entirely safe and fun

7 Jul ‘09, 12.29pm PDT PST: by ccreitz

Last weekend, a McDonalds in Humboldt County.

You can find out why for yourself. Simultaneously the strangest and the most accessible entry in Sunn O)))’s catalog, their new album Monoliths & Dimensions raises the technical bar for drone metal to a level unlikely to be topped. It has the things you might expect from this band — it is geologically slow, it is frighteningly heavy, it conveys distance and age and size and power. Not surprisingly, it features the unearthly throat-sounds of Attila Csihar, a frequent Sunn O))) collaborator, and the para-guitar wizardry of Oren Ambarchi, who also worked on Black One. Surprisingly, it also has a women’s choir imitating a mellotron, a trombone section (in hindsight, it seems unbelievable to me that no other drone group has picked up on the possibilities of low brass, and the slidiness of trombone in particular), and a rotating chamber group of flautists, trumpeters, keyboardists, and electronic sound manipulators.

For the uninitiated: get initiated! Sunn O))) is nothing like the metal groups you’re thinking of. No drums, no guitar heroism, no funny hair. Theirs is the heaviness of steel vault doors and glacial erosion, not small-arms fire and furious screeching. They have more in common with the minimalist experiments of Einstürzende Neubauten than they do with the operatic exercises of, say, Iron Maiden (not that there’s anything wrong with operatic exercises).

At any rate, this is Sunn O)))’s most accomplished work to date, the avant garde, the bleeding-edge state of the art in extreme metal, and the best album so far of 2009.

2 Apr ‘09, 10.28pm PDT PST: by ccreitz

Tasty indeed. And beautiful.

2 Apr ‘09, 10.24pm PDT PST: by ccreitz

Tasty home cookin’ at the Rancho

This is a machine for tragedy. Be sure to wear ear and eye protection at all times while operating it.

On Wednesday night, Sarah, John, Chris and I playtested Jason Morningstar’s beta game Fiasco, which he describes as being about “big ambition and poor impulse control.” It’s a state-of-the-art, GM-less game where the players build situations where crisis is just around the corner: think Fargo, Burn After Reading, Blood Simple, Double Indemnity. Then they wind up this tragedy engine and let it go, playing characters in an improv drama whose situation they’ve just specified. There’s usually going a simple plan, and then some complications, some backstabbing and betrayal, probably some murder. Characters often will ruefully remember that at one time, whatever they did seemed like a good idea, often as a guy with a sniffle and an extravagant collection of facial tattoos force-feeds them Ex-Lax after chaining their ankles to either side of a well-used concrete trough. Happy endings are rare.

Our game never quite got that dire — just a little pâté of murder in a tart betrayal aspic. I started up a discussion at Story Games, where there’s a summary. But I also wrote a detailed, scene-by-scene report and figured that this would be a better place for that. So, check after the jump for a story of armed foolishness on the Gulf Coast, a story of unknown paternity, unexpected tenderness, greed, revenge, and running over a guy in a wheelchair who had already been gut-shot and had his fingers broken. Fun times!

22 Mar ‘09, 2.17pm PDT PST: by ccreitz

Apparently.

11 Mar ‘09, 5.46pm PDT PST: by ccreitz

Enjoyable!