Notes on Supay, Incan God of the Underworld, Ruler of Ukhu Pacha

 

Art by Adrian Castro

Note: This was written on November 8.

Prayers and Spells to Supay  Սուպեյ, 𓇓𓊪𓂝𓏭

Holidays:

November 8 - Día de las Ñatitas

Epithets:

Ukhu Pacha (the name of the underworld He rules but also an epithet, not unlike Hades)

El Tio

Offerings:

Note: He, like most Gods of the Incan pntheon, prefers his offerings to be buried, not consumed.

Gems

Cigars

Cigarettes 

Liquor 

Beer

Greetings, and happy Dia de las Ñatitas. This holiday dates back to the Incan empire. Around the time of autumn planting, the Aymara people–under Inca rule after the fall of the Tiwanaku empire–would call upon Supay, the God of death and ruler of the Ukhu Pacha, the Inca underworld, splashing alcohol on the fields “to give more fertility to the soil and humans, and to be more productive in mining.” Upon arrival in the 16th century, the Spanish tried to suppress these practices which they considered veneration of the devil. The expression of beliefs persisted, but underground. The festival involves carrying the skulls of deceased loved ones dug up from their graves and decorating them as well as giving them offerings, in irder to give the dead one more day among the living. While there are a lot of key differences in how they are celebrated, in principle, it is much like Mexico’s Dia de las Muertos. In Andean culture there is an attitude of acceptance about death that may even rival that of the ancient Egyptians. It is customary for example, to keep the skull of a loved one on display in your home to ward off evil spirits. You can read more about it in this article:

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/article/la-paz-natitas-things-to-do-skull-festival-cemetery

I have not a drop of Andean blood in me, nor do I speak Spanish, besides what I picked up through cultural osmosis growing up in California. But my wife is half-Peruvian, making my son a quarter Peruvian, so I thought it behooves me to learn about their culture. Both the Armenians, Egyptians, and the Incans called themselves Children of the Sun, which kind of makes us distant siblings in a weird way. And one God of their pantheon I gravitate toward is Supay, God of the Underworld. He is still venerated today, particularly by people working in mines. The underground is His domain, and often a statue of Supay will be set up at the entrance to a mine, which will be gifted cigars, cigarettes, coca leaves and alcohol among other things, in hopes that he will protect the miners from disaster. It is said though, tht once you enter an agreement with Supay, you had better not go back on it. The repercussions can be deadly. 

If you have the time, I recommend reading this short story collection, told to the author by Peruvian miners. Read these and you may see why I feel like Supay and Set would probably see eye to eye on a lot of things. They’ve both been accused of being Satan, for one thing. My favorite is the story about a young miner who didn’t believe in Supay and disrespects the statue, only to receive comeuppance from Supay Himself. 

https://digitalcollections.sit.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2220&context=isp_collection

To Curse or Not to Curse?

The following is a post for my new spiritual blog on Facebook, Set of the Oasis. 

 To Curse or Not to Curse

𓋹֍֎𓋹

An interesting post on the Kemetic subreddit, asking whether or not casting a curse was within Ma’at, got me thinking about where I stand on curses. A lot of Wiccans and pagans will caution against doing curses due to the “Three-Fold Law” or whatever number-fold law they believe in, and some will carry this belief with them into Kemeticism. In my experience, karma doesn’t work that way. In fact I sometimes wonder if you first have to believe you’ve done something bad before you recieve negative karma for your actions, but I don’t know if that’s true. It just seems to me that people completely get away with committing all sorts of deplorable acts in this cold and indifferent world. I say this as someone who’s people, the Armenians, have endured centuries of continuous genocide with seemingly no external force choosing to step in to help the victims or punish the perpetrators, which was exact thing that made me first question monotheism. 

In Kemeticism there is no particular taboo against casting a curse. I find that a lot of the ancient Egyptian curses are of the “if you do x, all this bad stuff will happen to you” variety. Maybe that protects the caster from karmic backlash, at least partially, because it depends on the target committing a wrongdoing for it to be activated, so it’s not really an attack, it’s more like setting a trap. They had lots of curses that were more like the attack variety too, but I think I like the style of the Egyptian curses you would often find in tombs or on sarcophagi. Many Set followers I’ve spoken to have said that Set does not discourage His followers from casting curses, or in some cases actively encourages it. While it is like Set to go against the grain and never “turn the other cheek”, this hasn’t been my particular experience. Perhaps that’s because I haven’t really been compelled to cast a curse since making Him my patron. 

