RIP RAMMELZEE

Flooded London Designs via BLDGBLOG.

Rudy Rucker:

"Change is of course something that happens to any living art form—think of painting or popular music or literary novels or even TV sit-coms. Yes, it’s sad to see Golden Ages slip away, but it’s sadder still to keep doing the same thing. Inevitably the old material goes stale and the fire goes away. I’m not saying it’s become impossible to write fresh novels about aliens and spaceships and planets. But maybe it’s become a task as difficult and quixotic as writing a fresh doo-wop song.

"But why not a new kind of song? And why not a new kind of SF novel? This is, after all, the twenty-first century."

Also: uh, Dreamcolour / Lasers From Atlantis.

Men Diamler css on Bumtapes.

We like Men Diamler @ Kid Shirt. We like Men Diamler a lot.

B.Tapes also did a css vershun of that awesome Tulasi one-sided LP from a couple years back that I was playing as recently as a week or so ago. I like sitting on the step while it's playing.

I wish I'd bought that Unknown Tape by Unknown Asian Artist thing they put out. That v. much fits my *ulp* sensibility right now.

IRON SKY

Incoming: a crowd-funded Finnish movie featuring, er, Space Nazis. This could be pretty fucking cool if they pull it off. I do like the underpinning concept/conceit.

#26a

THE GREAT SOCIETY: "FATHER / BAD THUNDER"

For Betty Utility: The Great Society (minus Grace Slick's vocals):

Quantum Biology / Quantum Genetics: the world just got n-percent weirder.

TIMPERLEY, MON AMOUR

Saddened by the death of Chris Sievey / Frank Sidebottom in ways that I find hard to express.

Sievey's death represents, I dunno, a failure of some sort. I don't mean that his life was in any way a failure - it certainly wasn't; the pleasure he gave me and many others was enormous (tho oddly difficult to quantfy) - no, rather, it feels like his death was symbolic on some level - just as his life was - that it represents the last rattle n gasp of some older, purer Indie Ethic.

It seems to signal the idea that The Little Guy will never get ahead in the end, irregardless of how wonderful, talented or original he might be - that the system'll beat 'em down or - worse - just fucking ignore them.

Chris / Frank was an early adopter of a genuinely independent business model - he sold his own records, CDs, downloads, art, even games for the Spectrum ferchrisake - through mail-order, website, whatever... he toured like a motherfucker, pioneered the self-marketing approach that half the world uses now (and had a several year headstart on the rest of the biz) - that it failed and he could barely scratch out a living towards the end does not bode well for the future of that model. Or for the 'Indie' Sector itself. MusicFail.

Even the tabloid papers are full of talk about how he was a "National Treasure", a true "one-off", blahblahblah...but, really, where were they when he really needed their support? - a column in The Sun, a 5 minute late-nite TV slot, a show on Radio-5, 6, local radio, whatever...a support-slot on a tour.

And where did the audiences go? Where did we go?

It feels like something far bigger died with Chris Sievey.

And maybe that's why I'm feeling sad.

But I could write all day about the stuff he did. It's kinda deep. Someone really should write an essay on all this. I loved the way that Frank 'appropriated' other people's material, changed the titles and then made the songs his own by default. I don't know what that is, that process; some sort of Copyright Creepage, where intellectual/artistic property grows legs and walks across the border towards you. Songs, like cats, who chose a new owner.

Frank didn't do cover-versions. What he did was something else.

And that whole mediated identity thing. That leaked out into a novella I wrote recently. Characters that become their own thing; that become 'real'. That's very close to my own heart.

I think that the fact that he was so clearly loved by so many - that his passing caused such an upsurge of emotion - marks Sievey's life as a success. A Top Ten Hit in its own right.

And now there's going to be a cartoon series, a film, etc. Oh, if only he were here and all that was his. Ain't it always the way?

I think this, though, will have to stand as my own personal tribute.

But let's not forget just how fucking funny he was. He made me laugh in a way that only Tommy Cooper and The Marx Brothers come close to. Superficially, it's just slapstick, but there's so much more going on at the same time - an odd mixture of satire, surealism and anarchy.

We loved you, man.

*puts clothes-peg on nose*

"We really did, we really did..."

"Thank you."



"Little mark E. Smith!"

GNAWLEDGE PRESENTS FUNKY ISTHMUS MIXTAPE

Via Gnawledge, hiphop remezclas of Panamanian calypso, funk and cumbia from the 1960s & 70s:

Here.

