(Look at this keen fish! It’s the logo for The Chaos Series, a 3 month fishing tournament at Heck.)

Yep, for those of you who haven’t seen me post in a while, Heck is indeed still alive. It can be found at http://slurl.com/secondlife/Nina/208/142/124. We’re doing something special this fall. We’ll be running a 3 month 7Seas Fishing tournament called “The Chaos Series” with around L$20,000 in prizes, and it starts this Wednesday, at…well, we can’t tell you what time. Read on for why…

As stated above, The Chaos Series is a 3 month long 7Seas Fishing* contest, beginning October 1st, 2008 and ending December 31st, 2008. It consists of a totally random number of 30 minute rounds held on totally random days, at totally random times, and possibly even in totally random places, but usually at Heck, which is the home base of the contest.

Contest prizes:

First Prize: L$10000
Second Prize: L$5000
Third Prize: L$2500
4th Prize: L$1000
5th Prize: L$500

Individual Round Prize: L$100 (You can win individual rounds without being entered in The Chaos Series, but your points totals WILL NOT count in the totals for The Chaos Series unless you join pay the tournament entry fee! Points gained in contests prior to entry will, however, be added retroactively if you do join, so you can try our contest rounds and join afterward if you like them, without losing points.)

There will be random bonus prizes along the way, as well!

Points System For The Chaos Series:

1st prize in contest round: 100 points
2nd prize in contest round: 50 points
3rd prize in contest round: 25 points
4th prize in contest round: 10 points
5th prize in contest round: 5 points

Plus, all points gained in contest rounds count toward your final score. For example: if you win a round with 120, you get 220 points. If you show up 15 minutes late and only get 50 points, not placing in the top 5, those 50 points still count toward your overall score.

It is L$100 to enter The Chaos Series. To enter, look up the group “The Chaos Series” and pay the fee to join it. If this is too confusing for you, IM Lexa Pro and he’ll send you an invite.

For more information about The Chaos Series, to ask a question that isn’t answered here, or for information on hosting an event in The Chaos Series at your venue, IM Lexa Pro, or email us at webmaster@antimatteruniverse.com.

* 7Seas Fishing and all related properties are copyright 2008, Seven’s Selections.

(One of our favorite animals and seven deadlies, all in one picture. Photo Credit: praziquantel)

After careful consideration, our new design has been completed. The bulk of the work involved adding an extra line of menu selections to the menu bar, changing the name of one menu item, and adding more “subscribe” buttons to the bottom of the page, for y’all who use RSS readers. There wasn’t much wrong, beyond that we needed to emphasize accessibility to the things that people come here for, and to our lead projects.

So, that’s about it. Oh, and from here on, look for more posts from us. No, really. Honest. For reals.

The 2007 Heck Street Fair is Saturday, August 18th! Our inaugural outdoor event will be 8 full hours of the weirdness that is Heck, neatly packaged into four mini-events showcasing our most popular activities.

Part I of our programming day is called “Skate…Or…Dive!” and it features the sporting side of Heck. We recently had a popular event called “LIVE NUDE ROLLER DISCO!” at Heck (which will be a regular event here for now on), and because it was so much fun, we’re encouraging everyone to put their skates back on (or get a pair of Skoopfs from us!) and go nuts on our property. Do tricks, dance, explore the Heck compound, take your clothes off and skate nude, you name it! This part is purely an exhibition, but it’ll be fun!

We’ll also be having a skydiving contest, using Terra Aeronautics products (Pro Chutes are *required* to enter; get yours at Abbotts Aerodrome or check with us closer to the event). This contest will have a L$500 prize.

It’s all happening from Noon-2 PM SLT, and it’s just the start!