You see, the one time I decided to outright curse someone, I got negative backlash. Several years ago I was mistreated and fired from a workplace, and I was so furious that I cast a curse on the business. My wife and I were keeping hamsters as pets, and within the week, all four of our hamsters died of wet tail, a normally fatal disease they can get. I never got to revel in whatever negative consequences the curse may have caused the business either, all I was left with were dead pets. Since then I’ve found it safer to do binding spells, execration rituals, wear a protection amulet, or ask the Gods for help in exchange for offerings and hymns, and it’s worked for me thus far.  My life has improved since Set helped me climb out of the abyss that I was in. While there are people I know of who probably deserve to be cursed, I have not felt the need to curse anyone. I merely list those names during execration rituals to repel them from me, which is more of a binding spell than a curse. 

I think that rather than the “three-fold law”, a better way to understand karmic backlash from casting a curse is the Hermetic Principle of Rythm. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Like a pendulum. However, you can always choose to reach out and stop the pendulum, by not retaliating against every little slight, and making peace with an adversary, as Set and Horus did once their battles were over. That may not work for every situation, but perhaps there are other methods to stop the pendulum besides an attack or a curse. I see it as a last resort, a self-defense. I consider self-defense to be within Ma’at. Walking around cursing people left and right for every little offense would be isfet. While curses have their time and place, never curse someone over something petty, first think about the consequences of your actions. That’s my stance on curses. 

𓋹֍֎𓋹

~ Siamanto the Foreigner

 𓋷𓅁𓈖𓏏𓍯𓀭𓈖𓐎𓏺𓈉𓏏𓅂𓌙𓀀

Սիամանթօ Օտարը

A Kemetic Halloween

 

A Setian Halloween Story

When I first converted away from Christianity, I joined my friends in their Wiccan coven. I never really felt 100% commited to Wicca, perhaps I never really could get behind duotheism, I was mainly using it to lay the groundwork for a more modern pagan practice, which I think it is very useful for. And this was when I learned about the Wheel of the Year, and Samhain. Halloween is my favorite holiday, but it’s not all slasher films and candy to me, it is a spiritual experience. It’s the day we honor our ancestors, the “akhu” in ancient Egyptian. Honoring the akhu is a big deal in Kemeticism as well as Armenian paganism, so I feel no need to drop the holiday. Not to mention, I do have some Scottish, Irish and English in my background on my mother’s side. 

How to tie it in properly with Kemeticism, though? Kemetic Orthodoxy came up with “Moomas” as a replacement for Christmas/Yule based on the Ascension of the Celestial Cow (while Anpu and Wepwawet deliver presents to Kemetic kids around the world from a flying chariot pulled by jackals). I thought I might come up with a Kemetic, or better yet a Setian, Halloween. I call this holiday Magaween. 

—————

The story is based on the birth of Maga, the Son of Set (no relation to American right-wing nutjobs). To explain, Set, famously infertile, managed to impregnate Astarte and Anat using forbidden Heka from the Book of Thoth, after the botched attempt in the Story of the Seed Goddess. Astarte birthed the Ka, and Anat birthed the Ba, which came together into the crocodile netjer Maga. Maga was born knowing what injustice had befallen Set, and immediately escaped to exact revenge on Set’s enemies, against Set’s will. Maga has the power to cross through dimensions, and escaped to Duat, where Osiris was sailing in his underworld barge with His entourage, including the mysterious demon Medjed. Catching everyone by surprise, Maga lept out of the water and bit a chunk out of Osiris’ shoulder, disappearing into the inky black waters before anyone could retaliate. Osiris was rushed to Heliopolis and treated for His wounds. He declared that Maga must be killed on the spot if seen again, and tasked Medjed with this. That night as Osiris slept, Maga climbed through the window, and tried to finish Osiris off. He screamed, and Medjed breathed fire and shot light from His eyes at Maga, who retreated out the window and back into the celestial Nile. 

The next day, Horus, son of Osiris and Pharaoh of the Netjeru, was sailing the Nile with His entourge, spearing river animals for sport. Maga knew that Horus was also His father’s enemy, so he again leaped from the water and bit off part of Horus’ shoulder, disappearing before anyone could fight back. Now the Netjeru were on high alert, after the attack on Horus. Even Ra knew to be on the lookout for this dangerous menace. No one expected that this menace was the son of Set. 

