thisworldisablackhole

[thisworldisablackhole]

nice pulls from the used store today. Strugatsky one was pricy but worth it. both are from the late 70s and in fantastic condition.

[thisworldisablackhole]

My band Rue put out 2 tracks from our upcoming tape. Full release on June 27 via No Funeral Records. Thanks for listening.

FFO: grindcore, powerviolence, screamo etc

[thisworldisablackhole]

We, by Yevgeny Zamyatin (Mirra Ginsburg translation) - 5/5

"Oh, great, divinely bounding wisdom of walls and barriers! They are, perhaps, the greatest of man's inventions. Man ceased to be a wild animal only when he built the first wall. Man ceased to be a savage only when we had built the Green Wall, when we had isolated our perfect mechanical world from the irrational, hideous world of trees, birds, animals..."

We is a communist dystopia novel that takes place after the Great 200 Year War has utterly destroyed the world and fractured mankind, giving way for totalitarian governments to seize control of populations like a plague. Our protagonist, D-503, lives in the One State. A giant city of millions—walled off from the barbarism of nature—where everything is made of transparent glass, every hour of the day is mandated, and individuality of the citizen is the biggest threat to the status quo. The very freedom of thought is suppressed, critics of the state are lynched, and election day is a parodial ceremony in which every citizen lines up to unanimously vote for and celebrate the only candidate on the bill—the authoritarian ruler ironically referred to as the Benefactor.

Very cool setup already, but the reason I love this book so much is because of how much of a personal focus it has. This is really a story about one man's complete unraveling in the face of his own individuality. D-503 poetically documents his descent into soul sickness as the chains of his indoctrination are weakened. He is confronted with the shame of his thoughtcrimes, the fear of being othered by the State, and grief over the loss of his old self—blissfully ignorant and safe.

One of the most interesting things I found about We is how subtle the genesis for D-503's unraveling is. There is no big bang moment where everything changes, no tragic Batman origin story; instead, the shift creeps in slowly and seizes him before he even has the chance to shake it off. The novel begins as a regular day in the life journal entry of our protaganist before he meets someone who points out a minor difference in him, and the ball just starts rolling from there, growing larger as the crack in his foundation widens. As D-503 spirals further and further from himself, the book becomes more manic and philosophical. It really feels like the author is going mad as he comes to grips with the true nature of his being.

Subtle, complex, profound, terrifying, visceral—these are all words I could stick on this book, yet none of them come close to conveying how big of an achievement this novel is, especially considering the background of the author, who endured censorship and legitimate exile in the Soviet Union for his works. There are some big parallels to his own life experience bound into this novel, which increases tenfold the sense of personhood in the main character. It's truly a stunning piece of work, and one that I am already looking forward to reading again. Easily one of my favorite reads of the year, and right up there with Solaris and The Dispossessed as my favorite philosophical sci-fi novels of all time.

(side note: I have not read 1984 by George Orwell, but after reading We, I don't think I ever want to. I just don't think I'll ever be able to engage with 1984 on its own terms knowing that it lifted so much of the plot from this book. Major L for Orwell. I don't care.)

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Embassytown, by China Miéville - 4/5

I don't think I've ever been more conflicted about a book in my life. Torn between 3 or 4 stars, but I’ll leave it at 4 while I huff my copium. I could sum up this whole review with a GIF of someone crossing their arms and saying “I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed”. This is not a bad book, it just could have been so much better. It didn’t live up to its full potential because the plot doesn’t do justice to the world building, and that is why I am sentencing you to garbage duty for the rest of the week, son.

Good thing the world building is strong enough to carry most of the read. The first hundred or so pages were honestly the best part of the whole book. Our first person narrator, Avice Bennet Cho, introduces us to the sociology and politics of Embassytown (a human colony state on an alien planet) through a tapestry of past and present narratives. We get to hear Avice describe memories of her childhood growing up in Embassytown, and about her career as an Immerser (basically someone who can navigate through the pocket dimensions of space without getting sick). Through this we also get to learn about the strange ways and language of the Ariekei aliens who are native to the planet, and about their symbiotic relationship with the humans in which they trade medicine and other goods for Ariekene bioengineering (yes, there are weapons, buildings and machinery made out of sentient flesh, it’s awesome). We also get to learn about Avice herself, who honestly begins as a fairly compelling protaganist. Miéville subverts a lot of tropes in building her character without ever being showy about how “different” she is. In fact, most of the characters read as very normal, regular people, and I appreciate that level of detail to human behaviour. He even did a great job at writing one of the AI characters, Avice’s best friend Erhsul, who can imitate human empathy well enough to form real relationships while remaining frustratingly calculative and mechanical.

Arieka is genuinely the most interesting and well thought out alien world I’ve ever read about, and the book has such a clever narrative hook centred around the evolution of language being both devastatingly dangerous but also liberating and ultimately progressive. So why am I so conflicted?

