Interesting stuff, weird creationist edition (May 2018)

And we’re back with a renamed version of the ‘interesting stuff elsewhere’ posts, May 2018 edition. I’ve dropped the ‘elsewhere’ part so I can include my own space, and I might be a bit late. But like someone once said, in some cases it’s better to be late than pregnant…

The picture is the hand of Campanula climbing over the  quay wall in the port of Antwerp. You can make up your own story about that…

Interesting stuff here:
I wrote a post about hell for the renewed synchroblog: The problem of those unable to Love, or the question of hell as a reality and I reflected on the scary incel-movement: Sexual entitlement, Involuntary celibacy, porn and losing your humanity

One of my songs is included in The Co-Op Communique Volume 4, a free compilation, which is a very interesting project that I might blog about myself later. Go and check which one it is, and check out the other 54 (!) songs, some of which are quite good.

I didn’t post my recipe for thistle soup yet. I might later.

A new plant for me that I saw here in Antwerp, Polycarpon tetraphyllum, kransmuur in Dutch and four-leaved allseed in English, new species in this part of Europe.

Stuff elsewhere:

The extraordinary life and death of the world’s oldest known spider 43 years, and killed by a parasite before it could reach old age

Is Capitalism Itself a New God That’s Devouring the Planet? written from a chaos magick paradigm but very interesting nonetheless. It’s on ultraculture, so watch out for people trying to sell you a chaos magick course.

The Paradox of Progressive Political Theology on experimental theology

A Scientist Sat Through an Entire Flat-Earther Convention. Here’s What He Learned. The Flat Earth society is fascinating and terrifying, and might be a subject for a later blogpost here too. This is a very interesting inside view of the movement.

Jean-Paul Sartre’s bad mescaline trip led to the philosopher being followed by imaginary crabs for years. This one makes one ask weird questions about tulpas and the opening of the sixth sense for astral creatures and such.

The price of public shaming in the Internet age

Humans just 0.01% of all life but have destroyed 83% of wild mammals – study

A debate over plant consciousness is forcing us to confront the limitations of the human mind

A fasinating series on creationism and ostriches on the natural historian:
Consider the Ostrich: Job 39 and God’s Commentary on His Creation
Consider the Ostrich—Comparing Theistic Models of Biological Origins
The Prelapsarian Ostrich: Paradise Lost or Portrait of a Good Creation?
Consider the Ostrich: Literal-Day Creationists Unsure about the Ostrich’s Created Condition

The Dark Side of Young Earth Creationism, Jack Chick like cartoon tract that might be a bit over the top but makes some interesting point about the current batch of proponents of YEC like Ken Ham.

One of my favourite Franco-Belgian comics has finally been translated into English last year: Yoko Tsuno: The Titans The original French version and Dutch translation are from 1978, so better late than…

Consider the Ostrich: Literal-Day Creationists Unsure about the Ostrich’s Created Condition

Bram Cools album ‘Beware of Plato’s cavemen’ now available + Literary side project

Hi people,

I’ve delayed writing more posts because I didn’t even know what to say in a confused world like this, because I was busy with work and family and other stuff, and because I’ve been woking on my music and launched another side-project, the scifi/dystopian story ‘Ghostified City’ that will be published in parts on Oranderra, my fiction blog. For those last 2 I will give you some announcements:

‘Beware of Plato’s cavemen’ available now

Hi friends and listeners,

This is just to notify you all that my new album ‘Beware of Plato’s cavemen‘ is available now at bramcools.bandcamp.com . Musically and lyrically a follow-up to ‘cyberluddism’ and ‘Instant pocket apocalypse’, and a trip though different musical genres and a range of everyday battles and strange subjects in several languages. Apart from English there are 2 songs in Dutch/Flemish, one and a half in the artificial minimal language toki pona, and some key lines of another song in Latin, as well as several wordless pieces of music.

