#and it turns out the like 10 pages of french booklet i did were only recommended hw… so i didnt need to do all that… 😔

[driftwooddestiel]

todays the last day of holidays 😭

[hermanwatts]

Sensor Sweep: Hammett, Hernstrom, Heinlein, Haggard

Comic Books (Paint Monk): Copyright. Public Domain. Cease & Desist. Not the words one would normally think to associate with a battle featuring Conan of Cimmeria and yet here we are. Now that the smoke has cleared, Ablaze is finally able to deliver translated versions of French Glénat’s Conan comics. Let me see if I can sum it up succinctly. In Europe, most of Robert E. Howard’s works are in the public domain. In the United States?

Publishing (Kairos):  There’s a shortage of paper, because it comes from China. The two largest printers of magazines and books in the U.S., Quad/Graphics and LSC Communications were going to merge last summer, but something got in the way. Now, LSC Communications has filed for bankruptcy. The second largest printer, Quad, has shut its book printing facilities entirely. In some regions, major distributors have shut down or disappeared, while although others, like Ingram, are still operating, although with reduced staff.

New Releases (DMR Books): The next DMR Books release is The Eye of Sounnu, the long-awaited collection of Schuyler Hernstrom’s stories from Cirsova magazine. Today we reveal the incredible cover by Brian LeBlanc (who also did the cover for Renegade Swords.) The title of the collection is taken from the cover story, “Gift of the Ob-Men,” which previously appeared in the first issue of Cirsova, as well as the free anthology The Infernal Bargain and Other Stories.

Hard-boiled Fiction (Elgin Bleeker): The Hammett novel, which I posted about (here), is a complicated yarn of murder and political corruption. Nick Beaumont is an advisor and right-hand man to Paul Madvig, a political power broker. In the book, Hammett showed the strong ties between the men who were long-time friends. A lot of that was lost in the 1942 movie starring Alan Ladd as Nick and Brian Donlevy as Paul because the story needed to be trimmed down to fit a movie’s normal running time. (There is also a 1935 version starring George Raft and Edward Arnold, but I have not seen it.)

Pulp Science-Fiction (Adventures Fantastic): OK, I’m gonna do it.  With the exception of some of the novels, I’ll be looking at the nominees for the 1945 Retro Hugos, which are awarded for stories published in 1944.  I’m going to start with the novelettes.  I read “The Children’s Hour” earlier this week as a possibility Henry Kuttner birthday post before the Retro Hugo shortlist was announced.  Might as well tackle it while it’s fresh on my mind.

Pulp Fiction (Dark Worlds Quarterly): Edmond Hamilton was a Science Fiction writer who is loved for his Captain Future novels, his Star Kings and any number of other Pulp stories. He was an important innovator of the 1920s and early 30s, as well as one of the best writers of Superman comics in the 1940s, 50s and 60s. But there was this time when Ed wrote Mystery stories for money…Hamilton was one of the first SF writers who tried to make a living writing only Science Fiction and Fantasy. He succeeded for the most part but there were lean years in the Great Depression when he turned to Mystery fiction.

Fiction (Jon Mollison): Is now really the best time to write a post-apocalyptic novel? It is if you know what you are doing. And as a writer, let me assure you – I know what I’m doing. The sad fact is that we already live in a post-apocalyptic world. Sooner than expected, we’ll be tasked with finding a path out of the relative doom that follows the American Empire. And fiction can help us do that. If it is the right kind of fiction.

Fiction (Track of Words): Black Library’s Siege of Terra series reaches its halfway point with Saturnine by Dan Abnett, a 500+ page beast of a book in which secrets are revealed, big names start to fall, and the stakes – somehow – get even higher. Having taken Lion’s Gate spaceport, the traitor host marches on the fortifications of the Lion’s Gate itself while simultaneously driving at the Eternity Gate spaceport, stretching the loyalist defenders to breaking point. With battles raging on multiple fronts and resources dwindling, Dorn faces impossible questions of compromise and sacrifice, as he searches for a strategy that might tip the balance in his battle of wills and wits with Perturabo.

