Top 3 Songs of the Month – January 2020/Արաց 4512

It’s the beginning of the month of Արաց (Arats) by the old Armenian calendar.  Everyone’s recovering from their holiday hangover and it’s back to business as usual; as a result, it’s a dismal time of the year for a lot of people. But for those of us stuck in Florida, it’s one of only maybe four months out of the year where you can walk outside and not need a shower every time you come back in because the humidity reduces you to a sweaty, swampy mess. And it actually cools down at night. So, I’m trying to enjoy it while I can.

I have been just drowning in new music lately, between a 30-track compilation album I purchased this week and all of the weekly podcasts I listen to. Every time I get new music off Bandcamp or something and don't buy a physical copy, I burn the MP3s onto blank CD's, because I like to listen to it in the car or on my boom box (I guess I'm probably what the youngsters would consider a hipster too). I haven't even listened to all the CD's I've burned in the last month. I don’t have enough time to focus on all of it. I know, first world problems. It’s like complaining that your refrigerator is too full. I think I may need to just take a break from listening to new music and focus on what I have for a while. As of now, here are the top three songs that are powering me through the weather-roulette that is Florida winter.

Click here for an explanation of my tradition of keeping track of my top 3 songs each month, and last month’s picks.

[:SITD:] – Revelation (Solitary Experiments Mix)

 

For the first time in a long time, I finally found a song where I like the remix better than the original track. [:SITD:] (short for Shadows in the Dark) is a band I’ve been into for a couple years, and have become my favorite active German industrial band, perhaps in part because I’ve been waiting for a new album from Das Ich since 2006, but I enjoy this band on its own merits too. [:SITD:], which has been around since the early 2000’s (and I wish I’d heard of them a lot sooner than I did) released this just last month. “Dunkelziffer” and “Genesis” are two other favorite [:SITD:] songs of mine, but both of those are fast-paced and danceable, while this track is slower and introspective, more like something to meditate to. Maybe I’m getting a bit of a one-track mind lately when it comes to space, but this song makes me think about space, and the universe. The music has an emotion behind it that I can relate to right now as well. It’s music for a dark winter when the nights are long. Lyrically, it’s a pretty sad song. Take this bit for example:

I break my silence
To tell the truth
I curse the darkness
Where is my youth?

My will is fading
My hands are cold
My skin is hardened
I feel so old

Change “curse” to “love”, and maybe I can get behind that feeling, at times. “I dwell in darkness” might have worked too. But that's just if I were writing this. I wonder if I’ll come back to this song in 20 years and relate to it even more. To be honest I haven’t been paying much attention to the lyrics when I listen to this song, it’s the music that I get lost in.

 The original track is good too, but this remix just takes it to another level. Maybe I ought to give Solitary Experiments more of a listen.

https://infactedrecordings.bandcamp.com/album/requiem-x

Grey Gallows – Enemy

Grey Gallows is an emerging darkwave band from Greece. This track is off their album Shades, released in October. A few days ago, I went ahead and purchased a 30-song compilation album put out by the Obscura Undead collective called UnObscured Vol. 1 2019, collecting some of the best dark alternative music from 2019. I really hadn’t heard the vast majority of the 30 songs before, despite being (I thought) pretty up-to-date on the music scene, but that just makes it more worth the money. Its name your own price too. I haven’t had time yet to even listen to the whole thing (ah, parenthood) but I have liked what I’ve heard, and this song is one I’m probably going to be listening to a lot in the coming weeks. Best to take my time with an album this long.

Buy the album here: https://obscuraundead.bandcamp.com/album/unobscured-vol-1-comp-1-2019?fbclid=IwAR0rXQnBcdT4O7C4TfUoSO-iTyw2b1dOE_guPVY3SQuHDTv0E5Ss_rPCq6k

https://greygallowsgreece.bandcamp.com/album/shades

Scary Black – Stay in Your Lane

The perfect song for a Florida goth, where you have to deal with so many aggressive drivers on the road. But this song doesn’t really sound like a road rage anthem. It just reminds me of being on a long road trip at night, and you’ve been cut off, tail-gated and break-checked so many times; you’re just so utterly fed up that you’re numb to it, and you want everyone to just stay in their own lane and mind their own business. Scary Black is a pretty new band from Kentucky; someplace you wouldn’t really expect this type of music to come from. Wonder what the goth scene is like over there. I always figured everyone in Kentucky listened to country music or bluegrass, but Scary Black makes me face the prospect that my preconceived notions, shaped by growing up in California where people tend to turn their noses up at the southern US, are dead wrong. Scary Black sounds like they could be from Europe. I first heard of Scary Black back in September when I found the video to the song “Eat the World, Kill them All, Scalp Them With a Knife” (can’t ignore a title like that) and have been following them ever since.

https://scaryblackssr.bandcamp.com/

Honorable Mention: Essenger – After Dark

I think I’ll make these honorable mentions a regular thing. There’s always more than three songs I’m into. This one could have easily been on the list too as I like it quite a lot. Some darker synthwave. See, I listen to other genres. I like how the music video is a neon city, capturing the whole synthwave/retrowave aesthetic, which is essentially whatever people in the 1980’s thought the future would look like.

https://www.facebook.com/EssengerMusic

Mixtape Reflections: Naqoyqatsi: Life As War

           

It was early April 2016, when Azeri forces instigated a blitzkrieg against the unsuspecting border villages in the Republic of Artsakh. I had just been in Artsakh less than a year earlier. I had met people who lost family in their war for independence in the early 1990’s; I had been to their war museums, I had even been taken up to the trenches at the ceasefire line. Even though I was in the US at the time, this brief four-day war shook me to the very core. I had to take time away from social media as it became bombarded with graphic images. The US media tends to censor gore out of their news coverage, but Armenia does no such thing. The image of an elderly couple, slaughtered in their homes in their sleep after Azeri soldiers snuck into their home in the middle of the night, is forever etched into my psyche. And I did what I often do when I need a coping mechanism. I made a mixtape, this time about the horrors of war. And now, with the United States invading Iran, I felt like returning to this tape. It’s not a mixtape I listen to often, but it is there when I need it. I am troubled by the prospect of war with Iran for many reasons. I bear no ill will to Iran or its people, and believe the United States is the definite aggressor, working at the behest of its allies. And I detest war. There’s never a good reason for it. Self-defense, maybe, but then there’s no good reason for the aggressor to be attacking.

