Plutonian Velvet I

"Ministers of Night"

[This is one post in a series about my music mixes.  The series list has links to all posts in the series and also definitions of many of the terms I use.  You may wish to read the introduction for more background.

Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

As we approach the pinnacle of spooky season, I thought it appropriate to present one of my spooky mixes.  And I have several of those, many of which we’ve already encountered.  As a connoisseur of all things creepy and crawly—as an aspiring author whose pentagram of literary idols include Stephen King and Clive Barker—I distinguish among many different flavors of spooky.  We’ve seen Phantasma Chorale, for instance, which is lightly creepy, with a bit of child-like thrown in for good measure.  We’ve seen Darkling Embrace, which is creepy but pretty, and Dreamscape Perturbation, which is creepy and dream-like.  Darktime was all about dark music, and Penumbral Phosphorescence was full on goth.  But how about some music which is downright spooky?  Well, you’ve finally come to the right place.

For this mix, we’ll be concentrating on music which sounds a bit scary or unsettling.  If it has some creepy lyrics, that’s a bonus, but it’s not the focus.  Mainly these are songs from artists which usually are perfectly normal-sounding bands, putting out perfectly normal-sounding albums, except for that one track that makes the fine hairs on your arm stand on end.  The name of the mix is drawn from a few lines from The Raven by Edgar Allen Poe, the patron saint of Hallowe’en if there ever was one.  The ends of two different stanzas of that excellent poem are:

“Ghastly grim and ancient Raven wandering from the Nightly shore—
Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night’s Plutonian shore!”
Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”

On the cushion’s velvet lining that the lamp-light gloated o’er,
But whose velvet-violet lining with the lamp-light gloating o’er,
She shall press, ah, nevermore!

So, as we sit here, on the violet-velvet cushion of Night’s Plutonian shore, let’s see what dark and festering cobwebby corners of alternative music we can find to chill our bones.

When I first discovered Falling You, back in the early days of the Internet,¹ I immediately fell in love with them² and started trying to download every single thing I could find by them.  Which is how I stumbled on this “remix” of “Hush” by Abney Park.  The original is pretty good—listen to it if you like—but it’s not significantly creepy.  What Falling You did was to entirely mute Robert Brown’s lead vocals, kick up Abney Park keyboardist Kristina Erickson’s almost whispered backing vocals, cut out nearly all the instruments except for the synths (which are perhaps even enhanced a bit), and add some creepy sound effects.  The result is something entirely different from the original ... and insanely dark and excellent.  For years I had it paired with “Mad Alice Lane” as the opening to Darktime, but honestly it transcends just being about darkness.  It’s a wonderfully creepy tune that serves as a wondeful intro.

And it’s followed by my other great find from those early Internet days: “Mad Alice Lane” by Peter Lawlor, founder of the Scottish band Stiltskin.  It took me forever, but I finally tracked down the CD single of this excellent (and excellently spooky) song; the version I’m using here is the slightly longer “A Spooker Ghost Story” one.³  The story of the song is just as creepy as the song itself, so defnitely give that a look-see.

Once I divorced these two excellent tracks from Darktime, I decided they should form the core of their own spooky mix.  And instantly I knew the first two companion tracks that had to be added: both are by Siouxsie and the Banshees and both are off Peepshow.  “Scarecrow” is one of my favorite tunes to play at this time of year, and, while the choruses are a bit rockin’ (as much of the Siouxsie œuvre is wont to be), the verses are super eerie.  As for “Rawhead and Bloodybones” ... well, based on a disturbing British tale of child-snatching boogeymen (or a single boogeyman with a compound name; versions conflict), the song has a lot of discordancy and notes that just jangle your nerves.  It made for the perfect closer.

After that, “The Lights are Going Out,” the closer for OMD’s 1985 masterpiece Crush, was so unlike anything else on that album that I’d always had it in the back of my mind as a candidate for a spooky mix, and the Cure’s short “Subway Song” is a little two-minute gem with a little jump scare built right in.  I follow up the latter here with “Barrowlands” by the Bolshoi.  The Bolshoi were contemporaries of OMD, though not nearly so well-remembered these days.  They had a similar sort of new-wave/synthpop sound, and “Barrowlands,” the penultimate track on Lindy’s Party, is similarly conspicuous in its dissimilarity to everything else on that album.  It’s got a great graveyard feel to it, and also provides our volume title.

