#no audience music

[kekwcomics]

I have a new album out called DAGON ALLEY.

It's available here: https://kekw.bandcamp.com/album/dagon-alley

It's spooky and brooding, a soundtrack to a lost suburban Horror film, and will probably appeal to people who enjoyed my prose Horror books or my work on Judge Death and the Dark Judges in FALL OF DEADWORLD.

DAGON ALLEY is part of what I call my LOVECRAFT'S YEOVIL cycle of work (there's an art / photography book of the same name currently in production).

It's partially inspired by hidden parts / wrong-angle views of my home town - how it can suddenly reveal itself to me in new, unexpected forms - and my lifetime love of low-budget Horror films and crank literature.

A warped and malignant picture postcard of Yeovil, twinned with Innsmouth. The ink has run, has slid off the surface of Reality like a wet, finger-smudged Polaroid, leaving the image unrecognisable and speckled with mould. Paranoia and a sense of creeping, small town unease. Doors appear in walls, the roads no longer match the map. A 70s painting by Ian Miller.

File under: New Suburban Weird, Horrorscape, Post-Rural Uncanny, Gorestep, Dero Electronics, Spook.

[nikoisme]

I'm a proud soldier. It will be a big day on 4th of july

[inkskinned]

this is just my opinion but i think any good media needs obsession behind it. it needs passion, the kind of passion that's no longer "gentle scented candle" and is now "oh shit the house caught on fire". it needs a creator that's biting the floorboards and gnawing the story off their skin. creators are supposed to be wild animals. they are supposed to want to tell a story with the ferocity of eating a good stone fruit while standing over the sink. the same protective, strange instinct as being 7 and making mud potions in pink teacups: you gotta get weird with it.

good media needs unhinged, googling-at-midnight kind of energy. it needs "what kind of seams are invented on this planet" energy and "im just gonna trust the audience to roll with me about this" energy. it needs one person (at least) screaming into the void with so much drive and energy that it forces the story to be real.

sometimes people are baffled when fanfic has some stunning jaw-dropping tattoo-it-on-you lines. and i'm like - well, i don't go here, but that makes sense to me. of fucking course people who have this amount of passion are going to create something good. they moved from a place of genuine love and enjoyment.

so yeah, duh! saturday cartoons have banger lines. random street art is sometimes the most precious heart-wrenching shit you've ever seen. someone singing on tiktok ends up creating your next favorite song. youtubers are giving us 5 hours of carefully researched content. all of this is the impossible equation to latestage capitalism. like, you can't force something to be good. AI cannot make it good. no amount of focus-group testing or market research. what makes a story worth listening to is that someone cares so much about telling it - through dance, art, music, whatever it takes - that they are just a little unhinged about it.

one time my friend told me he stayed up all night researching how many ways there are to peel an orange. he wrote me a poem that made me cry on public transportation. the love came through it like pith, you know? the words all came apart in my hands. it tasted like breakfast.

[fact-dogsarehappiness]

[fishwithoneeye]

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Started a new book series, and has been a journey...an Odyssey, if you will.

[dootznbootz]

Penelope is also Athena's pet/blorbo/special little mortal/etc. and if you think otherwise you're straight up wrong.

You're also wrong if you think Athena only likes Penelope because of Odysseus and/or Telemachus. As if Athena didn't see a young Penelope pull some shit and immediately think "Oh! Another mind to mold! C'mere you! Let's do some riddles and weaving!". Athena was happy that two of her favorite pets have met and fell in love!

[scribefindegil]

As much as I adore conlangs, I really like how the Imperial Radch books handle language. The book is entirely in English but you're constantly aware that you're reading a "translation," both of the Radchaai language Breq speaks as default, and also the various other languages she encounters. We don't hear the words but we hear her fretting about terms of address (the beloathed gendering on Nilt) and concepts that do or don't translate (Awn switching out of Radchaai when she needs a language where "citizen," "civilized," and "Radchaai person" aren't all the same word) and noting people's registers and accents. The snatches of lyrics we hear don't scan or rhyme--even, and this is what sells it to me, the real-world songs with English lyrics, which get the same "literal translation" style as everything else--because we aren't hearing the actual words, we're hearing Breq's understanding of what they mean. I think it's a cool way to acknowledge linguistic complexity and some of the difficulties of multilingual/multicultural communication, which of course becomes a larger theme when we get to the plot with the Presgar Translators.

