I hesitate to comment on music, given my previous post, a gushing note on the Mars Volta album that I was astonished by for two hours, and haven’t listened to since.

Meshuggah’s new album “Obzen” is what I was trying to say before.  Bleed is astonishing.  The other day, when some people were gathered at my house, one of them decided to load up Disturbed in Itunes.  Drunk as I was, I cast doubt as to their assumed sexual preferences.   When I was informed that they were pretty heavy, I loaded up Bleed, and pretty much cleaned the room out.  It was too “angry”.  I think it’s the best metal album since Mastodon’s “Blood Mountain”.

Jon Chang’s “twitch metal” is among the best music I’ve ever heard, and I’ve been following him since I discovered Discordance Axis a couple of years ago.  It sounds to me like the heart of the world beating - the result of a Hellenic imagination in a world of glass and concrete slabs, perhaps?  The petite sensations of the electric pulse Wikipedia head shot remote control society?  I know I’m being wanky but I think there’s some poetic legitimacy here.  He wears his influences on his sleeve:  his vision is of a Philip K. Dick uneasy dystopia crouched inside a utopia, ghosts in the machine screaming out short bursts of static, blocks of text like a code revealing brief snatches of hazy mirage hints at something that maybe was once real, official live footage brutalised and destroyed by it’s own medium, “Pikadourei” like watching the perception of every possible viewer at once…  When I play it, the response is always a grimace, and a shrug.  I get a lot out of Chang’s twin projects, “Hayaino Daisuki” and “Gridlink“.  Both have albums out shortly!

Also been listening to an exceptionally eccentric metal album by Frederick Thordendahl’s Special Defects:  “Sol Niger Within:  Version 333″.  I like it because it’s not Tool’s easygoing Eastern Mysticism - it’s more like a drug trip with no reference to anything but itself.