"The Funky Isthmus Mixtape features instrumentals produced by Gnotes for the upcoming Gnawledge EP Panama Doaba, mixed by DJ Canyon Cody with acapellas from Maluca Mala, Calle 13, Isa GT, Tego Calderón y más."

Perfect for a summer evening.

SCI-FI ARCHITECTURE

Bought this as a sort of birthday present for myself at the beginning of the year. Found it in a second-hand bookshop in Crewekerne - it was a bit pricey for what it is, but I had to have it. What I really like about it is it's a late-90's edition of AR, so what they posited as cutting-edge or even - *eeek* - 'futuristic' back then, isn't.

Of course, that's not the point. Architecture also needs to have those elements and qualities embedded it that us proles call "Timeless"; the people who design these structures need to fool themselves (and us!) that their modern/futuristic designs will somehow remain that way and that if they do 'date' then they won't date as badly as the buildings aorund them - that their work contains (I don't quite have a word for this...) inner essences that will transcend the forces of erosion, entropy and decay and become, erm, "Timeless", "Classic" and other words that we use to describe Something-Old-That-Contains-Vaguely-Transcendental-Qualities-That-We-All-Subsconsciously-Agree-Are-Cool-And-Good.

When we see objects / buildings like that we all just sorta nod and make non-verbal noises - we're edging into post-linguistic territory here: where terms like "shared values" and (ulp!) "nobility" are about the best we can come up with to talk about these sort of things. These are almost-archetypes - buildings and objects and art that we hope will reflect the very best in us as individuals and as a species...and, since they're sort of weird mirrors of ourselves and our civilisation, and are designed to make all sorts of statements about Us both singularly and collectively, then we like to think or believe that these things - like us - won't ever age. Big Modern Public Architecture must stir up all sorts of subconscious conceits in the architect himself - even the most forward-thinking, futuristic building of any age becomes Legacy the moment it leaves the designer's brain and becomes a physical object. Buildings contain all sorts of tangled / fractured narratives; Mortality is just one of them.

Ummm, kinda drifted off somewhere there...think I meant to talk about how even that Late-90's notion of 'sci-fi architecture' has already started to 'date' and look ever-so-slightly retro (even the magazine's lay-out, font-set, house photography style is on the cusp of looking, well...) . That's what I meant to talk about when I said "Of course, that's not the point."

I like all that though. I like that point where drift starts to set in, where A Now Extrapolation drifts into being a Now, which then becomes a Possible Future, which then becomes a failed Future, PoMo Grist, Laughable Retro-Redundancy and eventually a form of Medievalised Exotica - something whose original inbuilt symbolism(s) are lost to the realm of Arcania.

Mostly, tho, I like looking at the pretty pictures.

I like to look at those half-built imaginings, schematics and soft wireframe models and try to visualise the sort of people and things who might've lived there if these were real Blueprints-for-Living. I think those people would still be very much like us; oh sure, their behavioural tics and the minituae of their lives would be different, but their dreams and their needs would still be very close to our ours. The ideal of 'freedom' - of having a place where we can be notionally 'free' to dream or be ourselves in some way - is something that'll never go out of fashion, irregardless of whether it's 1683, 1999 or 5641. That's true "Timelessness".

(Interesting that this ish is called "Sci-Fi" and not "SF".)

There's some amazing pictures and engravings here - designs for Cities or Communities "in the Sky" that date back to the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries - utopian stuctures held aloft by gas-bladders and sails that totally blew me away more than the New Stuff.

Strange to think that some day our own notions of Futurity will look as Ridiculously-Naive-Yet-Inspiringly-Exotic as those.

One of the things that define us best as a species is, I think, our continuing ability to dream in the face of the bullshit physical reality that we've built. The idea of 'Improvement' seems to be hardwired into our heads as much as it drives the bio-evolutionary forces of Nature.

Finally got to see Herzog's "Bad Lieutenant" tonight...

In a cinema! In Yeovil! Can't believe they actually showed it in my own hometown. Taking the cinema-manager hostage probably helped.

I fucking adore Herzog. Have done most of my adult life. If you've not seen "BL" then bloody well check it out; I thought it was absolutely fabulous.

A proper film.

I really want to see "My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?"

BAD ACID TRIPLE BURN-OUT ISSUE

The bad trip finally comes to an end:



The *sob* final issue of Bad Acid magazine is a triple dose (Tabs 11, 12 and 13). Out in August, it features:

200+ band compilation album

PLUS

4 hour dvd

PLUS

150+ screen colour pdf magazine with reviews of all featured bands, and interviews galore.

