Of Lingua Ignota’s Caligula, Mixed Feelings, and Emotional Deadening

First off, let me get this out of the way: musically, Caligula is amazing. It sounds like nothing that’s come before it, and I doubt there’ll ever be anything that comes after it that will manage to present such a convincing and powerful synthesis of the disparate strands of noise, industrial, classical music, and classically-trained singing (amongst others; I’m not really feeling like I want to write about the music here, so forgive the somewhat simplistic touchstones) that Lingua Ignota has presented on Caligula. It is, despite my deeply mixed feelings, something of a masterpiece that deserves the attention it’s getting.

But, to put it in the most casual, simplistic way, I just don’t get it.

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I (Probably) Regret Nothing Or: The New Gear I Spent Money I Shouldn’t Have Spent On

The past couple of weeks have seen a wholesale upgrade to my vinyl front end that I didn’t quite expect, but which happened all the same. My bank account hurts, and I’m starting to dip my toes back into the waters of an existential crisis regarding my general spotty employment and abandonment of multiple facets of adult life in order to feed this addiction, but hey, at least the music sounds a lot better now…

Of Record Collecting, F5-ing, and Feeling Like a Mug

It’s just past midnight on Easter Sunday. I’m sitting in front of my PC, frustrated from a shitshow of a Varathron non-show here in KL, with a Storenvy window open on my desktop auto-refreshing every 30 seconds, hoping to be able to grab a few records that I’ve been waiting for for the best part of the last week. I feel like an idiot, but the fallacy of sunk costs (time and emotional turmoil, the latter of which is really stupid, but I’m an emotionally retarded man-child) keeps me going. I might as well try and get these records, right?

March Vinyl Update: Belated, But Better Late Than Never (Maybe?)

Depression spending is a cruel, ravenous beast.

Funereal Presence – Achatius (2019, Sepulchral Voice/Ajna Offensive, LP)

The descriptor “old-school” is often used to describe an act (or album) whose sound is built mostly on atavism and an adherence to Ye Olde Ways. This often involves an intentional, possibly even ideological, dismissal of the past 10 or 20 years’ worth of changing tastes and musical trends, all in the name of conservatism and worship of the past. Willful musical anachronism, in other words. Funereal Presence’s Achatius is one of these albums. But it’s also so much more than that.

My Disco – Environment (2019, Downwards, LP)

My Disco have certainly come a very long way from the Albini-meets-Dischord stylings of their first three albums. 2015’s Severe was a significant departure, trading the propulsive post-punk of their earlier work for spacious, ultra-heavy machine repetition, but this year’s Environment has really seen the trio branch out into new musical territory, with remarkable results.