Really excited for this one, http://toliveal.ie/suppression and check the Decibel.com full audio stream.
Really excited for this one, http://toliveal.ie/suppression and check the Decibel.com full audio stream.
DRY SOCKET emerging from Stumptown with their debut LP featuring ten furious tracks laden with blast beats and downtrodden ethos. Chaotic, angular, and angry, the band is back after two blazing EPs and five years of perfecting their sound. If you like PAINT IT BLACK, PUNCH, or NEGATIVE APPROACH then you won’t be disappointed. One really dystopian release that mirrors the bleak
wintertime in the PNW.
San Francisco’s CAVEMAN drags their knuckles right out of the bay and into the blasty hardcore punk zeitgeist with five stomping dirges to whet your Neanderthalic appetite. After two sold out runs of this material on cassette, this first EP is now available here as a limited pressing on vinyl. Since this recording, the band has taken on SPY singer Peter Pawlak on bass for their live show and future releases. This is pissed, fist pumping hardcore, to take our your anger after a long day with all the horrible stuff going on the world. FFO GULCH, SPY, and SUNAMI but with their own slant.
More big stuff coming up soon. I have three unannounced LPs at the plant, one remastered release from 1999 never on vinyl before and two brand new 2024 material from exciting current bands.
Insanely busy 2023, I appreciate all your support. I apologize for the quality of Photoshop but it’s serviceable enough for me to post
Three tapes up for order now! Names you might not be familiar with as they are new and first offerings. BLIND SOLUTION is members of SIDETRACKED, NATURAL END is members of JOY, and NUCLER BLUD is members of SCHOLASTIC DETH, JUD JUD, IN/HUMANITY and more. Get in at the ground floor on all of these bands!
Brand new LP from AZ industrial metal supergroup featuring band members from SEX PRISONER, LANGUISH, GATECREEPER, and more. Only 150 on purple vinyl and 350 black vinyl available. Preorder here: https://toliveal.ie/realize
With the help of Unholy Anarchy Records, TLAL is on track for a killer new four way split with some of our favorite bands
Exclusive audio premiere:
A song about disillusionment, American Scum combines blast beats, chunky grooves, and dual vocals to highlight the dark side of power and trusting the wrong people. Written primarily while touring through Canada and recorded at Developing Nations Studio in Baltimore, MUSKET HAWK calls out subhuman scumbags everywhere with a clear message: “No one gets away with it.”
GRIND AND BEAR IT It is a musical group that addresses human problems with loud sounds. You, specifically, have sixteen internal conflicts that are tearing you apart right now, damaging your mental health to an irreversible degree. First, you shouldn’t have said that to your family, and they’re always going to hold it against you, and Grin and Bear It acknowledges this fact for you so you don’t have to think about it anymore. The second internal conflict is whether or not you wasted your day today; should you have done something else, or was all your hard work for nothing? Maybe you spent hours designing and building a magnificent structure that will soon be swept away during an overnight wind advisory. Grin and Bear It knows that you did that, and they know the wind is coming, and they absorb your pain with their loud bashing and rapid screeching. Your third and fourth problem are the two insects that splattered on your windshield on your way home from the drinking party. Oh, you don’t drive? Maybe it was the bus’s windshield, or maybe they splattered on your bicycle helmet. How would Grin and Bear It know? They aren’t omniscient and they aren’t stalking you. They don’t care about your transportation preferences; they only care that it’s bothering you that those two innocent lives were lost due to your eagerness to travel. Your next ten internal conflicts are too private or complicated for Grin and Bear It to process, but, fortunately, you will be able to use their tight, quick tracks as a vague, ominous, and mildly effective balm for your fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth inner turmoils. The fifteenth internal conflict is whether you should finally see the doctor about that shift in your mind, the changes in your perception, your diminishing ability to process the world around you. Were you exposed to a mass disabling event? Or maybe, and Grin and Bear It agrees with this theory, it’s probably a throbbing mass on your brain tissue that could very well be inoperable. The sixteenth problem is more about Grin and Bear It’s specific problem they have with you, and it’s relevant to your undiagnosed neurological condition. Grin and Bear It wants you to stop listening to music and go see a neurologist, man…
SIDETRACKED has been crafting chaotic, stop and go hardcore punk for over 20 years. Along with their brand of power violence, in recent times they have also incorporated noisecore. The material found herein starts things off with a noisecore block before launching into a frenzy of fastcore tracks that they are most typically known for.
Taking conceptual queues from bands like Swans, Dystopia, and Noothgrush and adding musical complexity and depth to arrive at something disgusting all on its own, UGLY is at once melodic, looming, and horrific. UGLY builds a tonal environment that is at times, angelic… just long enough to win your trust; then tries to kill you by dragging you to the depths with primal, flesh-upon-gear, rhythmic upheaval of any notion of good faith and wellbeing.
We pushed to ship all the Crom preorders out and have run out of packaging and steam so we are taking a week off and will be back up probably 3/20 for some new 625 releases. Stay tuned the week after for a TLAL preorder.
Okay jusr one piece of housekeeping to get past first, the Prayer For Cleansing LP went up for preorder about three weeks ago and sold out completely in minutes. No current plans to repress, I sold 100% of my copies, and I do not know what stores got them from me. I appreciate everyone’s excitement as I am flipping out at the record and the response.
Getting to the main topic but let’s start with backstory. I grew up in Winston-Salem which is a pretty plain and easy town in North Carolina. As I’m nearing 40 that sounds nice but at sixteen that is stressful because you watch Suburbia, and Hackers, and skate videos and CKY and you’re a nice quiet kid but you’re smart and you want more out of it all than working a job and going to high school. So you skate. And through skating you find music. In fact I found a show flier for Dillinger Escape Plan, Converge, Cave In, and Azazel on the wall at Surf Report and I decided to go. At this point of my life my parents are strict but oddly let me drive on my graduated license to this with the notion of if I get pulled that’s on me.
