A Change of Tone

Most of you who’d either been reading me for a while, or else had gone through my last year or so of posts, knows that my tastes in music already run a little… odd.

Metal – admittedly mostly power and symphonic. Darkwave a la Crüxshadows. Hints of EDM/trance, and what in all the holy hells is E Nomine?

Yeah, on top of that, in middle and high school I listened to musicals, orchestral, country – still love Marty Robbins, Johnny Horton, and such – classic rock, new wave, and shifted to indie/alt rock in the 90’s. Clubs I haunted in my navy days included bands like Skinny Puppy and appearances by Nine Inch Nails. My best friend was from Chicago and got me hooked on Ministry, Front 242, and the entire Wax Trax oeuvre (I still love the Mortal Kombat movie soundtrack, which has, hands down, the best mix of *Juke Joint Jezebel *by KMFDM). I was also as likely to be listening to Dire Straights as Concrete Blonde.

That said, perhaps it’s my family’s northern european background, but I love folk, especially the more Celtic end of things.

So it’s no surprise I fell in love with Moira Greyland’s “Avalon’s Daughter” – which includes one of the better renditions of “She Moved Through The Fair” I’ve heard.

By the way, this is the very one and same Moira Greyland who is daughter to Science Fiction “great”/feminist icon/incestually abusive rapist and pedophile apologist -who is still lauded alongside Chip Delaney by the worldcon crowd – Marion Zimmer Bradley, as detailed in The Last Closet. It’s a hard book. I’m barely halfway through and have had to put it down, not out of boredom but out of horror, several times, and that such a person as Moira remains, able to create such beauty, is an achievement of will and grace.