Big Halloween Finale, 2022: A Mighty History Book, For Free and More

The last batch of singles here was supposed to be the final Halloween dump, but things are unfolding so fast around the world that today requires another, A free magnum opus, outrageously funny memes and some tunes too. As always, click on artist or author names for their webpages, click on titles for audio, visuals, a quick read and probably a laugh.

Jason Powers is one of the hardest-working investigative journalists on the web. He did a killer piece on Renee Wegrzyn, the recently appointed US genetic engineering tsar, complete with receipts and Hunter Biden connection. Just for today, he’s put the new fifth edition of his book Operation Virus up at his Substack as a free download. It turns into a pumpkin at the stroke of midnight, October 31.

This working history of the plandemic and its origins is long, meticulously linked and has as many footnotes as Bobby Kennedy’s The Real Anthony Fauci. Powers is quick to remind that it’s as much a guide to where the gaps are as it is to what we actually know. Where Sage Hana is the avenging angel of the freedom movement, Tessa Lena is our soul guide philosopher and Mark Crispin Miller is the erudite, polymath department chair, Powers is a dogged, tireless, quintessentially down-to-earth Indiana sleuth. Grab this book now and sink your teeth into it: it’s many days of reading. Then find your own rabbit hole and do your own research and reporting.

MCM has great taste in music and since 2020 has been a prime source of protest songs. Here’s his latest playlist. Highlights: Safe and Free, Jude Roberts’ deadpan, Appalachian-tinged chronicle of how the plandemic destroyed independent businesses, and Safe and Effective, Chris Porro‘s snarky honkytonk tune. Stick around for the surprise ending!

Have you seen the ThinkTwice Team‘s memes? The first batch are spot-on parodies of lockdowner propaganda posters: muzzles, idiot circles, antisocial distancing, the works. There’s one for every divide-and-conquer scheme. If these last 31 months have been hard on you, this will leave you with a redemptive smirk.

Song lyric puzzle: this is Doo Wah Diddy, via El Gato Malo for more laughs:

The Juice Media in Australia have been having a sublimely amusing time with global politics. Here’s Zoe Amanda Wilson and Lucy calling bullshit on the Oz/US nuke submarine deal (thanks to Sage for finding that one).

Meme maven Anne Gibbons on the Hochul concentration camp regulation, its initial defeat and possible resurrection.

St. Petersburg, Florida whistleblower OB/GYN doctor Kimberly Biss drops a truth bomb: miscarriages up 50%, infertility up 50%, cervical cancer up 25% since the lethal Covid injection rollout.

Broken Peach just recorded The Night of the Halloween Specials, a live 23-minute medley: quirkily creepy punk rock versions of Tainted Love, Personal Jesus, I Put a Spell on You, Don’t You Want Me Baby and originals with impeccably choreographed four-part harmonies.

Let’s end this with Funkrust Brass Band playing an inspiring live take of theit latest single, Ignition. Set the night onfire!

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Stealing a Halloween Playlist From a Reliably Hilarious Source Here in Town

Thanks to Daisy Moses for making New York Music Daily’s job a lot easier today. Her Substack page is one of the most entertaining places on the web. She’s a native New Yorker who writes in a faux Minnie Pearl vernacular, but beneath the cornpone persona is a ferocious intellect. Her crime scene analysis of the mysterious death of Anne Heche went viral a couple of months ago. And she’s funny beyond belief.

Her taste in music runs toward the retro. Since she loves Halloween as much as this blog does, today’s next-to-last installment in the annual, October-long celebration here is the playlist she just put up today, which you can spin here. She’s got something for everybody: 50s cartoon stuff like the Zanies’ Mad Scientist and Nervus Norvus’ novelty hit, Transfusion; Zombie Walk, the Magics’ alternative to the 60s dance crazes; a Scottish murder ballad, and punk era favorites by the Cramps and Siouxsie & the Banshees.

And the obscure songs are killer. Check out Sheldon Allman’s lounge lizard parody Children’s Day At the Morgue; folksinger Oscar Brand doing The Hearse Song; The Cannibal Song, by franken-crooner Thurl Ravenscroft, and Stinky Picnic‘s If You’re Dead, a folk noir counterpart to Maria Gallagher’s version of the Clash classic The Guns of Brixton.