Listen and download ‘Beware of Plato’s cavemen’ here. And please let me know what you think, and if you like it share it with others…

Literary side-project ‘Ghostified city’ now online

For those who like the dystopian themes in my recent music, or those who like scifi and dark dystopian stuff in general there is a second non-musical announcement: I have started publishing the story ‘Ghostified city’ in parts on my fiction blog Oranderra this week. See here for what it’s about and here for the first part. There will be one or two updates to the story each week. Note that the style and some of the contents might not be suited for an audience that’s too young.
Adaman Yimmand would really appreciate if you check it out and like the Oranderra facebook.

peace

Bram

Tracklist:

1. Welcome outside 04:23

2. Selfmade universe 03:29

3. Muggles gonna muggle 04:11

4. Splintering dimensions 03:15

5. mi wile e ni 03:23

6. Cyberluddism VIII 02:13

7. In het niks 03:15

8. Shadows of shadows 04:31

9. Oh God would you? 03:46

10. Hold on 03:54

11. Cyberluddism IX 02:55

12. Enemies 02:53

13. Dark hour of fire 04:35

14. Mixed bags 02:55

15. Hoelang blijven we spelen? 02:23

16. Salva mea 04:12

17. Untitled in C-minor 02:36

18. Unseen disconnect/mi sona ala 03:35

19. Under the radar 03:42

20. Cyberluddism X 01:29

Bram Cools music: new songs & announcement!!

 

I hope I will be writing some interesting blogpostposts in various usual and unusual subjects this summer, but I also will do some cross-over with my musical project here with the release of a new ‘cyberluddism’ album.  To begin with I’ll give you the first announcement mail:

New Bram Cools songs on soundcloud!

I have been rather silent the last years music-wise, especially when it comes to actual new songs, but that pattern will finally be broken this summer.

To begin with, recently 3 new songs have been posted on Soundcloud:

Selfmade universe: A classic in the Bram Cools live catalogue that has been played live a lot over the years but never had a studio version though, Here it finally is, but re-interpreted in a rather electronic fashion, while keeping a rather relaxed indie-pop style. Might be about the dangers of pragmatic paradigm shifting, although I wouldn’t have used these terms when I wrote it.
Muggles gonna muggle: More electronica and indie-pop with a slightly disorienting chord scheme, and a rather dark defence of both magic and religion against certain totalizing tendencies in modernism.
mi wile e ni: Just a simple relaxed lo-fi pop song in Toki Pona, a minimalist constructed language with a vocabulary of around 132 words.World peace, all people should be friends and stuff like that..

So have a listen, share them with your friends if you like, and use them to scare away alien visitors if needed. And tell me what you think…

But that’s only half of the news, since these songs are by no means standalone songs but part of a bigger project:

New ‘Cyberluddism’ album announcement!

The last months I’ve been working on a collection of songs that will end up as an album (cyberluddism part III, further title to be announced) that will be released in electronic form on bandcamp as soon as it’s finished.

As the working title and it’s inclusion in the ‘cyberluddism’ series indicate, it’s predominantly electronic music with rather dystopian themes to the lyrics. The difference with ‘cyberluddism‘ and probably even ‘Instant pocket apocalypse‘ will be noticeable in a more minimalist approach with a lot less aggression and generally a slower tempo… Less techno and industrial sounds, and more indie-pop with sometimes a rather high dose of triphop. Although some gothic folk, atmospheric drum’n bass and -if I get the arrangement done- even acoustic reggae- may also turn up here and there.
It’s probably not completely a concept album, and still there is an overall theme to both the sounds and the words. There might be a certain influence for example of C.S. Lewis and Plato, apocalyptic pictures of dystopia, splintering dimensions, pragmatic paradigm shifting, and other everyday subjects.

As the Toki Ponan title ‘mi wile e ni’ of one of the 3 preview songs already indicates, not all of the songs will be in English (or purely instrumental) this time. Apart from a whole song and some fragments in Toki Pona and 3 words in Latin there might be 2 songs in Dutch too.

(Like the other ‘cyberluddism’ collections this is music I cannot play live in this form, but most of the songs can be played on just a guitar or piano and don’t need the arrangement to stand as a song. This makes it easier to adapt them to a minimalist live approach should I start playing live again.)