Part 2 of our event, “ZOMG SHOPPING” is devoted to all the wonderful vendors we have in the Heck Mall, including Absentia, Feelgood and Sunshine Kind, The Gamer Grid, Happycat Industries, Sin, Unexpected Error, Fugly Jewels and @Dusk, who generously bought naming rights to this event for their other store. ;)

Throughout the day, Heck vendors will be making appearances at their stores (times TBA; check with your favorite vendor or us for up-to-the-minute info), but this is an opportunity to devote quality time to checking out their wares without having the sky divers, video games or naked people distract you too much! Worry not though, adventure lovers! There will still be dancing throughout this event with Heck’s resident DJ, Lexa Pro and The Ladies Of Heck!

Part III of our event, the Arcade Olympics, tests your skill at 5 of Seven Shikami’s popular OpenArcade games! The person with the best combined high score ranking on Freestylers: Groove, Fist Of Discomfort, Phrase Invaders, Zombie Meltdown and Whack-A-Mole will walk away with L$1000! You will be awarded 5 points for each first place finish, 4 for each second and so forth down to 1 point for fifth. Ties will result in a sudden death showdown! All participants must play all 5 games to be eligible (and you’ve only got 2 hours to get ranked, so play fast and don’t get too hung up on any one game), and the games are L$1 per play! While you play, Lexa Pro DJs and The Ladies Of Heck keep you company!

To finish off the event in style, Part IV, “The Nightcap” is your last chance to shake it for us, and have us shake it back at you! Lexa Pro, already doing a marathon for this unprecedented outdoor event at Heck, gives you his best 2 hours at the back end, and The Ladies Of Heck will be there, so show them what you’re made of while you watch the last sunset of the event and dance into the night! Anything goes at this one, kids!

(Twill Juniper’s “Secret Place”. Twill’s artwork will be on display in Heck’s balcony gallery as part of antimatteruniverse.’s Heck Featured Artist series throughout August 2007.)

When I first saw Twill Juniper’s artwork, early in my tenure in Second Life, I said “I want to hang it on my refrigerator, and I mean that in the best possible way.” That, in a nutshell, sums up Twill’s work. On the surface, one might look at it and think of it as childlike, simplistic or perhaps even overly innocent, but in my view, these are the qualities that make what Twill does strong and viable. There’s something refreshing, in this age of seen-it-done-it-look-at-my-pain, about art that simply tries to convey beauty without any deconstructionism, duality or cynicism enveloping it. Twill Juniper’s work makes me happy when I look at it, nothing more, nothing less.

antimatteruniverse. is proud to have Twill Juniper as our Heck Featured Artist for August 2007. There will be a special opening tonight, Thursday August 2nd, from 8-10 PM Eastern Time (5-7 PM Pacific/Second Life Time) in the balcony gallery at Heck, where you will be able to meet with Twill and discuss her work with her. Twill’s paintings will be in the balcony gallery throughout August, where you can view them and purchase in-world prints of them if you desire.

(Heck’s very own Bobby Lomba sporting the Dr. Phil mask! Is this not the most disturbing thing you’ve seen in at least 15 minutes? Photo Credit: Gooden Uggla)

Yes, Heck’s one and only Bobby Lomba loves Dr. Phil as much as he loves the ladies. So, in honor of that, this afternoon at Heck, we will be passing out free Dr. Phil masks, which you’re encouraged to wear, and I’ll will be playing uplifting, motivational rock anthems! Yeah, it’s going to be pretty disturbing. Be there, so you can tell your friends that “Yes, I was one of the weirdos in that picture on the SL photo pool on Flickr.” Standard “Hey, we have a Sploder, Quince, an arcade, skydiving, and free cocaine” disclaimers apply. :D

(Our parties get weird sometimes at Heck. Tonight, make them a little weirder. Photo Credit: Scott Crawford)

For those of you who read this site and wonder when our parties are happening, antimatteruniverse. presents “Everything Weirder Than Everything Else” tonight at Heck in Second Life from 6 PM-8 PM Second Life Time (which is actually Pacific Time). I’ll be DJing the event, which aims to be a pageant of the beautifully absurd, so to speak.

From our event listing on the Second Life web site:

“This one’s real simple. It’s not a contest, there isn’t really any specific theme (though the vague stuff seems to throw people off sometimes)…

Just show up, be weird, look weird, and look at the weirdness around you. That’s what it’s about.”

