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This past week, I started what will be — unless in some kind of ultra-productive midlife crisis, I decide to become a lawyer — my last semester of classes. I’ve seen kids around the last two weeks, and it’s like that episode where Bart Simpson is trying to cram as much summer in as he can before he has to go back to school. There’s a kind of desperation in the second half of August, and I felt it too this year. I was trying to think of what I did this summer, and I realized that, more than anything else, I listened to music.

Every trip I took this summer — to Maryland, or Michigan, or even just out to Pennsylvania last weekend — music was a huge part of what took me there, and some of my best times the last couple months have just been listening to records or going to shows. It’s in that spirit that I picked the theme for this month’s audiObelisk Transmission: “How I Spent My Summer Vacation.”

Admittedly, it’s a simple idea. I took tracks from discs that I reviewed between mid-May and the end of August, and threw in a couple highlights from shows, and made a mix of it. If there was something you saw reviewed that you were interested in and maybe didn’t get the chance to check out, hopefully that’s in here, and obviously it’s not everything covered in that time (some stuff I didn’t have room for, and I still only use physical sources for the tracks I rip, so downloads are out), but I’m actually surprised it came out so good.

It’s a pretty diverse range of styles, but there’s a decent flow where one is needed, things get ridiculously heavy toward the end, and it gave me an excuse to highlight songs from bands I’ve really been digging lately — Mars Red Sky, Grifter, Admiral Browning, Elvis Deluxe and others. As always, I hope you dig it.

Press play to stream audiObelisk Transmission 019 on the player above. Download by clicking here, the image at the top of this post, or the link in the sidebar. Complete track list is after the jump.

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January 8, 1806

“Proceed to the top of the mountain next to the which is much the highest part and that part faceing the Sea, from this point I beheld the grandest and most pleasing prospects which my eyes ever surveyed, in frount a boundless Ocean… we arrived on a butifull Sand Shore, found only the Skelleton of this monster on the sand.” Clark

The above quotation is taken from the collected journals of Lewis and Clark as they encountered the skeleton of a beached whale on the ocean shore. Given the fact that they traipsed around the Pacific Northwest and named a bunch of stuff after themselves, I could think of no better source for a podcast title saluting the scene in that region, which itself feels like it’s currently leaving its mark on the international heavy underground.

In our recent interview, YOB guitarist/vocalist Mike Scheidt discussed this as “a time when the music is really vital,” and that phrase in particular has stuck with me. It’s true. Seattle and elsewhere in Washington has been a musical hotbed for 20 years or more, but Oregon — with the seeming nexus in and around Portland — is just beginning to command respect when it comes to heavy rock and doom. The music is fresh, and that while that’s invariably something that won’t last forever (at least it never has in the history of geographically-centered scenes), if we can take a slice of it at this moment, there’s something really special happening.

Accordingly, you’ll find as you listen that a lot of the songs here are new. Of the 31 tracks included in this podcast, 25 are from albums released in the last half-decade. As I always say with this kind of thing, it’s not a complete document, and I’m limited to the CDs I can get my hands on at any given time, but I hope as you make your way through the almost four hours, you get a sense of the vitality Scheidt was talking about. Even among the bands who’ve been around for a longer time — Earth and the Melvins, for example — I tried to make sure I was as recent as possible.

I was also trying to give a sense of the sonic diversity the region has on offer, from the straightforward classic rock of Stone Axe to the cinematic ambience of Grails, the simplistic riffing of Witchasaurus Hex to Megaton Leviathan‘s massive dronegaze. There might be some abrupt changes from one song to the next as a result, but just imagine all this stuff happening in roughly the same place. It’s amazing.

Download audiObelisk Transmission 018 by clicking here, the banner at the top of this post, or the big link on the sidebar. If you’re more the streamy type, have at it via the player above. Full tracklist with timestamps and release years is after the jump, appropriately enough, we start with new YOB…

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This July 4, I decided to honor one of the most vibrant and enduring American scenes, namely that of New England. As the fireworks begin to sound, the vision begins to blur and the “USA! USA!” chants commence, I can’t think of any better way to celebrate Independence Day than sitting around listening to bands from Boston and the surrounding region. So that’s pretty much what I did.