PLUS

Sick cover art from 3 separate poster artists.

PLUS

Label profiles and samplers.

Er, EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEKKKKK!!!!!

WOODEN WAND: "WHITHER THOU GOEST, CRETIN"

Brainmugged by events. I dun fell off radar.

Now, this is quietly fucking awesome - an album that picks up emotional momentuuuum as it rolls on, yet never gains any speed; the words take their time, build up a slooow, strange, inner heat: it's exactly what I'm in the mood to hear right now.



I try'n buy pretty much everything I can get my hands on by this fella. Wand / James Toth is one of my favourite singer-songwriter-ers (along with, errm, Turner Cody, Donovan Quinn and Pop Parker); 3 / 4 years ago the Kid Shirt blog bored the world stoopid by bigging Mr. Toth.

The man's never let me down. Ever.

This little album is an epic in understatement; a gentle bruising, a purpling of the soul. A cotton-wool heart. "Dying just to disappear..." Toth throws away classic lines like he plucks 'em out of the sky by the bushel load.

"I'm a mimic of the moon / I-aye-aye-aye got this sideways smile..."

It's stark in places - little more than acc. guitar and a couple vocal overdubs - but elsewhere, a small bar-band slides into focus - woozy photocopies of Wand on drums, bass, etc backing himself, I guess. "Unexploded Ordnance" is pure truckdrivin' Surrealism 'n' Western genius: put it on a car mix-tape with Cash and "Container Drivers".

"Skels" is like some weird Tennessee-born version of Jacques Brel, a slurry moonlit waltz with Toth throwing killer couplets to the wind like lyrical yarrow-stalks. Beautiful.

"Uncle Bill" is a love-letter to an old inspirational stoner uncle - some mythical everyman Willie Nelson - funny as fuck, yet oddly touching...

And that Gothy, spooked-out Eno-ish 'Desert Guitar' on "Spoilin' For a Fright": yeah!

I don't wanna write about this album any more; I wanna listen to it again.



"How late is too late, boys? / I got a little hung up..."

Reco-fucking-mended.

An 8-bit version of "No More Mr. Nice-Guy" by Alice Cooper.

Design Fiction, Design Fiction, Design Fiction.

The idea of Design Fiction has been making me hard for some weeks now. Really hard. But I still don't quite understand what it's supposed to be. And maybe that's a good thing. I get to fantasise about a still-not-yet-in-focus set of lit.playtools n almost-tropes.

I think Bruce S is coming at it from a sort of quasi-Ballardian p.o.v. - the next waveband/colour-strand on a never-ending Lit vs. multi-disciplinary mash-up that started with 'Golden Age' Radio n Electrical magazines spewing forth extrapolations of where hard Science, Engineering n Rocketry would go next. The Late-60s New Worlds Generation incorporated footnotes from research journals; terminology n leakage from psychiatry, astrophysics and paleontology. Speculative broadcasts haunted by the deepspace data retrieval-bleeps of radio-telescopes; text imitating the luminous 405-line images beamed into our eyeballs during The Television Age. After '63 we all climbed into the Box - entered The False World - and the eventual process of digitisation, of re-creating the physical world and migrating into it, began. Cyberpunk played w/ the ephemera of the Silicon Age; print-outs n imaginary peripherals; it documented the Proto-Net - landscapes reimagined as networks; Pop Culture and Media as entities - characters - in their own right.

Now it's all Design, Design, Design.

Design as - what? - a new open-source metaphor for imagining, one that can be incorporated - mashed-up - w/ literature - a new form of conceptualising that propels us past physical media and all known platforms? (Design is Imagining Incarnate. It's all about...wondering, but also factoring in the physical practicalities, the possibility of building something new - a product - that might actually come-into-being; how would it interact with us, how would it look?) It's heady stuff, indeed. But is this all really genuinely new n Post-Physical - the next new wave - or is it just Cyberpunk 3.0? Golden Age 6.5? Or all of the above? For every iPhone there's a zillion tech.objects that never get past prototype-stage. But that's irrelevent: the deal here is to create speculative objects, architectures, cultures that we can inhabit with our fictional archetypes - that's what old school SF did; what Scientific Romances did: they provided a 'plausible', coherent form of Futurity, a backdrop to our dreams - one that allowed us to act out morality-plays, satires n social critiques.

Either way, this is Next Wave Shit.

