Vat of Acid

It has been proven time and time again that things are often not what they seem and that we should praise complete and truthful information as the only thing that can diminish the numbing bouts of general ignorance. With the world being stuck in a constant state of turmoil, I sometimes find myself wondering how much do we actually know, where are we going and why haven’t we arrived there yet. As these questions drill my skull, my mind races off to a little piece of info I read as a kid, enamoured with stories of exploration and mystery.

One of the most interesting tales of data misinterpretation is the first visualization of Iguanodon, the herbivorous dinosaur from the early Cretaceous period. Discovered by Gideon Mantell in 1822, it was only the second dinosaur genus to be identified as such. Mantell, an obstetrician by profession, followed his great passion for fossils and administered the first skeletal reconstructions and artistic renderings by combining different sets of Iguanodon bones. With the subsequent discovery of better specimens, Mantell’s vision of the creature changed considerably, but his sudden death from an opium overdose in 1852 prevented him to correct many of his initial mistakes and his studies of prehistoric life were taken over by his rival Sir Richard Owen, who used Mantell’s early data to give expert advice in the making of the Crystal Palace dinosaur sculptures and usurped the public’s vision of dinosaurs for decades to come.

On New Year’s Eve 1853, a lavish banquet was held inside the mold of the Iguanodon to properly celebrate the triumph of mid-19th century paleontology. In a clear moment of scientific blindness, the Iguanodon was depicted as a bulky pachyderm-like quadruped resembling a dog or a cow. Included was its most distinguishing feature – a five-inch spike, which Mantell originally placed on the dinosaur’s nose, a move obviously inspired by rhinoceros horns. It was later discovered that the spike actually served as a modified thumb and that the dinosaur’s body was much leaner, sporting a posture that made it possible for the animal to easily shift from bipedality to quadrupedality. The Crystal Palace version of the Iguanodon is completely inaccurate by today’s scientific standards and the statues in South London stand as a reminder of just how deceiving the initial looks can be.

Back then, the sources of information were rather limited. News flowed through a complex, unreliable and time consuming whirlpool of market routes, sea adventures and pigeons. Fast forward to the present day, to a world of unbridled communication where wars are prepackaged and televised and every aspect of our lives gets paparazzied to the bone. The crookedness of humanity has become consumer-friendly and consumer-ready. And we seem to like it a lot.

WORLD LEADER PRETEND

But still, it feels like the gray area hasn’t diminished one bit. We dismiss history’s pedagogic prowess as a learning tool for the weak and harbour the pestilent thought that the calamities of the past could never happen to us until it’s too late and the world is left for dead with a flood in its throat. While times of crisis are times of reckoning, it’s hard not to bitterly giggle at the fact that those doing the actual accounting are the same sordid characters that threw the excrement at the fan in the first place.

Recession is just a word. A word written in golden letters on every recent state of the union address cheat-sheet, pulled out of the hat of a sideshow magician and brutally abused at the altar of free economy. Like all bogeymen, it filled our minds with specific fears and became a convenient excuse for state-led redistribution of wealth under the guise of interventionist bailouts, cuts of acquired rights and threats of a miserable jobless future, making the frightened individual even more compliant. The abstraction of a problem and the subsequent injunction of state-of-alert measures with inevitable side effects, apologetically described as necessary evils, has been an efficient system-preserving method for centuries. All that matters is the nervous tremor among the members of the world’s ant farm, who are shaking in fear like a superstitious actor on the eve of a Macbeth premiere.

That explains why all the pillars of power were ignoring the fact that the real estate bubble was bound to join the inflated dot-coms at the cemetery of financial mega-meltdowns, as the modern day Gilded Age’s second coming was inevitably coming to a halt. As the halcyon years mutated into an era of permanent debt and poisoned securities, the shepherds of the free world openly issued blindfolds to their respective flocks, succeeding to fence them in for another round of wealth redistribution that aides only the chosen ones. They made sure that the once golden goose, now transformed into a fatally wounded donkey, carried them for that one last mile to reach a relatively safe haven where they can recuperate and have another go at the next masquerade of structural reconstruction.

Buried up to the neck in moral tar pits and balancing on the scaffold of public disgust, those in the upper echelon did just about anything to avoid responsibility as the corporate corpses started to float belly-up in the pond of greed and corruption. Larger than life companies, the epitome of success and wealth, turned out to be nothing but panhandling Behemoths, shamelessly begging for bailout funds and trampling down as many rules as possible in their efforts to stay afloat, not caring one bit about the individuals they pushed over the cliff in the process.

And yet, most people still believe in the system, its high-flying political saviours and their ingenious plans, while the candidates get progressively more radical and caricaturesque. Back in the day, everyone in their right mind would frown upon the slightest possibility of the self-professed Great American Nation letting someone like Donald Trump take the helm of the largest army in the world. Then again, we were laughing at Bushisms for eight years while the joke was solely on us.

As the ramifications of voodoo economics and creative accounting eventually led to destabilization and poverty, following the sequence of events where the profits were private and the crisis is collectivized, every current world leader has proven to be just another mofo in a motorcade with his hands tied behind their back and the puppet master’s strings sewn discretely into their spine. It’s nothing new.

COBWEBS OF THE REVOLUTION

In a mixture of personal downfalls, leftist wishful thinking and good old-fashioned opportunism, the collective consciousness advocated that the modern Via Dolorosa ran through Zuccotti Park, encompassing the in-your-face martyrdom of the 99%. The Occupy Wall Street movement advertised itself as something fresh and pure, detached from the powers that be and focused on finding a new way to make the world better for everybody.

While there’s nothing wrong with activism, the said movement wasn’t able to articulate a unified message, but instead protested all things that are wrong with the world and hoped to attract a large mass of individuals affected by the economic crisis and capitalism as a whole. As a side-effect, they somewhat unintentionally invited every slacker in a Guy Fawkes mask to wiggle their middle finger at made-up injustices berating their far-from-under-privileged lives. The avalanche of philosophical rhetoric without clear practical solutions caused the action to wane in the abyss of idealism and forced many to reconsider the fight altogether, while those who remained drenched themselves in needless radicalization and intellectual self-importance.

In the aftermath, the opposite ends of the spectrum are occupied by the status quo profiteers with their lethargic attachment to good old capitalism, and the proponents of the new economic and social paradigm with only faint ideas of how to make it happen, relying heavily on utopic dreams of a reasonable division of labor and fair dispersion of goods that completely disregard basic human nature, while the actual measures in practice mostly attack the diminishing middle class. Both sides seem equally lost.

All the hype, division and name-calling have successfully masked the real problem that lies between the two extremes. It’s the silent majority, the regular Joes and Marys waiting by the fire escape, trying to catch a break and hoping for something to fall from the sky and bless them with a solution, while the modern mechanisms of state paternalism provide cushions which are comfortable enough for most to fall asleep day in, day out. Real change will only come if something manages to wake up this sleeping tiger.

As economic predictions stay grim, one cannot shy away from the feeling that the nearly-forgotten Occupy Wall Street movement and its subsidiaries were just soundchecks for the inevitable global downfall, spicy appetizers at the banquet held in honor of the collapse of the Western World. Spooked by the displayed inefficiency of those who should provide the right answers, we often forget that we actually have a choice. Never mind what’s been selling – it’s what you’re buying goes the mantra of Fugazi, the ultimate anti-establishment band, a stance that seems to be completely lost on the digital generation.