It’s an area whose hardcore/punk rock anger grew up well, and you can still hear the deep-seated aggression in the riffs of Roadsaw and the ’70s-loving rockers of their ilk. There’s a lot of that kind of stuff in this playlist, I guess because that’s mostly what I think of when I think of the New England scene — straightforward, unpretentious heavy rock. But that’s by no means the beginning and the end of it.

What I discovered as I picked out acts to include was that there’s a vast array of styles and sounds that have come out of the Northeast over the last couple decades. Being south of it myself, the most I can say I’ve had is a tertiary experience — that is, I didn’t grow up in this scene — and though I by no means consider this audiObelisk Transmission a complete document of it, I think it’s made for a pretty good mix.

You get the ultra-hateful sludge of Grief, the organ-infused country rock of Antler, Phantom Glue‘s thrashing rhythms, the crushing despair of Warhorse and the avant weirdness of The Body. Save for Vermont, every state in New England is represented — Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Maine — and as a Yankee fan, I’d like it to be known that the title “Such Sawks, Such Sounds” is meant with the utmost respect and reverence for the Boston Red Sox. My alternate name for it was “The Green Monstah,” but I liked this better.

Everything but The Body was culled from a direct physical source — i.e. my rips — and the total winds up at 33 tracks, 3:21:44 runtime. If you’ve been curious what Blackwolfgoat sounds like, I put the track “Fear of Stars” in there, which is one of my favorites from Dronolith, and there’s recent selections as well from the aforementioned Roadsaw, as well as Black Thai, Curse the Son and Olde Growth.

Listening back to it, I dig the overall flow and I hope you do too. To listen, click play above, and to get the file, click the header image, click here, or follow the link in the sidebar. Complete playlist is after the jump.

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Well, I asked on the forum which people would rather have, an all-Black Sabbath podcast or all-heavy psych, and heavy psych won won over 90 percent of the votes, so here we are. Heavy psych it is. Maybe I’ll do the other next month, or maybe, given the disparity, drop it and think of something else. In any case, we’ve got a month to go before then and a monster of a podcast to deal with in the interim.

I let the fadeouts go a little longer, got some really killer tracks in there you might not expect or maybe haven’t had the chance to check out yet, and managed to keep a good balance of the different kinds of heavy psych out there. From Colour Haze to Neurosis, it’s a pretty nebulous term, and I hope this podcast gives some sense of the range of styles and sounds to which it can apply. There’s some all-out jamming from Serpentina Satelite, some more grounded excursions from Asteroid and Datura, and a couple tracks that are just there because they’re weird or help set an atmosphere, which you’ll get with Dark Castle and Traveling Circle or the recently On the Radar-ized Larman Clamor.

That Dark Castle cut is new, by the way. Though it would have been easy for me to go back into the annals of psychedelic lore and pull out a handful of tracks from the ’70s, I thought I’d keep the focus on recent stuff, and so along with the already mentioned Floridians, there’s new music here from Baby Woodrose, Mr. Peter Hayden, Arenna, Elvis Deluxe, Tia Carrera and The Flying Eyes, who start us off with a track from their excellent new album, Done So Wrong.

If I do say so myself (and it seems I do), it’s a fucking excellent mix. All told, it’s four hours and 27 minutes long, and true to the psychedelic ideal, it’s a journey and a considerable one at that. There’s some stuff I had to leave off for time and/or other concerns — I think I’ve already overdone it on Mammatus in the past, for example, so they’re out — but hopefully this is one you can put on while you’re outside somewhere this summer and just go with it. That’s my plan, anyway.

So, as it borders on midnight on a Monday night, June 6, when I still have to go downstairs and take out the garbage, I hope you enjoy this labor of love and maybe find something you’ve never heard before alongside some stuff you know well. Aw heck, I’m ramblin’. Just download the damn thing.

