Suehiro Maruo - Gichi Gichi Kun

This is perhaps the most peculiar book that Maruo ever published. It was released in 1996 a little bit after he published his graphs. Gichi Gichi is very different from anything else he really did before and after.

Gichi Gichi Kun is an episodic story about a boy named Gichi Gichi. He's in elementary school and apart from his weird looks and out of place apparel he also has super powers. He calls them "secret techniques" for some reason. Probably alluding to that he's from China. Surprisingly for a Maruo work he actually tries to do good with those superpowers. So what you really get here is some kind of twisted parody of school manga cliches.

There's not much gore or similar usual Maruo material. So it's basically not in the ero-guro genre (apart from maybe last two or three chapters).

I think one day mister Maruo said to himself (after smoking serious amounts of opium): I'm going to make a commercial mainstream school-life manga.


Absorb.

Flying Teapot year 2.

You probably didn't notice (but I did :<) but "we" didn't celebrate Flying Teapot-s second birthday. This was due to several factors which I won't really bother to explain. Well, we'll celebrate it today. Why? Because my birthday is today so I guess the analogy could make some sense. You know, the blog is 2 and I'm 20. So it's kinda similar, the difference is just one zero to me.

Despite being inactive as fvck I think the blog pretty much remained the same as it was the year before. I like it this way so I don't really see any need for changes. Recently the followers numbers have hit the 200 mark but I still get the exact same feeling of being a small unnoticed blog even though whenever I spew something out here 200 people will eventually will see it in some form and 200 isn't a small number unless we're talking about ohm resistance and we're not talking about that.

I won't hold any long speeches, words would only spoil things. I would just like to thank you all for being here and reading/downloading everything I put up. It fills me with joy to share stuff that make me what I am.

And of course what better way is to celebrate this occasion other than to download? :D

So here are some presents:

Since its my birthday as well I thought I should share something with you that marked my entire childhood. I grew up in the 90s and I didn't really have any consoles and crap like that. I grew up on PC so DOS games were pretty much all I played. Now that I think of it everybody treated me as an outcast because of that. Every kid my age had a Nintendo but I didn't care. Me and my dad used to play Lucas Arts adventure games and all that crap all the time. He would translate and I would direct actions. It's how I learned English in the first place haha. But there was one game that I played over and over and over. And that was:

Commander Keen

 Yes this motherfucker drained several years of my so called life. I played these series all the time firstly because I didn't need dad around to translate and secondly because it's one of the best platform based games that I ever played (yes that's right, I don't like Mario games ;P). I knew all the levels, all the secrets and all the cool jumps. It was my first addiction. That terrible sound when you loose a life still haunts me. I actually hear it sometimes in my dreams when somebody dies.

There are seven titles that got out for PC. 1, 2 and 3 have one, really old, engine and 4, 5 and 6 (dreams) had a better looking one. When I was little 4, 5 and 6 were the popular and active ones so I overlooked the first three for a very long time. Eventually one really boring high school summer I went through the first three and I can't really recommend them. They are pretty much inferior versions of the later ones. I uploaded the games I played so you get here: episode 4, 5, and 6 along with Dreams.

The story is about a boy who is at night Commander Keen! He goes around saving our galaxy and slacks off from eating vegetables at dinner. The story isn't very important. The important segment here is the gameplay which is rich and diverse. Diverse as dos games go so I can't really recommend this to someone who can't enjoy nostalgic old games. The last sequel called dreams is actually the weirdest one. Apparently some potato troops trapped him through some dream like machine so he has to save himself by running around in his pajamas from potato soldiers and mad carrots. Never quite understood it. :D

TWO MEGABYTES OF INFINITE FUN

I'll post more stuff tomorrow. I don't want to cramp everything into one post.

Watain - Sworn To The Dark

Speaking of popular things, here's Watain.

They released a new album this year which kinda overstayed its welcome. They had great ideas and they wanted to repeat their past fame so I guess they overdid it a little too much. They tried to repeat the fame of their album from 2007 which is called Sworn To The Dark.

I personally consider this to be their best so far and arguably one of the best metal albums of the 00s. Why I like it so much?

I'm a man (more like a child in mans clothes) who is prone to bands that tend to step forward. Bands who dare to venture in the unknown. Sometimes I strike gold and sometimes I strike myself with a facepalm and then contemplate as to where I'm going with this existence of mine. But there are times when nostalgia strikes and I feel like I should spin some Darkthrone or whatever that was popular back in the day when black metal was about confused teenagers in Norway; also murders over trivial things. But hey, people still like old school black metal and they record stuff like that in this decade as well. Such bands either have 0 imagination or they have in mind something that will give old school a new flare and something that will sound fresh despite being old school. Sometimes they sound terrible and sometimes they sound just right.

