>Music that matters: Amebix – Part One

>One of my favourite bands of all time is without a doubt the almighty Amebix, formed in England 1978. The music, the lyrics, the artwork – everything is perfect. I will write a longer text about them further on, but for now I just want you to discover their fine malt lyrics in the shape of the opening lines to Nobody’s Driving from the Monolith (1987) album. This is real poetry to me, and the way it is sung is beyond artistry. But more about that later. Just dwell on these lines for a while. It’s not their best song (and certainly not their worst either, I love it!), but it displays the power, creativity and true independence of the band. No gods, no masters!

I awoke in a sweat from the American Dream
They were loading the bomb bay of the iron bird
Giving their blood to the Doomsday Machine
I screamed into the wind my goodbye to the world

Hell, I might just as well publish the lyrics in full.
Worship, on your knees, feeble bastards!

I awoke in a sweat from the American Dream
They were loading the bomb bay of the iron bird
Giving their blood to the Doomsday Machine
I screamed into the wind my goodbye to the world

It was dark in the desert so we walked through the night
The vessel was waiting where we had been led
An awesome machine to tear through the sky
The last exodus from the land of the dead

[Chorus:]
We are swimming in the lunar sea
Drowning in insanity
Look to the shore you will see
Your leaders were lying
Nobody’s driving!

Upon the horizon is the earth I once knew
Now a red ball of light suspended in space
So we erected a stone on the shore of the sea
As a grim epitaph to the lost human race

[Repeat first verse]

[Chorus:]
We are swimming in the lunar sea
Drowning in insanity
Between the devil and the deep blue sea
Our world is dying
And nobody’s driving!

>Roadburn Festival 2009

>Ah, the amazing Roadburn Festival 2009 in Tilburg, Holland. This is by far the very best festival I’ve ever been to: amazing bands, amazing venue with an amazing sound system, amazing people, hotel amazingly located a two minute walk from the amazing venue, amazing city, amazing smokes, amazing döner kebab… What more could you wish for? The line-up this year is fantastic, and hopefully we don’t get to see as much cancellations as last year.

This is a gathering of like minded bands and fans from around the world, joined together by a love of music. This is a celebration of tube-driven distortion and crackling electric guitars, a raising of musical consciousness and brotherly and sisterly love, a communion with THEE MIGHTY RIFF, a time and place to get high en mass and bask in the heaviness.

Check this out and worship eternally (names in bold (about 30 of them) are bands I really want to see, the rest I either don’t care or know that much about):

  • Neurosis
  • Amebix (not official yet, but highly probable)
  • Motorpsycho
  • Amon Düül II
  • Saint Vitus
  • Bohren und Der Club of Gore
  • Om
  • U.S. Christmas
  • Skullflower
  • Six Organs of Admittance
  • The Young Gods
  • Mono
  • Angel Witch
  • Baroness
  • Ufomammut
  • Church of Misery
  • Cathedral
  • Minsk
  • Rose Kemp
  • Orange Goblin
  • Scott Kelly
  • Steve von Till
  • White Hills
  • A Storm of Light
  • Burial Hex
  • Black Sun
  • The Devil’s Blood
  • Wolves In the Throne Room
  • Gomer Pyle
  • Negura Bunget
  • Farflung
  • Radio Moscow
  • Asva
  • The Outskirts of Infinity
  • Wino
  • Firebird
  • Akimbo
  • Guapo
  • Alexander Tucker
  • Aderlating
  • Colour Haze
  • Shora
  • The Atomic Bitchwax
  • Roadsaw
  • Saviours
  • Dragontears
  • Omega Massif
  • The Winchester Club
  • Seven That Spells
  • Dead Man
  • Solace
  • Dyse

And there are still more bands to be added to that list! I’m still hoping that Earth and Jex Thoth will be announced soon. Neurosis, who are curating Saturday, still have seven bands to announce, so anything could happen.

>Best albums 2008 according to Sweden Rock Magazine

>

Old but cool cover art.

One of the magazines I write for, Sweden Rock Magazine, recently published the writers’ favourite albums 2008. This is my list:

1. MglaGroza
2. Earth The Bees Made Honey in the Lion’s Skull
3. U.S. ChristmasEat the Low Dogs
4. Opeth Watershed
5. Grand MagusIron Will
6. ArckanumAntikosmos
7. Brainbombs Fucking Mess
8. Jex ThothJex Thoth
9. Witch Paralyzed
10. Ofermod Tiamtü

Check all lists here, and then feel free to read my interviews/articles with Earth, Jex Thoth and Brainbombs.
The list I will publish on New Year’s Eve on this blog will be different, though.

