#sunrise and dazzle

[parasiticc-anomaly]

You deserved better.

Another dazzle drawing, relating to todays episode.

God, seeing sun say all the names of the children and what they all loved to do was heartbreaking.

Sorry this one is a little messy, i struggled with the pose. But i will redo it digitally

[hollowskullhead]

HELLO

I did another thing for a discord prompt that was back to school related.

[azuli-bean]

babies

[twister-sister]

I love them, the episodes still make me tear up

[fablekitty]

I literally threw a fit after watching today's episode. I couldn't have asked for a happier segway for Dazzle and her transition in to a new body.

[coookiestars]

Just a family

I drew this at school so some of the characters may not be drawn that way(o_O)

[llamaisllama777]

LAES,TSAMS,EAPS DAILY*/WEEKLY* REVIEW SHOW!!!!

Sorry it's been a bit since I last did one of these, but I'm back and here to take a look at today's new episodes

I love this group so much!!!

I'm glad Molten,Jack, and Dazzle have finally found friends like them. It's so cute and wholesome!

I love how they just yeet a toy to its death in the beginning of the episode. I love how they just stinkin' trying to solve a murder (A FAKE ONE)

I love how Sun even gets involved and goes full Riddler. (Sun face it, you're a father now. And a great one at that!)

This episode was so fun and cute! I love it!

I wonder if Sun and Moon's will be as wholesome?

Oh....oh no.

Nexus.... did it.

He broke Moon.

I didn't think it was possible to break Moon unless it was like the death of Sun or something, but here we are!

Moon did still hold remorse for what happened to Johnathan and probably the July 16th kids as well it's just unlike Sun, Moon didn't express his emotions. He kept them inside, hidden deep. And now Nexus has brought all those emotions to the surface!

I like how Moon says that Sun and Solar will be fine without him. It's a problem ya but the fact he thinks Sun and Solar are so capable without him it's kinda wholesome.

Monty is actually a pretty good friend. Monty admits he is not perfect, far from it! But he's changing. He's better now. Thanks to the whole Celestial family! Monty tries to help Moon, but it's clear Moon is gonna need a bit before he can be back to his usual self.... if he ever does.

Now, with Moon out of action, this means it will be easier for Nexus and Dark Sun to kidnap Sun. This may have all been a part of Nexus' plan break Moon, take Sun. Nexus will probably try to torture Sun and break him to get the shards but considering the fact even after Creator badly mentally tortured Sun and didn't get what he wants I don't think it will as easy as Nexus think it will be. Sun is stronger than any of them know.

And lastly....

Eclipse ACTUALLY OPENING UP TO SUNRISE AND MOONLIGHT?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?! SHDHDVEUDGJWWEHEIEHWD!

YEEEEESSS!!!!

About time!

I'm glad to see that Eclipse is.... kinda sort of trying to be a friend.

Hopefully, Sun, Moon, and Eclipse can figure out what to do about this universe's Eclipse if/when he shows up.

Hi, Francis, long time no see. 👋

Also, Francis has a point, Earth, Puppet, Foxy, Sunrise,Moonlight, this world's Monty, and even Ballora are his friends. It's time for him to realize and embrace that and I hope he does soon.

Puppet.....please....get some rest! You are no help to anyone like this! Have you even talked to your son since the murder he witnessed!

Go talk to him! 👉 🦊

Seriously, Puppet, this isn't helping anyone. It's hurting you and the others, and you probably are Vincent's number one suspect for the murders.

GREAT EPISODES!

Especially, the Sun and Moon show episode! I really liked that one.

11/10!

[dear-nyu]

I am so normal about Blood and Whiskey again,, because!!! Guinevere you're my stars, Arthur you're my night!! Lancelot you can't just,, aaah??? Like.

If there's no Stars, It's just dark.

If there's no Night, It's just bright.

You needed both for it to be beautiful, and you need both for the Maybe, Just This Once, there could be a Happy Ending

It only makes sense when it's them three!!!!!

[artist-in-training-wheels]

Sometimes, you just need to give yourself some serotonin, and sometimes, you just need to play dolls with a kid.

This took me some time, but I LOVE how it came out! I struggled with the hoves but really liked how they came out in the long run. And for those who can't tell, Sun is holding a brush and brushing my sona's tail (cause I think he would like the idle task while watching Dazzle play with others).

I couldn't think of a background (yes, I could've made them sit on a couch, the initial idea but my sona and Sun are wearing SHOES!), so they're just in the rainbow void :)

[dragon7217]

Drew this like a few weeks ago, but here's the SAMS and LAES gang spending their summer at the beach! ^w^

[sidthedragon]

Have a bunch of styles from the same day! WEEEE more WoF soon.