Digging Up a Final Batch of Halloween Month Singles

It wouldn’t be fair to lower the curtain down forever on Halloween Month, 2022 here without a batch of short items: songs, snarky memes and a dash of black humor. As usual, click on artist or author names for their webpages, click on titles for audio, video, or a quick read.

Anne Gibbons’ Wake Up New York meme dates back to September of 2021, but it resonates every bit as much now as it did then.

Singer and satirist Daisy Moses wants to ask the FDA, “Why are food and drugs lumped together?”

Visceral Adventure‘s Sayin’ a Lie is a surprisingly true-to-life cover of a famous BeeGees disco hit, bandleader Tonika Todorova reinventing it as a fierce protest song with a hilarious video of a bunch of usual suspects

Irish hip-hop isn’t this blog’s usual fare, but They Despise Our Kind. by Dr. McHonkHonk has a long, redemptive litany of venomous lyrics for anyone who was persecuted during the lockdown:

They weren’t scared, and they were gettin’ all of the science
“The science” scared you into a state of fearful reliance
All those foolish daily briefings with Ivan, Tam and Valance
Three sadistic pharma henchmen engineering compliance

Enjoy some hilarious Amy Sukwan Halloween costume memes! The serial killer is the obvious one but the best one is the wokester.

Johnny Dollar just put out a ridiculously funny Substack parody of the ongoing Canadian investigation into the trucker protests and the government overreaction to them. One-minute read:

Dr. Vinu Arumugham is one of the world’s elite statisticians. He doesn’t post a lot at his Substack, but when he does, he really brings the science, as far as the plandemic is concerned. He also has a sense of humor. His latest piece proves how “the Pfizer vaccine trial shows saline injection has 75% efficacy in preventing cardiac arrest deaths and 85.7% efficacy preventing Bell’s palsy. The Josef Mengele Institute (formerly FDA) should therefore provide Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) of saline injections.”

Justin Trudeau needs a hug. Or at least a friend. Priceless 15 sec video from Stella Maris via investigative journalist Sage Hana

West Coast John and Dissident Army observe the Speed of Science in a page of memes. The best one is the last, schemed up in a late-night brainstorm on Sage’s comment page.

Dr. Meryl Nass, who blew the whistle on the anthrax vaccine that did so much damage to US troops, liveblogged the ACIP meeting where the death shot was rubberstamped as an addition to the US childhood vaccine schedule (even though it’s not a vaccine). If you can handle black humor, her play-by-play of how scientific fraud and genocide is perpetrated is priceless, with additional commentary from Brooklyn freedom fighter Brucha Weisberger. Dr. Nass: “I have screenshot all the people involved in these studies for future reference so we can get them discussing these studies with their hands on a bible.” Also see her comments on how fraudulently the incidence of polio in New York is misrepresented.

Orange County, California’s #1 freedom fighter Peggy Hall explains how Cali schools are being incentivized – and required – to report anyone who didn’t take the lethal Covid shot. They’re done with us and coming after the kids now. After all, the World Economic Forum doesn’t want an orphan crisis. Start the video at 5:30

Let’s end on a positive if cautionary note. Adrienne Elise is an intuitive healer and also the rare astrologer who has spoken out fiercely and hilariously against the insanity of the past thirty-one months. Fast forward this video to 6:05 where she calls bullshit on the hypocrites stuck in the death throes of the Kali Yuga. “This is part of the whole medical conspiracy right now. There are so many so-called spiritual movements, they have this high holy vibration, but nobody’s going anywhere. The end game is these loops that track you back in.”

Three Powerful Women From Heavy Rock Join Forces in a Surprisingly Subtle, Poignant Project

One of the strangest and most distantly haunting albums of the year is the debut album by the Erinyes. Not to be confused with the punkish Berlin trio, this is a new group. Their debut album – streaming at Spotify – is a concept record of songs that look at pain from a distance. You could call this the heavy record the Motels never made.

