THE LIGHTHOUSE FAMILY

SKOZEY FETISCH LIVE @ PUBIS NOIR/RAVE RAT

Ice Bird Spiral pal Skozey Fetisch gets down w/ some serious analogue reel-ta-reel tape manipulation (and early 90's video-transitions that woulda driven Stakker extemely green w/ envy if they'd known they could be done in 2009 w/ plug-ins; S'retroheadfuckware, innit; 5:52-in is pretty amzin' tho):



Go, Skozey, go!

Yeah.

CONE ZEROVIEW W/ D F LEWIS

Since the Cone Zero anthology has (quite deservedly!) been nominated for a British Fantasy Award for Best Anthology, the Black Static site is running an interview with editor D F Lewis (one of the great unsung heroes of Brit.Wyrd.Lit)...but the twist is that they've asked various writers from Cone Zero (incl. myself) to do the interview.

You can't buy this book in Ottakars, but you can buy it here.

Meanwhile, Kek'm proud, honoured and chuffed to be able to host one of Des' own short stories - "The Hoop Cycle" - over on The Kek-w Quarterly.

And if you're a member of The British Fantasy Society, then please check this anthology and vote for it. Votes close on Aug 1st. Cheers.

TE OCH SARDINER: THE MEGAMIX

Summer wouldn't be summer without a superfresh megamix from my Finnish pal DJ Müßta Kirahvi. This one's hot from the oven:

Here.

Official Not Kid Shirt Health Warning: this product may contain traces of Paul Hardcastle, Mandy Perriment, Kompleksi and, uh, Ted Nugent.

For serious Electro-Fonk SuperFreaks only. Get a drunk on n check it.

PARTY FOLKS SHOUT-OUT

Best of luck to Jayson, Pat, Evil John, Candace, Dustin, John L and the rest of the cast n crew of "Party Girl" who're knee-deep in blood n body-parts this weekend, somewhere in Corsicana, Texas, in a 1970's shed cum shack cum wkshop cum industrial unit (once used as an animal stable n makeshift knocking-shop), filming in 94 degrees (under 100 is considered mild this time of year, or so Jayson tells me). Principle photography, innit. The various location shots I've seen look creepy as fuck.

Good luck, you mad, wonderful bastards.

It's gonna be brilliant.

FLYING LOTUS: GLENDALE GALLERIA

Okay, so maybe thawing slightly to Flying Lotus - "Glendale Galleria" (Tectonic) is swirling cough-syrup samples and gelatine beats; the sound of jelly setting. It fits in with some of my current micro-obsessions: hypermoderne exotica and ketaminised architecture. Slooow 4am neon eyeball flicker.



The idea that music is a form of architecture itself; a construction, an artifice, but one that also has the capability of describing The Other...'places', buildings, both real and imagined.

Have always loov'd the word "Galleria"; it exudes a whiff of Calif.Exotica...of Ballardian Mall.Spaces; the hollowed-out, the vacuous and the empty. Shopping at twilight. It describes a type of 'place'; a state of mind; a retail transit.zone that didn't fully come into being here until early 80s (late 70s at most). I caught sight of it in London on a couple o'occasions around '81, '82 - and maybe in Bristol once, too: certain types of low-level bleached pine shelves, the way the staff folded and laid out the garments in designer clothes-shops, the light, the displays, the space...

Up until then I'd never realised that even the placement of retail objects - the display of fewer things, rather than more - could be pre-loaded w/ all sorts of cultural signifiers. I was just a po' boy up from the (West) Country, with no formal art training, who knew nothing of the ways of Design with a capital D. I knew nothing about anything. Still don't, in fact; still guessing, probing, peeking round corners...

Where I came from, shops just more or less stacked stuff up and either sold it or didn't. We'd just exited the Seventies. I didn't realise Design was a Science. And, then, to be confronted by, erm, Retail Design: well...I dunno, it felt like The Future was still coming; it was, y'know, just another aspect of impending futurity, like, uh, Electro, or something. I didn't realise it was also the start of trickle-down Thatcher Big-Town Boom-Economics.