Warhammer (Warhammer Community): This is Warhammer’s biggest plastic monster yet… it towers over a regular gargant and easily stares Archaon and his three-headed mount in their many faces. It’s festooned with details that mark it as a creature of the Mortal Realms, including trinkets from across the various factions and bits of monster – presumably to snack on after battle.

D&D (Boggswood): Both before D&D was written, and long afterward, Dave Arneson stocked his dungeons randomly and he devised different methods and  applied different ways to do this.  Monsters, for example, he stocked through a random “Protection Point: system.  Gold he rolled dice for and items he created random tables for.  The best early example is his The Loch Gloomen stocking list from 1972, reprinted in his First Fantasy Campaign booklet.

History and Writers (Frontier Partisans): H. Rider Haggard, an Englishman who had worked for several years in Natal in southern Africa, created one of the the quintessential Frontier Partisan heroes of fiction — white hunter and adventurer Allan Quatermain, hero of King Solomon’s Mines and a whole series of what Deuce Richardson calls “exotic adventure fiction.”  A hunter of wild game and hidden treasures; a “Man Who Knows Indians” (or, rather, African tribesmen); an English gentleman by heritage and termperament, yet one who sought out the wild places of the earth to wander.

Fiction (NC Register): The unmistakable features of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle looked down upon me from an impressive Victorian town house. Below a larger than life portrait there was a sign; it announced: “The Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Centre.” I made a mental note, intending to visit what I assumed was a place dedicated to the memory and literary legacy of the creator of one of literature’s most famous figures: Sherlock Holmes. It was then that I noticed another sign. It offered “services” and other activities: the building was a center for spiritualism — necromancy by another name.

D&D (Jeffro’s Space Gaming Blog): I just had no interest in running a game featuring kobolds and goblins like happens so often when you run Keep on the Borderlands by the book. But you know, with three healing spells at first level for each cleric, high powered rangers and paladins holding things down, and with enough money in the game that the fighting-men can afford plate armor now… hoo boy, they can hold their own up against some pretty tough opposition. Tougher opposition means bigger payoffs– a tradeoff that seems quite satisfactory, at least when the players are winning.

New Release (Amazon): A resurrected sorcerer grants the wishes of the desperate men who have returned him to life—but in ways none of them anticipates. A prince makes a bargain with a barbarian criminal to travel into a lost world of violence and sorcery to save the life of a woman who may already be dead. Marauders who attack a city devoted to a great goddess suffer her strange curse when she answers the pleas of her dying priestess. The last survivors of an ancient continent confront evil at every step as they march beneath skies of endless darkness to reach the haven they hope will lead them to safety.

Art (DMR Books): “Legacy Circle members of the Robert E. Howard Foundation have something to look forward to: The Challenge from Beyond Drafts. In 1935, fan publisher and future DC Comics editor Julius Schwartz wanted to celebrate the third anniversary of his Fantasy Magazine. He asked five prominent science fiction authors and five prominent fantasy authors to collaborate on two stories, both to be titled ‘The Challenge from Beyond.’

Louis L’Amour (Paperback Warrior): Deemed “America’s Favorite Frontier Writer”, Louis L’Amour’s chronicle of the fictional Sackett family was a bestselling series. Beginning in 1960, the 17-book series is still held in high regard with fans of the western genre. While Barnabas’ son Jubal is mentioned in these books, it is explained to readers that he was a loner and distanced himself from his family. Jubal was obsessed with exploring the far west and walking “where no white-man had ever wandered”.

Fiction (Fantasy Literature): Of the nine books that I have read over the last year or so from Armchair Fiction’s current Lost World/Lost Race series, which runs to 24 volumes, no fewer than three of them have involved the discoveries of hitherto unknown civilizations far beneath the Earth’s surface. In Rex Stout’s truly thrilling Under the Andes (1914), three unfortunate Americans go through a hellacious experience at the hands of a lost race of Incas beneath the mountains of Peru. In S. P. Meek’s The Drums of Tapajos (1930), a quartet of American adventurers discovers the descendants of both the 10 Lost Tribes and Atlantis, uneasily coexisting both inside and beneath a mountain in the Brazilian wilderness.