Three strong, individualistic frontwomen from the world of heavy rock – Justine Daaé, from French death metal-lite band Elyose; Mizuho Lin of Brazilian group Semblant, and Italian band Kalidia‘s Nicoletta Rosellini – blend and contrast their voices in a collection that transcends stadium rock.

The central theme is angst, more or less: a love rivalry is involved, although it’s hardly over-the-top. While all the singers have versatile chops, their voices are distinctive. Daaé brings the fullscale plaintiveness, Lin edges toward grit and Rosellini is the big belter.

The three women join in a brief, icy chorale in the brief opening theme, Life Needs Love, rising to full-blown High Romantic angst. The second track is Drown the Flame. Keyboardist Antonio Agate’s brooding, purposeful suspense film orchestration anchors the music in reality as guitarist Aldo Lonobile goes tapping up into the stratosphere over Andrea Buratto’s methodical bass and Michele Sanna’s drums. Daaé sings what’s basically a catchy early 80s minor-key new wave pop hit in heavy disguise.

Lin, who has a grittier delivery, sings On My Way to Love, a stormy, hauntingly allusive ballad with a momentary operatic break from the women. Rosellini takes over lead vocals in Betrayed, a similarly bittersweet, enigmatic, early 80s-flavored number, Lonobile adding ornate bagpipe-like riffage.

Guitar crunch contrasts with swirly organ and blustery synth as the women blend voices in Death By a Broken Heart, the energy climbing toward fullscale angst but never quite getting there.

Where Do We Go is a gorgeous vintage 70s soul ballad subsumed in the flames of a sunset going down on a churning ocean. The band go back to four-on-the-floor new wave era anthem territory with It’s Time, then the intensity rises again in Someday, the album’s most darkly turbulent number.

They could have left the hip-hop influences out of My Kiss Goodbye and it would have been a lot stronger as a stomping power ballad. The group shift between dissociative, trickily rhythmic verse and big hooky chorus in Paradise and follow with Take Me, an unlikely successful blend of Asbury Park piano rock and moody European stadium bombast.

They close with the album’s most towering, majestic, art-rock oriented cut, You And Me Against the World, which despite all the heroic overtones seems like a pyrrhic victory. May these chthonic deities stick together and put out another record as good as this one.

Whimz Put an Update on Hazy, Catchy, Drifting Late 80s and 90s Sounds

Whimz is the side project of Sunny Faris from Blackwater Holylight and Cam Spies of Night Heron. Spies seems to be a bigger part of the picture than Faris, who typically gravitates toward heavier and darker psychedelic sounds. Both sing and share guitar, bass, keys and drums duties. They file their new short album PM226 – streaming at Bandcamp – under “sludge pop.” It’s actually a surprisingly lighthearted, catchy record.

The first track is AM1, a slow, catchy, hazy dreampop theme set to a 90s trip-hop beat. AM2 is slower, slinkier and more mysterious, a mashup of 80s Clan of Xymox and dark orchestral Portishead.

The album’s centerpiece is the instrumental I Wanna, a warpy take on ethereally catchy Big Thief minimalism fueled by insistent raga guitar riffage. They build a more minimal, gritty take on late 80s Lush and Cocteau Twins in the album’s most epic number, titled PM1. The album has both a full-length and a single version of the closing cut, PM2, a morose but upbeat bedroom pop backbeat number with contrastingly icy textures.

Enigmatically Ominous Michael Hersch Works for Soprano, Orchestra and Small Ensemble

[Editor’s note: it has become something of an annual ritual to feature an album of this particular composer’s works here during the October-long Halloween celebration, which continues through the end of the month]

Michael Hersch might be the most macabre of all contemporary classical composers. While the macabre is one of many themes in his music, it’s hard to think of anyone who goes as deeply into it as he has, from his chilling musical portraits of the inmates of a closed ward in a mental hospital, to the torments of terminal cancer patients. His latest album The Script of Storms – streaming at New Focus Recordings – comprises two suites.

The first is Cortext and Ankle, a setting of texts by the doomed writer Christopher Middleton, sung by soprano Ah Young Hong and backed by innovative chamber group Ensemble Klang. In the second, she sings the words of Fawzi Karim with the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Tito Muñoz.

