A Thick Mist: Recent Episodes
Justin Snow
A live vinyl radio show that airs weekly on 91.7 FM WMWM Salem featuring an eclectic mix of experimental sounds, worldly folk, extreme metal, old Americana, and non-music strangeness.
My dog Winona died yesterday. This episode has nothing to do with that aside from the fact that I needed to do something to keep my mind off things.
00:00:00 Christopher Marlowe, with Frank Silvera as Dr. Faustus – Dr. Faustus (Part 1) (from The Tragical History Of Dr. Faustus)
00:00:17 Illusion Of Safety (Chris Block, Janie Bouzek & Kitty Bouzek) – Untitled [Side A] (from Finite Material Context)
00:23:07 Jed Speare – Mettle Of Metal (from Cable Car Soundscapes)
00:25:45 Jonathan Coleclough – Summand (from Period)
00:46:41 Tom Lawrence – Grand Canal Springs (from Water Beetles Of Pollardstown Fen)
00:46:55 Jamra – Armaggedon/Invocation (from The Second Coming)
00:51:10 Pelt – Untitled [Track 1] (from Untitled [2005])
01:01:43 TenHornedBeast – Christus Nox (from The Sacred Truth)
01:12:04 Natural Snow Buildings – Shall I Kill My Own Child, I Will Never Sing The Glory Of Satan (from Two Sides Of A Horse)
01:15:46 Hiroshi Yoshimura [吉村弘] – Time Forest (from Soundscape 1: Surround)
01:26:14 Harold Budd – Dark Star (from Abandoned Cities)
This episode is about women being powerful, women being assaulted, women being outspoken, and women being silenced.
All of these songs came out this year. Most of this is non-traditional black metal. The rest is other non-traditional metal that can barely even contain that wide genre. 00:00:00 RLYR – Head Womb...
I tried to keep a broad enough definition of "holy" to include a variety of music beyond just the obvious gospel and hymns. This is A Thick Mist so I made sure to inject some black metal, hip hop, and drone.
I think Hindustani tends to be the more popular style of classical Indian music in the west (see: Ravi Shankar, Ali Akbar Khan, Chatur Lal, Dagar Brothers, etc) so I figured I'd shed some light on the Carnatic side.
I thought it would be fun to highlight the wide variety rolling down the mountains: everything from the banjo instrumentals of Hobart Smith to the lone black lung vocals of Nimrod Workman. I've always been a sucker for banjos, a cappella, and grim vibes, so naturally Appalachian music is 100% my jam.
This episode is super explicit and not safe for work (unless you're a sex worker I guess). 99% of the spoken word is people talking about sex stuff like blowjob instructions.
I thought I'd try something new. A new process that might fit into my life and a new approach to curation that might appeal to more people.
New Fluisteraars, Yemeni folk, new Sarah Davachi, Godzilla sound effects, ionosphere recordings, Margaret Walker poetry, Cambodian ballads...
Got some good shit on this one. I start out with two of my favorite records this year, mix in some Bahamian folk, Bengali spirituals, Japanese weirdness, Greek hymns, Easter Island chants, and of course some killer black metal.
Got inspired to do an entire episode of soundtracks. Mostly horror and sci-fi stuff, there's a pretty good mix of new and old. The bit with Upstream Color & Annihilation is fuckin crazy.
I love nu metal. There was a short period of my life where I was a little ashamed by it, but that's long gone. There is some really good stuff in the genre that I think most people ignored because of garbage like Limp Bizkit's "Rollin." There's more to nu metal than that and if you can't share my love of the genre as a whole, maybe you can at least find a song or two for the next time you feel the need to mosh.
This is the first episode in a long time with no black metal. The only metal is some massive doom. But there's also some wind harp drone, weirdo Japanese disco, the Inanga queen, the new solo acoustic master Yasmin Williams, and some snapshots of the civil rights movement.
Watch out. That third set with Johanna Hedva, The Besnard Lakes, and Divide And Dissolve is fuckin monstrous.
Keep an eye on Gates Of Doom, that record is year end list material. I end the episode with an interview with someone who was incarcerated for a long time and just in case I didn't say it enough during the show, fuck the prison system and everything about it. Forgive everyone.
I didn't intend to make a comeback on inauguration day but here we are. First normal episode in 5 months. And because this isn't being broadcast on a radio station, I could play all 47 minutes of the Ali Akbar Khan piece without any problems. There's also some Harry Potter black metal, Fidel Castro alongside Phurpa, a Midwife & Amulets collaboration, and plenty more.
