Juli Bazooka (Crisix) aparca el thrash y se pasa al terror ochentero en su estreno en solitario

Olvídate por un momento de los circle pits y la velocidad absurda, porque Juli Bazooka ha decidido cambiar el chaleco de parches por la chupa de cuero

Guitar Calavera

“Heavy Sounds In The West” By Hans Verbeke And Onno Hesselink (Earth Island Books)

Heavy Sounds in the West is one of those rare instances where music history insists on dragging a place into its rightful spotlight. With a detailed, almost obsessive devotion to detail, Hans Verbeke and Onno Hesselink have constructed a monumental document of how heavy metal and crossover hardcore culture detonated in the unlikely soil of West Flanders. Their tremendous effort resulted in a coffee-table behemoth, comprising over 400 pages of full-color ephemera, photographs, posters, and battered memories, a vital reclamation of cultural history, refusing to let the margins stay marginal. West Flanders, long imagined as a sleepy, provincial corner of Belgium, erupts in these pages for more than a good reason. The book makes clear that what happened there between the late seventies and early nineties was not peripheral, not secondary, but an essential node in the web of heavy music’s global spread. Metallica, Slayer, Motörhead, Venom, Kreator, Rush, Mercyful Fate, and many more important names roll through these pages. However, what matters here is not just that these titans passed through, but how West Flanders, with its makeshift venues and stubborn promoters, offered them a stage at all. Promoters recalling the chaos of booking bands that no one yet believed in. Fans remembering the first time a Marshall stack rattled their ribs. Musicians, half-drunk, telling the truth in all its unruly, unpolished sincerity. These testimonies, presented without cosmetic smoothing, form a lively, imperfect, and therefore deeply convincing story. It’s oral history at its rawest, and that makes this book so good.

Verbeke and Hesselink understand the allure of memorabilia. Flyers plastered across these pages, some scrawled by hand, others cheap offset jobs, tell stories no prose could fully capture. A snapshot of Slayer grinning like teenagers before they were legends, a scuffed ticket stub from a long-defunct venue, beer-stained setlists carried home as trophies, these relics do not just illustrate the past. They are the past, brought back to the surface like archaeological fragments. The book situates heavy music as a cultural eruption and social necessity. West Flanders, so often portrayed as staid, conservative, even inert, finds itself shaken awake by distortion, speed, and fury. The book argues, persuasively, that this awakening was not accidental. Economic stagnation, generational boredom, and political unrest created a hunger that only the radical energy of metal and crossover hardcore could satisfy. If you want to know why metalheads would travel hours across muddy roads for a gig in a barn, this book supplies the context, because those nights felt like oxygen in a suffocating world. Heavy Sounds in the West doesn’t romanticize the past. There is reverence for the giants who played, but there is also a courageous acknowledgment of chaos, failure, and absurdity. Shows collapsed, gear broke, bands fought, audiences rioted, and still, out of the mess, something unrepeatable happened. By not sanding down the rough edges, Verbeke and Hesselink preserve the truth of the underground that it was never meant to be tidy.

Many of these voices come decades after the fact. Stories conflict, and dates blur. Did Venom really play that badly? Was the hall truly packed when Motorhead came through, or is nostalgia inflating the numbers? The authors wisely avoid adjudicating. Instead, they present the contradictions side by side, trusting the reader to grasp that the unreliability of memory is part of what gives this history its texture. The scope is staggering. Over three hundred photos, many never before published, provide an almost cinematic immersion. The density of this visual archive means the book can be approached as a chronology and a gallery. One can flip through randomly and still materialize with a visceral sense of time and place. West Flanders becomes a microcosm of how youth cultures germinate in unlikely soil, how global movements find local footholds. Heavy music belongs not just to New York, London, or Los Angeles, but to the provincial towns where scenesters scraped together enough to rent a hall and put on a show. The writing is sharp, unsentimental, and never lapses into academic jargon. Verbeke and Hesselink know their subject too intimately for distance. They do not disguise their affection, but their affection is tempered by honesty. They are as willing to recount embarrassing failures as transcendent triumphs. This openness gives the book its credibility. Heavy Sounds in the West reminds that cultural revolutions are not always glamorous. They are often awkward, cobbled together, and precarious. Yet out of such precariousness, something eternal emerges for generations to come.

It is tempting to call Heavy Sounds in the West a coffee-table book, but that would diminish it. It’s closer to an atlas, a cartography of noise, sweat, and defiance, mapping how a slumbering province awoke under the pressure of amplifiers turned to ten. Verbeke and Hesselink preserved a vivid memory of their local scene and constructed a monument. It’s like all good monuments, it doesn’t just commemorate the past but it also confronts it, demanding we recognize its power, its unruliness, and its ongoing relevance. Head to Earth Island Books for more information about ordering.