The show clearly lit a spark. I now had three main focuses in my life, skateboarding, technology, and music. The show was at 533 Uprisings, run by Paul from Azazel and Dave from Codeseven. If you’re familiar with Winston-Salem, there was a similar DIY venue run by Dave called Pablo’s. So at this time I knew and loved Dillinger Escape Plan above all because Under The Running Board came out and you know to this day its an insane record. I guess any of this is odd considering my love for hardcore punk and blastbeats, punk came first and blastbeats came later. Metalcore, punk (some cool stuff like Conflict but some mediocre stuff too at this age), and a light smattering of industrial powered me back then and seeing how it all worked and seeing how you could run a venue just for us really warped my thoughts of what was possible and opened my mind to bigger possibilities.
Youre wwondering why I’m going on this nostalgia trip now, well it all will come full circle but before we get there I started a band with my friends called The Dead Body Men. We played heart felt political punk for whatever that could mean for a 16-18 year old. Our first show was at The Somewhere Else Tavern and I first officially met John that night. I honestly sort of forget to pinpoint it to that night but photos prove we were there talking in the parking lot. John was somewhat of an enigma to me. I was new to this scene of people and John might not have been the king of it but he was the prince or something of that nature, existing so easily amongst these people. I would see him bellied up to the coffee shop bar at The Missing Link which was next to venue on Trade Street and he’d be in an engaging conversation with Frank the owner and some folks more my age who were wasting time to go to the show.
So those were the early years of knowing John as an acquaintance. He then was living in Greensboro with Andy and some other folks sort of living this anarchist life after I turned 18, did the college thing all the way through and then was spit out on the other side working and going to shows. This was more my reintroduction to John where we started to piece together a lot of similarities. I’d say let’s fast forward a bit more time to maybe 2010 and John and I are talking often. Usually on AIM but maybe at that point on FB chat. We would nerd out about what computer projects we were working on or we would talk about bands from the old days or we were both running labels so we might talk over that. It would be some combination of nerd and music items and I honestly didn’t have anyone else I could connect with so closely on those subjects so we talked a ton and got close. It’d be amazing to see him in person and hang out but I think our friendship really shined as a nerdy culmination of spitballing things that were possible.
John came up with Punks On Paper and was really exited to talk about how he was hand coding it all. I offered him help but it was really an outlet for him so about all I did was contribute some fliers for Raleigh shows to fill in some gaps, as well as some old Winston show fliers I had amassed and scanned.
John some breathing issues a few years ago and scared the crap out of all of us who really care about him, probably most of all Caroline his partner. He then had a stroke and he had surgery that was supposed to really fix the root cause of these in his brain. Unfortunately John passed away from his health conditions.
My interactions with John as someone who grew up in the same scene and he liked to talk to and respected were no different than his interactions with a lot of other people – he was kind and engaging to everyone in the music scene and beyond. At his memorial show I met a few people who had interacted with John as a stranger to him and he treated them with kindness that struck them as special and notable.
So fast forward to some months ago and I was reached out to by Caroline to plan something special in John’s name. Me, Grant from Bitter Melody Records (and John’s best friend), Dave from Codeseven, and Paul from Azazel formed the show planning committee. I would like to say I was more the moral support, sound board, direction pusher and the rest of these great folks made the show happen. It was exciting early on as Caroline would ask some bands that had not played since John and I were kids and they were confirming to play the show in his honor.
I don’t want to make this overly long of a narrative as I’m typing it on my phone into WordPress after mightnight on Christmas day. Fast forward to the shows and Sunday wasn’t just a big nostalgia trip but it was a gathering of old friends and seeing these bands again was a very real and modern exciting experience that wasn’t fully trapped in that old 533 Trade Street room. I’ve been bothering everyone by reposting a lot on social media from the show but my brain has be a bit locked on that show and in the past. The one thing I kept thinking and everyone kept saying is that John would have really loved to have been at that show. I couldn’t decide if he’d be obcessively filming the show for posterity or if he’d be doing flips over the barricade into the crowd but I’d know he’d be the very first person I’d have messaged the next morning to nerd out about our nights together with.
John was a supporter of the scene and asked for very little back. I’m not candy coating this like we do when someone dies, everything so far is accurate as I know it. He deserved two bands who I never thought would ever play again to play in his honor. He deserved for Codeseven to play the album he loved start to stop. I just would take all the amazement of that show back to have my buddy around to talk about benign stuff like databases and Rapsberry Pi projects back. I know Caroline misses him in similar but different ways and I know Penny has a father sized hole in her heart and I know they know how special he was to a lot of people.
In the end a lot of people had a fun time seeing some fabled bands they saw or didn’t see back in the day in the town where I grew up, blocks from our old 533 stomping grounds. John Rivera was a name and image around the show that everyone knew they were there for but some might not have known him or cared. If you read this far then you may have felt a bit of what made him special and that really was the main point of me spilling this out there on Christmas day as he’d have been on of the first people to get a “Merry XVXmas” text from me this morning and depending on my timeframe I might swing through Greensboro to see him before heading back into Raleigh.
In some other metaverse or some other scene there’s a quiet guy working his ass off on things he finds important for his own obcessive love of it and not for the recognition. If you are that person or know that person then you know John Rivera. North Carolina lost one important guy and a blog post won’t really explain why he was loved but his memory will be echoed in all that he did.