Rounding out the 80s contributions (though I embarrassingly didn’t think of it until quite recently) is “Sanctum Sanctorum” by the Damned.  I was looking for a replacement for another track that just didn’t seem to fit, and it suddenly occurred to me that I didn’t have anything by the Damned.  And, while the Damned may not be a proper goth band, lead singer Dave Vanian is the gothiest motherfucker on the planet: black leather and huge white streak in his jet-black hair (at least during the Phantasmagoria era), married to Patricia Morrison of the Sisters of Mercy (which is a proper goth band)—hell, he even used to be a gravedigger before becoming a rock star.  And Phantasmagoria has some goth gems on it, of which “Sanctum Sanctorum,” with its Phantom-of-the-Opera-style opening organ chords and backing thunder-and-lightning effects, is easily the spookiest.

Other obvious, if more modern, choices were “Shadow of a Doubt” by Black Tape for a Blue Girl (with Elysabeth Grant breathily telling us how she “met a stranger on a train” and Sam Rosenthal’s goth-soaked arrangement), “Mary of Silence” by Mazzy Star (more organ, sludgy percussion, and echoey vocals by Hope Sandoval), and “Danny Diamond” by Squirrel Nut Zippers (a taste of New Orleans creepy accompanying a song of tragedy sung by Katharine Whalen).  Those fell naturally into a little block, starting with “Diamond” and ending with “Mary,” that closes out the first third and sets us up for the middle stretch.

A few more self-evident choices: modern goth masters Faith and the Muse, who here give us the breathy, bassy track “Kodama,” and dark ambient, strings-heavy Amber Asylum, who provide “Cupid.” The lyrics of “Kodama” are actually about the commodification of Hollywood,⁴ but the song still retains enough sinister to secure its position here.  As for “Cupid,” it’s a rare vocal outing for band founder Kris Force, and those vocals soar and swoop; it’s not always clear exactly what the words are, but the arrangement is a bit menacing and a bit tortured, so it works well here.

Tossing in a bit of early-to-mid-’aughts trip-hop, the Belgian band Hooverphonic can go dark with the best of ’em, and I always thought “L’Odeur Animale” was one of their darkest.  The whole song just feels ... off, and that creepy little tag at the end just seals the deal.  When Geike Arnaert sings “deep inside,” it makes you shiver, even if you don’t know quite why.  My other choice was Germany’s Trost, whose Trust Me is normally fairly uptempo, if a bit surreal.⁵  But the last track,⁶ “Filled with Tears,” has more of that bass-driven, echoey and breathy vocals that have popularized so many of the other tracks I chose.  Plus the one-two punch of Hooverphonic and Trost makes a fantastic wind-down to our closer from Siouxsie.

Plutonian Velvet I
[ Ministers of Night ]

“Hush [Flashback Mix]” by Abney Park [remix by Falling You] [Single]⁷
“Mad Alice Lane (A Spookier Ghost Story)” by Lawlor, off Mad Alice Lane (A Ghost Story) [CD Single]
“Cupid” by Amber Asylum, off The Natural Philosophy of Love
“Scarecrow” by Siouxsie and the Banshees, off Peepshow
“Kodama” by Faith and the Muse, off :ankoku butoh:
“The Lights Are Going Out” by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, off Crush
“Danny Diamond” by Squirrel Nut Zippers, off The Inevitable
“Shadow of a Doubt” by Black Tape for a Blue Girl, off The Scavenger Bride
“Mary of Silence” by Mazzy Star, off So Tonight That I Might See
“Now, When I'm This” by the Black Queen, off Fever Daydream
“Ghost Children” by Bruno Coulais, off Coraline [Soundtrack]
“Toccata” by Nox Arcana, off Legion of Shadows
“Waltz of the Damned” by Lee Press-On and the Nails, off Swing Is Dead
“Subway Song” by the Cure, off Boys Don't Cry
“Barrowlands” by the Bolshoi, off Lindy's Party
“Sanctum Sanctorum” by Damned, off Phantasmagoria
“L'Odeur Animale” by Hooverphonic, off The Magnificent Tree
“Filled with Tears” by Trost, off Trust Me
“Rawhead and Bloodybones” by Siouxsie and the Banshees, off Peepshow