[schismusic]

Untitled piece on worried music (or some shit)

This piece has been floating around, shapeless and structureless, for the better part of four months now. I don't particulary care to give it any sort of unifying theme, or to put it into comparison with autobiography as I usually do. This will have to stand on its own as an ostensibly gratuitous exploration of various levels of preoccupation in music that I like. This being said, hope you enjoy the dive and you find something worthwhile to listen to. For those of you who hoped to read more about my very boring personal life, well, it's this way or the highway this time. I'm really bad at this, aren't I?…

Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark (don't worry, I will no longer subject you to this long ass name and will stick to the conventional acronym) live in this weird limbo where they might be among the longest-running acts to originate from the late '70s and yet at the same time are by and large considered by most a one-hit wonder. And to be fair, Enola Gay could very easily be the single best synthpop track ever recorded, thereby rendering other tracks from the same genre functionally useless to people who do not care about synthpop. I, however, care a lot about synthpop. But I also care a lot about a different, very underrated aspect of synthpop: its paranoia.

There's a really cool piece by Mark Sabatini on the Red Wedge magazine. The piece opens with a picture of peroxide-hair David Sylvian sitting in front of a Prophet-5 and is dedicated to Scott Walker and Mark Hollis, so it's basically just tailor-made for me right out of the gate. More importantly, however, it underlines the important relationship between some of the earliest bands in British synthpop and the concept of eerie in the Mark Fisher sense of the word, or some kind of uncertainty with regards to the future. The late 1970s sit at the cusp of a special time in contemporary history, not just because of what Sabatini notes, i.e. the passing of the torch between two decades that came to symbolize two completely different visions of the world (political, social, economic, cultural). The early Eighties would turn out to be some of the most tense years in the entire Cold War. A record like This Heat's Deceit is a direct byproduct of a terrifying climate of impending doom, faced with a dry sarcasm only the sense of rushing to an early grave could grant. In the Yellow Eyes post I also added a number of other examples, none of which strictly relevant to this exact post. One would think that OMD's preoccupation with being, at once, "ABBA and Karlheinz Stockhausen" would force them to a more sideways approach to these same feelings. To an extent, this is true, in that they very rarely discuss current-day topics in a direct way. I am specifically writing about, of course, Enola Gay, but take for instance a track like Telegraph. I remember sending it to Dog a while back and their reaction was quite priceless. Not only did they define it as "whimsical" and "faelike", wow!, but they also very acutely pointed out "something sinister about it just under the surface … it feels subtly dangerous".

This is technically true for the entire Dazzle Ships album. From the first moment we are in Prague, a weird place to be in the year 1983. A sampled trumpet fanfare loops around, a voice speaking in Czech, that same fanfare theme rearranged for a full orchestra. Then it hits you with a song titled, I shit you not, Genetic Engineering. The little children, the future in our hands, feel like more of a menace than they do a promise. They are to be controlled. International tackles rampant nationalism. Radio Waves echoes Kraftwerk and ties back into Telegraph. Of All the Things We've Made, a heartwrenching controlled melodic burst sounding like it could fit straight into the Disco Elysium soundtrack, reflects on the rift between Cold War superpowers with touching longing for world peace. And yet the most representative track of the whole lot might be Time Zones. A mess of jambled radio hourly signals: around the world in barely thirty seconds, codified conventional human behaviour presenting itself in the barest possible function, the capability to tell time. I've always been terrified of radio hourly signals. I remember car trips in the night, the mechanical nightingale chirping before the five boops right before the hour ended. I remember silent screens with sudden noises and an impersonal voice telling the time. So sterile it felt inexorable, the same way doom is.

On the other hand, this barely controlled element of quiet terror – a shift of the mask revealing an inhuman grin? – can at some point just burst into a more direct feverish sense of impending death. This is where a band like Sunrise Patriot Motion comes in. According to this incredible interview with Invisible Oranges, not only is every SPM release a piece in an ongoing story (so far there are two, so you're still in time to get in on the action before it gets too complicated), but Black Fellflower Stream – record number one – was actually itself the product of a driving obsession. In the words of Will Skarstad himself:

"For the first time ever Yellow Eyes was all over the place, but with this, we were like, twice a week, every week getting together. We got into this crazy routine, got obsessed, let’s finish this record. We were just so psyched about it."