There’s horror, and fingertips being torn off, “the dead tangled in a heap,” and an ineluctable end to all things in the initial eleven-part sequence. It’s prime material for prime Hersch, although the music itself is generally more airily portentous than sinister.

The brief overture is the closest thing to traditional film noir music that Hersch has written: an anxious, acidic bustle with furtive percussion flickers. Hong enters with a poignant, wistful resonance, until the group explodes with brassy growl and dramatic intensity behind her, a recurrent and judiciously utilized device. Austere, slowly shifting segments follow in turn. Hersch is known for employing a lot of space, and he does that here.

Anton van Houten’s determined trombone crescendos along with sudden bursts of activity from saxophonists Michiel van Dijk and Erik-Jan de With contrast with Hong’s resolute calm, but she leaps without warning to a full-throttle arioso power. Pianist Saskia Lankhoorn is often required to do the same. Percussionist Joey Marijs gets to contribute occasional surreal, clanking industrial textures, while guitarist Pete Harden’s contributions are even more skeletal.

The nine-part title suite, a grim reflection on the 1958 coup d’etat in Iraq and summary execution of Prime Minister Nuri Al-Said, is closer to Hersch’s earlier work, even as it follows much of the same template as the album’s first piece.

Ominous trombone also features heavily here. Anxious clusters of strings and reeds burst in, only to disappear. Familiar and juicily spine-tingling Bernard Herrmann tropes appear everywhere: shrieking high winds, ghostly slithers, and doppler crescendos. The drifting close harmonies and microtonal mist toward the end of the suite are particularly delicious, if disquiet is your thing. The persistent rhythmic overlays are just as clever as they are effective. As fits the subject matter, this is a horror film for the ears and a mighty effective one. Not for the faint of heart, but Hersch is the rare composer who seems committed to never backing away from any subject matter, no matter how disturbing.

Ruby the Hatchet Release a Hauntingly Diverse Reflection on the Lockdown

Has there been a better title for an album released this year than Fear Is a Cruel Master, by Ruby the Hatchet? More and more artists are putting out songs and albums about the lockdown, and this is one of the best, right up there with Mostly Autumn‘s 2021 release Graveyard Star. It’s less distinctly anguished than a reflection on alienation and isolation.

Ruby the Hatchet have made a name for themselves as one of the most melodic and unpredictable bands in doom metal, but here they move into styles as diverse as vintage powerpop and new wave, with tinges of psychedelic soul and garage rock.

The album – streaming at Bandcamp and available on limited-edition clear vinyl – opens with The Change, a pretty stunning but successful departure into new wave, complete with organist Sean Hur’s swirly lines behind singer Jillian Taylor’s bright vocals and guitarist Johnny Scarps’ catchy downstroke riffs.

Drummer Owen Stewart’s tricky tumbles open the second track, Deceiver in tandem with bassist Lake Muir, With the organ, it’s a smokier take on a classic late 70s acid rock sound, with a vintage Maiden-ish stampede out. Primitive Man is a killer, dark stoner boogie tune, with Taylor railing against authoritarians who would “steal my rights.”

The angst hits redline in 1000 Years, a slow, wounded ballad in 6/8 time: the point where Scarps suddenly ignites a fireball will give you goosebumps. The band slowly make their way out of the murk to an ominous ba-bump groove in Soothsayer, fueled by the organ and Scarps’ guitar multitracks.

They slow down again for Last Saga: imagine Blue Oyster Cult covering the Moody Blues’ Nights in White Satin (without the orchestral break). They follow with Thruster. the band at their phantasmagorical, propulsive best, with the smoky organ, stampeding drive and some surprising 60s garage licks, it’s the best song on the record.

They close it with Amor Gravis: “Looking back, I never knew you,” is Taylor’s mantra as the band shift between a familiar downward progression and a heavy soul gallop. So good to see how these guys survived the lockdown at the top of their game: one of the best albums of 2022.

