AEMfest is this weekend. Here's a handy guide.

Hey dudes,

The Athens Experimental Music Festival is coming up on Saturday, May 1st at The Union. It goes from 2 p.m. to 2 a.m. Here's a handy guide to what you should catch this weekend according to your tastes:

If you like dark ambient:

Check out Cleveland-based act Murderous Vision. MV has been active since the 1990s, alternating between old-school lush death industrial with scathing vocals and long passages of synthy dark ambient. Check out his upcoming releases, a c-70 on Danvers State Recordings and a new full-length orchestral industrial album on his own label Live Bait Recording Foundation.

If you like grindcore:

Make sure you don't miss fellow Clevelanders Fascist Insect. This quartet takes Napalm Death-style grindcore with disgustingly sludgy breaks. Check out their upcoming tracks collection Baptized In Smegma and various releases that they will have with them.

If you like doom metal:

Columbus' Do Chimps Battle? is not to be missed. The group takes a Melvins-esque approach to doom metal, with a pop-infused songwriting style. DCB is one of the many groups returning from last year's AEMfest.

If you like electronica:

Akron's Shapeless Shadow is right up your alley. Brian Wenner (formerly of Octoberfist) is the man behind Shapeless Shadow, which combines cosmic IDM and breakbeats with a rhythm-sequenced light show. Check him, as well as several other electronica artists, out throughout the day.

If you like noise rock:

Dead Peasant Insurance from Cleveland is the right choice for you. DPI is made up of Wyatt Howland (of the super-harsh noise project Skin Graft), Ryan Keuhn (of Thursday Club), Amanda Howland-Davidson (Wyatt's sister and the band's lead vocalist and guitarist) and drummer J Guy Laughlin (also of the band Puffy Areolas). DPI features filthy harsh noise, shrill vocals and chaotic free-jazz drumming.

Check them, as well as all the awesome acts, out on Saturday at The Union from 2 p.m. to 2 a.m.

The Upper Crust

It's springtime and I want something that hits as heavy as metal, but can still make me move and get into it like good hardcore punk. To satisfy this craving, I've turned to crust punk.

Crust, which blends hardcore punk and d-beat with metal style riffing (drawn quite a bit from early black metal like Bathory and Hellhammer), is a genre obsessed with anti-establishment politics, primitivism and ecological / animal / human rights issues. It draws these influences together in a melange of fast paced hardcore punk replete with extreme riffing and thrashing passages of mayhem.

My listening has led me to quite a bit of more “popular” crust bands, such as G.I.S.M., Aus-Rotten and Amebix. Of these, G.I.S.M. has clicked the best with me. In fact, I spun the track “Endless Blockade for the Pussyfooters” at a party this weekend and one fan went so out of control that he put his foot through the wall.

I've found myself more entranced with more contemporary bands, whose use of metal riffage becomes even more extreme. For instance, I'm drawn to bands such as Wartorn and Black September (both of whom I got to see at For Real Fest last year and have been in love with ever since), Dishammer (whose black metal-meets-d-beat sound and name are composed of two trends: “Dis-” and “-hammer”) and, most recently, Nux Vomica (who combine crust with jawdropping technical metal shredding).

Before anyone asks, I'm not just jumping on the crust bandwagon because of Lady Gaga's jacket. I don't know if that's actually going to happen for young crust punk fans, but I can't imagine that a scene full of anti-capitalist black bloc-ers will be too into their look and bands being bandied about on MTV as a hip name drop.

Fuck your drum circle.

Spring is in the air; as a result, I am largely confused with regards to music to listen to at my disposal. Normally, my one-two punch of harsh noise and black metal gets me through the frosty winter months. But what do I for the months where sun and fun is the order of the day? I've been searching for music to complement the weather, but I haven't necessarily found the right combo. Punk has been somewhat successful; the usual blend of Oi! and D-beat has worked to my advantage. Lots of lo-fi hardcore such as Total Abuse and Raw Nerve has been spun in the past few weeks, as have the requisite powerviolence and thrashcore discography CDs. However, when Scholastic Deth and Spazz can't pass muster, I turn to an old favorite: jazz.

I've loved jazz since high school and, naturally for me, my tastes have leaned towards the more chaotic, discordant realm of free jazz, especially the works of Sun Ra, Peter Brotzmann and John Coltrane. The jazz-fusion era of Miles Davis is also a must, especially the funkier acid-jazz albums such as On The Corner and Tribute to Jack Johnson. There are many contemporary jazz bands that make it into my rotation as well, notably Chicago's Tiger Hatchery (for their free-jazz workouts) and Cincinnati's Wasteland Jazz Unit (for their caterwauling free jazz meets harsh noise approach).

