Jan 29th, the International Blastbeat Celebration Day?

Have we missed the day? Shall we celebrate it next year? Huh? Read on:

“A blastbeat is a kind of very, very rapid repeat hitting of the drums, usually in excess of 180bpms, so it sounds kind of like an apocalyptic typing pool,” explains James Hoare, deputy editor of Terrorizer, the “World’s Leading Extreme Music Magazine”

“Most people associate it with Napalm Death and Extreme Noise Terror, because there was that period when John Peel was playing them a lot in the late 80s and Napalm Death’s drummer Mick Harris came up with the name, but blastbeats crop up in some of the strangest places. The Beastie Boys used one on one of their early punk records, Pollywog Stew.”

He thinks for a moment. “It’s difficult to say what its appeal is, really. I think it’s just because it’s extreme.”

Nevertheless, he’s agitating to have 29 January declared International Blastbeat Celebration Day. The idea started out as a joke on Good Bad Music for Bad, Bad Times, a remarkable blog written by Erich Keller, a European literature student and former frontman of acclaimed Swiss grindcore band Fear of God – it may well be the only place on the internet where you can find debate on the merits of both Gustav Flaubert and Dutch punks Suspense’s 1981 track, Crazy Sod.

read more: guardian.co.uk/music/2009/jan/16/popandrock

BTW, from the same article: “According to some sources, the blastbeat was invented not by a hardcore band in the 80s, but by either free jazz drummer Sunny Murray on a 1965 recording with Albert Ayler or Attila, a famously dreadful late 60s psychedelic band who dressed as Attila the Hun and were later dismissed as “bullshit” by their keyboard player, Billy Joel.”

Yup! Billy Joel was in a blastbeat band. Heh!