If you like that, you should listen to Portal's album Ion from this past year. It's in my top 10. It's not even heavy, really... just scary. It sounds like a bunch of horror movie villains came together to make a ****ed up metal album together.

I like noting and jotting down phrases that pop out to me. Sometimes as I collect them I arrange them into "found phrase poems." This is my most recent, built from bits and pieces of conversations, things picked up in books, or on student homework.


Sometimes what we find incidentally is better than what we're looking for.

I found h hunt completely by accident on Spotify sometime in the last few years, and boy am I glad that I did. Their work, which appears to be improvised solo piano, is ethereal calm and pure goodness. I love listening to Playing Piano For Dad when I'm anxious or stressed out, or just when I want some supremely relaxing music to listen to. Their playing is gentle, and obviously influenced both by ambient and jazz. The creaking of a piano bench and physical tapping of the keys, as well as other sounds picked up on microphone, become delightful percussive bursts that make what might be an uninspired piano noodling into something joyful. The last track, which features our mysterious artist humming and singing, is a standout.

Speaking of Robyn, over the past few years it’s amazing how dominant the Kate Bush vocal sound has been in good pop music. She’s like the Tony Iommi of female pop vocals.

She's a goddess, can you blame the copycats?

No. I think they’re doing the right thing.

I've got a more serious entry in the works and have a fiction piece I'll be posting in increments, so keep your eye out. In the meantime, listen to this ****ing incredible comedy album.


Jeff Simmermon creates weird, surrealistic visions of his life using incredible storytelling and a nihilistic, self-effacing sense of humor. He's artsy, avant-garde, and would probably get along well here. Check the bits about being in an experimental band with two chickens, a long bit about a death metal dad, surviving cancer. It's so good.

Here are a few relevant links:

Jeff Simmermon

https://open.spotify.com/album/4YEpX...QRCkuEDdZjLqOQ

I'll be posting a fiction piece of mine that I wrote last year in bits here, because **** it, why not?

I'll be pairing a song or album with each entry. I hope you enjoy. Or at the very least, I hope you hate it enough to say something.


David eased the compound bow up in front of him and pulled the bowstring back to his eye. Inside the arrow rest was a hefty aluminum number, ending in a fierce, jagged tip. It was aimed at a young buck—seven points, musculature brimming underneath a beautiful pelt. It was chewing cud underneath an enormous white oak. David’s fingers slackened.
A crack rang out to David’s left, and his tan face was sprayed with a mess of deep red and hard bits of white. His shoulder, with its arm stretched out in front of it, seemed to have exploded.
His arrow, which had been carefully trained on the placid deer, jerked into the air and shot off in an unknown direction.
With a prehistoric scream, David plunged from his tree stand into the brush below. He was unsure whether he should throw up or pass out.
He did both.

I hope he threw up first, or we're gonna have another Jimi on our hands!

Run (Part 2)

The rain was erupting from the black sky as David pleaded with his mother to slow down, but she was buzzed and reckless; she had nothing to lose but a son she hadn’t wanted in the first place. As a man of 17, David more than familiar with her caginess and bouts of fury, but this time was different. Her eyes were glazed, and her mouth was open, like her soul was already halfway to the other side in anticipation of what was to come.
The car flipped seven times and ended up against a beech tree just off the overpass. Sometime later, a rare passerby noticed the smashed husk dangling almost off the mountain, and rushed to a neighbor’s home to call for help. Rural living has many benefits, but the expediency of emergency vehicles is not one of them. When the ambulance finally managed to wind its way up and down the hills to their silent hollow, they found a battered and broken boy, completely unconscious, and what passed for the corpse of a woman. For the next month that he was with them, the doctors at Baptist Health in Lexington called his survival and speedy recovery “unprecedented” and “a miracle.” David did not.

Run (Part 3)

David’s eyes opened. The first thing he noticed was his shoulder, screaming like a dying rabbit. He turned his head from its resting place and groaned in horror. His left shoulder was a decimation of flesh and bone. His plaid shirt and orange vest were soaked with brown and red. It was sticky, but dry. The sun was going down.
As he pulled himself up, his teeth ground together, and a sharp exhalation of breath left his nose. The taste of vomit cloyed his mouth. He reached for his canteen—gone. So were his bow and his arrows.

As if from somewhere far away, alarm bells started ringing in his ears. He remembered his emergency training from his days in Iraq, and he transformed from flabbergasted hunter to battle-tried soldier.

This wasn’t an accident. Hunting accidents happen, of course—but they don’t usually end in a body abandoned with its weapon removed. This dread realization helped him to momentarily forget how much everything hurt.

He rolled into a deeper patch of weeds, and from his new vantage point, scanned the area. All was quiet, the only sounds being the cheerful gurgle of a nearby stream and the crackling of bare branches blowing in the breeze.

Without looking, he reached for the serrated hunting knife tucked into his belt. He wasn’t surprised at this point to find that it, too, was gone—but he was pleased to discover that the smaller knife, his grandfather’s knife, was still there, tucked into his jacket pocket. Thank Christ. He muttered a quick prayer and steeled himself. It was time to move.