Synchronicity is not a recent concept in the realm of pop culture, and has become quite well known with regards to the eerie pairing of The Wizard of Oz and Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. A long time ago though, I discovered an even more eerie pairing that synchronized in an unnerving fashion: The film Begotten and Marilyn Manson’s Antichrist Superstar…
Long ago, I stumbled across references to a film called Begotten. The images that I had seen online from the movie gave haunting and disturbing impressions. Curious, I began looking into the movie, and eventually watched the film. I was always interested in viewing challenging films, particularly those considered to be within the horror genre.
Dr. Ray Dolby, founder and guiding force behind Dolby Laboratories from 1965 to 2009, died on Thursday at his home in San Francisco, CA, according to an announcement by the company. He was 80.
The exact circumstances of Dolby’s death were not included in the announcement, but he lived with Alzheimer’s disease for several years and was diagnosed with acute Leukemia in July of this year. During those 80 years of life, he amassed a fortune of approximately $2.9 billion dollars, was awarded more than 50 U.S. Patents, and fundamentally changed how we watch and listen to media in the modern world.
Today marks the milestone of being 40 years ago that one of the great rock records of our age was released in America, Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. The record from the British quartet, who created sonic platters of transcendent and translucent sights and sounds, psychedelic rock done multi-tracked and highly adventurous, was a concept album which quadrophonically reached the entire universe on a collective level, both on the mainstream and the cult, creating genres and subgenres of lifestyles and became one of the greatest selling records of all time in the process.
By the time Dark Side of the Moon was released on March 1, 1973, Pink Floyd had already been a sonically swinging juggernaut, a blues unit mixed and melded with drug-laced and addled sounds and flavors of the late 1960s, utilizing jams and instrumentations that when played, created aural emotional tunnels within its listener to be pushed and lifted to different planes within themselves. They became out-of-body experiences in a metaphorical and even literal sense, even more so if one ingested many narcotics that were on hand and in a strange way, like Bob Marley’s work, came to be associated with Pink Floyd by that proxy, something that the band, however, had never consciously promoted.
Pink Floyd: The Story of Wish You Were Here, a documentary about rock group Pink Floyd‘s memorable album Wish You Were Here, is getting a DVD and Blu-ray release on June 26th from Eagle Rock Entertainment.
The album, which was their follow up to their enormously successful 1973 Dark Side of the Moon, is almost as revered by fans of the group as Dark Side is. Originally released in September 1975 and going to the top of the charts on both sides of the Atlantic and around the world, Wish You Were Here explores themes similar to Dark Side — alienation, confusion, longing, mental breakdown, and also even dissension in the music business. It’s also a tribute of sorts to one of their founding members, the late Syd Barrett, who had left the band a few years earlier, due to mental illness. The long track “Shine on You Crazy Diamond” is a recorded nod to their fallen member, who had also made a few unannounced appearances in the studio when they were recording the album. That track opens and closes the record.
For the past four years Finnish metal band lymystö frontman Timo Vuorensola has been struggling to make his directorial debut Iron Sky a reality. Following the online debut of a teaser trailer in 2008 Vuorensola was able to secure the necessary $8.5 million in funding, a chunk of which was provided by fans who wanted to see the neophyte filmmaker’s dream come to fruition.
Now Iron Sky is completed and preparing for its world premiere next week in Berlin and a trailer for the finished feature has been released. You can check it out here below.
Students of the Unusual™ comic cover used with permission of 3BoysProductions
The Mercuri Bros.™ comic cover used with permission of Prodigal Son Press