Stay tuned for further news…

peace

Bram Cools

Listen to my music at my bandcamp page and for random non-album music and new updates at soundcloud. Like me at facebook and follow met at twitter. And tell me what you think…

Bram Cools Music: new song ‘last fish’ & news about ‘Contemporary Christian Muzak 2004-2007’

(This is an adapted version of the Bram Cools Music newsletter. You can subscribe here if you want.)

A new Bram Cools song: ‘last fish’

A new Bram Cools song called ‘last fish’ can be listened on soundcloud now. it is actually a remake of a very old song from my early twenties, that originally appeared on a ‘limited edition’ cassette which was restricted to one copy. Even I don’t have it anymore, but this song nonetheless survived, and it kept playing in my head from time to time unlike most of the songs that I recorded once and never played live. So I decided to re-record it and I’m glad that I did.

The original was just me playing a keyboard with 2 sounds, singing a cryptic and dark text to a very repetitive xylophone-loop and some strings recorded in one session on minidisk in my usual manner at that time. I have recreated those 2 lines and added some more arrangement to fill it up some more. It’s still not the typical Bram Cools song (if such a a thing exists) but I do like the outcome a lot.

It’s quite gothic, and completely different from the songs I’m writing at the moment, but still too good not to share, and as a very atypical track it’s perfect to end a long period of silence without new Bram Cools song… I hope you all enjoy the song and share it with others who might like it.

But that’s not the big news. The big news is the following:

“Contemporary ChristianMuzak 2004-2007′ to be released soon

I did already announce in my last mail a coming electronic release of my old ‘Contemporary Christian Muzak’ songs, finally together on one album. Now I tell you that it will be released very soon, in the beginning of september.

For those still uninitiated: Years ago now I had a band called the Contemporary Christian Muzak collective (or CCMC). We tried to play some kind of experimental Christian music that did both connect to the Creator and make some interesting sounds that haven’t been used 100 times before already. Most of it was not exactly elevator music fit for a boring Christian radio station providing safe happy clappy Christian music for the conservative middleclass as the name might suggest, but rather some kind of rough folky indierock, mixed with very weird free-from noise and experimental impro-parts as well from time to time…

We only did a few concerts throughout the years (around 2004-2007) but we did have a lot of fun, and I really miss those days! But time passes and things change, and the bandmembers had families and other bands and other stuff going on, so it all sort of fell apart. Unfortunately We never did any studio-recordings as a band, and no real CD-worthy live recordings have been made either. So all that’s left is my own home-recorded multitrack-versions with mostly myself on a lot of instruments and Bram Beels on digeridoo in some of the songs. Some of these songs needed to be finished, and that has finally happened.

So stay tuned!

peace

Bram

(And thank you for clicking!)

PS: Find more Bram Cools music for download at bandcamp.com. (All music is currently ‘choose your price’)

 

Bram Cools Music: ‘Father I am tired’ + more contemporary Christian Muzak to come…

Hi readers,

Probably not everyone reading my blog is aware that I am also one of the most unknown musicians on the planet, but for those interested in my music, here is an update.

The Bram Cools classic ‘Father I am tired’, can now be heard and downloaded in a previously unheard version here  on my soundclcoud. Or click on the coffee if you like.
(Yes, for those who wonder: all instruments and vocals -including the choir!- are just Bram in this one!)

The rest of the news is that this upload of ‘Father I am tired’ can be also seen as the first ‘single’ announcing a coming electronic release of the old ‘Contemporary Christian Muzak’ songs, finally together on one album! This should have happened 5 years ago, but still it’s better soon than never.

For the uninitiated: Years ago now I had a band called the Contemporary Christian Muzak collective (or CCMC). We tried to play some kind of experimental Christian music that did both connect to the Creator and make some interesting sounds that haven’t been used 100 times before already. Most of it was not exactly elevator music for a boring Christian radio station providing safe happy clappy Christioa music for the conservative middleclass as the name might suggest, but raither some kind of rough folky indierock, mixed with very weird free-from noise and experimental impro-parts as well from time to time…

We only did a few concerts throughout the years but we did have a lot of fun, and I really miss those days! But time passes and things change, and the bandmembers had families and other bands and other stuff going on, so it all sort of fell apart. Unfortunately We never did any studio-recordings as a band, and no real CD-worthy live recordings have been made either. So all that’s left is my own home-recorded multitrack-versions with mostly myself on a lot of instruments, some of which were never finished. Finishing them is what we’re going to do now, so that in the near future everybody can listen to Contemporary Christian Muzak as much as they want…