Well, the main plot hinge is sudden and underwhelming (I think it’s meant to be a “small rock, big ripple” type of event but it’s not done very convincingly), and then the entire story from there on switches gears in a way that feels so counterintuitive to the setup. Things in the world begin rapidly changing, and the dual timelines coalesce into one present narrative. The scope of the story rapidly expands from interpersonal to factionary, and our once interesting, well developed protagonist gets flattened down to the personality of a news reporter—speeding through a list of current event headlines just to clock out of her shift a few minutes early. Almost 240 pages of “this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened” ad nauseam. It’s like sitting on a train and watching images flicker past. Sure, the landscape is visceral, and the quick pace keeps things engaging enough, but I couldn’t help but feel like the slow set up—the walk to the train, if you will—was where Miéville really shines. If the story would have just maintained a closer focus, and found some subtler avenue for expressing change, this could have easily been a masterpiece.

Fortunately, Miéville’s prose mostly makes up for his clumsy handling of narrative. He might be one of my new favourite writers on a purely sentence to sentence basis. He has a fairly lofty vocabulary, and also throws a ton of future slang at you without holding your hand too much, leaving you to search for context clues (this is actually a good thing that I enjoy), but he is also just a master at manipulating sentence structures to maintain clarity while still coming across as playful. There were so many sentences that I had to read twice or thrice not because I didn’t understand them, but because I was just fascinated by the clever wording. The prose itself was the second best thing after the world building, so even when the plot took a nose dive, I was still turning pages like nobody’s business.

Ultimately, Miéville hit a home run with the set up and then tripped and slid somewhere between second and third base, making for a highly entertaining but clumsy play. The fact that this book never lived up to it’s potential will be a thorn in my side for the rest of time, but I am still absolutely sold on Miéville as a writer, and can’t wait to read more of his works.

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The Chrysalids, by John Wyndham - 3.5/5

Quick-fire review because I've read two other books since finishing this one and my memory is getting hazy. I had multiple people tell me they read this in high school for English class, but apparently my curriculum missed the memo. Really glad to have read it now, though (I mean, it's not like I could say no to this pretty NYRB cover).

I absolutely loved the first half or so of this book. The setup was fabulous. Wyndham paints a terrifyingly believable post-apocalyptic world where isolated communities are ruled by a puritanical zealotry, and anyone whose genes have mutated through generations of radiation exposure are pushed out to the fringes of the country where they live as clans of lawless outcasts. Mutated crops are also burned, and animals are slaughtered. Anything that doesn't align with the "True Image" of man must be purged for the benefit of the species. But is it really for everyone's benefit, or are they holding themselves back by denying the growth of diversity? I really love how this story explores the idea of how our differences and irregularities may actually be our biggest strength and that true empathy and human connection knows no rules or boundaries. Having grown up in the Christian church and witnessed firsthand how cruel and hypocritical these people often act under the guise of godliness, this story really struck a chord with me.

The narrative itself is simple (a kind of coming-of-age turns escape novel) but packs a ton of contextual weight and realistic world-building that I often found much more interesting than the plot or characters. Unfortunately, as the story advanced into the second half, it ended up reading more like a kids action-adventure novel, and all of a sudden it became clear to me why this is read by high school students. Fun story. Very clear cut themes. No shade. But the ending became very predictable very fast and then sort of just fell flat into a bowl of soggy cornflakes. At least I respect it for remaining somewhat morally ambiguous in the end, but even that was made so painfully obvious in a way that felt hand-holdy. Still, for only 200 pages, this book packs a great punch, and I thoroughly enjoyed Wyndham's prose enough to make the weaker second half still enjoyable. A classic for a good reason, just a bit too on-the-nose for me.

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For Your Health This Bitter Garden

🌕🌕🌕🌑🌑

FFO: ABRASIVE MATHCORE, POST-HARDCORE, SASSCORE, EMO, ETCETERA ETCETERA / LISTEN

It's fitting that This Bitter Garden begins with a laugh track and a mime making sacrilege upon the altar. If you thought For Your Health's 2022 split with awakebutstillinbed hinted at a permanent departure from the group's disso-melodic sass into clean-sung Jimmy Eat World worship, you were (sadly, to a degree) mistaken. On their sophomore full-length, the group is continuing to flex their newfangled melodic sensibilities without abandoning their hardcore roots, and they are doing it in a fashion that is decidedly not very user-friendly (non-derogatory; picture a walmart shirt that reads "warning: does not play nice with others", or some other such comedic declaration of antisocial violence). This Bitter Garden is wrought with a macabre sense of divine horror, both lyrically ("They swear that He is just / the same one who sent the flood / Led Abraham to the mount to cut up his only son") and in the sadistic "we're gonna stab your eardrums with guitars because it's fun" type of way that seems at times obtuse. Do you like treble? Well, you're in luck. For Your Health will repeatedly try to alienate you with glass rods and a brash conglomerate of musical leanings; sometimes their attempt to mix pop-punk singalongs with abrasive panic chords and swingy sasscore rhythms sounds more like standing between two festival stages than hearing a singular whole (second track "Flowers For The Worst Of Them" is particularly guilty of sounding confused), but like a bloody crime scene, it's kind of hard to look away.

