All posts by Indy

>SRM Reviews (#65 September 2009)

>Published in Sweden Rock Magazine #65 September 2009.

Griftegård
Solemn, Sacred, Severe9/10
Ván (Sound Pollution)

Allvarsmättat? Jo, tack.
Sakralt? Så in i helvete.
Kännbart? Minst sagt.
Tyngden är ofattbar. Atmosfären så närvarande. Och allting har en stabil grund att stå på: allvaret i sökandet efter meningen med tillvaron. Man slipper det ytliga poserandet, det larviga som aldrig betyder något. På så sätt blir Griftegårds doom genuin på ett sätt som är få förunnat.
Och Thomas Erikssons röst svävar över allting annat och fullkomligt krossar konkurrensen.
Om du inte förnekar hårdrockens rötter lär du även kunna ta till dig de partier som på detta verk kan uppfattas som smöriga och pretentiösa. Hos mig går de rakt in i hjärtat, och det känns skönt att även kunna finna några smörklickar bland all aska som jag vanligtvis kryddar mina musikaliska rätter med.
Den som har svårt för religiösa tongångar – de tar sina mest extrema uttryck i psalmen Noah’s Hand – kanske inte faller pladask. Inte heller de som förväntar sig rockiga midtempolåtar. Inser man däremot det sakralas betydelse för den långsamt stundande undergången lär man hitta rätt direkt.
Doom metal blir knappast bättre än så här. Sacred, Solemn, Severe är en milstolpe.
[Interview in the print edition of the magazine]

———-

Switch Opens
Switch Opens8/10
GMR (Border)

Många band gör musik som ska låta på ett visst sätt. Switch Opens musik låter på sitt sätt, och det höjer dem över mängden.
Trummisen dyrkar The Police. Ena gitarristen har Van Halen som husgudar, medan den andre tillbringar huvuddelen av dagen inne i sitt huvud tillsammans med Hawkwind. Sångaren och basisten, Jesper Skarin, hyllar Megadeth och spelar trummor med technosnubben i The Field. Ni hör ju själva. Detta är helt jävla sjukt! I stället för musik: förvirring? Nej, inte alls.
Efter att tidigare ha hetat Fingerspitzengefühl och släppt två rejält spretiga men svinbra album har bandet äntligen hittat hem. Det schizofrena uttrycket har kokats ned till vad de gör bäst: de vänder ut och in på tyngden. Ändå är detta deras mest varierade album. Det händer saker hela tiden. Udda trumkomp, fantastiska sånginsatser, psykedeliska gitarrsjok och basfetma som berör både fysiskt och psykiskt – dessa fyra hjältar torde kunna rädda världen!
Produktionen är både taggigt trasig och mjuk som ett duntäcke. Bergsmassiv och genomskinlig. Man fattar inte riktigt hur det har gått till, men de har som sagt hittat hem.
Årets tripp? Fuglesangs fjuttiga rymdresa är en spottloska i havet.
[Interview in the print edition of the magazine]

>The louse of holy name

>

 How much longer will you keep up the worm-eaten cult of this god, who is insensible to your prayers and to the generous sacrifices that you offer him as an expiatory holocaust? Can you not see that this horrible manitou is not grateful for the bowls of blood and brains which you lay on his altars, piously decorated with garlands of flowers. He is not grateful… for earthquakes and tempests have been raging uninterruptedly since the beginning of all things. And nonetheless (this is a spectacle worthy of observation), the more indifferent he is, the more you admire him. It is clear that you are wary of his attributes, which he hides; and your reasoning is based on the consideration that a divinity of such extreme power can only show disdain for the faithful who obey the commandments of his religion. For that reason different gods exist in each country: here, the crocodile, there, the prostitute.

But when it comes to the louse, of holy name, the nations of the earth, one and all kissing the chains of their slavery, kneel together in the august sanctuary before the pedestal of this shapeless and bloodthirsty idol. Any people that did not obey its own grovelling instincts and made as if to rebel, would sooner or later disappear from the face of the earth like an autumn leaf, destroyed by the vengeance of the inexorable god.
Lautrémont, Maldoror 1868-1869
[more here]

>Theodore Kaczynski, The Unabomber – Part Fourteen

>

Before summarizing what I’ve written about Kaczynski, I’d like to write about his life in the wild. As stated earlier, this wasn’t as ”into the wild” as people seem to think. He was always in sight of his nextdoor neighbour, for example. The place he chose offered no solitude. The area was pretty much clogged with summer and hunting cabins. Snowmobilers, hunters, gold diggers and loggers constantly roamed the woods. If he’d went further into the wild he’d also find much cheaper places. The thing is that being this close to civilization made it easier for him to execute his revenge. Planting the bombs required travelling. Had he been too far off it would have been too time consuming getting where he wanted to kill. Also, with all these people disturbing the peace he would increasingly become very angry. They fueled his hatred.

The cabin in the lower left.

