Hit The Shites: Vol I

I've been shlepping my camera to gigs for years, putting up with drunks spilling beer on it and worring in case some cunt robs it from the car etc etc etc but now and again I get lucky and take a picture I'm happy with. Here's some of the better ones - bonus points if you recognise yourself.

Witchcraft, Newcastle 2004

Warning, Bradford 2008

Unearthly Trance, Newcastle 2009

Hit The Shites: Vol II

Sunn O))) / Xasthur, Leeds 2006

The Gates Of Slumber, Leeds 2006

Sunn O))), Newcastle 2003

Sourvein, Newcastle 2003

Reverend Bizarre, Sheffield 2004

Hit The Shites: Vol III

Pagan Altar, Leeds 2007

Om, Gateshead 2007

Marzuraan, Newcastle 2007

Khanate, Nottingham 2004

High On Fire, Sunderland 2007

Hit The Shites: Vol IV

Grand Magus, Newcastle 2004

Forsaken, Bradford 2008

Earth, Leeds 2006

Church Of Misery, Gateshead 2009

Blood Island Raiders, Newcastle 2007

Burying The Summer

It has been several weeks since this Blog has been updated and for the two, possibly three, people who seem to read it I will give a quick account o how the past weeks have been spent, because it has not all been Pimms and cucumber sandwiches. I spent much of July wandering around Scargill and Barningham moors. In the far south of the county, overlooking the valley of the river Greta and with (on a clear day) fine views to the Stainmore pass and the Cleveland hills this is an area with some of the most significant and beautiful Bronze Age rock art in the north of England. I’m planning further trips in the autumn when the bracken has died back, both to look for more panels and to continue my walks up the banks of the Greta. A two week family holiday to Lanzarote was rewarded with several lengthy sightings of hoopoe and also the discovery of a large raptor pellet, which on closer investigation was found to contain a lot of rabbit hair. A likely identification seems to be either buzzard or booted eagle, although I guess we’ll never know… August saw me putting the final flourishes to the Hunts & Wars album, which has been a developing and evolving work in progress for several years. The completed version was dispatched to Cold Spring Records in the middle of the month and appears to have met with a thumbs up, a release is being planned as soon as possible with Kevin Yuen of www.viraloptic.com slaving away in his garret on the art and design as I type. Also in August I completed a track titled Star Carr to be included on a double-CD project being put together by Hammer Smashed Jazz (http://hammersmashedjazz.blogspot.com) and conducted an interview with the Italian magazine Ritual, which I will post here in good time for the benefit of all us puny Anglophones. I also have been working on several long essays/articles which have demanded rewrites and edits, including an essay examining Robert E Howard’s tour de force Black Canaan and an essay on the Romano-Celtic river god Condatis – which was very timely seeing as the strong brown god was reawakened with dramatic results in July as the river Wear flooded and reshaped both natural and manmade landscapes. Both pieces will be published here and possibly elsewhere when they are finished. The dog days of August have been weary beneath heavy iron grey skies and in these last hours of summer I look forward to the changes to come. Cooler weather, frosts and mists, fiery colours and the signs of migrating birds crossing the skies above. As if to mark this end a spectacular sexton beetle, Nicophorus Investigator, resplendent in it’s black and orange livery, landed in the garden this afternoon just as the skies darkened to stormy purple and the strong warm wind, dancing ahead of the storm like a herald, began to shake the boughs of the trees. It had come to bury the summer and within minutes of its arrival day was turned to night and the raging rain drove us inside.

Only Death Is Real

Few bands mean as much to me as Celtic Frost. Their aesthetic as much as their music struck a deep chord from the very beginning - the atmosphere of barbaric splendour running through the lyrics, the riffs, the helmets and the eyeliner. To Mega Therion is in my view the closest metal ever got to realising the Wagnerian ideal of the Gesamptkunstwerk - a perfect synthesis of music, design and artistic vision. In this record is everything I want to achieve for my own music - breathtaking sweeps of epic immensity, searing golden highs and pitch-black frozen lows. When I am lost and mazed I can play this record and look out over empires and continents. Here is everything, all Innocence and Wrath.

Only Death Is Real: an illustrated history of Hellhammer and early Celtic Frost by Tom Gabriel Fischer with Martin Eric Ain will be published in November 2009 by Bazillion Points.

www.bazillionpoints.com

8.5

I never read Terrorizer these days, except when I get a mention of course. Many thanks to Avi Pitchon for this review from #185, July 2009.

TENHORNEDBEAST "My Horns Are A Flame To Draw Down The Truth". Cold Spring

Less a straight forward remix of 2007's "The Sacred Truth", this "companion" is suspended between re-working and re-recording existing tracks, plus a re-visiting and elaboration on sounds recorded for "The Sacred Truth" but not used. "Fenris-Wolf" reworks 2007's "In The Teeth Of The Wolf". The droning gongs of opener "Ruins Son" are a motif derived from "Christus Nox" that closed "The Sacred Truth". Nevertheless, a novice to TenHornedBeast's work is welcome to delve into this epos of ritual dark ambient as a release in its own right. Its barren minimalism is misleading, as further listens unravel extra layers of ominous, paralysing, pulsating spectral sounds that can be likened to a pitch black, empty, uncharted, enormous cavern whispering the hollow, sinister echoes of long forgotten gatherings of an uncanny occult nature. The space seems uninhabited, yet an abstract presence gradually increases to finally manifest in a deathly, rhythmic, rumbling procession. [8.5]