THE LAST MOVIE

The last movie, the last actor, the last director...



Gallo, Korine....it all comes back to him, don't it? It all comes back to Dennis.

Stoned immaculate.

God bless you, Dennis Hopper.

Thanks for the ride.

Warren, here, showing us how to do it properly.

A rather fucking wonderful 6-page sequence by anybody's standards, I think.

Fanboy - yeah, you over there! - you are now officially Ellis' comicbook bitch.

Another quick plug for our show at The Orange Box on sunday:



Some promo-blurb from Simon C:

POP PARKER (PJ HARVEY & JOHN PARISH tour support in North America last year), JACK HARRISON’S new band (“Awesome” according to the bearded gent in Café Nero), DESIGN (Simon Chesterfield’s new band) and HACKER FARM (‘Scene’ stealers at Yeovil’s ‘Weekender’ event in March) all on one bill? And tickets only £4? Surely not?

Doors 7pm, DJ Alan Flint
The Orange Box, Tabernacle Lane, Yeovil, Somerset BA20 1QA

PRAKASH JOHN!

REALLY NOT THAT FUSSED ABOUT BROADCAST

So, I went to see Broadcast about two or three weeks ago.

I don’t like ‘em much – in fact, I think “'Broadcast and The Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age'” is (one of) the most over-rated album-objects of the last year or so – so I assumed I’d almost certainly hate their live show, but – what the hell – thought I might as well check them out anyway. You never know.

Anyway, I accidentally got, um, stoned prior to the show, which turned out to be a brilliantly counter-intuitive way to approach the whole situation. Anything H-word-related tends to attract theory-heavy reviews n pieces by assorted whitebread bloggers n so forth, so what better way to tackle this than to get slightly trashed.

Band were already on-stage when we rolled up. “Mmmm. Quite like this one,” I said to Farmer Glitch as we looked for a good spot to hang. “It’s a bit psychedelic.” (Well, duh, Kek – Ed.) Actually, I was more kinda surprised n shocked that I didn’t totally detest the music.

“Hrrrm,” he replied, in a post-verbal, semi-affirmative.

Next song, def. not so convinced. Despite high internal THC levels, my onboard bullshit detectors were quickly coming back on-line. All my niggles about their recorded work started to resurface. Couldn’t climb into the music; it was too, ermmmm, mannered, I guess. There was a layer of innate contrivance that thwarted any attempt to connect. Neither danceable, nor engaging/immersive (despite film-show); just not interesting or genuinely weird, beguiling or novel enough for my liking. Too dry / slow / ‘bogus’ / up-tight / boring to draw me in.

((I’m amazed at some critics use of words like “Weird”, “Uncanny”, “Cosmic” when describing stuff that clearly, er, ain’t. Wait, no, H-music is supposed to be ‘weird’ in a terribly English, sub-surface, John Wyndham sorta way. Except that doesn’t really come over when the Contrivance Factor is set to 10. Also – while I genuinely don’t subscribe to Weirdness-for-Weirdness sake lifestyle choices – I can’t help think that maybe some people have just led a bit of a sheltered upbringing. Just please don’t take the W-Word in vain, assorted writerguys.))

Back at gig:

Vocals were annoyingly flat / off-key, and not in a charming way either. Everything soaked in the same pre-set echo.

The thing about trying to recreate certain music-forms, espesh psychedelia / acid-folk is that there’s far more to the music than just the effects-boxes you use; it’s about vibe n mood n intent (accidental or otherwise) as much as texture. Broadcast lack sympathy or feel for the music-forms they’re parodying / pastiche-ing / playing homage to. Without that 'feel', the music sounds hollow, emptied out. A container lacking content.

If they are actually fans of this sort of music, then it really doesn’t show on either the recordings or in the live-performance. The end-product comes off as dry and academic. An ill-fated, 4th-gen recreation of something that was once interesting.

Of course I get that some of these elements are supposed to deliberately come into play when we’re talking about music of a (ptui!) ‘hauntological’ nature; that there should be some sort of, grrragh, ontological ‘distancing’ involved or what K-Punk calls “positive amateurism” (something I def. subscribe to myself)... but – you know what – I just ain’t fucking feeling the music.

It just doesn’t work for me. And if it takes a layer of theories to prop up half-arsed psych-pop parodies or whatever they are, then forget it, folks. The end-point project has to work as a thing in itself. And this didn’t / don’t.

I think I read somewhere Broadcast were influenced by a band called The United States of America. By coincidence I was listening to some USA stuff a week or so ago on an old vinyl I’ve got. I like it. It’s the polar-opposite of Broadcast: warm, engaging, funny, passionate, streetsmart-yet-dumb, countercultural.

Real.

