4/29/26
listening
(content warning: all of the concert videos i'm linking here have a lot of flashing lights. don't give yourself a seizure or a migraine on my account, please!)
back on EBM day (February 24, or in European notation, 24/2), my pal Saga posted a great thread on BlueSky about the history of the genre in general and her history with it in particular. i listened to most of it over the next couple of days, but saved Front 242's final concert for a rainy day (and/or one when i thought i might have two hours to at least keep it running in picture-in-picture mode, if not give my full attention to it), which turned out to be last week. it was a pretty standard 242 concert, which even if you didn't get the chance to see them has been available to listen to since 2008's Moments release. i was a bit bummed that they didn't play anything from their strange, experimental final album, 2003's Pulse; i've always liked them but that album grabbed me like no other of theirs. thankfully, there's several albums more along those lines by Daniel B and Patrick Codenys' side project Male or Female, who i was fortunate enough to see live around 2005 in Salt Lake City, and they also played a couple of songs from Pulse when i saw them here in Boston in 2017. and there's plenty more live video of them if i want to watch that, too!
even more exciting, however, was one of YouTube's suggested videos after i finished the 242 concert, of Skinny Puppy's final concert, which amazingly is entirely fan-produced, to an exceptionally high standard. Puppy were actually one of my introductions to goth and industrial music, in one of those completely bizarre but nevertheless true stories of my life: in middle school, i had a very strange bus driver who played his own music instead of nothing or the radio like most of the other drivers, and there were two bands that struck me so much that i asked him what they were, and they turned out to be Clan of Xymox (who i have not ever actually gotten too into, though i like them well enough!) and Skinny Puppy. (how some goth got a job driving a school bus and playing this fucked up music for kids is a mystery for the ages.) it was several years before i was able to track down any of their music for myself. the first record of theirs i got was 1996's The Process (which i am bummed to realize is one of two albums not on their bandcamp!). of course, when i found it, i had no idea of what a tortured production the record was, but i knew that i loved it. so i was very happy that they played a couple songs from that record at their last show, even ending the whole thing with one of them; appropriate for what had at one point been their final album.
i know there's a contingent of fans who doesn't really care for this album, or the four they recorded after their reunion, all of which go in pretty different directions from each other and from the sound that their initial popularity was based on. i distinctly remember one time i saw them in SLC someone in the audience spent the entire show yelling "PLAY THE FIRST SIX ALBUMS". which, now that i actually look over the discography again, i realize excludes even the stone-cold classics Too Dark Park and Last Rights. i guess everyone's entitled to their opinion, but man, only being interested in the first six years of a band's 20ish year career (at the time; the final tour coincided with their 40th anniversary!) seems like a really boring way to engage with art.
it was really cool to get to watch the concert from multiple angles, with enough zoom to see some of the details of the performance that are much easier to miss when you're standing somewhere in the audience. of course, that also meant that some of the edges of their theatricality were more exposed than usual, which at times took me a bit out of the experience. despite that one small criticism, it's both an amazing piece of work from the fans who put it together, and an incredible document of one of my favorite bands' swan song.
inspired by nine inch nails' show at Coachella with Boys Noize (who i had never even heard of before this), i've been listening to a lot of old NIN too. turns out that the downward spiral is still absolutely fucking incredible, who knew? i managed to grab a recording of the concert in one of the couple-hour spans before it got nuked from the Internet Archive, and much like the Puppy show, i'm saving it for when i can dedicate most of my attention to watching it. i've never actually seen NIN live, but from the concert videos i've seen and what people who have been have told me, it's clear they're as much a feast for the eyes as for the years. check out the staging on their Coachella performance of Heresy; the dancing figures are like the maximalist version of one of my favorite Coil performances (nb: in addition to the flashing lights, this one has full frontal and rear male nudity. don't click unless you're up for seeing cock, balls, and hole! as ever, Trent has filed some edges off Coil's original ideas. it would be annoying if it weren't still so damn good.)
watching
we finally finished watching Babylon 5. i had low expectations of season 5, and it had some rough spots; in particular, Lyta's character development got dragged through the mud in the Byron arc, though i liked where she ended up after it, and Lennier's incel turn was just awful. but you know what? the previous four seasons also had some rough spots, and season 5 had a handful of all-timer episodes as well: The Very Long Night of Londo Mollari, where Londo's heart fails under the weight of the atrocities he's committed, and the only way to survive is to begin to make amends for it; A View From the Gallery, echoing Star Trek: The Next Generation's classic season 7 episode Lower Decks, following two maintenance workers as they navigate doing their jobs while the station is under attack; Day of the Dead, where we get some hilarious space-time shenanigans, and the best possible casting of Rebo & Zooty (the only thing better would have been them only ever being referenced, but i think they acquitted themselves quite well); and melancholy penultimate episode Objects at Rest, where everyone says farewell to the station, and Londo gets a brief respite from his puppet-masters to say goodbye to Delenn and Sheridan.
i'd only ever seen the show in bits and pieces when it initially aired, so i never had a sense of the overarching plotlines. i really enjoyed finally sitting down and seeing the whole thing through (well, minus the several TV movies, books, comics, and one spin-off series). i've heard stories of people at the time being die-hard fans of either Babylon 5 or Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, which aired at roughly the same time, and having no time whatsoever for the other one. and while i definitely like DS9 more in the end, i can't imagine not being interested in the stories both of them have to tell. it's two cakes!
making
i'm on the bottom hem of my Decadence blouse but tragedy struck: i ran out of beads!! we placed an order for them last Thursday, and they arrived the next Monday, which is an eminently respectable turnaround time. nevertheless, i needed something to keep my hands busy, and in our house the default project when one needs something small as a palette cleanser or to tide one over while waiting for beads or yarn to arrive in the mail is a hat, which we donate at the end of the year for clothes drives. it's always nice to get something handmade instead of a cheap generic beanie, after all! i'm making the Faux Seams Toque in a lovely bright rainbow self-striping yarn, some baby is going to be absolutely blinding this winter. of course, now that the beads for my main project are here i'm eager to get back to it, but i know if i put this down i'm likely to forget about it entirely so i'm soldiering on until it's done. i've done eleven of the seventeen three-row repeats before decreases, so another day or two of even semi-focused knitting should let me get back to my blouse!