The bigger picture of This Bitter Garden may be jeeringly disorganized, but there is plenty to enjoy on a song-by-song basis. "Gaia Wept" is a personal favourite for how the band approaches evil d-beat and grind in a way that feels like a truly fresh take on punk conventions. The band also delivers with their less haphazard approach to post-hardcore with tracks like "With Empty Promises & Loaded Guns", "Clementine" and "In The Valley Of Weeping" (the latter of which is threaded with a synth arpeggio that is endearingly reminiscent of the Owl City/I Set My Friends On Fire era). Album centerpiece "Heaven Here" is a beautiful spoken word piano interlude, and the first third of "Hostel Elysia" is the closest the band comes to sounding truly mellow before exploding into power chords and atmospheric tremolo leads that eventually fade out into a cloud of more piano and synthesizer. The rest of the album, however, is almost entirely made of psychotic panic chord salad that you may struggle to find the hooks in without getting punctured, but they are there if you look close enough. "The Rotting Pear" in particular does a good job at splitting the difference by sneaking a clever melodic hook into a whole bunch of peripheral noise.

The chaos of This Bitter Garden may rely too heavily on the diminishing shock value of panic chords and the showmanship of smashing together disparate styles for its own good, and the production certainly accentuates the jarring nature of For Your Health's songwriting, but there are some fairly inventive ideas here, as well as a plethora of mathematical musicianship to enjoy so long as you can bear the punishment. For Your Health has undoubtedly angered the Gods and ushered in our inevitable divine retribution with the needless violence of this release. Eat it with a smile on your face.

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Julia Wolf PRESSURE

🌕🌕🌕🌗🌑

FFO: HYPERPOP, ALT-METAL, POP-PUNK, EMO / LISTEN

Discovering music through algorithm-based social media apps is always a gamble. For every genuinely good-natured artist using the platform to promote their music, there are a thousand ragebait musicians looking for easy engagement or corporate normies coasting off of the success of focus group singles. Julia Wolf is one of those musicians who manages to stand out from the pack with her down-to-earth influences and charismatic voice, and despite her lead single "In My Room" going viral on TikTok (big ups to the Twilight fandom) and racking up over 23 million streams on Spotify alone, Wolf manages to back up the success by knocking out every other song on her sophomore record to an even keel without ever feeling the need to repeat herself.

Metal, hyperpop, hip-hop, emo, pop-punk, indie—holy shit. Wolf and producer Scro throw everything against the wall like a splatter painting and somehow wind up with a coherent package that reaches in a lot of different directions without ever sounding like it's trying too hard to be something it's not. "Pearl" might cycle between four different types of electronic and metal before landing in a huge, corny deathcore breakdown, but it feels like a genuinely satisfying conclusion to the song due to its brevity and the fact that it's a trick that only happens once. "Loser" also begins like a classic nu-metal revival track (slow fade-in and everything) before switching gears with the hip-hop production and turning into something much more fun and forward-thinking than just another Deftones riff. Across the board, Wolf and Scro never go too far down one path to get lost in the sauce of revivalism. Comparisons could be deftly drawn to modern acts ranging from Brakence to Loathe ("FYP" chorus, anyone?) to Poppy and Phoebe Bridgers. PRESSURE might also share an eerily similar DNA with the manic "playlistification" approach of Bring Me The Horizon's POST HUMAN: Nex Gen, but at only 30 minutes long, PRESSURE edges out the competition by providing a much more concentrated shotgun blast without any bloat.

Mind you, a lot of this ADHD brain-scrambling only works so well because of how outstanding and consistent Wolf's vocal performance is. Wolf perfectly balances the emotional angst of a 2000s Amy Lee with a breathy type of grace typically only flexed by indie singers. Her voice really becomes unbound in the back half of the record, where the production drifts away from the hyper-pop-metal mash-up and settles into more relaxed pop rock and indie territory. "Girls" and "Jennifer's Body" both see Wolf tackling insecurities in an almost embarrassingly real "Girl, so confusing" type of way that I find refreshingly raw, but the last three songs really thrust Wolf's voice into the spotlight for an unbeatable string of hits. "In My Room" deserves all the love it gets for how it so effortlessly captures an intoxicating obsession with a nostalgic mix of early Evanescence and Paramore, and the closing duo of "Sunshine State" and "You've Lost A Lot of Blood" deserve equal praise for their homely and sweet tenderness.