I hope you all enjoy the song and share it with others who might like it.

peace

Bram

2014 as a year of demodernisation for me

I know I’m not very active as a blogger right now, and most of my posts at the moment are older writings that I’m finishing now and finally posting after a long time of waiting in the pipeline. There’ some stuff I need to finish (about Christianity and capitalism, and about racism for example) but I don’t have the time and energy at the moment, and I’m focussing on work, children, gardening lately, and most of my writing has been fiction in Dutch, so it doesn’t fit on this blog.

(My fiction can be found at Oranderra, but most of it is Dutch. I do hope to one day continue my series of ‘the paralian priest and the acosmist nun’ though.)

I will still be writing blogposts here about a whole variety of subjects when I have the time and inspiration for it. (And there are some unfinished things that will be finished and posted too…) But in 2014 I will be starting a new project, which I call the ‘demodernisation’ of myself, which will most probably lead to some blogposts too.

So what do I mean with ‘demodernisation’? I feel it is the natural next step after my ‘postmodernisation’, that might have helped me a lot in some areas, but it did not help me much in a lot of other things…
Some years ago I found the ‘emerging church discussion’ through the internet, and learned a lot from it, or learned the right words to describe how I already saw the world, for I am a native postmodern. But I must say that the whole ‘emergent’ stuff has become more and more frustrating to me. A lot of it is just American anti-reaction to a fundamentalism that I don’t know, and acts more like a photo-negative of that fundamentalism. No-one can expect me to be interested in a photo-negative of something I don’t care about. The photo and the negative will generally be equally uninteresting to me.

And the other problem is that the more photo-negative of fundamentalism enters the picture, the more modernist Christian liberalism (the natural negative view of fundamentalism), which has never interested me at all. I think it was Scott McKnight who said that McLaren at the time of ‘A new kind of Christianity’ did not arrive at a new one at all, but an old one (referring to older protestant liberalism) that actually wasn’t old enough. Although I like a lot of McLarens earlier books and have benefited greatly from them, new liberalism just makes me lose interest, and I’ve seen that in most corners of the ‘emergent’ dicussion. (Also, I and just clueless about the American ‘liberal PC’ stuff. It’s just alien for me and feels like a new form of fire and brimstone preaching from a new corner to me.)

So, the project now, with my postmodern identity established, is to go way beyond postmodernism and Western though to reconnect with my Christian (and human) roots outside of modernity. My flirting with Eastern Orthodoxy is already part of that, and I will try to read more about non-modern, non-Western forms of Christianity, and also other religions and philosophies from everywhere. (I want to know more about native American thought systems, taoism and pre-Christian European thought for example.)

I do think that I will also go back more to my Lewisian roots, and explore Chesterton and MacDonald more for example.

(Not that I don’t value some things about modernism, like human rights and gender equality, the realisation of how serious the destruction of ecosystems and extinction are, and general growth in scientific knowledge about the natural world, and modern medics. But apart from those and other advancements, there is so much we have lost, and so much dark side to even a lot of advancements, and so on…)

My ideas on magic and the occult are part of what you can expect, but I will try do ‘deconstruct’ more  things and look from other angles than both Western modernism and post-modern hyper-enlightenment thought.

I hope to I can keep on having very interesting conversations here with all of you…

peace

Bram

 

Some old critique to ‘true love waits’ and Joshua Harris…

true love waits
and that’s okay
but you seem to spend your time waiting
ain’t that extremely frustrating?