(Pretty In Velvet’s “Scream” is finally available! See below for details.)

Long-time friends of antimatteruniverse. Pretty In Velvet have released their “Scream” album. It’s available on CD through CD Baby and Kunaki, will be available very soon through the iTunes store, eMusic, Rhapsody, Napster and the like, and is also available at Cafe Soundz and several other retailers in the NYC metro area. For more information on the band (and sound samples), check out their web site and MySpace page.

I spent hours in the studio with PIV’s Kage Hopkins (who, full disclosure here, plays guitar for me when I do my own music), and he busted his ass on this record. Enjoy!

(A distance shot of the new Heck compound. Photo credit: Scott Crawford)

Yes, we’ve talked a lot about Heck here in the past, but not said much about it (or anything else, really; blame life, but we’re going to fix that soon, as I think I’m giving up life for Lent or something…) recently. What’s been up with our Second Life club of late? Well, we’ve done a number of rebuilds over the past 6 months or so, and I think we’ve got it to where we can really dig in and get comfortable now. In our most recent build, among other things, we’ve added a 2 floor arcade with playable games and non-playable replicas available for perusal, a sculpture garden, we’ve moved our mall, we’ve built a second club available for event rentals for about $5 USD, I rebuilt my home in SL above it, and we added skydiving to the facilities. Below is a video walkthrough of just some of what we’ve done.

(”Outside” by Liza Cosmos, July’s Featured Artist at Heck.)

antimatteruniverse. proudly presents Liza Cosmos, the first of our Heck Featured Artists. Liza’s work will be featured and available for sale in the balcony gallery at Heck throughout July, with a special opening at Noon Second Life Time (3 PM Eastern Time) on Sunday, July 1st, 2007 that will be attended by the artist and DJed by yours truly.

Liza’s work, in her own words: “In many of these pieces, contrast is an important thing, be it through colors, material or subject. Varying a lot in media ranging from soundscapes, photography or projection, I feel plain pen and inks and scissors sometimes say something a lot better as when using state of the art equipment. As of lately, spatial design is added to the score as I started experimenting with sewed up sculptures due to entrance exams for a Dutch academy of contemporary arts located in Amsterdam. I got accepted, and will be attending starting this Fall.

I’m scaped through people like David Lynch, Jean Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol, and Dave McKean, and all kinds of counterculture output of the last 30 years. I believe in letting go of traditional values to see where the pieces themselves are headed, for they know better than me.”

In addition to the Heck installation, more of Liza’s work can be seen at her gallery in Second Life, fibrenation.nl, and she can be contacted at debasement at gmail dot com.

(Feelgood Tripp’s Drug ATM presents: Rainbow Acid! Available tonight at the Drug Olympics at our Second Life club, Heck. Photo Credit: Scott Crawford)

From the press release on Second Life:

“Feelgood Tripp and antimatteruniverse present: The Drug Olympics! Yes, it’s like a Tupperware party for dope. Free samples! A camping hookah! More drugs available for sale in our vending machines! And, of course, I’m DJing and playing messed up music to get high to. Heck’s just been rebuilt (again), and it not only looks great, but there’s also even more to do. Come get high and go skydiving. This is the first major event of the summer! Be there! 5-8 PM Tonight, Friday, 6/29/07!”

For those of you not sure, these are virtual drugs, not tangible, real-world ones. For those of you even more confused by the concept of virtual drugs, why not come by and see what it’s about? Heck is conveniently located at Innamincka 138, 195, 62 in Second Life.

Katrina Ford of Celebration, screaming like banshee.
(Photo Credit: Stephanie)

The sun beats down on the crowds assembled like swarms of ants in front of the twin stages. The most beautiful boardwalk in the world serves as a passageway between those two destinations, a journey filled with music, breakdancing, the alluring smells of countless flavors of seaside food and, of course, “Shoot The Freak”. And, perhaps most strikingly, the sound of the world-famous Cyclone roller coaster going over that first drop, screams and all, pierces through the rather glorious cacophony of it all every three minutes on the dot. That’s right, it’s Siren time again.

