we are crisscrossing angled steep hilly streets, this is a conflation of my experience of Boston in the time of my sister’s adolescence, (the early 90′s) and Providence and Free St. in Portland. Heavily buildings hang overhead, there is steel and brick, dark brown brick in great presence. We are in a car low to the ground, laden with dashboard charms, sitting sunken in it like some sporty wedge shaped silver toyota, there is dayglo rosary and american pitstop plastic effluvia barnacled over the coin-dish contours under the windshield.

We are driving back and forth on this steep angled street, passing a ground floor / set into the hillside entry, we are looking for work space, or A Space, some magical room hidden in the derma of the city like a tick, one we want to join in bloating on secret knowledge and escaping the inevitability of the horrid news and advertisement stream truth. We are looking for a chamber that is a way out.

we stop and pull into a metered spot, a red wagon ahead of us parked poorly angled out into the road and behind, as we parallel, an all black town car with tinted windows glowers ominously. it is summer, the air is soft and inviting, the light syrupy and approximating of position only, never defining. this seems like a very good idea, and we slink into the bluish shadow of the paving tiles before the entranceway. a man meets us there and in a minute we learn that this is Genet.

But at first we don’t know and we look at the 15 foot long sunken windows, which where they start to our left come out of the ground as the cement slopes down, but off to our right hang 6 feet above the walkway. 15 feet on each side of an empty space, the ‘windows’ are just: a concrete knee-wall, thick iron bars spanning a gap, and then a hanging concrete slab that ends at the foot of the first aboveground story. when we walk between the two walls, through the gap that is the door, we are in a nautilus shell-shaped room of brown brick. it is like being in the entrance to an ear, but of brick. a long wall reaching the full 12 feet to the ceiling comes 2/3 of the way across the space forming a sort of entrance hall into the building proper, the space spirals around it. Genet is there.

He is dressed in a dark pinstripe suit, he is a thick dark and straight bristled mustache that extends just slightly beyond the width of his smile. his face curls roundly, amiably, towards his almond-bubble eye sockets, somewhat piggish but also intelligent, which are adorned with rather small, octagonally framed spectacles. He keeps a careful eye on us, myself and the other one (driver-friend) through the spectacles.

We begin talking hash, white powders and weed. We need a space to do our dark arts. There is a drug trade involved for Genet, he wants us tohold, or transfer, or front… we serve as some facility of illusion in exchange for working room. He next is driving with us, he owns a rock club, we are driving to confront maybe the manager (i think he owns multiple clubs actually) of one of the them about a money issue, but he is also going to treat us to espresso and show us a space. He drives up a garage and begins proceeding on rooftops… we have taken his car which is some compact but bulky european city car. cushy, but small. it hops nimbly from coping to gravel, dodging exhaust vents and choicely positioned lawn chairs set by afternoon tokers or secret city nude sunbathers. we do fine, but then over exchange street (it obviously is, just patently the street from portland, me), we have to get down and he for the first time kind of hesitates and gesticulates and we flip, then plunge over the lip of the building that used to house the book store, by the alley that enters to Novare Res Beer Garden. We scream and plunge! I look over to see our driver as a blur of dark fabric.

We smash into the ground, right-side-up and without a scratch. “WHAT THE FUCK GENET, IS THAT THE ONLY WAY?” He laughs and fixes his coat jack, “Aha, sometimes…”. We get out, get coffee at a shop radiating with dark woods, aged floorboards and hammered copper detail. Soon Genet goes into a club not unlike Geno’s and we wait outside. He returns with a blue envelope, we go on, to another parking garage. we are making fun of it because it is 5 stories tall but the top floor is very poorly supported, like they were only building a 4-story garage and were banking on it being over built so they could throw up this 5th story, but the columns are thin, there are no concrete barricades at the edges, the concrete is chipping. very few cars are up here, but we are. dark colossus office blocks stride above us into the thick heart of the city, elm and ginko trees can be seen jumping in breeze, flashing up gold light on their leaves, in an empty lot by the garage.

on one side of the building, spanning 4th floor to 5th, is a narrow open shaft/grid/permanent scaffold of i-beams and thin concrete pads with ladders and stairs (the steel all painted baby blue). It is a vertical open air office, there are perhaps 7 or 8 levels, each like 8-10 feet tall, that have nothing but a chair and desk combination (like an adults version of a middle-school desk, curved steel bars linking surface to seat). We are told or understand, perhaps by Genet but I think on our own, that they do work here just exclusively on their phones, so they don’t even need power for laptops.

