Pittsburgh Calling: Satanic Bat
The News Review:
- Pittsburgh Calling: Satanic Bat
- h Fluxus it goes on and on and on
- ‘Dense but spatial’
Pittsburgh Calling: Satanic Bat
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette – Pittsburgh Post Gazette – Oct 25, 2007
“People make assumptions because of that name. People assume we’re black metal along the lines of King Diamond. We get inquiries from black metal bands — guys that dress up in corpse paint — asking to play gigs. I don’t know if they don’t turn the sound up on our myspace page or what. Bat beginnings: Central Pennsylvania natives Howell and Sobeck (“he’s obsessed with Vikings and anything Nordic” Howell says) formed the band as a two-piece with the idea of being like “Melvins meets Death From Above 1979 that kind of stuff. ” They jammed for a year and then added Warren and Milliren. Influences also included Sabbath Hawkwind Motorhead Cream… ” They jammed for a year and then added Warren and Milliren. Influences also included Sabbath Hawkwind Motorhead Cream. Where does the Southern rock come from?: “I was personally never a fan of that music” Howell says. “It just kind of came from playing together and we followed that direction. Initially our stuff was more disjointed metal. The songs that stuck around were the ones that we jammed on and had that Southern feel. They make noise too: Along with Southern metal thing Satanic Bat just might venture into seven minutes of experimental noise as on “A Generation of Digital Grooves vs.
h Fluxus it goes on and on and on
The Australian – Oct 25, 2007
This was surely a swipe at her own critics butit would have been more constructive of her to have considered how she could reconcile programming a retrospective with a prospective or even contemporary exploration of abstraction innovation and the unfamiliar. The two events I attended on Monday night were sad imitations of seminal artistic movements of the ’50s and ’60s: artistically akin to an ABBA cover band and intellectually comparable to an undergraduate art history lecture on 20th century theory and practice. The music committee of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company presented a program paying homage to both John Cage and contemporary composition. The program featured three recent compositions by the ensemble’s four members including a collaborative 40-minute tribute to Cage casually entitled For John: a legitimate informality given the professional collaborations these men enjoyed with the composer. In many ways these are Cage’s proteges a few decades on now with an average age just short of 70. The program was neither contemporary nor experimental: the abstractions were like a comfortable pair of old slippers the innovations 50 years old and the unfamiliar entirely absent. David Behrman and John King introduced real-time computer manipulation alongside the more conventional extended techniques prepared piano and everyday-object sound effects of Christian Wolff and Takehisa Kosugi: but the audible results differed only marginally from those achieved decades ago with analog synthesisers and magnetic tape manipulation… The concept sounded plausible enough: the austere Gothic-inspired Great Hall filled with a version of Warhol’s 1966 creation Silver Clouds (250 roaming helium-filled pillow-shaped silver mylar balloons) 200 guests paying $250 per head a food and wine-fuelled conviviality and interpretive performances by the Australian collective Slave Pianos of sound works created (however abstract their notation or conception) by visual artists in the Fluxus tradition. The performance art installation by Slave Pianos involved some wry humour. It was evocatively named The Execution Protocol (after a song by the Dutch death metal band God Dethroned) and featured a central piece entitled Electric Chair. Drawing on Warhol’s well-known mid-’60s series of works depicting the deserted execution room at Sing Sing prison a computer-operated mechanical baby grand ("slave") piano was suspended (and restrained with leather straps) on a large wooden frame in the shape of an electric chair; complete with two inauthentic but evocative high voltage travelling arcs (Jacob’s ladders) at the apex of the backrest. A television monitor at the top of the chair where a victim’s head would be located displayed the details of the artist and work currently being performed. Between items "SILENCE" was displayed as a direct reference to the public gallery sign featured in the Sing Sing photograph chosen by Warhol as the basis for his reworkings. The musical items themselves were typically of very short duration and more of an academic curio than thought-provoking.
‘Dense but spatial’
UI The Daily Iowan – UI The Daily Iowan (subscription) – Oct 25, 2007
“Look at the progression that happens a lot with sludgier metal bands” said Matt Show the owner of Iowa City record label Scenester Credentials. “They begin to explore melody. “In the mid-80s Broadrick played guitar for Napalm Death one of the first grindcore bands that fused metal with the sloppy-fast ethos of punk. Throughout the ’90s he fronted the industrial-metal group Godflesh which influenced thousands of bands such as Nine Inch Nails and Faith No More. With each passing year Broadrick seemed to up the ante producing albums more brutal than the last. But after forming Jesu in 2003 he began to explore music outside of the limitations of pure aggression and chaos. “To me [Jesu] is really atmospheric” said John Hopkins a sound engineer for the Picador and guitarist for the Horde.