This has all got me wondering about the appeal of Broadcast and their contemporaries to certain critical bods. I can’t help think that the layers of irony - the blatant ‘falseness’ of the music - are part of the allure; that despite all the “wow, weren’t the 70’s / sapphire and steel / tripods / public information films weird” talk, all this conceptual distancing of assorted h-word project-objects from their psychfolk / concrete / accousmatic forefathers is actually necessary in order for the dadcritics to climb onboard. This all whiffs of some sort of, I dunno, fear of cultural contamination; controlfreak-o-phobia.

I mean, God forbid you might actually like some original early 70’s acid-folk records. Y’know, commune-dwellers fucking about with recorders, bongos and bells. Mushroom-munching counterculturals playing a Moog thru an echodek while some naked Spanish bird who’s been painted purple recites poetry in a made-up language. (Actually, that sounds pretty fucking brilliant lol) The problem is, I think, that some critics have a problem even acknowledging stuff like that without, y’know, sniffily taking the piss...and maybe they, you know, even subconsciously worry that the simple act of owning-up to enjoying something like that – something created relatively unselfconsciously in simpler, cusp-of-postmodernist times – might rub off in a negative way. People (and editors!) might start thinking you’re a *eeeeeeeek* Gong-lovin’ pothead-pixie-collaborating wastrel whose (ulp) critical faculties are completely out-of-whack.

Stoners just cannot be trusted to be objective.

If we’re to be honest, acts like Broadcast are a fucking blessing for certain writers. They arrive (almost) fully-formed with their own conceptual / critical niche in tow, one which was quickly colonised by reviewers grateful – nay, relieved to the point of male-menopausal night-sweats – that the band has gifted them an appropriate level of ironic detachment to play with, along with sufficient theoretical ammunition for a couple articles and a symposium at Middlesex Poly. Plus some of them are mates, anyway.

The fact that the music, well, kinda sucks seems to be mostly irrelevant.

Once The Emperor’s New Critical Clothing becomes sufficiently established as a quasi-consensus amongst The Few, then The Many feel, I dunno, peer-group pressured to join the gravy-train. Well, okay, maybe not The Many - this is, after all, not exactly mainstream music we’re talking about here – but, rather, A Few More Than The Few.

What I really don’t like about this strand of music is it’s, I dunno, its ‘archness’.

(The ‘knowingness’, the wink-to-the-camera, the fourth-wall acknowledgement.)

Don’t get me wrong, I celebrate the application of intelligence to music. Intelligence and dumbness and playfulness all have equal cultural weight in my own mythology. But I hate stuff that’s Arch for the sake of it.

Worse, I really, really hate things that connive to be – and this is going to sound oxymoronic / auto-contradictory – Arch and Fey at the same time. (Maybe I mean “Twee” rather than “Fey”, which as a word has some cool, older connotations that I – being a product of my age - can’t quite shake off.) I mean, when did all that bollocks start? Morrissey and the C86 generation have to take a lot of the blame for that mindset / cultural shift, tho I’m not quite convinced it entirely originated with The Smiths. I think it was a symptom of several other things – a reaction to the ‘Maleness’ of a lot of 70’s Rock, a thickening / ripening of certain postmodernist tendencies in Rock n Pop, an intertwining of Art-Rock tropes, Lo-Fi / DIY music n fashion, etc, a celebration of the New Gauche, etc, etc.

Despite its affectations and the technology it uses - some of the music currently tagged as ‘Haunt-o-Logical-cal-cal-cal’ could perhaps be seen as a side-spur – a detour or B-road - taken by a certain strand of UK.Indie, rather than the genuine bastard oddspring of Delia Derbyshire, obscure library-records and The Incredible String Band.

Here’s a question for ya, culture-hounds: what’s the difference (apart from all the theories) between, say, Stereolab and certain releases on Ghostbox? Both camps obv. rigorously adhere to certain vintage sound and visual design strategies. Both camps are crate-diggers, researchers, archivists, enthusiasts, whathaveyou. So, what’s the difference, then – a reliance on certain sampling technologies amongst the newer acts; a more meticulous approach to sound-design by them, perhaps? I’m not sure. Stereolab always had more of a tendency to use riffs / sounds from old LPs of varying obscurity as a springboard to create something else – something new - rather than a specific urge to recreate something. Ghostbox releases presumably attempt to summon up a certain intangible atmosphere that these guys get from cultural objects that predate their own generational base-datum, but I don’t think they particularly succeed in that. I’m not entirely ‘convinced’ by Stereolab either (though I don’t think that’s necessarily the point of them), yet somehow they seem slightly more ‘successful’ – more listenable somehow (tho ultimately their default-position is self-repetition). It’s an oafish, ill-matched comparison all this, I know, but I’m trying my hardest - honest! - to put my finger on why bands like Broadcast don’t hit a spot for me.

