Welcome

The Interdimensional Vortex of Conspiratorial Tastemaking is the ultimate resource for staying abreast of musical developments and refining your critical taste.

Hottest takes

Goldicot Culls The Week - VI

Goldicot Culls The Week - VI

by Goldicot on Thu, Feb 20, 2025

40 days, 40 nights / Broken people go without

Six weeks in. I’ve completed my first goal: get some writing done whatsoever. Time to look ahead to another goal: that writing should be good. After all, the artists behind the art might be reading these. And what would they think, if instead of insightful commentary and discussion of the contents, it was mere faff and babble about their geographic residence, or lists of bands that bear some vague resemblance, or entirely unfounded observations about genres, et cetera ad infinitum?
weekly
Read more →
Goldicot Culls The Week - V

Goldicot Culls The Week - V

by Goldicot on Tue, Feb 11, 2025

Thus ends the beginning

And so through the door we are fully passed. Janus, the two-faced god, represents both beginnings and transitions, which I find a useful way to think about resolutions; to make them habitual they must be an endless succession of re-beginnings, in order to produce a transition in the actual pattern. January, of course, is not an actual beginning, except calendrically, just the endless procession continuing unabated. Nonetheless, it is the start of a new pattern, perhaps yet unrecognized, but the thread begins, indeed has now begun, to form, only fully glorious in hindsight and memory, yet you can still bask in its light as it dawns.
weekly
Read more →
Goldicot Culls The Week - IV

Goldicot Culls The Week - IV

by Goldicot on Tue, Feb 4, 2025

4/4

If I had time to listen to it all, I would. I don’t. This week, my defeat, already ever present, became known to me, when 20 albums a day was not enough, and when bygone weeks had albums I’d missed. This sensation of defeat feels like relief; having failed, I am free of the fear of failure. But not of its consequences. Henceforth I shall have two sections here: three from the present, as is tradition, and the misses from yesterweek, however many they should be.
weekly
Read more →
Goldicot Culls The Week - III

Goldicot Culls The Week - III

by Goldicot on Sat, Jan 25, 2025

Triplet feel

The honeymoon is over. January regresses from green to the mean. Yet the year remains strong, with almost half (12 of 28) of my above-average rates arriving in this week (albeit one of those will feature in Culls IV.) Aside from an unusual amount of thrash metal, from Sarcator, Axetasy, Hazzerd, and Cyanide Grenade, there was really no mainstream movement to speak of, yet nonetheless pleasant surprises abound the next strata down, with worthwhile contenders from Hammerheart, Personal, Sentient Ruin, Lifeless Chasm, and Scarlet, in the forms of Hesperia, Onirophagus, Necrotech, Synaptic, and Dragonknight respectively.
weekly
Read more →
All posts