The Siren Festival, put on for the 6th consecutive year by the Village Voice, is an all-day music festival showcasing a array of bands typically slanted in the indie rock vein. On any given year, you’re likely to see see a lineup that will include a mix of future superstars (like 2002’s Yeah Yeah Yeahs and 2001’s Peaches), indie stalwarts (2001’s Guided by Voices and 2003’s Modest Mouse), an occasional legend (2004’s Mission Of Burma), some glorious oddities (2002’s Bob Log III), and at the very least, you’re just about guaranteed to see a few of the artists that you won’t be able to get away from for the next year (2005’s Brendan Benson and Nine Black Alps). In between bands, some of New York’s most popular DJs spin records for the audience (this year, the resident DJs at celebrity stomping ground MisShapes controlled the booths), and if you’re tired of waiting for the next band to go on or tired of watching bands, period, you’ve got the strange wonder and hedonistic splendor of the Coney Island boardwalk at your fingertips.

Siren 2006 began with Deadboy and the Elephantmen, who came across as a sort of postmodern take on swamp rock. They were acceptable but not necessarily inspiring, though at his best moments, singer Dax Riggs’ vocals were reminiscent of 13th Floor Elevators howler and alien abductee Roky Erickson. It was a modest start to a whirlwind tour of the festival, encompassing 10 out of the 13 remaining acts. Between eating, travelling between stages, and actually pencilling in some time in for my group and I to enjoy ourselves.

Upon hearing Priestess and especially seeing them for the first time, I immediately asked myself,”is it too early for the Grunge revival to have started?” The Australian metal act had a loud, driving, grinding sound, a no-bullshit confidence that they controlled the stage with, and equal comfort on the harder, headbanging stuff and the slower, McCartney on “Helter Skelter”-sounding material.

Perhaps it was because their linecheck seemed to take forever just as the sun took it up a notch, or perhaps there was something off in the execution, but The Rogers Sisters weren’t able to hold my attention for long. They put forth a lot of effort and energy, but the Williamsburg locals’ take on late 70’s guitar-based New Wave didn’t click with me.

From there, Man Man was next up, and they were gloriously, insanely dumb. Employing a wide array of instruments and embracing the avant-garde lineage that Capt. Beefheart, Tom Waits and John Zorn built, their music was ridiculous, but engagingly so. These weren’t rank amateurs banging on a bunch of gear, either. Man Man were very clearly trained professionals who chose to use their abilities for evil, carving out their own niche in the lucrative “insane circus music” genre. “Overheard In New York” moment: “This stupid band sounds like my phone.”-Anonymous Crowd Member

Next up were the clear highlight of Siren 2006, Celebration. At festivals like these, particularly Siren where the very setting of the event can be so distracting, Celebration did the unthinkable and held everyone within earshot and sight distance in thrall for the duration of their performance. They were a perfect band to play in the center of an amusement park, as their music is a total thrill ride. They’re delicate, soulful and bewitching one minute, jagged, urban and electric the next, but as it’s all happening, it totally makes sense.

Singer Katrina Ford sets the tone for Celebration. A rare and most unusual vocalist, she heads in unexpected and brilliant directions on seemingly every verse, whispering, howling and doing everything in between. She’s constantly in motion, her body ricocheting around the stage the way her voice does through the air as she sings. Multi-instrumentalist Sean Antanaitis is a one man army, playing a number of organs and electric pianos, Moog Taurus bass pedals and guitar, always handling multiple instruments within each song with ease. Drummer David Bergander held down the rest of the fort on drums admirably, his playing on both the quiet moments and the frenetic ones both stylish and classy. By the time the set built to its crecendo, the band had made a crowd of thousands forget where they are, and they summoned the only rain of the day as well. It was absolutely perfect.

