www.Misanthrope.com

Demdike Stare!

H. F. — Mon, 14 May 2012 19:39:10 +0000

Demdike Stare @ Rotture, PDX. 13 May 2012.

Teeth

H. F. — Tue, 08 May 2012 19:08:09 +0000

Decoration

H. F. — Tue, 08 May 2012 19:00:36 +0000

Got my tail removed.

H. F. — Sun, 06 May 2012 17:20:39 +0000

GIMME YOUR MAGAZINES.

H. F. — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 06:21:24 +0000

I’m working on a new series of collages, and I need MAGAZINES!

Don’t just throw them in the recycling, I might be able to use them…

For these collages, I mainly need porn, lad mags (Loaded, Maxim, Stuff, etc.), fashion magazines, anything with good quality printing and photos with lots of flesh. The flesh does not need to be sexual, but does need to be bare. No (or minimal) clothes, tattoos, jewelry, etc.

I can pay a small amount per magazine, and/or postage if you are not local.

Please let me know what you have!

New photos of killer Charles Manson released – CTV.ca

H. F. — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 16:57:45 +0000

via CTV News - New photos of killer Charles Manson released – CTV.ca.

“Sonja Puzic, CTVNews.ca

Date: Wednesday Apr. 4, 2012 9:35 PM ET

New photos of infamous killer Charles Manson have surfaced a week before his next parole hearing.

The California Department of Corrections provided two photos of the aging Manson to CTVNews.ca, taken last summer at the state prison where he is serving a life sentence.

The photos show Manson, 77, with shaggy grey hair and a long gray beard. The swastika tattoo on his forehead appears faded.

The last prison photo of Manson was released three years ago.

Manson, the former leader of a cult that became known as the Manson Family, is serving a life sentence for the 1969 murders of actress Sharon Tate and several others, committed by his group of followers.

He was initially sentenced to death, but that was changed to a life sentence in prison when California overturned the death penalty in the 1970s.

H. F. — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 07:35:57 +0000

DARK STARS RISING is on the jury list for the Bram Stoker Awards, non-fiction category.

I wonder who did that beautiful cover artwork…

(Preparing to move studio and home to a new location, more regular posts should resume here shortly…)

THESE CHILDREN WHO COME AT YOU WITH KNIVES…

H. F. — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 08:42:37 +0000

An ongoing series of small collages.
This is the first one…

ALL NIGHT HORROR MARATHON!

H. F. — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 00:13:45 +0000

PDX – Tonight at the Hollywood Theatre!

THE ALL NIGHT HORROR MARATHON! Starts at 9:00pm!

- DAY OF THE DEAD (the original!)
- THE BURNING (Cropsey!)
- BOXER’S OMEN (Gooey psychedelic Asian occult wizard battle awesomeness)
- PIECES (“You don’t have to go to Texas for a chainsaw massacre!”)

Plus Pizza! Beer! Wine! Doughnuts! Coffee! Popcorn! Giveaways (including a REAL CHAINSAW)! Vintage 35mm trailers! And an amazing BOXER’S OMEN alien head pinata made by Mrrranda L. Tarrow!

Also, new original 24×36″ silkscreened movie posters on display and for sale, including my own poster for BOXER’S OMEN! All sales benefit the non-profit Hollywood Theatre!

Can I get a “FUCK YEAH!!!” ???

CENSORED

H. F. — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 00:58:49 +0000

THIS BLOG HAS BEEN CENSORED. I’ll be carted off to jail at any minute, or just financially ruined by ‘penalties’ and ‘legal fees’. Get ready to see and hear much more of that, or experience such joys yourself, if the ‘PROTECT IP Act’ is passed by congress. Please follow the link below and sign the petition NOW.

And I don’t even believe in petitions…

POSTERS!

H. F. — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 01:18:41 +0000

Posters! Posters! Posters!

18×24″ posters are now available in the Store!

Full-bleed images professionally printed on semi-gloss paper!

Prices include shipping in the USA!

Yay!

Speaks for itself, really.

H. F. — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 07:40:08 +0000

Love Craft @ The Lovecraft

H. F. — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 17:21:10 +0000

Hello.

I will be selling prints, stickers, and other things at this month’s LOVE CRAFT FAIR at Portland’s LOVECRAFT BAR. This Sunday, October 30, from 3-6pm!