Eventually news of the attacks reached Set’s oasis. Set and His consorts had been distraught at Maga’s disappearance, and unable to find Him anywhere else, Set knew and dreaded that he would have to descend into Duat, the realm of His brother, as this was the only clue they had about Maga’s whereabouts. Set went to Duat with his consorts Astarte, Anat, Nephthys, and Ash. The five of them encountered many obstacles, but Set and His consorts were all formidable opponents and made short work of the many demons They encountered, until they reached the Burning Pits of Duat, a large lake of fire, and were confronted by the shrouded figure of Medjed, also looking for Maga. Medjed was dressed in a white sheet with holes cut out for His eyes, His bare feet the only part of His body that was exposed. Despite this mysterious but somewhat comical appearance, Medjed was one of the most feared entities of the House of Osiris. His name means “the Smiter”. When Osiris threatened to send his minions to the mortal realm to terrorize the living if His son Horus was not put on the throne, He was talking about Medjed. Medjed knew that Set was enemy number one as far as Osiris was concerned, and was about to shoot light from His eyes and cut Set to pieces when Ash approached Medjed with a gift basket, filled with delicious offerings of bread, fruit, treats and wine. Medjed glared at this basket, and asked if this were some kind of trick, or was it a treat? Set and His consorts insisted it was a treat. Ash soothingly told Medjed that it was about time someone gave an offering to such a mighty and impressive netjer. Medjed never had a temple to Himself, only appearing once in the Book of Going Forth by Day, the humans barely knew who He was. So to receive offerings after so many centuries, even from another netjer, melted Medjed’s heart. 

Set explained that they were only there to retrieve His son Maga, that he meant no harm to Osiris and they would be on their way once Maga was found. He promised to discipline Maga and keep Him in the oasis where Set and His consorts made their home, beyond the Big Dipper and the Field of Reeds. Medjed agreed to help them, and after a long journey through Duat, they eventually found Maga. Medjed used His power of invisibility to startle Maga while Set snuck up from behind and wrestled His son into submission; a difficult feat. Set performed a powerful binding spell on Maga, so that Maga could not bite Him, and gaining Maga’s obedience, left back to His oasis with thanks to Medjed.  As a result the Netjeru banned Maga from leaving the oasis, and it was after this incident that Set became further villified and demonized, as most of the Netjeru believed Set had sent His son to attack Osiris and Horus on purpose. But, at least Set and His consorts finally had their son, handful that Maga was. 

Because of this story, we dress in disguises like Medjed, and anyone who is dressed up in costume should be offered treats, in honor of Medjed and of Ash, whose quick thinking and ability to calm and refresh anyone was able to pacifiy the mighty Medjed. 

80s Underground Vol. 4 ~ Experiments with Cassette J-Card Generators

 

I have been sick this past week. I think it might be bronchitis. I’m not diagnosed yet but I went by the color of what I’m coughing up (stop me if this is too much info, lol). It could also be pneumonia too. Woo hoo. I will be seeing a doctor hopefully today. It’s been a week of insomnia, fevers, headaches, and excruciating throat pain due to coughing up my lungs every few minutes. A little bug my son brought home with him from school; he bounced back after a couple days, fortunately, meanwhile a week later and I’m still like the walking dead.  Anyway, being in bed a lot, I’ve been focusing on my mixtape hobby. 

Someone in one of my cassette groups on Facebook was showing off a mixtape he did of obscure 80s music. I was thinking “wow, a kindred spirit, I already have three mixtapes like that”. He went the extra mile by generating a custom j-card, which for those not in the know is the name for those labels on the inside of a cassette case. I decided to be a copycat and make my fourth 80s Underground mixtape using his method. Of course, I’m going to have to wait a while to share it in any cassette groups so I don’t look like a complete copycat of that other person, even though I am. After a bit of searching and checking a few different websites out, I settled on this one. 

Here is the template of the website. You have to be careful switching tabs in your browser because it will lose all your hard work. Best thing to do is type the track listing out in a word document and then copy and paste it in. I looked through lots of pictures of 80s goths for the cover. The one I settled on is a portrait of Rozz Williams, singer of the band Christian Death. I made sure to include at least one song from the band to justify using it. As for the songs, they’re mostly selections from my YouTube playlist The 1980s in Music. I made sure not to pick anything that was already on the other three tapes. To fit the whole track listing on the cover I had to use a small font. The template seems like it was designed for short album cassettes that only have like ten songs, but you can make it work if you shrink the font down and forgo a few unnecessary additions like what type the cassette is. I can’t imagine using a tape any longer than 90 minutes though, unless you have a lot of long songs on there to bring the track listing down. Another thing to think about if you’re going to do this is that your playlist is going to be pretty much set in stone, you can’t decide to record over a song with another song or else you’ll screw up the J-card. With a normal J-card I don’t mind putting little sticker labels over my writing or white-out when I make an edit, but that wouldn’t work with this. You could just print out a whole new J-card, but that would be a pain. 