Something’s missing.

Why do I like the Mordant Music stuff more? I dunno. It just seems to have more ‘bite’ to it. A bit more ‘presence’, more focus.

I didn’t warm to Broadcast much as a live band. They came off as...well, arrogant is too strong a word. But the tone of their minimal inter-song banter didn’t exactly endear them to me. “Bloody musos,” muttered Bren, later that evening.

I dunno, sometimes live-show nerves – and they were running a fairly tech-heavy performance – can inadvertently make the most easy-going of people sound a bit dickish. I’ve been there myself. So maybe it’s unfair of me to even comment.

A couple of their tracks I thought, “Hmmm, okay-ish, I suppose” while others were just plain awful. It was a bit ping-pong / yin-yang, but the good bits just weren’t that good, tbh. The penultimate track was their best: it was a lot chuggier, stretched-out, looser-feeling. But it just didn’t take off.

“Hmmm, okay-ish, I suppose” just don’t cut it, especially these days.

The last track I knew / recognised; shamefully, I can’t remember the bloody title – or even be bothered to look it up and remind myself - tho I’ve heard it before. I guess I’m just not interested enough.

It was all kinda blah.

Unsurprisingly, they showed a bunch of films by Julian House.

“Is that an old Korg, over there next to his laptop?” asked Steve about 15 minutes into their set. And somehow that seemed to sum it all up.

HACKER FARM / JUNKCRUNCH LIVE

Hacking some vid-footage of cows from me bro-in-law's farm for a live show we're doing at The Orange Box, Yeovil, on sunday.



Very pleased to see my old friend Pop Parker has been added to the bill. Yay! He's cool.

We've been billed as Hacker Farm - not to be pedantic about it, but Hacker Farm is actually the over-arching / umbrella project-partnership thing, whereas Junkcrunch is the, er, audience-facing live performance, uh...thing. (Tho there's obv. an overlap btween the two and on sunday we're gonna be doing some conceptual stuff about cows, etc from our audio-installation as well as making a bloody racket.)

It's like the difference between, say, The British Electric Foundation and Heaven 17. They're the same thing, but not.

"Tonight, Matthew, we're gonna be Junkcrunch."

Come on down; should be a laff.

The second funniest thing I've heard today was stumblin' over a competition with the tag:

"WIN FREE CORRECTIVE EYE SURGERY!"

THE HOMEPRIDE FLOUR MEN TO REFORM

STOPPRESS: The Homepride Flour Men to reform!

Yes, it's true: The Homepride Flour Men are getting back together. I can scarcely believe it's true.



Although they have been dormant as a recording/touring outfit since 1981, their spokesman "Fred" said in a statement on their official fan-site www.spillerspoilers.com last night, "yes, we've patched up the differences that marred our last tour and LP. Me and the other blokes, well, we've been through so much together over the years that it just seems daft to have fallen out like that. Within 10 minutes of me talking to Tom on the phone we'd completely forgotten what it was we had even rowed about! We started jamming and found the old chemistry was still there..."

Sessions in Chicago with Steve Albini quickly followed. "Steve was awesome to work with," laughed "Fred", "he was very sympathetic to our sound. An extremely switched-on lad. He's nowhere near as fearsome as his reputation. I couldn't believe it when he told us Big Black had been big fans of our work..."

The band will be performing on The Other Stage at this year's Glastonbury Festival, at the V Fest and T in The Park, and at the J Spaceman-curated Meltdown at The Royal Festival Hall.

An album - "We're Only in it For the Dough" will be released on Mute in September.

The Pop Group to reform.

Is nothing fucking sacred? I mean, Jeez....

I was lucky enough to see them 4 or 5 times back in the day in various 'official' configurations and a few times in assorted jam line-ups. They were never less than incredible.

So many acts are reforming these days that I wouldn't even comment on this if they hadn't been so utterly, heroically bang-on the number with everything. Plus they came from Bristol.

*sigh* I guess this was all oddly inevitable. I've seen Mark Stewart play solo in 80's / 90's / 00's with Tackhead and assorted significant others and - although he was mostly pretty good and even occasionally great (I've got a lot of respect for Mark, see) - there was a sense of slowly diminishing returns about these projects as you track their trajectory dn thru the decades. As if there was nowhere else to go apart from back to The Pop Group.

I think it's a shame that he thinks his options are limited to one of two things. The past's the past. Why bother repeating it? (Apart from the, uh, obvious)

If this is the piss-poor Throbbing Gristle style reformation disaster I suspect it will be, then I won't hesitate in - as Jay Densman says - "tearing him a new one."

