Huge, Driving, Percussive, Transcending and Ear Candy are some of the words that come to mind when I hear the new KYLESA track “Vulture’s Landing” from their upcoming album Ultraviolet that will be released May 28th via Season of Mist. We have had their new record on constant rotation since we received it. We have come to the conclusion that Ultraviolet is going to sound off the hook live! Which is perfect for us, because CVLT Nation is presenting the KYLESA tour that starts on May 10th. Today we are stoked to share with you the most recent song they have released to the public, “Vulture’s Landing.” This killer tune is streaming after the jump, plus you can peep the tour poster!

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The CVLT Nation 2nd Anniversary Show is coming up soon on Friday, April 26th, at Unit B in Santa Ana, CA, and we want to offer our awesome radical readers a chance to win 2 pairs of tickets to the show! You can still pick up pre-order tickets from Unit B HERE for $8, or you can pay $10 at the show, but if you pre-order your tickets and email your receipt to contact@cvltnation.com you get a 15% off code for the CVLT Store for any one order of clothing or records! We will be drawing two lucky winners for a pair of tickets each on Friday at noon PST, so enter to win at contest@cvltnation.com with “2nd Anniversary” in the subject! Good luck and see you at the show!!!

**Congratulations to Daniel Echeverria and Jesse Barron for winning a pair of tickets each! See you at the show!***

Special thanks to Crash the Clubs and LACE Pickups!

This week, the mighty ABSU will be wreaking havoc on Brooklyn with two shows on Wednesday and Thursday at the St. Vitus Bar! CVLT Nation is honored to be giving away a pair of tickets to Thursday’s show!! We have 1 pair to give away to one of our lucky readers! Not only will the wretched sounds of ABSU melt your eardrums this Thursday, but you will also be subjected to an onslaught of TOMBS! To enter to win, just email contest@cvltnation.com with “ABSU” in the subject heading and we will draw the winner on Wednesday the 10th at noon PST! To buy tickets for the Thursday show, click HERE, and to pick up tickets to the Wednesday show with ABSU and Krallice, click HERE! If you aren’t in NYC this week, check their tour poster below for your city!
***Congrats Chris Intriago!***

All photos & text by Jan Zeleny

Reportedly, this has been the darkest winter since the beginning of weather statistics in Germany – and as if that wasn’t enough, while the Japanese are already posting fucking pictures of cherry blossoms, over here we’re still in the grip of winter’s third coming. Which, thanks to a slashing east wind, has been even more brutal than before. Good for Germans that the end of March saw the third Doom over Leipzig festival take place, which offered the opportunity to huddle together in the cozy bowels of the beautiful UT Connewitz with a few hundred fellow misanthropes once again and simply embrace the gloom & frostbite while getting bludgeoned by an excellent line-up of some of the most crushing artists around!

Before the doom would truly be upon us, Thursday started off with a film screening (the UT Connewitz is not only a concert venue, but also one of Germany’s oldest cinemas still in existence): a tourist’s look at the black metal scene and its pivotal formative/destructive events, “Until The Light Takes Us”. I had already forgotten how godawful the film really is, and was glad to find out that the subsequent lecture by Sascha Poehlmann of Metal Matters was also meant to shed a bit of light upon the film’s various problems (most notably the filmmakers’ apparent infatuation with Vikernes). However, it quickly became much more than that, as Poehlmann went on to explore black metal’s aesthetic & anthropologic roots in Romanticism with lots of competence and humor – most intriguing food for thought. Afterwards, there was an open mic giving the audience the opportunity for further discussion, but I figure I wasn’t the only one in attendance that was simply overwhelmed by all the input since no one took it (although a bit of talk developed among the audience with Poehlmann later).

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Thank god I am an Instagramhoor, because if I hadn’t checked it in the spare minute I had I wouldn’t have seen what fucking awesome shit was going down in my hometown of Vancouver today and tomorrow! Nothing is Heavy and Scratch Records are putting on a couple of art and music showcases at Interurban Gallery in the downtown eastside, and not only will you be able to admire the work of infamous artists like Alison Lilly (who put me on to these events), Bonnie Dobbin, Sab Kay, Gam Strudwick and Dena Lazerenko, but you will also be enjoying to extremely dope lineups! Friday features Black Wizard with War Baby, Astrakhan and Wilt, and Saturday features the legendary YOB with Alda and Harrow. Anyone who has toured through Vancouver knows that your audience is 150% with you and would literally bring the house down if their weed smoking wasn’t keeping them in check, so these shows are going to be off the hook. If you are in the vicinity this weekend make sure to head over to Interurban and say hi from CVLT Nation!

CVLT Nation is so happy to announce the KYLESA Ultraviolet 2013 Summer Tour! Starting May 10th, KYLESA will be traveling all over North America bringing their apocalyptic blues to your city alongside Blood Ceremony, White Hills and Lazer/Wulf, and CVLT Nation is honored to be the official media sponsor! We have a lot planned in the coming months surrounding this tour, so stay tuned for some awesome features and special surprises…for now, check the tour poster below and the dates after the jump!

