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Articles by Heather Drain
How synth pioneer Mort Garson shaped early electronic music
Sun 15 June 2025 12:52, UK When people talk about the pioneers of electronic music, several key names are invoked. Musique concrète founder Pierre Schaeffer, Karlheinz Stockhausen, John Cage and Moog-goddess Wendy Carlos, just to mention a few. But one name that does not get invoked nearly enough is Mort Garson.
Mike White May: Underseen Milos Forman Films
Special Guest: Stacy Keach Guest Co-Hosts: Heather Drain , Jedidiah Ayres Based on a book by and adapted by Leonard Gardner , Fat City... Special Guests: Jonathan Penner , Dan Rosen Guest Co-Hosts: Rob St. Mary , Martin Kessler We continue talking about comedic films ... Special Guests: Chris Elliott , Adam Resnick Guest Co-Hosts: Mike Sullivan Hey... Wanna buy a monkey? Cabin Boy ( 1994 ) is an a...
Hole in the Heart, Blood Under the Floor: Fhiona-Louise’s Cold Light of Day
True crime is a category that is equal only to romance, horror, and pornography in terms of both mass appeal and repulse. The fans are all incredibly ardent, at times to a worrisome degree to anyone who is not excited. Romance is often about as critically respected as a karaoke track. Horror has gotten a little more respectable over the years but is still treated as juvenile at best and sheer exploitation at worst.
Flesh is Chaos: Happy Birthday, Tinto Brass
How does one exactly define a filmmaker, much less a man, like Tinto Brass? Oh, let’s count the ways, starting with provocateur, auteur, ass-obsessed, movie director, subversive, sleazy, uncompromising, golden, offensive, vital, brilliant, gutsy, and most importantly, artistic. Tinto Brass is the type of pure spirit that is automatically not going to be for everyone.
MUSIC FROM HELL - MOVIES FROM HELL
Alright punks, this is it, our very first episode of MUSIC FROM HELL. Inspired by our friend Heather Drain, from MondoHeather.com, we take a wild, open-ended ride through underground video music, proto-mtv promotional video and more, all with an eye (and ear) for what we think are some of the most original and interesting pre (and post) mtv video creations we could squeeze into a spectacularly entertaining (Heather’s fault) 3 hrs.
Matryoshka Cha-Cha: Fermo Posta Tinto Brass & IsTintoBrass
Rebel. It’s a loaded word, especially in a pre-current-post apocalyptic world where the promise of an edge is something dangerous and sexy. It’s the edge of a pristine blade that whispers to the inner feral within. However, like so many sharpened surfaces, they can become dulled and their sheen robbed by pop culture commercialism and status quo dullards. You learn that many like the glossy whisper of the word but are actually repelled by the nitty gritty work of being an actual, true blue rebel.
Mondo Midnight Movies Goes Straight to Hell
Mondo Midnight Movies Goes Straight to Hell Mondo Midnight Movies is more than just a cult film podcast. It is the show that delves into the lesser known and loved movies in the outer fringes of cinema. For every big dog crossover title like Rocky Horror or Pink Flamingos, there are several that remain on the bench, never quiet being called down to the floor. Until now. This show as an idea was created by Mike "McBeardo" McPadden, Heather Drain, and Benjamin Reiser.
The Freak Out Chameleon & the Cinematic World of Al Adamson
The eye of a common director is a simple lens. Focused, uncomplicated, and infused by whatever pseudo-calm and palatable vision they are honing for the major and minor leagues out there in filmland. Al Adamson, on the other hand, was far from a common director. The man possessed a vision that was akin to a carnival funhouse run by brilliant but mad carnies all hopped up on goofballs and 3 tabs of dirty acid.
Electronic Voyager: In Praise of Ruth White
“Through the Unknown, we’ll find the New.” Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal Pioneers are a rare breed born in a world that is often resistant to real change and vision. People tend to like their change like it’s leftover takeout, all reheated with the illusion of freshness. So when a person bravely forges their own path into a land still forming, it is the special inching into the sacred.
Summer Wine: Brandon Colvin’s A Dim Valley
Strawberries, cherries and an angel’s kiss in spring My summer wine is really made from all these things “Summer Wine” Nancy Sinatra & Lee Hazelwood There is a strange magic about the summertime. The sun shines the brightest, taking the beauty of illumination while bringing the pain of heat and burnt skin.The air grows thick with humidity, adding a dreamy heaviness to the countryside, while mirages can take on all kinds of forms.
Love in the Rushes: Jeff Koons' Made in Heaven
In a world that is riddled from the basest form of life onward with war, poverty, rape, and strife, fewer things seem to anger Westerners more than modern art.
