I first came in contact with Betty “Mankiller” Barnes in 2007 during the promotion of Vision Éternel’s first album. I was adding people like crazy on myspace, and she was one of the cool ones who actually listened to the stuff and talked to me about it. We kept in touch for a little while, and later that year, after the recording of the second album, she told me she was putting together a compilation for animal liberation. I have to be honest that although I always liked animals, my concern with the compilation wasn’t at first with the pets. It was mostly to get some more attention.
Over time, many bands dropped off and were added on. This is the most complete list of bands I’ve been able to compile that were associated at one time or another:
- Atavist
- Audio Sodomy
- Benediction
- Black Noise Cannon
- Caina
- Capitalist Casualties
- Christdriver
- Circle of Dead Children
- Crippled Black Phoenix
- Defonc4
- Discordance Axis
- Downtune Despondency
- Dropdead
- Elusive Travel
- Godflesh
- Godstomper
- Iron Mtn
- Jesu
- Lethal Aggression
- Mouth Sewn Shut
- Mucopus
- Napalm Death
- No Future For Us
- Nov23 Soundsystem
- Overmars
- Scarred For Life
- The Communion
- Troglodyte
- Venomous Concept
- Versus the Stillborn Minded
I sent her a b-side from the second recording session I had called “Season in Seclusion”. In the beginning, when it was announced publicly in March of 2007, NotCommon Records was set to release the CD. But a month later, Rich Horror had decided to end his record label and form a new one, Obscenity Cult Records, which was hoping to release the compilation sometime in late 2007 or early 2008. It was the first real compilation that I was going to be part of, and I was a little too excited. I kept asking her about it and wanted to know when this thing was going to come out! What I didn’t know back then was that benefit compilations work with donations and volunteer work. And the label that had vouged devotion to it was looking at making money and not at helping out. Not to mention he was hoping to get laid with Betty, haha. So after pestering her for a couple months we got into an argument and I was no longer part of the compilation. We didn’t speak for about three years after that. I got in touch with her recently, and the compilation never came out anyway.
“Season in Seclusion” was later added on the compilation “An Anthology of Past Misfortunes”, and I would go further to say that it sort of became the song “Thoughts as Years” on the third EP.
The most up to date version of what would have been the cover