Heinlein (Pulp Net): As a young science-fiction fan, I read several authors, and would often gravitate to a particular author at a time, reading almost everything they did, before I moved on. Often I wouldn’t follow on their later works. One of these authors was Robert A. Heinlein (1907-88), one of the “grandmasters” of science fiction, and sometimes referred to as the “dean of science fiction.” Like many SF authors of the time, he got his start in the pulps, and was successful in leaving the “pulp ghetto” for better-paying markets, such as The Saturday Evening Post, and original books.

Sensor Sweep: Hammett, Hernstrom, Heinlein, Haggard published first on https://sixchexus.weebly.com/

[heirbm-blog]

ITW LEGACY MAGAZINE (All) (parue 11/17, répondue 10/17)

Good evening HEIR and many thanks for taking the time to answer my questions! I hope you are doing great in France! Let’s get right to it: Your first album “Au Peuple De L’Abîme” will be released soon. In the promo-text of your label it says that your art resolves around the idea that “mankind inherited an Earth it does not deserve”. Could you elaborate about this statement? What exactly do you mean by that?

Matthieu (guitare) : Actually the phrase sums quite well what we are saying with Heir. Mankind doesn’t deserve its status of “intelligent species” as he is constantly trying to establish his domination on everything he sees (this being humans or animals). We have a lot to learn and a lot of efforts to do to reach what we shall consider as the right behaviour for the human race. Heir propose basically a pessimist vision of things, the darkest side of our minds, where hope disappears and where all we can do is complain about our own weakness. For some of us, this band is an outlet for all that can make us “go insane” in the nonsense that is human life.

Let’s stay a bit with the lyrical aspect of your album: “Au Peuple De L’Abîme” can be translated as “To The Humans Of The Abyss” and your cover-artwork features an antique statue pierced by arrows while from the background an arm holding a scale is emerging. I guess one could interpret this picture in such a way that every great empire will one day be judged. However, that seems like a rather easy interpretation. One could also interpret the picture in that sense that some of the most brutal regimes and empires were ruled by laws and that some of the most horrific crimes have been committed by mankind while being completely in accordance with the laws of society. Could you tell us a little bit about this cover-artwork? What message would you like to convey with this picture and in how far is it linked to the lyrics of your first album?

Matthieu : The only instructions we had left for Cäme (designer of all the visuals) was that we wanted a amphitheater as a symbol of how power can be overused or corrupted &nd we wanted him to propose something. The artwork has a much more general meaning than what you’re looking for.  It is Auguste, the first roman emperor who got to power legally after making the senat slowly giving him more and more power. It is a choice of Cäme and perfectly illustrates the concept of overused power we are talking about in the album.

The song ,Meltem’ starts with a German quotation of Eichmann talking about the responsibility of the “average” person for the vicious and terrible crimes of the Nazi regime. In what way do you talk about the so-called “banality of evil” (Hannah Arendt) in your song? What message does this song tell us concretely? Do you also sing about the situation in France around that time?

Actually, the quotation is of Hannah Arendt herself, from an interview on western germany television from 1964, but there, it doesn’t really matter for that’s what is said that interests us,.

Here is the translation of some lyrics in english :

“Pages turn, word aren’t changing,

we remember, we remind, but we learn nothing,

nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything repeats itself,

a rule written, with non-erasable ink”

The song Meltem is about how lessons from the past are most of the time ignored and mistakes are occuring again. The problem is not rooted in the past, but deeply in our present. The reason of the choosing of this extract is that it explains the “banality of evil” concept in a really short and clear way :

“But they  were not murderers. They were people who fell into their own trap.”