Don't let me...don't let us down, Mark.

SCHLUMP MIXTAPE #14

Niiice Reggae Mixtape from the Schlump Crew.

Ages old, but only just stumbled over it.

EVIL BLACK N GREEN LOGO VARIANT

Some live shows n shit coming up soon, so brewing up a batch of fresh 19F3 merch:

"The Wonders of the Human Body" by Bradley Sands.

I'm pretty sure Bradley based this story on me, damn him.

ERIKOISDANCE 14

The Finnish 'electronic' label Erikoisdance is a long-time favourite of mine (check my blog archives if'n you think I'm jivin' ya).

Erikoisdance 14 is extremely very imminent. Tom Backström describes it as "a split CD-r full of demagnetized dub, freeform post-house and dedicated Yamaha-QY-100-only Berlin Groovebox Prog by Twisted Krister and Hauskat kotivideot, with pHinn Rautio of electro cvlt pHavourites Kompleksi doing guest vocals."

Kompleksi are another big ol' Finn fave of mine, btw. So whatcha waiting for, o fetid one? Get to it...

"Erikoisdance – online since 2010!" lol.

MY CROP CIRCLE

THE XX ARE CRAP

Right now about the only thing that might possibly be, errrrm, ‘hipper’ than The XX would be if you were somehow able to transform the lower part of your body into Dirty Projectors, your midriff into James Murphy and your top-half into some multi-headed Island of Dr. Moreau-esque representation of Animal Collective, hang yrself upside dn from the Brooklyn Bridge and perform an infinitely recursive hall-of-mirrors act of auto-fellatio that caused you to eventually to disappear up yer own arse in a Nightcrawler-ish pfffft of cultural quantum-foam, leaving only a vague anti-hapton after-echo for some 8yr-old intern at NME.Com to discover sometime in 2026 and declare 2010 to have been a "Golden Age of Alternative Rock" (though in a reductive text-like language that uses special characters rather than vowels).

But - you know what - having actually seen them live, I THOUGHT THEY WERE A BIG POOEY PILE OF INDIE.YAWN.

The XX = The ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ.

Like Dullsville, man. 9.3 on the snoooozometer. Or whatever the opposite of Richter Scale is.

Not surprised they've worked with Diplo 'cos they have a song that sounds like a really crap version of something by Santogold, which probably means they've all heard the same song by The Cure or The Cars. Or something.

*sticks out tongue and catches a small, midge-like fly*

"How's that for Indie/Not Indie?"

Next!!!!

I've always wanted to like Liars more than I do - which is to say: "NOT MUCH" - but I find myself curiously disinterested when I try to listen to them. Just. Not. Feeling. It. Some of my friends rate them. So do I, but not necesarily in a way that the band would like to be rated. While there's no doubting their fiercesome Quirky Quotient, it somehow all feels a bit, y'know, Trying Too Hard.

Live, their 7.8-8.2 showing on The Alt.Rock Annoyance Spectrum was replaced by, well, Sheer Boredom. Man.

Don't like lead vocalist's voice. Especially grates live. Shifted between somewhere North-of-Lee Hazelwood and what sounded like a Late Era Variety tribute to Ian McCulloch. Band lacklustre, mostly, I thought. On stage, the quirkiness translated into charmlessly sludgy Animal Collective Lite-isms and jetlagged NY (heh) "Dance Punk". Lost interest v. quickly.

Stoned students probably dug it a lot. I didn't.

Shame on Mute for signing them.

DON'T BE MEAN

Been really getting back into The Raincoats recently; re-bought first LP on vinyl, blahblahblah. Their later stuff is sounding remarkably presient/contempo now: improv lo-fi Folk shapes, etc. Never saw them back in the day - tho saw Essential Logic, Slits - so was pretty fucking cool to finally see them the wkend before last.



Got to chat (very) briefly w/ Ana and Gina in the afternoon; no vinyl reissues imminent for 2nd/3rd LPs, unfortunately.



They were delayed in taking the stage that evening, so Gina came on, told a few jokes, chatted to the audience. "So, what about this Lib-Dem / Conservative alliance, then," she asked semi-rhetorically (this was before the Coalition was formally announced a couple days later...)

I guess there was getting on for a 800 - 1000 people in the venue (it was rammed) and her comment elicited one of the nastiest, most vicious bouts of booing and hissing I've ever heard. Not mock, pantomine villain hisses, but the sort of vitriol normally reserved for a child-murderer making a high-court appearance. Or the hey-day of Thatcher.

Really angry stuff.