And just like a bunch of misguided Victorians dining inside a concrete dinosaur mold, we’re hypnotized by the irrelevant wonderland of zeros and ones, while the world keeps feasting on its misconceptions.

I have always been a sucker for strange love stories, those special tales that manifest themselves outside the ordinary and rise above the rusty shackled boundaries of the common sweet-toothed I-want-to-hold-your-hand-and-love-you-till-the-end norm.

Peculiar romances that wallow in their originality and weirdness are actually not that hard to find in fiction. They waltz on the pages of great literature and ooze from the film stocks of seminal silver screen achievements. But the ones that really left me in awe and made me reassess my own desires and expectations inhabit the realm of a very different medium, a form that is usually not considered when it comes to the art of telling epic love stories: the world of comics, the kingdom of movie stills with novels in speech clouds.

Knowing how we tend to project fictional characters onto our own lives and how it affects our relationships, especially in the matters of the heart, I will try to present some of my favorite comic book love stories in all their outrageous beauty. Call it self-analysis. Call it freelance psychology. I don’t care.

REQUIEM CHEVALIER VAMPIRE

The Requiem Vampire Knight graphic novels portray the saga of German soldier Heinrich Augsburg who died on the Eastern Front and reincarnated on the planet Resurrection, a hell-like parallel dimension of Earth, as a vampire knight, aptly named Requiem. In this sinister world of backwards virtues and opium den bacchanalia, the ruling class of vampires is haunted by their past as a convenient plot device that enables us to learn quite a lot about Heinrich’s former life. Apparently, while stationed in Berlin, he fell in love with Rebecca, a Jewish girl who was abruptly taken by the Gestapo in front of his very eyes. To blot out the memories, Heinrich became a monster on the battlefield, and when he died in the most sordid of circumstances his soul retained the fictional image of a heroic German soldier he wanted to be, while turning Rebecca into a latter-day Juliet to his unlikely Romeo.

As the story progresses we learn that Rebecca materialized on Resurrection as well as one of the leaders of Lemures, apparitions of victims that haunt their killers, prompting the unraveling of shapeshifting emotions with sadomasochistic undertones, and pushing the envelope further into darkness.

Besides being a very imaginative, well-written and superbly drawn story, what appeals to me the most is the lost-and-found love between an indoctrinated Nazi soldier and a Jewish girl, which lives on even after it is thrown into a macabre make-believe afterlife of unlikely partnerships and reversed roles of crime and punishment. In an environment where every nuance of optimism is dead, the relationship between Requiem and Rebecca reads like the obituary of romance, challenged by the strength of true love.

RANXEROX

RanXerox might as well be the greatest anti-hero ever conceived and in many ways reflects the drug-addled and anarchist spirit of his author Stefano Tamburini who died of a drug overdose in 1986, aged only 31.

RanXerox is a cyborg, created by a ‘studelinquent’ of electronics from parts of photocopy machines, who expresses a moribund and absolute love for the under-age drug-addicted nymphomaniac Lubna. A synthetic emotion caused by a loop in his electronic cerebellum makes RanXerox obsessed with Lubna’s image and forces him to cater to her every twisted wish, usually involving drugs, sex or senseless violence, leaving a brutal symphony of shattered bones and disfigured corpses along the way, all focused on the single goal of satisfying his beloved lolita.

The adventures of RanXerox begin in the Rome of the future, a city in such a state of cyberpunk deterioration that it seems suspended in space and time, a place where there’s room only for violence and nihilistic egoism of achieving personal pleasure by any means necessary. A place where a robot with a transistor brain, a simple killing machine with an alibi of not being human, is the only possible hero.

What attracted me to this particular love story is the irony of the purest of all emotions being felt by a machine in an environment where humans have long forgotten its meaning. Manifesting itself as a punishment of biblical proportions, love resurfaces as a destructive force in the form of RanXerox’ obsession, resulting in utter carnage and demise.

FRANK MILLER’S SIN CITY

The Sin City yarn mythos is the comic book equivalent of finest film noir stories and I won’t even try to venture into the complexity and chronology of its events and recurring characters. The Sin City protagonists are fearless hard-boiled survivor types who share a soft spot for the proverbial damsel in distress, and most of their actions seem to be motivated by women. From mysterious Goldie to treacherous Ava Lord, from little Nancy Callahan to confused Esther, the femmes fatales of Sin City run the show. As Marv nails it perfectly in The Hard Goodbye, they are worth dying for, worth killing for and worth going to Hell for.

I am drawn to these stories and their strong sense of chivalry, and there’s probably more of me in those gutter-dwelling characters than I’d like to admit. Despite all the collateral dips in the mud, the stories unveil unconditional love in its purest form, emotions lacking compromise or second thought, with guys fighting for their dames until the very end and often dying in the process. Sin City truly depicts that essential glory of love Lou Reed pinpoints so perfectly in Coney Island Baby, a subject matter many don’t dare to think about in a real life scenario, but secretly want to.

Y: THE LAST MAN

When it comes to love stories and Brian K. Vaughan, the first thing most comic book fans would think of is Saga, his space opera of forbidden love, but Y: The Last Man is an entirely different animal altogether. It starts like a crazed feminist’s wet dream, as all men on the planet instantly drop dead, except for our protagonist Yorick Brown and his pet capuchin monkey Ampersand. Literally the last male specimen on Earth, Yorick is trying to locate his globetrotting girlfriend Beth by embarking on a journey across a world completely messed up by sudden gender unipolarity. He is accompanied by Agent 355, assingned by the new president of the USA (and Yorick’s mother) to protect him as humanity’s only hope to counter the global androcide.

Navigating the world that is missing the Y chromosome is much more difficult than it sounds, as society gradually slides off its hinges and impales itself on a stake of imbalance. Along apocalyptic wastelands, intersected with tribe mentality and chaotic improvisation, we are treated with a bizarre adventure, sprinkled by an undeniable chemistry between Yorick and Agent 355.

In moments of hardship, love is not a straightforward commodity, but a complex whirlwind of emotion and opportunity. This unique and flawlessly told story, basically an embodiment of male insecurities, can be interpreted as a cautionary tale on all the different ways male selfishness can backfire, blinded by a myriad other occurrences and distractions that push aside the only thing that should be important, congregating in a fatally late realisation that the right person was in front of your eyes all the time. To this day, the sequence in Paris goes down as one of the most heart-wrenching moments in graphic novel history.

Y: The Last Man is ultimately an allegory of not knowing yourself enough to choose what is best for you. Makes you think, huh?

 

There is no truce with the furies. A mirror’s temperature is always zero. It is ice in the veins. Its camera is an x-ray. It is a chalice held out to you in silent communion, where gaspingly you partake of a shifting identity never your own.
R.S. Thomas – Reflections

All of us with wings.
Jane’s Addiction – Three Days

One of the more underrated aspects of detachment is the ability to take flight, to travel vast distances in slow motion or at the speed of light, across raven-infested dreamscapes and unbridled desires, over the rainbow of earthly pleasures and the boredom of being judged by the hypocrisy of normalcy. To be remembered as more than a quote for an epitaph. To fuel one’s quest for the holy grail, the fountain of youth, or just another pastime. A hidden octagon to fight nothingness.