Here in France, this is most of the time forgotten. Fear and hate are the most common answer to terrorism (and most of the time this hate is aimed at the wrong people) and the “enemy” is turned into a soulless devil. This is what this extract right here is all about. A loss of common sense leading to dumb hate will never make things better, and nor will forgetting/ignoring what happened before and what lead us here.

As far as I know you guys have not played in any other black metal band before HEIR, at least I didn’t find any reference to that. Could you give us a brief introduction in how you five guys met and why you decided to play black metal in the first place?

Matthieu : Heir was project initiated by Diego (drums) and I, we had played together a few times before this and wanted to start a more “post” project, influenced by black metal and post-hardcore. We published an ad on the internet, and Maxime, François and Loïc answered quite fast. I wanted to start a black metal-inspired band since quite long, and I knew Diego liked a lot of the same stuff I listened at the time.

Let’s shortly stay with this question: What makes the style of black metal so special and unique that it is perfectly suitable to express your message and your feelings?

Matthieu : Its way of being at the same time, oppressing, epic, harsh and tortured. I think it’s the better style for us to express in the same time the “stories”  and how we feel about things we are talking about. Definitely it’s the ability of black metal to be mixed with a lot a different sounds without losing its roots that makes this possible.

Your compositions contain a very interesting mixture of fast and slow parts. This comes, of course, not unexpected since you mix black metal elements with sludge parts. Most interestingly this is a musical combination which one can find quite a lot in France, but not so much in the rest of the world. Do you have any idea why this might be the case? And which bands did inspire you to go forward and mix these two styles?

Matthieu : Honestly I don’t know, we have great labels who are in a way promoting this encounter of black metal with other slower, more modern styles, like Throatruiner Records or Les Acteurs de l’Ombre. I think it can motivate french bands to play this music. Our main influences for making our black metal “different” are Neurosis, Amenra, Cult of Luna, those are the bands we share in common as influences. Making a mix between black metal and the overall feeling these music are giving us is the musical leitmotiv of Heir at the base.

Could you tell us a little bit about your song writing process? It says in the booklet that all music was simply composed by HEIR. Do you really hang out together, jam and then write the songs together? Or is there also one main songwriter present in your band?

No, we never jam for composing songs, usually one of us writes a song in its entirety and we play it in rehearsal, change little details, we almost all write music, and always before rehearsing we have quite a good idea of how the song will and/or must sound.

Your album was produced and recorded in the Dismalsound Studio and the Silent Ruins Studio – why did you specifically choose these two studios? And what was exactly done in which studio?

Matthieu : Well, we choosed those studios because they are close to our homes and mostly because they are ruled by friends we trust in. They both know the project since the beginning (we recorded the “Asservi” demo in the same studios) and understand what we are looking for. We recorded the drums at the Dismalsound studio and did all the rest at the Silent Ruins studio and we are glad we did it that way. They are talented people we also admire as musicians (their bands : Exylem and Havenless).

Concerning the live-front: When can we hope to see you guys play live in Austria, Germany or Switzerland in the near future?

Matthieu : We aren’t foreseeing any tour in this countries for now (except one gig in Geneva but I suppose that is not the part of Switzerland you were talking about). We don’t have any booker and currently don’t have time to book our own shows, but be sure that when the opportunity comes, we will play shows as much as we can, and those are country we’d  be very glad to come by.

Do you have any clue yet what the future will bring for HEIR? What are your plans?

Matthieu : We are now focusing on making the live shows more efficient and immersive, but when we are done with it we will start working on the next releases. Songs are already written.

Last question: What books are currently lying on your nightstand?

Matthieu : If I don’t mention books related to my studies (urbanism), the last books I read were “J’irai cracher sur vos tombes” by Boris Vian, “Le Crève-coeur” by Louis Aragon and an H.D Lawrence compilation. As I am finishing this interview I just restarted the “Petits poèmes en prose” by Charles Baudelaire. These are all books I read when I was younger but that I always like to revisit.

Many thanks again for your time and your effort! I wish you personally and for HEIR only the very best!

Thank you for your interest in our band and the interesting questions.