After Celebration, our group took a much-needed breather from the music and grabbed some food. However, while waiting for what seemed like forever for our hot dogs at Nathan’s, we began hearing what sounded like the roar of a jet engine, but was actually Norway’s Serena Maneesh, and they demanded our attention despite some concert fatigue having set in. Serena Maneesh reside in the heavier regions of what some folks still refer to as “shoegazer” music, applying insanely loud guitars and what looked like an electic violin to damaged, psychedelic pop. Fans of early Jesus And Mary Chain, Ride, My Bloody Valentine and Godflesh would most likely enjoy Serena Maneesh.

Still recovering, we took our time getting back to the main stage, where The Stills were finishing up their set. For some reason, perhaps all the sun I’d gotten, the only impression they made on me was that a couple of their songs sounded a bit like Jackson Browne. I’m not sure if this is accurate or not; I’d have to go back and listen to the studio stuff to be sure, but that’s what I heard at the time.

She Wants Revenge were up next, and while the music was what it was on the record (a competently played example of Joy Division worship) the band possessed the stage presence and charisma of 5 session musicians, which was perhaps a bit remarkable considering that I’m pretty sure there were only 4 of them, but nonetheless, they failed to excite my group or the rest of the crowd during what I saw of them. It’s unfortunate, but there are some acts who take to the stage naturally, and some who don’t.

Eddie Argos of Art Brut serenades the photo pool at Siren 2006. (Photo Credit: Matt Hobbs.)

Quite the opposite were England’s Art Brut, who were bursting with stage presence, but they too had their problems, as they struggled to be heard over the sound of their own drums due to some problems with the soundboard mix for a good chunk of the set. Art Brut are also very much a band that seems like they’d be more at home in a club or pub setting, as they’re constantly attempting to take their audience head-on with their cleverly written, raucous garage rock. Doing that can be tough when you’ve got the distance between the somewhat remote stage and the sea of faces that is a festival crowd, so it was an uphill battle for them on that front as well. By the end, they did manage to overcome these obstacles and received a hard-earned, loud ovation from a crowd who were admittedly pulling for them.

At the end of the day, it was decision time, as the Scissor Sisters and Stars were due to be on simultaneously, and being more familiar with one than the other, we opted to stick around the main stage for the Scissor Sisters set. Sorry, Stars fans! As expected (I’d seen them perform before while watching Live 8), the Scissor Sisters did not disappoint. They delivered pitch-perfect renditions of the hits from their self-titled debut, as well as giving us a number of sneak previews from their upcoming sophomore album “Ta-Dah”, due out on September 26th. Several of the new songs had a more serious, moody edge to them, but they still were great additions to their repertoire. The crowd ADORED the band’s smart, upbeat mix of glam and disco, and the band adored the crowd back while urging us all to dance our asses off (this included a hilariously accurate extended monologue by singer Ana Matronic comparing New York City’s considerably cooled-off nightlife to the movie “Footloose”). Closing with show with the modern day disco anthem “Filthy Gorgeous”, the Scissor Sisters provided a great wrap to what has become one of the better, if admittedly somewhat challenging days of the year for New York music lovers.

As I was thumbing around on the 4AD web site tonight, I saw mention of a band I wasn’t familiar with yet called The Late Cord. Being the curious sort, I went to their site, and checked things out. According to the brief bio on the home page, “The Late Cord are John Mark Lapham and Micah P. Hinson. Both are natives of Abilene Texas. Their debut mini album “Lights From The Wheelhouse” is scheduled for release in the UK on April 24 on 10″ vinyl and CD.”

The mp3 available for download on the site, “My Most Meaningful Relationships Are With Dead People” is a somber, yet gorgeous piece of music, heavily reminiscent of classic 4AD supergroup This Mortal Coil as well as Brian Eno and maybe a little bit of Ian Curtis from Joy Division on the vocals (but not in that Interpol-ish way…think “Atmosphere”). I’m really impressed by this, and can’t wait to hear the rest of “Lights From The Wheelhouse”. In the meantime, enjoy this track.

The Late Cord-My Most Meaningful Relationships Are With Dead People