Paul

A decade late eulogy for a long departed friend...

Blah Blah:

I dunno man, this one kinda turned into a long, nostalgic, tribute to an old friend of mine who died a long time ago. Just kinda reminiscing about a bunch of bands we both liked a lot and bonded over when we first started talking… Read on if you care to, but I totally understand if you don’t give a fuck.

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Muzak Since Last Time:

David Bowie - Back in my early, mid 20’s my buddy Paul was a big David Bowie fan and always tried to get me into his Berlin era stuff, but for whatever reason it just didn’t click with me until I was much, much, older… Now I’m a big Bowie fan, but sadly Paul passed away back in 2016 so I can’t tell him he was right about Low being a really fucking cool album.

So it goes I guess… RIP Paul, guess you’ve been gone ten years this year, weird to think it’s been that long.

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Zex Model - Since I mentioned him above: This was one of Paul’s many, many, MANY, MANY, bands (seriously I can think of at least 20 different band names he recorded under without even wracking my brain that hard)… An insane mashup of Foetus, the dancy SPK stuff, and Skinny Puppy that absolutely CRUSHES a lot of similarly “retro” EBM-inspired industrial shit.

Totally sounds like something that could have come out back in 1988… Smack dab in the middle of that Skinny Puppy VIVIsectVI era.

In a perfect world this is the album that would have finally got Paul underground famous/ noticed/ touring with his heroes, but I guess that wasn’t in the cards.

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Armed Memory - As an aside, the Armed Memory EP me and DD released back in 2020 was inspired by a Ministry “Twitch”/ Mentallo and the Fixer “No Rest For The Wicked” inspired thing that me and Paul were talking about working on together right before he died…

The main reason I decided not to record vocals on that EP is because I always wanted him to be the vocalist for that project… Unfortunately time ran out for him years before I finally got my shit together and made the recordings happen. I still feel pretty bad about that.

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Ninika - And for whatever it’s worth to anyone here’s the weirdo noise/ doom tape that Paul/ DD/ Me worked on together back in the early 2010’s… Always meant to do a second tape eventually, polish the ideas up a bit, but life got busy, years passed and it just never happened… I think in a lot of ways this tape is the genesis of what eventually became Rot Coven... Or like, Rot Coven is what Ninika would have been if I had like a decade and a half more studio experience when it was recorded.

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Poison Tongue - Another of Paul’s many, many, projects… I remember him telling me this one was his version of like Beherit or Von doing death industrial… The weird thing is, as impossible as that description sounds I actually kinda hear it.

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Degenerate Slug - Another of Paul’s many projects, and maybe my personal favorite of his projects next to Zex Model? But maaaan that’s a tough call ‘cos there were a ton of great ones… Batshit crazy rhythmic-noise-metal weirdness that sounds kinda like early Dissecting Table meets SWANS meets GISM meets Beherit meets an unhealthy obsession with that flompflompflomp war metal slow blast.

I think I might have sent him a random drum loop I made in Ableton that he turned into one of these songs but it was so long ago that I legitimately can’t remember if he used it on this or one of his zillion other tapes.

Side note: I’m legitimately jealous he got to do a split w/ Reclusa.

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Dissecting Table - I think probably the first thing me and Paul bonded over when we first started emailing back and forth was that both of us were huge fans of the early Dissecting Table shit… I think he was the first person I ever talked to who didn’t think I was outta my fuckin’ mind for liking DT.

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Celtic Frost - We were both huge Celtic Frost fans, but for some reason Paul hated “Monotheist” and me and him would occasionally spar about it over email. He said it sounded “like Nu Metal” while I think it’s one of the heaviest/ darkest albums ever recorded… I still wonder if he was listening to the right album.

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Van Halen - This is another one we vehemently disagreed on… I love the first two Van Halen albums, he wasn’t into them at all. I tried to convince him that Atomic Punk sounded a lot like Voivod but he wasn’t having it.

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In Slaughter Natives - One thing we definitely agreed on: “Sacrosancts Bleed” is far and away the best/ heaviest In Slaughter Natives record.

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Lietterschpich - Utterly fucking demented noise/ doom/ no wave/ sludge. This was a big one for both of us… As were bands like Grave in the Sky, Power of Jism, Cadaver Eyes, Burmese, and like 9/10 of the other stuff that was coming on on Heart & Crossbone at the time.

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Haisha/ Mizuko - Another one we bonded over during those earliest conversations. The Haisha side was nasty, totally ripshit digi-goregrind, but holy fuck! That Mizuko side was something else entirely… Just completely fucking melted slow-motion terror noise… Totally unlike anything else we’d ever heard.

Surely the person who recorded that shit must be a total glue huffing weirdo/ probably pretty cool to talk to.

And so the quest began…. Paul was a total throwback to the underground letter writing/ tape trading penpal days, and I think he probably emailed every musician on earth at some point in his life… He talked for literal years about wanting to get in touch with the person or persons behind Mizuko and asking if they wanted to collab with him/ if they had ever released anything else, but he could never find a contact address so they remained a total mystery to us.

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Beherit - Paul was a full-on Beherit obsessive, I am too, and we definitely talked a lot about them over the years… He even loved the electronic albums, which are way less my thing, but he hated “Engram”, which I always thought was weird ‘cos I fuckin love that album…

One thing we agreed on? “Drawing Down the Moon” is the greatest black metal album in the history of life, with “Oath of Black Blood” being an extremely close second.

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Havohej - A shared love of Havohej was another one where me and Paul realized we were operating on a really similar musical wavelength… Noise with drums man… Right on the edge of total collapse/ incoherence… Fuck yeah…

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Contagious Orgasm - I turned Paul on to this album probably the second or third time we ever spoke. He said he’d never heard anything like it, and that he fell asleep listening to it and it gave him fucked up nightmares.

The first track on this album is still one of the creepiest pieces of music I’ve ever heard.

- Pig Destroyer - September 2016. I got the news Paul had died while Me and DD were on our way to a Pig Destroyer/ Secret Cutter show… The news bummed me out so bad I didn’t even stay for PD’s set. I think I got halfway through Secret Cutter and had to go home and clear my head…

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Jerry Cantrell - I don’t think Paul would have dug this song very much, definitely way too “mainstream” for his tastes, but listening to it the other day is kinda what set me off on this whole weird nostalgic trip… I feel like it’s slightly weird to “miss” a dude you never actually hung out with in person, but I dunno man, I guess that’s a symptom of this modern age… He was a great penpal… Total metalhead weirdo every bit as completely, overwhelmingly, unhealthily obsessed with music as I still am.

Looking back through my old emails Paul would hit me up, conservative estimate, like forty-five times a week… Always geeking out about some obscure-ass release on some tiny label, to the point it would get almost overwhelming at times.

I miss those emails, a lot.

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I dunno… I could go on probably forever, but I think I’m gonna cap this here.

Paul’s been gone a long time now, but he was a good friend… Every couple years I’ll go digging through some of his old emails I’ve got archived looking for some mondo-obscuro bedroom black metal thing he recommended I check out back in like 2012 and the memories hit pretty hard.

RIP dude.

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