on one of the desks near our floor, there is a CAT machine Yellow phone that is long and boxy, very advanced machine but set in shockproof rubber and large like the cell-phones of the 90′s, kind of a thick rectangle with a flange, 10″ or a foot long. it is contemporary to or beyond 2012 circuit design. I get out of the car anyways and climb down and get it. Somehow it allows me to order foot from a cafe that is on the first floor of this parking garage. i do so, it is a little paper cup of espresso and milk, a scone-like baked good of rosemary and salty savory flavors with an egg and some thick, square cheese bar that is very white, relatively hard but extremely delicious. where the cheese is melted it turns quite yellow, more like Cabot sharp. the meal is delicious and i climb down and away into a pocket park between buildings, quickly, so that my subterfuge will not be uncovered. i want to eat my meal in peace. i have kept the phone and turned it off. it is a sunny beautiful day in the city.

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 1,400 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 23 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

The EP is close to done, version 1. There will probably be a v2, but it is somehow important that I complete this by year’s end. All drums and my guitars are done, artwork is closer.

Two new songs hashed out, I will share those here.

Glaurung

Falls of Rauros rehearsal space

Jordan Guerette

1: solvent

2: all ribs and fur

If possible I’d like to do v2 of the Culling EP by the end of January and get to work on a 2nd EP immediately, to be titled Eating Clay to Stay Alive, with the goal of having it out by April. Enjoy!

Lidded heavy eyes shine with dark hour thoughts and crippling self scrutiny, they burn with insomnia and excruciating internal dilemma never expressed, not talked of or confronted only swallowed and transmuted into disbelief in the world. The world which refused to solve their problems for them, but also to even try to relate to them, to help, to be transparent in any way. Given up on a world that was designed to make them give up and thus has fulfilled its goal: sheep for butchering, blood for power.

Sheep accept it. Pretty sheep fuck each other and eat downers, sleep in all day, pretty sheep fuck each other into lulling oblivion and make no charge, no attempts to change. It is so enraging to see such acute intelligence, minds so well connected to machines of fact finding and so capable of research and dissection that keep it all within. The bitter ball of intelligence and brilliance gone sour from being kept inside forces the world from your breast, makes of it a strange child, a bit stupid and ugly, a weakling not fit for your own soaring visions of domination and solitude.

They Don’t Understand. I remember having this secreted experience, the primal learning of my childhood an abuse and an education in sex from someone three times my frail age. I kept that event, held it, it was mine, my knowledge of it made me superior but also separate and I never shared my cutting observations, my brilliant solutions, never deemed others worthy. Of course also never risked being proved wrong, never accepted intelligent cooperation or compromise or transformation. A childish, static mental tyrant rusting in a putrid ocean of my own.

I write from such limited perspective. That just was late last night, 3am, home from Enslaved / Alcest in Cambridge, mind reeling and leering on the world in a dull phosphorescent blur. The mind sees through murky water the world when the body is exhausted, when no thought has been taken for order, no time set aside to prepare.

This morning I spent time (after masturbating, of course. It’s difficult when you wake up alone, horny, body still aflame from soreness, electricity, wounds of the night before and burning with the fire of awareness, your dick hard and pressing at your underwear in a way that makes you gasp, uhhhh) just laying in the prayerful pose, the child’s pose, and letting the shit just pour out of my brain. Trash thoughts, unfocused.

Then I stand up and do the few still forms I know, slowly. Stand with feet perfectly shoulder width apart, rotate your hips back so that your spine’s curve follows a dead plum line through your body hung from the crown of your damp little skull, shoulders are back, neck and head relaxed, ahead, level and straight. One should feel as though they were hung from a string, back totally straight. All pressure centered in your feet, your stance, knees bent slightly, you should be able to be hit by a pig and stay upright. Feels solid, doesn’t it? You also will soon feel pale blue cold fire slowly fill you as a liquid, from the earth up through your feet (doesn’t matter if you are on linoleum in a third floor apartment, though it is especially nice on dirt). Brings in new energy.