Get it here or by clicking the image above or the link in the sidebar, or stream it on the player above. Full tracklist is after the jump, as always.

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For the last two years, I’ve done a Buried Treasure report (see here, and here) on the return from Roadburn specifically related to the CDs purchased there, either from the bands or the labels with distro setups. Both of those posts were titled “The Tilburg Haul.” This time, I thought I’d do something a little different and use the discs I bought to put together the latest installment of the audiObelisk podcasts. The name, as you can see above, stayed the same.

Admittedly, it’s not all stuff I bought at Roadburn 2011. The Black Pyramid, Blood Farmers, Candlemass and Ramesses I already owned, but I thought they were worth including anyway, since those performances were highlights of the fest experience. Things like Quest for Fire and Samsara Blues Experiment I had promos of and was happy to nab full-artwork copies, and then there’s bands like Slough Feg, Mercyful Fate, Samavayo, Pontiak and Tia Carrera, who didn’t play at all, but whose albums I nonetheless was able to pick up.

Like the rest of Roadburn, the record shopping there is one of a kind. I picked up a lot of stuff on Nasoni (you’ll see it in the track list), because even in the Euro it’s cheaper than paying import prices for it here, and the version of Goatsnake‘s first album I bought just because it’s on Rise Above (as opposed to the Man’s Ruin original American release or the Southern Lord reissue). I bought On Trial and Dragontears discs from Lorenzo Woodrose directly, White Hills from White Hills, and a limited disc of Michael Gira home recordings  from which a couple of the tracks on last year’s Swans full-length, My Father Will Guide Me up a Rope to the Sky, were culled. That’s signed too.

That’s a special inclusion here, and throughout, you’ll also hear new music from Pentagram from their Last Rites album (review here) and The Gates of Slumber, who were selling their new record, The Wretch, for a measly 10 Euro. I was also thrilled to pick up the original issue of the first Dead Meadow, and live at Roadburn offerings from Bong and Year of No Light, tracks from both of which show up here.

There might not be as many songs here as last month, but with a couple cuts over 20 minutes and plenty of other spacious pieces besides, we still come close to three and a half hours, and I figure that’s plenty long enough. You’ll notice some abrupt transitions and some smooth transitions, which I thought was appropriate to the nature of Roadburn itself, where you can be watching Coffins one minute and Place of Skulls the next. In any case, I hope you enjoy listening, as always.

Full track listing is after the jump. Click here or the image above to download the file, or stream audiObelisk Transmission 015: The Tilburg Haul on the player above.

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Well, I finally did it. I made an all-Swedish podcast.

I’ve been threatening it for a couple months, but after my work/school schedule kicked my ass for most of February and March, I decided I’d end my spring break this week with the nerdiest thing I could think of. And here we are. I don’t mind telling you I’m wearing my Dozer shirt to mark the occasion.

The list just kept growing. I sat here yesterday afternoon and started going through the stacks (which is officially what I’m calling my CD shelves as of… now), looking for bands, and for each one I grabbed, another came to mind. It ended up being a whopping 40 tracks of heavy rock, cult doom and aural crush from the likes of Witchcraft, Demon Cleaner, The Quill, Entombed, Greenleaf, Bathory, Graveyard, Truckfighters, Kongh and a ton more. There were some repeaters from the winter podcast (looking at you, Candlemass), but there wasn’t anything included I didn’t think belonged.

A notable omission is Grand Magus, who I left out because I don’t yet have a hard copy of Hammer of the North and didn’t want to cop out by just including an older track. So yeah, I recognize they’re a Swedish band, and a good one, but they were in the last audiObelisk Transmission anyway, so if you’re interested enough to be reading this and to download the file, you probably already heard them last time around. If not, I apologize. Next $30 I get, I’ll pick up that import.

That aside, I personally think it’s a killer mix of tracks. You get a lot of Sweden‘s stoner rock heritage, but also a good bit of the diversity within that country’s scene, and a decent picture of why Swedish bands have been able to have such an influence internationally. It’s hard to imagine that we’d have the growing scenes in other European countries without the groundwork of a lot of these Swedish acts, and though this stuff ranges across a couple decades in terms of when it was recorded and released, the nation continues to innovate. I think the Ghost track included shows that, if nothing else.