Hopefully you can already read the track listing on the cover, but since I still have it typed out I might as well copy and paste it here:

Side A

Fehlfarben - Paul Ist Tot

Dance Macabre - No Answers

The Pulse - Plastic Man

Donación Agnelli - Lo Antiguo

Pornografia - Electrownie Atomwe

The Klinik - Murder

Vomito Negro - Fire Burns

Blood and Roses - Enough is Never Enough 

Blood Fetish - Cause Mistress

Fear Condition - Black and White

Smirnov - Savé

Side B

SigloXX - Sister Suicide

Christian Death - Deathwish

Altar Ego - Altar Ego

Threshold - I Want You

Vivabeat - Working for William

Voodoo Church - Egypt

Lost Loved Ones - The Dark

Magnum - Sacred Hour

A Scanner Darkly - Cigarette in the Rain

XDavis - Window to the World

Kill the Messenger - This is America

Sculpteurs D’Ombres - L’Ange Noir

A nice mix of post-punk, new wave, early industrial, and a little bit of metal. Here is how the spine came out:

It even let me add Armenian letters. Unicode hieroglyphs work too, I tested it out but I didn’t print the results. That opens up lots of possibilities. You can change the text and background colors too. One of these times I’ll use a black background with red letters. But white worked better with this particular photo. 

Here’s the whole happy family, 80s Underground Volumes 1-4:

 

I will have to marathon these tapes again. Plenty of time for that when I have bronchitis and can’t do much of anything else. I’ll be making some even prettier J-cards once I really get the hang of it. But I don’t think I want to do it for every single mixtape, just special themed ones like this. 

 

My Top Songs of the Last Year ~ Սուրենի Երգերը 4516 (Suren's Songs 2023-2024)

I have long neglected my monthly Top Songs of the Month blogs, I know. But for a long time I didn’t even have the creative drive to work on my webcomic, which tends to be my first creative priority. I think that happens to writers sometimes, the well just runs dry. Anyway, why don’t I just fill everyone in on what I’ve been listening to these past 12 months? This is my most recently completed Year Tape, to which as I explained in the previous blog post, I add two songs a month to throughout the year, and any extra space at the end of the tape gets the best of the #3 spots. Doing this on a two hour tape allots me ten minutes a month maximum, but your average song is about four minutes long give or take so there’s usually some extra space.

 So many songs I had to use the back of the J-card.

For the convenience of whoever is reading this, I’ll break it down by the Gregorian calendar, even though I did the whole tape by the ancient Armenian calendar. I’ll try to say a little something about each track, and link to it on YouTube (I don’t want to try to embed that many videos). If you follow the links and find yourself liking any if the music please consider supporting the artist and purchasing their music. Might be hard with some of the older tracks. 

Side A

August

• Sin Razón Zoocial - Crucifixion - Some insane Mexican post-punk from 1990. The singer goes crazy later on in the song and shrieks like Judge Doom from Who Framed Roger Rabbit when he’s melting due to the Dip. Specific reference, I know.

• Allie Frost - Abandoned Ghost - An eerie song about death. The whisper at the beginning talking about how ghosts are souls that didn’t walk into the light after death is particularly jarring.

September

• Trait d’Union - Marche Nocturne - I love how this song just builds and builds. I almost didn’t like it at first but I’m glad I stuck around. It’s like a brewing storm.

• Mannequin Twin - Threshold -  This song carries a lot of passion as well as darkness and melancholy, which came along at the right time for me last September. 

October

• Cashiari - Oscura Noche - This song came around just in time for Halloween for me, such a haunting and spooky track. Cashiari is a band out of Peru, and they make lovely music like this along with some artistic and macabre animated music videos.

• Blurpz - Escape - “Cuts me like a kniiife.” A very moody post-punk track from 1983. At this point in the year I was dealing with a lot of emotions and moodiness, that this song was perfect for. It’s a beautiful and underrated song.

November 

• Rob Zombie - Phantom Stranger (slowed + reverb) - This one was kind of a passing fad I guess. I liked Rob Zombie back in my early teens, but only his first two albums really, before he, much like the pro-wrestler The Undertaker with a similar undead gimmick, became a patriotic redneck zombie biker, and started to suck. I just thought the intro to this song sounded so badass being given the “slowed + reverb” treatment.

