SEEN AND HEARD ON THIS LAST DAY OF JULY

Here are things I saw and heard today.

OUR WEATHER

I saw a temperature gauge at high noon here in The Emerald City: 63°F. And the sun is shining. All of you poor fuckers who are broiling like burgers on a charcoal grill everywhere east of the Pacific Coast can hate me now, and along about January you can remind me that I made this obnoxious crack at your expense.

BUNCH

I saw that awesomely phantasmagoric piece of artwork up above. It’s by Ken Sarafin of Sarafin Concepts. It’s for a death metal project called Bunch, of which Sarafin seems to be a member — one of many. Here’s this description from the Bunch FB page: “Bunch is a band formed from 28 different members, each playing one note a song. Occasionally during recording, a member might repeat a note several times. If that happens, a break with cookies is required afterwards. Bunch likes cookies.”

There are a bunch of Bunch demo tracks at this location. I picked one to stream after the jump.

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/16542741″ iframe=”true” /]
 

I saw this piece of artwork, too:

PAULO GIRARDI-ASHENCULT-MARROW

Is that fuckin’ awesome, or what? The artist is Paolo Girardi, whose fantastic work we featured in a post last April (here). This is a recent piece he created for a forthcoming split by Ashencult and Marrow. I hope you remember Ashencult — BadWolf reviewed their debut album Black Flame Gnosis here, calling it his favorite black metal album of 2012 to date. We expect to have more news about this new split a bit further down the road.

But I’m still not through with the artwork, because I saw this nasty thing, too:

This is the cover to the second album by a band from Ottawa, Canada, named Mortor. It’s due for release in September.

Mortor is a new name to me, but based on the following collection of snippets from the album, it’s a band I think I need to know more about:

 

And next . . .

KHONSU

I’ve been really intrigued by this band since stumbling across them in June. Khonsu are from Norway, they’re a recent Season of Mist signing, and they’ve completed work on a debut album called Anomalia, scheduled for release on August 24 in Europe and August 28 in the US . They include two members of Keep of Kalessin — guitarist/keyboardist Obsidian Claw and vocalist Thebon, though the principal songwriter and founder of the band is Obsidian Claw’s brother Steffen Grønbech.

I’ve already featured one song from the new album (here), and today the band released an official video for a second one — “The Malady”. The video was directed by Steffen Grønbech and Christian Falch, and it’s really fuckin’ cool. So is the song. It’s dark, strange, groovy, quasi-industrial — and as in the case of the first song, it features a mix of vocal styles that suits the music. Check it out:
 

 

And last, I saw this:

NOCTEM

This is Noctem, a Spanish band we’ve written about repeatedly (here’s a collection of the NCS posts that mention Noctem, including Andy Synn’s review of their latest album).

The occasion for this photo was the alignment of the band as representatives of a boot and shoe-maker called New Rock. I have to say that I’m not inclined to buy a pair of these boots, because I would look truly ridiculous in them. But these guys? They look baaaaaadaaaaasss.