Then, all of a sudden, that Peter York bloke was everywhere. And The Face. And Neville Brody... and everyone was talking about Design and how things looked...and how it was suddenly important that things looked 'right', whereas before things just 'were'. They seemed to exist unto themselves without any explanation or back-story.

Design recast as Cultural Exposition.



And - rewiiind: that's how the word "Galleria" still makes me feel. It's that first moment of seeing something - some elusive, abstract aspect of retail.architecture that I didn't/couldn't quite recognise or grok. That doesn't happen any more. Well, hardly ever. The Future slipped away. It was soaked up by a thirsty sponge called Greed. But that word still makes me feel that way.

(caught myself increasingly using the first-person here; is this Canonical, then?)

It's an empty, nothing word is "Galleria" and in America it has completely utterly different connotations - something banal, but I don't care - I've got my fingers in my ears now; I don' wanna hear - I don't want to know the truth - I want that word to remain exotic and elusive to me: a bubble of Faux-European Americana.

But this is the point at wh/ 'America' - or rather the concept of 'America' - floats away and becomes something unfathomably alien to me; an idea - something I can't comprehend; another planet. I like that America.



(I remember hearing Moon Zappa say "Galleria" in her Andreas Wolfson voice - her at 3am in her dressing-gown in dad's studio (he's just got her out of bed) - and when I first heard heard that word spoken in ValleySpeak it sounded like the start of a new language, a new human sub-species splitting off; divergent evolution. Shallow and self-obsessed, but a new species nevertheless. And she was documenting it. That moment was another kind of futurity to me. )

But back to the music: it's got that shimmer, that swirl; a sense of nocturnal motion, of being inexplicably carried forward, lost in a limbo retail zone. Don't call it Wonky. Call it Woozy.

Are we moving? Or is everything else moving relative to us? It's like a dream, everything's lost in a blur of light and shadow; the banal becomes mysterious again, a fiction...we're a few seconds out of sync with the rest of the world; we percieve it as a series of after-images, a vague warm neon glow...the physical world seems out of reach somehow, never quite coming into focus.

The Present, Future and Past have somehow overlapped. This is how The Future feels now; it's wrapped up in some respun aspect of its own past; the two have become intertwined somehow. This is how it's going to be from now on.

We are in The Galleria now.

The Galleria.

PUNKY MEADOWS / ANGEL

Angel: "The Tower".



Nice Moog! (oh, crikey - a ribbon-controller! haven't seen one of those in a while.)

Angel were, of course, immortalised by FZ on "Punky's Whips".

Damn. Just realised don't actually own any albums by Angel; must remedy that.

NACKT INSECTEN LIVE

Nackt Insecten playing live on the Glasgow tube between St. Enoch and St. Georges X station, 7th Feb 2008, as part of the Instal 08 fest.

INCOMING: EROKOISDANCE 13: "JUHANNUS 3008" BY MALLISTO

Release date: August 2009
Running time: 18+ minutes
File under: electronics, ambient synth folk, psychedelia, pop, home recording.



"Mallisto, founded in Helsinki by Christer Nuutinen (kb/v) and Jukka Vallisto (bg) in the mid-nineties, was active off and on for several years with slightly varying line-ups. Nuutinen and Jenni Rope (kb/v) were present in most of the incarnations, either as a duo or with Vallisto, and later with Ilja Karsikas on guitar.

"A year or so of semi-active live playing (at events ranging from ordinary club gigs to art-show openings and private house-warming parties in tiny student flats) gradually saw the band's output evolve from childish instrumental electro-pop to a peculiar lo-fi sound, mixing synth pop and psychedelia. The only recording to enter the public sphere during Mallisto’s active phase was the self-released EP "Polku", performed and produced in 2000 by Nuutinen and Rope as a duo.