Naqoyqatsi is a Hopi word meaning “Life as War”; or in one interpretation, “civilized violence”. I guess one way you could interpret it is war or violence becoming routine. I don’t speak Hopi, so I can’t really say for sure. The name came to me after watching the Qatsi trilogy of films, which mainly consist of stock footage and images paired with orchestrations by Phillip Glass, focusing on some aspect of human society. Koyaanisqatsi, the first and most famous, is my favorite of them. Naqoyqatsi was the third and final film in the series, and you can read about it on Wikipedia if you like. The opening track to the mixtape is of course the theme song of that film. Listening to the orchestration gives you a mourning feeling, and a feeling of horror. The energy of war. 

Next, we have the two opening tracks from Hanzel und Gretyl’s 2003 album Uber Alles. I feel the need to stress this to those who give these tracks a listen: I don’t think the band Hanzel und Gretyl are neo-nazis; they’ve gone on the record stating that their music is a form of satire. But they’re still banned in Germany, perhaps because there are those might take their music non-ironically. I understand if someone has misgivings about their music. My own great-grandfather, a Jew living in Austria under Nazi rule, was shot and killed when he failed to pass their Aryan tests, and my grandfather Suren spent much of World War II as a prisoner of the Germans. These are blog posts for another time. These tracks to me symbolize the way governments beat the war drums and whip their citizens into a frenzy for war with propaganda. It’s the same in any country on Earth. Think about the techniques Germany used to prepare its citizens for World War II. How many of these techniques have you seen other countries use on their citizens? How many are being used right now?

From there we go to Voltaire’s song “Crusade”, in which a brave knight is radicalized into thinking dragons are evil, and he goes to slay one, only to find that the dragon was a mother protecting her young. Years later, his son is radicalized into believing that Muslims are evil and he wants to join the crusades; the father warns him to know his enemy. The song is about humanizing the so-called “enemy”, and its lesson is an important one. We’re all human beings. We are one. Why do we kill one another? Because we make the enemy into an “other”. We demonize and dehumanize them.

Rage Against the Machine’s “Darkness of Greed” speaks for itself mainly. Wars and genocides are committed by the rich to satisfy their greed. The poor are sent to their deaths so that the rich can fill their pockets. Genocide and war often go hand-in-hand. And they’re both caused by greed. As an Armenian, I know this only too well.  I’ve known this song for a long time, and I always felt a connection to it.

Next is System of a Down’s “Soldier Side”. They’re going to be on this tape a lot. A song from the soldier’s point of view, and that of their mothers watching them go off to war. Watching your friends die, the black hand of death always looming. “They were crying when their sons left, God is wearing black. He’s gone so far to find no hope, he’s never coming back.”

Voltaire returns to the tape with “Accordion Player”. It’s because lyrically I find it relates to both the previous and the next song. This song is actually a cover of a song by the somewhat lesser-known Julia Marcell. Both versions are good, but I chose this one for the bomb sound effects at the end of the song. It’s about an accordion player who didn’t want to be drafted into the war. He wanted to keep playing his songs. “Oh mother, I could die a hero, and bring glory to your home. But what would you do in a house full of glory if you had to live there alone?” What really gets me is when I was in Artsakh, I stayed in the home of a mother who lived alone in a house full of glory; her husband and son had fought against Azerbaijan in the early 1990’s. I’ll do an in-depth blog entry about my time in Artsakh at a later date. But this song really encapsulates my feelings on war.

The sounds of bombs and gunfire at the end of “Accordion Player” bleeds into Metallica’s “One”, a song which begins with sounds of war. Probably the most well-known song on the tape so far. This song was inspired by the book Johnny Got His Gun by Dolton Trumbo, a book about a soldier in World War One who had all of his limbs, his eyes, his lower jaw and his nose blown off by a bomb, leaving him blind and deaf, being kept alive in a hospital and wanting nothing more than to die. The insanity and horror of war. If everyone read this book there’s be a lot more anti-war sentiment in the world, let me tell you.

And One’s “Unter Meiner Uniform” (Under My Uniform) is in the same vein as the previous songs. The line that strikes me most translates to “Under my uniform, we can only die once.” I remember having this song in my head when I visited the Fallen Soldiers Museum in Stepanakert, Artsakh. The walls covered with portraits of fallen soldiers, old uniforms. A shrine to those who needlessly died; a war of self-defense on their part. The reasons behind any war, no matter which side is in the right or the wrong, who was the aggressor and who was the defender, do not change the costs much at all.

The faces of war.

Cradle of Filth’s “Sleepless”, a cover of a song by Anathema, captures the raw anger and despair behind those who suffer because of war in a way only black metal really can. “Surely without war, there would be no loss, hence no mourning, no grief, no pain, no misery. No sleepless nights missing the dead.”

Me at the monument to Sardarapat

Side B starts with the song “Sardarapat”, an Armenian anthem to the battle of Sardarapat in 1918. My own great uncle fought and died in this battle, in which the Turkish army attempted to invade Armenia and destroy the country once and for all. However, the Armenians were victorious, and declared their independence after pushing back the Turkish aggressors, ensuring that today there is still an Armenia on the map. Once again though, I put this song here not to glorify war. As glad as I am that the battle of Sardarapat turned out victorious for Armenia, it should never have happened in the first place. My great-uncle could have survived. Instead, my grandfather grew up an orphan. He was around 13 years old, with no living immediate family save for a sister; his father died sometime before of typhoid fever I believe, and the story is that his mother died of fright when she learned the Turks were invading the area they lived. War has cast a long, dark shadow on my family. Did you know psychological trauma can be inherited and passed down the generations? Explains a lot of these blog entries.

System of a Down’s song “War?” is a song I’ve actually already talked about on this blog, and appears on the mixtape for obvious reasons. Marilyn Manson’s “Cruci-Fiction in Space”, I believe, illustrates what drives humanity to the practice of war. “This is evolution: the monkey, the man, and the gun.” Is the gun the end result of our evolution, when we inevitably cause our own extinction with it? Time will tell. The next song, “Jihad” by The Kovenant”, is on the mixtape to represent religious wars of all sorts. Merely another justification for war put forth by the rich who profit from it. Killing is easier when God says it’s alright.

Ayria’s ”Friends and Enemies” is another song I’ve spoken of on this blog before. It makes me think about human nature, of what drives humanity to create “enemies”, of pacifism versus violence. Are people your enemies, or is it the philosophy they follow that is the enemy? Is it ever okay to retaliate? System of a Down’s “B.Y.O.B.” (Bring your own Bomb) poses the question “Why don’t presidents fight the war? Why do we always send the poor?” The answer to that of course is obvious, but the question is something more people need to ask themselves. You’re not going to see Trump or any of his family at the frontlines in Iran, that’s for sure. No, it’s going to be the poor and the young, who joined the military because health insurance and college are kept expensive by the powers that be; done in lieu of the draft because that seems to make the masses too angry for some odd reason.