Despite the quality of Wolf's voice reaching its full potential in the back half of the record, I can't actually say that I like one half more than the other. Wolf's voice makes for such a consistently enjoyable experience across the entire plethora of genres and all of Scro's wild production techniques. The front half is just more flashy and fun, and the back half is more contemplative and serene. Put it all together, and PRESSURE is an amalgamation of everything a dopamine-deficient adult needs to get through the 9-5 without snapping. It creates such an intense blender effect that I sense a quick burn-out from repeat listens, but I'm just going to enjoy the high while it lasts.

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Steve Von Till Alone in a World of Wounds

🌕🌕🌕🌗🌑 (3.7/5)

FFO: AMERICANA, EXPERIMENTAL, AMBIENT / LISTEN

You may know him primarily for having the best beard in the now-defunct post-metal band Neurosis, but Steve Von Till has also been steadily putting out weirdo folk records since the turn of the century. If you know anything about his previous groups, you know that Von Till can manipulate mood and texture better than most. While Von Till's earlier solo work was more hauntedly bare in its approach—centered more closely around the acoustic guitar and Von Till's baritone voice—the project really started to develop its own amorphous brand of eclecticism in 2015 with the release of A Life Unto Itself. Von Till began stretching and warping his song structures to allow space for orchestral strings and pedal steel guitar to really drive the songs more than ever before. 2020's No Wilderness Deep Enough and 2021's A Deep Voiceless Wilderness then saw the project embrace an affinity for piano and new-age synths, with the latter album being a fully instrumental and ambient-focused counterpart to the prior.

Flash forward to Alone in a World of Wounds, and there is no longer anything traditional about Von Till's music as far as the conventions of Americana are concerned. Piano, synthesizer, and cello have come to dominate the space where acoustic guitars once grazed, but nothing has exactly been lost; every tool that Von Till has picked up along the way still has a seat at the table, and it's important to note how humble his approach has remained in spite of his rapidly expanding repertoire. Alone in a World of Wounds may be Von Till's most expansive record yet, but there is still a shocking lack of excess; only a few tools are ever used at once, and each layered arrangement is both meticulously and sparingly composed as to never betray the sense of isolation the album's concept suggests. Opener "Corpse Road" is about as naked as this album gets (while retaining a certain cinematic scope), but this open space is filled to the brim with Von Till's resounding voice, which has developed its charcoal brush-like delivery into a much larger and more confident presence than before. He straddles the line between tasteful and overbearing amounts of soul at times, but his gut-wrenching narratives almost always pay heavy compliment to the instrumentals so long as you can get behind his dramatic huskiness.

And speaking of gut-wrenching, it should be no surprise that Alone in a World of Wounds is a terribly sad record. Not only is Von Till tackling familiar themes of loss, disconnect, and inhumanity through his lyrics, but the arrangements are tear-jerking on multiple fronts. "Calling Down the Darkness" could easily go down as the most depressing slow burn of the year. The record is so consumed by a sluggish dismality, in fact, that it almost struggles to inspire much of an enthusiastic listening experience. It is absolutely gorgeous and full of subtle depth, but it's a tough chew, and it wears on the heart rather quick without providing much in the way of relief (which is why "Horizons Undone" ends up being one of the most memorable tracks for its relatively whimsical chorus). There are a few ways in which Von Till manages to shift tone and surprise the listener, though. "The Dawning of the Day (Insomnia)" sees Von Till reciting some spoken word poetry over a bed of piano and softly fiddling cello, and then "Old Bent Pine" and the closer "River of No Return" lean a bit into flanged electric guitars to create a wispy desert atmosphere through which Von Till's voice floats like a tumbleweed propelled by an ancient wind.

Alone in a World of Wounds may be strange, tortoise-like and completely devoid of flashy dynamics (most, if not all, of these songs start and end on a similarly grim note), but the calamity is so well executed—so honest in its baring of flesh—that one can't help but fall into the hypnotic misery and lose track of time. I certainly wouldn't recommend the album for your summer playlist, but I can see it coming back into heavy rotation during the dark months of the year. In the meantime, try to pour a bit of brightness into the world. Reconnect with nature. Tell your friends you love them. Do anything but let your wounds fester in silence.

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End of the World and Hard-Boiled Wonderland, by Haruki Murakami (Jay Rubin translation) - 4/5

My first Murakami. Was not disappointed. I would consider this to be a peak comfort novel: flowy, colorful, fun—and not challenging in the slightest (which I am discovering is not always a bad thing). The reader is very much put in the passenger seat, and Murakami delivers on providing a vivid wonderland and a fun cast of characters to engage with. The way Murakami describes the world is so vivid, it doesn't even bother me that the larger political powers at play in this reimagining of Japan are portrayed as these overblown, cartoonish, shadow puppet-type caricatures. It's very much a "the big scary bad guys" versus "the good guys" type of deal, but it just works for the story, which ends up being far more ambiguous and interesting than you might expect. The tone is kept fairly light and comedic even when the action gets intense, but this doesn't stop the philosophical nature of the book from losing its impact. Our first-person narrator—the classic "likeable but slightly problematic aloof guy turned hero" who sort of stumbles into importance on accident—thankfully has a good sense of humour and a lot of insightful observations to express.