Watain would be one of those bands that sound just right. There's no ambient wankery, no drifts to other nowadays hip styles of playing or any of that crap yet they still have that touch of freshness which, surprisingly for me,  doesn't go away throughout the whole album. It's black metal as it should be and it's greatly crafted with much attention to details and compositions. Vocals are what they should be, drums kick precisely when they need to and guitars do wonders in each song. I absolutely love this album and I recommend it to all black metal fans that haven't checked it out yet.

I don't think I'll list tracklists anymore. I just don't see the need for it.

Original Soundtrack - Up

Hey, 200 followers. I feel popular. 8)

Up was a very uplifting (oh play on words) film that most of us saw, this year I think? Or was it 2009? I don't keep track of time.

Anyways, besides swell animation and a rather original and heart warming story about letting your past go this little movie also had a really great soundtrack.

What I particularly liked about it is its touch of swing in it. Somehow I felt the Rudy Valle and all the others in this soundtrack. It had that something which made me like it a lot. It has its share of orchestral pieces in it as well but I found them somewhat medicore. Despite that, it's a really good soundtrack that you should check out if you haven't already.

Download.

Jun Hayami - Bloody Angel (untranslated)

Oh here we go again.

Jun Hayami is one of the most well known and perhaps the most incognito Japanese authors of guro comics. He has a very direct style in his works which makes him rather unique among the bunch. By direct I mean that his stories are not very plot driven. Most of them are actually just events that occur somewhere to someone. Sometimes there isn't even a single word throughout the whole story which is why I think this is worth looking through despite the fact that it's not translated. You won't really miss much if you don't know Japanese. Some stories appear in other volumes that I posted before. So you practically have it 1/2 translated.

This particular release has it all. All kinds of fetishes you can think of you'll find them here; violent fetishes that is. The offenders don't get punished, the girls never end well and a lot of them are not adults.

I discussed his style several times before so I won't repeat myself. You'll either like this or won't.

Download.

Art Farmer - Baroque Sketches

Oh wow, I barely remember writing that last post haha. All of the sudden I was wondering why I started getting more followers on Tubmlr.
Here's a peculiar album that has been waiting to be posted for a few months now (yeah, lazy as usual). Baroque Sketches is an interesting mixture or more precisely an attempt to "jazzify" classical baroque music. Did it succeed? Well I think it did, to a point.
Art Farmer wasn't exactly an world wide known jazzist but he did have his own style and I throughly enjoy his works. To blend jazz and strict-to-the-note classical music is perhaps a daring challenge because these two types of music usually don't cross paths very effectively. Jazz tunes played by an orchestra don't really sound right, something is missing. So why should it be different if it's vice versa?
Well for starters Jazz is open for improvisation so there's a basic melody and structure in the skeleton of the music but it goes beyond. It dares to change it and rearrange it. I think this album does it fairly well. It's a strange little album that clocks for only about half an hour so it flows really fast to me. Worth checking out if you're into jazz and have knowledge of baroque music. Otherwise I can't really recommend this to you.
Tracklist:
01. Fuja Ki
02. Aria
03. Little David's Fuge
04. Prelude in ''E'' Minor
05. Sinfonia
06. Zortzico
07. Alfie's Theme
08. Jesu
09. Etude
10. Prelude in ''A'' Minor
11. Rhythm of Life

Download.

Bitrate: 320

Oneraspoložiti.

I feel bad for neglecting this place. Maybe more authors? Maybe not. Probably not.

Tumbling now and then.

Maybe that's why I don't do daily crap anymore.

Maybe not.

I feel even badder (is that a word?) for neglecting Terror Noise Audio even more. - Starting to hit borderline douchebaggery about now.

All I do is watch Hokuto No Ken all day.

Maybe I'll write a review about it. Never did reviews before. I think. 

I should really stop being embarrassed about my translations and post those damn comics already.

Suehiro Maruo. Did I really make just one post about him this whole year? I need to fix that.

Why do I write everything so orderly when I'm shitfaced? Why do I drink on sunday? -_-

Loro's - Dream(s)

Now that I have some insight as to what to post, here's some underrated post rock.

At first I wasn't too exited about this release. Gave it a whirl and I threw it somewhere deep down my hard drive. Then one "spring cleaning" day I came around it again and to my surprise I found this album (or EP, whatever) to be quite exhilarating.

Loro's (whatever that means) is a small band from South Korea and they have about 600 listeners on last.fm. Not that quite known but they did release their debut album recently called Pax. I didn't like Pax very much but this EP, as I mention before, is something just right up my alley. I'll be posting Pax probably in the future as I give it a more thorough listen.