And One’s “Steine sind Steine” is about the endless colonialism engaged in by the higher powers. The same patterns followed throughout history. Translated lyrics include “first comes gold, then comes the world”, “first comes pride, then comes your land”. People are too historically illiterate to see the patterns. And they’re kept that way on purpose. If you’re over twenty years old you’ve already seen this play out in your lifetime with the farce that was the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, I don’t get why these idiotic armchair warriors who are actually for the invasion of Iran continue to be fooled.

Covenant’s “The Dark Conquest” is yet another song I’ve talked about on this blog before. A song about a dark lust for power, from the point of view of an overlord that has conquered an empire and left ruin in his wake. The album In Times Before the Light is mainly dark fantasy, but fantasy is always a reflection of reality. This song would be on the playlists of many tyrannical warlords throughout history, if they had playlists.

With the tape wrapping up, we return to Hanzel und Gretyl with the song “Auf Wiedersehen”. A song about ruin befalling a country on the losing side of a war, its pride in tatters, sounds of bombs falling in the background. Like Germany in 1945, and so many other countries throughout time. And the last song is by The Kovenant. ”Industrial Twilight”, is a song about nuclear apocalypse. Which of course, is the end game when it comes to war. It’s how this is all going to end up if we don’t put a stop to it. We’re only one world war away. “In nuclear war, all men will be cremated equal.”

At the end of the day, there’s nothing I can do about war beyond writing about it, and making mixtapes that only I am ever going to listen to. And, even though I hate that it’s happening, it really doesn’t affect my personal life beyond perhaps gas prices, at least until the nukes start flying. I think I’m too old to be drafted, should it ever come to that. I’d probably be a poor fit for the military anyway. Yet it depresses me anyway. I’m too empathetic for my own good. But I can only control what I can control. I can take care of my wife and kid (and hope there’s not a war going on when he’s 18), and I can work on my novels. Anything else is beyond my control.

There are more songs I could have put on the mix, but the tape was only 90 minutes. Fortunately and somewhat surprisingly, I was able to find all of these songs on Spotify (although “Unter Meiner Uniform”, even though I found it, wasn’t playing for some weird reason, so I‘ll link that to YouTube), so now all of you can listen to the mix too. Go ahead and give it a listen, if you feel in the mood for a playlist with anti-war sentiment.

Naqoyqatsi:Life As War – Spotify Playlist   

Side A

Phillip Glass – Naqoyqatsi

Hanzel und Gretyl – Overture

Hanzel und Gretyl – Third Reich from the Sun

Voltaire – Crusade

Rage Against the Machine – Darkness of Greed

System of a Down – Soldier Side

Voltaire – Accordion Player

Metallica – One

And One – Unter Meiner Uniform

Cradle of Filth – Sleepless

Side B

Sardarapat

System of a Down – War?

Marilyn Manson – Cruci – Fiction in Space

The Kovenant – Jihad

Ayria – Friends and Enemies

System of a Down – B.Y.O.B.

And One – Steine sind Steine

Covenant – The Dark Conquest

Hanzel und Gretyl – Auf Wiedersehen

The Kovenant – Industrial Twilight

And yes I've been doing a lot of mixtape reflections as of late. I want my next blog entry to be about something else, but I don't have a topic yet. But I love talking about music, and have over 200 mixtapes from nearly 21 years of making them, so that's always going to be a common topic on this blog. So yes. Stay tuned.

Mixtape Reflections: Nightwalk

            “In my age, as in my youth, night brings me many a deep remorse. I realize that from the cradle up I have been like the rest of the race – never quite sane in the night.” – Mark Twain

I think about this quote from Mark Twain’s autobiography quite often. I first came to hear it in the claymation film The Adventures of Mark Twain, which everyone should see, by the way. None of us are quite sane in the night. You’re not the same person at 10am that you are at 10pm. You’re not of the same mind. Not quite.

Nightwalk is my most recent mixtape to date, made in mid-November 2019 at the beginning of the month of Տրե (Tre) on the ancient Armenian calendar. I’ll be making some new ones soon. I do these bimonthly, except on special occasions. I made this mixtape shortly before starting this blog. For context as to what was going on in my life when I recorded this (because that always influences my mixtapes, even if only subtly), the seasons were changing, the world darkening, the depression catching up to me and causing me insomnia. I was between jobs again. I felt lost. A couple weeks later that would motivate me to start blogging; to write and do what I want. It has helped.

I made this mix during a restless night, on a 90-minute tape. It is very conceptual. There’s a story behind this tape. Picture being unable to sleep, being kept up by dark and unhappy thoughts, regrets from the day that just passed, and deciding to just get up, go out the front door and go for a walk in the middle of the night, just to clear your head. The moon and stars are overhead, the only light shining down in this dark world. The starlight traveled hundreds of lightyears to reach this speck of a planet, and your eyes. There is beauty in the darkness. A kind of comfort. You breathe the cold night air, pick a direction, and just walk through the abandoned neighborhood, no cars on the roads, everyone’s asleep, leaving you alone with your thoughts. Each song is another set of thoughts that occupy your mind for a period. The songs on Side A kind of start you the journey into the night. The two songs bridging Side A and Side B are instrumentals that make me think of staring up at the night sky into the stars, and contemplating your place in the universe. If it had a music video, it should be a series of photographs from the Hubble Space Telescope. After that we have songs about dark thoughts, and then restlessness (Silent Em’s “No Rest” being the fastest song on the tape). The last song, Fornicata’s “Daylight”, symbolizes dawn; that moment when you’ve had insomnia for so long you start to see light through the curtains or blinds on your window, and you realize you now have to get through the day on very little sleep. The nightwalk is over, time to return home.

This is the part of the blog where I usually share my playlist and at least attempt to recreate the mixtape on Spotify. A lot of these songs are not only fairly new, but obscure too. Even though I actually found the likes of Mindless Faith and Lovataraxx on Spotify, they didn’t have their newest releases. I wasn’t able to even find the title track for the tape, ”Nightwalk” by Frail. Alas, Spotify has failed me in trying to put together a playlist based on this tape. I’ll probably always have an easier time replicating my old mixtapes on there from back when I listened to more popular music off the radio. These new ones are going to be difficult. Sigh. They had 14 out of 22 songs though. I’ll link to the missing tracks on YouTube.

