Nash the Slash

Nash the Slash was a musician in the late 70s & 80s, who played electronically enhanced violin or mandolin or maybe something else, with lots of effects and synthy things, solo or with others.  He played wrapped with bandages and in dark shades.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_the_Slash


He passed away a few years ago.  But his music lives on:


http://nashtheslash.com/


I first learned of Nash the Slash, in Heavy Metal Magazine.  In the February 1980 issue, which had what is certainly one of the coolest HM magazine covers of all time:

Just a few years into its existence, the mag was trying to elbow its way into a place in the popular culture, and was just starting to put out a group of articles about music and movies and books and art etc.  It wasn't Dossier yet, that was about a year later, but Ted White started his time as editor in January and the articles are something he brought on.  Lou Stathis and Jay Kinney and Bhob Stewart are some of the names that would become familiar to readers in the coming issues.


Ted White wrote this about Nash the Slash:

It caught my eye, enough so that about a year later, I saw this in the record store (where one had to go to buy music back in those days):

It must have meant something to me to spend $2.75 on a single, at a time I'd spend just a few bucks on a record from the cutout box, and even HM magazine was $2 (it went from the original $1.50 cover price just by then).  I kept it all this time, I've even played it a couple times within the past decade.  I liked it a lot, the funny and rippin' cover of Dead Man's Curve, and the driving noises of Reactor No. 2.  I got a bit of influence on my musical tastes from the music reviews in HM, but Nash the Slash was the one time I actually bought some music directly because of reading about it in the mag.  It was cool and obscure, but I didn't seek out any more, and I didn't hear anything else about Nash the Slash after then.


But more recently, I came across a slew of Nash the Slash CDs in a resale shop.  I gleefully snapped them up:

It was a lot of fun finding one, then the others, on that bottom shelf.  There's lots of cool stuff on them.  "Children" has Dead Man's Curve and Reactor No. 2 on it, yay I can play it in my car.  There's a soundtrack for Nosferatu, the silent horror movie, and I enjoyed that.  I liked a lot of the other stuff, some more than others of course.  I'm good with metallic fuzzy noises and Mr Slash showed some ability and creativity in this pile of work.  There a few tracks that are replayed at different speeds for different effect, kinda neat.  I won't play music critic, but it's been great to find some tunes that are right up my alley, as well as great to chance upon this from a Heavy Metal Personal History perspective.


So I really enjoyed finding these CDs, and finding the article in my old mag, and putting together this post.  So much fun.

Interwebs

So, being about a bazillion years old, of course I'm bad at the internet.  I got to do computer work in school in the mid and late 70s (meaning carrying around paper rolls and cards with holes punched in them, and printouts of results), played Amiga video games in the 80s (DeathSword!) and had home computers from the late 90s (dial up internet anyone?), and have been doing this blog for almost 10 years.  But none of that ever helps me keep up with where the cool kids hang out.


Actually getting up off my lazy butt and looking, helped me find that Heavy Metal still has an active internet prescence, on Igram, and is also more active on Tmblr.  That's a bit more encouraging than the dormant state of the HM website and the relatively low activity at their Fbook or Twiddler.  By the way, the youtube linked on the HM website exists, though nothing new has been added since the Eastman era, but the older one with the Eyebrow Tuna videos is still up too (that I noted here).  I bet there's other stuff out there I don't know about.


All this takes me back to the early days of Heavy Metal on the internet, and the forum that led to my little blog, full of Eastman promises and early troll dumbfuckery, as well as adding depth and breadth to my HM worldviews.


So it's nice to know someone is still trying to keep HM on the internet, and I hope they get some help soon.