#;;muse theme: mell

[alexandriteobscuraarchive]

@guardianofyesod

[symbioteburnout]

MUSIC (here we go...)

[[Send me “MUSIC” and I’ll pick a song that reminds me of your muse]]

@nobodyofsparks

Could have cheesed this with some kingdom hearts music, but apart from a boss theme, I don't think Larxene has her own theme music ^^;

Trap Phantasm - Mega man ZX Advent

Red Fraction - Mell

Johnny C. Bad - Final Fantasy VI (for like an ambient theme in the Manor maybe (least before all the night activities start~))

[adevotedappraisal]

The Id and the Super Ego, part two of two

A look at Kendrick and Drake’s latest albums, and the links between them.

The Id and the Super Ego part one can be found here

I found a new muse, that’s bad news for you

Drake on the other hand, needs no excavation, as he famously wears his heart on his sleeve, when it isn’t carved into his head. Throughout the decade the singer/songwriter rapper documented his life, focusing on two major themes: his rise to the top of rap stardom and his restless love life. Through songs like the minimalist hit “Marvin’s Room" from 2011s Take Care and “March 14th" from 2018s Scorpion, he painted voyeuristic exposes about his past loves and his estranged son respectively, garnering derisive labels of ‘sensitive’, ‘soft’ or ‘emotional’.

For his actual fans it was fascinating and compelling. Rarely did the rapper with the number one spot in the overtly masculine genre reveal their life like this. Really, what did Melle Mel tell us about his love life? Or Rakim? Or Cube? Jay Z himself waited until his third decade of albums before he pulled the curtain back. With Drake, this lack of a filter endeared him to his worldwide audience, and because he talked about the easily relatable aspects of the human experience- that of falling in and out of love- he could grab his fanbase by their heartstrings and their Id and never let go.

On Honestly… Drake continues this oversharing in songs, regaling us with his tales of excess riches and exhaustion over love, this time over kinetic, nocturnal house and dance beats, the words not studied and rapped, but sung unimpeded and untethered, as if lucid dreaming through an album. On “Sticky,” anchored by door-slam kicks and anxious hi-hats, he is relishing his assholia, blithely disposing his women like a Saudi Sheik, or forget-me-not petals. He crows “King of the hill, you know it's a steep one, if we together, you know it's a brief one/ back in the ocean you go, it's a deep one,” expressing his puerile passions with the same acuity as Kendrick on “Worldwide Steppers” when he reveals “silent murderer, what's your body count? Who your sponsorship?/ objectified so many bitches, I killed their confidence.” It’s the same transgressions, except Kendrick is reflecting on the past, while Drake takes us with him to the sweating moment.

His indulgences are entertaining, but his naked longing is more compelling. His approach to songcraft here never explicitly explains how he always ends up the bachelor looking for a bachelorette, or explores how it effects him, but, in a sense, the music reflects his mind state. Basslines are deep and ponderous behind the stalks of four-on-the-floor kick drums, while the pianos are moody, rain-speckled chords. Songs like “Massive" and “Falling Back" are the hypnotizing daze you would dance the night away to in New York’s Webster Hall or some basement party in order to get over a break-up. It’s house as cosplay sure, but in some cases the music gets the point across better than Drake’s lonesome digi-warbling could alone.

We manage a moment of clarity on “Flight’s Booked,” a late-album highlight soaked in the same midnight vibes, centering itself around a classic Marsha Ambrosious sample. Drake is lovelorn and undone, singing a tender tale of holding onto a love his life can’t bear the weight of at the moment. He sings “although there's distance between us, there's no place I'd rather be, I owe you some hospitality, and it comes so naturally/ promise, I just need some more time if you can bear with me.” It’s endearing really, but you get the sense that she will be the one to respond back in the ocean you go sir, it’s a deep one.

