the whole system to work. E-mail functions in a poisoned and hostile environment, flooded by viruses and spam. The seemingly simple exchange of text-based messages operates under complex rules with complex tools, all necessary to keep the poison out and the system functioning and useful in spite of the abuse it's constantly under.
From a normal person's perspective, e-mail seems like a solved problem: sign up for Internet access and your ISP gives you an e-mail address. Google, Apple, Yahoo, or any number of other free e-mail providers will hook you up with e-mail accounts with gigabytes of space and plenty of cool value-added features. Why do battle with arcane dragons to roll your own e-mail solution?
I use “sing” in only the most general sense, by the way, because the vocals come in a cracked, nerve-abrading snarl — a translation of agony, fury, and contempt.
But if there is a synthesis of the album’s divergent strands — the physically pulverizing and the eerily dreamlike — it comes in “Immorality Dictates”. The song is a hybrid of hypnotic tones and alien melody, ghostly female vocals that come like the soft breath of sleep, and some very heavy fuzzed-out riffs that carry the music into post-metal territory. If this song were all you heard from the album, it might be a mis-direction, but it’s probably the one that could best serve as a stand-alone track. I’m really stuck on it.
Transit Maps.
Diane Duane:
Are you excited to see us expanding our Pelikan line? What's your favorite Pelikan pen?
Ars Technica:
