One of the things I appreciate about the explosion of reality-based TV is that I have found shows like “Oddities,” which indulge my love of weird, wacky and sometimes nauseating art and the places that dedicate themselves to it, like Obscura in New York and Loved to Death in San Francisco. One of the things I love best about these shops is their focus on taxidermy – through them, I have learned about these wonderful things called “gaffs” – where a “rogue taxidermist” creates the creature of their dreams by altering and combining the animals they are working with. The King of Rogue Taxidermists is Japanese-born, Coney Island-based Takeshi Yamada. While many gaffs are of the standard two-headed poultry variety, Yamada takes taxidermy to new heights of artistry, using mainly organic materials to create freakish visions of nature’s most strange creatures, such as my daughter’s favorite, Cinadora the eight-legged spider dog. His creatures are from a world where the normal rules of science don’t apply, where trees are the habitats of octopi and starfish, where gerbils and rabbits and human-faced fish roam the seas. He fashions realistic and terrifying alien skulls, things that would look at home in an ancient alien tomb excavation. He uses materials like horseshoe crab shells to sculpt hideous scuttling beetles and insects, like his NYC giant subway bugs. Anyone who has been in the dank depths of the New York subway system can imagine these mutant fuckers scurrying around in those dark tunnels. By far his creepiest collection of sculpture – in a kind cute way – is his baby series, where he immortalizes the corpses of various humanoid species in their larval stage – lobster baby, snake baby, lizard baby and my personal favorite, potato head baby. Yamada has his own showcase on Coney Island, Takeshi Yamada’s Museum of World Wonders, where his children roam the walls of their world together. After the jump, take a look at some of Yamada’s creations…

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Lacquered is a new jewelry line by San Francisco-based artist Angela Casserly. Casserly turns her artists’ eye on to her jewelry, and creates stunning sculptural pieces to adorn the necks of gothic goddesses. Each piece is handmade and custom, so that no two are alike, and the result is that you wear a piece of her sculpture. Her pieces are dense, crawling with insects and writhing scaled creatures, but at the same time they exhibit a lightness, and look as if they could fly away at any moment. They are immortalized in lacquer, an entomological still-life that hangs from chain. She often uses bats as the body of the piece, coating their leathery wings with moths and beetles and winding lizards at their feet. One of my favorite of her pieces is a broach with a snake’s head peeking out between butterfly wings. If all this description sounds flowery to you, what brings her jewelry an element of dark, ominous beauty is it’s thick blackness, as well as the shapes she creates out of organic bodies. Lacquered can be bought from Casserly’s Etsy shop HERE. After the jump, take a look at a gallery infested with beauty…

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Decay and death in many ways is the beginning of life itself. Many forms of beings walk this earth, only to die to have their bones returned to the earth. Some people are able to see life and beauty in things that other people might throw away as garbage. Jana Miller is an artist that is able to look at bones as something she can create art or jewelry with. She lives in the south on her own land, where she finds the skeletons of animals that will become parts of her jewelry. Honestly, I have mad espect for Jana is doing because not only is her work killer to look at and wear, she is self-taught. Many of her pieces have this almost medieval vibe about them that makes me want to wear them even more. The things that Jana does with human teeth are way better than anything the tooth fairy could do. Make sure to check out her shop Bone Lust and peep a gallery of her work after the jump!

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A few weeks ago, I posted about Ixaxaar Occult Literature‘s witchcraft shop, and while researching for the post I came across a stunning piece of artwork enshrining Santissima Muerte. The artist who painted this saint with depth and passion is Devon, UK’s Stuart Littlejohn, and I have since come to admire his work above many others I have seen. He delves into a world rich with magick, occult and symbolism, depicting ancient figures in powerful scenes that make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. His colors are vibrant, but he layers them to create a profound darkness, a cavern of color that pulls the viewer in. His subjects are gods, goddesses and royalty of the esoteric shadows, richly robed and holding talismans, exuding emotion. His portraits are modern renditions of Renaissance work, but encompass centuries on the canvas. It’s almost like looking at the Ancients through time, and as it builds up around you it changes the lens through which you are seeing, layering realities to create a whole image. After the jump, check out a small sample of Littlejohn’s paintings…
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Ixaxaar Occult Literature, Finnish purveyors of all things occult and to do with Satan, Qayin, Cults of the Dead and Death, and everything witchcraft has been featured on CVLT Nation before, in a post Braydon did about Liber Falxifer I: The Book Of The Left Handed Reaper. Their literature covers a broad range of subjects pertaining to the occult, but they also run The Calvary Cross Botanica, a “shop” of sorts where one can purchase fetishes and statuary for ceremonies involving Brujeria, the Cult of Qayin, Quimbanda and Magia Negra. All of the items for sale are certified by their team of witches and socerers, and some are even handcrafted by Brujo and Bruja Pactada in places like Guatemala or Bolivia. These items are not only real, and not to be handled by the inexperienced, but they are also beautiful in their construction, a perfect example of beauty in darkness and magick. After the jump, read The Calvary Cross Botanica’s mission statement, and check out a gallery of their fetishes, statues, rosaries and more…
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by Oliver Sheppard

Christopher “Ilth” Erickson has sung for Chicago punk bands like the Functional Blackouts and Daily Void; the latter was a band that was often compared to Rudimentary Peni. Nowadays he plays bass in the dark punk band Cemetery. What fans of these bands may not know is that Ilth is a prolific artist who works with a variety of media: collage, sculpture, and various assemblages that all somehow recall the weird fiction of HP Lovecraft, the alternate and surrealistic universes of Max Ernst, and vintage sci-fi/horror. Ilth has had six exhibitions of his work in the past year alone. His visual work is a fine complement to the strange and dark music he’s been involved with, but it’s also sufficiently remarkable to be taken on its own and completely separate merits.

Below is an interview I conducted with Ilth recently, as well as a visual essay of his amazing artwork.

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One of the raddest things about live music, especially in metal and punk rock, are the bands that take care with their stage presence. The ones that bring props, and create an atmosphere in which to conduct their live ritual. We were recently at the YAITW show in Pomona, and they killed it with the smoky, scented air filled with incense, and the skinned sheep’s head that at one point ended up in the crowd, only to be hurled back on stage. Or there is also Skinfather’s epic chain mic stand that they rocked the CVLT Nation 1st Anniversary show with. One person who understands the importance of atmosphere is Laura Greenwood of Primitive Ways Arts, who creates some truly breathtaking mic stands. As one of the co-founders of Primitive Ways Records, who just released the OCCULTIST demo, Laura creates amazing, haunting statuary using animal bones and found objects. Her materials include cow, deer, sheep, goat, squirrel, bird, woodchuck, beaver, possum, raccoon and so many more artifacts of nature and man. They are carefully crafted into demons and talismans, wands and mic stands that showcase the beauty of the objects while binding them into other forms imbued with power and energy. She just opened up an Etsy shop where you can purchase her curios…after the jump, check out a gallery of her works…enter the boneyard…

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Tomorrow at 7pm, Breath of the Black Muse opens at the Black Vulture Gallery in Fishtown, PA. This celebration of the macabre arts is the first of a series of installations curated by JL Joseph Beaulieu at Black Vulture that will showcase artists whose work is so often admired in the metal/hardcore/blackmetal scenes. This first installation in the quarterly series features artists from around the world, including Belgium artists Kluze Hellion and Patina Vas Diaz, Irish artist Paul McCarroll, Brooklyn’s Karlynn Holland – who also curates the Dreams Were Made for Mortals series, Bianca Olson from California, Seldon Hunt from NYC, Yeshua Hill from Burlington, VT, and many more talented and morbid artists. If you’re in the area tomorrow, we highly recommend that you check out Breath of the Black Muse! Check out some preview pieces and a list of the artists showing after the jump…

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My favorite issues of Juxtapoz have always been the ones that feature dark, weird and disturbing artwork – but there are always a lot of pages I skip through to get to my favorite parts. It turns out, someone has created my perfect magazine, and it’s called Fire Mass. Fire Mass is dedicated to the dark arts and folklores, and features many of the artists we’ve covered on CVLT Nation and many, many more that I have to cover. The issues are in glorious full color, all except the Shadowplay issue, which is in equally glorious black and white, and they are serious eye candy for the appreciator of twisted imagery. They also feature stories, poems, interviews and all kinds of magickal things that you want in your world just to make it a little bit creepier. The next issue of Fire Mass will be released very soon, and for now you can go to their store HERE and purchase hard copies, and you can also get free digital downloads of all their issues, which I am subsisting on right now until I can get the hard copies. The zines are 8.5″ x 11″ and anywhere from 64 to 80 pages, and from the pictures they look like they are beautiful to hold. Check out a few preview pages after the jump, and this is a call for support for Fire Mass – these are the kind of publications that we need to keep around!
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Greetings, i am writing now in a semi sane state after bearing witness to the most abhorrent life forms imaginable. It is with severe relief that I have been told these are only replica of creatures from long dead aeons, and no longer dwell on this planet. But gawd! who knows what is out there!!!

…..screech, hisss!!
I fear my mind has been peered into by these fleshy, amorphous and gibbering masses and such biological revelations were not intended to be studied by the eyes of mere man! I now see them in my dreams, and in my diurnal hours as well. The normal serpent becomes studded with a crustacean exoskeleton, bats have dragon-like heads, and even the fish started to walk on all fours with their gaping horrendous mouths sharing the sight of dripping sickly teeth. Their limbs do not obey the simple laws of physics, and such adaptations do not make logical sense. In what atmosphere would this broken leather winged creature needs so much damage to its wings, or the fish with an exposed ribcage. I care not to think about it. And these fossils, did they originate from after the Cambrian? or is evolution a misconception, these look a lot older, perhaps before the prehistoric era even.I have a feeling the Japanese had something do this with this, I have found photographed specimens of the entire obscure kingdom open to the public! What they do not know they are doing if these reach the eyes of others!
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