Total:  19 tracks,  79:13

And that just leaves us with the centerpiece of the volume.  We start with 3 instrumentals: a rare double-bridge leading into a hardcore synth-driven update of Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D minor.” First up, the Black Queen, a dark synthwave band composed of former members of Trent Reznor’s touring band for Nine Inch Nails.  I discovered these guys while checking out the veritable cornucopia of dark synthwave that’s springing up these days (such as Urban Heat and Light Asylum), and while dark synthwave doesn’t necessarily mean creepy, there’s certainly something ominous about “Now, When I’m This,” which is the short intro to the Black Queen’s debut album, Fever Daydream.  And the transition from “Mary of Silence” straight into “Ghost Children” wasn’t working for me, so this little track made a nice bridge to the bridge, if you see what I mean.  And “Ghost Children” itself was picked to be a little bridge into “Toccata”: it’s a nice (but creepy) little track off of Bruno Coulais’ excellent soundtrack to Coraline.  I mean, all of Coraline is pretty creepy—it’s the entire raison d’être for Phantasma Chorale after all—but I tend to think that “Ghost Children” is one of the few actually spooky ones.  And it tees up the Nox Arcana take on Bach’s classic, given its uncanny bona fides by association with early silent horror films such as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in 1931 (it didn’t become associated with The Phantom of the Opera until 1962, by which point it was already cliché horror film music).  Nox Arcana does some excellent work here, keeping it lively while also providing the appropriate amount of darkness for being the anchorpoint of an album named Legion of Shadows.

And all that takes us to perhaps the only surprising choice of the volume: Lee Press-On and the Nails.  Retroswing auteurs LPON are often silly, but also occasionally gothy, and their album Swing Is Dead contains a few tracks that aren’t out of place in the Halloween season.  But only one is truly spooky: “Waltz of the Damned” sounds almost exactly like what you would hear while waiting in line to see the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland.  The amusement-park-style sound effects fade into some New-Orleans-style dirge before leaping into LPON’s more typical big-band sound, with Lee’s vocals heavily processed through a voice-distortion unit spewing lines like “and when the leader waves his fiery baton, the band begins to scream in three-quarter time!” It’s eerie, spooky fun.

Next time, we’ll sneak up on some sonic explosions.

__________

1 Which is when I also discovered a bunch of other crazy things I’ve shared with you, like Ensemble of the Dreamings and Zoolophone.

2 Well, him: Falling You is almost entirely composed of John Michael Zorko.

3 That single also contains the nearly-ambient “Dogs of Breakfast,” which we heard on Shadowfall Equinox III.

4 Or at least that’s my interpretation.

5 We’ve heard from Trost once before: her weird little ditty “Even Sparrows Don’t Like to Stay” was featured on Gramophonic Skullduggery.

6 These sorts of weird, creepy songs are often used as closers for their native albums.

7 This one is so damned hard to find that I just gave up and uploaded it myself.  You’re welcome.

Rumble in the Jungle

After a break of a little over a year, we’re finally back to the Family Campaign (which is what I call the D&D campaign that I’ve built around my children’s characters, who happen to be all animal-based).  Why so long?  Well, a big reason was the return of my eldest child and their partner.  You’d think that would make it easier to do a thing called “the Family Campaign,” but not so much, as it turned out.  But another reason was that this was the first really big battle that I’d planned for the campaign.  Now, if you watch actual play games like Dimension 20 or Critical Role, you might recognize that this is very light in terms of combat: D20 typically has a major (as in, episode-long) combat every other episode; CR is usually a bit less often, but not by much.  However, I’m a much more combat-light (and therefore story-heavy) GM.  While I pepper in short combats, done using theater of the mind, I save big set-piece combats utilizing fancy battle maps for special occasions that come along maybe once a level.

So, with the arrival of the party in Maztica (a jungle-dominated continent with cultures influenced by Aztec, Incan, and other Mesoamerican cultures), I figured it was time to pull out all the stops.  You can see the array of enemies I put up (with apologies for my limited Phtoshop skills); there’s a few evil cultists (always fun to battle, with no pesky moral quandaries to worry about) and then a number of creatures taken straight from Legendary Games’ Latin American Monsters, which I purchased specifically for this purpose.  There’s a jaguar in the right foreground, with a werejaguar right behind it, a couple of pumas, and a werecaiman.  That red furry thing with the horns is a timbo; the scary horse-headed woman is a sihuanaba, and the big snake with antlers is a mazacoatl.

And, yes, I built a full map for it.  Here’s some pics we took to mark our place when we had to pause this mega-combat:

As you can see, I had to use a number of proxy figures: my jaguar is here represented by the tiger (and the werejaguar is a weretiger figure), the timbo is the wrong color (but otherwise surprisingly accurate), the werecaiman is really just a lizardfolk, that “wolf” is actually supposed to be a black panther (one of the good guys), etc etc.  But the overall scene—a bar on a beach with a jungle right behind it—is actually pretty accurate for what I had in my mind.  The kids seemed to have a good time with it anyhow.  (Fun fact: the legs you can see in one of the pictures belong to my middle child, who was taking their own pictures of the battle.)