Regardless of the level of inclination to blend in, I always end up as one of those wingspreading creatures butting heads against the grain. There is no mountaintop, no endgame, no happy ever after. Just this moment, right here, right now, a still frame that passes in the blink of an eye, hopefully replaced by another, longer, better, more intense. Time is a harpy stealing the offspring of my lifeblood.

 

Recorded, produced and mastered at Wreckworld Studio, Ljubljana (Slovenia).

Cover art by Cheeky Orchid.

© Vat of Acid Records 2022.

 

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

– Aldous Huxley –

Dragging myself through these days of forced isolation and redirected focus, music is one of the few things that keep me sane enough to function, so I decided to keep record of what I am spinning on the outskirts of the pandemic maelstrom. I grew up listening to whole albums from the first tune to the last, just as they were intended to be heard. The playlists are presented in this pre-mp3/streaming format.

Monday, March 16

PSYCHIC TV – SNAKES

You can stumble upon many hidden gems by following the trails of Genesis P-Orridge exploring the West African roots of voodoo. The legendary challenger of morality is in top form, preaching like a psychedelic Vodun priest-ess, burning the amulets of their old home and wrapping everything up in an uncharacteristically coherent package.

After decades of teaching how to be ex-dream, Genesis showed us how to res-erect. After You’re Dead, She Said, the first song I put on after finding out about Gen’s death, is the best example of coming to terms with your own immortality.

BIG BLACK – SONGS ABOUT FUCKING

Big Black’s sophomore outing spits Steve Albini’s trademark freedom of expression all over, expanding his offering of a safe haven for difficult people and providing a brutal swansong for his first musical project. An intrepid blend of noisy punk-meets-industrial guitars and rudimentary drum machines, it was one of my favourites in my teenage I’m-so-over-Nirvana phase.

Don’t be fooled by the nihilistic proto-hipster potpourri: the songs aren’t really about sexual intercourse and the title merely reflects Albini’s stance that the male-female relationship as a subject for song is thoroughly bankrupt.

THE JESUS LIZARD – GOAT

The Albini-adopted orphans of articulated noise released their second album on the verge of alternative music’s invasion of the mainstream. Handling the heavy biomass of gargantuan rhythm with industrial precision, augmented by the famed producer’s vintage microphones and the vocals buried low in the mix, The Jesus Lizard invented a style of their own, imitated by countless bands that formed the shape of the 90’s rock revolution.

And before you ask, yes, Kurt Cobain and Dave Grohl were huge fans and many tunes from In Utero come straight from The Jesus Lizard songbook.

MICHAEL GIRA – DRAINLAND

Do you love me at all, Michael?

The Swans leader’s first solo effort is a brooding affair, an endless ocean of noises scattered over an echoing guitar strum. I always referred to it as an optimistic album about demise. Yes, there are shadows that loom over a doomed relationship, and yes, there’s the downward spiral of substance abuse. But if anything, Drainland is a painstakingly honest portrayal of one’s personal flaws and vulnerabilities.

I actually played this one twice.

Tuesday, March 17

PETER MURPHY – DEEP

Flying high on budding mainstream popularity of his previous two records, the Godfather of Goth crafted a perfect dark pop album, with a flawless radio-friendly sound and a bona fide MTV hit in Cuts You Up. It was his first solo album that I heard, and it’s always a pleasure returning to it and shooting nostalgia in the back.

SUICIDE – SUICIDE

The pioneers of synth punk set it off in style, outramonesing the Ramones in minimalistic approach and their love of 50’s rock’n’roll, while adding unbridled sexual undertones and a menacing sense of danger. The end result introduced an everlasting blueprint for all electronics enthusiasts who wanted to create rock music with their beloved machines that go ping. Another standout is Alan Vega’s heavily delayed vocal delivery that achieved the impossible by being haunting and straightforward at the same time, cementing Alan’s status as one of the best frontmen of American underground.

On a personal level, Suicide’s debut connected like few other records and opened me up to krautrock, primitive electronica and EBM.

SMASHING PUMPKINS – SIAMESE DREAM

I could rave on about this one for days, so let’s keep it short: it’s a masterpiece and it influenced my own musical endeavours more than any other record. While the seemingly infinite stream of guitar tracks laid on top of each other is an art form in itself, what I was trying to emulate the most in my songwriting days was the ingenuity of using weird tunings and chord voicings to create unique sounds of my own.

The album always conjures up one of my fondest memories: learning how to play Mayonaise on guitar and feeling that I’ve truly bonded with the instrument for the first time.

FRANK BLACK – FRANK BLACK

Oh, the joyful sounds of Black Francis transitioning into Frank Black! While not the first artist trying to reinvent himself, good old Charles did it with effortless panache, remaining quirky and genuine in the process. And yes, being equipped with an undeniably intricate ear for a pop tune always helps to smooth things out.

All you need to do is sit back and allow yourself to be pulled into a kaleidoscopic world where Places Named After Numbers, a love song for a black hole, might just be the prettiest thing you’ve ever heard.

Wednesday, March 18

PET SHOP BOYS – BEHAVIOUR

The synthpop powerduo’s deviation from dancefloor spotlight was as much a statement of maturity as it was a sign of changing of the musical tides. Bored with stock digital samples and sounds, Neil and Chris sought old school analogue equipment and produced some of the most polished and sophisticated recordings of their illustrious career. From the poignancy of Being Boring and the pop genius of So Hard, to slower numbers like Only the Wind and Jealousy, the boys put together a monumental bouquet of songs, with a little help from the likes of Johnny Marr and Angelo Badalamenti.

Even though I preferred guitar-based music from an early age, I could always find solace in the soothing melodies of the Pet Shop Boys. I had their first four albums on tape in my teens and I played them so much they literally disintegrated.

CLAN OF XYMOX – MEDUSA

A darkwave staple, it somehow never got the recognition it deserves. While the band’s other material was a bit of a mix-and-match affair and plagued by inconsistency, Medusa stands out as being flawless from beginning to the end, and I promoted many of its tunes to permanent fixtures in my DJ sets back in the day.

I once asked Ronny Moorings if the song Back Door was about anal sex, and he laughed for a good five minutes, though he never gave me a definite answer.

THE CHAMELEONS – STRANGE TIMES

This Mancunian cult ensemble is one of the most underrated bands of the 80’s, and easily one of the best. Championed as the early heralds of alienation, they seem like a perfect companion when the walls crumble and the flood reaches the attic. Though the epic Soul in Isolation might be better suited for these times of trouble, it was Swamp Thing that struck the biggest chord, connecting the dots of a detached existence.

WOJCIECH KILAR – BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA OST

The famed Polish composer’s amazing soundtrack to Coppola’s take on a classic of horror literature just might be my favourite piece of orchestral music: the build-ups, the lyrical cellos, the grinding basses, the angelic choirs… everything is incredibly atmospheric and always on point, including the closing credits theme, Annie Lennox’s insanely beautiful ballad Love Song for a Vampire.

