Small Talk

Here's my new song. Made it this afternoon in five hours because I was bored.

Jason Herrboldt - Small Talk.mp3

Made entirely with my voice, manipulated only by pitch, delay, and reverb. Made on Snow Leopard using TwistedWave.

A Strange Relationship

Forget mother, father, and boyfriend. My love affair with Satan is far and away some the rockiest relationship terrain I've ever had to negotiate. We've been going steady for a few years now, and I still don't know what he wants of me, nor I of him.

Sometime in the last few years I felt the dark calling. It manifested itself in my choices of music. I stumbled into some bad music over the last few years that made me feel so good (Hi, Coil!), that I just didn't know what to do with myself. I still don't.

Sunn O)) - Vlad Tepes.mp3

One of my favorite things to do is load up my iPod with six hours of brutally dark sounds and walk until my feet give out beneath me. These walks become meditations, and a variation of grinning, half-dead faces appear in my mind's eye. Low voices rumble, fires burn, walls bleed. The walking turns into floating, and I wind up wallowing in an undiluted dark joy that I've never known before. There's no anger, no fear. No emo bullshit. There's nothing but a blissful emptiness. I've hardly ever been happier, in fact.

So am I a devil worshipper now, or what? Hardly. I'm a die-hard skeptic and a devoted student of science and materialism. I laugh at propriety and spit in the face of dogma. I will never belong to a church (even a satanic one). Furthermore, the last thing I want to do is perform evil acts. In fact, I delight in bringing joy to others. The only time I have negative feelings toward someone is when I or someone I care for is being fucked with, a form of social justice with which we are all familiar.

In the meantime, Satan is calling. I mean, come on. I make celebration-of-horror Halloween mixtapes every fall, and I unequivocally rejected Jesus as my savior in 2005. So I figured it was only a matter of time before one of Lucifer's minions was dispatched to claim my scalp. I would go willingly, but I've been programmed my entire life to equate the Prince of Darkness with all things vile, evil, mean, and spiteful. That's not me.

I delight in darkness and fear, but only because it delights me! I rejoice in sexual perversion and blasphemy, but only because it tickles my fancy! I savor the images of peering into an endlessly dark, spider-infested cave in the middle of nowhere, or stumbling alone through the foul basement of an abandoned insane asylum at midnight.

These ideas and aesthetics are fun to me. Fun! Why would I want to then turn around and joyfully partake in someone's undeserved suffering? I wouldn't! So I stop just a few feet short of running into Satan's arms, eyebrows knotted. What does he really want me to do in exchange for his love? Nothing bad, I hope.

I turned to Anton LaVey's Satanic Bible for answers and found none. Oh sure, there are a few gems of philosophical interest, but they're buried under a thick layer of corny theatrical pomp that fails to distract the reader from the sense that he's taking in a regurgitated mix of ideas better expressed by Ayn Rand and Friedrich Nietzsche.

But those few gems do shine. What I did gleam from LaVey's take on Satanism is the fact that violence and hatred in the name of Satan need not be random and pointlessly cruel; in fact, sometimes they can be quite justified. It feels good to laugh at a social conservative who gets caught with his pants down. It's satisfying to tell a manipulative and passive aggressive acquaintance to stop playing mind games or fuck off. And I liked the whole, "Be your own god," "Fuck the afterlife" and "do what you want now" parts.

But the rocky terrain continues. Perhaps this is just my way of reassessing my idea of ethics and morality in the face of what most people consider to be the essence of pure evil. For how can I find so much joy in something that is supposed to be so mean? I don't want to be mean. I want to be a good person, but sometimes I just want to tickle Satan on the nose and take a ride on his cold black cock.

Can't I do both?

Class of '93: Robot Dub Killer

It's come the far reaches outer space to destroy humanity... after destroying a blunt.

Here comes the perfect combination of evil robots and smokin' dub music for the fourth installment of my Class of '93 mixtape series. Pulling audio from sci-fi thrillers and pitched-down techno from back in the day, Robot Dub Killer drops beats so heavy your squinty bloodshot eyes will roll right out of your head.

