Closing in on the World Below

What? Why? Who?

I've lately awaken to the thought that although I love writing, I nearly never do it any more, besides the bullshit I occasionally crank out in the form of schoolwork. This has created a rather frustrating cycle of me deep down loving to write, but almost never enjoying it. How to break this cycle? And what should I write about? Come to think of it, the answer to the first question is kind of obvious, since I already am in the internet. And the second one, well, I don’t know. How ‘bout writing about the things you enjoy, you dimwit (or “me dimwit”? I don’t know any more if I’m speaking to myself as myself or as some other… being)? Basically this will probably mean metal music, underground and extreme, although I reserve the right to write about anything I find interesting. Sure, it would be interesting to write about things that actually matter, like politics, sociology and whatnot, but there’s a shitload of people who know much more about those matters and are able to bring up valid and original points, so I’ll leave that to them. One thing I will not write about, though, is my personal life. First of all, it’s kind of mundane, and secondly, although I admit this blog might have some aspects of a “therapy project”, I simply find diary-type of writings to be uninspiring.

I pondered for awhile should I write the entries in English or in Finnish. As you can see, I settled on English, at least for now. There are a few reasons to this. I’ve always considered myself to be “ok” in English and I read a lot in English, but I feel like I’ve lately lost touch with writing it. So, perhaps this blog can serve as a tool for me to keep up, or even improve this skill. I recognize that I might not be able to be as “witty” in my written output in English as I could be in Finnish, but I want to believe that writing in a different language will also have a positive influence on my writing altogether. Of course there will be tons of grammatical errors, but I hope you’ll bear with me. If you won’t, well… It doesn’t really matter, since in that case I guess you most likely have stopped reading this text by now. Also, I have some friends (did I hear a “yeah, right” back there?) who do not speak Finnish, so I think it would be nice if they also had the possibility to read my mumbles, whether they in reality want to or not.

Goals

Yes, goals. I got to have them, ‘cause I admit that I have had trouble committing myself to long-term projects. Why do I want to consider this as a “long-term project”? Basically, because I have some sort of unexplainable urge to create something of my own. Something, that would follow with me and offer me some sense of accomplishment. Cryptic, I know, but I said “unexplainable”, didn’t I? So, yeah, goals:

• To write actively. No, I won’t do any promises about how often I will write entries, ‘cause that would a) be bound to fail, and b) probably take the fun out of the whole thing, making it “mandatory” to write something by deadline, thus turning the whole idea of this blog upside down. Still, I want to keep this thing fairly active, since I want to maintain, and further improve my writing.
• To contribute to the underground scene. If even one person finds a new band which he likes, buys a record, or goes to see a gig thanks to my writings, it will be more than enough.
• To do interviews and write reviews. A simple goal, huh? Be that as it may, I feel this would be a good way to reach the goal mentioned above. The internet is already of course full of album reviews and band interviews, but I strongly feel, that this is a good way to make people aware of the more unknown bands. Plus, I myself really enjoy reading interviews of smaller bands and other not-mainstream operators.

So, there. I have few other goals for this thing in my mind as well, but as I am in the end quite unsure of myself, I won’t reveal them, at least not for now, since I fear they would seem stupid. But to tell you the truth, even having a vision of some sort feels good. Although I said earlier that I don’t want to make any timetables, I try to finish the first real post quite soon, so that I could have a active start. Plus, it would be fucking embarrassing if this post would be my last.

Yours truly,
Emplate

Ps. Oh yeah, I wanted to say a few words about the name of the blog, too! I wanted the title to be somehow connected to death metal, since that genre is probably closest to my heart. At first I thought of “Where the Slime Live”, the track from Morbid Angel’s “Domination” album. What a kick-ass name would that be, right? Unfortunately, someone else had apparently also had similar thoughts, as the name was already taken. Next I wound up stealing the title of Immolation’s fourth album, “Close to a World Below”. I felt that it reflected the idea of the blog pretty well, since you could perceive it as referring to the underground.


Some people feel that already "Domination" is a poor performance from Morbid Angel. I beg to differ.


I hope that Ross Dolan & co. won't come after me for stealing their album title.