Thursday, March 19

THE NATIONAL – ALLIGATOR

The National is that rare band I discovered in the last 10 years I can fully identify with, and even though I must admit they lost me a bit with their recent output, they had a string of four outstanding albums in a row, starting with this one. Drenched in melancholy galore, the tight arrangements delightfully complement the lyrical content, while the trademark baritone of Matt Berninger gently flies you to the moon and back, usually within the same meandering song. On Alligator, the band seems to always know how to cater to different moods of my complicated existence: sometimes I am Secret Meeting and sometimes I am All the Wine. And just like every fan born in November, I believe that Mr. November was written about me.

R.E.M. – FABLES OF THE RECONSTRUCTION

In early 1985, R.E.M. decided to step out of their comfort zone and move to London to record their third album. What was intended as a much needed change to break their cosy recording habits turned out to be an exercise in misery and the band later admitted that they were never as close to breaking up as in those two months being huddled in the cold and damp London studio, directionless and deprived of confidence in their own creativity. Their homesickness is on full display in the folksy Southern Gothic tales and outlandish characters that comprise most of the album, augmented by surreal sonic twists and turns, which only add to a sense of extreme longing and estrangement.

I’d like it here if I could leave, and see you from a long way away.

ALICE IN CHAINS – JAR OF FLIES

If Dirt was a monolith, then Jar of Flies is a gemstone. Predominantly acoustic, but with enough punching power to blow away every false pretention in its path, with undeniable excellence in the slow-rolling avalanche of Nutshell or the repressed pain of I Stay Away, the perfect harmonies between Layne and Jerry and the carefully crafted noises of Whale & Wasp, which actually sounds like a conversation between a whale and a wasp if you allow yourself some imagination. After this laid-back instrumental break, the brilliance fades a notch and the record loses its momentum during the last two songs, but I like to listen to them anyway.

MOTHER LOVE BONE – APPLE

Few things had as strong of an impact on the nascent Seattle musical community as the death of Andrew Wood. His band members Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament went on to form Pearl Jam, his roommate Chris Cornell put together the transcendent tribute project Temple of the Dog and his friend Jerry Cantrell penned one of the most recognisable anthems of the era in his memory. The self-professed man of golden words lived for the stage, his Shangrila, where stargazing muses danced on tables in the French Quarter. A few days before the scheduled release of Apple, Andy tested his own myth that the fast ones always ride for free, and embarked on a train bound for Olympus. He died of a heroin overdose exactly 30 years ago.

Listening to Mother Love Bone’s debut after all this time, I can’t avoid the wretched and ultimately futile what if. The album is just that good.

Friday, March 20

SKINNY PUPPY – BITES

The self-produced debut album from Canadian pioneers of industrial dance music gets you going from the start, as you’re immediately propelled into an electronic Grand Guignol of synthesizer wastelands and nightmarish samples, injected in club favourites like Assimilate and Dead Lines. Listening to this after a while, I still find it outlandishly grim and you can almost feel the filth oozing from the headphones. Quarantine Friday at its finest!

THE NEON JUDGEMENT – 1981-1984

Early works straight from the crypt of Belgian premiere faux-new wave duo. A collection of cold rhythms and minimalist arrangements with prominent bass synths, it significantly differentiates from their later work, which I also like a lot (Mafu Cage, anyone?). This one, however, seemed more suitable for the bleak work-from-home setting.

EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN – HALBER MENSCH

From the a cappella rendition of the title track to the cascading finale of Letztes Biest and all the chaos in between, Neubauten’s third album is a triumphant achievement. Blixa Bargeld and his cohorts expanded further into the bordering realm of cacophony and grinded their teeth against the uprising of EBM, all while keeping their precious industrial purity. Forever etched in my heart for Blixa’s standout vocal improvisation, ranging from deathly whispers to ungodly shrieks, this record is as feral as it is calculated, and represents an important cornerstone of my musical upbringing.

WEEKEND INTERLUDE

I mostly listened to new releases. Nothing worth mentioning, really.

Monday, March 23

COIL – THE APE OF NAPLES

Released after the sudden death of John Balance, it’s hard not to view Coil’s final album as an epitaph of sorts, celebrating the life of the intrepid frontman and releasing an ethereal mixture of everything we’d grown to love and associate with the band, culminating in the morose closer Going Up, with John’s sampled chants seemingly preceding his own memorial.

I listened to this one to death when it came out and you could often find me sitting on my bed and strumming the two chords of Fire of the Mind on autopilot, absently murmuring the words while contemplating my next move.

THE VELVET UNDERGROUND – WHITE LIGHT/WHITE HEAT

Although most prefer the banana-cover debut, it is the band’s sophomore release that, at least for me, captured the true essence of The Velvet Underground. Recorded after Lou Reed’s falling-out with Andy Warhol, the album is uncompromisingly primordial and rough, lacking the structure and poetic beauty of its predecessor.

This album holds one of my favourite moments ever put on a record: the instance when Lou takes over the John Cale-sung Lady Godiva’s Operation with a loud and utterly out of tune intervention in the second half of the song.

SYD BARRETT – THE MADCAP LAUGHS

With his mind racing at the speed of light and soaked in hallucinogens, the former Pink Floyd singer kissed away the devil-may-care 60’s with one of the most original personal statements of the turn of the decade. While not really being my cup of tea, the album contains unmistakable flashes of brilliance and Syd’s reckless yowls on Dark Globe send shivers down my spine every time.

ROXY MUSIC – ROXY MUSIC

Extremely influential, this eclectic introduction to one of the best bands ever should be the pinnacle of delight for every music fan. With nods to freeform postmodernism and vintage dandyism, and fuelled by skilled musicianship constantly bordering on reinvention and experimentation, the album floats on a higher plane, unmatched in its unlikely combination of contemplated weirdness and universal appeal.

Tuesday, March 24

LOU REED & METALLICA – LULU

Originally conceived as a theatrical production inspired by German expressionist writer Frank Wedekind’s set of two plays depicting the rise and fall of a sexually-enticing young dancer at the turn of the century, Lou teamed up with the guys from Metallica to form an unlikely partnership of theatrical poetry and shredding metal. Doom-laden and ultra-distorted, Lulu is still well within the reach of the artist who brought us compositions as diverse as audio feedback symphonies and meditational music. Lou’s trademark spoken word singing is even more prominent than usual and the melody is practically nonexistent. The lyrics, addressing nothing less than the rejection of morality and the subsequent deconstruction of life, coldly resonate through the half-shouted, half-spoken vocals, making the record sound painfully stagnant and unapologetically grim.

For Metallica, Lulu is a different kind of monster altogether. Demoted to a backing band to Lou’s vision of epic theatre, it sounds as if the heavy metal legends freed themselves of heavy duty headbang-til-you-drop attitude and provided a menacing and almost stoner-like soundtrack, resulting in a slow death march that perfectly fits the atmosphere of the album. If I remember correctly, no one liked this one when it came out, but I keep returning to it frequently.

