A storming tempo ignites as the howls scathe, turning madness into a freezing front, spitting electricity as the playing swirls around your head, robbing you of breath. The shrieks do ample damage before the pressure begins to pull back, gently flowing over the land, only to be absorbed by the earth.... The playing is sudden and forceful, wrecking with soaring chaos, the speaking making your flesh crawl. Darkness falls as the anger bursts, leading to a volcanic pace that wrecks everything in its path, managing to make you feel feverish while withstanding the attack. There are gasps of calm as the drums patter, noise hovers, and the spirit makes a strange exit into hypnosis. Bull of Apis Bull of Bronze create experiences more than mere records, which they do again on “The Fractal Ouroboros,” a stunning display that will leave you fulfilled and exhausted.
Annihilation is the second track to be presented to the world from “The Fractal Ouroboros.” Suffocate O Earthen Lungs; They Now Lungs of Ash was released as a stand alone single on the summer solstice, and is a driving monster of a track. Annihilation patiently builds, spending over six minutes in the process of constructing the mood necessary for the moment of annihilation which comes when the composition explodes into furious oblivion. The build is a wondrous, ambient deconstruction of conscious thought, leading to a deep seated sense of nothingness, a preparation for what is to come. Approach this track with reverence. Let the ambience warm you. Float in it. Let the plucked notes pluck at your subconscious. Allow the whispered rasps to float alongside you. Allow the rhythms to pick you up and carry you towards finality. Allow the annihilation. And then…
Hayduke X of MoshPitNation was kind enough to take the time to interview us and put together a full track-by-track review of our upcoming album The Fractal Ouroboros. The article also serves as the premiere of the album’s second single “Annihilation,” as well as the reveal of the cover art, full track listing, and release date (December 21, 2023 – Double LP Vinyl, Cassette, and Digital on Fiadh Productions in the US & Vita Detestabilis in Europe).
Get Productive! is a tool for quickly tracking, categorizing, sorting, and filtering all sorts of projects and tasks.
This project arose as the result of personal needs. For years, I have used the whiteboard in my studio/office to keep track of all the things I would like to accomplish. But a whiteboard has a limited amount of space, is a pain to reorganize, and can only be modified if you’re standing right in front of it. That system can make it difficult to figure out what to prioritize. I looked at existing digital solutions but didn’t find anything that really thrilled me, so I spent a little time to make an application tailored to my personal desires.
Projects can be defined/sorted/filtered by:
Name
Priority
Difficulty
Length of Time to Complete
Estimated Cost / Resulting Income
Created Date
Deadline Date
Started Status
Blocked Status (i.e. if there’s anything preventing completion)
User-Defined Categories
Additional Comments
Filtering criteria can be stacked, so it’s easy to quickly see any combination of properties that the user can think of (e.g. show all projects that have a deadline that have not been started, show all projects that are set to high priority that can quickly be completed, et cetera).
Projects can be marked Completed, sending them to a separate list from the Ongoing projects, or they can be sent to the Trash, from which they can be permanently deleted.
The application has a fully encrypted JWT-based authentication system with the ability to create/verify users and reset passwords via email. I’ve been wanting to learn how to build a secure authentication system from scratch for a while now, so this was a good excuse to take on that technical challenge.
If it looks interesting, create an account and give it a try!
An excerpt from The Fractal Ouroboros, the second call to action by Bull of Apis Bull of Bronze. Over three years in the making, The Fractal Ouroboros is the embodiment of grief, catharsis, and empowerment. It shall be unleashed in time, but for now we offer this piece, "Suffocate O Earthen Lungs; They Now Lungs of Ash", on the Summer Solstice--this day marking 4 years since Offerings of Flesh and Gold was released. Much has changed in these 4 years, but our statements have not. Our hopes have not.
Towards a better world.
This cycle shall be destroyed,
Achaierai // Athshean // Yaeth
This is the first single from our upcoming double LP The Fractal Ouroboros. The album is a beast, clocking in at 74 minutes. Creating it was a lengthy process and I am very pleased to finally be putting a portion of it out into the world. I played drums and mixed and mastered the record.
THEREWOLF has been invited to play a reunion show at the annual Dax Lee’s Barbershop Chili Cookoff at Seventh West in Oakland, CA on Saturday, June 3rd. We will be sharing the stage with our old friends Commissure, whom I have played many times with over the years while in various projects. This will be my first live performance since 2017 and Therewolf’s first show since 2010. All proceeds will be donated to The Homeless Action Center and Punks With Lunch, Oakland homeless-outreach non-profits.
Therewolf was a band that some of my best friends and I formed way back in 2009. We got together in our drummer’s garage and wrote these songs. For our one and only performance, we were lucky enough to be asked to play the final show at the legendary Oddstad Gallery in Redwood City before it was sold to a commercial real estate developer. That space was central to our community — it had hosted hundreds of shows and major bands from all around the world. The energy of that final event was incredible.
For reasons none of us are really clear on 13+ years later, Therewolf disbanded shortly after that show. A few months later, I chose to move to Washington state and everyone else moved on with their respective lives as well.
I was disappointed that we had never recorded what we had created and tried multiple times to get a remote recording project together. I recorded some demos and tabbed out all the songs to preserve the ideas. The first attempt at a proper recording took place in 2011, but the effort fizzled and the session was scrapped before much progress was made.
