Twitch:0ne: June 2018

It's that day, and you know what that means... Industrial!!! This week we have a project out of Planet Exx (yes, they are not from this planet... I haven't visited their planet either, but I may make a trip soon, we'll see...). The music is in the vein of Industrial Metal/Industrial Death Metal. The bands sole songwriter is Nate Exx Gradowski (drums, guitars, keys and soundscapes, vocals, and bass). This endeavor is called: Demise and Domination! Check it out!!

demiseanddomination Facebook

demiseanddomination.bandcamp.com

soundcloud.com/nate-gradowski

P.S.: I do definitely get a Fear Factory vibe from this! Excellent stuff!!

1. Nine Inch Nails: Pretty Hate Machine

This was the first NIN album I ever purchased. I do believe I first purchased it in high school… still have it too… If I hadn’t purchased this, I would have never realized music was the thing I wanted to do with my life… I remember seeing the Head Like A Hole video for the first time… I remember the angsty synth lines mixed with aggressive guitar… This is what influenced me to become a musician… I realized I loved industrial (especially guitar driven), and this is the type of music I want to write/make.

2. White Zombie: La Sexorcisto

This was the album that I listened to non-stop in high school… I loved their look, the horror imagery (zombies)… I remember when I first heard the song “Thunderkiss 65”… my best friend and I were at his place, and he turned on the video, and I was hooked… I went out and purchased the tape… I listened to this thing non-stop. They were my favorite band in my high school years… even though I don’t really listen to them too often anymore, they influenced my style (yep, I bought skeleton hand gloves cause of these guys, I also purchased knee pads and decked them out with zombie-esque artwork… I wish there were photos of that shit… but alas there are none),

3. Marilyn Manson: Portrait Of An American Family

The first time I ever heard of Manson was through a movie (that we borrowed from a friend) called “S.F.W!” or “So Fucking What!”… not gonna go into details here, but the movie was basically about a group of teenagers who were taken hostage and the whole undertaking was filmed live on TV… Can’t remember exactly when Manson’s song “Get Your Gunn” was played in the movie, but I remember listening to the soundtrack afterwards, and when this song kicked in, I couldn’t stop listening to the aggressive creepy vibe and the “Shocking” (to whoever got offended by it) lyrical content… so I went out and purchased the album… At this point, I was quite into my rebellious stage of life and this album pointed out a lot of the hypocrisy of what was going on at the time…(side note: I remember showing my parents this album… and they fuckin hated it…) … I remember turning up the stereo to max volume, to fucking listen to this album…

4. Korn: Self-Titled

Now this album has had a big influence on me… I remember hearing/seeing Korn’s video for the first time… my best friend borrowed a video tape from another friend, who recorded a bunch of music videos onto it, and my best friend put it on and said “check this out!” So we watch through the video, and then Korn’s “Blind” comes on… holy fuck! The aggressive down tuned 7-string guitars…aggressive vocals, the hiphop/noise sounds that they are making with their guitars… and Jonathan Davis comes in with “Aaare You Ready!!” then just the really emotional/angry lyrics… no band has done something this heavy and emotional before… or well at least expressed it the way that they do… Can’t remember exactly when I purchased that album (I’m sure it wasn’t long after the seeing the video, like a couple of days)… After seeing this video, and listening to the album, I knew I wanted to incorporate that heavy down-tuned 7 string sound into my music… granted it wouldn’t be until I moved here (Calgary) several months later and started writing my first (Twitch) album, that I started putting that kind of stuff into the album… but those sounds are now a part of Twitch!

5. Skinny Puppy: Brap: Back & Forth: 3 + 4

I did a very long blog about this particular album… so if you want to read it you can find it here (there is also a video attached... so you can listen to that as well while you are reading the blog!!) http://twitch00.blogspot.com/2018/03/skinny-puppy-brap-back-forth-series-3-4.html, I will say (that I don’t mention in the blog) this was the first time I ever heard electro-industrial type stuff, I loved it, the horror imagery, dark, and bleak… probably angsty…and just the sheer fucked up abstract lyrics (if you really listen, they are not so abstract)… even the quality of their live performance videos… they had this dark/bleak aspect… watching Ogre’s presentation and performance aspects I always thought were excellent… granted I think the next album I purchased was either “The Process” (which I love) or their remix album “remix dystemper” (which was interesting [loved Deftones remix of “Spasmolytic”]) … and it wasn’t until a few years later that I started to actually dig into their discography, and really listen… but if I hadn’t listened to this, I probably wouldn’t have explored other electro-industrial acts/bands out there.