Spring also means the reemergence of hippies and their drum circles on College Green. Personally, while I enjoy the sound of tribal drumming and polyrhythmic drum patterns, I absolutely despise it when it's used as a way for hippies to draw attention to themselves. On top of that, I find it annoying to have to hear the same monotonous, unchanging rhythms over and over as I walk around College Green. Don't get me wrong, there are many people who are incredibly disciplined at their hand drumming and have been immersed from birth in the cultural traditions of generations of skilled people who use drums as a method of ritual, worship and cultural significance. I feel, however, that besides the AZA and other culturally-minded groups who embrace these traditional drumming rituals and meanings, 90% of the hand drummers wasting their time on Court Street or on College Green are doing their part to eliminate the cultural significance of tribal drumming.

Whereas a drum circle in Africa might signify any number of life occasions or religious ceremonies, in Athens, it means that King Lavender and Silverfish found their djembes in the garage and want you to know about it.

It's the same way I feel about white people with dreadlocks and mohawks. First of all, very few white guys can pull off dreads and not look like total tools. The symbolism of dreads lies in the ideas of black pride and African resistance to white standards of beauty, not in the popularity of Bob Marley as a cultural icon. The wearing of dreads by most white people is unintentionally a method of cultural colonization that erases the meaning of dreadlocks in popular culture. Instead of being associated with Black culture and Rastafarian religious beliefs, they become associated with the guy selling grilled cheese at 10KLF. The same goes for bros with big tribal tattoos down their arms. You're not a part of any “tribe.” You live in a housing development in Westerville. Stop getting tribal tats and get something original.

It's not just hippies and meatheads, though. Punks: shave your Mohawks. These were worn as a tribal hairstyle by Native Americans until DeNiro in Taxi Driver made them cool for alt kids to wear. Since the 1970s, Mohawks have been more closely associated with those scary punk kids at the mall than with Native American culture. Besides, its not really that edgy anymore. Shave your head or grow it out or do something new.

To clarify, it's not that I think whites should look “white” or something like that. It's that whites shouldn't appropriate the looks of cultures struggling to maintain what little culture they have. If I piss you off for saying shit about your hair, don't take it personally. I'm sure this is restating what a million punk zines and blogs have already said about these issues.

Listen to some free jazz, shave your head and enjoy the weather.

My Favorite Mistake (By The Lake)

Cleveland. The butt of many a joke. A home to Polish Boys, awful sports teams, pollution, industrial collapse, extreme poverty and consequently one of the best industrial / harsh noise scenes in the country. As a harsh noise guy, I'm lucky enough to have a dual citizenship between Athens and the Cleve, due to the summers and winter breaks that I spend at my parents' place a half hour from the city. Thankfully, this puts me less than an hour from the nexus of depressive and abrasive noise emanating from the bowels of the city.

For instance, last weekend I was privy to witnessing a show of incredible proportions at The Cool Ranch, a basement venue not far from the Case Western campus. The show featured a lineup of out-of-town acts from Chicago (Winters in Osaka, Koufar, Pyrrhic Thanatology Monger) and Michigan (Dog Lady, Body Collector), as well as an enormous amount of local support (The Family Chapter, Arsonist's Prayer, Michael James and myself as Nyodene D). All the acts set up in the absolute filth of the basement and created some of the most hellish clatter, shriek and thud I've had the privilege to witness for a few months now.

There were several standout sets that readily come to mind. One of the first was Arsonist's Prayer, the anarcho-power electronics act who was performing his second set of the day. AP made use of disgusting low end synth rumbles and forceful vocals in a way that toed the line between out-of-control and completely dominating. The sheer violence of his set was a promise for more great things from his project in the future.

Another standout was the set by the Family Chapter, made up of Wyatt Howland (Skin Graft), Steve Makita (of Lockweld), Amanda Howland-Davidson (of Dead Peasant Insurance) and Christine Brennan (vegan chef extraordinaire). Full-on white noise screeching, out-of-control screaming and arcs of sparks being ground off the side of a machete into the audience. It ran a lot of people out of the basement and prompted one hapless attendee to ask Makita afterwords if he'd ever killed anyone. He explained that, while never intentionally, he thinks he may have given a woman a heart attack after walking into a nursing home wearing a hockey mask. Mike James did a unprecedentedly short set, full of scrap metal abuse and sonic self-loathing that made for a super grimy time.