Oh, and you might wonder: what the heck is up with the Bazooka Joe wrapper?  Well, I asked my youngest to find a way to mark that space, and that’s what she came up with.  We had to mark the space because one of the powers of the timbo is called “Gravedigger”: in a single turn, it digs a grave, pushes you into it, and covers you up so you start suffocating.  So that bubble gum wrapper is actually a grave marker, and there’s someone in there buried alive.  So that’s fun.

We’ll pick it up here next week, if we can wait that long.  It’s a tough battle, but I provided a few allies to help them out, and I think they’ll prevail in the end.  I’m anxious to find out how it all comes out!

I thought Jared Kushner was going to fix this ...

When the WGA went on strike earlier this year, I was miffed for an entirely selfish reason: I get almost all of my news from places that employ writers, like The Daily Show and Steven Colbert on The Late Show.  Just as when the coronavirus first hit, I was abruptly plunged into a news-free zone.  As I noted back then:

Sure, I could sit around and watch CNN or something along those lines, but I gotta tell you: I spent a long time doing that right after 9/11, and all I got for it was way more stressed and not particularly more well-informed.  In fact, study after study has shown that “fake news” shows such as The Daily Show produce more well-informed viewers than almost any other outlet.  So right now I’m losing not only my major source of news about the world, but also the coping mechanism I was using to deal with the stress of said news: being able to laugh at it.

During this year’s stoppage, I found some new outlets, mostly on YouTube, where creators are not writing for the AMPTP, so the strike allowed them to continue.  Most of them, however, were not nearly amusing enough.  I’ve grown somewhat fond of Brian Tyler Cohen, for instance, but there’s no denying that he’s not only a radical liberal (which I don’t mind so much), but also a staunch Democrat (which I’m far less tolerant of).  Generally speaking, the Democrats are not nearly as liberal/progressive as I’d like, and they fuck up just as badly as the Republicans (case in point: Bob Menendez).  Then there are the “dirtbag left” and their less extreme offshoots, who will happily—even gleefully—attack Democrats, but traffic more in manufactured outrage than incisive and funny commentary.  About the only truly postive find during this long dry spell was Some More News, who are not so much current news like Colbert and whoever ends up being the next Trevor Noah, but more like John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight: deep dives into an single problematic situation, trying to use humor to explore the nuances of the story that traditional news outlets (even the “fake” news ones) just don’t have time to cover.

But now the strike is over, and Colbert is back, Meyers is back, Oliver is back, and The Daily Show will be back tomorrow night.  And just in time for the most violent flare-up between Israel and Palestine in decades; by the time it’s over—and I’m being optimistic just in assuming it will eventually be over—it will almost certainly jettison the “almost” from that description.  This is the type of thing that it is very difficult to inject even a modicum of humor into, but one of the reasons I truly respect these folks is that they always find a way: you can’t make jokes about the tragedy itself, of course, but you can make jokes about the idiots talking about the tragedy, or trying to “manage” it.  You can point out hypocrisies and people being greedy and foolish.  They figured out a way to do it about 9/11 (eventually), and they figured out a way to do it about the pandemic.  And, I have to say: I’m a bit disappointed by the lack of even trying that I’m seeing from my usual outlets.  That probably sounds a bit crass, like I’m complaining that this humanitarian crisis, where thousands are being killed, isn’t funny enough for me.  But that’s not what I mean to imply.  I’m more disappointed in how this is the line that my comedic news idols are afraid to cross.  A world-wide pandemic that killed 7 million people?  Sure, we can find a way to make jokes about that.  The Middle East?  Fuck that, man: I’m not touching that.

I think the main source of the problem is, perhaps more than any other hot-button issue in the United States—perhaps more even than abortion, or gun rights—there are reflexive reactions to stating a position on either side.  If you refuse to say you stand with Israel, well then of course you’re supporting terrorists.  And, if you do say you stand with Israel, then you’re supporting apartheid at the best and genocide at the worst.  Best just not to take a side.  Except ...

Except I reject this false dichotomy.  I do not stand with Israel, nor do I stand with Hamas (or any of the other Paletinian terrorist groups-du-jour).  I stand with the innocent civilians.