It starts fairly easy and uplifting as most post rock albums begin. Judging by that you might go and say, like I did, "oh great, another guitar wanking fest". Verily I say onto you, thou is mistaken! It quickly grows in detail and texture. Sounds start to bend with piano and an acoustic guitar and it goes further and further. As this little EP goes for more and more time things become attached to it. Vocals, violin and so on, all kinds of crap. That's what I enjoy so much about it. There's a bit of everything that's good about post rock in here and it doesn't go enough long to bore you. It's what I like to call: balanced out music.

It's a nice little voyage that goes for about half an hour. Definitely check it out if you're into post rock and similar.

Download.

New Deathspell Omega coming out in november.

Fuck yeah! It will be released on November 8th in Europe. For those of you who live in the US it would probably be a good idea to know that Ajna isn't their distributor anymore. Season Of Mist took the job. This is probably because the scale of distribution is too big for Ajna this time.

The album will be called Paracletus. It is also the last part of the trilogy (first being SMRC, second FAS).

This is how the cover will most likely look:

Speculations on my behalf:

- what does the title mean and what will the album be about?

From what I researched Paracletus is some sort of advocate or lawyer in a religious context. It's a Greek word and is fairly difficult to explain. If we look retrospectively the SMRC album was about relation between God and Man. Kenose being the appendix of SMRC also covered that theme to some extent. I didn't do much research about Kenose so I can't say much. Fas was about angels and their revolt against God. The appendix of Fas was Chaining the Katechon. Katechon was/is someone/something that keeps the antichrist from manifesting. Paracletus then could be about the Antichrist or the devil himself. Not to mention that on the cover is something that looks like it's going to murder the cosmos. And it has 7 heads?

- how will it sound?

Probably in a direction that FAS took but hopefully we won't get a FAS clone. Since they have Mikko Aspa on board with them I'm sure he'll provide a lot of non-metal music in the album  and since his forte are noise and similar atonal genres I'm fairly certain it will contain a lot of chaotic noisy/ambient intervals between their common black metal arrangements. Katechon to me seemed a lot calmer and far less atonal compared to FAS so I'm guessing this time around the songs won't be screaming all over the place like The Shrine Of Mad Laughter for example. It will be more brooding and darker since it (again I speculate) deals with a far more darker and sinister being than mad angels stricken with jealousy.

- since the trilogy is going to be concluded, will they split up after that?

I highly doubt that! There are so many themes to cover in religion and the occult so there's plenty of material to work with. They have proven (to me at least and probably to a lot of you people as well) that they are highly creative and innovative people so I'm sure they will continue to surprise us with more releases every few years and I hope they will not stagnate (or do a live show, that would kill everything :< ).

What are your thoughts about this whole thing? Are you looking forward to it?

I'll be buying it the moment it comes out and preferably in some pretentious elitist limited format. :3

Hideshi Hino - Lullabies From Hell

If you watched (and enjoyed to some extent) the Guinea Pig series then you probably find this name familiar. Well, Hideshi Hino was the director of the Mermaid one and the Flower Of Flesh and Blood from the Guinea Pig Series. Despite his movie endeavors his main work accumulated in the form of horror comics.

Lullabies From Hell is a collection of four of his distinct stories. Although distinct they all share this common dread and some kind of depression. In each story, the main character is either a complete outcast or he is in a situation where everybody is against him. There is no good guys/bad guys, just bad, terrible and deranged guys. This might be a problem for people who usually when they read stories (or watch, whatever) try to connect with the characters and find similarities between themselves and the characters. I don't usually do that so I had no problems with that.

The most peculiar story from these four would be the first one. It's kind of an autobiographic fantasy tale where the main character is the author himself. It goes surreal very fast but you get to meet and understand his fascination with the grotesque. It's a bit corny but it's all good fun, not even the author took the story very seriously.

My personal favorite though would be the third one, called: Train of Terror. Oooh! More cliche names! I liked this one the most because of the constant feel of being completely alone in this rapidly changed world. Nobody seems to be what they show and there's this constant paranoid feeling. Paranoia and dementia; nuff said.

This isn't a modern day manga so the art isn't what you might except. It's more of a Kazuo Umezu style. I'm not sure when was this published but I think it's from the late 70s. There is a lot of gore to be found here but most of it isn't very explicit so gore hounds might be a little disappointed with this one. That doesn't mean there are no disgusting moments or blood crazed panels of comic violence. The aspect of gore is more focused on infection and disgust rather than on dismemberment and so on. Overall art is fairly good, a bit weird I might say. I especially enjoyed how the characters were drawn and especially their eyes. Oh the terror in them is so delightful! :D Everything is so round and circular-ish~.

All in all this is an great old school horror manga and should not be missed by anyone who enjoys this stuff.

Download.

Be sure to check this post from Unflinching Eye for another Hideshi Hino manga and some more information about his work!