Darted in Your Armchair: The Tubes Ask the Question, What Do You Want From Live?
“Rock & Roll? They’re gonna cram it down your throat!” gleefully threatens dancer, choreographer, and current-day film director, Kenny Ortega, looking like, for all the world, a disco Dracula. (Which is, of course, a fantastic look.) Many a band can try to grab at such a macho-man-aggro claim, but in the case of The Tubes, they owned it like the biggest peacock at the rock and roll zoo.
American Haunt: Fear, Phobias, Family & Sanguinary Delights
The Halloween season is magical for its multitudes of possibilities. It’s hard to come up with a major holiday that gives such free reign to explore fear, surprise, and celebrate the thinning of the veil between the living and the dead. (The bounty of candy typically doesn’t hurt either.) One of the most popular ways to get your metaphorical bleeding into literal spook-on is to get your mitts on a ticket to your hopefully not-too-friendly local haunted house.
We Live for Love: A Guide for Art Preservation & Not Being a Dick
By Heather Drain “Rules are made to be broken. Can’t kill what you don’t understand.” – Wendy O. Williams “Love is the Law, Love Under Will.” – Aleister Crowley Art can motivate us to change the world (and clean the house). Loving art is an incredibly rich and rewarding relationship. When your mind and heart are open to all kinds of expression, the world is your veritable oyster. When it’s fun, it can bring some much-needed cheer to a rough day/month/year.
So You Want to Be a Writer?
So let me hear you out, you want to be a writer? Cool, we could possibly be tribe! I’m talking howling at the moon, libations, and an intrinsic understanding. Soon, the reveries will begin! But before we become full on blood brothers and sisters and drink from the same glass, I have a few questions for you. First of all, why do you want to write? Feels basic enough but sometimes the simplest of questions can have a puzzle box of answers. The reason I write is because I really don’t have a choice.
Don’t Click on This Link or ELSE!: Aka The Clickbait Rant
Social media is a vessel of communication that is often both a blessing and a curse. It’s all in the motion of the virtual ocean and if a positive connection with our fellow humans is the vibrant sea life that thrives and spawns, then creatures like hot takes and clickbait are the Coney Island Whitefish washing upon the shore. At the very least, they’re a hamburger wrapper mucking up something inherently magical. We’ve all seen them.
Sonic Seraphim: The Interstellar Voices of Klaus Nomi & King Diamond
Angels in the musical arts have gotten a bad reputation. Not even bad in a colorful, smoking-in-the-boys-room kind of way, but bad in a cliched and whitewashed way. Simpy, bloodless, with nary an ounce of passion and power. Once portrayed as creatures that possessed a fierce range of emotions who sported the faces and limbs from a variety of animals, how did such powerful creatures get their wings clipped and used to push the safest of music?
Darted in Your Armchair: The Tubes in What Do You Want From Life?
“Tell me how you want it. And that’s how we’ll play it” “Up From the Deep”-The Tubes In the wilds of the United States, in the middle-of-the-back-road small cities, the big towns, and even the little burgs, there’s always a song to be sung and music to be made. It’s the kind of tunes and expressions that give an unfiltered eye–sometimes loving, other times cynical, but always with a knowing wink, into the pop cultural and societal meat of America.
Who Can Touch Us When We Run?: The Pain & Beauty of Strange Advance
Serendipity. It’s defined by Merriam-Webster as, “the faculty or phenomenon of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for.” It’s also a force that takes you through an unexpected back road that leads to some of the best and most unforgettable paths. There is nothing that could better describe how the band Strange Advance come upon my own battered and thirsty shores.
MotorWay City Midways, Middle Fingers, & Mayhem: Creem-Rock & Roll's Only Magazine
Capturing lightning in a bottle is not half as hard as folks make it out to be. You just have to find the right combination of brains, vision, full hearts, piss with the vinegar, money, stimulants of all sorts of variety, testicular AND ovular fortitude, and a way with words that makes the eyes stop, pop, and simmer! Shit.
Minor Roles & Major Players:The Top 5 Small Parts in Cult Cinema
In the world of cinema, theater, and even mere prose, it is always the lead characters who get all the royal attention. After all, they are typically the pinpoints on the map of the story, so it makes sense. But much like life itself, sometimes the best parts are the smaller yet finer details. It's those seemingly wee moments that shine bright like a planet in the interstellar distance.
Nights in Black Leather: An Interview with Ask Any Buddy Creator, Evan Purchell
Film preservation is a vital act that comes in many forms. The most obvious and important approach is restoring and preserving an actual film itself, but right behind it is something equally special and often overlooked. It is the act of planting the seeds of curiosity and proving how important certain types of art and expression are. This is precisely what Evan Purchell has done with his work of film montage art entitled Ask Any Buddy.