Yes, Murakami is a freak for writing in a semi-sexual relationship between the 35 year old protagonist and a 17 year old girl who is repeatedly referred to as just "the fat girl" throughout the book. I was unaware of this going in, and it did gross me out. Don't care whether it's legal or not. Unfortunately, this type of stuff is incredibly common in so many male authors of his age; trying to avoid it is like walking through a minefield with a blindfold on. It's a problem that plagues so many of the classics. For extra context, Japan has had one of the lowest ages of consent in the world until just 2023, when they finally raised it from 13 to 16, so I can't even imagine how normalized these types of relationships were in the 80s when this was written. The protagonist does show a surprising amount of restraint in not allowing the relationship to get too physical, but what does happen is already uncomfortable enough by any reasonable standard.

That in mind, this was still such a well-written story. I was hesitant about the parallel narratives at first, because an approach like this usually ends up with one narrative being far superior to the other, but Murakami kept things so consistently enjoyable between the two, and I loved the way the connections between the two worlds slowly become closer and closer throughout the book. I was always so happy to jump back and forth to check in on what was happening with each perspective, and the climax that really brought everything together was so good. Murakami does sort of hastily dump the plot on the reader in one conversation in a way that felt overly expository, but he followed it up with what I found to be a pretty surprising finale that made me cry like no other book has in a long time. Good book.

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The Man in the High Castle, by Philip K. Dick - 2/5

Perhaps my most controversial rating? Surprisingly, most of the people who I talked to about this book felt similarly. Really not sure how this ended up as his second most popular book on Goodreads. I'm sure the TV show adaptation boosted the numbers significantly, but I imagine it was already popular enough pre-2015 for Amazon to even make a show out of it. Perhaps someone saw the potential in the book and decided to give it the coherent justice it deserves? I guess I won't know until I watch it. This was absolutely nothing like the the two previous PKD books I read (DADOES? and A Scanner Darkly), which I loved dearly for their quirkiness and deadpan absurdist humour. No, this was much different. In a mostly-bad way.

I liked the idea that Dick was playing with here, the meta commentary and the raw, sometimes wildly offensive cultural worldbuilding, but as a story, this book is nothing but threads. This is not a plot book. It's barely a character driven book (although I did at least enjoy the story threads of Robert Childan, Nobosuke Tagomi, and Juliana Fink). If you think really hard about the meta aspect of it, you can make a good case for its genius, but I can't excuse the fact that it was just not enjoyable to read. There were some small blips of humour of profundity here and there that made me think or chuckle, but it was overall an incoherent slog. There were so many scenes (especially concerning the German characters) where I just tuned out because I didn't know who anyone was or why they were talking. I enjoy an abstract narrative but I also have limits for the pain I must endure to piece it all together. At best, The Man in the High Castle was an interesting thought experiment, but it was too borderline-psychotic to make its ideas digestible. I think some prior context for what Dick was trying to achieve here would have increased my enjoyment, but unfortunately I don't think it's worth a re-read.

I'm not giving up on my boy Phil though. I have five more of his books in my unread pile right now and I'm sure some of them will connect with me the way DADOES? and A Scanner Darkly did.

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Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro - 3.5/5

This was such a nice change of pace and a perfect palate cleanser after reading a bunch of really dense sci-fi over the past few months. I had never read Ishiguro before, and went into this book more or less blind, which is probably the best way you could ever read this. Admittedly, this isn't my regular style of science fiction, as its scope is very zoomed in to the personal fabric and the actual science element of the book was kept very out of focus despite having a somewhat large implication on the story. Luckily, Ishiguro's smooth, almost lavender-like prose and meticulous first person narrative managed to draw me in quickly. Ishiguro sticks the landing early and coasts at a consistent, and sometimes tedious pace for most of the book, but it is almost always enjoyable just to bob along inside the head of our first person narrator as she recounts the finest details of her life experiences. Kath takes us through a ton of tangents, never more than a few pages away from a "this happened, but before I can tell you, I have to go back and explain something that happened 10 years ago", but the slow, journalistic quality of the narrative also gives so much room for depth to really examine the human condition. I don't want to give away any plot details, because half the joy of this book is watching as Kath gives us new details that slowly reveal the bigger picture, and that unfolding process is super easy to spoil. But I wouldn't say the plot is the most important part anyway. The heart of the book rests in the moment-to-moment train-of-thought of our narrator as she forces us to confront the meaning of life in all its tragic and beautiful ambiguity. And for that, it does an amazing job.

