2002) went behind the barbed wire into the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman. Armed with a reel-to-reel tape deck--and, in 1959, a camera--Lomax documented as best an outsider could the stark and savage conditions of the prison farm, where the black inmates labored "from can't to can't," chopping timber, clearing ground and picking cotton for the state.
They sang as they worked, keeping time with axes or hoes, adapting to their condition the slavery-time hollers that sustained their forebears and creating a new body of American song. Theirs was music, as Lomax wrote, that "testified to the love of truth and beauty which is a universal human trait." Their songs participated in two distinct musical traditions: free world (the blues, hollers, spirituals and other songs they sang outside and, when the situation permitted, sang inside as well) and the work songs, which were specific to the prison situation.
A chilling account of how slavery persisted well into the 20th century in the institutionalized form of the chain gang, Parchman Farm includes two CDs with 44 of Lomax's remastered audio recordings and a book of more than 70 of Lomax's photographs, many published here for the first time.
FORMAT: Slip, Hbk, 6.25 x 9.5 in. / 124 pgs / 77 color / 2 Audio CDs.Newly installed Howard County Executive Allan Kittleman hit the ground running on his first day in office Tuesday, announcing several key staffing positions as well as a list of initial priorities.
Kittleman named campaign manager Diane Wilson as his chief of staff. Wilson's resume includes a post as deputy secretary of Maryland's General Services Department during the administration of former Republican Gov. Bob Ehrlich, as well as a 2002 run for County Council against Democrat Guy Guzzone, then the incumbent in District 3. Wilson also served as an aide to former Republican councilman Dennis Schrader.
Lonnie Robbins, Howard's chief administrative officer under former County Executive Ken Ulman, will remain in his position. A county press release said Robbins "will have expanded responsibilities to complement the chief of staff."
Kittleman said he plans to take a closer look at several policies and initiatives, including the capital and operating budgets, the county's Mental Health Task Force and the adequate public facilities ordinance.
The ordinance, commonly called APFO, is a set of guidelines, last updated in 1992, that were designed to ensure Howard's infrastructure keeps pace with development. County activists have long said they are concerned the ordinance is outdated. Kittleman said he would soon name members to an Adequate Public Facilities task force to take a look at the current standards.
Budgetwise, Kittleman said he would look to the Spending Affordability Committee to review the county's capital and operating budgets for fiscal year 2016. The committee's "work to ensure fiscal responsibility would be vital under any circumstances but especially so now, when the administration will be looking to identify priorities and areas for savings in our current fiscal climate of challenging revenue forecasts," Kittleman's office said in its press release.
Kittleman's office said he "appreciates the service of these sworn and highly trained public safety officers, and believes their time should be spent serving and protecting the public. If occasions should arise where he needs assistance in traveling to official functions, he will ask for the help of staff members or others rather than taking police officers off the street and away from their official functions."I used to work at CHEP so I knew a lot about the history of pallets and CHEP. But I didn't know about all the stuff that happened since I left the company. 

We were taught that the company had to do everything in its power to recover its assets because if they didn't it could be seen as the company forfeiting it's property in the eyes of the law. 

I learned so much in that job, including how the produce and grocery industries work in the US. 

FUN FACT: CHEP stands for Commonwealth Handling Equipment Pooling (IIRC) from back when they started in Australia.Aeviterne's first full-length album, The Ailing Facade, is a soundtrack for crumbling foundations. The record is a timely meditation on humankinds' inability to escape Sisyphean cycles of violence and irrationality. It embodies, both in its content and its musical approach, the very breakdown of social order we're witnessing in real time in 2022. This is death metal by way of Camus.
Former Flourishing members Garrett Bussanick and Eric Rizk started Aeviterne with drummer Ian Jacyszyn in 2015. Their debut EP Sireless wrought dissonant destruction over its brief span. Sireless's second track "Inborn" turns out to have been a good indicator of the band's direction—its echoes can be heard in the churning noise of "Penitent," The Ailing Facade's third track, as monolithic synthscapes rear up out of the washes of guitar.
The band added guitarist Samuel Smith (Artificial Brain, Luminous Vault) for The Ailing Facade. Rather than deploy this additional firepower in service of beefier riffs, as could perhaps be expected of a death metal band, Smith has helped Aeviterne open up further compositionally. "The Reeking Suns" sees Smith and Bussanick's guitars create a runway for a grim, triumphant passage, which in turn gives way to spare ambience. This is just one of the moments where The Ailing Facade shapeshifts from harrowing intimacy to towering might.
The Ailing Facade makes deliberate and phenomenal use of negative space. This might sound like damning with faint praise, but it's true—the gulfs of noise in tracks like "The Reeking Suns" create anticipatory thirst that's then slaked by tracks like "The Gaunt Sky" with its more frenetic composition.
Speaking of deliberation, if this record sounds like the product of careful craftsmanship, that's because it was. In some form, most of these songs have existed since before Sireless. The band spent the intervening years carefully adjusting the record's many pieces. The recording process was already multi-tiered prior to the pandemic; the subsequent interruption and the band's dissatisfaction with an early mix added time to the album's gestation.
The final result is a musical edifice of carefully controlled chaos. No song here is a template. With engineering and mixing from drummer Jacyszyn as well as additional drum engineering and mastering at the hands of Colin Marston, this is one of those records that is so effortful as to sound effortless. The title track is one of the record's least conventional, an instrumental colonnade of relentless rhythm supported by pattering drum work. Rizk's ornate basswork forms a floor while the guitars soar high above, the distortion slowly falling away as the song progresses. "Dream in Lies," the album's closer and longest song that follows, is a fitting destination.
That all of this is also a delivery vehicle for philosophical meditation on the futility of human progress only adds to The Ailing Facade's gravity. Aeviterne clearly made good use of their time in the years leading up to this release—this album has the density and depth of a work of literature.
The Ailing Facade comes out March 18 via Profound Lore Records. Listen to an early stream of the full album and read an interview with Aeviterne frontman Garrett Bussanick below.
The Ailing Facade is billed as a psychological record—the cover art could be read as a depiction of the conundrum of trying to understand the mind using the mind. What are the thematic underpinnings of this album?
The themes can be broken down into two parts. First, the lyrics directly ponder ideas of futility, extinction, madness—concepts that exemplify, for instance, that utopia is likely impossible, as a positive can’t exist without its corresponding negative, or that the further we remove ourselves from nature, the more we create problems societally, culturally, etc. And then secondly and in response, the record is ultimately asking, "what is progress, and is it possible?"
It's been about four years since Sireless, and in that time you added a guitarist. How did this relatively long gestation period play into the development of your first album?
Almost the entire LP was written before Sireless was released. However, three or four years were spent attempting to achieve a recording we’d like. Tracking was a piecemeal process over many months at various locations. A notable delay was due to working remotely with a different mixing engineer on a mix that was eventually scrapped, leaving us to start completely over. In my experience, rarely has a recording come together quickly or smoothly. Often (and sometimes, I feel, unfortunately), it just takes time.
"Stilled the Hollows' Sway" is the first place here where the electronics really announce themselves, but there are layers of ambience and synth throughout the record. Who handled the electronics here? How did the band weave these threads into the record?
The electronics were handled chiefly by our drummer Ian, as well as myself. When conceiving what the band would be, he and I agreed on having electronics be part of the formula.
The electronics were part of the compositional process from the beginning, and so weren't added last minute or randomly "on top" of anything. And we were shooting for a balance; sometimes they have a more