the Book Of Very Very Bad Things Podzine - a 3:33 A.M. Studios Production

Higher Plans is the first Shadyside record in 18 years, and by gawd was it worth the wait. At a short but sweet five track run time, the Ohio unit exercise 2 decades of demons and atrophy. Chip, Wendell, and Michael join Peter to map the band’s formation, recorded material, performances, and inner dynamics. We explore the necessity of personal space, family, love, and youthful revelry. We clarify the impetus of the records’s visual components, release, and the incredible Mind Over Matter records. We get ill. https://mindovermatterrecords.com https://shadysidemusic.bandcamp.com  All music used by Kind Permission of Mind Over Matter Records and Shadyside. 

Hello all and welcome to Season 3 of the show! We return with some format changes, a new team member, and some industry heavyweights! Producer and engineer (Jerry Cantrell), Grammy Nominated Mr. Paul Fig (of Amen and Blue Bird) and Christopher Lewis (of The Kinison) have dropped their second album together, and it is an indie rock masterpiece.

All Music used by kind permission. "Martyrs" by Heart Out. Theme by Gown.

https://lewislosangeles.com

https://musiclewis.bandcamp.com

Album Personnel:

Christopher Lewis - Vocals, Acoustic guitars, percussion

Paul Fig - Electric guitar

Sam West - Drums

Corey Britz - Bass

Conner West - Backup vocals

Vince Jones - Keys on The Outside

LEWIS is:

Christopher Lewis - Vocals & guitar

Paul Fig - Guitar

Sam West - Drums

Conner West - Bass

Nathan Van Hala - Keys

This is the final chapter of Book II! Thank you all for your support. Book III Begins this Samhain!

To celebrate the release of his book Encyclopedia Obscurum, as well as the reissue of Timescale Zero's "Welcome to the Kali Yuga" via Damien Moyal's Lore Fanzine, I give you Adel Souto.

Herein lies a longform summoning of our nether selves, called upon to converge and build to a psychic crescendo.

The less I preamble the better, so listen like thieves.

All music used by permission.

Tonight we celebrate the triumphant return of one of our all time favorite bands, The Julies! Chris Newark and I dive into where they've been for over 2 decades, how this album came into the universe, family, love, children, gun control, mortality... We explore, ponder, and pontificate together for your listening delectation.

https://thejulies.bandcamp.com

https://lostinohio.com

All music used by permission.

Tonight I mine the virtues and sonic glory of the spiritual essence of Rock and Roll with one of it's greatest practitioners, Chuck French. Chuck along with the most fierce psychadelia laced Punks known to man, Git Some, have returned from an elongated slumber with their most realized work yet, New Blood. This conversation barely scratches the surface of the unique heft and sonically monolithic contents of this modern classic.

https://gitsome.bandcamp.com

https://radgirlfriendrecords.storenvy.com

All songs used by permission.

"Martyrs"by Heart Out https://heartoutband.bandcamp.com

Dave Clifford is the thinking man's musician. Having served time in bands of such import as Red Sparrowes, The VSS, and Sub Pop alum Pleasure Forever, he has seen every angle of independent music and lived to speak of it. Pleasure Forever have issued their first collection of new material in over 20 years with the incomparable "Distal", an EP so Gothic that it mines a stygian abyss that would confound those that define themselves in such terms. Gothic, not "Goth".

The entire first half of the discussion is dedicated solely to music, thereafter, we warm to one another, and therein lies the magic. You can find Distal at https://solidbrassrecords.com.

All music used by permission of Solid Brass and Pleasure Forever.

Intro by Heart Out.

Theme by GOWN.

Hello all ye Friends and compatriots! Welcome to an episode that I had never imagined I'd reach. 100. To celebrate, we decided to have a freewheeling conversation with Tara Van Flower. What we'd gotten was a rare interview with Mike VanPortfleet, who had forsworn interviews, AND an acoustic performance of "Where Has All The Time Gone"! We'd also gotten a bevy of well-wishes from artists, label runners, and influencers from across the genre divides and beyond.

Tara and I discussed everything save for her new novel, "Black Wolf Manor :Book Two of the Wulric Series", to my absent-minded chagrin.It is now available on Amazon, and will appeal to anyone that has enjoyed her "Violet" series (ROMAN, ROMAN) and digs a bit of romance mixed into their horror.

Tonight we have altered the usual format to include audio clips of the well wishers that have gone above and beyond to make this Chapter so special!!!

Hello all ye Friends and compatriots! Welcome to an episode that I had never imagined I'd reach. 100. To celebrate, we decided to have a freewheeling conversation with Tara Van Flower. What we'd gotten was a rare interview with Mike VanPortfleet, who had forsworn interviews, AND an acoustic performance of "Where Has All The Time Gone"! We'd also gotten a bevy of well-wishes from artists, label runners, and influencers from across the genre divides and beyond.

