SHEL PLOCK
PRESENT: THIS IS WHAT I AM DOING NOW
Announcements
Jan 2024
The new album has taken shape. Featuring 11 new death-tingued country-and-western songs, the album will be realeased in the front half of the year. There will be an accompanying solo tour, so expect details of that before long.
Oct 2023
Back in the studio. This time with some new songs and some new arrangements of some old songs. Looks like Grave Domain II will be wrapped up sometime towards the end of this year or the beginning of the next. And it's looking like it is going to have a lot of acoustic guitar on it.
Aug 2023
New Release: Grave Domain (Weirdjazz | Digital & Cassette)
"Getting back to my roots a bit, this is a new album of heavy music framed conceptually around the notion that there is a place between this life and whatever follows that is populated by ghosts, psychopomps, and a variety of spirits."
Think: Heavy Metal | Gothic Rock | Horror Punk
February 2023
New Album: Arcade Moon Echoes
Released on Bandcamp and the evil streaming services on 03 February 2023. Will be catalogued in the Weirdjazz archive.
“It’s been awhile and I couldn’t just come back into releasing music as though nothing has happened,” said Shelly, “So, I approached this recording as the distillation of the musical habits that I’ve engaged in over the last dozen or so years. I'm coming back in after a long time out in the field and offering something up for peer review. Having my son along for the ride is a bonus.”
Think: Paranormal Jazz
2023
Grave Domain
(Weirdjazz)
2022
Arcade Moon Echoes
(Weirdjazz)
2007
The Violencestring
(Umlaut / Fall)
2002
Drug Warriors
(Ringing Boots)
New Music
Grave Domain: Released: 04 August 2023 (Weirdjazz WJ20230002)
Grave Domain emerged in 2022. The gloomy but overstimulated brainchild of Shel Plock.
"Something of a concept album... the new collection introduces a 'host of characters' with a prevailing horror theme, track by track. Grave Domain leans into its influences as a 'pastiche of heavy metal, hard rock, and gothic influences derived from music, comic books, and horror novels alike, stitched together like some Frankenstein’s monster with a taste for the anthemic.'" — Wildfire
"Baltimore based Grave Domain is the one-man metal/hard rock/goth creation of one Shel Plock who took the name from a character he found flipping through a Dungeons & Dragons spell book. Proudly lo-fi in attitude, Grave Domain thunder through such songs as 'Death Notices' and 'Across the Acheron' with a rabid kaleiodoscopic energy, enhanced with strains of psyched-out 70s synthesizer for cheap splatter movie soundtrack effect. Plock signs/burns out with 'Deth Bed' [sic], a great, mad rant squawked through a shredded microphone, as a roiling junk-heap of broken electric guitars and crushed electronics crashes behind him."
— The Wire (Issue 475 September 2023)
Arcade Moon Echoes: Released: 03 February 2023 (Weirdjazz WJ20230001)
Inspired by the architecture, ambience, and haunted charm of Glen Echo Park — an historic amusement park just outside of the District of Columbia — this album features improvised electric guitar and alto saxophone getting sometimes melodic and sometimes shambolic over spooky synths and a blend of electronic and acoustic beats.
"Shelly excels at imagining, creating, and inhabiting new idea-spaces. It is incredibly fun to hear this kind of world-building approach applied to the making of a record... Time both stretched and compressed. Infinite and impossible. Familiar and yet surreal. A waking dream that you can revisit over and over again." — Rose Burt
It's a bit of jazz and a bit of not-jazz with a shadowy late evening feel — right for setting the tone for an after-hours stroll across the grounds of an old haunted amusement park.