But a mask won't hide who you are inside

Look around, the realities carved in the lies, wipe my ego, dodge my pride

The immutable truth of ourselves lays with us in the valley, between the monuments of the persona we greet the world with. And even when the artist or celebrity inflates this persona to the size of a myth, glimpses of truth find their way through in fits and starts. With Mr. Morale…, Kendrick Lamar shepherds these truths into a grand drama of himself and the events that made him the mythical hero of the shire of rap music, a persona he had clearly gotten tired of hiding behind. The album both shines from this honesty and is hamstrung by the unevenness it causes.  Really, is this how anyone wanted Beth Orton from Portishead to be utilised, swallowed by self-pity instead of defiantly belting her heart out? As fascinating and visceral as “We Cry Together" was, is this the type of Alchemist beat we wanted Kendrick over? But it reminds me about what the Good Book says about the truth in the scroll, that about it being sweet to the taste but bitter in the stomach.

Drake reveals his truth as well, in slivers of misogyny and churlish boasts, or in slipped out confessions and his unthinking yearnings for real connection through the myth of himself, across his cavernous, meaningless mansion. If his divisive Honestly, Nevermind reveals anything about him, it’s his deep love for the genres of r&b and house, as well as their function of charting the moods leading up to and away from falling in and out of love. In the context of his turbulent, beef-mottled rap career, his love songs themselves were muses about his transient muses, and this album, much more consistent than Kendrick’s, revels in these affairs. They are precious, underwritten things though, tossed-off melodies about indelible loves and groupies over muscular dance beats, the ear candy of the summer, but candy nevertheless.

These two artists, linked by ambition and circumstance, represent two different modalities of rap music, one existing to move the crowd, the other wanting to move the crowds mind. If you asked Drake fans his best songs they’d list singles, controversial diss songs and immaculate late-night driving songs. You ask Kendrick fans and they’ll tell you about his thematic closing songs, his sprawling, epic centerpieces, his tender biographies. Even their choice of bling is telling. Drake recently unveiled his chain titled Previous Engagements. Designed by famed jeweler Alex Ross, the piece consists of 42 stones totaling 351.38 carats, embedded into 18K white gold, representing the 42 women he considered marrying. Kendrick meanwhile, appeared in performance wearing a diamond encrusted literal crown of thorns by four craftsmen from Tiffany & co. The crown has 8000 cobblestone diamonds totaling 137 carats. The two pieces are both about love, but the two different manifestations of it, that of the material flesh and of the eternal spirit.

Remember though, these two lads aren’t really that different in a certain light. At their core they’re two rappers who found their lane and deliver product to a fan base attracted to the persona they present to the marketplace, same as Nas and Jay did before them, same as Rakim and Kane even earlier. However, Kendrick’s carnal urges read more like Drake’s lines sometimes, while Drake on “Flight’s Booked" sounds like the long distance musings Whitney might hear from Kendrick himself. Over these essays they have been compared to an Id and a Super Ego, famous psychological categorizations first developed by Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud, whose theories have fell out of fashion in modern times.

Consider then the work of Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, who believed the psyche consists of the ego, the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious. What if the two are simply mining their personal unconscious, (Kendrick digging deeper quarries of course) and, in expressing their truths in these songs, tap into the collective unconscious of rap? Drake presents to us our romantic, egotistical desires while Kendrick the spiritual and reflective, but up to a point. For within the fuckboy shell of Drake's tales is a human need for connection with another real human, and the catalyst for Kendrick’s emotional and metaphysical self-reflection is his coming to terms with his destructive addiction to the flesh and to his image. What we can learn from these two curious B-tier albums then is that our polarities, positive and negative, feed off of each other ultimately. We can acknowledge in the valley then, that to deny the earthly desires that reside within us, is as ill-advised as denying the savior that lives there as well.

[alexandriteobscuraarchive]

@avaliantqueen / @garnetwrites

@domina-noctisim

Sing To Me – MISSIO Death Stranding

[yasuda-yoshiya]

Now that I think about it, what do you think The Maid thought and felt about the three men? Like I said before, I think she was jealous of them, and might’ve even subconsciously took pleasure in their misfortune, even as she sincerely wished for the WHG to find happiness with them. She does frame them as tragically flawed and as rather terrible people, like she dehumanises them and doesn’t think of them as people with agency because of the curse. Am I bothering you with all these questions?