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People may want to hate on the cupcake trend, but in my opinion there is nothing better than having an entire cake to yourself, even if it is small. When I was a kid, I loved having cupcakes at my birthdays, but since my mom wasn’t the biggest baker/homemaker type, I had to settle for the store-bought variety with that pretty but chemical-tasting icing. Now that I am older, I have a better appreciation for the things that can be done to the individual cake. You can take inspiration from the things you love and turn it into a delicious edible creation. Like…metal! I have followed Metalcakes out of Chicago for a while now, and I decided it’s time to do a post featuring cupcakes that are inspired by some of my all-time favorite bands. While the inspiration may sometimes be disgusting, Metalcakes manages to make it mouth-watering. Some of my favorites are the Sleep “Holy Cupcake” Tres Leches cupcake, the Judas Priest “Hell Bent for Cupcakes” bondage cupcake, the Saint Vitus “White Batter/Black Batter” cupcake the Black Sabbath “Cupcakes Bloody Cupcakes” strawberry syrup cupcake and the Watain “Sworn to the Cake” flourless chocolate cupcake with ganache frosting and red M&Ms…I mean, come on, that takes a creative brain to make Watain taste good! Metalcakes doesn’t share their cupcakes with you just to taunt you with their scrumptiousness, she actually gives you the recipe for each cupcake and provides you with a video and musical soundtrack to inspire their preparation! So embrace your need for chocolate graveyard dirt and strawberry blood, and check out a gallery of Metalcakes after the jump, and find all the recipes on her site!

Watain – Sworn to the Cake< /center>
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Last night, one of our readers posted a link to this article, and the contents of the following letter posted on Hiphopisread.com last April are explosive. It is an anonymous letter submitted to the site by an ex-executive in the American music industry, one who lived with the guilt of his knowledge for more than 20 years before he wrote this. It details how the major labels he worked with in the 80s and early 90s made huge investments in the privatization of prisons in America, and how they decided in the early 90s to take an active role in making sure those prisons filled up with young men. The letter writer explains that “since technology and media weren’t accessible to people like they are today, the industry had more control over the public and had the means to influence them anyway it wanted”. It’s fucking despicable, but not surprising maybe for a lot of people. One thing about our readers is you are all committed to independent music and music labels, and share a distaste, dare I say hate, for the mainstream music that is ubiquitous in our societies. Major labels have blanked independent music and have even tried to erase some genres from existence by having absolutely nothing to do with them and marketing a more palatable and weak substitute. Both Sean and I are fans of some hip hop, but we have both leaned towards the more “conscious” or underground hip hop because of the sheer stupidity, racism, sexism and homophobia of most mainstream hip hop music. Sean was a part of hip hop in the late 80s and early 90s in the Bay Area and LA, and he witnessed first hand the demise of Afrocentric, positive music that uplifted black American culture and people; music that went from scorning crack to selling it, from promoting powerful women and men to taking their power and their lives away. Hip hop went from showing American society and the world that black Americans were intelligent, political and motivated people to returning to the negative stereotypes that have kept American society segregated and hateful for the past few centuries. It actively fed the mentality that young black men deserved to be in prison and were a threat to society that should be locked away. So the contents of this letter are no surprise to him, but that’s not to say that it doesn’t make both of us sick. The idea that major music labels wanted to promote criminal activity in the black community, and by extension in all communities of all colors, in order to maximize their investments in the prison industrial complex is an outrage. It makes you wonder in what other ways they have decided to influence society – for example, the way that women are mostly given powerless and sexualized roles in music. It is so sad to think that generations of children have had their futures tampered with by being repeatedly exposed to ideas that make them negative, self-conscious and powerless to motivate themselves or each other to change the world. Thankfully there is a movement towards change happening, real change at the grassroots level, to make our societies happier and more equal places. After the jump, please read this letter and share it as widely as possible!

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It’s been said that it’s hard out here for a pimp, but I would argue that it’s even harder for an independent artist or designer trying to make a living selling their work to a society mostly obsessed with obsolescence. Unlike the large corporations that dominate consumer culture, the work of small business is often meant to last – the materials are quality and each piece is lovingly constructed by human hand. It’s really the only thing that small business in North America has going for it; we certainly can’t compete with the quantity and price of the corporate goods. But a growing number of people realize that supporting local artists and designers – whether in the music we listen to, the clothes we wear or the art we decorate our house with – has much larger benefits than just getting something that will last you longer and is made better than its made in China counterpart. By supporting your friends and neighbors, you are improving their lives and the community’s economy, because the money stays in the community and cycles through it, supporting other local businesses and helping others improve their livelihoods. Unless you think we’re all better off working at Wal-Mart for minimum wage. Most small business is a minimum wage job, but one infinitely more rewarding than greeting huffy obese shoppers and making rich Christians richer. Being creative and running my own business has made me get used to being broke, yes, but so happy. However, I believe that the time of the artisan is nigh, that disgruntled citizens are waking up to the fact that the only way to live the way we want to live is to support each other at a grassroots level. One of the only ways creative people have been able to survive is by supporting each other, and Amanda Moore of Adelina Mictlan jewelry is doing that with her popup shop project From the Black Lodge. She has big plans to do a series of national and international popups featuring designers and artists who produce their pieces in small batches by hand, companies like Ovate, Guts, Glam Glory, Morph, Death/Traitors, Terra Luna, Wicked Apothecary, Thrillhaus, Lisa Muerta leather works, David Guy and more. She’s starting out at Austin Psych Fest this year, and she needs our help to get her started, so she’s put up an Indiegogo campaign to raise the funds. There are 7 days left to get involved, so I highly recommend that you check it out now. She has some excellent incentives for people who donate starting at $1, including a jewelry raffle, patches, tees, totes, tattoo credit, Adelina Mictlan gift certificates, original paintings and the one I am hoping for – a chance to win a stunning Bloodmilk ring. After the jump watch read about her mastermind plan and please help her get this awesome project started!!!

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