#BOOK #CROSSOVER #EARTHISLANDBOOKS #HANSVERBEKE #HARDNHEAVY #HARDROCK #HARDCORE #LITERATURE #METAL #MUSIC #ONNOHESSELINK #REVIEWS #ROCK #ROCKNROLL

🐄  Get ready – Clotilde’s back and she’s stompin’ louder than ever!🤘🏻

🔥 On April 30, POWERHILL unleash their second single “Generation X”, the electrifying title track from their upcoming debut album, dropping June 27 via Dr. Music Records. This is more than just a song – it’s a full-blown #HardRock time machine powered by hooves, humor, and heavy riffs! 🐮

🚜 https://www.dr-music-records.de

#HeavyRock #HardNHeavy #HeavyMusic #RockMusic #MelodicRock #Metal #HeavyMetal #NewMusic #FemaleFrontedMetal #GenX

Dr. Music Promotion is the music PR agency with distribution label, booking agency, management department and publisher specialized in Pop, Rock and Metal!

True to the motto ‘Medicine for your ears | The all-round carefree service for bands, artists and labels’, we offer a wide spectrum of services in the music industry, and we are established for a long-time experience in the entertainment business and the creative accomplishment of worldwide cross-media PR campaigns since 2006. We cover the whole range of print, online, radio, playlist, TV and tour promotion and offer targeted social advertising campaigns.

Dr. Music Promotion is the music PR agency with distribution label, booking agency, management department and publisher specialized in Pop, Rock and Metal!

True to the motto ‘Medicine for your ears | The all-round carefree service for bands, artists and labels’, we offer a wide spectrum of services in the music industry, and we are established for a long-time experience in the entertainment business and the creative accomplishment of worldwide cross-media PR campaigns since 2006. We cover the whole range of print, online, radio, playlist, TV and tour promotion and offer targeted social advertising campaigns.

Das Video zu Guns'n Roses' "Welcome to the Jungle" war dem Musiksender MTV zunächst zu provokant und wurde abgelehnt - der Song wurde ein Welthit. Die ganze Geschichte: https://www.3sat.de/kultur/musik/hard-n-heavy-the-story-of-guns-n-roses-102.html#xtor=CS1-20

#GunsNRoses #HardNHeavy #MusikDoku

Hard 'n' Heavy: The Story of Guns N' Roses

Eine der legendärsten Bands der Rockgeschichte: Erfolg von Guns N' Roses war Mitte der 1980er-Jahre noch nicht abzusehen: Tumulte, Eskapaden und Exzesse bestimmten das Bandleben.

3sat
Auf dem Weg nach #leipzig mit Dr. Woo‘s Rock’n’Roll Circus, wo heute Abend im #tonelli‘s die Hütte brennt! #drwoo #rocknrollcircus #live #hardnheavy
Doku-Serie #HardNHeavy auf #ZDFinfo. Nicht eine Folge über #ChrisHülsbeck!

Oh my *drops jaw* 😯

#TOOL will be touring US, UK and Europe in 2022 again. Presale starts October Fist. Err, First.

https://metalinjection.net/tour-dates/tool-announces-massive-2022-us-uk-europe-arena-tour

#ThinkingHumansMetal #Rock #Progressive #Metal
#Alternative #ProgRock #HardnHeavy #Stink👊

TOOL Announces Massive 2022 US, UK & Europe Arena Tour

Inoculating Europe once again.

Metal Injection

Творчество музыкальное практически стоит на месте. Меня-то дома особо не бывает в тёплую пору. И играть не с кем. [...] #nocomment

Изредка, дабы не потерять слуховые навыки и последнюю уж беглость пальцев, поигрываю на клавишах то, что не могу довести до конца: для звукозаписи нужно "железо", - и на флейтах - под фонограммы. По-прежнему предпочитаю мягкие, гибкие формы, хотя порой накатывает вставить сопилку в #hardnheavy. И успешно вставляю, но первым "попадает" отчего-то #JoeSatriani 😄

Впрочем, добрую кельтскую тётушку #Enya тоже не забываю - как раз тот самый этнический срез, для которого сопилка предназначена. Энья наряду с #Jarre и #Vangelis заметно повлияли на меня как худо-бедно, но фонового клавишника.

NB. @mitsuha_s Вот такая у меня "солянка" "наставников" по части клавишных. Гармония на трезвучиях квартового и квинтового строения и минимализм навеяны Жан-Мишелем ещё в 2008 году - и незабвенной "бригадой" :-D

Не совсем позабыты и губные гармошки. У нас нынче вообще блюзовые времена - подлинный #KillingFloor (cc: @masolei помнишь ведь беседу, затронувшую блюзовый сленг? Трек во вложении так и называется #blues.) Что удивительно, даже помню, как исполнять горловое вибрато, да ещё и на бендах, - далеко не самый простой приём звукоизвлечения.

Подумываю о приобретении поперечной флейты. Если выживу, разумеется (но НЕ из себя #сарказм), останутся свободные #дензнаки и осмелюсь осваивать очередной инструмент с полного нуля без чьей-либо помощи.

...Если во всём мире - время "коротких позиций", то в #FEFS - сверхкоротких #shitHappens