 And by the way, I could no longer find “In Every Face” by Brigade Rosse even on YouTube. Me and my niche tastes. Just go support them on Bandcamp (support all the artists if you can), if anyone is really serious about recreating this mix. I doubt anybody is, but ah well.

Nightwalk– Spotify Playlist

Side A

Frail –Nightwalk

Mindless Faith – Moth Without a Moon

Lovataraxx– Rekon

Buzz Kull – Avoiding the Light

SYZYGYX – Velvet lips

Silent EM – Machine

Wonder Dark – Mirror of Life

Antipole – Closer

Diary of Dreams – The Plague

Assemblage 23 – Binary

CMD094 – Phase I

Side B

Arel –No Way

Drab Majesty – 39 By Design

Minuit Machine – Black is my Anger

SYZYGYX – Ultra Doll

Silent EM – No Rest

Lebanon Hanover – Du Scrollst

Twin Tribes – Fantasmas

Brigade Rosse – In Every Face

Tearful Moon – Anxiety

Hørd – No Eyes For

Fornicata- Daylight

My Top Picks From Public Domain Day!

                Hey you, yes you! Did you know that you are now the proud owner of all of the intellectual property from 1924? And so am I. And so is your next-door neighbor. And so is your ex from ten years ago. And so is that bully that used to give you wedgies back in 7^th grade. (We mustn’t dwell upon them though, it’s been a long time and you should get over it.) Yes, Disney has allowed another year to slip through the cracks, so unless you live outside the United States and in a country with actual sane copyright laws where everything from 1924 went public domain decades ago, we’ve all finally got 1924 to work with. I don’t know how many more years Disney is going to allow this to go on. They’re obviously biding their time and playing a long game. Expect them to do something before Steamboat Willie gets on the copyright chopping block. Let’s just enjoy this while it lasts. And you should be enjoying this stuff. Take it. It’s yours. It’s ours. The big corporations don’t want us watching, reading, and enjoying this stuff. And they assume that we won’t, as long as they keep us distracted with their shiny new stuff. Don’t fall for it. And when The Man tries to stop anything from entering the public domain again, to take ownership for themselves our collective culture and heritage, fight them on it. Fight for your rights!

There’s a lot of books, movies, songs and art from 1924 I’ve never even heard of, but I plan on checking things out. I’ll tell you a few of the things I’m excited and proud to own the rights to now. And remember, you own them too!

Grampa in Oz by Ruth Plumly Thompson

            Oh goody, another Oz book! I get to be as excited as kids of the 1920’s, waiting for a new Oz book to come out every year. Except I’m too cheap/poor to actually pay money for something that I’m going to be able to get for free soon, so unlike those Roaring 20’s kids I’m waiting for the books to fall into the public domain one by one so I can catch them on Gutenberg.org. One day when I have enough money to throw around, I’ll get physical copies, I promise. Last year we got The Cowardly Lion of Oz. I plan on reviewing it eventually, but let’s just say I found it to be kind of like a bizarre fever dream. It had its moments, but I didn’t like that clown protagonist much. So, what’s this book going to be about? Someone’s grandfather ending up in Oz? Apparently not. You can read the summary on Wikipedia or the Oz Fandom Wiki. Sounds like another book where Thompson really wished she were writing her own original books, but since writing Oz books was the only gig she could get, she just shoehorned her story into Oz by introducing yet another previously-unmentioned micro-kingdom. To be fair, L. Frank Baum started doing this first (look at Rinkitink in Oz and The Scarecrow of Oz), so you can’t really fault Thompson for doing it too. Even though I’m working on my own Oz book (because public domain is so wonderful) it would be horrifying if those were the only books I was ever going to be allowed to write for the foreseeable future, since I’ve got my own original stories I want to eventually publish. From a writer's point of view, I understand why Thompson does this, and why Baum did it too. But Thompson usually does her best work when she’s using her own original characters, so maybe it’ll be one of her good ones. I haven't heard great things about this book from the Oz fans, but let me read and judge it for myself. Plus, we’re getting some John R. Neill illustrations as part of the deal that are going to be new to me, and are guaranteed to be good. Those are always the highlights and lighten up even the less-good Oz books.

            So, I wonder how on top of things people are going to be over at Gutenberg.org this year. I still had to wait about a month last year for The Cowardly Lion of Oz to get posted there. I don’t see that it’s been added yet, but it’s only January 1^st. I just thought whoever posts up Oz ebooks on Gutenberg would have gotten the PDF ready ahead of time this year. I’ll have to keep checking.

The Dream by H.G. Wells

            I need to brush up on H.G. Wells, so I’ll probably be checking this book out when it goes up on Gutenberg, if I remind myself to do it. If I leave it in this blog, I’ll remember. I read The Time Machine and War of the Worlds when I was a kid, and found them very fascinating. This book deals with someone from a future Utopia dreaming of living in Victorian England, and apparently going back in time to do so. The grass is always greener, hm? I wonder if this visitor from the future discovers that the past isn’t all its cracked up to be. It’s probably going to be one of those stories. Although it’s been done since, this book would have been one of the first to have such a plotline I’d imagine. It sounds interesting to me.

Girl Shy and Hot Water, both starring Harold Lloyd

Yes! Harold Lloyd! I love his movies! He’s the hapless, somewhat nerdy everyman we can all identify with. I’m hoping my local historic theater, the Historic Cocoa Village Playhouse, will show these and other silent films now that they don’t have to pay anybody for them. That’s the true way to watch a silent film, in a theater with organ accompaniment. Something that should definitely be on your bucket list if you’ve never done that before.  Back when I lived in St. Petersburg, Florida, I went to the Tampa Theatre to watch Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last and had a great time. This was in the summer of 2018. But it’s just as well to put them on when you’re in the same room with someone who’s sleeping and it needs to be quiet, but you still want to watch something. This is when I usually put them on. When the wife and baby are asleep.

These have both been on YouTube for a while and I haven’t seen them yet, but now I’m going to set aside some time to do just that. I own them now by the way (and so does everyone) so it behooves me to do so. Funny how even though these just now entered the public domain these have been on YouTube for a few years, and no one bothered to take them down even though they were still copyrighted. Could it be that the mega-corporations that still own things from the 1920’s aren’t actually that bothered about protecting their copyright because old jazz music and silent films aren't very marketable or profitable (but they will still take you to court if you try to use it, just to make a few bucks), and this is why Disney and our other corporate overlords are allowing things to slip into the public domain for a few years until we get to the juicy stuff from the talkie era so that it at least looks like they’re throwing us a couple bones before they extend the copyright terms to forever and a day? Nah, I’m just being a crazy conspiracy theorist again, aren’t I?