Regarding the out-of-towners, all performed well, but three stood out in my mind. For sheer brutality, PTM was the winner. His set was four minutes of the most pissed-off harsh noise I've seen since, well, the last time I saw him. The set ended with PTM storming out of the room, glass broken all over the floor and a feedback loop ringing for an extra two minutes of performance time.

For his haunting aural beauty, Michigan's Dog Lady takes the cake. His synth fuckery, combined with his delicate yet shrill violin bowing, made him a standout once again and brought a Godspeed You! Black Emperor sensibility to a scummed-out basement noise fest.

Finally, the most harrowing performance was the emotionally draining and politically-driven set of Chicago's Koufar, whose brutal vocal delivery lent a throatbleeding cry to the cause of Lebanese nationalism. It's hard to not be moved by Koufar's plaintive and urgent pleading in front of the flag of Lebanon, and anyone who gets to witness his set will be privy to a emotional display of fervent hatred and mourning.

With its crumbling factories, brutal neighborhoods and pothole-laden streets, the Cleveland skyline provided the perfect backdrop to an evening spent bathing in waves of harsh noise and sonic hatred.

Da Zeuhl Wortz Mekanik

Reflecting on the review I wrote last week for Zoo's Triologi Peradaban, I came to the realization that I owe it to myself to listen to more Zeuhl.

As I mentioned in the review, Zeuhl is a genre that got its start in France in the 1970s. At the time, Zeuhl was a bastard hybrid of prog rock, jazz, opera, early heavy metal and chamber music, expressed through fat basslines, driving drum rhythms, horns, strings and vocal acrobatics, usually from at least two different vocalists. The sound was pioneered by Magma, whose album Kobaia debuted an unmistakeable sound, fueled by an almost cult-like devotion to a sound that was bombastic and militaristic, but at the same time primitive and organic.

Magma's output is also notable for how tied they were to the idea of conceptual mythology being intrinsically tied to their music. Roughly 90% of Magma's output between the 1970s and now (their most recent album, Ëmëhntëhtt-Ré came out just last year) focuses on a complex mythology of humans, having fled Earth in the midst of the oncoming apocalypse and arriving on the populated planet Kobaia, where the humans and Kobaians engage in various conflicts over cultural and religious assimilation. Naturally, this epic saga, spread across dozens of songs and releases, are sung in a language created by Magma's key visionary and drummer, Christian Vander. The language (Kobaian), for which a dictionary existed, bears a strong resemblance to German and has been analyzed for years by legions of fans to learn the fate of Earth, Kobaia and the human colonists. Magma still plays live fairly regularly, and several blogs have been set up to share bootlegs of the band throughout their career.

Zeuhl, however, did not simply stay with Magma. Several offshoot bands and projects were founded in Europe in the 1970s and 1980s, including the Magma side projects Univeria Zekt and Weidorje, soundalike bands Eider Stellaire and Dun, and the chamber-music sounds of projects like Univers Zero, Shub Niggurath and Art Zoyd. As of right now, the British band Guapo (especially their albums Black Oni and Five Suns) are the Europe's freshest take on the genre.

Zeuhl managed to catch on outside of Europe as well. Artists from Japan picked up on the style quickly in the 1990s, resulting in several bands such as Happy Family, Koenjihyakkei and perhaps most notably, Ruins. Most often a two-man project helmed by virtuoso drummer and vocalist Yoshida Tatsuya, Ruins brought a fast grindcore element to the Zeuhl sound, which made them popular among the avant-garde metal community. Ruins has released several albums and has collaborated with artists such as jazz guitarist Derek Bailey. Zoo, a relative newcomer to the scene, shows a great deal of promise as a rising Asian Zeuhl band. Hopefully they stick around long enough to see more success and exposure.

Zeuhl never particularly made it in the U.S., which is a shame. Perhaps its militaristic sound was too much initially for the arena-rock tinged U.S. prog scene of the 1970s. The success of bands like The Boredoms and other Japanese noise rockers brought Ruins to U.S. fans fairly painlessly, and the advent of the internet has enabled American fanatics to catch up with Europe and Asia's zeuhl scenes. Perhaps the closest thing we have is the scene of no-wave-meets-prog-meets-hardcore bands such as Hella, The Flying Luttenbachers and a few notable others. It's high time for a US Zeuhl movement to start, however. There's hundreds of us wearing bootleg Magma and Ruins t-shirts that we made with iron-on transfers and our mothers' iron, keeping our ears to the ground for the howling march from beyond.

St. Elsewhere or: Dirty Dogs and Dirty Dudes

The shinding metropolis of Columbus set the stage for a weekend of good food, fun tunes and crucial hangouts. My girlfriend and I drove up from Athens to meet up with some Columbus friends, grab some hot dogs and then go catch St. Vincent at Columbus's number one goth club, Outland on Liberty.