The other stances involve placing arms out as if gently cradling a giant balloon and then again overhead in an embrace of the sky. I stand in the blazing sun, bare skin just tingling from the early autumn chill, pure white radiance pouring through the window and this body form shriving my exhaustion from me. My faculty for observation has weakened from my failure to exercise it. It’s like when you stop getting fucked and then start again: it’s really tight at first but then once you get over that and into the next phase, your muscles get stronger and you go off even harder when you cum. Everything got measured in fucks eventually.

Even when you are acting on a thing you love, modern life is poison to us. Even when you are working in a trade of the world that you love, it’s modern format will still construct a poisonous life for you. I realize this as I step to my laptop set below the window atop Rob Cook’s loaned amp head. I have let drop the time for wondering and days of not knowing what comes next or even hours of chance and wandering. This is my choice, but made because I finally feel really close to that tantalizing state of doing and succeeding at things that I am passionate about. But chance is removed from the equation in this iteration, fuck: this iteration of life is an EQUATION, not a life. A beautiful one, yes, one I am given great pleasure by and that has its ins and outs, but very mathematical, tight. I guess it’s just that the math of the world is much more subtle and complex and this is barren and crude in its mechanics. It is not a bike tour, it is not hands in the dirt helping food grow, it is not playing music with other people. It is get up get coffee practice guitar go to work work hard all day go to bed lather rinse repeat. In service of a good cause, but fact.

After the second waking I move around the room to become ready for work, 6 hours of sleep again, always 6 is the best for some reason. At the door is a large pumpkin; this is a great omen and I am cheered immediately. I leave and ride through the heavy fog, curtaining the city with a beauty I dare not wish to possess but that sometimes I get to glimpse in ones I love at those moments when I feel actually shriekingly like I want to become them, too. For those of you who I have and will and do care for so immensely, your haunting beauty is inspiration and awe, sometimes terrifying and baffling. We skate across the time-plate like galactic high notes hitting a phosporous screen, trace actors so remote and constant in our shifting and exertions that only the ghosts of us excrete light. The rest surpasses, we are so much unseen a lot, sigh sigh.

I get the sun sign, the gnosis, the crossed wheels of my first real vision drilled into my hand after work. This is medicine. I have suffered a pretty brutal relapse this week, it isn’t going to be shared here. I made some bad decisions and let myself get into a spot where I could make some much worse ones. I am caused to remember that I am as weak as everyone else and that I must take great care with myself and that I still have a long way to travel to source.

As is often the case with human brains, I am learning to play my guitar a lot better by having to teach Jordan how to play Feral songs. Rapid robotic programming is underway, new programs give a widening scope to my learning.

After I walk in the torrent, the woods are everything but black and whispering in the most untrustable way but my mind is so peacefully dissolved in the Grand Magic Grotesque that I absorb the gothic world and see what there is without fear. The sumacs are screaming crimson, I can hardly believe anything in nature can be this color and the maple we hung our bones from all summer veils off in a rainbow of leaves to the first gate: across the estuary is a twenty foot tall skeleton being, folded into a fetal position and a bit rounded for bone, but lodged in the wall of leaves and branches as if it were a soft curb of deep moss. It rolls inward there and is eyeless in slumber; 960,000 glacial sharp rings show up quartzlight pink on the deep purple marsh water in an obstructed cone leading from the Hood milk truck lot light, all of them dance in spirals to the feet of the skeletal giant.

Shadow Paths, I think to myself as I go through the boughs. Walkers and soft shady animal shapes turn suddenly out of air as the whole woods swims in a greasy dimensional lumber at 90 degrees to the known; what-ifs stagger forward and dissolve on my nose, the Ninja Scroll bridge is a holy passage.

In my talks with Joey she helps me locate myself in such a more comprehensible way than I have felt in months. I have so much desire to be with this person I love, but I still have a lot of self to live and some to untangle. Being wrapped up in one serious relationship after another, especially in this amazing thing that filled 5 years, I have been closed off from the world. In a large part it’s why I left, the insularity was terrifying, suffocating. It made me angry and superior feeling and I had to leave. But now I must know change and people all over again, break expectation and listen, see, feel. It is true that I still have a fair amount of undoing to do and this makes me all the more excited for my travels with this one I love so much. New worlds to explore and vast lands to let thoughts unfold on and evaporate under the sun.

I arrive and climb a slick, verdant clay tongue up the jaw of an impossibly wide face with burning fiery pink eyes that hypnotize me as I am upward swallowed and then at a point of coming to the lower lip the jaw dislocates and elongates into a vast concrete plain that water beats down upon. If you don’t come the Monster way to get groceries, you’re not of us. The downpour is joy, I haunt Shaws and people avert utterly, pay go.