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Emma Goldman all you are is we

🌕🌕🌕🌕🌗

FFO: SCREAMO, POST-HARDCORE / LISTEN

"I came amidst the horny slog of revolution and woke up to a technocratic fairyland"

all you are is we, the debut full-length from Vancouver-based screamo band Emma Goldman, revels in the absurdity of life under late capitalism—the irony of our social politics replicating the hierarchal structures perpetrated against the working class—and serving sandwiches with a fucking smile, please. It's angry, it's critical, but it's also humorous in its stark representation of our collective fatigue and the vices we use to cope. The band has undergone a couple of different revisions since their inception over seven years ago, but with their debut full-length, they have arrived in nothing short of full bloom, displaying a tight-knit lineup oozing in musical chemistry, dizzying riffage, and a thematic vision that is so well executed it actually boggles my mind. It helps that it also sounds fantastic. Absolutely hair-raising guitar and bass tones that bite high without compromising on bottom-end (just try not doing a stank face when the bass punches in and out of the intro to "I don't think much at all"), highly adaptive drum work with one of the tastiest snare tones I've heard this side of '96 (perfect ping to pow ratio, ya dig), vicious dual vocals with carefully mapped out patterns, and a clever lyrical approach that often reflects the collage theme of the album artwork to enchant and disorient the listener. Crème de la crème.

Not only is the record superbly produced and mixed, the songwriting is best in class, clearly the culmination of years of fine-tuning with a wide net of influence. Emma Goldman plays loose with genre boundaries and has managed to chisel out a distinct sonic identity, evoking the scrappy melodicism of bands like Portraits of Past and Saetia while adding a splash of white belt sass and a modern sense of heaviness—emotional hardcore tastefully adorned with metalcore chugs and panicked incisions. Even when the band hangs out in a dirge, their songwriting maintains a naturalistic quality that swells and drops with dynamic tension. I haven't even mentioned the two produced-in-house rave interludes ("diss track" and "canned response"), or the ASMR poetry of "whispers catastrophe" that flows oh-so-perfectly into the slow and explosive crescendo of "this is the land of lost content". All of this combines into an experience that is visceral and engaging from the first minute to the last. all you are is we is chock-full of variety, that's for sure, but it all feels uniquely Emma Goldman—fresh, fun, and incredibly powerful when it wants to be. It is easily one of the best produced screamo records of the 2020s thus far and a more-than-promising debut full-length from a band already on top of their game.

[thisworldisablackhole]

Reading Gene Wolfe has honestly made me super interested in religion almost entirely for lore reasons. I feel like the more I understand the bible and religious mythology, the more I understand the themes and motifs that Wolfe plays with in his books. I have been watching videos about the Gnostic Gospels particularly (lots of Alex O'Connor interviews) and my mind was blown when I realized how much they clearly influenced the story of Long and Short Sun especially. The idea that the material world was actually created by an evil demiurge (Pas) as a prison for mankind, and the real God (the Outsider) has to free them from the physical realm, or they have to gain some secret knowledge (from the fliers, perhaps) that allows them to access the pleroma/spiritual realm (Mainframe). I'm still learning about it so there is a lot that I'm failing to put together in a cohesive way, but I may try to write a properly researched post about it some day.

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A Canticle For Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller Jr. - 3/5

I picked up A Canticle for Leibowitz immediately after finishing Gene Wolfe's Solar Cycle because it seemed fitting to read the book that more or less inspired Wolfe to incorporate religious themes into a sci-fi setting. A Canticle for Leibowitz is by no means as grand in depth and scale as a Wolfe novel, but it is a pretty unique story on multiple fronts and enormously influential for its time despite its relative simplicity. I'm really glad I read it, despite not loving everything about it.

A Canticle for Leibowitz takes place after a nuclear war (and a subsequent anti-intellectual culture war against any and all knowledge of technology) essentially resets society back to the Stone Age, and the story centers around a small Catholic monastery in the Utah desert that exists with the sole purpose of preserving ancient documents from the hands of the ignoramuses who would see them burned (these documents being anything from grocery receipts floating in the wind to blueprints for war machines—none of which is really understood by the Order that keeps them). The book is split up into three acts that cover roughly 1,800 years through a series of small yet timeline-altering events, beginning with the discovery of a fallout shelter by a lowly Brother Francis, to the slow resurgence of education and scientific interest, and then accelerating (degenerating??) all the way back to the same age of nuclear weapons and spaceships in which society first destroyed itself. A Canticle for Leibowitz makes a clever case for the cyclical nature of history and brings to light questions of whether science and religion can ever fully coexist under the same framework of morality.