Count me in, but I still, y'know, like Old Shit because...well, because some of it works, some of it's still ripe n open to re-evaluation / reinvention. I like the Oddd, The Straynge...I'm a slave to Modernism too, in some ways. A creature of 20c.

There was a part of me that was gonna do a Graphic Design degree after I was through w/ Microbiology, but computers caught my eye and family circumstances put a kibosh on all that. Now, they seem so...old, computers. And not in a good way. It's all config these days (and the same is true of a lot of books, films, comics - it's all config.); whereas I was a programmer once. A writer who wrote stuff that moved things around; whose work had a physical, transformative presence in the world, if only in a commercial context. Programming languages are a form of Magic too.

All these things play off against each other in my head constantly. They bounce back n forth. I'm a creature of contradiction, but in the end you wind up using what works for you creatively. You have to stay true to yourself, build a voice, an inner, truer You and throw the other stuff away. The end-game is to De-Lame.

Design, Design, Design: I hear it calling to me, but I think I take it all too literally; I'm not clever enough to think round some of the softer edges of what Sterling might be hinting at. I'm making up my own version of what Design Fiction might mean.

But I notice that my rejection levels go up when I do try to apply what I *think* Design Fiction might mean. Editors tell me that the characters are okay (Hurrah! Getting somewhere, then!), but concept (a) or (b) is implausible or unrealistic, so I back off. I haven't got the balance right yet in terms of tone or Concept vs. Story.

In some ways I think I might've been here before - applying Design; the idea of how the world might look - a story I wrote in the early 90's called "Linoleum Sky" seems to have some pre-emptive Future Ghost-Image of what Design Fiction might be about...the perpheral stuff about shop-facades and fashion and names-of-things seems oddly in-line/in-tune with what I Should Be Writing Now; it's a shame it's such a leaden/lumpy clunker of a story. It needs rewriting, but I don't have an electronic copy. Some other recent stuff also feels like Design Fiction - but prob. not in any way that Bruce describes; just my own misreading of it all. Which is fine. I think writing for Dazed and Confused, etc a few years ago has bled out into my fiction.

Maybe I've inadvertently invented Style Mag SF.

Design, Design, Design.

It's a v. fucking interesting time to be a writer.

Spime.

GX JUPITTER-LARSEN / THE HATERS

NON-LOCAL CONNECTIONS OF REMOTE OBJECTS

What's the blogging equivalent of Quantum Entanglement, I wonder?

A random thought generated by Nina passes thru KekSpace causing a sudden, unexpected change in Fritz's energetic writing.state!

Oh, allriiight...I know, I know: there's nothing even remotely quantum about the damn process - hyperbole's a habit w/ me - guess I'm just a lowly, slower'n light Classical Information Channel...

But - y'know what? - I love that whole blogadelic mexican-wave cum chain-letter thing where something ripples out and becomes something else. It's cool being a conduit.

Fritz sent me some chapbooks a while back - *proper* chapbooks done old school stylee - and they're really good...Fritz has nailed a particular variety of, I dunno, anecdotal quasi-travelogue type voice-thing where characters and incidents pile up on one another - and where the joy is in a good tale told well - but he's a sly old fox, is Fritz, and there's quite often a subtle layer of embedded morality half-hidden in the anecdotal-stream-o-postconsciousness, or a quiet lesson to be learned - a slight nudge or knock applied to his protagonists; the deftest of jolts or self-reappraisals - in amongst the beer-swiggin' campfire bullshittery...and it's that sudden understated moral undertow or twist that he applies at the end which adds a real shine to his work. I'm kinda envious of the ease at which his stories talk; the velocity n grace with which his narratives seem to bifurcate...but there's often that ahhhh, right aftertaste moment that stays w/ you when the words have skidded to a halt.



Despite the, uh, Holmesian titles, these tales have nothing to do with Doyle. My favourite of the three Fritz sent me is "The Paradol Chamber" and its eye-watering pepper-tasting trial...but its that last paragraph - with its bittersweet appraisal of a relationship/time long-passed - that really hits home, leaving a strange aftertaste of its own in the reader's mouth.

JOZIN Z BAZIN

This is genius:

Was that - nah, couldn't be! Could it? - was that Tom Waites making a guest appearance on The Story of Tracey Beaker this morning?

SOME STUFF I LIKE AT THE MOMENT

1. Bird Costumes.

Nah, shut up n give it a chance. Something's going on here that I can't quite put me finger on: I like that slightly claustrophobic, darkly descending feel to "Freedom and Weep"...like a psychedelicised version of - *oooof!* - Bauhaus. Late Seventies / early Eighties; not Late Seventies / Eighties. Oppresive 'production', like a thick fug of...something hanging over the recording. Makes me think of "Kill City" for some reason.

