So don’t forget, you Vancouverites, that my little rock band, The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets, are playing at the Backstage Lounge on the 21st – mark it on your calendar! Do it! It promises to be a good show, with lots of new songs. Speaking of new songs, things are going well on the writing front. We have a song that Warren describes as a cross between Nomeansno and Iron Maiden – it’s a really fast bass-driven song with a bitchin’ drum soloesque part, and I sing falsetto through the entire thing. And it’s pretty hilarious. I just did the singing at home on my ‘puter so it’s pending approval from the Chilliwack Jam Triad. It’s called “Ride the Flying Polyp” and, Cthulhu willing, it will appear on the album The Shadow Out of Tim. Here’s a recap on how the album is looking, for you literary punkophiles:
Track 1: prologue: A Marine Biologist
My own ancestry and background are altogether normal. What came, came from somewhere else – where I even now hesitate to assert in plain words. H.P. Lovecraft, The Shadow Out of Time
Track 2: Chapter I: Some Things Man Was Not Meant To Know
Man must be placed on guard against a specific, lurking peril which, though it will never engulf the whole race, may impose monstrous and unguessable horrors upon certain venturesome members of it. It is for this latter reason that I urge, with all the force of my being, final abandonment of all the attempts at unearthing those fragments of unknown, primordial masonry which my expedition set out to investigate.
Track 3: Chapter II: No Way
From the moment of my strange waking my wife had regarded me with extreme horror and loathing, vowing that I was some utter alien usurping the body of her husband…These feelings were shared by my elder son and my small daughter, neither of whom I have ever seen since.
Track 4: Chapter III: It’s Automatic(?)
Track 5: Chapter IV: (to be determined)
If the mind came from a body whose language the Great Race could not physically reproduce, clever machines would be made, on which the alien speech could be played as on a musical instrument.
Track 6: Chapter V: Return to Melanesia
I was given charge of my funds, and spent them slowly and on the whole wisely, in travel and in study at various centres of learning. My travels, however, were singular in the extreme, involving long visits to remote and desolate places.
Track 7: Chapter VI: They Come in Threes
Other ugly reports concerned my intimacy with leaders of occultist groups, and scholars suspected of connection with nameless bands of abhorrent elder-world hierophants.
Track 8: Chapter VII: Operation: Get the Hell Out Of Here(?)
Track 9: Chapter VIII: Ride the Flying Polyp(?)
The basis of the fear was a horrible elder race of half-polypous, utterly alien entities which had come through space from immeasurably distant universes and had dominated the earth and three other solar planets about 600 million years ago. They were only partly material as we understand matter and they had the power of aerial motion, despite the absence of wings or any other visible means of levitation. Their minds were of such texture that no exchange with them could be affected by the Great Race.
Track 10: Epilogue: Downtown (In the Cenozoic)
Track 11: Footnote: Sleestak & Yeti
My own history was assigned a specific place in the vaults of the lowest or vertebrate level – the section devoted to the culture of mankind and of the furry and reptilian races immediately preceding it in terrestrial dominance. H.P. Lovecraft, The Shadow Out of Time
Track 12: Footnote: Nyarlathotep
I talked with the mind of Khephnes, an Egyptian of the 14th Dynasty, who told me the hideous secret of Nyarlathotep.
MEANWHILE…Tonight I’m going to Drexoll Games for their weekly German Board Game Night. Join us, won’t they?
ALSO…Martin Scorcese’s “The Departed” is getting good reviews and is playing at the best cinema in town until the 19th. If anyone wants to go I’m game.
ps – Here’s a fun simulation game to download: Truck Dismount (thanks Jeff)
I’ll be there!! With friends!!