And not just oldies, but teenagers / students up to 50-somethings. I don't think the Lib-Dems quite realise the degree of hatred they've unleashed at the grassroots level. Next election they'll be back to 20 seats again, if they're lucky. The Tories have fucked them completely and they're political pariahs. Unelectable again.

And The Raincoats?:



Well, they were as infuriatingly brilliant, dissonant, ramshackle, charming, untogether, entertaining, inspiring, off-the-wall, clueless, sussed, hilarious, exhilarating and darnright wonderful as ever.

The encored with the best version of "Lola" ever.



Gina Birch has just started selling these awesome hand-made bags with "Don't Be Mean" stitched onto them, but I'm not sure how you buy them because they don't seem to be on her website yet.

I'm going to have to get a couple for my daughters.

VIV IN FULL EFFECT

Some pictures of Viv Albertine playing live (courtesy of our good friend Bren):

"Snow White", or, uh, as it's better known:

"Aarne-Thompson folklore Classification Story Type 709".

We know most of these tales via The Brothers Grimm via Disney (Disney: the Google of its day: running round buying up childrens stories cheap and copyrighting them! (Whereas Google just, uh, digitises other people's work and 'borrows' it)), buuuuuuu-u-u-ut, the point here is that most of these tales are folklore aggregates - conglomerations of older ur-story threads n archetypes - they're meta-tales derived from ancient theme-clusters...each central European country / principality had its own local variant.

Viral stories.

Of course, if The Evil Queen or Snow White solved their own problems they'd be no conflict, no drama, NO STORY.

And no one to rescue Snow White / Cinderella / The Little Mermaid / Belle / etc.

But, hey, doesn't the Evil Queen / Stepmother Archetype deserve a happy ending too?

(Evil Queen = Partial-Witch / Proto-Goth. Isn't she more in step w/ modern sensibilities?)

SNOW WHITE FAIL

Think I've found a plot hole in Snow White.

You know how the Evil Stepmother Queen is, like, totally vain and obsessed with her own (imagined?) fading middle-aged beauty, right?

And how she takes a potion and then turns into a hag in order to slip Snow White the poisoned apple?

Well, why didn't she just make a potion to make herself more beautiful, instead of ugly?

Just saying, is all.

HACKER FARM WORK-IN-PROGRESS

There's going to be a hanging in Yeovil this week.

I should explain that I, uh, mean this in an art-gallery sense; as in: hanging a picture.

The Hacker Farm collective are contributing to an exhibition that kicks off this thursday at The Octagon (hence the "Project O" pseudo-nomer I've been using for the last few weeks). Most of the other artists are working in visual media, paintings, etc, but we're wading in with an audio-installation which plays manipulated field-recordings thru a series of hand-made / purpose-built amplifiers and speakers. The "farmyard sound-system" I posted some pics of recently.

This afternoon, Farmer Glitch n I popped into the venue to check out the lay of the land, measure the lengths of leads we'd need, etc and also to road-test and tweak the Glitchster's audio-mix, before dumping the files onto the set of USB-powered mp3-players that'll be hosting the sonic-data for the duration of the exhibition.



(The Farmer's been testing the big churn by playing Prince Far-I records through it. No, really...I love the fact that you can see the words "YEOVIL DAIRY" through the layer of rust.)

Then, a quick visit to B&Q to score some plastic conduit to cover up the loose wiring for later in the week. But - hey! - what the fuck's that over there in the corner...? A bird-house with a volume-control!



It was pretty damn cool (and surreal) wandering round the cafe-bar space upstairs and being followed by the sound of assorted electroaccoustic drones, bleeps and cow-moos from my brother-in-laws' dairy-farm down in Hardington Marsh.

Once we crack the perpetually-changing live quad-mix, then we'll syphon off some audio for this:



It's udder-worldly.

CHIHEI HATAKEYAMA / PAUSAL / HERVE

Chihei Hatakeyama. Also: here. Tokyo-based Ambient / Electroacoustic composer.

Not exactly, y'know, life-changing, but some nice, quality old-school drone-age. He's appearing at The Cube, in Bristol, on the 20th, along with Pausal (who're getting major Ambi.props right now) and Herve.

(A laptop and bassoon collaboration; I like the sound of that...)

RIP RONNIE JAMES DIO

RIP R J Dio, the Man with The Devil Horns hand-gesture:

Facebook, an online Deadzone / shrinkwrapped cybergraveyard w/in 18 months, or just wishful thinking on my part?

NO NIPPLES / IRAN EDITIONS

"Iran Editions"; or How Apple Outsourced Censorship to Paper Magazines Desperate To Conform to eTablet.Tyranny.

Magazines are dying - let's not be coy about this - yet they are queuing up to self-filter their content so they might have some presence in the glorious MacJobs AfterLife.

"No nipples! No nipples! No nipples!"