(the irresistible 21st century virgin boy)

Last week I had a serious flu and I was quite sick, and not able to do much at all, not even reading or thinking, so I was lying on my bed listening to old CD’s with demo songs that I recorded years ago, when I still used the nick/artist name ‘the irresistible 21st century virgin boy’*. One of the old CD’s contained a song I kissed waiting goodbye that I thought was lost forever, one of my earlier attempts to do something with beats and guitars together in a real song. But it also  vocalised  some critique to a book I mentioned in a recent post (‘I kissed dating goodbye’ by Joshua Harris), and I suppose more broadly to the rhetoric of the people of ‘true love waits’ , who then had a Flemish division here in Belgium that sent me a lot of news letters because I once had carelessly signed one of their pledge cards on some christian event. (It seems they’re out of the running now though , can’t find anything of them anymore lately…)

The song itself was dismissed later because I hated how I hadn’t been able to find a really fitting melody on the sometimes quite random chord progressions. Re-listening there’s something in it that I like, and some things that I hate (that really bad word flow of the ‘don’t concentrate’ part for example.) But is was a good try, even if it got forgotten without ever been played again…

[please listen to the song ‘I kissed waiting goodbye’ here https://soundcloud.com/bram-cools/i-kissed-waiting-goodbye (lyrics are there also) and tell me; does it suck completely, or is there still something interesting about it?]

The title ‘I kissed waiting goodbye’ does not mean that I (with my weird artist name) had any problem with the idea of sex as belonging into a marriage relationship (I still believe in that, even though I don’t think a state marriage has much to do necessarily with the definition of marriage) but the whole imported ‘purity culture’ had some exaggerations that I found quite weird. And the local people that preached it were quite peculiar specimens too btw… The emphasis on waiting and not doing stuff was what was getting on my nerves…

Like I said earlier in my recent post a purity culture I don’t know, some of the critiques to ‘evangelical purity culture’ I’ve seen lately are describing something I don’t recognise at all, but I did have my concerns with what I did see. If I would have encountered weirdos like the 2 creeps in Sarah Moons latest blogpost my concerns would’ve been a lot bigger. And it might be that I didn’t even register some of the things that didn’t make sense to me, I think that’s how I never picked up those gender roles in Harris’ book if they are there. my brain didn’t even notice them because they made no sense to me, and they got thrown with the ‘this is too American’** garbage bin.

(Remember that an ‘American writer’ for me is as distant and exotic as an Italian cardinal, and Indian Sadhu  or an African Touareg songwriter…)

The whole movement always was a bit too obsessed with sex for my taste. (an obsession with having no sex all the time is just a weird form of sex-obsession.) It seemed like all they wanted to talk about was how to not have sex, and that was not what I was looking for, I was looking for how to actually grow in my relationship in all kinds of areas. All that talk about what not to do is not good for building a relationship. what people need is positive advice about to grow in love, and not just sexually!!!! there’s much more to a relationship than that, and focussing a relationship on that will make it unbalanced, be it a relationship focussed solely on sex or one focussed solely on avoiding sex …

One of the things I probably dismissed as otherworldy nonsense was the idea of ‘never being alone with someone of the other sex’, including the one you’re not yet married to but having a relationship with. As someone who had been always single with a lot of female friends some of which I saw alone regularly such things just didn’t make sense and didn’t get registered in my brain. It was not something that could convince me anymore than the idea that Belgium does not exist… (It would never haver worked with me and my wife either)

Another point that I found troubling was that I did not see how filling people with a ‘no sex’ message and conditioning them all the time to not touch and not be intimate would ever be reversed on a wedding night. I was too realistic to believe such a thing, whatever promises of ‘great sex lives for those who wait’ were gives. I just didn’t see that happen with such an obsessive attitude. And I later read a lot of articles that affirmed, sometimes from people who were completely blocked down sexually, so it wasn’t a false concern… I know it did work for other people, but I who was already blocked on sex and completely turned off by a world around me that seemed to sell sex on every corner but no love was more traumatised about sex on that moment. And in need of simple honest not overly sexual intimacy. It would actually take years of very slowly growing in intimacy before I would even be ready for sex and by that time I’d be ready to get married too.