DEAD MOON – HARD WIRED IN LJUBLJANA

Mostly taped at their gig in the student campus cafeteria of my hometown almost 25 years ago, this live juggernaut is soaked with blood of a pure rock and roll heart. Dead Moon might stand for many things, but for me, it always comes down to freedom, with their unadulterated garage rock, so perfect in its imperfection, trickling down the speakers and inking the memoirs of my youth. The warmth I get from listening to this band is hard to describe, and this album is the testament of my first Dead Moon experience.

RIP Fred Cole

RIP Andrew Loomis

Wednesday, March 25

BAUHAUS – THE SKY’S GONE OUT

It felt like Goth Wednesday so it was only appropriate to blast off the day with this supergroup of four distinctive styles with at least two giant egos, which imploded only a few years after its ambitious inception. The Sky’s Gone Out was probably the last time the band worked as a coherent and somewhat amicable unit, and it shows both in the tightness of the performance and the surreal songwriting approach, infusing their dark post punk with dub and cabaret.

In your face, pretentious and as far away from being modest as possible, Bauhaus encompassed the true essence of art rock while remaining mysteriously likeable. Add the superb musicianship and you get one of the most important bands of my early musical exploration.

SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES – NOCTURNE

From the appropriately alluring Stravinsky intro to the captivating ramshackle of Voodoo Dolly, this live recording from the Royal Albert Hall is a triumph from start to finish, celebrating the coming of age of one of the greats of the gothic subculture pantheon, while also throwing in two Lennon/McCartney compositions for good measure. While it can serve as a reminder of Robert Smith’s short but excellent stint with the band, the album is primarily showcasing the poise and star-appeal of Siouxsie Sioux, which is even clearer if you watch the video version.

A very special band that, much like Bauhaus, expanded my appreciation of all things nocturnal, this time from a female perspective.

THE CURE – BLOODFLOWERS

How do you know when a couple are huge The Cure fans? They named their first-born Untitled and their sex only lasts seventeen seconds.

Stupid jokes aside, Bloodflowers was their last album that I really enjoyed, and that was 20 years ago. They are still amazing live.

Thursday, March 26

THE JOY FORMIDABLE – WOLF’S LAW

With their second album, The Joy Formidable hit me like a heavily amplified swarm of bumblebees, challenging their own hype further with passionate nods to shoegaze manifesto and bedlam-buried hooks, and awarding the listener with chunky oil smudges on the stormy sea full of caterwauling killer whales.

»Let’s take this walk, it’s long overdue«, the opening line of This Ladder is Ours, fittingly serves as a self-assuring starting point for a band ready to make the next step with a newly acquired brew of performance mileage and studio experience that was somewhat missing from their debut. Cholla, with its Zeppelin-esque riff ripping into massive bass lines that redefine the thickness of sound, follows similar rifts in the noise vs. melody divide, boiling up to a breakout chorus of eternal questioning that is soothing as much as it is menacing. As is the case with the cactus that lent the song its name, the barbed spikes of sound stay with you long after the brush of music touched your ears, sunk deeply into the flesh of awareness to prepare you for the lengthy excursions into the uncharted territories of noiseville.

But the real surprise is lodged in the second half of the album. Slower and gentler, soaked in spiritual introspection, the songs creep up on you from the very shadows that the most intense dreams are made of, sailing on the established contrast between the seemingly fragile vocals of singer Ritzy Bryan and the actual weight of the compositions. Between cascading turnarounds and the urges for less talking and more reason, the notes float in unison as a single entity, straight to the fall of the curtain in the form of a hidden title track, with its downstroke drama slowly cartwheeling to an epic climax, wrapped in a sonic waterfall that is both painfully honest and blissfully gut-wrenching.

As far from easy listening as possible, but still wildly accessible to satisfy a broader audience, The Joy Formidable remind me of no one in particular, yet sound so familiar.

MEAT PUPPETS – MEAT PUPPETS II

Versatile and influential, the album number two from the precursors of the Seattle sound is a fine example of blending the right ingredients to produce a unique sounding mix of psychedelic punk rock with strong folk references.

Needless to say, the popularity of my cassette tape of this album skyrocketed after MTV’s first broadcasting of Nirvana’s unplugged concert, where the kings of grunge performed a triptych of Meat Puppets songs, accompanied by the Kirkwood brothers.

Friday, March 27

EELS – ELECTRO-SHOCK BLUES

Life is funny, but not ha ha funny.

Eels leader Mark Oliver Everett, also known as E, is a very peculiar character and this was his first descent into darker music territories. The majority of songs are dealing with his sister’s mental illness and her subsequent institutionalization and suicide (Elizabeth on the Bathroom Floor, Going to Your Funeral, Climbing to the Moon) or his mother’s terminal cancer (Hospital Food, Cancer for the Cure, Dead of Winter). The sounds and melodies are fittingly bleak and gloomy, with very little room for E’s trademark quirkiness.

A staggering record of questioning your own life and the time you’ve got left before the final departure. Every time I listen to this, I’m amazed how E can make everything so simple. And perfect. Simply perfect.

SUEDE – DOG MAN STAR

Preceded by a successful non-album single, this one was supposed to launch Suede to the upper echelon of UK rock stardom, which was quite an expectation for a band that never felt completely at home with the whole britpop gimmick. But as is often in the land of inflated egos, the creative process was marred by personal issues and general disarray. Bernard Butler fell out with the flamboyant and acid-gobbling frontman Brett Anderson before the album was completed and Dog Man Star was the eccentric guitarist’s final work with Suede.

Despite its troubled birth, the album sounds fresh even after more than two decades, boasting with a rarely seen balance between vintage rock’n’roll excess and experimental mastery.

INTERLUDE

Three weeks flew by since my last update and in this time, I had no inclination or willpower to publish a write-up on what I was listening to during the quarantine. There was, however, lots of introspection, and the music was always a big part of everything I did. Guess we all deal with seclusion in our own way. The lack of visible Vat of Acid engagement doesn’t mean that I just stood idly by. I wrote a long-form article on the 40^th anniversary of R.E.M.’s first concert for the alternative music website Louder Than War and made a couple of alternative rock playlists for a local independent internet radio. I also began work on a few new texts for this site and wrapped up some projects from my day-job.

Discussing and writing about music makes me feel good, so the Quarantine Playlists continue as the annus horribilis of 2020 marches on.

Monday, April 20

PLACEBO – WITHOUT YOU I’M NOTHING

It’s difficult to find an artist expressing himself about sexuality and addiction with such poignancy and grace as Brian Molko did on the early Placebo albums. On Without You I’m Nothing, one of the best songwriters in the game displays his full arsenal of talents, demystifying the obscure and knocking down taboos to the sounds of a band at the top of its game. The outlandish interchange of bombastic rockers and introspective slower tracks makes for a colourful off-the-grid carousel I keep returning to over and over again.

MAD SEASON – ABOVE

Born out of a rehab, Mad Season was primarily a side project catering to the fans of darker aspects of 90’s alternative music. The haunting tone is set right from the slow burning opener Wake Up, with a meandering guitar melody and droplets of pain dripping from the echoes of Layne’s voice. The record opens up right after that with a couple of bluesy licks, but never crosses the borders to naïve or banal territory. A little underrated to this day, this somewhat unpolished gem contains some of the best tunes of the era. Sadly, with the deaths of John Baker Saunders and Layne Staley, Above was the grunge supergroup’s only release.