It's true: imagine a scenario - in ten years or so - where, between them, Google and Apple own everything....all your books, music, comics - anything that can be tranformed into content.

This is just one of the reasons I want to go in the opposite direction. Make analogue copies of digital things. Physicalise the invisible.

Make data into something real.

Christine Pearson in The New York Times: "Neuroscientists tell us that dividing our attention between competing stimuli instead of handling tasks one at a time actually makes us less efficient..."

Not if you're a writer.

Clarify: not if you're a writer / artist / 'creative' type who spends n% of waking time creating multiple ideas, plots, characters, scenarios - conceptualising stuff, juggling ideas prior to more trad. typing type activities; engaging in activities where procrastination is pretty much a way of life, yet yr constantly under heavy manners of - *cue ominous film-music* duhhh-duhh-duhhhhh - DEADLINES...

In that sort of situation I'd say that multiple concurrent project activities can actually speed things up, since you can play the different projects off against one another - procrastinate on one or more, while working on 'favoured' project/activity; solve problems subconsciously on Project A or B, while doing admin or dull keyboard-bashing stuff on Project C.

As my good friend Skipper Webb always says: "If you want something done, ask a busy man."

CLUES

Have just risen from my disease-pod - (I've been ill, you see, and if it wasn't for the fact that I'm only 1/64th Jewish I'd probably go on and on and on and on about it; but I'll restrict myself to moan-oan-oan-oaning-on on Twitter, for this url is an Official Internet Happyzone) - only to be presented with this:



There's something kinda freakish and vaguely disturbing about this picture that I can't quite wrap my brain around (mind you, can't quite wrap my brain around much right now - that Abba 5 x LP box-set over there is creeping me out; winking at me from the corner of my, uh, what was I saying...?).

It suggests some sort of Anti-GraphicNovel stance to me.

(I'm very anti-GraphicNovel right now. I'm cherishing the idea of Nano-Comix; embracing the charm of The Very Small. Reductive Storytelling.)

And who is that character? What's he called? What's his...thing?

(I'm worried that he actually, you know, exists; that he lives in her wardrobe and that's a from-life sketch or something. We're only ever a wrong look - a misheard quote - away from Magic)

"Clues" to what, exactly? My kids constantly throw ideas at me - get the ol' neurones firing - make me think about stuff in ways I wouldn't normally come at it from.

I constantly trip over things they leave on the floor - diagrams; word-charts in imaginary languages; half-assembled cardboard n sellotape gizmos; conceptual kipple.

Love it.

MARTIN'S ELECTION NIGHT EXPERIMENT

Martin from the Beyond The Implxde blog was up all of election-night pseudo-tweeting on Blogger. At around 4:45am, he posted:

"Let's try a psychic experiment. I will Kid Shirt to have a dream about managing a mermaid pop group. He's on tour with them in Atlantis, and one of them develops a smack habit, so he persuades the others to record a hard house version of Stimmung. If Kid Shirt reads this post tomorrow, and he really did dream about it, we'll know its possible to gatecrash peoples' heads while they're asleep."

Nah. Sorry, Martin, don't remember having that dream.

But I have started writing a 3 x LP Rock Opera using some of your psychically-projected ideas.

Changed Atlantis to Lemuria. The plot needed some baddies, see? Gonna get a local pub band to record it. Keep it lo-fi and cheap. Going for an aquatic Chas n Dave vibe.

Former Page-3 models as the mermaids.

I'll split the publishing with ya.

Psi-mail me, yeah?

Ciao.

URBAN GUERRILLA

"This is Radio Free Yeovil broadcasting from exile on Frequency-D...

This is Radio Free Yeovil...Radio Free Yeovil...the voice of the True British Government-in-Exile broadcasting from 19F3....

Is there anyone there? Can you hear me...the dead are all around us...they're everywhere now..."

This tune is for our friend and fellow exile John Eden who sounds like he could do with some cheering up right now:



I'm locked down and ready for the shitstorm. I ain't going anywhere, people.

Holler if you need me.

RIP FRANK FRAZETTA

Frank.

He was fucking great, wasn't he?

One of the greatest.

A king.

STEVE AYLETT: "THE INFLATABLE VOLUNTEER"

There's a "remastered" version of Steve's "The Inflatable Volunteer" available via Raw Dog Screaming Press and, uh, here.



"In the constant apocalypse nobody cares if your skull is made of wood or your friends are flying ants..."

SERPENTCOILS MEETS WERNECK - WRETCHMOND

Many thanks to the ever-cool April for her extremely kind and generous review of the Werneck-Wretchmond "Oneiric Hardware" CD-r that I built earlier in the year.

Cheers, April!