Yeah, I think that’s probably true! Again, the game doesn’t really explicitly go into it or anything, but I do think you can certainly read a sort of jealousy into the Maid’s framing of the three men to the WHG (”these guys all suck, ditch them and stay with me instead”), even if it’s obviously very repressed. I agree that the Maid sort of dehumanises them in the same way that she dehumanises basically everyone (including herself), by turning them into tragically doomed protagonists defined by their respective fatal flaws. Framing them that way allows her to look back on them with a kind of distant pity and sympathy that probably helps to repress any more difficult emotions she might feel about her respective relationships with them, or about the WHG choosing them over her; it puts her in a position of being “above” them, in a sense. It also seemed to me that the Maid personally identified with and used parts of their stories as outlets to talk about and reflect on issues that were important to her personally, without her having to take ownership of them herself (so her complex feelings about Bestia’s attempts to retreat into a fictional narrative and escape his humanity become a casually detached sort of musing on someone else’s story - “Hmm, I wonder if you could say he really was a beast?” - rather than something that betrays anything about her own identification with him).

Going into each of the three men individually, let’s see... I think the Maid doesn’t really have any particularly strong feelings about Mell, aside from a sort of disdain for his shallowness and his lack of awareness of how fortunate and privileged he is (she makes a lot of very barbed comments to that effect in door 1, which I very much enjoyed). She does make a point of explicitly saying she sides with him over Nellie during their big fallout at the theatre, which I found interesting - I expect that’s probably mostly down to her resenting Nellie being cruel to the WHG, but I could also see Nellie’s desperate clinginess and denial of the fact that Mell doesn’t really love her hitting a sore spot for the Maid too, since it probably reminds her of the things she dislikes and represses about herself. Her telling of Mell and Nellie’s story focuses a lot on the theme of childhood happiness inevitably being lost, which obviously speaks heavily to Giselle’s issues.

Yukimasa is particularly interesting to me, because I think the Maid shows a lot of sympathy for him and seems to genuinely wish for his happiness in a way she doesn’t so much for the others; there’s a persistent undercurrent of her saying things like “I had truly hoped he could find happiness like this, but in the end...” and generally seeming very actively invested in his efforts to build a new self-contained reality with the WHG, which I think speaks to her personally identifying with what he was doing there. (Well, there’s also the fact that the Maid is the one who originally took him in and taught him to speak like a human, so she probably feels a kind of maternal affection from those days as well, even after he got increasingly messed up.) Her deliberately biasing the story towards his perspective by portraying him as a literal beast and glossing over the impact of his actions on others (Pauline and Javi’s stories were explicitly not part of the Maid’s telling, and something Michel had to hack his way into himself) was very interesting to me; she spends a lot of time musing over the question of whether he truly was a human or a beast, and asking Michel if he can understand and sympathise with Bestia’s feelings, in a way that I felt betrayed a sort of insecurity about herself as well.

As for Jacopo...well, as the Maid pretty much says herself in door 3, I think she originally regarded him as a very unlikable man but came to better understand his true nature as time went on. There’s a canon short story about them that describes them coming to a sort of understanding in the years after the WHG left; I got the impression that the Maid did get fairly invested in him in the end, though of course she’s also very well practiced at detaching from such things by that point as well. And writing this out just makes me all the more mad about how little reaction Giselle gets to have to the past versions of Yukimasa and Jacopo in door 8 despite having such interesting relationships with both of them, but for some reason they just wanted Giselle to stop being a character partway through and now we all have to deal with that, unfortunately!

[funkylittlejazzman]

Alright lads I've got a BMC roleplay server on Discord

Uh yeet as the title says, it's a Discord server themed around Be More Chill - Currently it only has four people. There is an Out Of Character category where there is an OOC chat, a headcannons chat and a chat to share any bootlegs, videos or art. There is then (obviously) the Roleplay category where there are various locations to use your muse.

Taken Characters:

Jeremy Heere

Michael Mell

Christine Canigula

The SQUIP

Available Characters:

Rich Goranski

Jake Dillinger

Chloe Valentine

Brooke Lohst

Jenna Rolan

Dustin Kropp

Mr. Reyes

Mr. Heere

To join just Direct message which character you want to be and I'll give you the link!!

We hope to see you there!!