The Navigator and Sherlock Jr., both starring Buster Keaton

 

I went on a Buster Keaton binge a few months ago actually, and wish I’d done it years ago. What a talented man. The only one who goes neck-to-neck with Charlie Chaplin and might actually have been better in a few ways. He does all his own insane stunts, so there’s that of course. I first saw Sherlock Jr. years ago on Turner Classic Movies, when I recorded it on a VHS tape for posterity, and I’ve watched it many times since. It’s one of my favorite silent movies, and now I own it. For some reason I thought it already was in the public domain. Well it’s been on YouTube for years, so it really might as well have been. And should have been. Now I can finally make that music video to Voltaire’s The Projectionist I’ve long wanted to make using clips from this movie. I just need video editing software, and Voltaire’s permission. Let’s work on getting the video editing software first (I do miss Windows Movie Maker). I need to see The Navigator again, by the way. I saw it once, many years ago. I’ve missed out on a lot of the longer silent films, I’ve realized. Whenever I’m in the mood for silent movies I tend to stick to shorts. Some of the longer ones I’m aware of I’ve watched maybe once if at all. But I’ll watch it. It’s on my YouTube playlist of silent films now.

Rhapsody in Blue

             

This is a nice relaxing song I’ve just now heard because I just checked it out while writing this blog. It’s a good piece of music. And it’s finally ours. I like to listen to jazz every now and again. I eagerly await someone to do a synthwave cover version now. Or a goth version. ”Rhapsody in Black”, mwahaha. Just listen to how old, crackly and grainy this recording sounds. It really shines a light on how ridiculously long copyright terms have gotten in the United States. My youngest grandparent, “Grandad” Dean Mann, was born in 1925, and he sadly passed in 2007. This is from the year before he was born and its finally just now public domain. For his entire life, and thirteen years later, this was copyrighted. Ridiculous. Oh finally, we get to own this little table scrap from the greedy billionaires. Thank you sir, may I have another? I think everything from at least before the 1960’s should be public domain by now. Maybe unless the creator is still alive and making a living on it. That’s how it would work in my world. Even that would be a compromise. Instead, movies where every actor, director, producer and staff member has long since died are owned by corporations that had nothing to do with creating the movie. Often times they just bought the rights from the corporation that actually funded it. Look at the 1939 adaptation of The Wizard of Oz for a prime example of that. Warner Bros. gets to go after people doing Oz adaptations for making the Wicked Witch of the West too green even though they had nothing to do with creating or even funding this 80-year-old movie.

Anyway, there’s a lot more where this came from. Quite a lot. Go ahead and look up all the literature, movies, songs and art from 1924. Wikipedia has lists. Go take what’s yours.

How I Spent New Year’s 2000

“A long December, and there’s reason to believe, maybe this year will be better than the last.”

New Years is a pointless holiday. It makes much more sense to celebrate the New Year during a Solstice or Equinox. For most pre-Christian cultures it was the Spring Equinox. January 1^st is a random date. There’s no real cosmic significance. You can make resolutions any time, why wait? So it follows, 2000 was nothing more than a number. I got swept up in the excitement at the time of New Year’s Eve 1999, but Nihilism and disillusionment have killed any chance of me getting as excited for 2020. I’m not even making a mixtape about it this time. I only pay attention to the Gregorian calendar out of necessity. I have to because everyone else in the society I find myself in is doing it. You can’t ever completely divorce yourself from it psychologically. One thing I will say for the holiday is it works as a time to reflect. I get caught up in that sometimes, like when it comes to cultural shorthand such as decade nostalgia. I guess that’s what I’m doing now by writing this blog entry. 

It’s now been twenty years since “the Year 2000”, or “Y2K”. I ranted enough about the passage of time in my blog about the music I listened to in the 2010’s, so I’ll save it. I’ll just say though, that it feels strange to have such clear memories of a night from twenty years ago. Twenty years used to seem a lot longer of a time to me ten years ago than it does now. The main reason my memories about that night are as good as they are is that they’re all tied in with the recordings I made that night, both on VHS and audio cassette. Perhaps it just gives me a story to tell myself and isn’t really a true memory, but either way, I know what I was up to. So, this post is going to be a bit of a double-whammy, I’m going to talk about a mix tape and a VHS tape. But, since I don’t feel like writing a 25-page term paper, I’ll just talk about what stood out most, give you a list of what was on it, maybe see what I can find on YouTube of it.

            Anyway, to get a big topic out of the way, I didn’t fully buy into the Y2K Bug paranoia of the time. I still to this day wonder who profited off spreading a lie like that. Maybe the media did it for the ratings, and a few con artists helped spread the paranoia so they could sell their survival books and videos. It wasn’t that I was a total skeptic. But I was 13. I didn’t own a computer, I didn’t have a bank account, so I didn’t think it would affect me even if it did happen. Best case scenario the schools would be closed, and that’s what I was hoping for. No such luck.

            And the people who didn’t think we were on the brink of technological Armageddon had such high hopes for the coming century. Flying cars, robots, world peace. Instead the world has only gone downhill in the last twenty years. The people on this tape had no idea what disasters the future would bring, starting in 2001. Endless war, ecological disaster, economic turmoil, an ever-widening gap between rich and poor, and to top it all off, all the movies coming out suck. It’s kind of sad watching this old VHS tape again, knowing what happens next.

So, back to twenty years ago. It was New Year’s Eve, 1999. I was determined to stay up all night. It was the start of the new millennium. I wasn’t old enough to drink, and I wasn’t going to any party, so I had to do something special. Everyone else was making a big deal about the year 2000, so I believed it was a big deal. My father had gone off to celebrate with his friends, my sister was at a sleepover at a friend’s house, and my mother went to bed early, so it was just me. And I recorded myself channel surfing for a big chunk of the night. I still have my New Year’s 2000 VHS tape that I was recording all of this on.

Now Y2K compliant and guaranteed to survive technological Armageddon.

 
The first thing on the tape is The Three Stooges short “Malice in the Palace”, one of the four public domain episodes, so it's pretty safe to post it here without worrying about it getting taken off YouTube. Because we ALL own this episode. I love public domain. Anyway, the sad thing about this one is Curly was going to come back to play the cook (this was after his stroke caused him to have to quit show business and he was replaced with Shemp), but he was too sick so Larry took the part instead. I want to travel to the alternate universe where we got a short with both Curly and Shemp.