>Theodore Kaczynski, The Unabomber – Part Nine

>


When finally caught, Theodore Kaczynski was at once dismissed as a nutcase. People said ”He killed because he was insane”, rather than asking themselves ”Why did someone so like me commit murder?”
And so, the man who media at first portrayed as a genius and then a hermit was now dubbed a nut. There was nothing more to explore. The man was a freak. Case closed. And then silence.

As for the proceedings in court, Kaczynski’s lawyers and family worked hard for the court to declare Ted mentally insane to save him from the death penalty. His family gave interviews to all the major newspapers and television shows, saying that Ted had been mentally ill since childhood. Their campaign was very effective. The only problem was that Ted himself constantly would object to the whole insanity thing. ”David knows very well that I would unhesitatingly choose death over incarceration”, he writes in his book Truth Versus Lies. Ted would rather die for his ideas than being humiliated in court, being labelled insane. He valued his ideology more than his own life.
Ted asked his lawyers for them to send for his test results that he recieved during his years at Harvard, when he was participating in Professor Murray’s psychological experiments. They would prove he was clearly not insane at the time. His lawyers didn’t put much work into it, and they did so for a reason: it would ruin their case. They were well known for being respectable and reliable and they had worked on this ”mentally defect” line for so long it would ruin their reputation if the old test results would show what Kaczynski claimed – that he was perfectly normal.
In fact, the defense attorneys refused to let Kaczynski meet with psychiatrists, fearing they would not come to the ”correct” conclusions. They said their client had a ”pathological dread of examination by psychiatrists”, which was very far from the truth. One professor of psychiatry, Phillip J. Resnick, was not convinced that Kaczynski suffered from a mental disease, the writings of the Unabomber did not show this at all. While media, the defense attorneys and the Kaczynski family cemented the belief that celibacy, primitivism and that kind of lifestyle and ideas were signs of mental illness, Kaczynski rationally concluded that if he was labelled mentally ill his political agenda would be denigrated and he could not sit back and accept that. Resnick wrote several letters to the court asking for Kaczynski to be examined by a psychiatrist, without success.
At the same time the story about Murray’s experiments in the 60’s surfaced in the press, and people immediately assumed that he had suffered from mental illness since he had been psychologically examined back then. But nobody knew exactly what had happened at Harvard, not even the family. It was all rumours and media kept the real significance of the Harvard data in the dark, letting the rumours grow.

It was not until February 1998, when it was too late to make a difference, that Kaczynski managed to persuade his attorneys to send his answers from these psychological tests, along with the answers of the twenty-one other study objects, to a psychological testing expert. Because the individuals who took these tests were identified only by code names the expert could conduct a blind evaluation measuring the answers without knowing who had given them.
The expert, Berthram Karon, found that on a scale of 0 to 10, with 0 a complete abscense of illness and 10 the highest degree of illness, Kaczynski scored 0 for ”Schizotopy” and 2 for ”Psychopathy”. In other words, Kaczynski was perfectly normal.

After much delay and stalling from Ted’s attorneys the court finally sent for psychiatrist Sally Johnson to examine Kaczynski. She spent ten days interviewing him and reading his writings. She concluded that he was competent to stand trial and represent himself, which was exactly what he wanted. She wrote that ”he does no show evidence of overt disorganization or psychotic symptomology”, and does not show ”evidence of a mood disorder, obvious thought disorder, intellectual dysfunction”. But – and this is the weak threads on which they hung a diagnosis of mental illness – he is ”introverted, shy, and socially insecure”, and he believes ”the system as it exists is bad and rebellion against it is justified”, and that ”freedom and personal dignity have greater importance than comfort and security”. She saw it equally symptomatic that he ”feels compelled to live a life of extreme isolation and to focus his energy against all aspects of society that are attempting to control the masses.”
Media immediately hailed the report as proving Kaczynski insane.

Only three days after Johnson delivered her report to the court the trial was on. The judge – to everyone’s astonishment – denied Kaczynski’s request for self-representation, even though the report clearly stated that he’d be able to represent himself in court. What the hell happened?
The only explanation the court could provide was delay: Kaczynski had waited too long to invoke his right to self-representation. It was obvious that this cheap judge wanted a quick trial so he could go on with his life.

Facing a humiliating trial in which his attorneys would portray him as insane and his philosophy as the ravings of a mad man, Kaczynski capitulated: In exchange for the government’s agreement not to seek the death penalty, he pleaded guilty to thirteen bombings that killed three men and seriously injured two others, and took responsibility for sixteen bombings from 1978 to 1995.
On May 4, 1998, Kaczynski was sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole.

>Spengler: The morale of dawning "civilization"

>This is a continuation of the quote in the previous post.

