Although he's been active in the Houston street art scene for almost a decade, the work of the artist known as Give Up has only recently begun to gain wider attention within the larger extreme art underground. His work has been featured on numerous blogs over the past year such as Hammer Smashed Sound (which is where I learned of him) and Cvlt Nation, and he has created several shirt designs and record sleeves including one for the UK hardcore band Rot In Hell. When I saw his stuff posted on HSS, I was instantly attracted to Give Up's stark, high-contrast black and white images. They reminded me of old hardcore punk 7" sleeves from the 80's, or the ascetic designs of Industrial cassettes, or the heavily saturated black spaces found in Xeroxed black metal fanzines. Once I investigated his stuff further and found that there were a couple of books and zines that Give Up has produced, I snatched up everything that I could get my hands on, and found that this guy has produced a hefty amount of work, ranging from extensive and ambitious guerilla-style street art pieces to Xerox-damage collages to abstract landscapes. And it's all consumed with visions of urban decay, Satanic symbols, death and dissolution, drug abuse, eroticism, violence, and an overall nihilistic attitude that appeals to my general worldview. The bottom line is that I love feeding my eyes with Give Up's art, and his massive softbound book collections are filled to the brim with this stuff. He's received most of his accolades for the actual street art that he has plastered all across Houston, but fans of grimy zine art, nightmarish Xerox atrocities, and graphic design steeped in both occult and dystopian ideas would probably be hooked by Give Up's negatory, inky hallucinations.

The latest issue of Give Up's obscure long-running art zine Hate Fuck is the tenth, bound in a black cardstock cover with grey/silver screen printed art. And it get right to it, blasting your eyes as soon as you open this chapbook up with sixty pages of nightmarish poster designs, grisly close-ups of animal skulls in negative, more references and symbols from the Process Church, blasphemous anti-Xtian Xerox vomit, feral wolves, goats, and other demonic imagery. And as always, I can't get enough of this stuff. Give Up also incorporated sheets of transparent acetate into the book to create a cool visual effect for several pages where black images on the acetate overlay other images in the zine. It's all very cool looking, and recommended for fans of occult collage art, and the simple stark art aesthetic of old hardcore and industrial records, which are no doubt a big influence on Give Up's style.