As we now know, the culture of despair had undergone transformation, from worry about society to worry about nature. Ecologists in the 1940’s concluded that in nature, every part plays a role in keeping the system in balance. If the system loses parts we will suffer ecological collapse.
Guided by this reasoning, ecologists began searching for signs of balance in nature. However, they could only find very few, and instead found great instability. Therefore, by the 1960’s, they would conclude that we were in the middle of a global environmental crisis. This caused pessimism to spread and it obviously nurtured the culture of despair, and The Unabomber and his anti-technology agenda.
However, by the mid-1980’s, most ecologists would realize that their previous assumptions were false. There is no balance in nature. There never had been any balance to find. But in the 1970s, they didn’t know that… And in 1971 Ted starts to build his cabin.

Many young people were willing to try anything to get away from everyday pessimism, slave-like labour and hopelessness. They wanted to reach a higher level of consciousness. Self-hypnosis, meditation, dream journals, Tai Chi, karate, Feldenkrais, Kabbalism, Buddhism, therapy studies… stuff like that. Some of them sought escape in nature, hoping to construct new communities, often supported by the economy of marijuana. They moved out and grew pot, so to speak.
Some of them soon embraced a form of terrorism labelled ”ecotage” – ecological sabotage – dedicated to saving nature, where monkeywrenching soon became the thing to do. Monkeywrenching is a tactic which was used at first by students protesting the Vietnam war. It’s all about vandalism in the name of environmental protection, like destroying machinery, roadside signs, hammering lots of nails into the trees which will cause chain saws to virtually explode in the operator’s hand… At first, since these people did harm to property, not people, they were treated almost as harmless by the national media. But like all historical movements, ecotage came to have its imitators who didn’t shy from real violence. Alston Chase writes in his book Harvard and the Unabomber: ”In these groups, America was for the first time encountering the mind of the modern terrorist”.

Another group of people, sometimes called the Silent Generation, believed that the collapse had already occured. They found that their world had simply disappeared. The 1960’s should have been their days of joy, their salad days, but instead everything went over their heads. The 1960’s were years of chaos. They didn’t fit in. Some of them simply kept low profiles, getting on with their day to day lives, sticking to the family and the job. Others sought escape in nature. 
But while the young people were motivated by a desire to get close to nature, the Silent Generation wanted to get away from a world gone mad, away from public life, away from people. The young were optimistic and active, the Silents were pessimistic and passive. Kaczynski’s birth date – 1942 – lay at what demographers consider to be the gap between the Silents and the youngsters. He was pessimistic, but he also wanted action. Despair and commitment would be a deadly combination.

Kaczynski’s life in the cabin was mostly dedicated to learning and gathering information. He was a frequent visitor to the library, to say the least. He read books on woodcraft, botany, organic chemistry, poison antidotes, nutrition, pesticides, Indian customs, rifle shooting, first aid, wilderness medicine, seeds, weeds, trees, animal tracks, mushrooms, edible and poisonous plants, wildflowers… You name it, he read it and made efficient use of it.
The cabin he built was ten by twelve foot (3 x 3,5 metres), and he also dug a root cellar and planted a garden. Instead of digging a well, he got water from a creek with a hose. Life would’ve been good, but as Chase writes: ”No sooner had he settled in his Eden than serpents appeared”. Kaczynski was very sensitive to noise, and the sounds of chainsaws, snowmobiles, jet planes, helicopters, people – the serpents – made him even more angry. So he decided to take action. He strung wires across trails hoping to get the bikers, he shot at helicopters and he destroyed peoples’ stuff.
He writes in his journal:

Risky to commit crime so close to home. But I figured if I did not get those guys, the anger would literally kill me. Anyway, so one night in fall I sneaked over there, though they were home, and stole their chainsaw, buried it in a swamp. That was not enough, so couple weeks later when they had left the place, I chopped my way into their house, smashed up interior pretty thoroughly. It was a real luxury place. They also had a mobile home there. I broke into that too, found silver painted motorcycle inside, smashed it up with their own axe. They had four snowmobiles sitting outside. I thoroughly smashed engines of those with the axe.

By the summer of 1977 he wrote:

I set a booby-trap intended to kill someone, but I won’t say what kind or where because if this paper is ever found the trap might be harmlessly removed.

When Exxon did seismic explorations for oil, using dynamite from helicopters in the area:

 Early August I went and camped out […] hoping to shoot up a helicopter in area east of crater mountain. Proved harder than I thought, because helicopters always in motion, never know where they will go next. Tall trees in way of shot. Only once had half a glance. Two quick shots, roughly aimed, as copter crossed space between two trees. Missed both. When I got back to camp I cried, partly from frustration at missing, but mostly grief about what is happening to the country. It is so beautiful. But if they find oil, disaster. Even if not find oil, the blasts and helicopters ruin it.  Desecration. Where can I go now for peace and quiet?

The removal of the cabin as evidence.

The cabin, now an artifact owned by the FBI, I think.

