Friday 28 October 2011

the awful truth



I fear for my sanity.

The things I have seen would make a stronger man weep like a little child and scream like a banshee who has caught her thumb in a doorjamb.

It all began that fateful day when, immersed in my studies, I stumbled over the threshold of the Forbidden Manuscript room in my college, Miskatonic University. I wasn’t much for the musty old scrolls and tomes in there; structural engineering was more my line. But, having wandered in, something about the timeless, eerie atmosphere in the room made me linger. I strolled here  and there, perusing hoary old alchemical almanacs and occult treatises, things with long, Latinate titles and illustrations of strange geometrical forms and demons with quaint little horns and tails.

Then, I stumbled upon the dreaded Necronomicon, that fabled compendium of the most unhallowed secrets of space and time, written by the Mad Arab, Abdul Al-Hazrad, he whose name is abomination to this very day. With my analytical mind and speed-reading techniques, I rapidly realized that even this text was only a gateway to another, more diabolical secret book; an Unholy of Unholies. The Book Of The Djinn.

I do not know what spark of madness had slumbered all these years in my rational, workaday mind, waiting to be fanned into a raging flame of obsessive insanity. Perhaps there was some flaw in the physical structure of my mind, perhaps some loathsome practitioner of dark arts lurked in some distant branch of my family tree, perhaps my mother dropped me on my head as an infant while laughing out loud upon perusing the horoscope section of the newspaper; I shall never know.

I do know that, from that moment, I could not rest until I had to read The Book Of The Djinn. Thus began a decade-long quest that took me from my native clime to the furthest reaches of the globe, from a cattle farm in Central Africa to an abandoned mine in Rhodesia, from the icy northern shores of Iceland to the Japan Sea and beyond.

Finally, I found the tome I sought in a cave high in the Himalayas, amidst barren rock and thick snow. Three chambers did I uncover, smashing stout doors of an indefinable substance to pass within, before at last I entered into the fourth, innermost chamber. Without pausing to explore the outer chambers, I read the long-sought-after book. I found therein a tale of the utmost brutality and strangeness, a tale of three beings, known collectively as The Djinn, although they had nothing in common with the Arabic imps who go by that name. These were three creatures of vast, cosmic evil whose very existence proved that the universe was little more than a largely empty bag of swirling molecules, governed ultimately by chaos but momentarily by three savage beings who stood atop the eldritch pantheon already revealed in the Necronomicon, lying dust-covered back there in dear old Miskatonic University.

They were: The Hitter Of Things; a massive, powerful creature who sought to remake the universe to the rhythm of his own percussive assaults. The Rumbler Beneath: a conniving, insidious behemoth who tortured the very fabric of reality with his subsonic imprecations. The Bellower Of Abomination, a colossal leviathan, crooning and ululating foul words of madness and ultimate disruption.

My fear and misgivings grew stronger and stronger as I learned how even Hasthur and Cthulhu had joined hands to chain these three terrible creatures in some fastness tucked away in a then-obscure corner of the universe, high atop a snow-capped mountain. A strange sense of déjà vu overcame me and as I compared the symbols in those ancient pages with the etchings on the doors I had so carelessly smashed through, I realized the awful truth.

I had released the Three Most Dread, unleashed them on an unsuspecting universe.

I fear for my sanity. I fear for my life. I know that they are sending their minions to deal with me even as I write these words.

I beg of you, heed my words and learn from them.

I beseech you, do not listen to their songs of madness and dissolution.

I implore you do not listen to
Djinn & Miskatonic.


Djinn & Miskatonic is:
Gautham Khandige: Vocals
Jayaprakash Satyamurthy: Bass
Siddharth Manoharan: Drums
We bring together fuzzy bass, dramatic vocals and kickass drumming to play songs that channel influences from Black Sabbath, Electric Wizard, Sleep, Hawkwind, Neu!, Soundgarden, Reverend Bizarre, Cathedral, St. Vitus, Melvins, The Tea Party, Joy Division, Eyehategod and more into a primitive, groovy, heavy, spacey assault of droning doomoid rock.
You have been warned.

Wednesday 19 October 2011

I am zombie and so can you

My band Djinn & Miskatonic's first gig is on monday.

Here's one of our songs: I Zombi

Recommended for fans of: slowness, heaviness, minimalism, Fulci, Lewton and La Noche del terror ciego

Monday 3 October 2011

I could go there


He was something like an emperor
Something like a hero
He chose a path; he was destroyed
He was something like a friend

It's lurking, a cleaner world
A neater world, sparse and silent
It's waiting to pounce
Pain measures the distance you travel

A single incision after a pitched chase
A moment's shuddering; release
Or die for days after falling
Terrible infinite surfaceless seconds

I wish I could use his remains
like the man in 'Rogue Male'
Make a weapon, fight the killer
Vengeance, a vain chance

I wish I could freeze that frame
I wish I could hold those seconds
Or days in my mouth
Feel cold salt dissolve on my tongue

It's a neater, cleaner place
Sparse, silent and free from despair
I could go there and be with you
If I only had the measure of pain
'You bite into an apple and find a worm in it. You throw the apple away.


But what if the worm could make itself look like part of the apple?


What if the worm could make itself look like the apple?


What if the worm could make itself look like many apples, like an apple orchard, like a man walking through the orchard, plucking an apple, biting into it, finding a worm, discarding the apple?


What if it's worms all the way down?'


- from the Ouroboros apocrypha
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