satellite cult 48.48
satellite cult 48.48
EGO DEATH, Games for Gaza, dead websites
welcome to this week’s satellite cult dispatch. i’m so glad you’re here. i hope the artifacts i present you with will zap you backwards, de-aging you in a painful but cathartic ritual of blood and tears, dragging you through the dregs of time and space until you hit the ground with a thump. You sit up, and when you get your bearings, you realize you’re 12 years old, on the floor of the manga section at a Borders, surrounded by TokyoPop volumes you never thought you’d see again. You’re about to go home and beg your mom for passes to 2005’s Anime Expo, even though you know it’s never happening.
please be aware that the void dive section below contains flashing gifs.
you can find satellite cult updates and memes on Instagram, satcult merch here, and you can visit your cult leader’s Neocities page here.
i write and research satellite cult each week because i love it, and it’s important to me that it remains free to read and subscribe. but if you want to give altar offerings for the time and labor i invest, you can support me on Ko-fi.
if you enjoy what you find here, like, share, and consider subscribing to satellite cult.
want more music recs? here’s my Bandcamp collection.
ＭＥＴＥＯＳＡＴ
when people talk about warmth, they talk about the sound of vinyl or the grain of film. rarely do they include VHS. video has long been chased by the opposite reputation—cold, clinical even. think of news broadcasting, where no particular attention is paid to cinematography, or the low-budget instructional videos that were largely shot and released on VHS throughout the 80s and 90s. the six episodes of The Twilight Zone that were shot on video, then a fairly new format, are largely considered the worst looking of the series. but time has lent a warmth to analog video, as captured perfectly in this climatewave album by International Telecom, which has more substance to it than your typical Weather Channel late night lo-fi.
STAR VIRGIN (THE REMIXES)
just like the title says: these remixes of サクラSAKURA-LEE’s beloved STAR VIRGIN tracks are tight, pulsing examples anime house and future funk royalty.
EGO DEATH
it’s not enough for new music to just be scene—the subculture is perhaps too associated with millennials and MySpace for any take on it to feel fresh—scene didn’t have the legacy that its counterpart emo had, after all. while emo had simply changed with time, perhaps the closest thing scene had to a predecessor was mall goth (it’s also arguable that scene played a role in birthing the pastel goth aesthetic that became popular on Tumblr in the mid-2010s, around the same time soft grunge also blew up on the site). scene was never really a genre of its own. lately, i’ve noticed the proliferation of the tag scenecore on albums like this sophomore effort by ethosss.
while many of its elements seem inspired by crunkcore acts like Blood on the Dance Floor and Dot Dot Curve, even clearer are influences like the bitcrushed trap emblematic of hexd (a tag that doesn’t appear on the album) and aesthetic connections to digicore, chiptune, hyperpop, and nightcore. some tracks, like “goth girl get down,” even drop future funk into the mix. if you want to check it out, there’s a listening party on November 3rd at 3pm EDT.
GREAPER
released for Halloween, this short breakcore EP by Latvia-based Poltergeist pays homage to your favorite Nintendo ghouls.
chiyo chans adventure in music
i have mixed feelings about the use of the term lolicore,1 and I guess maybe N0where G1rl does, too—the word doesn’t appear anywhere on the album’s Bandcamp page despite it leaning into the genre’s aesthetic tendencies. instead, the producer opts for breakcore, mashcore, speedcore, and experimental, which are also accurate, but don’t quite capture the depressingly online, NEETcore vibes music of this kind expresses; sometimes it’s hard to tell if releases like this are put out by trans femme anarchists or /r9k/ regulars. Azumanga Daioh2 has long been one of the few things that unite Something Awful goons, 4chan degens, and Tumblr anime girlies,3 and it’s a staple of the aesthetics of shitposting. overall, chiyo chans adventure in music is a shitpost album, but a thoughtful one, choppy and complex in ways that feel dark and immediate.
bootleg tape vol.2
new from beansclub, this sextrance-dariacore-nightcore bootleg tape will mesmerize you as its icy, pounding beats bring optimism to tragedy.
Games For Gaza
this bundle on itch.io hosted by Esther Wallace includes work from 140 creators and raises funds for Medical Aid for Palestinians. it’s only $10, but you can donate more if you want.
dead sites
speaking of Azumanga Daioh, one of its most popular fansites was called Wonderland, and though it’s well remembered in the fandom, the site has been offline for years. Here is how it appeared on December 30, 2007. there’s a contact page for the webmaster, listing only an email with a dead domain.
created in 1999 and last updated in 2011, Jonny's Website has information about the Amiga, web development, game tips, and some links to websites the author likes, including a now-defunct GameSpy site. digging through the HTML also reveals a hidden link to the textiles.com UFO archive.
last updated (probably) in 2014, Animetion was a popular UK-hosted anime site that published news, reviews, episode guides, convention updates, cosplay, and community links. its news archive goes back to 2004, and it has that charming DIY feel similar sites of the era exuded before the lucky ones (or maybe not so lucky) got pumped with venture capital.
void dive
wanna see more art? explore my Void Plaza gallery.
SEHR BREITE REIFEN by connectedoom
BULL UP XTZ😈 by KazuhiroAihara
soapy_suds by sean_luke
thank you for joining me. until next time.
a lot of musicians and producers who use the term are trans and probably doing, like, inner child work or something. but some are weird cis men? moecore is less bad, maybe?
i own the manga omnibus.
you might remember that back in the day, we were called tumblrinas.