Someone called me "Drumcorpse" the other day.

🙄

That one Freudian slip of the keyboard reveals quite a lot.

It's a subtle tip that they are likely one of those breakcore ultraviolence 4-chan dweller folks, to which I am allergic. Oh, it was all totally my fault, attracting those folks, and I am grateful for all genuine support, truly, but sometimes I have an idea what's coming next. Sometimes people want to be beaten, relentlessly, with the heaviest, most brutal, aggressive music. Forever. It's about something in them.

While I respect pushing the envelope in this direction, greatly, my time pushing the heaviness contest is over. I won it once, by accident, but this is not the thing I'm going for. If you haven't realized this, and are hoping for lots more mega distorto splattercore, please move along, for in this neverending tournament there can be only one winner. NAILS wins, currently. Code Orange also. Neurosis. Converge. They add texture, but also go to the frontier. No laptop person can ever touch these bands, for their fire comes from a very real place and their bodies and their practice and efforts. All the sampling in the world won't take you there, to the simple place of a mic and all your energy.

I'd ask that we take a step back please.

Heavy isn't a sound. It's a mindset. It's intent.

The heaviest work can be delivered with the lightest touch, the softest words, an acoustic guitar. A spoken word. A whisper. Heavy is intent. It's not sound, and it's not distortion. Those things can help, but they aren't the thing, just as the menu is not the meal. Listen to Townes Van Zandt and tell me it isn't the heaviest thing you've ever heard. If it still sounds light to you, please sit quietly, listen to the lyrics, feel them.

A lot of the subcultures I've been involved with over the years aren't the best at subtlety, to put it mildly. They focus narrowly on a particular edge. The mega-hyper-niche. Cool. I get it. But now, in this post-internet explosion time, I think we're about to see a return to the well-rounded. A step back into context. Can it really splinter even further? Sub-sub-sub-sub culture niche balkanization? I think we're at a limit.

The time of the well-rounded is starting. It's making me hopeful. This is the heartening thing about the EXE event I just played in Manchester. No artist was the same. It's Multi-Genre. Variety. Spice it up, explore different things. Everyone is good, and there are common themes connecting us all. But the sound itself is varied. I love it.

This review makes me very happy, because the writer is well-versed in all kinds of music. This is a new kind of person I've been seeing at the shows, the really well-rounded music fan who just loves all its endless variations. I love when these folks are aboard and it makes me very happy.

Life is all about contrast. You could put a whole bottle of hot sauce on that pizza, but really now. It'll be inedible. Mono-dimensional. Art is in subtlety, the spaces in between. The balance, the endless new combinations.

I'm going for dynamics in the new work. Heavy is one aspect of many. It's about life, figuring things out, reacting to the collective unconscious. Love. Society things. Technology. If you dig it, happy to have you aboard.