I Love the Night: Kathryn Bigelow's Near Dark
“We thought we were driving SouthIn our late model hearseWe had no clue we were headedFrom bad to worse” “The Vampire Roadtrip” by The Hammerdowns There is something so quintessentially American about road trips. I’m not talking about a new-ish SUV careening down major highways and byways, leading you to chain hotels and eateries that are as about authentic and pure as a televangelist’s intentions. No. A real road trip is through the back roads that vein out through small town and no town America.
Ode to the Amazons: Feminism, Cheesecake, & the Art of Being Fearless
Inspiration. It’s that bolt of blue that hits every living creature, from when we’re learning to crawl until we are leaning towards the grave. What or who inspires us is varied, which is fantastic! After all, what’s more visually striking—a vivid rainbow after a heavy rainstorm or a row of beige trousers flanked by yogurt? Exactly, though if the latter inspires you? That’s great too! All of this is part of evolving and growing, both individually and as a human collective.
Floridian Grand Guignol: A Lookback on Terror on Church Street
Coming out of certain mouths, the word tourist can seem dirty. Downright nasty, if the speaker has enough of a chip on their hunched in, tense shoulders. But everyone is a tourist at some point in their lives. Travelling abroad or being a hormone-ridden, misfit-teen sitting in the backseat of your folks Nissan on a road trip throughout Southern Florida in the 1990s, we are all tourists.
A Dream Within a Dream: A Moment with Jeffrey Combs
Great performative art is one that is often built like the most nourishing and simultaneously decadent layer cake. This is exactly the image and sentiment I felt when I first heard about Jeffrey Combs, an actor near and dear to all of us fringe-film-culture loving misfit elves, doing a one-man-stage-show as legendary genre-defining writer Edgar Allan Poe.
Sky Blue Ice Dawn: 'The Soldier' (1982)
I’ve got spies. They’re coming to get you. From Berlin to Rome, Bangkok, Germany. – Spies, Roni Griffith It takes a lot less to end the world. – The Soldier If ever there was a downright halcyon time for the action film genre, it was the 1980s. The decade was positively brimming with ultra-violence and ultra-conservatism, because, hey, one extreme will beget another every time.
Holiday Hari-Kiri, or The Top 5 Holiday Albums That Will Make Your Ear Drums NOT Want to Commit Seppuku
Standing underneath the unflinching fluorescent lights in your local grocery store, you start wondering what Lovecraftian entity came up with the idea for a food item called “Uncrustable,” and a song hits your ears.
Hidden Habits: Elly Kenner & Norman Thaddeus Vane’s The Black Room
Need and desire are twin forces that often intertwine around each other, sometimes coiling so tight that it’s hard to see where one begins and the other ends. This is often how addictions can be nurtured, but it is also how life itself can begin too. Such human condition elements are positively rich with all manners of potential in the horror genre, especially where vampires are concerned.
Picture Music: Volume One - Beyond the Music Video Rainbow
If there is a redheaded stepchild of the creative arts, the music video format is it. Literature, music, theater, even the L’Enfant terrible that is cinema, all have their “respectable” champions and preservationists. Music video, on the other hand, has often been regarded as historically vital as a car commercial.
Devil in the Woods: Love, Lust, Death & Life in 1980s American Post-Punk Part Two - The Seven Days in the West Edition
“You’ve come a long way, I know, you got a longer drive aheadthrough the bones of a buffalo, through the claims of the western deadand just like the spokes of a wheel you’ll spin ’round with the rest,you’ll hear the drums and the brush of steel,you’ll hear the call of the west.” “Call of the West” by Wall of Voodoo A wise man once said that all good things come in two parts.
‘Punk Rock’: Porno and New York City punk collide in this gritty 1977 X-rated crime drama
‘Punk Rock’: Porno and New York City punk collide in this gritty 1977 X-rated crime drama Mixing a 1940’s style noir detective film with the grittiness of mid 1970’s New York City is the peanut butter firmly engulfed in the sleaziest of chocolate. Throw in the then still-fresh punk movement and you will have the bittersweet treat of Carter Stevens’ 1977 film Punk Rock.
Contributors
Susan Leighton has written for many entertainment sites including 1428 Elm, VHS Revival, Cult Faction, The Queen of Style, TV Series Hub, Heroic Hollywood, That's My E and Crash Palace. She is known for her interviews with genre icons, Bruce Campbell, Joe Lansdale, Joe Bob Briggs, Dee Wallace, Michael Ironside, Jeffrey Combs, Josh Becker, Danny Hicks, Brent Jennings and Alice Krige.
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