And cheers - as ever - to my pal Dan Poeira who provided me with a bunch of hard-drive recordings sourced from his Brasilian hometown, so I could conceptually twin Belo Horizonte with Yeovil and create a sort of alt.mythic dreamware hub.

This release has slid nicely into its Long Tail now, ticcing away beautifully in the background like one of the oneirdrive configurations that I tried to conjure into being.

Things might seem fairly quiet on the release front right now, but I promise ya some pretty damn cool produkt/projekts are currently inching towards completion during my self-inflicted exile in 19F3Space.

VIV ALBERTINE

I should explain: a few minutes before I boshed off that last post on Bren's laptop in a cafebar on the main concourse, I'd just seen Viv Albertine play a live set. I'd seen The Slits play in, errrm, not quite sure - '80? 81? - the exact date eludes me. But they were great.

30 years later, solo Viv was still great, tho - v. pleased to report - in a totally different way. Backed by a thereminist who she'd only met two days earlier and a guitarist who she'd only ever played twice before with, the music fused written song-structures with an inspired, but fairly minimal improvisational chasis (the encore was a song that her accompanists had never heard before). "I like it when stuff goes wrong; when unexpected things happen..."



The songs were playful, but also very direct - v. emotionally raw in places - riddled with musings on love n sex, and peppered with stinging references to assorted broken relationships, etc. The performance painted Viv as oddly vulnerable, yet someone you wouldn't ever want to mess with. A woman who was both fragile, yet full of street savvy. A life lived, not one watched half-heartedly from the sidelines.

The inter-song preambles were similar: both nakedly honest and extremely endearing. "Hook-Up Girl" was, like, ouuch! It takes a lot of bravery to put yrself on the butcher's table like that. But the show was a lot of fun too: "Couples are Creepy" is a terrifically wonky-yet-catchy singalong - Viv certainly isn't afraid to poke fun at herself, her tangled life-story or her own painful emotional predicament - while another song overtly auto-dissected and lampooned her own self-declared MILFdom.



But there was also an echo of sadness and regret when she talked about innocently dicking around in Flowers of Romance with a pre-smack Sid Vicious and other later-to-be-famous friends. For a moment she sounded - and looked - kinda haunted by her own past. "I never slept with any them," she said.

Viv and the women of her generation taught-by-example their own brand of feminism - a form of self-empowerment wh/ I still find pretty fucking inspirational all these years on. It's something sadly lacking from a lot of younger female performers these days. The self-empowerment has been replaced by, I dunno, some variety of dumbed-down self-entitlement. It's a shame; I think a lot of the lessons taught and the ground gained by Viv and her contemporaries has been lost.

So it was great to see that fire still burning brightly. She's still out there doing her own thing and still - by her own admission - making it up as she goes along.

Anyway, literally a few minutes after I wrote the previous post Farmer Glitch bumped into Viv post-gig. Then she vanished, but Bren quickly mobilised and tracked her down. A couple minutes later I look up and he's gently guiding Viv over towards me for a chat. Duuuuude. I could kiss ya.

About 30 years ago I got to shyly stammer "hello" to her at a Pop Group show in Bristol.

This time I get to stammer a few sentences. Some of them actually made sense. She's an extremely nice lady is Viv. Super easy-going.

I might be exile right now, but - hey, guess what? - I couldn't be more happy:



You should buy her CD. It's ace.



And you really should go and see her live. Cheer her on. I'm biased, of course, but we definitely need more Vivs in this world.

Still alive. Barely.

People are trying to kill me. With drugs and stuff. Help!

Just seen Viv Albertine: holy fuck.

I'm completely smitten. 30years: I thought I was over her. lol.

Bren's just said hello to Eye from Boredoms. How cool's that?

Enjoy 5 years of Conservative rule, suckers!

I'm an exile and I ain't ever comin' back.

KINGS-IN-EXILE

I have decided to go into exile.

It's either that or have a stiff brandy and shoot myself in the library after lunch.

Yes, I shall become a king-in-exile. I shall set up an alternative government in Canada. Or Preston Plunknett.

I will not colaborate with these...these fucking Nazis. These PR men in moleskin brownshirts.

But first I shall go to ATP in North Somerset with my pals where we will drink and scheme.

No, no, no...I cannot leave you...I cannot abandon you, my people. I shall return to Yeovil - my birthplace; the town where my heart is forever buried - and there I shall pick off the enemy one by one, like a sniper hidden in a tree. I shall protect and nourish thee, my little ones.

These are shitty times we are about to enter. We are all kings-in-exile. Such is our lot; always has been, always will be.

But worry not during these dark days, for I have your back.

And you, I suspect, have mine.

