Metal Inside(r) Home Quarantine is Metal Insider’s new column during this time of isolation due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We asked artists five questions on what’s been keeping them busy ranging from their favorite movies, food they’ve been eating, music they’ve been listening to and more. We caught up with Charlie Looker of Psalm Zero as he’s been spending this time building up his YouTube channel.
What have you been doing to pass time during Quarantine?
I haven’t been writing much music the past couple months actually. My main project has been building up my YouTube channel. I do a mix of music talk, cultural criticism, and philosophy. I do some solo videos, and I also do live streams with brilliant weirdos I meet online.
Have you been listening to any music or have any playlists worth checking out?
Here’s a disease-themed YouTube playlist I made for quarantine. Death and black metal.
A lot of people have been spending this time cooking including making their own bread, what food have you been prepping during this time?
My girl has been making amazing biscuits from scratch. She’s a legitimately great cook. As for myself, I just keep cooking pasta with some crumbled hot sausage and Rao’s marinara, which is without question the best sauce you can buy in a jar. It’s legendary. I eat this several times a week. I’m a creature of habit.
In terms of entertainment, what movies, TV shows, books, or games have been keeping you busy?
Book-wise, I’ve been loving Fred Moten’s In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. He’s an African-American post-colonial/Black studies scholar who writes a lot about jazz, politics, and race. Wild, galaxy-brain philosophy that’s also really beautiful and poetic. I’ve also been getting into Peter Sloterdijk, who’s a more right-leaning (or perhaps just pessimistic) thinker. His book Rules for the Human Zoo is an uncomfortable read about Heidegger, Nietzsche, and the limits of humanism.
What advice do you have for your fans in isolation during this time?
Just completely accept and embrace how utterly insane this all is, and that the entire rest of our lives may be completely different (worse). If you can, try to have some sense of humor about the fact that, even before Covid, it was already apparent that human life on earth, or at the very least the “modern world,” is in a state of irreversible decline. So throwing a plague on top of that, it’s like hey why not?