By the way, there is something really problematic about all the weirdness this kind of movements does attach to the Christian ideas about sex and marriage. There is something dangerous about a good idea or a truth being hijacked by people who exaggerate in preaching it, and lump it together with nonsense and worse… It might work as a really good vaccination to ever believe it again. Those preached to who are first convinced but later see that the ballast is nonsense will most likely throw away the child with the bathwater… (an example of that here)
See also Ken Ham and his weird form of young earth creationism as litmus test for Christianity…

But let’s close with what I think is important about true love: it loves! And loving is not about not doing things, but about doing things. Apophatic theology (saying things about God by saying what He is not) can be an interesting way to communicate truth about God, but not doing certain things is not the essence of any form of love, and if it is you’re distracted from the real thing…

peace

Bram

* There was something sarcastic in that name, mainly the ‘irrestistible’ part… I’ve been single and eh, extremely celibate until I was 22 or so.

** Nothing racist about that. Other cultures always have things that are found to be nonsense and irrelevant by outsiders. But I do think I can indeed say that ‘too American’ is a valid reason for a lot of Europeans to  dismiss something…

Bram Cools : ‘Noisetrade essential songs sampler’ now available for free download!

The list of ‘essential Bram Cools songs for dummies‘ that I’ve posted a while ago is now available for free download (unless you want to pay, that’s possible too) on noisetrade:

You can listen and get it here

Tracklist for the ‘Bram Cools Noistrade essential songs’ sampler:

    1. Coca cola
    2. Father I’m tired
    3. Unfair competition
    4. Qualities
    5. Key
    6. Doos vol cornflakes
    7. I’m not flirting
    8. Praise the Lord
    9. Nettle fields
    10. Consumer’s delight
    11. Albatross (indie-folk mix)
    12. The chosen one
    13. My old name (original tape mix)

(And yes, the artwork is loosely based on the first verse of the first song, but those were aliens that did come over to paint circles (and more) in the fields, not just to drink coca-cola)

enjoy

Bram

2 new Bram Cools songs

I haven’t been playing music for ages it seems, which has something to do with a small baby and stuff like that. But listening to old recordings I decided it is time to finish a lot of almost-finished and half-finished songs before making new ones… Which led to the bandcamp release of 2 songs I’ve been working on since forever… They’re not my usual style (if such a thing exists) so I just bundled them into a two-song single.

The first song is some dark metal-without-the-metal thingy about the way in wich images of women are used in our digital country. The second one is an electronic rock tune about a failed postmodern savior. At one moment I thought about including those 2 songs in my cyberluddism album, but they didn’t fit…

Both songs can be listened and downloaded here on my bandcamp.

byte of my byte, pixel of my pixel

softly spoken to my eyes
images of naked flesh they tell intimate lies
how could I want her if she’s not mine
how could I want her If she doesn’t even exist
how could I want her

and this game will always go on
in this world Venus is just a slave of Mammon
how do I fight against those evil gods
oh lust in the eye only also is adultery yes it is

softly spoken these intimate lies
could I just not turn away my eyes
why should I look at her if she’s not mine
why should I look at her if she doesn’t even exist
why should I look

and this game will always go on
in this world Venus is just a slave of Mammon
how do I fight against those evil gods
oh lust in the eye only also is adultery it is
oh beautiful re-creation oh sweet deception
byte of my byte and pixel of my pixel

The chosen one

Am I the chosen one
who’s gonna save the world
am I the chosen one
from the ancient prophecy
they all told me that I was the one
they all believe will deliver
they all see something that I’m not
And I’m here face to face with evil

I’m just a pointless stupid postmodern guy
on opium for the people I’ve always been so high
distraction much more pointless than the most deformed religion
I’ve wasted my whole life and now I’m ready for nothing
the great nothing

I’m not chosen one
that was gonna save the world
I was not the chosen one
from their stupid prophecy
they still think  that I was the one to save them from evil
they still believe that I will deliver the way their fairy tales told them
but here I’m being  torn into pieces
it wasn’t me they needed to fight this evil

I was just a pointless stupid postmodern idiot
I didn’t learn a thing, I cannot use their stupid magical sword
and now the world must end, and evil will take over forever
I’ve wasted the world  I wasn’t ready for nothing

should I’ve been the chosen one
that could’ve saved the world

enjoy

Bram

“Father I feel”, or cyndi McCoy playing “Father I’m tired”

When you make songs you also create the possibility for people to play them themselves and do their own thing with it. This is a beautiful rendition of “Father I’m tired” by Cyndi McCoy:

Enjoy!

Bram