[bubacorn]

(x)

[agenttommykinard]

sometimes you just need to be honest with yourself and admit that your blorbo probably would have different music taste than yourself

[lululeighsworld]

it was literally their moment and they just let us watch

(if you need me i'll be marinating in this for the foreseeable future)

[kekwcomics]

The second of my BROKEN SKIES albums - THE NOETIC UNIVERSE - an album of spooky, off-kilter New Age meets Weird.Lit ambient strangeness meets Psych-Minimalism, originally released in Finland in 2019, is now up on Bandcamp as a digital release. Long sold out at source, but I also have the last few remaining CD copies for sale with beautiful psychedelic packaging and a small art book by Jani Hirvoven included.

[missholloween]

I'm still not over the fact that when Paul re-enters in NPMD after If I Loved You, Inevitable stars playing. The leitmotif of Paul Matthews The Guy who didn't like musicals, it's his final solo, the song of his defeat. His leitmotif is a love song that ended up with his soulmate's life. His leitmotif is of the song where he's happier in the musical, but he's also dead.

[blooms-in-april]

In Oxenfurt there is a sacred tradition, which no one dares encroach upon: no one can be arrested during a theatre performance. And the scholars of Oxenfurt, for all their learning, are a dramatic, suspicious sort, and so the law stands. It's been taken advantage of by many a drunk and disorderly student, taking refuge in the audience of the Grand Theatre to evade the guard, until inevitably, the curtain falls and their reprieve is over.

When they come to arrest Professor Pankrantz, his students won't have it. He had come back to them quiet and broken this winter, more careless with his dissent, more bold in his defiance. He did not seem to care when the warrant was put out for his arrest, as an elvish sympathizer, a sodomite, and a conspirator against Nilfgaard.

"He knows the White Wolf will save him. He always does." Essi had said with false confidence, but the weeks pass and the university's protection wanes and the White Wolf does not come.

"He's not coming." Adrien whispers, hunched over his songbook. "We must do something."

"We will," Essi responds.

When he hears the guards outside his office, Jaskier puts down his quill for the last time. He swings open the door.

"Gentlemen!" He says. The armored faces are featureless, unmoving. "How would you like me?" They grab and cuff him hard across the head, then frogmarch him down the hall. His head rings like a great bell tolling the hour. He can feel the blood trickling out his ear.

There is a great crash, and a scuffle, and a large hand grabs him by the elbow. "Geralt." He whispers.

But it's not. Jeremiah smiles awkwardly, and holds his dented tuba in one hand. "I used to be a blacksmith before this." The quiet youth says. "Never thought it would come in handy again."

"My dear boy." Jaskier says as he's pulled along. "You shouldn't have. You saved my life."

"Your tutoring saved mine during finals. I think we're even, Professor."

Jaskier is hurried in through the backstage door, crowded with students carrying instruments, costumes, sheet music, and props. They all part way to let him through. "Top box, Professor." Essi says, hurrying him. "We saved it just for you."

He sits down, bewildered, as the guards shout outside and the orchestra tunes frantically. The curtain opens just as the guards make it into the auditorium. Everything hushes in that special breath before a show.

Essi steps on stage.

"Thank you and welcome to the members of the Oxenfurt Academy faculty, staff, and student body who have come to support this performance," she says. "We'd also like to welcome representatives of various law enforcement communities who have chosen to join us in the Academy Grand Theatre tonight. In the spirit of the arts, leave all discord at the door, and please enjoy this special performance by the students of Oxenfurt - 'The Adversities of Loving', a tribute to the life and works of Professor Julian Alfred Pankrantz."

She bows. The audience applauds. The play begins.

[primal-con]

Wanted to draw robots again so I’m going back to my roots

[horsechestnut]

I absolutely love how casual the Seaweed Brain name drop was! It would have been so easy to make it a big moment, or to have Leah put emphasis on it, but no. Because to us it's huge, but to the characters it doesn't mean anything yet. It was perfect.