Pure 2010 disco funk. That sums up Miami Horror’s new dancefloor confection “I Look To You” featuring the breathy vocals of New Zealand singer Kimbra.
Archive for September 20, 2010
In the spring of 1990, Kay Söhl, the two keyboarders Volker Söhl and Matthias Harder, founded the band TEMPORAL TEMPTATION. By that summer the band had already played its first gig – the first live performance of the core founding members of the band. In a way it was also Sylvan’s birth. At this time the band played hard rock music and sang in German. Only a small part of their music was progressive rock.
In Autumn 1990, the band changed its name to CHAMELEON, a symbol of changeability, representing the long instrumental parts in their music. The cover artwork had a likeness to early Marillion covers and has never been issued. In summer 1991 Marko Heisig joined Chameleon as the lead singer and bassist. Between 1992 and 1994 the band had a gloomy and aggressive tonality to them and in this they were very different from the more rocky sounds of the previous years. In 1992 the first official demo tape of Chameleon was released. With Matthias Koops as lead singer, the second official demo tape was recorded. The title was ‘Slaves’ and its tracklist was ‘Time’, ‘Slaves’, ‘Mirror of a Lifetime’ and ‘Childhood Dreams’. (By the way, ‘Slaves’ was the old title of a version of today’s song ‘Deliverance’ after which Sylvan’s first album was named!).
The fact that there is an army of teenagers out there who were 1-2 years old when Kurt Cobain died is massively disturbing – that’s roughly how old some of my friends were when Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix died (yes, I’m a little older than that, shhhh!). But besides all the useless self-pitying observations about our almost approaching senility, this crude fact can only mean that we are just about to experience a grunge renaissance. All the signs are there: all the surviving grunge bands seem to be reuniting and simultaneously releasing new albums, from The Smashing Pumpkins to Soundgarden… and now this: The Indecent (let’s open a debate about this name!) are a group of extremely young kids who are not ashamed to say they play grunge. They do a good job at it, and the video is a perfect lo budget play on the atmospheres of Smells Like Teen Spirits. Still, there’s something a little creepy and… morbid (??) about the entire concept. It’s that feeling you get when you watch Japanese horror movies where cute little pale girls reveal some kind of monstrous side (eyes without pupils or something). Probably because the word “grunge” somehow became intimately connected to the ideas of “drugs abuse”, “depression” and “suicide”. Honestly, I’d rather have teens follow other examples, in particular if the entire concept smells like teen… marketing?
P.S. Thinking about it, if the return of grunge is going to wipe out all those fake sounding auto-tune-rock/emo bands that for some obscure reason seem to thrive in LA, that’s probably not so bad.
The brand new video from The Indecent. This was shot in NYC @ the Cutting Room where the band was recording. The video is directed by Noah Hutton.. 25 Steps by The Indecent.
By far, this is the most spectacular and insane photography of an aurora borealis I’ve ever seen. When I showed this in our virtual bullpen, the unanimous reaction was complete awe.
Auroras emit light because of the emission of photons by oxygen and nitrogen atoms in the upper atmosphere. Those atoms get excited—or ionized—by the collision with solar wind particles, which are accelerated by the Earth’s magnetic field. As the atoms get excited or return to their normal state, they emit visible energy. When it is an oxygen atom, the light emitted is either green or brownish-red, depending on the energy level absorbed by the molecule. Blue happens when nitrogen gets ionized, and red when it returns to ground state.
It was photographed by Ole Christian Salomonsen over Tromsø, Norway, using long exposure. That’s why you can see streaks from satellites and an airplane crossing the firmament.
Check the rest of Salomonsen’s beautiful photos on his Flickr stream. [Ole Christian Salomonsen via APOD]
written by Jesus Diaz
Futurama‘s milestone 100th episode arrives Thursday night, but the warm, weird remembrances of the show’s creative team have come in early.
Click through the gallery of images from “The Mutants Are Revolting” and other episodes above for the favorite moments of executive producer David X. Cohen and voice actors Billy West, Lauren Tom, Maurice LaMarche and David Herman from Futurama‘s first 100 episodes.
Futurama’s Season 6 finale airs Thursday at 10 p.m./9 p.m. Central on Comedy Central.
Read More http://www.wired.com/underwire/2010/09/futurama-cast-100/?utm_source=SFcrowsnest.com#ixzz105nesOKy
FEAR: 13 Stories of Suspense and Horror
edited by R. L. Stine
In this collection of 13 fabulously chilling stories — from 13 true masters of suspense, including five New York Times bestsellers and a number of Edgar Award nominees, all edited by none other than R. L. Stine — nothing is what it seems. From cannibalistic children, to an unwitting date with a vampire, to a crush on a boy who just might be a werewolf, no scary stone is left unturned.
VOYA
Vampires, aliens, mind creepers, demons, sinister swamp people, hungry shadows, or cannibals next door —any one of these would guarantee shivers, chills, and sleepless nights for avid horror fans. R. L. Stein, dean of the creepy-crawlies, has collected stories by thirteen authors to provide thirteen times as much of the right stuff, under the aegis of the International Thriller Writers. In “The Night Hunter,” by Meg Cabot, there are no princesses, but rather a teenager with a typically boring job at the mall—boring, that is, until she witnesses a bank robbery and finds herself at the mercy of a strange young man called the Night Hunter. James Rollins’s protagonist in “Tagger,” Soo-ling Choi dreams of a disaster that destroys her city. Will the Chinese symbols she feels compelled to paint ward off her horrifying visions? Don’t move to the strange small town of Entrails, Michigan, the setting for Jennifer Allison’s chilling tale, “The Perfects,” or you might find yourself with cannibals for next-door neighbors. To most people, geckos are just cute little lizards, but Raymond Gunstein, the hero of Tim Maleeny’s story, “Ray Gun,” learns that a very nasty alien can disguise itself in a tiny green body. It is rare for a collection of stories to maintain the same quality from beginning to end, but Fear succeeds in delivering all the suspense, terror, irony, and twisted endings that any horror addict could crave. Add this title to all library collections and watch it find its victims, uh, readers. Reviewer: Jamie Hansen
YA readers ages 12&up
Robert James
In The Prog Zone 