Tara and I discussed everything save for her new novel, "Black Wolf Manor :Book Two of the Wulric Series", to my absent-minded chagrin.It is now available on Amazon, and will appeal to anyone that has enjoyed her "Violet" series (ROMAN, ROMAN) and digs a bit of romance mixed into their horror.

Tonight we have altered the usual format to include audio clips of the well wishers that have gone above and beyond to make this Chapter so special!!!

No. 2.0... Go! The second 90 minutes of my conversation with Jack of Soft Riot, in which, we further traverse the multitudinous aspects os music culture, childhood touchstones, the word "Post", and other ponderous pontifications.

https://softriot.com

https://softriot.bandcamp.com

https://linktr.ee/BookOfVeryVeryBadThings

JJD of Soft Riot and I hunker down for a trans-Atlantic, conversational Odyssey in 2 parts. The Canadian ex-pat began his career in the Punk sphere, playing in indie darling band Radio Berlin. after leaving for the UK, he began to stir up new anarchy with the New Wave and Industrial informed sounds of Soft Riot. This is part one of a 2 part journey into the world of JJD.

https://softriot.com

Soft Riot, consisting solely of JJD, was a founding member of Canadian first-wave post-punk revivalists Radio Berlin (1998-2005) and A Luna Red (Gold Standard Labs, 1999-2003), with Soft Riot surfacing as a solo act in the early 2010s in London, England. Soft Riot has toured Europe numerous times, from Rennes, France all the way east to Moscow, Russia with selected performances in North America. and stages have been shared with peers such as Keluar, Linea Aspera, She Past Away, Section 25, Selofan, Drab Majesty, Lebanon Hanover, Noi Kabátand Robert Görl of Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft. Soft Riot is currently based out of Glasgow, Scotland — a city that JJD has now called home since 2016.

With origins from the mid-nineties in the vibrant art-punk/hardcore dominating the West Coast American/Canadian underground at the time (the first EP, No Longer Stranger, is the name of a track by hardcore band Universal Order of Armageddon), JJD followed a trajectory through to the revival of synth-based post-punk music just over a decade or so ago, which spawned a number of highly successful Canadian artists out of that scene.

Soft Riot’s sound is an amalgamation of JJD’s personal experience with music, containing elements of synthesiser-based film soundtracks, romantic italo-style flourishes, throbbing arpeggiations and angular, psychedelic synth-pop all tied together with an underlying tension. It is a science-fiction heavy soundscape that narrates the listener through today’s fractured, excessive landscape with hints of black humour.

The latest album, entitled No., is to be Soft Riot’s tenth full length album to be released on 11 August 2023. To be preceded by two extended digital singles from that album (A Spade Is Played Again and Linked Between Two Minds), this new album of nine tracks brings forward expanded production techniques, experiments with vocal styles and tones, and stylistic shifts mark a progression of Soft Riot’s sound. The result is snarkier, urgent and more playful, with a focus on pure synthpop, new wave, art-punk, proto-EBM as well as grittier synth-punk and post-punk tones. 

No. is a joint release between Possession Records (UK) and Wave Tension Records (NL).

In the years 2021 and 2022 there were a number of one-off tracks released on compilations, as well as a digital single entitled Windows To The Wild (Versions), including new versions of that track by Soft Riot himself as well as friends Qual (William of Lebanon Hanover) and Glasgow’s Ubre Blanca. Also released was the compilation album Second Lives in June 2021, which contained re-vamped versions of tracks from older albums, previously-released and hard-to-find covers of songs by Bruce Cockburn and Nomeansno, as well as unreleased matter from album sessions. 

When Push Comes To Shove, the natural predecessor to the latest album No., was released in late 2019 and resonated with references from all corners of the synthpop’s origins. Nonetheless, When Push Comes To Shove manages to retain its own individual voice, melding and reinterpreting its antecedents with a personal twist and an impressive demonstration of synth-craft and programming.

Around the same time Soft Riot released a counter-part album, Chin Up, written at the same time as When Push Comes To Shove and released in April 2020. This album features a notably different sound: more “ambient synth pop” for lack of a better description, and more for late night listening rather than live performance. 

2018’s The Outsider In The Mirrors was the first release on the Possession Records: a somewhat new label imprint co-founded by JJD. It is a consolidation of all the stylistic elements Soft Riothas pursued in the past, fusing his maximalist sonic palette with a sharp-edged sense of post-punk anxiety, unique synth interplay and brooding, claustrophobic new-wave dread. The music is tense, synthetic and precise, embodying and exploring issues of isolation, urban alienation and social paranoia. Yet despite these dark thematic preoccupations the Soft Riot sound is not without its warmth and humour.

When playing live JJD mans no less than three synthesizers, a microphone and an on-stage mixer all performed with the energy of a full band. 

Image by by JJD Works.