Crease Magazine

Notes Toward a Music of Sequences, Cheap Machines, Ghost Signals, and Unapproved Methods A programmer once meant somebody who arranged movies. Not necessarily the director, not necessarily the producer, and certainly not the person whose face appeared twenty feet high over the theater entrance. The programmer assembled the evening. A western, a crime picture, a newsreel, a cartoon, another feature. Cheap films, old films, strange films, whatever could be obtained and made to work tosgether for an audience sitting in the dark. A programmer now also means somebody who writes instructions for a machine. These meanings have become accidentally useful to me. Programmer Music sits somewhere between them. It is music made through selection, sequencing, interruption, repetition, corruption, recombination and transmission. It may contain guitar, code, radio, MIDI, found sound, generated sound, damaged sound, samples, homemade recordings, synthetic instruments or things whose origin...

OUTER ORDER “What a bunch of noise.” ⭐ u/entro_play

THE BLIND DEAD ARE WATCHING Copy / Dada Transmission by Gideon Void OCTOBER HAS NO EYES. Neither do they. WSTX CHANNEL 68 opens the crypt every night this October for the complete procession of THE BLIND DEAD . Dead knights. Dead horses. Dead centuries. No pupils. No mercy. No commercial interruption capable of saving you. TOMBS OF THE BLIND DEAD The train stops. The woman gets off. The Middle Ages get back on. RETURN OF THE EVIL DEAD Church bells. Blood bells. Everybody bring a bell. THE GHOST GALLEON A ship sails through fog without permission from geography. There are monks on board. There should not be monks on board. NIGHT OF THE SEAGULLS The sea requests a sacrifice. The village checks its calendar. Yes. Thursday again. ALL MONTH LONG Midnight becomes 1273. The horses have no business moving that fast. The skeletons have no business moving at all. Your television develops a monastery. Your antenna points toward Portugal. Somewhere behind the horizontal hold, a Templar...

Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, David Bowie and the Fluorescent Afterlife of the Seventies By Kit Mercy Everybody likes the sacred triangle when everybody is beautiful. Lou Reed. Iggy Pop. David Bowie. Put them in the early seventies and the photograph develops itself. Leather. Powder. Berlin. New York. Hotel rooms. Bad decisions made glamorous by black-and-white film stock. Three men passing electricity between one another while popular music is still young enough to believe electricity might kill it. We know this version. We have sanctified it. There are books. There are documentaries. There are deluxe editions thick enough to stop bullets. There are men in expensive denim explaining Raw Power to you. Fine. I love that triangle too. But I would like to direct your attention to 1986 . Not because 1986 was cleaner. Not because it was better. Because it was stranger. By 1986 the sacred triangle has survived long enough to become inconvenient. The beautiful doomed young men have failed ...

Ralph Von Francis Reviews the So-Called Philosophy of Lou Toad There is, regrettably, a Lou Toad philosophy. I had hoped there wasn’t. Philosophies generally require systems, principles, schools, terminology, followers, enemies, perhaps a bench beneath a tree where an elderly man may look disappointed in civilization. Lou Toad has instead assembled his philosophy from streaming subscriptions, obsolete aesthetics, artificial intelligence, cheap consumer electronics, forgotten films, malfunctioning genre categories and an apparently constitutional inability to use anything for its advertised purpose. The result is irritatingly coherent. Its first principle appears to be: A tool becomes interesting precisely when it stops doing what it was sold to do. Spotify recommends music. Toad uses it to excavate nonexistent genres. Artificial intelligence answers questions. Toad converts it into an editorial department, recording studio, cultural archive, imaginary repertory cinema, rese...