More important than that, though, this stuff rocks, and I hope you dig it.

You can listen on the player above, or download the file by clicking the image at the top of this post, following the link in the sidebar, clicking here, or by carrier pigeon. Seriously, if one shows up, I will buy a flash drive and tie it to the leg of the carrier pigeon and send it back to you. It’s not animal cruelty because those things are super-tiny.

Full tracklist is after the jump.

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aOT13

Pretty self-explanatory, this one. I don’t know what’s going on climate-wise in the part of the world you live in, but here in the Northeastern US, it has snowed like a bastard for the last month, and it’s not showing any signs of letting up. I wanted to capture that feeling of winter where you’re so cold it feels like you’re never going to get warm again. The kind of cold that makes your blood move slower.

Needless to say, there’s a lot of doom.

But it’s not all downers. Occasionally winter can offer small triumphs — snow days, good soup, an extra excuse not to leave the house when you didn’t want to anyway — and there are some songs in this 13th audiObelisk Transmission that embody that idea: Scissorfight, Lords of the North, Grand Magus, but basically, I wanted this month’s podcast to sound cold. Some of these bands are here because they’re from cold places (Celtic Frost, Yearning, Candlemass), and others just sound like winter to me (Neurosis, The Awesome Machine, Anathema). Hopefully my personal seasonal associations carry over. I think they do, but I’m hardly unbiased.

Most of this stuff is pretty recent. There are a couple deeper cuts, but the majority is from the last decade at least. I didn’t realize it while I was picking out bands and albums, but 2008 features heavily for some reason. Maybe it was especially cold that year, or maybe I just listened to a lot of music that winter. Who the hell knows.

Like last month’s podcast, I hid a couple off-kilter picks toward the end. That’s where you’ll find Celtic Frost, Bathory, Enslaved, Primordial. I like the thought of changing things up to finish. All told, the podcast is 30 songs, just over three hours’ worth of material. Certainly long enough for you to revel in your wintertime malaise as I did while putting it together this afternoon. As always, I hope you enjoy.

Full tracklist is after the jump. To listen, click on the player above, follow this link, or grab the file by clicking the banner.

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aOT012

Not like the reveal is any big surprise, but I’m still really excited about posting the January podcast. It’s not even that it’s the first of 2011, or, that as the 12th, it marks a full year since I did the first audiObelisk Transmission — which also had an octopus banner — but just because of all of them, this has the best flow yet. One track to the next, it’s smooth in a way I’ve been trying to achieve but haven’t quite until now. I hope you agree and I hope you enjoy.

We’ve already covered 2010 to death, and a simple flip through the blog pages will show that. I have more to come, but in terms of wrapping up the audio side of it, I tried to jam as much as possible into this podcast. Like last month’s, it’s 31 songs, although with the inclusion of tracks like Aquilonian‘s half-hour-long “Symphonica de Levita” from their split with Sollubi, it stretches a full 45 minutes longer, all the way to three hours, 50 minutes. Like 2010 was, it’s a monster.

I don’t know about you, but I think what I’m going to do one day at work this week is download this podcast and play it right in a row with the last one. It’s nearly a full seven hours between them, and as the soundtrack to a day of office-dwelling, I know it’s time well spent. Just a suggestion.

Things get a little off-kilter toward the end, getting into stuff like Les Discrets and Alcest, Crippled Black Phoenix and Master Musicians of Bukkake, and though there’s some hits up front from big names like Earthride, Melvins and Monster Magnet, make sure you don’t miss the Clamfight track, as it’s a personal favorite, along with Droids Attack and Samsara Blues Experiment. Like I said, I really do believe it’s the best podcast yet.

Listen to audiObelisk Transmission 012 by downloading it via the image above, following this link, or streaming it on the player under the banner. The full tracklist, with time stamps, is after the jump.

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