Peculiarium Show (PDX)

H. F. — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 16:00:52 +0000

Hello.

I have four small prints in the October art show at Portland’s PECULIARIUM, the opening is tonight (October 6th) from 6:00 to 9:00pm! The show should remain up throughout the month of October…

Support WFMU! Listener-Supported Free Form Radio!

H. F. — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 15:21:06 +0000

WFMU’s “Shock & Awetober”!
“This October, WFMU is attempting to raise all of the funds we need to make it through the fall without interrupting our programming with a second pledge drive. We hope you can help us out with a pledge!”

Love Craft @ The Lovecraft

H. F. — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 18:04:04 +0000

Hello.

I will be drinking and selling small (i.e: cheap) archival prints, and postcards and buttons, at this month’s LOVE CRAFT FAIR, at Portland’s lovely LOVECRAFT BAR. This Sunday, September 25, from 3:00 until 6:00pm…

Artwork Update : Sept. 2011

H. F. — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 09:21:05 +0000

Hello again.

I will be selling a small selection of prints at the next LOVE CRAFT FAIR, at Portland’s lovely LOVECRAFT BAR.

Sunday, September 25, from 3:00 until 6:00pm.

I will also most likely be having some drinks.

Do stop by.

Artwork Update : Sept. 2011

H. F. — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 09:04:05 +0000

Hello.

I recently completed the package art and design for Threnody For Collapsing Suns, the new album by SKY BURIAL.

Mr. Burial provided me with a few images, and I reworked and mixed them into something else…

I’m not sure if it’s actually been released yet, but if not it should be out soon…

CD released on Small Doses and Phage Tapes.

From Goblin to Morricone: The Art of Horror Movie Music

H. F. — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 18:25:41 +0000

via The Guardian:

“From Goblin to Morricone: The Art of Horror Movie Music” by Stephen Thrower (of COIL and Cyclobe)

The scariest horror films don’t just make you want to cover your eyes, but your ears, too. Stephen Thrower on movie music with real menace.

Please note: some of the links in this article point to gory or graphic horror movie scenes

There are two schools of thought when it comes to film music: some say you should scarcely notice it, while others are attuned to every flattened fifth. Being a musician as well as a film journalist, I’ve always been staunchly in the latter camp (although I did have to look up “flattened fifth”). It seems inconceivable to me that we should fail to notice something as profoundly affecting as a movie soundtrack, and that goes double for the horror genre.From the moment Bernard Herrmann‘s violins assaulted the shower-loving public in Psycho, horror soundtracks have rarely been content as mere background gloop. James Bernard’s music for the Hammer films for instance – a strident mix of horns, violins and clattering percussion – is gallopingly melodramatic, although one has to say it often raises more giggles than goosebumps (think of his brass section blaring “DRA-culaaaaa!!” whenever You-Know-Who is around). A more innovative approach came from Ennio Morricone, famed for his 1960s spaghetti western scores, who brought a shuddering, paranoiac quality to the early 70s horror-thrillers of Dario Argento (The Bird With the Crystal Plumage), Aldo Lado (Short Night of the Glass Dolls) and Lucio Fulci (A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin), based on brittle modern jazz, weird electronic effects, and rampant atonal twanging.

Admittedly his best scores weren’t always for the best films; Umberto Lenzi’s daft-as-a-brush Spasmo, for instance, is blessed with a nerve-shredding Morricone score (standout track: Stress Infinito) far better than it really deserves.

If I had to choose just one great horror soundtrack from the 1970s, I’d go for The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Relentless, disturbing and totally “out-there”, this groundbreaking work arose out of free improvisations by the film’s director Tobe Hooper and his musical associate Wayne Bell. Rather than composing melodic themes for the characters, or dutifully applying motifs to particular events, Hooper and Bell approached the soundtrack like vengeful deities, raining down storms of pure nightmare. The sound design rumbles with elemental violence; it’s difficult to discern precisely which musical instruments, if any, are responsible. When I spoke to Bell a few years ago he told me that a signature ingredient was “an upright bass, which we did all sorts of torturous things to during the Chain Saw sessions”. There’s also lots of tape manipulation (slowed-down and speeded-up gongs), and what sounds like a heavily asthmatic pedal-steel guitar (it is set in Texas, after all). Hooper and Bell smear these cues (with ad hoc titles such as Seethe and Madness) throughout the film, creating a dense, expressionist impasto into which screams, chainsaw engine noise and murderous gibbering are embedded; the effect is to completely mire you in the film’s claustrophobic horror. (A more recent equivalent would be the extraordinary electronic score for Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible, by Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter.)