• Slow Danse with the Dead - Are You Tortured? - This song should have been #1 in November, history has vindicated it. Slow Danse with the Dead is still one of my favorite still-active bands, and made a few appearances on this tape. In this song SDWTD captures their signature “misery goth” style. Sometimes the answer to their question is yes. 

December 

• FEVR - I’ve Had Enough - A breakup song that I fortunately don’t relate to on a personal level, but it has this cold and dreary melancholy sound to it that was perfect for December. Some great seasonal depression vibes. 

• Conjunto Vacío - San Benito - Some dark Mexican post-punk from 2022, carries kind of a similar energy as the previous song. Very wintery. It’s in Spanish, which I don’t speak, but I just listen to the sound of the song.

January 

• Tout Debord - Les Gens Sont Les Gens - Okay, I mostly liked this song because of the cute little “beep, beepbeepbeep boop, beepbeepbeep boop” sounds throughout. It just amused me, and got stuck in my head for days. 

• Flue - Sometimes - A 1983 post-punk track with vaguely Middle Eastern influences. I couldn’t pass that up. The band Flue was from Holland though. Actual goth bands from the Middle East are sadly pretty rare. If only this song had started a new sub-genre. 

February 

• Obsidian - Night Director - I saw this band live in Tampa a couple years ago opening for Twin Tribes, and they seem to be doing just fine, I liked this track even better than the songs on their previous album. They have been improving.

• Metawave - Ausencia - Oh goody, another Middle Eastern-sounding goth song. It sounds more authentically Middle Eastern than Flue, although the band is “Franco-Portugese”. It’s a song about how fleeting life is apparently. But very dancey regardless. Great for goth bellydancing. And that ends Side A. Made it over half the year on one side; that means a whole extra ten minutes to spare, and bonus tracks!

Side B

March

• Tango Mangalore - Re-Vamp - This little-known band fronted by a Greek fisherman who sings about how much he craves the sea and hates living on land released a new album early this year and it was great. This is the title track off the album. It’s about, of course, craving the sea and hating living on land.

• Scary Black - The Fallacy of Worth - A therapeutic goth song with a positive message. “Don’t believe them if they say you’re not worthy.” I have wrestled with the fallacy of worth myself in the past. Don’t let your self-worth be determined by the opinions of others, or by capitalism or religion or what have you. Word on the street is Scary Black is going to have a new album soon, which I look forward to. This was released as a single by itself, it could end up on the new album.

April

• Kalte Nacht - The Last Breath - I had been waiting for this band to come back since 2020. Their new album was a blast, as expected, and this was the lead single from it which got a music video. A very dancey track that makes for a great intro track.

• Tango Mangalore - Thelema - Another song from their Re-Vamp album. Apparently an anti-Aleister Crowley song, but I didn’t really pay much attention to the lyrics, it’s just catchy. 

May

• Mekong - Danse Danse - This is just one of the prettiest post-punk songs I’ve ever heard. All the little guitar riffs here and there accenting the song. It even uses the cool spelling for “dance”. Mekong’s other songs on the album don’t quite sound like this, tracks like “Picture of Wrong” on the same album are a bit comical. But I love this song. I would show this to someone who didn’t know what post-punk was, alongside early The Cure.

• Slow Danse with the Dead - The Hermit - I was shocked that Slow Danse with the Dead decided to write a song about my life. Pretty much every word in the lyrics could be about me. I mean I’m a hermit that somehow managed to get a wife and son, but still a hermit at heart. My bedroom is the safest place to be. 

June

• Dead on a Sunday - Dammit (After Dark) - This is a goth cover of the song “Dammit” by Blink 182, apparently to the somewhat similar tune of “After Dark” by Mr. Kitty. I am less familiar with the latter song, and Blink 182 was never one of my favorite bands, but I did hear them on the radio a lot back in the late 90s. I knew well the song “Dammit”, or as I probably would have called it, “I Guess This is Growing Up”. It’s a catchy, upbeat, happy pop-punk song that captures the spirit and energy of youth, while perhaps having some melancholy lyrics which you wouldn’t notice unless you were really listening, but it was never really my type of song. It never even made it onto my old mixtapes at the time. But this version. Wow. Suddenly the “I guess this is growing up” chorus feels like it’s being said from the point of view of a jaded 30-something adult who has had all the dreams of their youth beaten out of them, has to work a soul-crushing 40 hour a week job to barely scrape by, has no free time and lost most of their friends. I can’t help but feel both versions of the song capture the spirit of the Millennial generation at two different stages in their lives, even if the original song isn’t my cup of tea.

