A Thick Mist

My dog Winona died yesterday. This episode has nothing to do with that aside from the fact that I needed to do something to keep my mind off things. 00:00:00 Christopher Marlowe, with Frank...

This episode is about women being powerful, women being assaulted, women being outspoken, and women being silenced.

All of these songs came out this year. Most of this is non-traditional black metal. The rest is other non-traditional metal that can barely even contain that wide genre. 00:00:00 RLYR – Head Womb...

I tried to keep a broad enough definition of "holy" to include a variety of music beyond just the obvious gospel and hymns. This is A Thick Mist so I made sure to inject some black metal, hip hop, and drone.

I think Hindustani tends to be the more popular style of classical Indian music in the west (see: Ravi Shankar, Ali Akbar Khan, Chatur Lal, Dagar Brothers, etc) so I figured I'd shed some light on the Carnatic side.

I thought it would be fun to highlight the wide variety rolling down the mountains: everything from the banjo instrumentals of Hobart Smith to the lone black lung vocals of Nimrod Workman. I've always been a sucker for banjos, a cappella, and grim vibes, so naturally Appalachian music is 100% my jam.

This episode is super explicit and not safe for work (unless you're a sex worker I guess). 99% of the spoken word is people talking about sex stuff like blowjob instructions.

I thought I'd try something new. A new process that might fit into my life and a new approach to curation that might appeal to more people.

New Fluisteraars, Yemeni folk, new Sarah Davachi, Godzilla sound effects, ionosphere recordings, Margaret Walker poetry, Cambodian ballads...

Got some good shit on this one. I start out with two of my favorite records this year, mix in some Bahamian folk, Bengali spirituals, Japanese weirdness, Greek hymns, Easter Island chants, and of course some killer black metal.

Got inspired to do an entire episode of soundtracks. Mostly horror and sci-fi stuff, there's a pretty good mix of new and old. The bit with Upstream Color & Annihilation is fuckin crazy.

I love nu metal. There was a short period of my life where I was a little ashamed by it, but that's long gone. There is some really good stuff in the genre that I think most people ignored because of garbage like Limp Bizkit's "Rollin." There's more to nu metal than that and if you can't share my love of the genre as a whole, maybe you can at least find a song or two for the next time you feel the need to mosh.

This is the first episode in a long time with no black metal. The only metal is some massive doom. But there's also some wind harp drone, weirdo Japanese disco, the Inanga queen, the new solo acoustic master Yasmin Williams, and some snapshots of the civil rights movement.

Watch out. That third set with Johanna Hedva, The Besnard Lakes, and Divide And Dissolve is fuckin monstrous.

Keep an eye on Gates Of Doom, that record is year end list material. I end the episode with an interview with someone who was incarcerated for a long time and just in case I didn't say it enough during the show, fuck the prison system and everything about it. Forgive everyone.

I didn't intend to make a comeback on inauguration day but here we are. First normal episode in 5 months. And because this isn't being broadcast on a radio station, I could play all 47 minutes of the Ali Akbar Khan piece without any problems. There's also some Harry Potter black metal, Fidel Castro alongside Phurpa, a Midwife & Amulets collaboration, and plenty more.

Field recordings of an autopsy, a rotting corpse, and an electric chair execution, as well as cult leader monologs, trance babblings, lots of deep dark ambient, and a truly memorable ending.

Not much metal in this one. I highly recommend checking out Cinder Well's album in full. Ends with 30+ minutes of absolute mayhem while Paul Giamatti reads A Scanner Darkly.

This is a pretty heavy & dark episode with tons of collaging (there's 4 songs going at once for part of "Blood Rite") but ends on a light note with some simultaneous Jobin/Atkinson action and a couple 80s New Age dreams.

Got some excellent new metal, some excellent new weird shit, new Shirley Collins (!!!), Korean religious rituals, a poem about Harriet Tubman, strange 70s spoken word stuff, an excerpt from Annie Jacobsen's book Surprise, Kill, Vanish (which sounds especially good paired with both Christopher Elmore & Sunrot), and plenty more.