6. Covenant: Dreams Of A Cryotank

Covenant is a band that I got into, before I actually purchased one of their albums… a looong time ago, I was living in London, UK… and I had met someone who introduced me to their music… it was good! I think I heard tracks off the “Sequencer” album… then while I was there, I saw that there was going to be a big Halloween concert at some venue in London (I still have the ticket stub, unfortunately it doesn’t mention the venue name… but the address was at Charing Cross Road), Covenant happened to be playing that show… so they went on and their set was amazing… I was very inspired by their performance… then sometime after I came back… I went and purchased their first album “Dreams Of A Cryotank”…I remember putting it on, and “Theremin” kicking in… the heavy EBM beats… I don’t quite have a way to articulate Eskil’s singing voice for this album… but the way the album sounds, this dark, heavy… almost noisy EBM… something that wasn’t being done. Some of that has bled into my own productions.

7. Assemblage 23: Contempt

This is on the list cause I remember when I first heard Assemblage 23… I received the Gashed budget compilation “Virion Sequences” as a Christmas gift (2001)… and Assemblage 23’s remix of their own song “bi-polar (serotonin)” was on it… I liked it enough, that I found the song “Sun” by A23 on Napster (yeah I know, I probably should have just bought the album [which I did eventually ;P ])… On my first listen to “Sun” the way the lyrics are, the cadence… the way they roll out of Tom Shear’s mouth… there was something about it… I wouldn’t say hypnotic… but something along those lines “I turn my eyes up to the sun, and stare at it as if there is none. These cinders where my eyes have been, was to forget the things I have seen!”, Such excellent lyricism… and then after going out and purchasing the album, probably in 2001… and giving it a full listen… The song “Anthem” is just that… that’s what I like about Tom Shear’s lyricism… it is written and comes out in such a way that makes the lyrics even though, they are heavy topics seem so easily digestible I guess… This album influenced me to get better at writing lyrics!

8. Rob Zombie: Hellbilly Deluxe

This album is on this list cause, after it came out, in an interview Rob Zombie had said, he was tired of taking things so seriously in the music department, and he just wanted to have fun! That statement right there struck me! In the end, for me, musically it’s all about fun! If I’m not having fun, what’s the point! This album is a whole lot of fun!

9. VNV Nation: Futureperfect

Now this album, I didn’t purchase till after they played a show in Edmonton, at New City (December of 2001). I saw their set and was amazed by the amount of energy they have. They are absolutely amazing! At the time, Mark Jackson was also part of the group… and I felt like their combined stage presence they put on a great show! The music was quite inspiring too! I know some of you folks don’t like futurepop, but I thought this album was a evolution for them… It was quite inspiring musically for me as well… I ended up being so influenced by them, that I wrote an EBM/Futurepop album… Although, I didn’t pursue that direction further than the one album I wrote but, they definitely inspired me, and still continue to!

10. Ministry: The Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Taste

Now, I don’t think anyone who is a musician into industrial metal can say that Ministry hasn’t had an effect on them at some point in time in their lives. They basically created the industrial metal genre… if it wasn’t for these guys we wouldn’t have industrial metal… and I would probably not be doing what I’m doing musically… The first album that I had purchased of theirs was “The Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Taste”... granted I didn’t go in the direction Ministry did with the metal side of things (Korn gave me the direction), but if you were a goth in the 90s this was most definitely being played in the clubs and shit! At the time, it was hard to put my finger on what was going on with Ministry musically speaking… I didn’t realize Al Jourgenson was a hardcore drug addict, granted not someone you want to really follow in their footsteps, or really look up to and take notes from… but this is here cause, if it wasn’t for Ministry, I don’t think anybody would be doing industrial metal!

Monday, 25 June 2018

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Monday, 11 June 2018

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Monday, 4 June 2018

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