And I must have been channel surfing, after this is an episode of Kenan and Kel recorded off Nickelodeon. That channel was still watchable at the time. It was the episode where Kenan’s family is eating at a restaurant and they one by one get locked in the freezer after Kel switches the sign pointing to the restroom. It’s a mystery to me why Kenan made it to Saturday Night Live but Kel didn’t. Kel was funnier. It's not on YouTube, I checked.

  
Next, I changed the channel to TLC, back when it was a documentary channel (TLC once stood for “The Learning Channel”, if anyone even remembers that). The documentary I recorded was 100 Greatest Achievements of the 20^th Century. These “Greatest ____ of the 20^th Century” list shows were freaking everywhere in 1999. On every channel. But especially on the likes of TLC, The Discovery Channel, The History Channel, etc. This is just an example of a typical one. When it came to the documentary channels it was either this or “How Will the World End?” documentaries. Silly fools, didn’t they know the world wasn’t going to end until 2012 according to the Mayan calendar?

 
Throughout the day the main channels (NBC, CBS, ABC, etc.) showed New Year celebrations around the world, of course acting like this was some monumental celestial event. There are bits and pieces of this on my tape too. You get to learn all about time zones on New Year’s Eve. They would show different cities where it hit midnight. You’ve got Maori tribes in New Zealand celebrating, this interesting ceremony going on in New Guinea, cultures that don’t even use the Gregorian calendar still wanted in on the fun. Then they’d periodically check up on those poor fools in Times Square in New York City suffering frostbite and wearing diapers so they could stand there all day and wait for a stupid ball to drop. I don’t know why people do it every year. Being in Times Square must feel like being inside an advertisement.

Right before midnight on CBS, Bill Clinton gave a sweeping, optimistic speech about the future, which time has shown to be very much overly-optimistic. It’s long and boring, but it makes me remember that we used to have presidents that were articulate. After enduring some of this, I changed the channel to the ball dropping in New York on Fox (I couldn’t find it on YouTube). Apparently, they dropped three tons of confetti on the crowd. Such wastefulness. How many trees were mowed down to make that much stupid, useless confetti? How many animals did that confetti probably kill? And for what?  “Woo hoo, year number on made-up calendar different now! Perfect excuse to get drunk!”

And one of the sponsors for the event in Times Square was Blockbuster Video. Oof, that’s like a punch in the gut. If no other moment is symbolic of this tape, of people being blissfully unaware of the complete disaster that awaited them in the next two decades, it was that little tidbit.

After watching the ball drop at Times Square and usher in the new millennium from the TV that used to be in my room, I remember filling up on sparkling apple cider and switching the channel to AMC (this was back when every TV channel stuck to what it’s supposed to be, in this case “American Movie Classics”; I blame MTV for degenerating first, most of the other channels have followed suit now and I rarely if ever watch cable as a result) to catch and record the rest of the Three Stooges marathon, filling up the rest of the tape. It was mostly Shemp episodes for some reason. I must have been partly disappointed at the time, but my respect for Shemp has grown over the years, even if Curly is more iconic. It’s an acquired taste. I never disliked Shemp though. He was his own thing and can’t really be compared to Curly. Once the tape was finished, I retired to my bedroom and turned on the radio, determined to pull an all-nighter.

Pay no attention to that mention of "Fatboy Slim", it's not on the tape anymore.

At any rate, my audio cassette this time was a 110-minute TDK "CD Power" tape. These were essentially Type II cassettes, which have better sound quality than your standard Type I cassettes. Has to do with the type of magnetic tape that was used. It was called Michael’s Music 2000, and was my 15^th mixtape. My second in the “Michael’s Music” yearly series (later renamed “Suren’s Songs”), like the first, didn’t so much record what I listened to throughout the year as later ones did, but essentially acted like a “New Year’s” tape. I‘m not sure how I got lucky enough to record “Anthem for the Year 2000“ by Silverchair as the first song. This was before I had dual cassette players. Maybe it was fate. But I think I may have cheated and recorded it early. If true, I would probably have heard the DJ say he was going to play the song and madly scrambled for the tape. It was so long ago I don’t remember. It was a song that I listened to a lot in 1999; its lyrics encapsulated my disillusionment with the world. "Never knew we were living in a world where our innocence is so short", and all that. Middle School was awful. This song was my turn to the dark side. My childhood ended with that guitar riff in the beginning.

  
But by the time 3am rolled around, to stave off my sleepiness I relocated to my bedroom and turned on the radio to record any good songs playing. I was at it for the rest of New Year’s day. Live 105, a San Francisco alternative rock station that I think might still be around, did a “Best Alternative Bands of the Millennium” countdown that day, giving me a lot of material to work with. Unlike the near-identical countdown they had the previous summer, this one also included bands from the 80‘s. As with Michael’s Music 1999, it’s hit-or-miss with me these days, with quite a few old shames that I don’t really like anymore, per se. To be fair, I’ll still listen to Silverchair and Oasis for old time’s sake. They’re inseparably attached to my childhood and preteens. Rage Against the Machine’s music is something I understand a lot more now than I did then. And Powerman 5000, whatever happened to that band? They were pretty good. Korn, Nirvana, Nine Inch Nails, these are all classics. But then Weezer, Sublime, and Smash Mouth? What was I thinking? I had a thing for the Beastie Boys around that time too, I remember. Ehh, I still think they’re okay, I’m kinda neutral on them now. And then there’s that “Pretty Fly for a White Guy” song that everyone was listening to at the time. I don’t even really remember why I liked it. Oh well, I was 13 and it was basically still the 90’s. What were you listening to at 13? Probably a lot of stuff you hate now. But because I’m feeling shameless, I’ll share the playlist and recreate it on Spotify. Maybe someone out there is morbidly curious. It definitely captures what a lot of people my age at that time were listening to if they weren’t either into pop or whatever their parents listened to, at least if they lived in the United States, specifically the San Francisco Bay Area. So, if that was you, maybe you’ll be interested. But it’s not as fun without the DJ’s, old radio commercials and station bumpers.

At some point during New Year’s Day I finished the 110-minute tape, but I remember having lasted until shortly after dinner that day before finally dozing off. I was quite proud of myself for conquering the night. The sad thing was I had to be back at school in two days, with a screwed-up sleep schedule. I couldn’t have been the only one though. Probably even some of the teachers were in the same boat. They were old enough to drink, so most likely.

Michael’s Music 2000 – Spotify Playlist 

Side A

Silverchair – Anthem for the Year 2000

Bad Religion – 21^st Century Digital Boy

Beastie Boys – So Whatcha Want?

