Since 2017, we’ve been wrapping up our end-of-year coverage with a Yearbook encompassing our favourite articles from the year; pieces we can be proud of and look back on in the years to come as the very best of what Heavy Blog has to offer. We love sharing things with…
This is one of those years where you’re writing your end of year summary every day. It’s a year which inundated all of us with so much music, and from so many angles and genres, that it almost begged to constantly be analyzed, made sense of, and conceptualized. I’ve written…
There’s a genre of science-fiction that’s all about love. Or, rather, it’s about the human emotional landscape in general, magnified against the vast canvas of space. Emotions become grandiose, cosmic even, the only bridge we have across the relative emptiness of the galaxy. You’re actually familiar with the genre; in…
If it seems like I always mention how much good music has been released during the previous month that’s because that’s probably correct. The fact is that we’ve been enjoying an insane outpouring of music for years now and these posts, keyed as they are to some sort of “summary”…
If there’s anything you should have learned by now about Clipping. it’s that they are seriously attuned to the importance of the body as a site of meaning, politics, and knowledge. In that sense, they are perhaps among the most “post-modern” rap/hip-hop/noise acts out there (though Pharmakon and her nightmarish…
Ah, expectations! What a terrible and unavoidable burden. Expectations color pretty much everything we do; whether we like it or not, our brains are wired into creating an image of a thing before we perceive it and then measuring the actuality of that thing against it (do you hear that?…
Those of us music lovers who purchase and collect physical media understand the thrill of the hunt. Be it digging through crates, scoring a deal on that grail on Discogs, or getting in on the pre-order before the limited edition variant sells out, the rush of broadening the collection is one of the most fulfilling things about consuming music for much of the Heavy Blog staff. Fear of missing out (FOMO) is also a huge driving force due to the limited nature of many releases, and collectively, we tend to spend way too much money for the sake of getting in while the getting’s good. However, funds are not always in supply, and we often spend our free time adding out-of-press releases to our Discogs wantlist or staring longingly at /r/vinyl and /r/heavyvinyl in hopes of catching a contact buzz.
Hello, it is I, the resident science fiction nerd for Heavy Blog (there are actually two of us now that Joshua has joined our ranks). A year or so ago, I covered Clipping.’s phenomenal Splendor & Misery, dissecting its themes and lyrics. In the process, I tried to give an overview of “afrofuturism”, a media spanning genre which uses science fiction and futurist thought to conceive of racially radical ideas and propose a counterpoint to what is often a white dominated genre. As I wanted to keep the posts from getting insanely long (they were already really long), I could only touch upon afrofuturism briefly and, seeing as that’s my medium of choice, I focused on its presence in literature. How good of Clipping. themselves then to help me shed light on less known but not less important instances of the movement/genre/way of thought.
Travelling in space will probably be a lot less glorious than what most of science fiction would like us to imagine. When it comes, space travel will be intrinsically tied with the very real forces of economics, efficiency, and all powerful physics. As such, the smooth flight of an Enterprise…
It’s finally not as cold here in New York. I’ve been here for almost a month now and the weather hasn’t been to kind. Last time I left a Brooklyn based show, it was Clipping., the wind was blowing cold off the Atlantic and snow was in the air. This Saturday, it was thankfully less punishing and there was a sense of elation in the air post show. Or maybe it was just me, my heart so full of the sets I had just seen. Pallbearer, Marissa Nadler and Kayo Dot all reminded me, in their own way, why I love seeing music played live and why I love, even with the amount of genres I listen to, the darker sides of music. All three sets were more than just proficient; they had a musician’s touch, an earnest and powerful conviction in self expression and its strength.