Tuesday, 21 April

SONIC YOUTH – DIRTY

While probably not the best Sonic Youth record in objective terms, Dirty is definitely my favourite, introducing a more melodic twin guitar attack of Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo and some of the finest riot grrrl vocals from Kim Gordon. Who would have thought at the time that the kingpins of noise are capable of delivering such hooks as the intro riff of Sugar Kane or the slowed-down middle part of Purr? Still, when the band goes on a full cacophonic rampage, I can’t think of anyone who can do it better.

THERAPY? – SUICIDE PACT-YOU FIRST

With a profound disgust of the music industry and a ferocious thirst for vengeance, Therapy? opted for lo-fi production and raw atmosphere, and the band’s intentional return to obscurity resulted in one of the more potent records of their 30-year career. Suicide Pact is an impressive back-to-the-roots soundtrack to disenfranchised DIY ethos gone awry and the trampled integrity of alternative acts when they make it big. Be it the heavy stomp of Little Tongues First or the return to the times of childhood overtaken by the Northern Ireland conflict in Six Mile Water, Therapy? always manage to find an angle that is distinctively theirs. It was the record they had to make instead of becoming another cautionary tale from the bowels of the big machine.

In his top ten hit One piece at a time, Johnny Cash sang about a man working at an assembly line in the gutter of the automotive industry with the task of putting wheels on Cadillacs. Knowing that he will never be able to afford such a mythical vehicle of luxury and power, he conjures up a daring plan to steal one, screw by screw, one piece at a time, avoiding the risk of getting caught by his supervisors.

Beside offering a fresh deck of ingenious storytelling, not quite uncommon to the realm of country music, the song introduced the term ‘psychobilly’, describing the end result made out of parts of different Cadillac models, straight out of Doctor Frankenstein’s wildest dreams. The same expression was used by Lux Interior to promote his band The Cramps, a mixture of garage Americana and adolescent punk that scorched the earth of decency with its primordial noise-driven slapstick’n’splatter ethos. Thematically, the new subgenre combined standard rockabilly love of all things American with science fiction, pulp magazines and vintage horror.

The Cramps, who later claimed that branding themselves psychobilly was just a carny move to promote the band, always wreaked havoc a couple of steps ahead of the pack of countless imitators. From the pro bono tours of lunatic asylums and Lux Interior’s reckless head-through-the-drumskin stage antics, to the performance on the Halloween episode of teen TV series Beverly Hills 90210, they tight-knitted their own heritage of simple exploitation odes to oddball worshiping like I was a Teenage Werewolf, Can your Pussy do the Dog? and Bikini Girls with Machine Guns, songs that seemed to be crafted by demand of the fanboys of genres that found their home under the rug of pop culture.

On February 4th 2009, Lux’s nonconformist heart, the crux of his engine, twitched out its last cramp, while his spirit – wherever it may be – continues to relentlessly push the limits of his assembled car, much like the protagonist of Cash’s song. It’s in his nature.

February 17th 1995. The police found an abandoned silver Vauxhall Cavalier at the parking lot of the bridge across the Severn river, a notorious suicide spot. Its owner Richey James Edwards, member of the Welsh quartet Manic Street Preachers that hijacked the British music scene a few years earlier with a mixture of social counter-activism and archaic rock’n’roll glamor, pushing aside the dancefloor psychedelics and painfully apolitical sounds of Madchester, was missing since February 1st.

As the author of the Manics’ manifesto, lead lyricist and chief public relations officer, Richey embodied the most visible of the many faces of the band, despite never hiding the fact that his musical contributions were minimal and his guitar, hanging down to his knees in finest rock star fashion, was nothing but a stage prop. This demeanor went hand in hand with his nihilistic idea of disintegration and subsequent destruction of rock’n’roll, where the mythologized musical persona takes over the cornerstones of reality in an ultimate triumph of style over substance.

Richey was well acquainted with the power of provocation and used it to perfection. The notorious interview for NME, during which Richey responded to journalist Steve Lamacq’s relentless taunting about the authenticity of the band by calmly carving ‘4 REAL’ across his forearm with a razor blade, was followed by countless bizarre convictions and planned media manipulations, like the demand to wrap their debut album in sand paper so it will destroy every other record in the listener’s collection. The perks of two-way publicity weren’t lost on bass player Nicky Wire either, as the intrepid motormouth demonstrated by stamping the Manics’ 1994 performance at Glastonbury, the epitome of British musical pride and tradition, with a rant that they should “build some more fucking bypasses over this shithole”. Ah, those were the days!

The band was aware that in this wicked day and age, even intellectualism is a matter of presentation to the audience. They packaged their message in the epiphanic slogan of ‘Culture, Alienation, Boredom and Despair’, paired with an intense sense of urgency, as if they knew that their carefully crafted system wasn’t built to last. Too many big words for each line, too many grandiose ideas for each song, a devil-may-care approach as if every performance was their last, with the mandatory destruction of their instruments as an ultimate showdown of rock’n’roll imitation and disgust – all this were the Manic Street Preachers in their naïve subversive early phase.

The synthesis of a thorough mass consumption of books, records and video cassettes and the boredom of a small mining hometown in South Wales made sure that Richey’s lyrics weren’t conceived as a cohesive unity, but rather as an egalitarian mixture of fragments where the influences of pop culture had the same value as the classics of literary and political history. It was all but uncommon that the ideas and images of Karl Marx, Kate Moss, Yukio Mishima, The Clash, Albert Camus, Fidel Castro, Harold Pinter, Kevin Carter, Bret Easton Ellis, Madonna, Stephen Hawking, Sylvia Plath, Public Enemy, J.G. Ballard, Noam Chomsky and Traci Lords weathered under the same roof.

Through his whole tenure with the band, Richey was battling with melancholic alienation, substantially worsened by his elephantine alcohol intake and random bouts of depression and anorexia that slowly paved a thick black fog over his undeniable charisma. Even his self-professed heroes – Ian Curtis, Colonel Kurtz from Apocalypse Now and Johnny from Mike Leigh’s Naked – were nothing but a shadow-casting premonition of things to come. After a lengthy stint at the prestigious Priory Clinic, on the eve of a long-anticipated US tour to promote the band’s latest masterpiece The Holy Bible, Richey checked out of the Embassy Hotel and vanished into thin air. After a very public and much-criticized police investigation, he was officially declared presumed dead in November 2008.

The band decided to carry on, achieving unimaginable greatness. But that’s another story. James Dean Bradfield, Nicky Wire and Sean Moore honored their lost childhood friend with every step they took on the slippery slopes of success, making sure that even now, 25 years after Richey’s disappearance, j’accuse-ridden words still dance barefoot on the shards of crystal glasses with their middle finger poking at the rectum of false morality in true Manic Street Preachers fashion. Never forgotten, Richey’s legacy lives its own life, for real and forever, both as a memory and a reminder that death doesn’t always have to be the end.

The wails of dying cicadas blast through the speakers, as the cityscape extends itself in a magnificent sprawl and its flickering lights start their dance of a million pre-midnight cinderellas. Biotech vultures sit atop the silicone abattoirs and solemnly gaze at the glitches in the information highway capillaries spurting out viruses to numb the digital ghosts of yesteryear. Deep in the core, the best of the species compete in an intertwined playground of order-within-chaos cybernetics without a defined set of rules or restrictions. A raw and unhinged metasphere where lifeblood vortices go to die. The scenery of Panther Modern’s Los Angeles 2020.

