Buried Treasure and the Spoils of Adventure
I know this is going to sound strange looking at the stack of CDs above, but the truth is, I didn’t buy as much at Roadburn and Desertfest as I could have. For instance, this whole trip, I only picked up two pieces of vinyl — the new Electric Moon 10″ and the Yawning Man/Fatso Jetson split 12″ — and that’s it. I didn’t buy the Dread Sovereign 12″, limited as it was, and there were countless other pieces I could’ve grabbed and justified buying with the sheer fact that it was money I wasn’t spending on booze. I’m not going to go as far as calling it restrained, but it was nowhere near the most reckless I’ve ever been when it comes to spending cash on albums, even with the exchange rate taken into account.
Stuff like Winnebago Deal, Black Skies, Sparzanza and Endless Boogie (good thing I bought that, because indeed, they didn’t have it at the merch table) I’ve already talked about picking up at Sounds in Tilburg, and that was awesome. It came as a surprise though to find a full-on Svart Records table in the merch area when Roadburn itself started up. I guess it made sense, with Svart acts like Victor Griffin’s In~Graved, Jess and the Ancient Ones and Seremonia playing the fest, but it was still cool to see and I appreciated the chance to buy CDs from the former two acts (the latter I’d already bought my last time at Armageddon Shop in Providence), since although I was sent digital 
promos for both, I’d rather save myself the trouble of hearing something like Jess and the Ancient Ones‘ Astral Sabbat or Hexvessel‘s Iron Marsh, liking it and then being pissed later and just cut out the middle-man, bite the bullet and buy the album without feeling like I then need to cover it. I got the High Priest of Saturn CD from that table too, and no regrets.
The Burning World Records table at Roadburn also had a few necessities, among them the Mount Wrath live set from Conan — their 2012 Roadburn appearance in the Stage01 room that was so frickin’ loud I feel like I can still hear it — and I also grabbed a disc from The Angelic Process called Coma Waering that I’d later learn was a reissue of a full-length from 2006 and not in fact a follow-up to 2007’s Weighing Souls with Sand, which I remember digging a lot when it came out on Profound Lore, and a copy of Slomatics‘ A Hocht, which Burning World released last year but which I hadn’t gotten to hear. Right on the other side of the same room was the Exile on Mainstream table, which was selling Toner Low‘s III and from which I also bought the first Tlön album, having remembered digging the second one after getting it from the same source last year.
It’s worth pointing out that neither of those records is actually on the Exile on Mainstream label, but they were selling them nonetheless and I relished the chance to pick them up, along with the self-titled Johnson Noise, which it turns out I already own, and a copy of Electric Moon‘s The Doomsday Machine, of which I’d later buy a double from the band’s table. Admittedly, when Electric Moon showed up, I got impulsive. My instinct was to buy everything they had, and I didn’t go that far, but in addition to a second The Doomsday Machine, I also got the Electric Moon, D-Tune EP, the aforementioned 10″ You Can See the Sound of… and one of guitarist Sula Bassana‘s solo albums, as well as Vibravoid‘s Gravity Zero on Sulatron Records. There was more and I’d have got it, but frankly I didn’t want to embarrass myself.
From bands, well, I got two tapes from The Cosmic Dead — Live at the Note and Inner Sanctum — in addition to a CD of Orbiting Salvation, both Kadavar discs from their table, the digibook version of Les Discrets‘ Ariettes Oubliées… (review here) after seeing them so thoroughly bring that material to life on stage at Het Patronaat, Black Magician‘s Nature is the Devil’s Church, The Midnight Ghost Train‘s Buffalo, and the Within Time album by Koiramato, which I’d soon understand was being sold by Mr. Peter Hayden because it’s a full-length of complementary textures for MPH‘s Born a Trip sophomore outing. I set up the CD to go at the same time as the Born a Trip Bandcamp stream and sure enough, even the changes lined up. It was excellent. I’ve never gotten something like that just right before — see Neurosis‘ Times of Grace and Tribes of Neurot‘s Grace and me with my fingers on two very out-of-sync play buttons — so it was exciting on multiple levels.
Aside from a free Van Records compilation, that would be it from Roadburn, and though I tried and failed
to hit up a couple stores I’d been to previously in London — goneski — I still did alright at Desertfest and at the pre-show, picking up albums from Enos and 1000mods from the night before the fest-proper began, and filling out the weekend with that already-noted Yawning Man/Fatso Jetson split vinyl, a CD by Black Moth that I haven’t had the chance to hear yet but am very much looking forward to based on the couple minutes of their set that I saw, and Center of Gravity by Croatian heavy riffers Center, which I was given to hopefully review. I haven’t gotten there yet — I’m back a week now and I haven’t even gotten caught up on email, though I’m working on it — but maybe one of these days. The record’s pretty cool, in any case.
A lot of the stuff I’ve not yet had the chance to check out, but the good part about an actual CD is I don’t get pissed off about the real estate on my desktop it’s taking up and delete the folder. Can’t say the same for, well, nearly every digital promo I get these days. The last couple years have definitely seen a decline for the compact disc — more than ever in 2013 were the vinyl-only releases featured — but I still did alright, and hopefully I’ll continue to do alright until CDs go the way of those other dead formats, LPs and tapes. And by that I mean get a retro comeback. I’ve got no shortage to listen to in the meantime.