"Quite sadly, as the band continued to further refine its trademark sound — finally maturing into their very own specific blend of Lofi Ambient Folk Pop — their active phase also seemed to slowly, but firmly grind to a halt. Today, not even the members of Mallisto themselves are sure if the group still exists.

"Juhannus 3008" compiles 5 tracks, originally recorded in separate sessions, during a timespan of almost 15 years, but still managing to sound coherent as a single, solid body of work.

"Here, a charming array of old electric pianos, organs and beautiful analog synths are paired with frail lullaby vocals and the occasional hand-picked guitar to a most enchanting effect. Melodies — melancholic, warm and inviting — hover mid-air, gently held afloat in the almost invisible, ethereal embrace of buzzing oscillators, reversed tape-loops and a strange kind of audible silence. The bands instantly recognisable sound is simultaneously both rich and humble, intimate and spacious."

Audio-snippet.

Available (soon!) from here.

MY NEW ARM

THE MASTER MUSICIANS OF BUKKAKE

Appearing at The Croft, Bristol, on 23rd July.

SIGNS #3

Uh, yeah.

Looks like Nikki Sudden's old pal Dave Kusworth is playing Yeovil on saturday night. Unfortunately - as is always the case when someone interesting actually plays my hometown (ie Turner Cody) - I'll be somewhere else.

Hitting tha road w/ my peeps for a coupla days; but will checking in via Blogger/Twitter if I can find free/cheap wireless in whatever hellhole we end up in. The Mystery Machine is outside revving up...

ALL CITY SEVEN INCHERS

Call it Squee/Skwee, call it Dublin/Detroit Down-beat Boogie-Down, call Glaswegian G-Fonk.Wonk, call it - call it whatevr the fuck you like. To be honest, Kek wasn't (n still ain't) really feeling Flying Lotus when he saw him last year, but he's (finally! - yeah, like 15yrs after the fact) started to seriously warm to some of the more (cough-)syrupy-sounding abstract helium-voiced e.fonk stuff. Favourite bits're when it's collaged, chopped into snippets (the smaller the better) that hint at a wider, broader, wobblier canvas - a misplaced, miniature world of found.sound that seems to sit in some sidereal '80's/'00's NonNuum. And the 7" seems the perfect format. It's nice to sit and imagine what this is the soundtrack to - to what world do these brrrrpy-splatch splinter-beats belong?

A few more nudges - a few more philter'd VCOs and sluggish snip-n-paste neon-smeared android-snares - and it might even blossom into a full-on robotik G-Sexxxx romance.

Damn. Bring it awwwn, girl.







All City.

Mwëslee.

HudMo + Mike Slott = HOC.

THE (OFFICIAL) GEORGE LUCAS PROJECT UPDATE

Recent sparcity of bloggage mainly due to immersion in The (Official) George Lucas Project - not its real name o'course (that's a Non-Kek Secret) but it'll do for now. And, no, it's not fucking fan-fiction.

Anyway, this is all chudderin' along v. nicely, tho still a fair bit to go. Kek'm not the fastest of writers - and neither am he a slowcoach - ah, but those young turk Bizarros, some of whom recently chalked up 100 pages in a three day marathon *sigh*...well, guessing that most of 'em ain't got kids, etc, etc. Moorcock usedta write some of his early SciFant stuff in short-ish 10-14 day bouts and Keruoac, well, you know...

Kek's research has led him into all sorts o'interesting areas aside from Canonicity/Non-Canonicity (carpentry, animatronic puppetry, the post-structuralists, etc), so the damn thing'll eventually either make a major splash or get him sectioned or sued. Could go any way. The trick is not to lose yer nerve with these things.

Now, one of the story's main characters has to build something - a construct that's been designed within narrowband conceptual parameters, using non-metallic pseudo-early-80's tech, soooo decided it might be fun to try'n figure out how such a thing might have possibly be constructed back then in The 'Real' World. 'Course, it's not really feasible to make such a device, buuu-ut: if you were trying to do this back in the day, how might you approach the problem?

