All posts by autistatic

Wild Moth ‘Patience’

Wild Moth’s cranked out 2 of the better EPs this year — this is trodding on some of my fave ground, exhuming & dusting off some old 80s SST/Homestead-ish riffs that have been ignored by cretins by a few decades… there’s a Joy Division thing going on & some Daydream Nation-ish sounding breakdowns… the bassline is totally awesome… This is the video to ‘Patience’, the b-side to their ‘Morning Glory’ 7″ (2nd release)… if this don’t make you wanna thrash, check your pulse or you might’ve just been born too late…

Wild Moth linkys:
WM blog Bandcamp record label

comics coming out 10/24/12 that probably don’t completely suck

10/12/12… should be a banner week in my comics shopping: not only is there a new installment of Brandon Graham‘s uber-grey-sci-fi-opus-Image-rehash Prophet (ish 30), the 1st installment of his own series Multiple Warheads is coming out! woot!

CBR has a 6 page preview of Prophet #30 here and a 5 page preview of Multiple Warheads #1 here… MW #1 = comic book event of 2012 as far as I’m concerned…

and if I could, I would be here on Weds for the BG signing at Beach Ball Comics (Anaheim)…

finished reading: Jo Marchant’s Decoding the Heavens

Got something of a serious jones about mechanical computers, which is unfortunately something there are not too many books about. Decoding the Heavens by Jo Marchant covers the history of the earliest known mechanical computer, the Antikythera Mechanism.

The Antikythera Mechanism was discovered in 1901 in a shipwreck, dated back to 1st century BC, and was basically a mystery until the 50s when a scientist named Derek de Solla Price started publishing articles about it. In the 80s, Bromley & Wright smelled some problems with Price’s conclusions, and arranged to have the AM re-X-rayed, and then in the 00s X-ray technology had advanced far enough to create 3D models of the inside of the rusted shut lump of old gears, and finally allowing a thorough reconstruction of how all the clockwork gears intersected and what they did.
Basically, it is an analog computer that calculates the positions of the Sun, the Moon, the zodiac, and the planets at any time in the past or future. And it’s fairly important since nothing else like survived from such a distant point in antiquity – before its discovery, it was believed that clockwork gears were invented in the 13th century in Europe. We don’t have a lot of historical artifacts like this – the gears were made of bronze, and most things made of valuable metal like this ended up melted down and repurposed. The AM only survived (such as it did) thanks to being in a shipwreck.
DtH is valuable because its one of the only popularizations of the history of analog computers that I know of. Unfortunately, it is not really a page turner… Marchant covers some important ground, but the prose does not burn off the page – and it takes about 150 or half the book to get to Wright, which is the first point there is really a protagonist that the reader can really identify with… so the book is a bit of a struggle to get through. The final chapter is an attempt at reconstructing the history of the clockwork gear/planetarium technology from ancient Greece into Byzantine & Islamic scientific culture and finally into medieval Europe — so hopefully someday in the future, more archeological discoveries will allow that history to be filled in.

Some links:
Decoding the Heavens home page
Antikythera Mechanism entry at Wikipedia
Antikythera Mechanism Reserach Project
another page on AM
and a Lego reconstruction of Antikythera Mechanism:

heavy rotation: Garmonbozia

another gem from last year’s deep dive into punk sounds.. Minneapolis’ Garmonbozia, a crust punk band with a cellist front and center. Unfortunately I know next to nothing about them, and can’t recall how I ended up finding out about them :( and most of the information I can find online is just copy & paste from the same 1 or 2 press releases…

And I don’t really know anything else that sounds like this… maybe like GYBE with Tom Cora doing Rudimentary Peni covers? I’m tempted to describe their music as ‘atmospheric’ — but that may be misleading: those atmospheric conditions would be storm clouds gathering… Garmonbozia end up being a lot more gloomily melodic than what I would usually associate w/ ‘crust’, largely because the cello parts are front & center, not just filigree…

As best as I’ve been able to determine, their discography is entirely composed of the 2004 self-titled 7-song mini-LP on Profane Existance, an Amebix cover on thew 2008 Profane Existence comp Global Rebellion, and one side of a posthumous split LP with Silence Means Death from 2011 entitled A Cessation of Thunder.

Listening to their s/t album gives me chills…

Handy links:
Myspace Discogs Last.fm
{in addition to the lack of info on Garmonbozia, there is at least one other band using that name, and most searches on the name would turn up Twin Peaks references…}

heavy rotation: Hedgehog’s ‘Sun Fun Gun’

Hedgehog, 3 piece noise poppers from Beijing, China. On their Facebook page, the list their influences as “Can/Joy Division/Nirvana/Jesus And Mary Chain/Spacemen 3” & their genre as “indie classic rock shoegaze,” while on their Bandcamp page they said: “in this new album, we want to create a new sound feeling of Hedgehog, we called it Sonic-Rock. it combine Punk/Pychedilic/Noise with Hedgehog’s unique C86 sound&power.”

link to Hedgehog’s Sun Fun Gun on Bandcamp

They basically sound like a bunch of my favorite bands passed through a completely different culture’s filters… Hit that link and drop the needle on “Heart on Fire”. Some awesome melodic bass lines, trem’ed out fuzz gtr, and whispery Chinese/English hybrid lyrics… It is pretty satisfactory, as far as I’m concerned.

Handy Hedgehog links:
Discogs Last.fm Bandcamp Myspace Facebook Twitter website

Unfortunately, only about half their songs are actually streamable from their Bandcamp site, and their albums don’t actually seem to have US distribution that I’ve been able to find so far :(