I spent 2012-2018 running Big Name Recording Studio full time. In early 2018, my wife and I decided that it was time to switch things up and start our family, and we decided that the best path forward was to pack up and move to Colorado to be close to her family. I had greatly enjoyed having such a flexible recording space for so long and was uncertain what the future might hold for me with regard to being able to produce loud music without irritating any neighbors. I had a few loud recording projects that had yet to get off the ground that I felt could be great — I thought, “It might be now or never!” (Thankfully, I did end up finding a great recording space in Colorado.)
So I set up the necessary gear and got to work on those projects before we moved. This is one of those sessions.
Our drummer Mike told me at some point prior to 2018 that if I wanted to make the Therewolf recording happen, I should just play the drums on it, since it would be much easier logistically than having him do it, and because it would probably never come to fruition otherwise. So I did, trying to stay as faithful as possible to what he had written based on our full-band demos from 2009. (I am thankful that he was still able to participate in this release as the artist behind the album cover!) I then recorded my guitar parts and sent the session off to Steve (guitar) and Kol (bass), who recorded in California and Illinois, respectively.
The session sat dormant until 2021 when Albert announced that he had booked a recording session (also in California) and would be tracking his vocals. This was quite a surprise after the long pause and I was really excited when I heard the result.
Of course, soon after that I began my journey into the world of software development. I took about a year where I did not work on music at all, so again the session sat dormant. But finally, in 2023, more than 13 years after writing the songs and more than 5 years after beginning the session, the music is ready to be shared.
There are plans in the works to resurrect the band and perform live again. I’m not sure exactly what my capacity will be in the new iteration of the project due to living in a different state, but I am excited to see what the future holds for THEREWOLF.
Tapes available through Big Name Records or the Bandcamp. BNR2301
Gapless w/ Lyrics on YouTube:
Stream or Download/Purchase (name-your-price) on Bandcamp:
The question of how to use existing MIDI tablature software microtonally has come up regularly in the microtonal communities I participate in. I decided to dive in and see if I could figure it out a way to make it work. I then decided to document every step of the process hoping that it might help some other microtonal guitarists!
Quick and Dirty Explanation of How to Do This:
- Use loopMIDI to re-route your MIDI from a tab program to a DAW
- Create a track in your DAW for each track in your tab
- Use a microtonal-capable virtual instrument to retune each track
All the Software Mentioned in the Video:Tab Software
http://tabit.net
MIDI Router
https://tobias-erichsen.de/software/l...
Digital Audio Workstation
https://reaper.fm
Microsoft Windows Default Soundfont (gm.sf2)
https://musical-artifacts.com/artifac...
Virtual Synth with Microtonal Capability
https://plogue.com/products/sforzando...
Shown Microtonal Scale Generator
https://colorhorizons.com
Other Microtonal Scale Generators Mentioned
https://huygens-fokker.org/scala/
https://sevish.com/scaleworkshop/
TabArea.net has been updated! Over the last few weeks I have spent pretty much all of my free time working on upgrading the site. I am very pleased with the results and hope that this provides utility to those who, like me, still use TabIt.
What’s changed?
An advanced search function has been added to help find Tabs, Users, and Folders. Items may be searched by many parameters. Parameters may be stacked to run advanced queries.
The broken search bars on the left side of every page have been replaced with new, functional search bars.
The other broken functions that were present on the original mirror (“show album titles” buttons, download zip links, login pages, ratings pages) have been removed.
All links to that route to TabIt.net now open in new windows/tabs. The “Home” link in the header has been changed to a pair of TabArea Home and a TabIt Home links.
Some background and technical info from the GitHub Readme for the project:
TabArea.net was created by using WGET to scrape TabIt.net's Tablature Area.
WGET simply starts on whatever link you first give it, converts it to a static HTML file, and adds every link present on that page to a list. It repeats this process for every link on the list until it has found every link on the entire website.
For the Tab Area, this process resulted in ~350,000 HTML files, along with the ~44,000 TBT files.
Turning a PHP-based site into a static HTML site can break a lot of features. The most sorely-missed functionality of the scraped version was the ability to search. As one would expect, it is much more difficult to find anything on the site without it.
In early 2023, I learned how to use Puppeteer and thought it would be a perfect tool to scrape TabArea.net, examine each static HTML file, and create a proper database of all the information present on the site. Once that would be complete, I could build a search function. After announcing these plans, TabIt compatriot Ryan Leber let me know that he had already completed this task with an app he built in Python! He sent me the complete SQL dump and it was exactly what I was planning on creating. That part of the work was already done! Score. Thanks Leber.
Once the database was in place, there was still a lot of work to be done.
Frontend
The TabArea Advanced Search frontend is a React App. This element makes up the majority of the repo.
The Advanced Search page is intended to maintain TabIt's classic Web 1.0 aesthetic. I wanted it look like it had always been a part of the site, despite being powered by React. Since the files this app searches can only be used on a desktop computer, it is designed primarily for use on PC. That said, it should still be entirely usable on mobile.
Backend
The TabArea Advanced Search backend is written in PHP. These files are in the php_backend folder.
Other
The python_utils folder contains two scripts. The TabArea update plan involved removing various site functions that were no longer operational after the site had been converted to static HTML files. With these broken elements removed, hundreds of thousands of the HTML files serve absolutely no purpose.
The first script deletes all the unnecessary files. This was a necessity because my OS gets very unhappy if I try to manipulate a folder of that size using normal methods. It makes sense to run this script first so that the second script doesn't waste time processing files that will just end up deleted.
The second script is a find and replace function. The update involved changing identical HTML elements of the remaining 100k files. This removes the broken functions, modifies the header, and adds the new search functions to the sidebar. Imagining changing that many files manually makes my head hurt.