"We Go..." is oddly plaintive. A slow spiral. The muggy sound hints at a similar compression of emotion. Reminds me, not so much of depression, but being on some really unpleasantly icky anti-depressants in the late 70s - brain sledgehammered by the very drugs that're supposed to, er, help it.

"Food Hole" - I mean, well, what the fuck - but then...wow.

I like this shit and I don't care who knows.

Live, it's a bit more, well...abstract:



He's from Portland, Oregon. Y'don't say?

2. Manfred Mann's Earth band: "Nightingales & Bombers" LP.

Sits at some interstice of mid-70's Hard/Soft Rock, with some Proggy bits and a few genuinely weird/unexpected sound interluudes; an odd mixture of 'proper', relatively radio-friendly songs, frantic soloing and, uh, "why did Manfred just make that weird synth noise" moments. Ticks quite a few different boxes, yet doesn't feel too diffuse or contrived. I've had this on vinyl for over a year - quite liked it, but now really like it. It's just kinda clicked for me. Maybe it's the weather. Nah: it feels inventive - yet also poppy - in a way that most Modern Indie ain't.

Deeply, terminally unhip, but - really - who cares? Get over it.

3. Conrad Schnitzler. What's not to like about ol' Connie? But, jeez, when's this from - the early 80's? If I hadn't told you that you woulda thunk it's from "Selected Ambient Works VII" or sumthin'. Fool.



Like that, didja, bitch? Didja, huh!!? Well, here's another:



4. Caboladies.

"Aquarium Railroad": LOL. "Careful with that chorus pedal, Eugene."

caboladies at sonic celluloid (evanston) may 21st, 2009

JO JO GUNNE: "RUN, RUN, RUN"

Nina Infinite Thought posts on having weird thoughts during illness. Actually, the only time I don't have weird thoughts is when I'm ill or have drunk myself into near-unconsciousness.

I really like this bit:

"Anyway, the best weird thought I had was for a kind of horror-gossip story whereby every time you mention somebody’s name, you temporarily become that person for a few seconds."

Feels like some Westernised maladaptation of assorted mid-00's Asian horror-film tropes; y'know, the viral stuff passed on via VHS-tapes, phones, texts, etc. Still, this feels different to the idea of, say, possession - where someone else's body is taken over from forces from outside - or a character like Deadman who originally inhabited a different person each episode for dramatic purposes...Quantum Leap also utilised a similar conceit.

This feels more like some sort of transference deal - where you actually become the person temporarily. I think Nina's idea has some narrative mileage. Inadvertent body-hopping, perhaps. But what happens to "you" when you're someone else? The body-swapping thing's been done to death (Big, etc); instead, I think this should be a complex chain of random gossip-triggered transferences that gets increasingly difficult to undo or reverse, with bizarre, embarrassing and potentially lethal consequences. Maybe it's a weird disease or something.

Says Nina: "It would be quite complicated to film, but if it were ever to come true it might make for interesting avoidance strategies..."

I love the way she just casually says "...if it were ever to come true..." lol.

Not entirely sure why I've posted this, but it feels like the idea has some underlying narrative use somewhere, so typing it up might allow it to percolate in me sub.conscious in some way.

JUNKCRUNCH SHOW #3: FURTHER ADVENTURES IN AN IMAGINARY MILKING-PARLOUR

Loki on the lens, Farmer Glitch on the edit!

Some spliced together snippets of wednesday night's show:



"It sounds like ghost music. Y'know: yeeeeegaarrrghhh...."

- Kid Kid Shirt.

The Glitcher brought along an old bucket we'd found last week. It had a mouse's nest in the bottom.

Hope you dig it.

The Lokster retro-expands on last night's photos (links in previous post below) with some very kind and generous words. Cheers.

He also gamely let us press-gang him into shooting some archival vid of the show - which hopefully we'll post pretty soon. I enjoyed playing very much - it felt like a pretty good show to me - but sometimes it's hard to gauge since what comes out the PA can often end up sounding very different to what you hear on the fold-back monitors. Still, I met some really nice folks who seemed pretty enthusiastic about what we were doing. The whole evening was a lot of fun.

I really enjoyed Tim Hill's set: he played a series of self-composed pieces for various-sized saxes backed by a Powerpoint presentation! I thought Tim's live playing had a lovely tone to it.