The Decline of The West, Chapter IX
Soul-Image and Life-Feeling: Buddhism, Stoicism, Socialism
The morale of dawning “civilization”

When Nietzsche wrote down the phrase ”transvaluation of all values” for the first time, the spiritual movement of the centuries in which we are living found at last its formula. Transvaluation of all values is the most fundamental character of every civilization. For it is the beginning of a Civilization that it remoulds all the forms of the Culture that went before, understands them otherwise, practices them in a different way. It begets no more, but only reinterprets, and herein lies the negativeness common to all periods of this character. […]
There was an Egyptian or an Arabian or a Chinese desouling of the human being, just as there is a Western. This is a matter not of mere political and economic, nor even of religious and artistic, transformations, nor of any tangible or factual change whatsoever, but of the condition of a soul after it has actualized its possibilities in full.
Culture and Civilization – the living body of a soul and the mummy of it. For Western existence the distinction lies at about the year 1800 – on the one side of that frontier life in fullness and sureness of itself, formed by growth from within, in one great uninterrupted evolution from Gothic childhood to Goethe and Napoleon, and on the other the autumnal, artificial, rootless life of our great cities, under forms fashioned by the intellect. Culture-man lives inwards, Civilization-man outwards in space and amongst bodies and ”facts”. […]
Only the sick man feels his limbs. When men construct an unmetaphysical religion in opposition to cults and dogmas; when a ”natural law” is set up against historical law; when, in art, styles are invented in place of the style that can no longer be borne or mastered; when men concieve of the State as an ”order of society” which not only can but must be altered – then it is evident that something has definitely broken down. […]
As soon as Life is fatigued, as soon as man is put on to the artifical soil of great cities – which are intellectual worlds to themselves – and needs a theory in which suitably to present Life to himself, morale turns into a problem. […] One feels that there is something artifical, soulless, half-true in these considered systems that fill the first centuries of all the Civilizations. They are not those profound and almost unearthly creations that are worthy to rank with the great arts. All metaphysic of the high style, all pure intuition, vanishes before the one need that has suddenly made itself felt, the need of a practical morale for the governance of a Life that can no longer govern itself.

>Spengler: Morale as a life-feeling

>I’ve started to read Oswald Spengler again, one of the most interesting minds I’ve ever encountered, and right now I’m working on an article about Man and Technics (1931). In the meantime I’ll publish some quotes from the abridged edition of The Decline of The West (1918/1923).

For a better understanding of these quotes (that is if you’re not familiar with Spengler, his definitions of Culture and Civilization, the Faustian soul and so forth) I recommend you read the previous posts first:
Oswald Spengler – The Decline of Cultures
Här finns inget varaktigt och allmängiltigt (Swedish)
Is world peace possible?

The Decline of The West, Chapter IX
Soul-Image and Life-Feeling: Buddhism, Stoicism, Socialism

Western mankind, without exception, is under the influence of an immense optical illusion. Everyone demands something of the rest. We say ”thou shalt” in the conviction that so-and-so in fact will, can and must be changed or fashioned or arranged conformably to the order, and our belief both in the efficacy of, and in our title to give, such orders are unshakable. That, and nothing short of it, is, for us, morale. In the ethics of the West everything is direction, claim to power, will to affect the distant. […] You ”shall”, the State ”shall”, society ”shall” – this form of morale is to us self-evident; it represents the only real meaning that we can attach to the word. But it was not so in the Classical, or in India, or in China. Buddha, for instance, gives a pattern to take or to leave, and Epicurus offers counsel. Both undeniably are forms of high morale, and neither contains the will-element.
What we have entirely failed to observe is the peculiarity of moral dynamic. If we allow that Socialism (in the ethical, not the economic, sense) is that world-feeling which seeks to carry out its own views on behalf of all, then we are all without exception, willingly or no, wittlingly or no, Socialists. […]
It is quite wrong to associate Christianity with the morale imperative. It was not Christianity that transformed Faustian man, but Faustian man who transformed Christianity – and he not only made it a new religion but also gave it a new moral direction. The ”it” became the ”I”, the passion-charged centre of the world, the foundation of the great Sacrament of personal contrition. Will-to-power even in ethics, the passionate striving to set up a proper morale as a universal truth, and to enforce it upon humanity, to reinterpret or overcome or destroy everything otherwise constituted – nothing is more characteristically our own than this is. […]
There are as many morales as there are Cultures, no more and no fewer. Just as every painter and every musician has something in him which, by force of inward necessity, never emerges into consciousness but dominates a priori the form-language of his work and differentiates that work from the work of every other Culture, so every conception of Life held by a Culture-man possesses a priori (in the very strictest Kantian sense of the phrase) a constitution that is deeper than all momentary judgements and strivings and impresses the style of these with the hallmark of the particular Culture. […]
Each Culture possesses its own standards, the validity of which begins and ends with it. There is no general morale of humanity. A morale, like a sculpture, a music, a painting-art, is a self-contained form-world expressing a life-feeling; it is a datum, fundamentally unalterable, an inward necessity.

…to be continued.

by Mattias Indy Pettersson