Despite the three acts of the book having 600-year gaps between them, Miller Jr. weaved some subtle threads throughout that I really appreciated, like the mysterious old wanderer from the first chapter continually popping up around the abbey (in the second act, he straight up tells people that he's lived for thousands of years, but everyone just thinks he's lying), and then Dom Zerchi finding the skull of Brother Francis in the final act was just pure gold. The final act, however, is also responsible for this book only getting 3 out of 5 stars. Miller Jr.'s religious philosophy just really reared its ugly head at the end, and all of his pro-life and colonial apologist views started getting rammed down my throat. Blech. I don't mind these themes cropping up in books, but when Dom Zerchi tried to force a woman and her child with lethal radiation poisoning to die a prolonged and terrible death instead of letting them opt peacefully for medically assisted suicide, as a group of monks and their world-destroying knowledge simultaneously get blasted into space to colonize the stars, it just felt yucky. Learning about Miller Jr.'s life helps put some of his views into context, and the irony of his own suicide calls into question whether he really sympathized with Zerchi and the Catholic worldview or whether the scene was just a representation of his own internal conflict. Either way, it soured the ending for me a bit.

Overall, A Canticle for Leibowitz was still a great read, with enough enjoyable prose, societal critiques, humour, and narrative playfulness to keep it from buckling under the weight of its philosophy. I can definitely see myself reading it again in the future.

[thisworldisablackhole]

Virtual Light, by William Gibson - 2.5/5

I was really excited to get back to reading some Gibson and see what he can do outside of the Sprawl setting, but this was unfortunately a bit of a disappointment. Prose-wise, this is still classic Gibson—full of janky syntax and a bad habit for narrating everything like notes on a police report, providing a ton of zoomed-in imagery but little in the way of context to tie things together. I keep underestimating how little Gibson cares about holding the reader's hand. Just like all his other books that I've read, it probably took about 50-100 pages for the narrative to really become clear. Gibson likes to set up his stories like an investigation board with snapshots of suspects and scenes that slowly converge into a single lead, and it usually works as long as the stakes are high and the payoff is explosive—two things Virtual Light lacks almost completely.

There were definitely some cool things going on in this book, but none of them were applied in a way that actually strengthened the main plot (apart from Chevette and Sammy Sal being bike messengers; that was actually cool). Gibson's worldbuilding of an alternate Los Angeles and San Francisco was great. The condemned bridge to Oakland that had been converted into a lawless shantytown was especially a fascinating setting; it almost felt like the labyrinthine gothic castle from Gormenghast that just kept growing and growing until it resembled an M. C. Escher painting of nonsensical architecture. That setting definitely could have been explored further and made into a larger part of the story. There was also some interesting cultural stuff going on on the sidelines; Gibson was clearly impacted by the AIDS epidemic while writing this, and part of his alternate reality was one in which a non-lethal strain of HIV was found in the blood of J.D. Shapely, who became a sort of patron saint figure for the communities that lived on the bridge; then there was a separate religious cult out in the suburbs of L.A. who believed God could be found in old movies and TV shows and would just set up stacks of dead televisions all over the place, yet they had rules about what material could be viewed, and one of the characters gets labeled as an apostate for getting caught watching Videodrome.

Yet somehow Gibson managed to craft a main plot that completely sidelined all of these interesting tidbits of cultural worldbuilding to instead focus on a dull investigation about some stolen virtual reality sunglasses and a secret plan to rebuild San Francisco that both felt so disconnected and unimportant despite at least two or three people getting killed over them. Not even the characters could come up with an argument for why anything they did mattered—hell, the whole thing starts because Chevette jacks some random guy's sunglasses on a total whim. "Exhilarating and terrifying" my ass. If I was Gibson's editor, I would have sent him back to the drawing board on this one. A good story does exist in this world; this just isn't the one. Hoping to have better luck with Idoru.

[thisworldisablackhole]

John Patrick Elliott February Songs

🌕🌕🌕🌗🌑

FFO: INDIE FOLK / LISTEN

The sun is finally starting to show—yet as the malaise of a long, grey winter still has me in its teeth, and as I struggle to shake joy out of old haunts (at least until the New Me powered by vitamin D expels the creature from my system), I find myself being called back to the simple indie folk comfort of February Songs and its beautiful encapsulation of rebirth. Having been recorded and released in January during the first few weeks of his newborn son's life (to whom these songs are also dedicated), John Patrick Elliott's fourth fully self-produced album feels almost like a eureka snapshot of both the personal and grand cosmic cycles waltzing hand in hand. These themes of parenthood and the Lunar New Year are central to the concept of February Songs, and they echo throughout the entire record in a way that makes the whole experience feel strikingly cohesive—from the photograph on the album cover, to the lyrics of the first song ("You are the purest little reason to spring to life when it calls, as February falls like a star in the palm and draws a line through us all") to the very palette of sounds that Elliott employs. Elliott takes a minimal approach to instrumentation, mostly centering his songs around a roulette of piano, finger-plucked acoustic guitars, and frosty synthesizers, but he succeeds in crafting a diverse array of memorable songs from this utilitarian tool belt. You can practically feel the joy radiating from these songs as Elliott paints us these quaint little celebrations of life's small moments—fuzzy socks, coffee steam on the windowsill, first light offering a few drips of ice melt as penance for its absence. "Goldcrest Dawn", despite being fully instrumental, probably best sets the whole sunrise visual in motion with its Winged Victory-esque blend of soft piano and dazzling synths. But as the album progresses into its final act, dawn fades into dusk, and the ritual of merrymaking begins. "Aquarius" portrays a lively gathering of loved ones as Elliott sings of laughing and drinking in candlelit rooms and "dancing clumsy across the ice". The song then drifts into ambient swells before "Eventide" caps off the night with a thoughtful lullaby to cradle us to sleep. February Songs is, if nothing else, cozy as all hell. It's an album of simple joys, and when things get tough, it reminds me to slow down and appreciate the little things. Hopefully it can do that for you too.