Silverchair – Abuse Me

Oasis – Morning Glory

Slipknot – Wait and Bleed

Pink Floyd – Another Brick in the Wall

Nine Inch Nails – Head Like a Hole

Nirvana – Negative Creep

Rage Against the Machine – Guerrilla Radio

Korn- No Place to Hide

The Offspring – Pretty Fly for a White Guy

Side B

Devo – Whip It

 Beastie Boys – Brass Monkey

Powerman 5000 – Nobody’s Real

 Bad Religion – A Walk

Dire Straits – Money for Nothing

Counting Crows – A Long December

Smash Mouth – Walking on the Sun

Oasis – Wonderwall

Orgy – Blue Monday

Crystal Method – Busy Child

Weezer – Buddy holly

 Beastie Boys – Paul Revere

Blur – Song 2

Cake – The Distance

Sublime – Santeria

The Verve Pipe – The Freshmen

"I can't remember all the times I tried to tell myself to hold onto these moments as they pass..."

Mixtape Reflections: Michael’s Music 1999 and Michael’s Music 2019

It was twenty years ago last February that I made my first mixtape: Michael’s Music 1999. In February of 2019, I commemorated this by creating what I consider to be an updated version; calling it Michael's Music 2019 despite that I stopped going by “Michael” once I turned 18. While my first mixtape was a mainly a collection of music I had been fond of for the first twelve years of my life, this one would cover my late 20’s to early 30’s. I tried to choose songs that had a similar energy to the songs on my first tape, even if they were a different genre (under the "goth" genre umbrella, mostly). Anyway, first I’ll go ahead and tell the story of my first mixtape, because 2019 is ending soon and I want to get this out there before it does.

Michael’s Music 1999

We begin our story in the year 1999, the definitive BC/AD moment in my life. Everything before February 1999 is prehistory; I hadn’t begun to record my life yet. In 1999 my name was still Michael. But Michael might as well have been some other kid. Up until 7^th grade I used to go by Mikey, however I had decided based on the amount of teasing I got over it at school that the name was too childish, and had come to loathe being called by that name. My real first name is Suren, but if I went by that name at school, I’d have been even more of a target for bullying than I already was, being shorter than everyone else in 7^th grade, having to wear glasses, and a bit shy and bookish. It was as if no one had seen a short person before. “Did you skip a grade?“ “Are you legally a midget?“ And so on. Middle School kids will look for anything abnormal about you to make fun of. So you see, if I’d have gone by some strange Armenian first name, it would’ve been just one more thing for people to go after. So I kept that name a secret and went by my middle, much more American-sounding name. Better to be one of as many as four Michaels in one class, than to be unique and become a target. Michael became a sort of shield. They couldn’t do much with Oganessian, though watching my teachers try to pronounce it on the first day of class was always amusing. But there was nothing they could say about Michael.

            One day in February I was watching TV with my sister and mother. I remember it well, it was a new made-for-TV adaptation of Alice in Wonderland. I‘d anticipated it for months. And I kid you not, it is the only time you will ever see Gene Wilder in a turtle suit playing a balalaika. Still no match for the 1985 made-for-TV Alice on Wonderland which I am going to cover another time, but still pretty good. As we were watching though, the speakers on the TV blew out. It made this really loud, horrible noise, and then silence. I didn’t get to see the end of the movie until YouTube was invented.

            Though I protested greatly against it, my parents resorted to taking my TV out of my bedroom and moving it to the living room, taking away my ability to play my beloved Sega Genesis games (Even back then, I relied on outdated technology. It was another thing for me to be ridiculed over. “You don‘t have an N64 or a Playstation?” I’d get asked in disbelief. These things mattered in Middle School.). I had my books, but they weren’t enough to keep me entertained for long. So, my mom relented, and instead gave me her boom box.

            The boom box had a CD and cassette player. I didn’t have very many CD’s. Most of the CD’s I had to listen to were my mom’s. I could listen to Smashing Pumpkin’s Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, Weird Al’s Bad Hair Day (my only CD) or Journey’s Greatest Hits for a while, but eventually that got old, as much as I liked them. So I began surfing radio stations. Only ones that played alternative rock of course. Back then there were at least four to choose from in the San Francisco Bay Area. And I eventually came to 90.5 The Edge, a local student-run rock station. This would be my new home for the coming years.

            And then, I noticed that the boom box had a record button. My mother graciously let me go through and choose a tape from collection of blank cassette tapes from the 80’s, and I was ready to record all my favorite songs from the radio. “Michael’s Music 1999” was born. I developed a list of songs I wanted to record, based on what I’d grown up listening to during car rides or while watching MTV, and I sat and waited for the radio to play them. It became a constant waiting game. A game that would eventually become a testament to those endless days, sitting in front of the radio alone in my bedroom, on my favorite chair that while dumpy-looking I refused to let my dad throw out. My radio would become my best friend; at times, my only friend. And each melody on those cassette tapes contains a memory. Melodies which enable me to relive those dreary Middle School days every time I listen.

            The first song I recorded was “Oh Yeah” by Local H. Essentially a random pick, there wasn’t any special reason I recorded it first. I even recorded over it later, but I eventually restored it for posterity once I got it on a CD. I also recorded over the rest of the tape throughout the year, particularly over the summer, only officially retiring it on December 31^st, 1999. Some songs survive that had been there from the beginning, but they are few. A lot of the songs are something I’d never really be into today (Alanis Morsette for example), but my excuse is that I was 12. In the process, Michael’s Music 1999 became a curious testament to both my past and future. Music from my childhood in the 1980’s and 1990’s evoke bygone days of accompanying my mother in the car on errands, or her job managing a paper route, while listening to the radio. Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer”, which came out the same month I was born, was a favorite song of mine as a toddler and would have been the first song on the tape had I any control over the song placement. Songs such as “The Impression That I Get” by Mighty Mighty Bosstones, “Sell Out” by Reel Big Fish”, and The Prodigy’s “Firestarter” were songs that I loved in the mid-90’s and remind me of some of the best years of my childhood from ages 9 to 11. Except I didn't start fires as a child. At least not often.

Other songs capture what was then the present, who I was at the time, a shy awkward preteen who was dangerously close to being pushed too far. And still other tracks seem to speak to my later teenage years and beyond; two Rammstein songs appear on the tape, recorded the first times I ever heard them. They seem to foreshadow the influence German music would have on me in the future, as well as heavier music in general once I got further into my teens. And then at the end of side A is a song by Velvet Acid Christ, “Fun With Drugs”, recorded from 90.5’s Goth Industrial show. So ahead of it’s time was it that I never quite bothered looking the song up and finding out its name and who made it until I was into my late 20’s, by which time I was fond of the genre. After that, I began to listen to and like other songs by Velvet Acid Christ. It was almost as if I’d recorded it there fifteen years in the future, but it had been there all along. Before then the song was merely a dark curiosity that I never pursued.