From the get-go, the haunted electronica of Panther Modern sounds like the work of a man who dismantled the atomic bomb a few seconds before the blast, as if the synthesizer gods had to purge these tunes out of his system to prevent the swollen sky from falling on our heads. While the focus of the EP is undoubtedly pointed at the dancefloor, the barrage of noise trinkets in the background induces a parallel evolution of sonic sexual mutagenesis, provoking the subconscious receptors of broken human transistors that call themselves normal.

Perfect in its minimalism, the cascading build-up of the tracks resonates against a cold vocal delivery fed on a heavy diet of static, resulting in a straitjacket-trapped explosion of catchy melody and firm arrangements bound to release the cerebral tourniquets of a dystopian moral majority. The tribal firedance continues unfazed, as the pillars of id succumb to the effects of electronic opioids, dispersed within a collection of tunes that make you stop caring about your surroundings and forget that the streets are littered with armies of creeps putting on iridescent masks and pretending that the world is taking notice.

Floating rudderless on a shockwave of tomorrow, the riveted addicts fuse themselves with the vibrations from the subterranean trenches where mutant rats reign over neon-lit sewers, bartering their pound of flesh for a shot at the driver’s seat. At the control deck, the most daring ones ensure that the echoes of the EP’s four songs ­­­­will start their afterlife the moment the needle is lifted from the groove. Affected by the age of the night, the matrix is in perpetual overload, urging us to hurry up and pose for final shots before the dawn breaks out and sets the cycle on repeat. Before Molly kicks in the door and saves the day…

In its essence, rock’n’roll is supposed to be a never-ending stream of conscious-expanding expression, a spiked glass of escapism under the hood of the proverbial rebel yell. Outstanding songs tend to paint visuals in our mind, but the intensity of those pictures depends on the listeners’ imagination and their emotional attachment to a particular tune. That being said, conveying the crux of the song to a visual medium can be quite tricky and it has been proven time and time again that music videos can make or break whole careers. The importance of the music video has pushed musicians, visual artists and directors to move away from classic performance shots and create memorable mind-bending clips that stand out as true triumphs of creativity and transgress into a life of their own. In the immortal words of Hunter S. Thompson: »When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.«

What follows is a bouquet of my favorite hallucinogenic rock music videos. Enjoy the trip!

MARILYN MANSON – DOPE HAT

It’s only appropriate to start it off with Marilyn Manson and his merry bunch of sideshow rejects. Taken off the band’s debut, the Dope Hat video delights us with a bizarre sugar-coated incubus set over a shameless rip-off of a Black Sabbath riff (then again, aren’t they all?) and spooky theremin effects. Throughout the video, we follow the self-proclaimed antichrist superstar’s boat trip across a perpetual Willy Wonka nightmare, intercut with cartoonish satanic images and allusions to child molestation, featuring a sordid array of disturbing scenes with ingenious props like insect pills and lab rat baguettes. Sailing on either blood or syrup, this Oompa-Loompa orgy is arguably the best representation of the early phase of Manson’s career, before he started to take himself so damn seriously.

Colors never looked this creepy.

PLACEBO – NANCY BOY

Placebo are well known for high-value artistry and impeccable sense of aesthetics. With Nancy Boy, we are invited to their perverse world of morphing faces and dilapidated bathrooms bearing various transgender innuendos and blueprints to all kinds of depravity. While the key features of the video are often intentionally distorted and blurry, the creative use of lighting perfectly accentuates the macabre atmosphere in which the twisted imagery can be stylized to a full Jacob’s Ladder effect. Get ready for an orgasming bathtub, a thorny wheelbarrow and a torso impaled a fakir’s bench, with the addition of sex doll mouths and human mannequins straight out of a lunatic’s wet dream.

A masterful exercise in goth psychedelia.

BLIND MELON – GALAXIE

To an unsuspecting beholder, Blind Melon seemed like a straightforward rock band that sprouted from the side-roots of grunge. But as in most cases, there’s more than meets the eye and it’s a well known fact that charismatic frontman Shannon Hoon was no stranger to mood-altering substances that ultimately cost him his life. The video for their 1995 single Galaxie starts off in what looks like an unbalanced kid’s meth lab and ends with Timothy Leary’s frown, but most of the crazy scenes revolve around the band goofing around in Hoon’s 1964 Ford Galaxie. It doesn’t take long for the trip to turn into a genuine crackhead paradise as they speed down the birth canal with a swarm of sperm and vividly react to various hallucinations lurking under the neon city lights, with a haunted Hoon, visibly on drugs, literally disintegrating in front of our eyes while lamenting about lost love.

All in all, a lot of trippy stuff happening for what is basically a song about a car.

SOUNDGARDEN – BLACK HOLE SUN

It’s hard to believe that this video almost wasn’t made. By the time the question of a visual representation of Black Hole Sun came around, Soundgarden head honcho Chris Cornell apparently grew tired of the strenuous process of making music videos and didn’t want to put any effort into what looked like a tedious chore. The end result was one of the most iconic MTV staples of the grunge era, a shocking portrayal of quotidian life sliding slowly off its hinges. From the calm of the initial abundance of pastel colors, we are plunged into a mind-piercing slideshow of psycho smiles, barbecued Barbies and other bizarre occurrences representing the moral numbness of the privileged at the dawn of a full-fledged apocalypse, as the care-free and tanned White America gets washed away in a purifying storm of a dying sun, which bears an uncanny resemblance to the Eye of Sauron.

A disturbing suburban meltdown.

THERAPY? – LONELY, CRYIN’, ONLY

With the plethora of colors in other videos that appear on this list, I wanted to have a pure black and white entry. Northern Ireland’s Therapy? certainly have the goods and I had quite a hard time choosing from their extensive back catalog of trippy outings. Ultimately, it came down to Teethgrinder and this Buñuel-inspired whirlwind of absurdity which impressed me with its fresh twist to the old head-in-the-box routine.

Simple and surreal.

Disclaimer: This is not a complete list, as I haven’t included the masterpieces from the likes of Nine Inch Nails, Smashing Pumpkins, White Zombie and Tool, which only opens up the opportunity for a follow-up post.

In the last 50 years, the fabled City of Angels certainly had its share of eminent musical outputs, but few of them represent a cornerstone as big and strong as Jane’s Addiction.

In an environment infested with pompous hair metal bands and their soulless songs that portrayed life to be one endless party of excess and fame, filling the fans’ heads with up-to-date fairy tales of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll, Jane’s Addiction was sticking out like a sore thumb. As the forerunner of the anti-Strip, equipped with spiritual depth and urgent zeitgeist edginess, Jane’s Addiction represented nothing less than a shambolic foray into one’s pleasure dome. Browsing through the sepulchres of psychedelia and the legacy of The Velvet Underground’s shady vision of the Sixties, the band exhumed a unique sense of community, seen through a prism of punk attitude that was more warpaint smudges than lipstick traces. Their intrepid mix of classic rock and underground alternatives offered no elaborate shout-outs to the metal kids and seemed to be even less suited for the rabid followers of the fading Southern California hardcore and goth scene, yet their following increased dramatically after each show. More than any other musical combo before them, they were not a nobody’s band, they were everybody’s.

