Lately, I’ve been really getting more and more into Doom Metal, especially Drone Doom and Funeral Doom. I’ve also been going apeshit on Dark Ambient, Experimental and Ambient Noise albums. It’s all great shit to zone to. Here’s some of the albums I’ve snagged off of eMusic this past month that I’m really digging:

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Since I’m still loving eMusic and have been racking new albums every month, I thought I’d list some of the better to best shit I’ve accrued lately.

Electric Wizard is by far one the dopest, heaviest bands around. Their Ozzy-era Black Sabbath-inspired, Stoner/Sludge Doom Metal style is straight-up 70’s era evil psychedelia. It’s loud, chunking and very slow. I have all of their albums and my latest addition, “Come My Fanatics“, is by far their best work and definitely one of the best albums I’ve ever owned in my life. It’s low, slow, evil-hippy vibe makes me want to start wearing denim jackets, grow a fu-manchu, contact Satan and start living out a van (complete with air-brushing). I highly recommend this album.

Boris is a Japanese experimental band who are difficult to place in a genre. Though I only have one of their albums, I’ve read they bounce all over the place with different styles of noise/music. “Absolutego” is one 65-minute long track of ambient noise/Drone Doom filled will slowly plodding bass, buzzing guitars, lotsa feedback and heavy usage of the e-bow. There’s no riffs, melodies or anything. Just ambient guitar noise for over an hour and it’s great. Truly creepy, bad acid trip shit. This is a soundtrack to accompany corpses crawling out of graves. I’m definitely going to check out their other albums.

Similar in style and direction is the band Sunn 0)) (pronounced “Sun” and named after the amplifiers they use). Extremely slow and heavy, using droning, heavily-distorted guitars and sound effects to create a dark, malevolent soundscape, Sunn 0)) are prime examples of Drone Doom. The album “Flight of the Behemoth” is five really long tracks of ambient doom, despair and inscrutable evil. I love these guys. To top it all off, the duo that makes up this band wear evil monk robes whenever they perform live! Could it be cooler?

In fact, I love them so much, I bought another one of their albums, called “The Grimm Robe Demos“. It’s exactly the same kind of shit, which is perfect. Evil, weird, down-tuned and long. Lacking any discernible form or structure, it is music for alien landscapes. That said it’s not for everyone. If you’re not into evil, ambient noise then this music is either going to scare you or give you a headache (or quite possibly both), but if you dig the heavy, creepy shit, you’ll love Sunn 0))) and these two albums.

I’m really into Metal. Death Metal, Black Metal, Sludge, Doom, Blackened Death Metal, Viking Metal… on and on. It’s the best shit in the world. But, I will admit I’ve become addicted to the polar opposite. As of late, I’m all about hippy, nature sound recordings.

You know, those CDs that sit in the bargain bin of your local record store’s New Age section. The albums where some geriatric and well-bearded hippy trudges a recording setup out into the middle of some remote and uninhabited area and records whatever natural, ambient noise is going on, slaps it onto a CD and sells it out of the back of his VW bus to keep himself in yogurt and granola.

I’ve always been a fan of ambient noise and these nature sound disks deliver well, but due to their being just a recording of background noise, I can crank it up without being distracted.

Here’s a link to a collection I’ve been downloading off of eMusic. Out of the bunch, the forest one is my favorite so far.

In the past two years, I’ve gone from having a freak religious cult for neighbors to having a chicken waving, chanting, hooting and hollering idiot living next to me. Is it a case of “like attracts like”? Who knows? It just seems that my luck with neighbors in Brooklyn kind of blows hairy donkey balls.

I live on the third floor of my building and outside my bedroom window is a kind of a pit-like opening, made up of several of the surrounding buildings meeting up. It’s one long shaft straight down and all there is to see are the windows of other apartments in the surrounding buildings. The whole space is only about 12×12 feet and this shaft manages to act as a natural amplifier, bringing all kinds of interesting noises into my bedroom and blissful beauty rest at any odd hour of the day or night.

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Yesterday, I was doing the morning rush-hour commute to the city, hungover, late and addled with lack of sleep. A typical morning for me. I sat there in the subway car, shifting from position to position, trying to find the one magical contortion that would prevent me from blowing massive chunks all over my fellow passengers like a poor man’s metro rendition of “The Exorcist”. A warning to the wise: if you are riding the 2, 3, 4, 5 or 6 trains in the morning on a weekday and you see a skinny, pale and sketchy looking white dude with glasses that keeps leaning back and forth, shifting from side to side, make sure to stay out of range. Possibly, you might want to switch subway cars because it very likely could be me, very close to painting you with the contents of my twisted and unhappy stomach. You have been warned.

That morning, my voyage on the good ship nausea was not off to a particularly good start as I sat down in the one free seat in the car to a smell that made me think of the taste one might come up with after licking a few used ashtrays. Whoever had been sitting or had died there prior to my arrival was one hell of a fucking champion cigarette smoker. Perhaps it was the ghost of the Marlboro Man, come to haunt my morning hangovers, who knows, it stank like a motherfucker though.

So, up to my waist in stale cigarette stank, I held it down. Green in the face with a sweat beaded brow, I braved the bumping, the jostling, the screeching and the squealing, holding the lid down on my stomach with an iron will.

Finally, I made it to my last transfer. After switching trains, I only have a few more stops till I can hide behind my desk until death, or lunchtime releases me. I leaned against one of the platform pillars, proud that I’d made it so far without decorating some senior citizen or homeboy with hangover barf. The train arrived. The doors opened and I entered into the welcome air conditioning. Almost there.

