The Donkey Sanctuary

As Pranjal pointed out below, it’s been a long time since we updated this page. Personally I’ve had a ridiculous amount of work-related stuff to deal with but I’m glad to say I’ve still been following the elevated path of vegan living and kvlt listening. My diet still causes weird sounds in my belly, my singing/screaming in the shower still causes the neighbours to howl in disgust. Anyway, you get the message.

At the end of the summer I spent some time in Ireland and was lucky enough to get to visit The Cork Donkey Sanctuary. The sanctuary has been around for 21 years and has been home to over 2,400 donkeys and was a real pleasure to experience. The terrible tales of abuse that many of the donkeys had endured was countered by the numerous stories of the mental and physical improvements that the animals made at the sanctuary. Understandably the donkeys were generally very nervous at the sight of humans, but I was able to stroke a couple of brave ones and I was touched by their gentleness (not to mention their manners in not chuckling at my awful and decidedly not ‘metal’ red jacket).

Recommended listening for leisurely walks in the woods

Whilst in Ireland I took the opportunity to go for long walks in the woods near where I was staying. I had my MP3 player to accompany me and spent a bit of time thinking about the ideal music to listen to ; living in an urban environment and being a big fan of black metal that is heavy on bucolic imagery has often felt a bit wrong. It’s pure escapism of course, but playing air drums along to Emperor’s In The Nightside Eclipse whilst on the London Undergroud has always felt a bit odd. So while in the woods I gave a spin to two albums that matched the environment perfectly – Carpathian Forest’s Through Chasm, Cave and Titan Woods and Ulver’s Kvelssanger. I’m not entirely sure what happened to Carpathian Forest after they released the aforementioned album, because they seem to have turned into some kind of joke band – the singer was on stage with no underpants on in the last pic I saw. Not good. Through Chasm…has a weird Celtic Frost/ pagan/ Edgar Allen Poe vibe going on, and in the inlay the band look like they genuinely live in a cave and survive purely on celery, which is much better (in my book, anyway). The Ulver album is incredible and has such a calm but powerful atmosphere…the a-capella singing sounds strange at first but kind of fits with the haunting tone.

So now I’m home, back to a place with no donkeys and certainly no forests to wander around in. Still, there were no places to get good vegan food or weird music nearby, and those two things go a long way in making up for the loss! PeteF.

Lost on Planet Metal (and my Swedish summer)

"I thought you brought the map..."

OK, so it’s been a while since any of us have written anything. Reports are sketchy, but suffice it to say that our myriad adventures around the Planet ov Metal have left us little pause for thought, reflection, and report backs of late. In the other-worldly language of black metal, time and space have truly been devoured as one, as our tortured souls toil in the constant struggle to wrest ourselves from the nauseating whirlwinds of anti-cosmic chaos. In the more realist lingo of thrash, we’ve all just been really fucking busy with a whole lot of shit.

Unleashed. Hanging out in a forest. You know.

Tell you what, though, it does actually feel like I’ve entered some kind of wormhole through space and time and ended up in Sweden for the summer, because we’ve had a few months of shows from some of the best Swedish bands ever. I’ve already posted about the At The Gates reunion tour, but since then we’ve had the likes of Unleashed and Watain grace our shores. Unleashed played a great show with Obituary in San Francisco last month, on my birthday actually! Their set was a bit too short to do them justice, but they still kicked some ass with tunes like Midvinterblot. It was worth it just to see Johnny Hedlund shout “I only fuck the dead.” Amazing. Turns out I share my birthday with their drummer too! And fittingly enough, we share our birthdays with the day the Battle of Stamford Bridge took place in 1066, marking the end of the Viking age in England…

OK, on to other topics before I reveal yet more of the inner nerd.

Norwegian black metal is, of course, legendary, but Swedish black metal doesn’t seem to get many props, eclipsed as it is by the x number of crappy Gothenburg-sound metalcore bands out there. But just last week we had one of the best Swedish black metal bands, Watain, play in what ended up being a warehouse show in Oakland… the show was epic in the true sense of the word- we had to wait like what seemed like a starless aeon before Watain hit the stage, which turned out to be just after 1am (I won’t go into the crazy organization of the show, or ponder why the hell a band like Book of Black Earth was on this

"You've got red on you..."

US tour with them). For the 200-odd people who stuck around for their set and the encore, it was not just worth the wait, but would have been worth another 10 hours of waiting just to see them destroy Oakland with enough dark energy invoke Leviathan itself. No goblets of blood and gore poured on the audience like the pre-tour marketing was suggesting (luckily, I’d say)… though a sickly-sweet garbage like smell (Monica described it as smelling like period blood) did kind of permeate the venue, gaining in pungency as the band came on to the upside down cross, candle, skull, and spinal cord-decked stage. The set list was mainly from Sworn to the Dark, though they did play some older stuff as well. The Serpent’s Chalice was more intense live than I could ever imagine, and you could actually feel the firmaments crumble as they went into Stellarvore. Some weird vibes at the show, and it seemed the band was pretty pissed off with the audience by the end (even beyond their usual grimness), but damn their set made for an amazing night.

And hey, speaking of Swedish black metal, I’m off to LA for the weekend to see Nifelheim, among many, many others…

Rest assured, the horde has not abandoned its post! Expect more very very soon… PranjalistKrieg