A short-lived but rewarding trend for progressive rock in horror began when William Friedkin used Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells in The Exorcist, proving that music designed for stoned headphone voyaging actually suited the genre perfectly. Italian prog-rockers Goblin contributed eccentric riffage to Dario Argento’s brutal and beautiful Deep Red (standout track: Death Dies), but they really hit the motherlode on their second Argento collaboration, Suspiria (1977). If ever a film set out to disprove the argument that the best film music is that which you don’t hear, this is it. Built around a melody that drags Tubular Bells into a cackling Mittel-European whirlwind, Suspiria is a demonic assault that only the stone deaf could fail to notice. Film critic Alexander Walker famously referred to Goblin’s contribution as the sound of “500 cats having their tails trampled on in unison”. The key word there is “unison” – make no mistake, there’s method in Goblin’s cacophony, if not always in their film choices. Like Morricone, they occasionally gave brilliant work to dumb movies; listen out in particular for their sublime score to Luigi Cozzi’s goofy Alien rip-off, Contamination (1980).

With the advent of affordable synthesisers came the rise of the cheap synth score. In 1978, John Carpenter was putting the finishing touches to his third low-budget feature, Halloween. Being fond of synthesisers, and knowing his way around a piano, he elected to save money by writing and performing the score himself; a decision that helped turn his simple, elegantly shot slasher film into one of the biggest independent hits of the 1970s. For the devastatingly effective main theme, Carpenter employs an insistent metronomic pulse, but with a twist; the piano taps out five beats to the bar (shades of prog rock again). Meanwhile, the synthesiser provides a rapid “ticker-ticker-ticker-ticker” in the background. This, combined with the oblique 5/4 time signature, instils a jittery sense of something moving at the periphery of your attention, perfectly in keeping with Carpenter’s canny use of widescreen framing to create menace.

Horror went mainstream in the 1980s, but not before the smartest of the 70s freaks, David Cronenberg, delivered his sci-fi/horror masterpiece Videodrome (1983), with music by Howard Shore. Shore’s conceptual response to Videodrome’s reality-busting narrative was to blend a small string ensemble with synthesised orchestrations, using a new computer instrument called the Synclavier. The resulting ambiguity perfectly mirrors the film’s unsettling philosophical core. Are the characters having real experiences or simulations? Are these real instruments, or artificial? In neither case can you ever quite tell. Shore continues to exert a profound influence on the art of horror, and while his imitators rarely capture the same gravity and power, it’s not unusual for cut-price composers to mimic his solemn, glowering cello chords and shimmering microtonal violins.

Grunge, goth, metal and skate-punk have been regular party guests in horror ever since the release of Dan O’Bannon’s The Return of the Living Dead (1985), a pastiche of George Romero’s zombie films which added the Cramps and the Damned to the menu. At around the same time, corporate “synergy” was born; by the 1990s, soundtracks of all kinds were treated like foie gras ducks: stuffed with pop and rock in the hope that the album might shift enough units to reach the charts. The marketing wet dream was the Flashdance LP, which sold 700,000 in its first two weeks and went to No 1 in the US album chart. (No wonder Videodrome flopped, you can imagine the studio saying; who wants to do their morning calisthenics listening to Howard Shore’s Pins and Needles?) For me, though, plastering rock and pop songs on to a horror soundtrack merely normalises that most precious component: mood. Besides, I want to experience a director’s vision in sound, not listen to his crappy mix tape.

If I were asked what’s needed today, I’d say innovation, and greater timbral variety. If you truly want the audience to experience the clammy thrill of the grotesque, the uncanny and the fearful, you have to reach for the unfamilar, the perplexing, even the ugly; there’s an infinite Lovecraftian sound-world out there waiting to be explored. We need new combinations, new textures in film scoring. Horror has a licence to be weird – it’s supposed to mess with our heads. Comfort-zone rock and respectable string arrangements be damned; what we need is a neat draft of madness.

