Cool lil zine that came with the DLP of the vinyl of the same name. Was not expecting this to be more than like a lookbook of the band, but it is in fact quite a bit more substantial than that.

Death has a belt, and he notches it just once, no matter who you are

Insane lore drop to have a story of a prof of history at Amherst to write some commentary for the band about a fake book about a fake prophet who spawned a fake sect of Christianity that bordered on pagan nihilism. I only questioned the legitimacy of the texts being quoted after spying some lyrics which made me go “oh shit, are the lyrics quotations from gnostic scripture??" and then found out that, no, Tim and Dan just made up all this lore for their album which is so insanely cool for a generational record they produced in a basement with handmedown everything

And with that, Marisa Giovan grabbed the knife from Antiochus’ hands, held it to her throat point-first, and drove it in so hard that her hand passed out the back of her neck.

Like House of Leaves in terms of creating so many layers of immersion that it’s relatively easy to take different layers as fact and appreciate “fiction” at different levels of the narrative, e.g. after the historical commentary on Antiochus there's a follow up story on the scholar / author of the Books Of Terror and Longing who goes insane, and ends up immolating himself and his copies of the books that failed to sell:

He left a one-lined suicide note on his desk, carefully placed on top of everything that was left of his writing. Attached to the small scrap of paper was a 50-pound note.

“I would be remiss,” he wrote, “if I did not include this month’s rent. And being remiss is one thing I can no longer tolerate”

I can hear the crescendo of Earthmover as Shelley flicks a cigarette butt at his kerosene-drenched papers and commits himself to Antiochus

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