While many young artists marinate in the cocoon of the known, superglued to their comfort zone, Perry Farrell brushed off the mapped-out convenience of his upper-middle-class upbringing to fully absorb the strange and mysterious world behind the American Dream façade, soaking in influences from different cultures and walks of life like a skin-and-boned pointy-nosed sponge. With primal ritualistic tribalism, drug-fueled escapism and pure drive of his artistic sincerity, he managed to gather all the corners into a powerful unit and overturn the prevalent mantras of the powers that be, proving to the rigid music business and the risk-avoiding media that alternative culture has its place in the spotlight. Blessed with the fire of the Seraphim and the wingspan reach of the Albatross, his intimidating and outworldly onstage persona united ancient and modern times in an epic hybrid war of the worlds, as if he escaped from the seminal works of Homer, Wagner or Dalí. Following the call of his true nature, battling through banned album covers, refused urine tests and general rancor towards the establishment, Perry displayed Dionysian fortitude in its purest form, leading onslaught after onslaught against anything and anyone that threatened to compromise his vision.

Perry’s status as the undisputed leader of a blossoming new generation of the dismissed notwithstanding, all his efforts wouldn’t generate one tenth of the impact without the chemistry of sound that accompanied his inner detonations and constant schizophrenic switches from passionate cosmic lover to unhinged wildman and back. In the early days of Jane’s Addiction, it seemed as if the larger-than-life foursome was soul-kissing each other every gig, every backstage party, every step of the way, churning up the molecules of the heavy-clad air of the LA clubbing scene. A rare combination of paranormal unity and collective hunger was the first sign that the band’s raw energy was shaping into something grandiose.

A big part of the band’s unexplainable sonic sorcery was Eric Avery. Many Jane’s Addiction tunes, now considered classics, are based on his rudimentary and repetitive, yet never dull bass-lines, locked into an eternal groove over which the other members laid their respective bits of the puzzle. Thanks to him, the songs had structure, a solid foundation that could be built into anything, from superfast trains to dreamy remembrances, but at the same time providing a soothing background to fall back to when the musical excursions into the eccentric needed a break.

Speaking of musical excursions, Jane’s Addiction was a perfect launch pad for Dave Navarro‘s beyond-belief talent. Mentored and encouraged by Perry and Eric, he spontaneously introduced a prominent guitar sound that in many ways simulated the old glory days of guitar heroes, but still felt fresh and interesting within the context of the band’s overall musical attire. Raised on classic rock guitar of Jimi Hendrix and Jimmy Page, Dave’s pentatonic scales had enough of Robert Smith and Daniel Ash in them to endear him to the self-conscious and dinosaur-wary alternative crowds. Despite joining the band as a youngster, he showed musical maturity beyond his age, never stepping over the magic of the collective noise and refusing to add a guitar solo where the prevailing atmosphere of the song didn’t indicate one (most notably on the striking Then she did).

Acting as a polyrhythmic backbone, holding it all together, was Stephen Perkins, a skin-pounder every band craves for. From thunderous to cushioned, whichever mood the song evoked, his precise energy embodied an unstoppable motor permanently switched to maximum power. Much like the rest of the band, he wasn’t afraid to experiment and his contribution was far beyond of just keeping a beat.

It is clear by now that Jane’s Addiction is one of my favorite bands and I was profoundly touched by the band’s mesmerizing sound throughout my life. I could write page after page about the ethereal flow of Up the Beach echoing the ocean waves breaking against the slick surface of a surfboard, or how the chaotic bundle of noise and blasts complemented the in-your-face attitude on Ain’t no Right, or how the effortlessly addictive real life narrative of Jane Says also includes a lesson on the dangers of postponing what needs to be done now to another day – a situation we can all relate to. Every song was a magical and emotionally cathartic experience in its own right, but if I have to sum it all up in one tune, it has to be the poetic Behemoth on a roller coaster that is Three Days, its legendary mid-song jam still sending the same shivers down my spine as the first time it ran through my ears.

As for their legacy, Jane’s Addiction inspired countless left-of-the-dial musicians and paved the way for the explosion of grunge and alternative rock in the turbulent Nineties. Their farewell tour, Perry’s brainchild festival, befittingly named Lollapalooza, became a celebration of the diversity of alternative culture where the torch was symbolically passed to other talented and original artists crawling out of their underground shelters to finally get the well-deserved recognition of the daylight world.

Then they broke up, only to be reborn many times under different circumstances. Due to the incredible, almost supernatural unison inside the band, it seems as if the Jane’s Addiction members couldn’t stay away from each other for long. Impomptu collaborations evolved into Eric-less relapses and finally into a full-fledged reunion that unfortunately didn’t last long enough to produce another original line-up record. The torch may have been passed, but the crown still shines as bright as ever, ready to once again catch me off-guard and force me to step out of my pleasure dome to face the unknown and feel alive. This, I believe, is the true power of Jane’s Addiction.

Jane’s Addiction guitarist and all-around celebrity Dave Navarro once remarked that you haven’t lived until you’ve been hugged by Lou Reed, obviously enchanted by the moments spent in the presence of the legendary musician who penned songs like Rock’n’Roll, Venus in Furs and The Bed (all of them covered by Navarro in some form or another) and inspired the title of the quintessential Jane’s Addiction track Jane Says.

I’ve never been hugged by the great Lou Reed, but metaphorically speaking, he’s hugged me long before I’ve met him. I’ve discovered him by chance, listening to a cassette tape that someone left on the bench of the school basketball court, and became instantly enamored with his diversity, truthfulness and unconventional approach to tunes-crafting. From the frank junkie tale of Heroin and Coney Island Baby‘s monumental glory of love, to the telling-it-how-it-is inner city vignettes of New York, Lou’s powerful delivery left a lasting impression on a budding teenager who was just about to shed his tadpole skin. In a way, he prepared me for everything I was bound to achieve. I felt I was ready to hit the world with my own traits and quirks.

By then, I have ventured to another stage of my musical exploration – Jane’s Addiction and the early Nineties underground-to-the-fore movement. For what seemed like a perfect band, Perry’s surreal echoes, Eric’s viscerally organic bass lines, Stephen’s thunderous tribal blasts and Dave’s masterful-yet-unpretentious licks led the ferocious wolfpack of my musical preferences for a number of years. They combined The Velvet Underground’s streetwise poetry with Led Zeppelin’s larger than life presence and nurtured a unique mixture of several musical genres before the alternative rock explosion in the early Nineties made it a mainstream standard. Jane’s Addiction rocked like hell, but weighting everything in retrospect, it all came down to honesty. Perry’s portrayal of life and the soundscape of the band’s instrumentalists was the most honest thing I have heard since Lou Reed.

I shook Lou’s hand before a concert in 2000. He wasn’t in the mood for talking (I was told that he rarely was). Nevertheless, I will always consider him a father figure that taught me how to survive the toughest of times through the varsity of his music. He’s the king of all my heroes, the instigator of the “Pris Says” of my life.