• Stephen Thrower talks about the Sound of Fear as part of the Vision Sound Music festival (2-4 September) at London’s Southbank Centre on 3 September. Details: soundandmusic.org

Trailer for the New DANAVA Album

H. F. — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 18:40:17 +0000

via Portland Mercury Blogtown PDX:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBDFsG2YzYc

“Danava has released a trailer for their upcoming third album, Hemisphere of Shadows, evoking an old 16mm print of a ’70s grindhouse horror movie—right down to the synth arpeggios and blast of riffage at the clip’s end. I’m not quite sure how they made it look so authentic (even down to the typeface), but I’m hooked; there’s an eerie vibe that’s a perfect match for Danava’s stoned-out space rock. (And just what is going on with those oddly garbed people on the beach? Questions, questions.) Curiousity will be slaked when Hemisphere of Shadows comes out October 4; in the meantime, Danava plays a free show tonight at Mississippi Studios.”

News : Jim Jones plotted a 9/11-style plane crash

H. F. — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 18:09:25 +0000

From Boing Boing:

Before cult leader Jim Jones convinced more than 900 people in Guyana to kill themselves in an act of “revolutionary suicide,” he had plotted to hijack an airplane and crash it into the city of San Francisco. The hijacking plans and other ideas Jones explored to kill his congregation and others have come to light in a forthcoming book by Julia Scheeres, titled “A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Hope, Deception, and Survival at Jonestown.”

From the Bay Citizen: The San Francisco hijacking plot progressed to the point where beginning in 1975, Maria Katsaris, 21, a close associate and lover of Jones, attended the Sierra Academy of Aeronautics in Oakland. Academy records confirm that a church paid her tuition. Katsaris earned a private pilot’s license and began commercial jet training, but church officials instructed her to attend school only long enough to learn how to take the plane’s controls after storming the cockpit and killing the pilots, according to Teri Buford O’Shea, one of four church members who knew of the plot, and the only one of the four to survive the mass suicide in Guyana.

“They told her she didn’t have to learn how to land, only how to fly,” O’Shea said in an interview. She said the plane was to have been a chartered commercial jet filled with members of the church’s hierarchy, which was called the planning commission and numbered about 200 people.

Jones reportedly wanted to kill commission members who he believed were undermining his leadership. He would not be on the flight.

Artwork Update : Aug. 2011

H. F. — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 18:00:10 +0000

Hello.

I just finished a new book cover for Headpress Books, OFFBEAT: British Cinema’s Curiosities, Obscurities, and Forgotten Gems by Julian Upton. Out some time later this year, I will post more info as I get it…

Artwork Update : Dec. 2010

H. F. — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 02:13:47 +0000

Hello.

I just completed the cover art for KIEHTAN, the new album by SKY BURIAL.

Released 07 December 2010 on Lens Records, US. – OUT NOW!
Order from Lens Records US • Order from Speaker Fire US

Artwork Update : Aug. 2010

H. F. — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 07:00:04 +0000

Hello.

I recently completed the cover art for Confessions Of A Narcissist, the new album by power electronics unit FIRE IN THE HEAD / Michael Page. The album features contributions from Nick Blinko (Rudimentary Peni) and J. Randall (Agoraphobic Nosebleed). Nick Blinko also contributed some of his beautifully obsessive calligraphy for the package interior.

Released 25 May 2010 on Cold Spring Records, UK. – OUT NOW!
• Press Release • Order from Cold Spring UK • Order from Speaker Fire US

* * *

I’ve also recently done the cover art for DARK STARS RISING, the new book by Shade Rupe (of the legendary Funeral Party books). DARK STARS RISING collects twenty-seven interviews conducted over twenty-four years with artists, filmmakers, writers, et cetera. In addition to some of my personal favorites — Brother Theodore, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Gaspar Noe, Hermann Nitsch, Andre Lassen, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, and Crispin Glover — the book also includes interviews with and contributions from Richard Kern, Buddy Giovinazzo, Udo Kier, Jim VanBebber, Dennis Paoli, Tura Satana, Teller, Peter Sotos, Johannes Schoenherr, Chas. Balun, Divine, Floria Sigismondi, William Lustig, Dennis Cooper, Johanna Went, Zamora the Torture King, Arnold Drake, Richard Stanley, Stephen O’Malley, and Dame Darcy. I also have some artwork reproduced inside…

Released December 2010 by Headpress Books, UK. – OUT NOW!
• Order from Powell’s Books • Order from Amazon US