Class of '93 - Robot Dub Killer.mp3

Track list:

1. Hardcore Math User - Forbidden Intro
2. Meat Beat Manifesto - Original Control (Electro The Robot)
3. GTO - Hasty Hare & The UFOs
4. FUSE - Into the Space (Hardcore Math User Remix)
5. Hardcore Math User - Robot Monster Interlude
6. Meat Beat Manifesto - DJ Interruptus
7. GTO - Dub Fire
8. The Orb - Earth (Gaia) (The Black Hole Remix)
9. GTO - Dub Killer
10. Aphex Twin - 0181871
11. Hardcore Math User - Perfect Female Interlude
12. Griselda - Oxygen
13. Orbital - Lush 3.2 (Hardcore Math User Remix)
14. Kraftwerk - The Man Machine
15. Polygon Window - UT1-Dot
16. Aphex Twin - Dodeccaheedron
17. Autechre - Bronchus 2
18. Bernard Fevre - Earth Message

Fool humans. There is no escape.

SCHOOL'S OUT

Alice Cooper - School's Out.mp3

'Nuff said.

Sign o' The Times

Back in the day a friend of mine and I ripped the audio from Prince's Sign o' The Times concert movie using a VCR and a tape deck. Then I'd take it with me everywhere on my walkman. I used to play that motherfucker out.

At first I thought the live versions of the songs were better, but after listening to the CD again I decided that they're not better -- they're just different interpretations of the same fantastic songs.

Sign o The Times.zip

Folder includes:

• Sign O The Times (Live)
• Housequake (Live)
• It's Gonna Be A Beautiful Night (Live)
• If I Was Your Girlfriend (Live)

Adding a Hammond B3 organ, a live audience, and an army of amazing musicians, Prince brings these otherwise reserved songs out of the studio and into a breezy rhythm and blues explosion. A summertime must.

The Human Centipede

My friend Dennis and I threw caution to the wind and braved Tom Six's disgusting new horror adventure The Human Centipede last night. It lived up to all the hype, and we both loved it. I am posting a rare remix of Coil's The Anal Staircase in honor of Mr. Six's sickness/genius.

Coil - The Anal Staircase (Restless Mix).mp3

THC was nothing short of a revelation. There are so few horror directors out there that dare to not only push boundaries but cover them with human pus and shit and annihilate them with a nuclear bomb. Tom Six has managed to drag us, kicking and screaming, into a brilliant new unexplored territory of suffering and humiliation.

Yes, we are forced to watch a beautiful young woman eat a mouthful of shit right out of another guy's asshole to which her mouth has been surgically attached (spoiler alert!), but while this is happening the sick surgeon is lording over them shouting, "YES! FEEEED HER!" in German accent at the top of his lungs. If this is not high camp, I don't know what is.

The twist ending, which is not totally a surprise and which I shall not reveal here, finds the director shed of all camp and staring unblinkingly into a bottomless pit of human depravity and anguish. It is a moment this blogger will not soon forget, and it absolutely guarantees my forking over $10 to see anything Tom Six ever lays a finger on again.

My hat is off to you, Mr. Six. I await the next sequence with, um, baited breath.

Millennial DNB

Drum & bass caught my attention almost immediately after it's arrival on the UK scene. Actually, I was privileged enough to witness its evolution from techno, breakbeat, hardcore, and jungle over the first few years of the 90s. I've been a disciple ever since.

While there's something unique about every era of drum & bass, the millennial sounds are special. I couldn't possibly post all of the best drum & bass to come out on and around the year 2000, here are a few essential head knockers I could never live without.

Millennial DNB.zip

Folder includes:

• Danny Breaks - Mars To Jupiter
• Calyx - Trap Door
• dj TeeBee - Gravity Distortion
• Dom & Roland - Soundwall

Prince Spinoffs

Remember Apollonia 6? Sure. Morris Day & The Time? Of course. How about Dez Dickerson? Who?

Here are some of the less celebrated, but undeniably enjoyable, Purple Rain-era spinoffs.

Prince Spinoffs.zip

Folder includes

• Apollonia 6 - Sex Shooter (12")
• Dez Dickerson - (I Want 2 B A) Modernaire
• Jesse Johnson - Be Your Man
• Mazarati - 100 MPH
• Morris Day & The Time - My Drawers
• Sheila E - Shortberry Strawcake

Let's pretend it's 1984.