Upon entering the car, I see this huge, black young man. He looks at me, smiles and says, “I’m on American Idol!” and proceeds to screech, not quite coherently, Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You”, only just the chorus part, over and over, hanging from the bars in the train. As quick as I could, I made to back out the door, but I was too late. The doors shut and I found myself taking a seat, front and center for a one-man diva-thon without the medication.

This guy was clearly having a psychotic episode. Screaming, laughing, squealing his way through those four words much like the guinea pig at a “proctology as chainsaw art” seminar might do.

“Ladies and Gentlemen…I’m on American Idol! AND IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII WIIILLLLLLLLL ALWAAAAAAAAAAYS LOOOOOOOOVE YOOOOOOUUU!!!! AIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!”

Over and over, this crazy fucking nutcase assaulted my eardrums. He screeched so high, it was actually painful and I swear to god, something inside my head ruptured. Fifteen years from now, as I sit on the edge of the exam table and the doctor delivers the bad news of an inoperable brain something or other and asks, “Were you ever exposed to any high-frequency sound?”, I’ll look back and it will all make sense. That nutty squealing bastard will be the death of me.

My neighborhood is incapable of shutting up. I live on the 3rd floor of an apartment building that while I have the fortune of quiet neighbors, is located on a street that is constantly visited by heavy traffic, booming car stereos, loud drunks and screaming ghetto drama. Ah, the motherfucking ‘hood.

In my last apartment, I lived above a person of some stature in a religious cult that I think is unique to New York, called the Black Zionists. African American men who claim to be the true Jews, chosen by God (you Ashkenazi and Sephardics are full-on fakers, don’t lie now). They were nice enough, I mean, they hated me and my white ass, but they were polite and while they didn’t respond to my hellos, good mornings or the occasional nod in the hallway, they left me to my heathen life, which is enough for me. In some ways I liked the uniqueness that I could claim due to my odd neighbors. Nothing like coming home on a Saturday morning to interrupt a prayer meeting in your stairwell or a conversation along the lines of “After we’ve taken over and crushed all the white people…” I’d squeeze by some huge robed guy wearing a scarf over his face, trying not to trip on the huge staffs covered in duct tape they’d carry around and zip my hungover, sinning devil self up the stairs to my Apartment of Doom. It was a nice little balance, me the White Devil, high all the time, leaving a stench of sin in the hallways with my passing juxtaposed against the holiest of underdogs, the Black Jews. Together, we did our parts in keeping it real in Brooklyn. My only complaint was the damn chanting.

Every weekend my days and nights would be spent with headphones, securely clamped over my ears blasting something, anything to drown out my neighbors. Drums, chanting of nonsense Hebrew, screaming, yelling, stomping over and over in an endless loop on the tape deck from Hell. My favorite was “talent night”, when everyone, young and old would entertain each other with a cappela performances from such greats as Mariah Carey, Led Zeppelin, Usher and Pink Floyd at the tops of their lungs. After two or three days of this God-vaudeville, the headphones would come off and I could expect relative peace for the rest of the week.

Now, living in my new arrangements, I am adjusting to the 24-7 noise pollution variety. I get it from both ends now. The window next to where I sit typing, looks out onto Washington Ave. and it’s non-stop drama. There’s a bar across the street with a gaggle of smokers out front who by virtue of the liberating effects of alcohol, find it necessary to shout every stupid thing that pops into the grey slurpee that’s their brains. Somewhere close by, is an all-night Caribbean dance fest, which in truth, is most likely some old dude with a boombox and a couple of Coronas, but it’s loud enough to be one. Soon there will be the inevitable pseudo fight, where the whole family, from grandfather to toddler will crowd the sidewalk screaming to the whole block everything you’d ever want to know about their drama and who is whom’s babydaddy. I give thanks daily that it’s not me. Since every good pseudo fight deserves a backbeat just as every superhero deserves his own anthem, you never have to look far on my street for the obligatory double parked car, doors wide and stereo blasting with bass powerful enough to loosen fillings and sterilize small animals. Add on top of that the traffic and the busy fire station around the corner, the occasional gunshot/firecracker and a hodgepodge of random screaming and yelling and you’ve got the average evening on Washington Ave. Seven fucking days a week.

My bedroom is at the opposite end of the apartment, far from the street and all the previously detailed noise. However, a nice, quiet little fortress of solitude it is not. The one window in the bedroom looks out into a cul de sac that acts as a natural amplifier for all the apartments in my and the surrounding buildings. With this wonder of acoustical science, I get such classic hits as the lady that screeches gospel hymns in french at the crack of dawn. The person who chants fervently, usually starting around two or three in the morning. Then there’s my neighbor upstairs who is in the habit of what sounds like furniture rearrangement in in the middle of the night. It’s a never ending party.

Still, it’s nothing. I once lived in Williamsburg, in a fourth floor loft on Broadway, with my bedroom window about fifteen feet away from the elevated JMZ line. My eardrums, my bed and everything else rumbled and shook every five to fifteen minutes during the day, blessedly slowing down to every half hour to hour in the evening. On top of this, I had the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway next to me. I learned to sleep like the dead.

Sometimes I think to myself, will it ever stop? Will I find peace in Brooklyn at least once before I die? Then, as if in answer, a car alarm begins it’s blaring and I know…Never, motherfucker. You’re in the ‘hood and I ain’t ya babydaddy.