Down on the tracks again a tree rears and I see a swarming hive of red and angry Kabuki masks falling on me before I face the long perfect reduction of thin parallel mirror strips that marks a walk on any railroad ballast. The strongest and now humanoid and grey-white phantoms loom at the switchboxes and drop straight into my sight from behind no barrier. The rearmost car resolves into an enormous statue’s head, Lenin or some granite godlike visage. It turns to see me incrementally as I approach and becomes a powered string, I must avoid it. Somehow a lit wire cage shows the engine room. I return home across a parking lot that is mostly archipelagos now, more like Michigan as I remember it.

I hope I can connect and be truthful in any way with people now. Let’s help each other.

Her mom poisoned her. Systematically, each morning with breakfast, a tablespoon of drain cleaner, followed by several of sugar to mask the taste. After receiving this abused child back from a home of exploitation and aggression, her bitter accounting concludes an elimination of this dependent creature would be best, forget ingenuity forget lateral moves or sacrifice in comforts (was there even enough to do that in the cold Maine winter? Perhaps not, truly survival at hand then.) What dark room must someone come to inside of themselves that they can decide, despite a world of options and possible living forms, that change of some radical type is more abhorrent than gradual murder of a child who depends on you? To protect and feed her, to guide her into life and make her strong, smart, capable of tackling the problems life besets us with already. When we aren’t being poisoned from one most trusted. Your own child.

If the destruction is slow and systematic, she reasoned, They will think she simply fell ill and died. No taste for explosive violence, too messy, no this murdering spirit visited the mother with a whisper in a cloud of guilt and shame. Must to make it happen quietly, subliminally, in a way the killer can even turn a blind eye to. Just a part of the routine really, wake up, make coffee, microwave some oatmeal and get a glass of milk, pour out a sublethal dosage of toxic nervous system rape and mix it in with her food, add flavor to make it invisible, stir. Go into her room. Put your hand on her shoulder and stir her sleepy form from resting, soft bleary eyes and delicate features, frail, pale, unsuspecting, crawl up from a nest of warm cuddly blankets to greet you and the day. And serve her death, for breakfast. Day after day.

Real humans do this to each other deep inside America. Meanwhile, a corrupted abstraction of popular consent, being operated for the pleasure of greed and the ultra-rich, flows across the TV in the living room, uses its paid for mouthpiece to tell Americans how it is telling the world with all due mercy and righteousness how to behave by bombing hospitals and cutting water supplies to citizens of a country controlled by another abuser. Where for a moment sits this little girl eating her own demise, perhaps taking in a minute before switching off to cartoons, distraction, a dingy grey spot in the pale green carpet from where she daily sits and scootches around to get comfortable. Her mother never bothers to scrub this up, she’ll be gone soon, happy phantom. Unavoidable, tragic death. I am bereaved, pay attention to me.

Except this little girl survived. Someone found out, figured out, guilt overcame Mom, something. Her growth permanently stunted, her body forced to adapt to hideous privations and inclusions, grotesque imbalances. Probably still pretty enough, how ever would she preface this before some would-be lover peeled off her clothes to do his part in them devouring each other? I was poisoned near to death by my mom, so take it easy, I am fragile. Or perhaps habit and need led her to partner up with the type that would do all the devouring, wouldn’t be asking questions or caring about the answers, just angry fucking, using her to get off, weakness be damned. Sometimes there’s a therapy in that, a measure of rotten inverted control. What do we do?

This is how your life began. Now make sense of it. Make control, make some measure of your own will determine the shape of your environment, find a way to soak up the necessary light of love or some ruddy semblance thereof, else your starving heart will finish caving in your poisoned body. This is a legacy some parents leave their children. There is no inherent beauty in the family form. Often enough it is just a cage to trap innocents for torture and slaughter by monsters. Humans.

+++++++

I have such a strong day, I center myself, then exercise my body, then my mind in thinking, writing. I make steps on the album by practicing drums again, I go into work early to prepare. The night is hard, very busy and complex, I scarcely stop. Soon it is 8:30 and then comes the black bolt. I had planned to surprise Joey with a visit and I have become self-conscious, disappointed, with how scheduled and limited our time together has become. This is a first try at being sweet and random to Joey the way I so dearly enjoy being to those I do love. It fails miserably.