Yes, the Skarstad brothers are once again involved. Not that much of a surprise, to be completely fair to you. Their guitar work with Yellow Eyes somehow manages to transcend the usual arrangement tactics of black metal, sounding less and less like cookie-cutter true-Norwegian imitators by the millisecond. While a record like Immersion Trench Reverie perfectly illustrates that, in SPM that same reality-warping harmony is bent in the direction of a post-punk-tinged beast, retaining however the powerful drive and pulse of metal. The brothers, ever so self-conscious, call it their "nu metal" project. I'm not inherently opposed to the idea: Deftones's Chino Moreno is notoriously a massive Japan and Duran Duran fan, Korn's Jonathan Davis got into makeup because of the Cure's Robert Smith. Where the fundamental difference with classic nu metal comes in is probably in the themes. Specifically, Black Fellflower Stream details the psychological journey undergone by a man who, in a religious stupor, comes to believe that he can dig a hole deep enough to find oil. Military symbolism, Catholic imagery relating to mystical ecstasy, incoherent autobiographical babbling, all tied together with the progressively clearer and unavoidable understanding (as per My Father Took Me Hunting in the Snow's liner notes) "that he is the sun, and, as the day ends, so will he."

Musically, in these two records, anything goes. Dungeon synth-inspired fake-ass FM keyboard preset sounds leave space to chugging heavy rhythm guitars, interspersed with yelled (more so than screamed) vocals courtesy of Andy Chugg and incredibly imaginative sampling and sound layering. The musical landscape painted by all of these elements, brought together in such a way that it feels miraculous for them to actually coalesce, is one of absolute military terror, where personal life and one's past are exploded into shrapnel, transform a delusional pretense into a mission of quasi-religious penance. One certainly wonders how long the experiment can go and how it can evolve. But I, for one, am glad that I got to hear these two records, and can't wait for any new music coming our way. Even if it means delving into horrifying visions of petrol war.

But what happens when this state of worry, paranoia almost, comes to essentially burn a hole into reality itself, detaching from average parameters of direction, time, weight, emotion? My guess is you get something close to the latest Ben Frost record. Not one to be intimidated by loud noises, Frost's body of work evolved from forlorn, cinematic guitar to progressively more Dangerous, noisy and aggressive territory. By the time A U R O R A hit it was hard to see where the project would go next. I would argue this was true for Frost as well: the vulgata around The Centre Cannot Hold (and its related EPs and singles) seems to be that it was a bit out of focus, speaking euphemistically. I don't disagree, regardless of my affection towards Threshold of Faith specifically. But Frost's arrival to a deviant, eldritch post-metal form sounds like it holds the key to a new fascinating approach.

The idea of "blending metal and electronica" will bring some of my older followers back to the Prodigy, or Nine Inch Nails, or Godflesh, or even Atari Teenage Riot if we want to force it a bit. On the other hand, some of my slightly less old followers will probably be catapulted into horrible traumatic nightmares of generic 2010-era metalcore bands incorporating keyboardists, brostep mid-range drilling FM modulation, overcompressed guitars and autotuned vocals. I'm proud and happy to report that, if anything, Scope Neglect swings more in the first direction than it does in the other one, but it's not a matter of sound as much as it is a matter of approach. Greg Kubacki (Car Bomb) provides absolutely crushing guitar work – not to mention Liam Andrews (My Disco) and his devastating bass guitar – sounding very much like abstracted takes on his main band's tracks. Yet the guitars sound heavily compressed, laser-focused on filling the mids in a very djenty way (look mom, I said djent in 2024, do I get an award for this?). This is, by design, as modern metal as it gets: and yet it sounds nowhere near as cauterized.

Not just because of the arrangements. And granted, the arrangements go a really long way to achieve the core idea of the record; but Frost's processing of the sounds turn Kubacki's cerebral bursts themselves into inhabitable, inhospitable spaces – bedrock for mind-crushingly heavy atmospherics – which are only then left to be filled with the listener's own imagination and a minimal number of sparse effects and austere melodies. Much in the same way as Autechre (and we're back!), this record comes to build the very spaces it describes, setting aside cinematic tactics – except, maybe, on closer Unreal in the Eyes of the Dead – in favour of an architecture of impossible terrors and, well, a worry and paranoia so imposing and totalising that it transcends discernible form, solid structure, anything but the (very few) bare and basic sonic referents it alludes to.

[pratchettquotes]

Holiday Theme: Happy Hogswatch

A breeze blew up.

Something stirred in the landscape, something under the snow. The branches on the ancient pine trees shook gently, dislodging little needles of ice.

The sun rose.

The light streamed over Susan like a silent gale. It was dazzling. She crouched back, raising her forearm to cover her eyes. The great red ball turned frost to fire along the winter branches.

Gold light slammed into the mountain peaks, making every one a blinding, silent volcano. It rolled onward, gushing into the valleys and thundering up the slopes, unstoppable...

Terry Pratchett, Hogfather