We arrived in Columbus around 5 p.m. and met up with friends at Dirty Frank's Hot Dog Palace on South 4th Street. It's a hole-in-the wall hot dog shop with a full service bar and a constantly crowded seating area. The menu offers an insane variety of hot dogs and sausages topped with anything you could imagine. I ended up getting the T-Dog, which is topped with roasted red peppers and bacon, and the Sonoran dog, which was topped with diced onions, refried beans and verde salsa. These dogs were accompanied by some impressively salty fresh-cut fries and an order of fried leeks, which tasted like super-light onion rings. Other dogs at our table featured the old standards (chili, chese, onion, etc.), but a few were topped with beef brisket, cole slaw and the mind-blowing Sriracha mustard.Following dinner, we made our way from the Short North over to the Brewery District to the venue, Outland, where the show was to take place. Outland is known for its industrial (rock), EBM, darkwave and dubstep DJ nights, which make up about 3 or 4 nights of the week. I'd go on to talk about the venue's décor and ambience, but we didn't go in. As we were parking, it was announced that the show would be canceled because, according to St. Vincent's twitter, “The promoter failed to provide us with a working PA.” Strangely, the girls working the door didn't seem to know, as they were still carding people and letting them in. Given the lack of grammar, spelling or design on Outland's MySpace, it doesn't seem to far from the truth that the venue would be so disorganized. A number of hipster kids, apparently angered by the last-minute cancellation, fought back, hurling snowballs at the venue and hitting random goths standing around on the outdoor patio.

We decided, instead of driving back, to hit up Skylab Gallery, which was hosting an epic lineup of noise rock, hardcore and no-wave bands. Skylab, the art-gallery penthouse of the Columbus DIY scene, is adorned with murals featuring tribal psychedelic artwork and strange art pieces hanging from pipes and rafters. The four bands on the bill were set up at various points around the room, starting at the front of the venue and working their way back.

First up was Ginger Fetus, in one of it's many incarnations. This version featured John Also Bennett on guitar and vocals, Nicholas Murer on drums, Eva Ball on keyboards and vocals, Dan Olsen on bass and Toby Waggoner on guitar. Ginger Fetus has been different every time I've seen them, ranging from weird, crackly shit-fi noise to old-school no-wave. Last night fell into the latter category, with the band locking into three extended Krautrock grooves that swelled with layers upon layers of noisy guitar and keyboard skronk.

Up next were Cleveland noise rock supergroup Dead Peasant Insurance, the four-piece ensemble made up of Wyatt “Skin Graft” Howland on guitar and electronics, Ryan “Dr. Quinn” Keuhn on electronics, Amanda Howland-Davidson on guitar and vocals and J. Guy Laughlin (of the Puffy Areolas) on drums. It was an ear-splitting blend of feedback, shrieking, free-jazz drumming and lacerating guitar feedback that started off strong and kept getting more and more furious.

After them was Vile Gash, the Columbus hardcore band known for their bummer attitude and anthems such as “Fuck Your Positive Attitude.” They played an extremely aggressive set of songs, each punctuated by a generous dose of guitar feedback between songs. Meanwhile, a huge mosh pit opened up in the tiny room they were playing in, which lead to several shattered bottles as the set became increasingly more violent.

Finally, we were treated to a set by the night's headliner, the legendary Hair Police. The trio of Mike Connelly (also of Wolf Eyes), Trevor Tremaine and Robert Beatty were on top of their game, playing a hellishly atmospheric set that reeked of black metal influence punctuated by bursts of heavy electronics and frantic guitar-and-drum thrashing. The noisy dirges that Hair Police played seemed to release the pent-up aggression and frustrations with the recent cancellation of a huge two-week tour with darkwavers Cold Cave. However, much like my friends and I hitting up this show after a cancellation, the Hair Police guys turned their setback into a positive as well, by recording and mixing a new album in the time they had off.

The night, which at one point looked grim in the wake of a huge change of plans, was a blast, and redeemed my faith in the power of friendship and scene solidarity. Skylab was so welcoming to the throngs of people packed into their house, and all the bands were readily approachable and there to appreciate each other's art. There were no riders or mix-ups or last-minute cancellations. There were no greenrooms or lines out the door or monetary hunger. It was just dirty dudes having fun and coming together in their love of music and art. Isn't that what music is really all about?

The new Burzum album is probably going to fucking rule.

The new Burzum album is probably going to fucking rule. It's very important that it does. The black metal underground has been waiting for Varg Vikernes' next Burzum album for the last 11 years, even longer if you don't take into account the two dark ambient albums that the incarcerated black metaller released from prison.

