#nick blinko

[weepingwidar]

Nick Blinko (British, 1961) - Counsel of Voices (1986)

[rabidhiss]

Omg. I dunno how I missed this, but will blame the pandemic. Regardless, 2021 saw the first ever release in DECADES from the tortured soul of Nick Blinko and his Rudimentary Peni outlet. I will review it after I’ve given a fuckton of listens. Rudimentary came out of Crass Records in the very early 80s, since that time releases and live performances have been sporadic to say the least- this is likely in no small part to the artist (he does all RP cover art) and musician whom has spent a lifetime in and out of mental institutions. "Great War” is a monumental release and so telling of the magnitude of hell the pandemic left in its wake that I actuAlly missed its initial release.

[guerrilla-operator]

[infinitemercy]

Mandrake by Nick Blinko (from The Haunted Head, Coptic Cat, 2009)

The field of poison is made so by the crop of mandrakes simultaneously screaming underground. Even planting a solitary mandrake 'neath the blackwood will not produce the greatest desired effect. No, the mandrake must grow in the moon's rays. And dwell near its cursing cousin, the deadly nightshade. Trail the walk of the natterjack toad, for many nights it will make you follow then you unearth the young mandrake's home as shown. The teething specimen you may eat as it screams. If assorted mouthfuls of worms and mud impair your mad meal, you may do better and mummify the mandrake harnessing screams in the strength and frequency you desire. A mandrake attaining great age is usually a mute, certainly so in captivity. If ungagged as its life expires the mandrake issues forth a most horrendous and macabre death rattle. Like a combined group of humans, similarly emitting the gurgling-screaming-crying and other more chilling sounds from the throat at the point of death is also how the expiring ancient mandrake sounds, only longer and louder in volume. Or you might have your stomach cut open, mandrake inserted, halitosis ensues as do words which offend and an occasional play of flame across your lips, a reminder of the origins of the mandragon. They fall off the womandrake, tiny but fully formed males and females, purposeful and self contained like toadlets. These are baby mandrakes following ways lit by the night's white beams. For some the path is interrupted. Intercepted at dusk by occasional juvenile individual birds, called the Goatsucker or more often the Nightjar. Once swallowed the mandrake will cause the bird, at first, great sadness, then mad flights, swooping, crashing, dying. Landing up in a vicinity advantageous to the mandrake who exploits the dead bird as a kind of compost. This process does cause some apparent harm, afflicting the body of the mandrake but this acts only as a kind of early drastic pruning and if the mandrake survives and it almost always does, it becomes far more hardy, growing quickly but also in a more sturdy way.

[werkboileddown]

[sethhulsey]

blinko

[savage-kult-of-gorthaur]

IF AN EASTER ISLAND STATUE EVER CAME ALIVE ON A BAD ACID TRIP.

PIC INFO: Spotlight on back cover sleeve art to the "Death Church" debut LP by English anarcho-punk/deathrock band RUDIMENTARY PENI, released under Corpus Christi Records in 1983. Artwork by the mental genius Nick Blinko.

There's so many of Nick's pieces to choose from, but this is the one that I am always going back to. It really does look like some twisted Easter Island monstrosity, doesn't it?

Source: www.pinterest.com/pin/575827502337093478.

[dieletztepanzerhexe]

time passing unseen, heavy with mortality

with memory and sentiment and fearful regret

bitter seed of futile fertility

[weepingwidar]

Nick Blinko (British, 1961) - Untitled (n.d.)

[xphaiea]

Nick Blinko

[ammoniahuffer]

arte de Nick Blinko

[ogrishtoonz]

My mind malaise might not be as complex as Nick Blinko's, but that didn't stop me to relate to RUDIMENTARY PENI'S POPE ADRIAN 37TH PSYCHRISTIATRIC, the album inspired by Blinko's (who has schizoaffective disorder) whole time in an institution and his delusion of being Pope Adrian IV. It's an album that uses repetition as a way to convey a feeling of claustrophobia and senselessness (to the point of a sample of the phrase "papas adrianus" being played on loop non-stop for the entire record) and if you know me, you know i love a despair-inducing album as part of a healthy diet of music.