The Incendiary Second Part of The Real Anthony Fauci Documentary Goes Live

“People don’t want to compare the Holocaust to anything else. Why?” asks Holocaust survivor and medical rights crusader Vera Sharav in the second part of Jeff Hays‘ stunning documentary The Real Anthony Fauci, which just went live about a day ago, hot on the heels of the first half. This latest installment is ostensibly going to VOD in two days, but you can watch it for free now – and you should, even if you’ve read Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s bestseller. The conclusion is only about an hour long, and if Hays is involved, there’s a good chance it’ll be up for viewing for longer…or will make a mysterious return to the web in a few days.

If you don’t have the time to watch this relatively brief movie, Sage Hana is cutting up part two into easily digestible excerpts just as she did with the first segment. If you see just one of her clips, your best bet is her second segment from part two. This is where the really juicy history kicks in.

Kennedy provides a shocking insider account of Operation Northwoods, the false flag CIA operation targeting American civilians, which served as the prototype for 9/11, and, arguably, the plandemic.

If there’s any doubt that Bill Gates has power over Presidents, the newly released footage here puts that to rest. The funniest of many blackly amusing moments is an artfully sequenced series of Anderson Cooper CNN clips, where a little Pfizer money seems to go a long way.

Dr. Sherri Tenpenny – one of the first physicians to speak out about the lethality of the Covid shot campaign – gets considerably more time in the spotlight in part two, succinctly tracing how deep state and big pharma laid the groundwork for a slow walk to fascism in 2020: “SARS, MERS, H1N1: same playbook, different virus.” In between, she touches on how the childhood vaccines were weaponized as a cash cow for big pharma: “When they vaccinate those kids, they basically become customers for life with their allergies, asthma, eczema. ADHD. diabetes.”

Kennedy, who also gets more screen time here than in part one, unpacks how the Pentagon turned to Fauci as a conduit for shady gain-of-function viral research. As he did in the first part of the film, Hays unflinchingly connects the dots between the 2001 anthrax attacks, 9/11, the military germ warfare establishment and the fateful rollout of the PREP act, which set up the Emergency Use Authorization for the lethal Covid injection scheme.

Dr. Robert Malone, the controversial mRNA researcher who is widely seen as controlled opposition, makes some chillingly revealing comments here that are too central to his role in the operation to spoil. You have to make up your own mind.

Fauci the individual is subject to considerably more scrutiny than he was in part one, which is more of a history of how the AIDS crisis of the 80s and 90s was a soft launch for the plandemic. He comes off as part arrogant twit and part coldblooded sociopath. Without giving anything away, you could call this Kennedy and Hays’ Godfather 2. Commentary from investigative journalist Celia Farber  and  Dr. Pierre Kory, the ivermectin pioneer and hero of the early treatment movement, is witheringly funny and spot-on. Fauci’s whiteboard game with the other NAIAD functionaries is just plain creepy.

Whitney Webb adds important context on anthrax, as does UK doctor Tess Lawrie on how Fauci took remdesevir, a failed and terrifyingly lethal ebola drug, and repurposed it as a Covid “cure.” At the end of the film, we get a parade of familiar faces in the freedom movement, and a searing coda from Kennedy and  Mark Crispin Miller, the world’s leading expert on propaganda. If you have to choose between seeing part one and part two, see part two (Sage’s clips will help). But you should really see them both while you can.

Musically, the first film has a better and more sparse score than the second, although it’s good to hear that uneasy string quartet theme again as the credits roll for the final time.

Happy Halloween from Anarcho Soccer Mom

Thanks to Bretigne Shaffer, thoughtful interviewer and producer of a consistently provocative, eclectic podcast, for sharing this funny and uplifting two-minute Halloween video for today’s installment of the annual, ongoing October-long celebration here.

The Ragas Live Festival 2022, Part 2: Hits and Misses

This year’s return of the 24-hour-plus Ragas Live festival of Indian music and related sounds was so epic that it requires two parts to reasonably digest. The frequently rapturous first half was reviewed here yesterday. The second part was also often transcendent, with some issues.

Let’s tackle those and then get to the good stuff. You’re never going to see fusion jazz on this page: with rare exceptions, good jazz is basically acoustic music. So if you enjoyed the tropical midnight act and the interminable Moroccan fusion interlude yesterday afternoon, glad you had a good time.