Vikernes' infamy is almost a cliché topic among the underground, as is his imprisonment for murder, church arson and the social faux pas (to put it lightly) of being a white supremacist. These scraps of tabloid fodder have managed to keep Burzum from languishing in obscurity over the course of his imprisonment and have led many to speculate when, if ever, Varg would make his return.

Vikernes was released from prison with little fanfare in the Spring of 2009 and, a year later, is ready for the March 8 release of his newest effort, entitled Belus. The album marks his long-awaited return to black metal, which he employs to tell the tale of Belus, a god from Norse mythology. The album was announced in late fall in a statement by Vikernes, who was using the working title The White God, a title which he changed after racist and homophobic sentiments in the interview turned many off from the title. Granted, he was kind of asking for it when the announcement of an album called The White God also contained a rant about how modern black metal suffers from “homosexual” and “Negro” influences.

For the last few weeks, samples of the album have been available to stream on Amazon.com, which have given many fans hope for the newest Burzum album not being a snooze like Vikernes' dark ambient albums. It appears that the album will cost around $30 for an imported audio CD. There's also a $40 2xLP on 180-gram white (duh) vinyl. Amazon is also offering an mp3 download of the album on the release date for $9, which is probably a good move for metal fans who can't commit to a $30 Burzum CD.

The samples reveal that Burzum has fully re-embraced the Norwegian black metal sounds that he and his contemporaries laid down almost 20 years ago. From what I can gather from 30 seconds of each song, the songs on Belus follow the shrill, hypnotic riffing laid down on other Burzum works such as Filosofem, where spidery reverb-drenched guitar chords build into enveloping walls of sound.

There's also a more fast-paced traditional element, drawing in the old-school black metal sound of blastbeats, manic shrieking and wind-lashed guitar work heard on Burzum's self-titled effort and other early releases. There's even a slight nod to the incarceration-era dark ambient albums, which are polarizing among fans for their abandonment of the black metal sound. Here, that sound is recaptured on two intro and outro tracks. Based off the samples, it appears that Belus will show influence from all eras of Burzum's career, but it's impossible to tell how the entire album will play out until it's official release date.

Naturally, this album is going to get torrented and uploaded like a motherfucker. I'm willing to bet that every blog that hosts it will also get a shitty comment along the lines of “thanks for posting it. I wasn't going to fund any of Varg's politics.” Whoever writes these comments: go fuck yourself. Varg is a pretty awful human being. Yes, he's a great musician, but he's also a murderer (which, lets face it, is a bit more to be concerned about than someone being a Nazi), a domestic terrorist and a “heathen” who longs for the days of Aryan supremacy to reign over Europe, free of Judeo-Christian and African influence. You know exactly who he is.

If you're still interested in downloading it and not buying, it's not because you're not into “funding racism,” it's because you're a cheap douchebag who needs to justify downloading underground music to yourself. If you were really concerned about giving his racist views a platform, you wouldn't even download the thing. Varg (and other National Socialist or racist metal, punk and noise, for that matter) isn't like the Christian church, which grows more powerful with the more money that gets put into it. The album is probably going to make some profit, but it's not like he's going to be funneling millions in profits into something like anti-gay marriage legislation or paying lobbyists to oppose changes to institutionalize racism. You downloading his album is actually furthering the spread of his views, or at least putting them out there. Just admit that you're a closet Burzum fan but don't have the cash. At least it's honest.

While I'm at it, here's a disclaimer: I don't support any racist, nationalist or “white power” views. That's stone-age bullshit that shifts blame towards oppressed minorities rather than addressing the actual problem, which is that the world is ruled, largely, by rich, white, aristocratic men who seek ways to cement their power and influence. However, I'm not so delusional as to think that me not buying the Burzum album is going to strike a blow at the heart of institutionalized racism and oppression, or that it's going to stop the rich, white world powers from exploiting third world countries and populations for profit.

Let me be honest: I don't have 30 bucks to drop on a new Burzum album that I'm just going to rip to my computer anyway. Hell, I don't even want to pay Amazon eight dollars for their mp3s, as I would rather buy something else (like a tape or CD-r) and get a whole release than pay money for some mp3s without any packaging.

I want to walk around in the snow with it blasting over my iPod headphones, like I do with the other Burzum albums that I've downloaded. I'm going to download it and probably talk about how great of an album it is. It's not because I love Varg's politics, or murder, or arson, or any other bullshit that disconnects his views from mine. It's because Burzum fucking rules and because a new Burzum album is probably going to fucking rule, too.