She is not only working in the morning, she has Patrick her lover over. I am ruined by this for the rest of the night. The stupid, arrogant, self-absorbed and precocious children that feed off of the good energy of the cafe and give nothing back, they swarm in abundance and volume this night. Swaggering, shit-talking, gossip and engineered drama saturate my angry mind and I can’t leave. I think blackly on how much they like to promote themselves as humanistic, romantic, progressive queer super-babies and how much they are talking horrible shit when they assert this (and they do so incessantly because they are so deeply insecure) and how I might find myself in a position to force a confrontation that agonizingly and brutally illustrates how fake they all are. In public preferably. A sour state of mind.

In excellent example of their farce, I have to continually field questions, withstand obnoxious interactions and am asked to participate in asinine jest and the all-corrupting asshole of irony that is these people’s very air. My painfully obvious and displayed misery is ignored. The humane thing to do would be to realize that I am having a shitty night and leave me the fuck alone. Instead I am vomited on emotionally and raped continuously for attention. Thoughts fail to form, imaginations are aborted by this grinding shitty drunken calliope. I try to go out for a single drink because one of the people I like is having her 21st birthday night and is at a once-familiar haunt down the block. I can’t even enter their crowd to sit because I am confronted by a wall of oppressive screaming and clapping and stupid LOOK-AT-ME antics and comments. The very height of wit is gathered at this table. The black bolt slams, I stare at them and want to shoot myself in the head, utterly pushed out and ostracized. These are horrid people. I shoot myself in the skull, I shoot myself in the skull, I shoot myself in the neck, I shoot myself in the guts, I slam against this.

It has become so wearisome, but still I capsize and split open, gored on these people like on a black ice floe in the driving midnight, I smash into the wall of their ignorance and thoughtlessness and shatter. Once again I find myself bitter, miserable, alone and sad. Feel age taking hold, a bitter curmudgeon watching deluded puppies loudly arrange themselves for ruthless slaughter by the world, again and again I see this and scarcely ever can I help change it or stop it and I am saddened as much as disgusted. They take up all the interest, all the effort and attention and care in their venal squealing to have the most cute and neat persona, not accomplish, not build, not change, simply to appear. This is their goal.

There’s no time for refinement right now, just blast out the spirit, record the waveform as best you can and keep sweeping. This is a time of torrent.

(pics to follow. too fucking tired, internet too fucking slow.)

I don’t really know where to begin. I’ve got writers block, had for days, and now I just blew two more speakers on the guitar cab I just bought to replace the one I blew two speakers on last week. Playing electric guitar is awesome but owning electric guitar equipment is a load of shit. Fuck The World.

Let’s go with this dream I had to kick it off.

I first found this place myself, I walked across this rotting wooden bridge / walkway thing, it led to a high light place with tunnels and mysteries and then my friends were there. Together we tried to cross back across the bridge, but even though we went slowly and one at a time, big pieces of boards kept falling off. It was something like a 12 foot drop into piles of softish earth and leaves, maybe up to 20 feet at the highest point. One girl fell down and managed to land without hurting herself or even losing her balance.

A piece had gone missing so you had to jump at this one point and when it came to the last four people, myself and another person I don’t know or can’t remember in the rear, the first two jumped and brought down this huge section, falling with it. It looked like a far drop and timbers were spinning all around them while jagged rotten teeth flared out from the torn wooden pilings; a sawdust blizzard glimmered the air in sun specks and a cloud redolent in smell of an old New England barn. As they were hitting the ground and sorting themselves out, we began (or I did at least), to hear sirens in the distance. Time became thick and viscous, events come with a rushing and a saturated multitude that I have as much interaction with as does a twig in a river, pouring over a cataract.

Friends scatter like the pigeons when I open my door at prime. Into the woods they take off, the two fallen, perhaps injured, they
go away too and there is shouting that echoes up from the table of land below off the peeling maples and up to us, lain flat on the damp boards now with iridescent green moss lighting up our cheekbones and nose tips, fuzzy if you pause for just a moment and let your optic chasm be fully revealed to light, soaking in nanometer detail and then you can see the terrifyingly opulent texture that infests a bald layer of scum so thin as to barely be there. And just a moment before we were staring at the breaking downward trusses which supported this now swaying spine, the splinter and crumble of flashing white wood and its softer rotting skin or else corrupted members of the support gone fully to spongy dead weight. I crawl backwards along the damp board, in retrospect I should have just taken my chances and jump but in this moment of fear I hesitated. One, three and now six police in plainclothes have run by the end of our shielded wooden trench, the handrails being atop solid walls of ply. The seventh, in a blue collared polo shirt and dark brown pants (or did I just make that up? was it a white turtle neck and brown longcoat?), catches us and turns in.