Field recordings of an autopsy, a rotting corpse, and an electric chair execution, as well as cult leader monologs, trance babblings, lots of deep dark ambient, and a truly memorable ending.
Not much metal in this one. I highly recommend checking out Cinder Well's album in full. Ends with 30+ minutes of absolute mayhem while Paul Giamatti reads A Scanner Darkly.
This is a pretty heavy & dark episode with tons of collaging (there's 4 songs going at once for part of "Blood Rite") but ends on a light note with some simultaneous Jobin/Atkinson action and a couple 80s New Age dreams.
Got some excellent new metal, some excellent new weird shit, new Shirley Collins (!!!), Korean religious rituals, a poem about Harriet Tubman, strange 70s spoken word stuff, an excerpt from Annie Jacobsen’s book Surprise, Kill, Vanish (which sounds especially good paired with both Christopher Elmore & Sunrot), and plenty more.
00:00:00 Soyuz – The Sacred War (Towards Victory) (from Red Blood, White Frost)
00:13:11 Phew – Can You Keep It Down, Please? (from Can You Keep It Down, Please?)
00:15:51 Margaret Walker – Harriet Tubman (from The Poetry of Margaret Walker)
00:23:41 Musikautomatika – Untitled 2 (from Musikautomatika)
00:31:57 Annie Jacobsen – An Assassination Capability (excerpt) (from Surprise, Kill, Vanish)
00:35:44 Christopher Elmore – James River Running Beneath Boulevard Bridge (from Two Studies For A Self-Portrait)
00:41:00 Sunrot – Aether (from Sunnata)
00:50:19 Undirheimar – Heljarrúnar (from Heljarrúnar)
00:54:24 David First – Scene 7 (from The Consummation Of Right And Wrong)
00:56:11 Shirley Collins – Sweet Greens and Blues (from Heart’s Ease)
01:07:57 Lamp Of Murmuur – A Burning Spear To The Heart Of Dawn (Part II) (from The Burning Spears Of Crimson Agony)
01:18:18 Marr’del – Maria (from Mystery Of Love)
01:30:35 Marina Rosenfeld – Two (Joy Of Fear) (from Joy Of Fear)
01:40:47 Group lead by Kim Dae Re – Che-Sok Kut (excerpt) (from Shamanistic Ceremonies Of Chindo)
01:41:43 Clarice Jensen – Day Tonight (from The Experience Of Repetition As Death)
01:53:35 Horace Sprott – Early One Morning, The Blues Come Falling Down (from Music From The South, Vol. 02: Horace Sprott, 1)
UPDATE 2: The episode is back with the Atramentus song removed. I didn’t update the timestamps in this post so if you need to, just subtract about 23 minutes from whatever timestamp you see after Atramentus to get an approximate time.
UPDATE: I removed the whole audio file as the quickest way to remedy a takedown situation (my sincerest apologies to the band). I’ll figure something out so you can listen to the episode again soon. Sorry for the fuckup.
It’s been a long time since I’ve been as obsessed with a record as I am with Lankum’s The Livelong Day from last year. I just found out about it thanks to this Shirley Collins interview (they’re her new favorite band too). I’ve listened to nothing but that record all day every day for the past week. There’s lots of other great stuff here too but there’s a reason I bookended the episode with two tracks from The Livelong Day.
00:00:00 Lankum – The Dark Eyed Gypsy (from The Livelong Day)
~~00:07:36 Atramentus – Stygian III – Perennial Voyage (Across The Perpetual Planes Of Crying Frost & Steel-Eroding Blizzards) (from Stygian)~~
00:30:47 Terry Riley live in Japan, July 23, 1977 (excerpt)
00:34:18 Ruth White – The Litanies Of Satan (from Flowers Of Evil)
00:44:00 Side D (excerpt) (from WARM Radio – River On A Rampage)
00:47:20 Joanna Bruzdowicz – Homo Faber: La Solitude (from Bruzdowicz – Bogaert)
00:59:16 You Have Chocolate, No Money (Jaipur, Varanasi, Darjeeling, Arambol) (from Indian Soundscapes)
01:03:20 Budhaditya Chattopadhyay – The Well-tempered City (from The Well-tempered City – Book I)
01:20:40 Charles Kellogg – Sounds Of The Forest Pt. 2 (from The Nature Singer: His Complete Issued Recordings – February 1915 to January 1919)
01:25:20 Bell Witch & Aerial Ruin – Prelude / The Unbodied Air (from Stygian Bough Vol. 1)
01:48:53 Evicshen – Under The Stall Door (from Hair Birth)
01:56:44 Lankum – Hunting The Wren (from The Livelong Day)
Definitely grab that Overgrow To Overthrow benefit compilation from Bindrune. All proceeds go to Black Lives Matter and Life After Hate. It has 31 tracks including Thou, Inexorum, Vukari, Obsequiae, Falls Of Rauros, Cloud Rat, Aerial Ruin, Woe, Krieg, Dawn Ray’d, Krallice, and so many more incredible artists.
00:00:00 Panopticon – Flag Burner Torch Bearer (from Overgrow To Overthrow)
00:10:04 Unknown artist – I Want Some Food (from Street And Gangland Rhythms, Beats And Improvisations By Six Boys In Trouble)
00:15:04 Julianna Barwick – Safe (from Healing Is A Miracle)
00:19:57 Thai Elephant Orchestra – Floating Down The Pin River (from Elephonic Rhapsodies)
00:24:41 Marcin Barski – Conversation With Father (from Wanda’s Dream)
00:26:56 Ann McMillan – Gateway Summer Sound (from Gateway Summer Sound)
00:37:58 Murdered By A Woman – ΜΔiden-ΜΘther-ĊrΘne (from Murdered By A Woman)
00:43:58 Divide And Dissolve – Black Vengance (from Basic)
00:50:01 No Home – Burning The Body (from Fucking Hell)
00:56:28 Pattie Rosemon – I Heard The Voice Of Jesus Say (from Sorrow Come Pass Me Around: A Survey Of Rural Black Religious Music)
00:57:22 Aki Onda – Seoul (2010) (from Nam June’s Spirit Was Speaking To Me)
01:03:11 Unknown artists – Gamelan Angklung: Margepati (from The Balinese Gamelan – Music From The Morning Of The World)
01:14:13 Ehnahre – Warriors, Columns Of Infantry, Warships (from Quatrain)
01:22:41 Nawaharjan – Umbibrautiniz (from Lokabrenna)
01:32:57 Emmalee Hunnicutt – Cirrus (from Wooden Hollow)
01:34:55 Mary Price – Dark Was The Night (from Music From The South Vol. 7 – Elder Songsters, 2)
01:39:26 Simo Lazarov – From Melody To Melody II (from The City (Electronic Music))
01:48:52 NYZ – CEZbulgan (from Old Trx (87-93))
01:55:49 Félicia Atkinson – This Is The Gate (from Everything Evaporate)
How is the “no talk breaks” thing going? Does it totally ruin the experience or are you enjoying the show just as much?
The 3 metal songs are from 3 of the best metal records this year (M.S.W. is the Hell guy, Paysage D’Hiver should be obvious, and I thought Velnias was dead because their last LP was in 2012). The AWE track is from the upcoming final AWE record. RIP. Thankfully AW will still be active on his own and elsewhere. Backxwash is some phenomenal new horrorcore that I didn’t know I needed. And I am way psyched that there’s not one but TWO new Revolutionary Army records. We’re not worthy.
00:00:00 M.S.W. – Obliviosus (from Obliviosus)
00:19:38 Unknown artists – Rise And Fly (from Angola Prison Spirituals)
00:25:22 Plank & Ishq – Church Of The Holy Shale (from Nine Maidens Circle)
00:28:00 Robert Pete Williams & Tom Dutson – Dig My Grave With A Silver Spade (from Angola Prison Spirituals)
00:43:25 Backxwash featuring Malldate – Into The Void (from God Has Nothing To Do With This Leave Him Out Of It)
00:48:58 Andrew Weathers Ensemble – An Unkindness Of Ravens (from The Thousand Birds In The Earth, The Thousand Birds In The Sky)
00:54:32 Caroline McKenzie – A Thousand Butterflies (from A Thousand Butterflies)
01:00:10 Tony Schwartz – Dog’s Life, Part 2 (from An Actual Story In Sound Of A Dog’s Life)
01:10:07 Paysage D’Hiver – So Hallt Es Wider (from Im Wald)
01:28:30 Unknown artists – “ベ平連” 街を行? (1) (from 新宿広場’69)
01:29:25 Unknown artists – Ceremonial Drums (from African And Afro-American Drums)
01:34:05 Zero Kama – Winged Eye Hadit (from The Secret Eye Of L.A.Y.L.A.H.)
01:39:16 Velnias – Oblivion Horizon – Null Terminus (from Scion Of Aether)
01:54:24 The Revolutionary Army Of The Infant Jesus – Opening (from Nocturnes)