[stephaniemarlowftw]

LEGENDARY DUO EARTH MINE FOR MINIMALISM WITH “CATS ON THE BRIAR”

The track appears on their ninth studio album, Full Upon Her Burning Lips, due out May 24th on Sargent House

See Earth on tour across the U.S. with label mates Helms Alee this May and June.

Commemorating thirty trips around the sun as one of metal’s most monolithic bands, Earth have announced plans to release their ninth studio album, Full Upon Her Burning Lips. A purge of the embellishment and panache from previous releases, Full Upon Her Burning Lips intimates Earth’s commitment to the minimalism of their primordial days.

Listen to the album’s first single, the six-minute Morricone-charged epic “Cats on the Briar,” via Consequence of Sound (or directly on YouTube).

Deconstructing the tried-and-true dynamic consisting of Dylan Carlson on guitar and bass and Adrienne Davies on drums and percussion, Full Upon Her Burning Lips taps into the Platonic ideal of Earth—an incarnation of the long running band bolstered by the authority of purpose, where every note and every strike on the drum kit carries the weight of the world. In addition to scaling back the flourishes of their hulking, drone-driven opuses, Full Upon Her Burning Lips was composed sans narrative, relying instead on their collective subconscious to hone in on the overarching muse as the songs developed.

The record was engineered, mixed, and mastered by longtime associate Mell Dettmer at Studio Soli. Showcasing Carlson’s sepia-toned Bakersfield Sound guitars and Davies’ death knell drums, Full Upon Her Burning Lips mines for the expressive, nuanced, and tonally rich components of Earth’s arsenal of sound. And indeed, anyone that’s followed Earth on their journey will bask in the unadulterated hums, throbs, and reverberations conjured by Carlson and Davies.

“I wanted this to be a ‘sexy’ record, a record acknowledging the ‘witchy’ and ‘sensual’ aspects in the music… sort of a ‘witch’s garden’ kind of theme, with references to mind altering plants and animals that people have always held superstitious beliefs towards. A conjuror or root doctor’s herbarium of songs, as it were,” Dylan Carlson said of the record’s aspirations.

Coinciding with the announcement of the new album (which is available for pre-order here), Earth has also announced an expansive U.S. tour with support from label mates Helms Alee. A full tour itinerary can be found below.  

Full Upon Her Burning Lips — Track Listing: 

1. Datura's Crimson Veils

2. Exaltation of Larks

3. Cats on the Briar

4. The Color of Poison

5. Descending Belladonna

6. She Rides an Air of Malevolence

7. Maidens Catafalque

8. An Unnatural Carousel

9. The Mandrake's Hymn

10. A Wretched Country of Dusk

Earth — On Tour w/ Helms Alee: 

May 24 Seattle, WA @ Neumos

May 25 Portland, OR @ Doug Fir Lounge

May 28 San Francisco, CA @ Great American

May 29 Los Angeles, CA @ The Echo

May 31 Los Angeles, CA @ The Echo

June 1 Phoenix, AZ @ Rebel Lounge

June 2 Albuquerque, NM @ Sister

June 4 Austin, TX @ Barracuda

June 5 Dallas, TX @ Club Dada

June 7 Houston, TX @ The Secret Group

June 8 Baton Rouge, LA @ Mid City Ballroom

June 10 Orlando, FL @ Wills Pub

June 11 Atlanta, GA @ The Masquerade

June 12 Carrboro, NC @ Cat’s Cradle

June 14 Richmond, VA @ Gallery 5

June 15 Baltimore, MD @ Ottobar

June 16 Philadelphia, PA @ Johnny Brenda’s

June 18 Somerville, MA @ ONCE Ballroom

June 19 New York, NY @ Le Poisson Rouge

June 21 Pittsburgh, PA @ Spirit Hall

June 22 Detroit, MI @ El Club

June 23 Chicago, IL @ The Empty Bottle

June 24 Minneapolis, MN @ 7th St. Entry

June 27 Denver, CO @ Marquis Theatre

June 28 Salt Lake City, UT @ Urban Lounge

June 29 Boise, ID @ Neurolux

[alexandriteobscuraarchive]

@guardianofyesod