It would have been fun to catch sitarist Abhik Mukherjee‘s set to begin the second half of the marathon. Who knew that a trip for coffee a little earlier in the morning would also have turned into a marathon, a much less enjoyable one.

Back at Pioneer Works, bansuri flutist Jay Gandhi took an absolutely harrowing detour, running variations on a haunting, wary chromatic theme with Ehren Hanson on tabla for what seemed the better part of an hour. Beyond Gandhi’s breathtakingly liquid, perfectly modulated sine-wave attack, the somber mood was impossible to turn away from. These are troubled times: nobody has channeled that with such subtle power in recent months as these two. Which made their clever and allusive permutations on a bouncy nursery-rhyme-like riff afterward such a stark contrast. And yet, the darkness lingered, if at a distance.

Trumpeter Amir ElSaffar, whose most recent specialty has become oceanic Middle Eastern big band jazz, followed with about an hour of brooding electroacoustic sounds. Starting off on a labyrinthine rack of analog synthesizers, he rose from enveloping ambience to an achingly gorgeous, regal solo trumpet fanfare in a moody Iraqi maqam. Next, he looped an austere, baroquely churchy organ processional, then employed it as a backdrop for a constellation of santoor riffs which echoed Gandhi’s pervasive angst. He wound up the set on vocals with a similarly cautionary clarion call, more or less.

Another santoorist, Vinay Desai kept the angst at redline with a saturnine tribute to the late, great Shivkumar Sharma, who left us this past spring. We don’t know for certain if the lethal Covid injection took him out. With Vivek Pandya on tabla, the two musicians developed an absolutely gorgeous, elegaic, allusively chromatic theme and variations. Remaining mostly in the midrange, Desai rose for the great beyond with a somber glimmer before bringing it down to a dirge and the tabla entered. As the hour went on, Desai’s ripples off the walls of the space echoed into a galactic drift. Eventually, the duo took the theme skipping into the stars, a sober but energetic farewell to a pioneer.

ElSaffar returned for a second turn on santoor, joining percussionist Zafer Tawil and violinist Sami Abu Shumays behind impassioned veteran Iraqi crooner Hamid Al Saadi. After the sober, stately initial march, the maqam singer would begin the rest of the set’s expansive numbers with darkly dynamic, rubato intros, one leading to a surprisingly subtle call-and-response with ElSaffar. A little later, the group made their way into a swaying, ebullient major-key tune with a starkly contrasting santoor-and- violin break. They closed with undulating, biting chromatic theme with even more lusciously intertwined santoor and violin and a machinegunning coda.

Violinist Arun Ramamurthy gets credit for the festival’s most pyrotechnic performance, a role he’s become accustomed to. This time out he had his Indian jazz trio with bassist Damon Banks and Sameer Gupta on drums. This was the symphonic Ramamurthy: in the boomy space, with the natural reverb bouncing off the walls, he was a violin army. Banks would typically shadow him, Gupta inventively doing a nimble churning groove with tabla voicings on his kit, as the bandleader made his way through a rising and falling epic in tribute to his ancestors, to moments of icy ambience as well as frequent excursions through the bluesy raga riffs that he likes to mine in this context. Nobody knows how to draw an audience in with foreshadowing and judiciously spectacular slides and stabs better than Ramamurthy.

After that it was dance time. All-female Moroccan trance-dance ensemble group Bnat el Houariyat, featuring New York’s Esraa Warda took over the stage and then stomped and twirled and spoke power to male hegemony.

In her New York debut, singer/dancer and mystic Parvathy Baul brought ancient archetypes to life in a fervent but utterly unselfconsciously spiritual set of Bengali ritual songs. Showing off a soulfully soaring, meticulously melismatic, carnatically-infused voice which took on a grittier edge as her set went on, she sang innumerable mythical metaphors and cheerily translated them for the English-only crowd. Moving from ecstasy to tenderness and then an acerbic insistence, she cut loose and reminded that crowd that the truth is like a lion. All you have to do is set it free. Or words to that effect. Let’s hope there’s a Ragas Live festival in 2023.