[Music] Various Artists – Decay, Death and Darkness – Aural Visions Of Beksiński’s Art

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Zdzisław Beksiński was a Polish multimedia artist whose utopian realist works stood in stark contrast to his rather jovial personal demeanor.  He may have been an artists whose work could scare the hell out of you, but he was also quite a decent man who had a fondness for classical music, as well as some rock (his son, Tomasz, was a noted DJ who committed suicide in 1999).

Once again, the brilliant folks at Eighth Tower Records, a subgroup of Unexplained Sounds, have released a compilation whose subject inspired some of the most brutally dark ambient music artists active to come up with some bleak aural monstrosities.

[Music] black (w)hole – altered states

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black (w)hole are an Austrian drone-psych band who are covering similar ground to Masaki Batoh’s legendary group Ghost.  Don’t think that this is their only influence, however.  One can hear shards of Blue Cheer, The Melvins, and other Japanese psych bands like High Rise and White Heaven. This is well-recorded, powerful, and drone-laden enough to let your mind melt for a few moments. Recommended.

[Music] Various Artists – ELECTROFRAMEWORK

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Unexplained Sounds empresario Raffaele Pezzella is on a quest to make sure the best in experimental and electroacoustic music gets published.  It seems like, week after week, he is releasing a compilation of stunning quality from a specified region, a broad retrospective, or his own delightfully noisy work as Sonologyst.

These tracks might melt your headphones a bit, but the sounds are, in their own way, blissful.  Familiar names such as Sonologyst, Stefan Schmidt, Fahmi Mursyid and Thomas Grenzebach appear alongside a slew of new artists whose career trajectory will be interesting to follow.

Another masterpiece of a comp.

[Music] Iamthemorning releases “5/4” from upcoming studio film ‘Ocean Sounds’

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I’m becoming a big fan of the Proglodytes blog, and their articles just get better and better. In this post, they give us wonderful news that Russian Progressive Rock band iamthemorning have a new release coming!

Thomas Hatton's avatarProglodytes

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Russian chamber prog group Iamthemorning, in anticipation for their newest studio album, have released a track titled “5/4”. Iamthemorning’s last album was one of our Proglodytes’ Picks for 2016, so we very much look forward to the new record! From the press release:

“Ahead of the release of Ocean Sounds, on Kscope on 19th October, the band have released a video to accompany the song “5/4”, which previously featured on the band’s first release for Kscope, Belighted.

“We usually say that 5/4 is one of the two cheerful songs we have in our discography, the second one being about burning houses down! To me, it feels that when you grow up and live in Russia, specifically in St Petersburg, everything you do is soaked up in this very special type of melancholy, which makes it difficult to write happy music.” Vocalist and songwriter Marjana Semkina muses…

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[Literature] The Fight of Their Lives: How Juan Marichal and John Roseboro Turned Baseball’s Ugliest Brawl into a Story of Forgiveness and Redemption

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As the 2018 Major League Baseball season, this new book by John Rosengren talks about one of the ugliest incidents (and a legendary moment in their rivalry) between the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Francisco Giants, and the redemption which occurred between the main protagonists of this powerful story.  John Batchelor interviews Rosengren in a three part interview below:

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//embeds.audioboom.com/posts/7027482-marichal-steps-into-the-box-knowing-that-baseball-s-code-calls-for-koufax-to-throw-at-him/embed/v4?eid=AQAAAGzqsVsaO2sA

Happy birthday to The Hobbit

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A wonderful book every child should read. Happy birthday to “The Hobbit.”

Matthew Wright's avatarMatthew Wright

I discovered the other day that it’s 81 years this month since The Hobbit was published. I’d missed the anniversary.

Check out the battering. Is my copy of ‘The Hobbit’ much-loved, or what?

The Hobbit is just about my favourite book of all time. The other, naturally, is its sequel. I first read it around 1973, inspired by the Pauline Baynes map of Middle Earth – a wondrous place, it seemed, which set my imagination roaming. The Hobbit didn’t disappoint. I still have the copy I was given that year by my aunt – the Allen & Unwin edition with Tolkien’s own sketch of the death of Smaug on the cover. It’s, shall we say, very well worn.

The book has never lost its charm; Tolkien wrote it as a story for his children, but it speaks to adults and children alike. Looking back on it now, I can see…

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