We give it  up instantly, silently standing. I at this point lose all track of this forgotten other person who was hiding up there with
me, I think another cop pulls them away to a separate destiny by the woods. I actually gesticulate for silence and care from the arrestor and he complies. This walkway is rotten and we must be very quiet now because I am giving up without a fight anyways and I just can’t hear your brash yelling right now. So please, and thank you. I go with him, time buckles and we are already at the holding place. It is an elementary school. Broad shallow staircases that double around a vast square chasm and then join overhead backlit by two story windows. Blonde plaster walls, lofty cold ceilingboard, cinderblock and brick to the roots far below by institutional grey concrete floors and similarly painting pipes who everywhere run and are painted to match the walls but house boiling black water and find their source in a knot, contained in a sunken concrete tub with reinforced walls deep in the earth, a great boiling shell, encrusted with jewely dials and gauges, attended by a lightbulb (new kind, tall smooth rectangle described by
folded glass pipes filled with gas) headed balding man with tiny lozenge shaped spectacles who hovers over a chessboard and a green thermos filled with coffee. It is probably bad coffee I guess now.

His name is Billy or Mr. Bill and he grew up in this town and went to this school and never really left after graduating. He is really quite good at chess.

They interrogate us in classrooms, I am remet with my friends and continually encouraged by them to try escape, a window, a bathroom break I must have hypnotized a cop to allow, alone in the womens, possible fucking with myself through my pants before sneaking away up a linoleum hall. Stacatto footsteps beat the autumn light in a race to make you dread the dying world because they are the death that’s imminent. Somehow away we get.

Palaces of yellow leaves reigning from peeling white/black columns attend our solemn march away from this bad place, vast sheer
cubical shape heaved from the earth unwilling. People are being shot within, spirals of blood are being allowed to circle drains and leave rooms and a simple solution to the problem of a mess and this is all that it is fucking looked at as by the shooters. Don’t climb in behind those dead lights and look out. All too human.

Dry-mouthed I awake and gulp water from my clear plastic gallon. I face the window, sky is deep blue of dawn coming. Hangover is coming but I doze off again once my thirst is satiated.

This was the night after the night after the Wolves in the Throne Room show at my house, during which I had an even more vivid but shorter dream where I put on a pair of pants only to find that they were crawling with corpse-eating millipedes and maggots because I had been storing a raccoon carcass in them and forgot and just put them on anyways.

So what to say? Well, here are some videos somebody shot. That will help and also delay me actually writing anything.

http://www.youtube.com/user/briangenepool

(or http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZisYJjzkt8&feature=channel_video_title if that doesn’t load).

Anyways. Well, that was the most well attended show with the largest amount of the most complicated equipment that I’ve ever run, but for the most part WITTR + Brandt the tour manager and Matt from Backstabbers Inc. (acting driver) had their shit together and ran their own show. I made sure there was enough power supply and that it stayed on, did crowd control and herded people and cars into the appropriate spaces so that the show would continue without interference. The original venue cost $300 (an aside about that in a second…), but since this is my place I didn’t charge anything but asked that Wolves give up $100 to spend on food so people could eat for free if they wanted. Falls of Rauros graciously did this food run / cooked huge amounts of food at their home and brought it to you all, so thank them. And buy their fucking amazing album, which I have had on repeat since last Saturday. For that matter, after you’ve bought their album (bindrunerecordings.com) if you have money left over, buy the album Summit by Thou and then Celestial Lineage, the new one from WITTR, in that order (being the order of least established and needing money and support, to most established). I will say before my aside that it is rare that I see a show where all of the major bands have albums out, new ones, that I am actually excited about. Wolves are cool, they have never been an end-all mind-blow influence to me but I have a lot of respect for what they do and there are moments of spine-shivering on all their records. I may like the new one most after Diadem of 7 Stars… not sure yet.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

The aside: if anyone knows this Dude (in every negative sense of the word) Jason Simcock, where to get at him or how to make him hear, let it be known: he almost fucked this show into non-existence. I happened to have a ready venue and a wish to have this show in the first place, I happen to have known about it for months now and happen to have had my phone on me and been free from work enough to make shit happen and then have nice enough co-workers to pick up all my slack by leaving early on Saturday and showing up Sunday having had only 3 hours of nightmare filled sleep, but IF NOT for ALL of those things, I am not sure that Wolves in the Throne Room would have played anywhere in Maine on this tour or any other one. The reason for that is Jason Simcock.

