Slaughter Prod. Cassettes

The A5 bag cassettes that Slaughter Prod. released in the 90’s were such a pleasure.  It’s a simple, but interesting, presentation, and I was always really fond of them. The fact that there were very few (if any) disappointments in the ones I got my hands on doesn’t hurt.

I found a stash of these in a couple of crates I haven’t dipped into in ages.  Tonight I got  “Fac-Totum” and “Omega” from Die Sonne Satan and “Exile” from Drift burned into the computer. I had forgotten about Drift entirely, it was a Dark Ambient side project of the man behind Dead Body Love and Discordance. Good stuff. I don’t think that project ever had CD release or collection from any of the cassettes come out.

Slaughter Prod. was a label I had hoped to do something for at some point. These cassette releases, and  “Death Odors” series were among some of my favorite releases back then. There is a tone and mood that is captured in a lot of that material that is so definitive for how I view Dark Ambient and Death Industrial. It was a special label, and Marco Corbelli was always a good person to deal with. He’s gone now unfortunately, but aside from his own music in Atrax Morgue and Morder Machine etc. he left a brilliant capsule of dark electronics with the releases on Slaughter Prod.

Richard Gavin

I recently finished Omens (published by  Mythos Books )  by Richard Gavin, and wanted to sound the horn for him.  The 12 stories here showcase a diverse and peculiar dread. Gavin has some great ideas  and his command of language and tone made this a quite enjoyable.

His work has been compared to such shambling giants of the macabre as H.P. Lovecraft,  and Edgar Allan Poe and Thomas Ligotti and Omens deserves such comparisons. It’s not as nihilistic as Ligotti, or as cosmic as Lovecraft. Of the three, I’d place it closest to Poe. The pervasive creep factor that each of those writers possess is present in Richard Gavin.  His imagination is impressive and unique, and he does a really nice job of overlaying that strange darkness into a modern setting.

I’m always looking for more writers that capture this side of horror. The current crop of writers that are making waves seem more straight forward. That is not to say they are unskilled or not to be enjoyed.  I have just always favored more obscure tales of secrets, nightmares, and oddities and Gavin impressed me.

He has a brand new collection entitled The Darkly Splendid Realm (published by Dark Regions) that I’m anxious to get my hands on. The introduction was written by Laird Barron (who I swear I will do a post on one of these days). It was Barron’s involvement that brought Richard Gavin’s name to my attention and I’m grateful for it.

http://www.richardgavin.net/

NanoWriMo Pt.2

Well, I plowed into Nano skeptical, but with good intentions. I realized as I got into it that I was more interested in the stories I had been working on already than getting in too deep to a new one. I could just paste the writing I have been doing into my nano story since the word count is what matters for Nano, but what’s the point really? I have a solid chunk of something that I will definitely finish in the future, but it’s not what I need to be working on right now. If I hadn’t gotten a lot done in the first part of the month I’d feel bad about it, but I have so…

NaNoWriMo pt. 1

Nanowrimo (National Novel Writing Month) started today, and my wife and I decided to give it a go this year. The goal is to write 50,000 words during the month of November. That works out to between 1,600 and 1,700 words a day. So far she is kicking my ass.

I’m going to try and also continue working on some of the other stories I have been plugging away on as well, and I have Writers Workshop with Michael Knost II starting in about a week and a half. Hopefully though I will be able to keep up. Whatever happens it figures to be a productive month.