As Kaczynski slowly became addicted to violence his campaign of terror slowly made him feel worse. He hated his family, and wanted to break totally with them, but he was dependent on their financial aid. The more complex his bombs, the more money he needed, and his family was the only source of income. His anger and frustration went off the charts. In February 1987, when planting the very deadly bomb number twelve, he was seen by an employee who gave a good portrait of him, and Kaczynski was frightened. Between 1987 and 1992 he stopped with his bombings, instead testing new mixtures and devices to find the perfect detonator at secret sites in the wilderness behind his cabin.

>Socialized death sentence

>

You punch in at 8:30 every morning, except you punch in at 7:30 following a business holiday, unless it’s a Monday, then you punch in at 8 o’clock. Punch in late and they dock ya!
Incoming articles get a voucher, outgoing articles provide a voucher. Move any article without a voucher and they dock ya!
Letter size a green voucher, oversize a yellow voucher, parcel size a maroon voucher. Wrong color voucher and they dock ya!
6787049A/6. That is your employee number. It will not be repeated! Without your employee number you cannot get your paycheck.
Inter-office mail is code 37, intra-office mail 37-3, outside mail is 3-37. Code it wrong and they dock ya!
This has been your orientation. Is there anything you do not understand, is there anything you understand only partially? If you have not been fully oriented, you must file a complaint with personnel. File a faulty complaint and they dock ya!

Isn’t it strange? A job I loved a couple of months ago (November 2008) has turned into crap. This isn’t supposed to be a blog about my private life, but some things cannot go unnoticed. Work kills.
Dystopia, one of the best bands to ever grace this beautiful planet infested with rotten humans, puts it well in their super smash hit Socialized Death Sentence. Check out the earlier Dystopia post for even more joy. Happy time!


I am just a fucking slave
bust my ass for minimum wage
Before I’m paid the system comes and takes half away…
for bombs someday
My boss hates my fucking guts
I was never good enough
If I’m injured on the job
he’ll say ‘tough luck’
He’ll find someone else to fuck
My job… My life

Landlord’s pissed, rent is due
Haven’t worked in a few
If I don’t pay I get evicted
I’m fucking screwed
What am I supposed to do?
Each day… I die

Your… Your job sucks
The system fucks
A timeclock head
I’m dead
Employed… Mind void
Destroyed… Can’t avoid

I try… to survive
…losing…
Work, work
Socialized death sentence
System, system
Fucked all around
Work, work
like taking cyanide
System, system
Washing it down…
And I die again tomorrow…
When I wake up

This is Louis Harrell with his retirement award from J.P. Stevens Mill, his employer, shortly before his death 1978. Harrell died at age 62 of byssinosis, or “brown lung,” after years of inhaling dust generated in cotton manufacture. Brown lung – a term coined by Ralph Nader – occurs almost exclusively in cotton processing workers who handle raw cotton.
Byssinosis could have been recognized sooner. Health officials as far back as the 1930s were aware of the dangers of workers’ prolonged exposure to cotton dust. Because it was able to control the outflow of health data, the cotton industry stalled acknowledgment of the disease for 50 years. Finally in 1978 OSHA imposed a protective standard on textile factories. It estimated that 35,000 people had the disease and 100,000 more were at risk.
Today cotton production and byssinosis are largely ended in the US, but both are common in the third world.

>Jehova, Christ, Lucifer and Satan

>

Robert DeGrimston was the founder of the very odd religious group The Process Church of The Final Judgement, whose main thing was that they worshipped both Christ and Satan. Their belief was that in the end times, Satan would join with Christ and together they were to judge humanity; Christ to judge and Satan to execute judgement.
The Process believed there are three God-patterns that exist within all of us.
Wikipedia:

  • Jehovah, the wrathful God of vengeance and retribution, demands discipline, courage and ruthlessness, and a single-minded dedication to duty, purity and self-denial.
  • Lucifer, the Light Bearer, urges us to enjoy life to the full, to value success in human terms, to be gentle and kind and loving, and to live in peace and harmony with one another. Man’s apparent inability to value success without descending into greed, jealousy and an exaggerated sense of his own importance, has brought the God Lucifer into disrepute. He has become mistakenly identified with Satan.
  • Satan, the receiver of transcendent souls and corrupted bodies, instills in us two directly opposite qualities; at one end an urge to rise above all human and physical needs and appetites, to become all soul and no body, all spirit and no mind, and at the other end a desire to sink beneath all human codes of behavior, and to wallow in a morass of violence, lunacy and excessive physical indulgence. But it is the lower end of Satan‘s nature that men fear, which is why Satan, by whatever name, is seen as the Adversary.

The X Spot has a great article about these people here. The group existed between 1963 and 1974, and when Robert was removed from the top position as Teacher the group quickly renounced most of his ideas. They changed the name to Founding Faith of the Millennium, and within short time their focus had changed completely. Now they exist as Best Friends Animal Society, which is one of America’s best known animal welfare rescue groups (!).  
However, I’m not at all interested in their old religious belief system. What I like is their old newsletters and prose, especially the book Satan on War. I enjoy the words immensely. Like this:

Know that life is worthless unless it is lived in the very teeth of death, that peace is nothing except as a fleeting moment in the midst of WAR, that love is empty save as a transitory oasis in a world of violent hatred, that to create is only meaningful in order to destroy.