This illustration is a "fanart" of some sort of that album, and of blinko's entire body of work, that i highly recommend. rudimentary peni has a whole aesthetic world that is very rich and grim.

my sharpies are dying so this is mostly black acrylic on regular cheap paper

[infinitemercy]

Come gentle death In dead of night, And steal away The morning light.

Nick Blinko, No More Pain

[henryrodhamkissinger]

Darby Crash (with Exene Cervenka of X.) The savant and enfant terrible of punk, surprisingly sharp and introspective lyricist given how insecure and awkward and bad at talking he was, for one of the greatest rock and roll bands ever. It is a shame ofc that early punk fashion involved swastikas and iron crosses. It’s hard for us to imagine that social world now, but it had absolutely nothing to do with any kind of beliefs. It was a symbol of the grotesque, a signifier that “I am not like you, fuck off, you should fear me” for a 19 year old kid who was ruthlessly tormented his whole life for his speech impediment and supposed learning disability and appearance, and many punks adopted this. The most extreme symbol of shock and immediate visceral revulsion. Your heroes weren’t exceptions (Siouxsie Sioux, early on, wore a Nazi arm band sometimes.) I’m not defending it—obviously. It was rather quickly abandoned, as punks grew up a bit, literally and figuratively. Today being Punk is one of the things you can be, one of the Fashion styles, one of the genres you can adopt and work a regular job and be basically a normie. In the mid to late 1970s-early 80s it was a group of people who came together on the basis of their mutual ostracism from the world, and felt liberated in simply owning it, with power in small numbers. You were a vile freak to most of humanity if you looked different, if you dressed “punk,” now a Look, now Mary-Kate Olsen wears a Minor Threat t-shirt as Fashion. (Aside on that: imo, it was Fugazi, the anodyne NPR late night music hour friendly world-music-appreciating vegan pacifist pussies, who started to make punk something palatable.)

The Germs were a direct musical (and sometimes outright amusical) expression of Darby Crash. Darby, in turn, the consummate sputum-target of old drunks and yuppie young husbands alike, the most ferocious embodiment of that early punk spirit before punks figured out how to be actually subversive against power, hell, before they were old enough to know the Vietnam war from their own assholes. That later subversive transgression (from Dead Kennedys to Crass and Discharge to Gang of Four and the Slits) was bought by the complicated, sometimes ugly embittered embodied aggressiveness of someone like Darby, whose musical style if it sounds familiar is only because the Germs had the vision and the guts to invent it. Germs were the first band to play punk music that wasn’t basically sped-up, slightly gnarlier power pop. Who in that period of norms in the music idiom and in that social climate would invent such a blisteringly sonically-hostile ramshackle dirge? Everyone in that audience was Rejected by the society, everyone who came out to see Germs play their noise-striped hazardous materials while Darby, again this was a Kid, guzzled whiskey and downers and benzedrine in desperation (not as a rock-star gesture.) Suicide, Stooges, and the Velvet Underground had done abrasive and minimalist music before, but it was self consciously Art, rarefied music for cool people, decked out in Fashion. The Germs, and a bit later the Middle Class, Black Flag, Void, No Trend, The Dicks, Negative Approach, Dead Kennedys, and all those other bracing visionaries of a subculture of total refusal were by contrast losers and social pariahs. They turned repellant into menacing, and menacing into subversive and subversive into truly radical, forging a home for the castaway all the while. Radical esp with UK entrants like the incomparable avant-garde grating noise poets Crass; Rudimentary Peni with their fearsome dirge courtesy of bipolar self taught inimitable visual artist and poet of paranoia and death Nick Blinko; Discharge, violently heavy sludge-thrash whose ascetically stripped down formula of minor-key panic attack extremity has never been matched or successfully grokked; more consciously but no less effectively anarchist/anti-capitalist greats like Zounds and Subhumans.

Darby had a suicide pact with a friend, who opted against following through with it ultimately. The world was too intolerable for Darby, though, who took his life before it had hardly started, at 22.

Anyway, “what’s in an image,” I guess the whole early history of hardcore punk. I don’t need to have a thesis or conclusion do I? Listen to Germs, listen to No Trend, listen to Reagan Youth and Crass. Punk made me everything I am, once a punk always a punk.

[weepingwidar]

Nick Blinko (British, 1961) - Untitled (NB1) (n.d.)