            Two songs on the tape that really seem to capture who I was when I made it are “Anything, Anything” by Dramarama, and “Freak of the Week” by Marvelous 3. With “Anything, Anything”, it isn’t so much the lyrics themselves that bring me back to Middle School, no. It’s the constant guitar riff in the background; the energy it has. There’s a sort of innocence and light to it, mixed with melancholy. Perhaps it is the upbeat guitar riff coupled with sad lyrics that reminds me of being 12 years old, a mixture that evokes the happiness of childhood dissolving into a tormented adolescence. With “Freak of the Week”, the feeling is very similar, though the lyrics applied to me more. A song about being ridiculed, being the center of cruel, unwanted attention. Being a freak. Yet the music itself still contained a light, innocent energy. No other song really captures the end of my childhood quite like that.

Michael’s Music 2019

            For the twentieth anniversary of my first mixtape, I wanted to put together something special. Something that would mimic the same feel and energy of the first tape, using only songs I’ve liked in recent years, recorded on the same style of yellow Memorex tape (lucky finds at the thrift store has supplied me with a few extras of these). I wanted to find a suitable counterpart for each song on the original tape. Where there’s a slow, emotional song on Michael’s Music 1999, I chose a newer slow and emotional song in the same spot on Michael’s Music 2019. Where there’s a fast and energetic song on Michael’s Music 1999, there was a similar song on Michael’s Music 2019. At the end of Side A is another Velvet Acid Christ song. The 1999 tape ended with Orgy’s cover of the New Order song “Blue Monday”, so at the end of Side B on the 2019 tape is Noir’s cover of Ministry’s “Same Old Madness”. “Damned” by Brotherhood symbolizes trying to find happiness while undergoing stressful times and slowly losing hope, just like Marvelous 3’s “Freak of the Week” made me feel when I was 12.  Michael’s Music 1999 didn’t have a lot of rhyme or reason to it, because recording off the radio gave me very little control. So, the songs in the 2019 version don’t always quite flow well together either, on purpose.

            This mixtape was made shortly after the birth of my son, so there are some songs that remind me of those times. I remember that it really made me come to terms with the idea that I'm not as young as I used to be, and that’s what “When the Night Meets the Day” by Stratovarius is about. Kill Shelter’s “Get Down” is actually the song I had stuck in my head in the delivery room. The lyrics didn’t fit the situation, it was mostly just the tune. Just as Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer”, the second song on the 1999 tape, is a song I associate with my birth as it was released the same month I was born, this is a song I can associate with the birth of my son. [:SITD:], a German EBM and Industrial band, is my modern Rammstein, carrying the torch of German music. The Hot Dad synthwave cover of “I’m a Believer” is my modern answer to “Anything, Anything”; as the latter is about a troubled love life, “I’m a Believer” is about finally finding love after years of wondering if it was ever going to happen to you, which is actually quite relevant in my case. For the record, I’m not really a fan of the original by The Monkees nor the cover by Smash Mouth, this is the first version of the song I’ve actually liked. Because synthwave makes everything better.

Anyhow, if you listen to both tapes one after the other, you might draw parallels between the songs yourself. Below is the playlist for both tapes. The tapes are 90 minutes long, for reference. Keep in mind the 1999 tape is padded out a little with radio commercials, and not all of the songs are complete because I had to press record on the radio to get them. I wasn’t going to go that far to make the 2019 tape like its predecessor, although I threw a Communion After Dark intro on there at one point as a callback. And because I just love my audience so much (especially those of you who want to read about my old mixtapes), I started a Spotify account just so I could reproduce my mixes on my blog for your listening pleasure without having to embed 40 YouTube videos. Spotify didn’t have everything though. I’ll just link those to YouTube if you click on the song and band title. The songs not on Spotify includes “Goth Kids Song (Dear Rosie)” by Daniel Guerra Caballero, which is a cover of the song that the goth kids from South Park listen to, with lyrics added. It sounds quite good, kind of like The Birthday Massacre if you know that band. And then  "Ecoutez et Repetez" by Spiritual Sky is a strange Acid House song from 1989 I encountered on YouTube.

Michael's Music 1999 Spotify Playlist

Michael's Music 2019 Spotify Playlist

Michael’s Music 1999 - Playlist

Side A

Local H - Oh Yeah

Peter Gabriel – Sledgehammer

Nirvana – Lithium

Third Eye Blind - Graduate

Rammstein – Du Hast

Crystal Method – Busy Child

Dramarama – Anything Anything

Mighty Mighty Bosstones – The Impression that I Get

The Wallflowers – One Headlight

Weird Al Yankovic – Christmas at Ground Zero

Reel Big Fish - Sell Out

Velvet Acid Christ – Fun With Drugs

Side B

The Prodigy – Breathe

Gin Blossoms – Follow You Down

Fun Lovin’ Criminals – Scooby Snacks

Soundgarden – Black Hole Sun

Marvelous 3 – Freak of the Week

Goo Goo Dolls – Iris

The Prodigy – Firestarter

INXS – Need You Tonight

Alanis Morsette – Ironic

Rammstein – Sehnsucht

Bad Religion – 21^st Century Digital Boy

Suicidal tendencies – Institutionalized

Michael Jackson – Thriller

Orgy – Blue Monday

Michael’s Music 2019 – Playlist

Side A

Stratovarius – When the Night Meets the Day

Kill Shelter - Get Down

Daniel Guerra Caballero – Goth Kids Song (aka Dear Rosie)

 [:SITD:] – Dunkelziffer

Spiritual Sky - Ecoutez et Repetez

Twin Tribes – Still in Still

Masquerade – Too Depressed to Dance

Holygram – Still There

Hot Dad – I’m a Believer

The Cure- Cold

Velvet Acid Christ – Futile

Side B

District 13 – Touch Me (One More Time)

Voltaire – Underground (demo)

Brotherhood – Damned

William Control – Cemetery (acoustic)

Statiqbloom – Thin Hidden Hand

Michael Sembello – Automatic Man

SYZYGYX – Violet Violence

Omnia – Alive Until you Die

We Are Temporary - Medication
Boy Harsher - Fate

Noir - Same Old Madness