A Film Program by Dax Silver There is a particular kind of person who has always frightened civilization more than the murderer, the thief, or the revolutionary. The person who says: I know something you don't. Not because they read the report first. Not because they bribed the right clerk or crawled through the appropriate air duct. They know because they saw . Dreamed. Felt. Received. Divined. Heard a voice from the wallpaper. Looked into your hand and discovered Tuesday. Civilization hates this person. Civilization also pays this person extremely well. Thus we get the medium, the oracle, the carnival mentalist, the prophet, the debunker, the mesmerist, the fraudulent widow-whisperer and, inevitably, the professional skeptic who has made disbelief into an occupation and therefore has almost as much financially riding on the universe remaining orderly as the psychic has riding on it becoming strange. Welcome to SECOND SIGHT , six films about people who claim access to ...

Bloodrock, Grand Funk Railroad, Sir Lord Baltimore, and the beautiful historical accident before heavy music learned to behave By Kit Mercy There is a terrible thing that happens to music after it acquires a name. It begins dressing for work. Before the name, there is only the sound. Nobody has purchased the correct boots yet. Nobody knows which guitar shape is permissible. Nobody has drawn the family tree. Nobody has written THE DEFINITIVE GUIDE TO THE 100 HEAVIEST ALBUMS OF 1971 and started screaming because Uriah Heep came in three positions above somebody's sacred cow. The musicians are simply standing in a room discovering that electricity can hurt people. That is where I want to live. Not permanently. I require plumbing. But spiritually. And that is the territory Lou Toad has wandered into with these first two Metal Before Metal playlists, beginning with Bloodrock and then expanding outward through Grand Funk Railroad and Sir Lord Baltimore. He has stumbled into one of my f...

Kit Mercy goes looking for the moment a keyboard stopped being respectable and became a blunt object. There is an alternate history of heavy music in which the guitar is merely one of the suspects. This will irritate guitar players, which is already one argument in its favor. We have spent fifty years building a heroic mythology around six strings, Marshall stacks, leather trousers, damaged hearing and the sacred masculine ritual of standing with one foot on a monitor while looking constipated. Guitar became not simply an instrument but the official zoning ordinance of rebellion. And somewhere beneath all that mythology is an organ plugged into an amplifier, humming like a refrigerator possessed by the Holy Ghost. The old garage bands knew. They did not necessarily know that they knew. That is one of the wonderful things about teenagers. Teenagers discover nuclear physics every Saturday afternoon and call it rehearsal. They had drums. They had cheap guitars. And sometimes t...

By Dax Silver The first thing Cybercide does correctly is refuse to contain anything that sounds remotely like what a playlist called Cybercide ought to contain. No industrial-metal starter pack. No obligatory synthwave Lamborghini traveling toward a purple sunset. No anonymous dark-electronic artist named N3UR0M4NCR_77 whose entire discography appears to have been recorded inside the menu screen of a gaming PC. Instead: Lou Reed. Pussy. Thelonious Monk. Pere Ubu. Peter Hammill. Dwight Twilley. Bloodrock. John Cale. This is either a catastrophic misunderstanding of the word cyber or a considerably better understanding of it. I vote for the latter. Especially because the cover presents the whole thing as a ColecoVision game that somebody's mother accidentally bought in 1983 and subsequently blamed for the collapse of American childhood. Beautiful. We are already operating at the proper level of intellectual irresponsibility. PLAYER ONE: LOU REED HAS ACCESSED THE TERMINAL The fir...

By Dax Silver There is a particular kind of playlist made by people who distrust the phrase guilty pleasure because it implies pleasure needs an attorney. Fourshame is that playlist after three drinks and an argument. It begins with Lou Reed’s Mistrial , moves through Bloodrock, wanders into the exquisitely ill-advised territory of Pussy, and eventually finds Dwight Twilley waiting under a streetlamp with his collar turned up and his heart making several actionable mistakes. This should not work. More importantly, it doesn’t work in exactly the correct way. The transitions are not bridges. They are trapdoors. Lou Reed gives way to Bloodrock like a New York argument suddenly relocating to a Texas parking lot. Bloodrock gives way to Pussy as though the parking lot has opened onto a meadow painted by somebody experiencing both a religious vision and equipment failure. Then Dwight Twilley arrives and reveals, with some embarrassment, that everybody involved has actually been ...