He demanded $300 up front which was extorted from WITTR (don’t worry, they can afford it, but they are on a tour budget and this is a very shitty thing to do), wedged himself between Ryan Fairfield (who was the original promoter who agreed to take on the show and had to do so from the Waterville area, which I am certain made it harder to judge this douchebags character accurately) and Deering Grange Hall, even though he didn’t need to be in the way. And in fact, his being in the way only served to obscure the fact that the Grange Hall had at some point lost its permit to host concerts, a fact which Jason Simcock neglected to tell anyone until THE DAY OF THE SHOW.

Let’s go over this again: extorted payment up front. Overcharged. Did nothing other than profit. Failed to inform Ryan, Wolves or anyone that Deering Grange Hall had lost its permit to have shows until it was waaaaay too late to book an alternate and then DID NOTHING to find another venue. Jason Simcock is now blackbooked. No one in Maine will book shows with this fuck, no one will host shows that this fuck tries to book. He is out. Smashing is not out of the question. End transmission.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

So things were hectic, trying to back that fucking full-sized RV plus trailer into my humble dirt lot was shitty but patience won the day. No real problems with power, had to run 4 cords from 3 rooms to spread it all out over enough breakers, only tripped one. People were by and large very cool and happy to be there, which I predicted they would be and it was a beautiful night with a nearly full moon. It was good to spend some actual time talking to Nate W. from Wolves, he is doing mostly exactly what he wants to be doing and is currently succeeding, he’s into farming and good organic food, so we talked about that since I work at a place that focuses on such things. I was interested to learn about the strategy of this tour, which stands out to me as unique among touring arrangements. Nathan and Aaron have been putting this huge PA together for a number of years for the main purpose of being able to do a band-controlled mostly underground venues tour of the U$A.

Instead of asking a guarantee and splitting profits in some way, the band takes all financial risk and responsibility and in turn reaps all reward (or all loss. Most of us know how it feels to ‘pay to play’ when you drive to a show that doesn’t cover your gas expense, but it is something else to be at the level of acknowledgement / popularity Wolves is at and still willingly encumber that risk). They have to take in around $1400 a day to stay afloat, calculated for paying the two non-coms, Thou, gas, buying a venue, paying local bands / the promoter and eating. They did at least break even in my front yard, which is saying something for a last-minute venue change to an off-the-map unofficial venue. I gave instructions to Ryan and friends on what angle to take if armed intervention arrived, but it didn’t matter. Here is nowhere, that’s why I live here and love it. Nobody wants to be here, no hipsters (except when a show like this happens, of course, but whatcha gonna do?), no cool kids, nothing but trash and woods.

Let me say again thank you to Ryan Fairfield for taking on the stress of this show, being held responsible for the promotion and therefore the money to a certain extent (which I absolved myself of because I had enough shit to do with jumping this in 18 hours into a viable event and because I had offered to take a part in things early on and twice more during the summer, but Ryan took full responsibility) and also to his good fucking friends who ran the door and kept an eye on trouble.

Shows like this happen because people give a lot of time and effort, usually without recognition, into making them right. This is what makes a scene thrive, dedication and strict anti-bullshit action.

I guess I will just let people’s pictures and memories carry the story, I didn’t let myself enjoy the show until the last hour and I don’t want to try to describe it. Let’s say it was a personal high in my life, a top 10 moment for the time being. It fucking ruled, so many of my friends were there and had an awesome time, it was really awesome to see so many people have good or even potentially moving experiences right where I base my life. Rad.

And then Deering Grange Hall or the booker loses their fucking mind at the last minute and the result is Thou and Wolves in the Throne Room playing in my front yard instead. With fire. And bones. At my fucking house. Tomorrow night. Because this is our fucking town and we are like a Sarlaac pit, a fucking event horizon for cool shit. So come get crucial at the point of no return.

Blackberry Hole