Numbers are hard to pin down, but the United Nations says that “More than 1,200 Israelis and foreign nationals, the majority of whom were civilians, were reportedly killed ...” and that ”... at least 1,100 Palestinians have been killed, including older persons and 290 children ...” ABC News reports that “In Israel, at least 1,300 people have been killed ...” and that “Palestinian authorities said at least 2,329 people have been killed ...” Would it really be so controversial to posit that killing innocent civilians is bad, regardless of which side is doing it?

This conflict has been going on so long that people don’t even bother going back to its beginning in their lists any more: the United Nations lists casualties only going back as far as 2008; Wikpedia’s list of military operations headed “Gaza-Israel conflict” only goes back to 2006 (and has 21 entries in those 18 years).  But, trying to extrapolate from Wikipedia’s timeline, I think there have been more than 50 incidents just in my lifetime—the first of which started when I was 7 months old—ranging from plane hijackings to full-on wars.  And I was only trying to count incidents in which multiple innocent bystanders were killed: I skipped all the assasinations of military and political figures by both sides.  Also, once it became clear I was going to hit 50 (easily), I actually quit counting, because it was just so goddamned depressing.  The Israelis and the Palestinians have bcome the Hatfields and McCoys of our lifetimes, except if the Hatfields and McCoys were wiping out huge swaths of the West Virginia population.

And I understand the issues of conflating the state of Israel with the Jewish people, but I don’t think it’s antisemitic to criticize the government of Israel.  If it were, there would quite a few antisemitc Jews these days: Jon Stewart has done some of this, not to mention there’s an entire organization of Jews for whom it is the raison d’être.  But it’s harder for non-Jewish people (such as myself) to do so.  In fact, there are, bizarrely, actual laws in 35 states (including my own) saying that you’re not allowed to boycott Israel in protest of its policies.  You know where it’s not illegal to protest Israel?  Israel.  Many Israeli newspapers have been extremely critical of Netanyahu in particular, which is only sensible: in a democracy, people are supposed to be critical of their governments.  They are supposed to hold them accountable.  There are no laws in the US about not being able to protest the US government (probably), but it’s okay to make it illegal to protest other countries’ governments?  It’s just surreal.

Meanwhile the Palestinians have the opposite problem: too often the face of their people is a group like Hamas (or Hezbollah, or Fatah, or the PLO, or ...), which everybody condemns, and rightfully so.  But condemning a terrorist group that operates in a country is not the same as condemning the people of that country, and expressing support for the people is not the same as expressing support for the terrorist group.  Netanyahu has said that “the enemy will pay an unprecedented price”; does that mean that Hamas will pay this price?  Because it sure seems like it’s the Palestinian people paying it right now.  If the Israelis wanted to hunt down every single Hamas soldier who participated in this henious attack on their country, who would speak out against them?  But bombing innocent civilians back to the stone age because of the actions of some madmen who claim to speak for them?  Does that really seem “justified”?

So I would like to take the (hopefully!) uncontroversial stance that people in both Israel and Palestine have the right to live their lives without fear of being shot, kidnapped, or bombed.  I dunno ... that just seems like common sense—and common decency—to me.

Even More News, the current news discussion podcast from the Some More News folks that I mentioned way back at the beginning of this post, had an almost entirely humor-free discussion of the current situation in Israel and Palestine that you could check out for more in depth discussion.  The episode of Some More News that they reference is actually two years old at this point, but (as Cody says) it’s eerily relevant to today’s news, so you should probably watch that.  The older video does lean more towards the Palestine side, but the recent podcast is more balanced.  And all the information is good regardless.

Trying not to ruin the apology

There should be something longer here.

But there isn’t.

I should have found the time to write it ...

But I didn’t.

The vagaries of life have struck me down, the minutiæ causing me to drown, hopefully I won’t have a breakdown ...

I’m feeling insufficient.

Perhaps next week will be much better.

Then again, perhaps it won’t.

I typically strive to produce some content.

But then sometimes I don’t.

Not that you should pity me (I’m not asking you for sympathy), I’m just sayin’, that’s all I have for thee: ’cause this is all I wrote.

In a house with unlocked doors

As I sit here rewatching The Meg, which really isn’t as bad as it’s cracked up to be, in preparation for watching The Meg 2, which probably will be as bad as it’s cracked up to be (but it’ll be entertaining enough, I expect) ... as I sit here, pondering old Jason Statham will be before they stop casting him in action movies, I appreciate the fact that I took this blog to a biweekly schedule.  See ya next week.