Month: May 2014

I Survived Maryland DeathFest XII

and all I got was this lousy beer koozie… for my co-worker.

I survived MDF!

Seriously, MDF XII was a blast and I bought a lot of records. Highlights included:

  • Coffins – twice in two days!
  • Impaled
  • DropDead
  • Victims
  • At the Gates
  • The Land of Kush
  • War Master
  • Erik and I deciding whether a band was European or American, based on the backs of t-shirts.

europe vs us

I did less documenting this time, I am trying to live in the moment more. But, here are a few pictures I took.

victims
war master
coffins
crowd & nocturnus ad

Also, Erik and I got the xebooksx Twitter bot running on his server. Follow it for ridiculous youth crew, straightedge nonsense.

Catharsis in the AV Club

samsara

Jason Heller mentioned Catharsis in last month’s edition of Fear of a Punk Decade – a series where he revisits the punk/hardcore/emo explosion of the ’90s year by year.

Many groups released hardcore albums on the fringe in 1997, from Capitalist Casualties’ scathing A Collection (courtesy of Slap A Ham) to the Southern-fried sludge of Rise And Fall by Damad (which would birth the metal band Kylesa in the coming millennium). But the best of the bunch were Catharsis’ Samsara —a bleak, brutal statement of bestial hardcore— and His Hero Is Gone’s opening one-two punch, Fifteen Counts Of Arson and Monuments To Thieves.

Most of the article is about emo and pop punk bands; Blink 182, Jimmy Eat World, Hot Water Music, etc… But it’s a good read, and a good series too. Check it out.

Youth Crew, Straight Edge, and Markov Chains

Have Heart

My friend Erik recently explained Markov Chains to me, especially regarding the ‘ebooks’ Twitter account phenomenon. So of course I had to make my own ebooks bot and feed it a bunch of straight-edge hardcore lyrics.

I tweaked Roger Whitson’s Markov-Tweet Python library to my own liking. The hardest part is getting a large enough corpus so the chains aren’t lifting lines from songs directly. I’ll be adding more lyrics gradually, so the resulting tweets will improve – if you can call more nonsensical lyrics an improvement.

Without further ado, I present @xebooksx.


Here are a few choice tweets as of this post: