there's all these ancient cities around the world that are practically buried. consider antioch, which is now in turkey. it was founded as the capital of a greco-syrian empire that one of alexander the great's generals created, around 300 BCE. it was a really important city in the roman empire for the entire time it controlled the levant, even holding one of the most important bishops (patriarchs) in the christian church. it became arab/muslim for a while, then got attacked in the crusades, and is today just a pile of rubble at the mouth of a river.
i could just imagine wandering into the place, though, in the period between when it was destroyed and when it got buried by geological processes. there would have been places to live there, free of rent or labour. i mean, you'd have to figure out how to plant and water some food, but besides that it's just free living. did people do that? i mean, it obviously couldn't have happened on too great a scale, otherwise the place wouldn't be rubble. but i'm interested in knowing who might have lived in these ruins and what kind of a society they may have had.
i guess a modern parallel would be ghost towns out west. i mean, they're called ghost towns because nobody (supposedly) lives in them. but, how empty are they actually? do people (besides the aboriginal inhabitants, but that's a different kind of ownership) actually own these structures? if i walked into an old house in ghost town, saskatchewan and just started fixing it up, is anybody going to charge me rent or demand i pay taxes?
i know there's this common law idea of gaining ownership over a structure by "improving it", but that's something else.
this is an extreme example, the climate's a little much for my tastes, but there must be literally thousands of abandoned houses here: Uranium City was a thriving town until 1982, with its population approaching the 5,000 threshold required to achieve city status in the province. The closure of the mines on 30 June 1982 led to economic collapse, with most residents of the town leaving. It was later designated as a northern settlement with about 300 people remaining. The local hospital closed in the spring of 2003. The current population is 201,[1] including a number of Métis and First Nations people.[4]
i mean, a place like that, you can't just scatter seeds in your yard. that's far enough north it might even have permafrost.
then again, the permafrost is melting.
this is a little more reasonable. some of the houses may be unliveable, but smashing the doors down on the church might be something like discovering an empty castle.
there's probably ghost towns in southern ontario.
like i say, i believe the common law on this is if you smash the doors down and fix the place up, you take ownership of it.
like, check this abandoned church out. somebody is obviously maintaining the lawn. it's still an interesting possibility.
i'm stable and happy where i am, but it's an idea that crossed my mind and something i'm going to really contemplate should the shit hit the fan. i'll have to check the common law a little more closely, obviously.
always liked this song, although you'll need to find a translation if your german is rusty.
so, after all these years, i've finally found a streak of 90s screamo that i can acknowledge is actually not stupid - meaning i can stop being evasive on the topic. my standard response all these years has been "there's probably some underground screamo i would like if somebody showed me it, but i haven't spent any time looking for it because i've been listening to jazz and electronic music. it's just where my head is right now. the stuff you're talking about, though, is just a bunch of corporate garbage.". well, my head is back to punk, so i've gone looking. ironically, what i've found just sounds to me like a set of logical deductions stemming from nirvana and sonic youth. it's easy to derive the spoken word thing from slint, and maybe the connection is real, but it's just the same beat tradition that punk and no wave and grunge had already tapped into. which is to say that branching this off into it's own genre strikes me as arbitrary, but, if i were to do so, i'd have to claim it's alpha document is actually in utero (interspersed with influences from slint and drive like jehu).
this is stuff that was also really obscure at the time. ottawa wouldn't be the best place to live to tap into this, pre-internet era or not. these bands all made one or two records to almost no response and then disappeared. some of it actually seems to be known primarily through some more commercial indie rock that band members did later on. i'm going to guess that, at the time, people mostly interpreted it as a bunch of kids ripping off nirvana and yawned it out of existence. the ability to tell the subtle differences would have probably been lost on most, and interest probably would have been lost along with interest in nirvana (ironically). there does seem to be a huge influx in interest a little after the year 2000, when a bunch of kids went searching for it.
on the one hand, i'm glad some kids did do this research because it's making finding it a lot easier. on the other hand, i feel a little out of the loop for doing this in 2014 instead of 2004. i think my initial reaction was largely correct though - there was some stuff going on underground that i would have connected to, but it also seems like almost nobody knew this stuff existed at the time.
it's interesting to consider an alternate universe, though, where this more raw sound would been nirvana's legacy - rather than green day and korn (equally). if that were the case, i think cobain's ghost would probably feel a bit better about itself. and, strangely, what's spurred this on is actually a newish batch of hardcore bands with a decidedly noise-rock kind of sound....i'm going back and trying to figure out where they came from....and realizing i completely missed this undercurrent. again, though, this was an undercurrent that is only really traceable from it's endpoints.
this is a good example. it's a compilation of a few singles released in the early 90s, and seems to have been almost unknown until it was rereleased in 2002. it's been marketed variously as emo and post-hardcore, but it just strikes me as a solid no-wave/grunge record. i probably would have greatly enjoyed this had i heard it in 1994 or 1995.
like, there's a can reference in the second track. how many well known screamo bands reference can?
"This eight song LP was not an immediate success. When it first came out it was way ahead of its time and the LP didn't really start to sell until many years after the band had broken up.
At one point the LP completely stopped selling. In fact, it was selling so poorly that we recycled all the left over inserts and covers as it appeared that no one was really interested in Portraits of Past. This turned out to be a mistake. A few years later interest in the band exploded and we started to sell a lot of LPs. So many in fact that the LP was repressed, but the original covers and cover art were no longer available. So we ended up making these hand screened versions.
Portraits of Past started out as a screamo band, and their debut split 7" with Bleed captured that sound. But the LP was much more controlled and refined. It has a moody almost sad feel to it that is quite captivating. "
the "sad feel" actually reminds me a lot of do make say think, enough that i'm wondering if the dmst band members may have been in the handful of people that checked this out. that's actually entirely plausible (one of the guitarists is an open hardcore fan).
see, the thing about slint being a big influence is that they were also a big influence on the bands i was actually listening to. which makes it all the more of a shame that i wasn't aware of this stuff (but, as mentioned repeatedly, nobody was). it's like i'm coming face to face with an evil twin sibling or something, lol.
those were 94 and 96 - two of four bands i've found after 91 by following slint's influence outwards that i think are worth listening to. note that i've found four and rejected well over 100 (the other two are june of 44 and a minor forest, both of which i knew of but didn't listen to closely enough to get into. the two records i posted are completely brand new to me.). well over. i'm still snaking through, but i'm a little worried that this is going to dry up in '98 like everything else, leaving me no closer to filling that gaping early 00s hole. i mean, it's nice to find a few more 90s acts, but i like lots of 90s acts. there's lots of interesting abstract music from the early 00s that i'm aware of, but as far as actual rock bands go, ones that formed and released records in the early 00s, i couldn't fill up the fingers on one hand, honestly. don't bother - i've probably heard what you're thinking of and think it's awful.
i'm really cringing to find out just how badly and thoroughly refused completely fucked this all up.
i'm still hoping that little undercurrent is there, though.