Luckily, one of my friends is a former aeronautical engineer (now on wheels) who just happened to do his doctorate back in the mid-80s, so he let me raid his dissertation for clues to the sort of background tech available in that era:




Yes, yes, I know: 'tis only a piece of fun fiction, but stuff like this helps 'me' imagine...plus: Kek could happily read 'tific papers n academic.lit til the cows come home. He was raised on Jack Kirby and The British Journal of Microbiology. Looove the dry descriptive narratives that inhabit these sort of texts - they're not plot-less, but Total Plot, w/ implicit characters, goals, values, etc - the footnotes, references, indices, hyperlinks to other secret knowledge: this is SubMetaFiction, part of some vast HyperNarrative that dwarfs the imagination.

Viral genetics get me off every time; they come complete w/ their own set of beautifully mind-boggling asthetics; it's as elegant as any great whodunit or piece of 'experimental' prose fiction. Intelligent Design: don't make me laff. Life is self-assembling, innit. Systems tend towards unimaginable levels of stacked hypercomplexity and sometimes you just have to sit back and dig the Nth-ness of it all.

Reading's fun. Learning's even better.

PRACTICAL REPTILE

"Inverts" - LOL!

RIP JOHN KEEL

V. sad to hear (via Robert @radionihilist) about the death of John Keel, one of Kid Shirt's favourite hyperstitional writers/theorists and a huge influence on my own personal alt.crank mythology.

HEAVY

Punch Drunk vinyls are so much heavier than their fellow Bristol labels - not metaphorically, but physically...the Guido twelve feels like it's made from dwarf-star matter. Or a 1959 Webern LP on Colombia. Almost impossible to lift. Have had to get local engineering firm to create a special test-rig to even play it. Our house has sunk deep into the earth since that record moved in - like that old ish of Tales of Suspense where Iron man ended up in the Mole Man's realm, at the bottom of an impossibly deep Stark Industries-funded drill-shift. Ah, Gene Colon.

Tom Ford's not a big guy, but he weighs in at 126,000 kilos. The Rooted Records shop has had to be underpinned by girders to stop Stokes Croft collapsing into the River Avon. Chris' T-shirts are heavier than a B&Q paving slab; no wonder everyone walks reet funny up the Gloucester Road. Knees buckling under the weight of superdense cotton.

A funny place, Bristol.

THE ILLUSTRATED HARLAN ELLISON

Yeaaah!



Charity-shop find. Two quid!

There's a 3-D Steranko story in it and the glasses are still all present n correct and undamaged.

Tom Sutton. Ralph Reese.

Yo!

Warren Ellis asks: "How many people could you house inside a dead whale?" An interesting conundrum. Are we gonna get species-specific on this? The whales, I mean.

Never much liked Dionne Warwick.

The Tories already have the Beeb in their gunsights along w/ public sector pensions.

Is the BBC's current Drama shutdown partially in anticipation of a funding-siege when Cameron and Co. get into power?

Poor auld Blue Oyster Cult. Let's be honest: it was all over for them by '75.

Gah. Made a cup of tea 40 minutes ago, but forgot to drink it. Thwarted by pesky kids; no, not in the Scooby-Doo sense.

JC was right on the number w/ Brain Donor and "Bogus Metal" trope.

Finally time for a Post-GnR revolution - not of smack-dabblin' rebel badboys, but big-haired, spandex n dry-ice axe-worshippers.

Not 'ironic'/comedic festival fodder like The Darkness, but a legit. committed new gen of Poodle Metal/Heavy Soft-M Rockers.

Now that Alt/Avant.Metal, Doom, etc has finally caught, time for a Hair Metal Revival.

Or maybe no one cared enuff; too busy getting off their tits on e or chasing 2nd-gen indie-acts.