ELECTION HALF-TIME SCUMCAST

West Country Posse: keep the revolting Rees-Mogg family out of Somerton/Frome and North-East Somerset!

Bristol Crew: hold tight!

As suspected, but confirmed by my polling card, the Conservative candidate for Yeovil - Kevin Davis - lives in (you guessed it!) fucking Surrey. Boooo! Hisss!

JUST DON'T VOTE FUCKING TORY TODAY.

That's all I'm sayin'.

HAINTOLOGY

V. interesting unintentional (?) typo from Simon Reynolds:

"Haintalogical".

Haintology: Now, that I can work with.

Round our way - in the deep, dark limbostreets and murky slurry-filled autumncopses of S. Somerset - "Hain't" is local.vocal shorthand for "It ain't".

As in: "Hain't wot you fink it is."

Haintology it is, then.

RIP PETER O'DONNELL

THE ZOMBIE KING SAYS "HI"

So, my friend Jayson Densman sends me a cryptic mail that says: "Who is The King of Zombies?"

Being a windbag, I reply:

"Do you mean: who's the King of Zombie Film-making?

"Well, for sheer utter consistency and brilliance and duty to gore-making and creating endless new zombie-fuelled narative subtexts...

"It has to be George Romero !!!"

So, Jay mails me back and says "That's the correct answer!"

And he sends me this:



At this point, I fall off my chair.

Mr. George Romero is The King. King of the Zombies.

He's the fucking Gov'nor.

I can still remember seeing "Night of The Living Dead" at a comic-con in the mid-70s like it was yesterday. I can remember exactly where I was when I saw all his Zombie flicks. And "The Crazies" too; I loove "The Crazies". There's not many films you can say that about; that they leave an indelible mark on your mind, stay with you down thru the years.

Being a director himself, Jayson kept all of George R's fluff-takes lol. He said: "I woulda got you Carpenter too, but the queue was too long" lol.

George might be the King of Zombies, but Jayson is the King of The Dudes.

Bless ya, man.

BLACK HELICOPTER: "BUICK ELECTRA"

"Buick Electra" by Black Helicopter.

Relatively straight-up, (pre-Nu-Metal) late-80's/early-90's-referencing US Alt.Rock: not the sort of music you'd probably associate with me or this blog. *shrugs*

But: can't quite get this song out of my head, for some strange reason. I think it's the vocals: there's some weird, mildly obsessional thing playing out here in the lyrics and their delivery. I like their pull; the slight catch in the voice. The minor obsessing over car-production in Detroit is, well, oddly fascinating; he doesn't tip over into full-on David Thomas hysteria, or shrill David Byrnish nerdisation over banal cultural ephemera. His restaint kinda makes it more interesting to me: like, what's he not saying here - what's *really* bugging him...?

The band have a new LP out (it's not exactly life-changing stuff, but I like it more than, say, the most recent Motorpsycho LP), but my ears (somewhat perversely) seem to have fallen on a track from their previous album.

Typical.

But "Invisible Jet" is a pretty cool name for an record.

I quite like "Casio" too.

*shrugs again*

HACKER FARM WORK-IN-PROGRESS

My friend Farmer Glitch has been extremely busy lately, putting together the physical infrastructure for what I currently call Project O. Beautiful, aren't they?





Coming to a, er, gallery-space near you soon!

GETTING OLD

Apparently, my short story "Getting Old" got what's known in the biz as An Honorable Mention in Datlow's 2009's BEST HORROR LIST.

So did several hundred million other stories, so I'm not gonna blow too much smoke out my arse about it, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't pleased about being included and, quite frankly, I could do with a few excuses to spark up a cigar right now.

It's in the Bare Bone #11 paperback anthology, which is still available here from Raw Dog Screaming Press.

Ah, screw it, here's an opening-scene teaser:

Sure, you all know the routine, the drill. Hop a slab-wagon out of Division and head downtown with a cup of cold coffee and the Dust 'em Down Boys. Hang back when you get there, take your time. Light a cigarette, swap some small-talk with the uniforms while they tape off the snuff-scene. No one's going anywhere.

"What have you got for me, Todd?"

"Small-time extortionist, name of Larry French. Professional strike-breaker, low-rent tough guy. Made a living from shaking down bakeries and grocery-shops. Looks like he finally picked on the wrong guy. Somebody gave him a bellyful of twelve-gauge bird-shot for his trouble. How's Linda?"

We follow a trail of blood-soaked gravel across the lot until we find a body tangled up in an old plaid work-shirt. Don't ask me why, but the guy tried to take it off while he was dying. "Oh, you know. Fine."

"And the kids?"

"They're fine too."

ABISMO HUMANO #4

Abismo Humano nº4, ghost-edited by my friend Ruela.