• Slow Danse with the Dead - Today is a Good Day to Die - I was thinking perhaps “The Hermit” would be the best song of the year by Slow Danse with the Dead, but I was mistaken. This song here has such badass energy. It’s almost a metal song, insofar as it’s the first time we hear a metal-growl from the lead singer Johnny Montoya during the chorus. And I wonder if the corridor in this song is the same corridor mentioned in their song “Strangers in the Dark”. Is there a lore I should be following? Anyway, now that SDWTD is an official band rather than a solo-project we are getting a different sound out of them, a little heavier sometimes but more polished.

July

• Vomito Negro - Bone Cutter - I went on a binge of the extensive discography of Vomito Negro (“Black Vomit” in Spanish, before you ask) this summer and found a lot of great tracks I had been sleeping on previously. Vomito Negro has been around since the late 1980s, one of the pioneering industrial bands. This song in particular is off their 2017 album, Black Plague. It’s very catchy. 

• Cashiari - Sombrio Reflejo - A song I had overlooked previously from the Peruvian goth band. It has their typical spooky sound and haunting, whispering vocals. Then about a minute and a half in the tone shifts a bit, becoming slightly heavier but not by a whole lot. It’s a darkly psychedelic song like most of their work.

Bonus Tracks

• Vivabeat - Working for William - The #3 song for June. No idea who William is but this song is super catchy and was stuck in my head for like two weeks. It’s a New Wave track from 1980 that I discovered while building my 1980s playlist. I always have a hard time finding good music from the year 1980 because disco wasn’t dead yet and there wasn’t much goth music, so I get excited when I hear a song I like from that year.

• Vomito Negro - Chicago Cave - From their 1989 album Shock. I am unaware of any caves in Chicago, and have no idea what the song is about, but it’s so catchy, and I love joining in with the singer and singing “the Cave, the Cay-yave” in a Cookie Monster voice during the chorus.

• Nemuer - The Gates of Duat - This song got robbed of the #1 and #2 spot because it was September and there was heavy competition. Nemuer is a pagan folk band that up until now mostly did Norse pagan stuff but decided to do an album based on the Egyptian Book of the Dead in reconstructed ancient Egyptian language. The results are incredibly badass, I definitely recommend giving it a listen. It had its fair share of detractors but they’re just jelly (I specifically remember one comment saying “this is what happens when goths watch too much National Geographic”, which was cruel but also admittedly funny). The music video for this song is awesome too.

• Have a Nice Life - Bloodhail - And this song got robbed in October because of Cashiari and Blurpz. Have a Nice Life is pretty famous in some internet circles but I only recently listened to their 2008 album Death Consciousness, which is a modern classic but very depressing. It’s kind of post-punk mixed with shoegaze and maybe even some emo, but tolerable emo at least. This was my favorite song of theirs. It’s very emotionally deep. 

• Glis ft. Ayria - Dream Chaser - Ayria came back! Or rather, Jennifer Parkin did guest vocals on this song by Glis. It was good to hear from her again, probably my favorite song I’ve heard from her in a long time, hopefully another new album is forthcoming. 

Anyway, what a year it has been! And at least my list won’t get crowded out with everyone else’s year-end music lists in December. Maybe I’ll write some more about music, even do monthly blogs again. Let’s just see if I can get ahead on that webcomic. I guess the trick to these music blogs is to work on them little by little so it isn’t such a daunting task. Anyway, hopefully someone discovered some new music thanks to my little mixtape here. 

And you know what, because I’m feeling generous, here are the first two songs on this year’s tape!

August 2024/Նավասարդ 4517

• dreDDup - Garden of Dead Friends - dreDDup is a Serbian industrial band I have been getting into lately, been around since 1997 and still making music. This song came out in 2011, but all their music is new to me at this point. It’s a very spooky tune, I love the melodies in it, very unique. The climax at the end of the song is awesome too. 

• Damien Hearse - Negative Mental Attitude - Damien Hearse is a darkwave/industrial band from Florida, and I can feel like I can tell, because he sings about very relevant current political topics (“Pro Life Death Camp” is one such song, about the repeal of Roe vs Wade). This song is about how you could technically give into your darkest desires (stabbing your landlord in the neck, strangling a senator and dousing them with gasoline to light them on fire), like it’s always an option, there are just severe consequences. It’s a strangely motivational song. Don’t worry I’m not going to do it