[thisworldisablackhole]

The Book of the Short Sun, by Gene Wolfe (1999 - 2001) - 6/5

Stunned. Just stunned.

The Book of the Short Sun is the three-book conclusion to Gene Wolfe's Solar Cycle, and is, in my opinion, the best three books in the whole series—a magnum opus, and probably the best cap to a series I could ever ask for. I loved New Sun a lot, and had a slightly more complicated yet loving relationship with Long Sun, but Short Sun was by far the most impactful to me on an emotional level. Wolfe cranked up the heart without ever compromising on the narrative complexities that made his earlier books so alluring. It is a return to form in terms of writing perspective, combining the strengths of Wolfe’s first person narration with some of his most cogent storytelling and consistent pacing into a soul-searching journey that is all things vibrant, violent, and deeply, deeply humbling.

Short Sun takes place 20 years after the events of Long Sun began driving humanity out of the Whorl, and it becomes apparent that life outside the crew-maintained cylindrical world-ship was not easy. The planet Blue quickly descended into violence and war as the lack of technological, government or religious framework failed to hold people together as a race of blood-sucking inhumi from the neighboring planet Green weakened them even further from within. Desperate for a real leader to unite them, the colonists start sending people from different towns back to the Whorl to search for their old Caldé Silk. Horn, who wrote about Silk's life in the Book of the Long Sun—a book whose physical manifestation has taken on a life of its own, turning Silk into something of a legend and a Godhead figure—is among those chosen for the task of bringing Silk down from the stars and back to Blue. What begins as a somewhat pulpy seafaring adventure between a writer, a siren, and a vampire, quickly turns into a psychedelic dream journey where the bonds of reality and identity begin to dissolve, and the question of what it really means to be a person becomes the central focus. Like in Long Sun, empathy is a huge theme here, as Horn befriends devils and saints alike and exposes the humanity that ties us all together. There is love and betrayal, but Wolfe is constantly subverting the reader, and Horn ends up accomplishing (and failing) his goals in ways you would never expect.

Because Horn starts this account after returning from his search for Silk, the author will kind of supplant information from the present and then go back and explain how things happened from the past, and the constant switching between present and past causes the narrative threads to overlap in a sort of mesh that the reader will have to sift through with caution. These threads kind of move in opposite directions, with the past narrative ending where the present narrative began, and despite the story connecting back around to the very beginning of The Book of the New Sun, Short Sun could almost act as its own closed-circuit loop that demands a full reassessment as soon as you close the final page.

Wolfe, despite his Catholic faith, was a skeptic at heart, and was obviously obsessed with how Gods end up representing different things to different people (there are many allusions to multi-headed gods), and religious texts become untrustworthy—warped over time as they pass through the hands of different authors, revisionists, interpretations and translations. That is something he tries to imbue in all of the Solar Cycle books, but he brings this concept to its absolute peak as The Book of the Long Sun in itself becomes a pseudo-representation for the Bible that has a direct influence on the happenings of Short Sun through the mythology it created. It's in this way that Wolfe manages to break the fourth wall and turn the actual, physical Long Sun books—the ones sitting on your shelf right now—into an artifact of the world he created. It's truly genius, and I'm not aware of any other author that could be bothered to have as much ambition as Wolfe did. Like with New Sun and Long Sun, there is a trove of religious symbolism and literary references to unpack here. I'm definitely not well-read or Bible-smart enough to pick up on them all, but the symbolism is usually obvious and easy to appreciate even if you don't know the direct reference. Wolfe often employs small microcosms to represent and remind the reader of the larger themes.

It's hard to go into much more detail without spoiling the best parts of the book, so I'll just express once again how amazing Short Sun is—how intelligent, compassionate, and adventurous. It's a story that will stick with me for a long, long time, and I already can't wait to read it again. It's a master stroke from the first page to the last, one of the best books I've ever read, and I really wish more New Sun readers would make it as far, they are seriously missing out on some peak science-fantasy literature. Long Sun was definitely a bit tough to get through at times, but my god, Short Sun makes the whole journey worthwhile.