JUNKGHOSTS

Loki in the house: real-time blogging on The Wytchmaschine: Junkcrunch ghostmeltdn 1, 2, 3, 4.

Posted before we even got off stage.

Great to see ya, man. It's been too long.

THE HACKER FARM SPADE

Stencil courtesy of the mighty 2ND.FADE.

PEVERELIST: "BETTER WAYS OF LIVING", ETC

Punch-Drrrrunken Master Pev backflips off the pagoda.tech porch of his "Jarvik Mindstate" LP and delivers another biff-bang kerwhallop double body-blow. With echo.

"Better Ways of Living": My God, this is fucking good.

Really nice fullsome clunky-sounding drums - and that's clunky, as in Post-Clonk (in the Sweet Exorcist sense of the term), not badly programmed. There's a bit of stray flange that dive-bombs the listener like a metal, delta-wing'd kite or one o'them Flying Guillotine thingies.

Fuck, I do like them drums.

Karate-chop key-stabs. Rim-shots that sound like an armed monkey trying to kick his way out of a wooden barrel. A blind pole-fighter hammers on the palace-gates demanding to be let in.

Blimey! He's taking this Punch-Drunk label-name thing a bit too seriously, I think. A right proper dance-floor dust-up.

"Fighting Without Fighting" - great title! - woaaaah, could this be even better? This is frantic, crazed stuff: a lone programmer sees off all-comers, lashing out with broken rata-tat-tat beats, echoes ricocheting off the temple walls, bodies n beats flying in all directions, white whiskers n eyebrows flapping in a slo-mo pressure-wave. Bullet-time Dancehall. Cunning, ingenious, exhausting to listen to.

2:15 in is the best keyboard line I've heard since The Chuuuung Dynasty. An Asian Version of the Residents mourn the loss of....something. Fabulous, fabulous stuff.

Hairs rise on back of me arms when I hear that organ-line.

Peverelist is the King of Some New Unnamed Science.

BUY!!

WHERE THE HEART ISN'T

"What's a PoVid?"

My friend, the Texan film-maker Jayson Densman checks in with the answer:

"...just finished something unique called a PoVid...A Poetry Video. It is based on the work of a one John Edward Lawson up in Maryland. John is a published author/poet/editor and owns/operates Raw Dog Screaming Press along with his wife Jennifer Barnes. The PoVid was created to help re-introduce a general populous who don't read much creative literary works, if any at all. Especially the younger crowd. A good portion of us absorb classic and modern storytelling through movies and TV, and have put aside the pleasures of reading a good book or some excellent poetry. The idea is to mesh a poem (in this case, surreal/dark) with audio/visuals in a way that caters not only to the literary-appreciative bunch, but to those who may find a cool doorway into a world of some damn fine writers/artists. At least those are my hopes.

"Soooo, the link below is the first of three PoVids I'll be making, all based on Lawson's work. This particular one was written by J-Law in Maryland, the narration and sound bed by the great Kek-w in Yeovil, England and shot with a tiny camera here in Irving, Texas with Tom Young, actor extraordinaire.

"If ya dig this little 2 minute Thing and/or what we're trying to do with it, by all means please help promote it, link it, shoot it up a flagpole!"

"Where the Heart Isn't"

SOME EARLY SIGHTINGS OF THE 19F3 RECORDS GORILLA PEG-BAG

Coming to a town near you: The (Official) 19F3 Records Gorilla Peg-bag.

I thought about selling this on-line, but the weight / size of the damn thing would make the postage costs prohibitive, so it currently stands guard over my merch-table like some sort of flashback mascot.

Sometimes it joins me on stage, occasionally hanging out with a little totemic plaster-head that one of my kids made and which I drew on. There is also a large ball of purple wool that accompanies me to shows which I've not quite figured out what to do with yet. I may one day use it to weave a weird woollen web around the audience. Or something.

The peg-bag is slowly filling up with goodies that some, er, 'lucky' person will eventually score.

19F3: we're here to give you the things you never knew you needed.

JOE: "UNTITLED"

On Appleblim's mighty Applepips label comes "Untitled" by Joe from the Hessle Audio crew. The track is like a weird audio-illusion, tho I can't quite figure out which direction the trick mirror is facing; its own spaciousness keeps me guessing: is this a minimal-ish mix that presents a mirage of biziness; or is the tune in fact programatically complex, but tricksy beat-spacing makes me think it's wide-open and stripped back?

Ah, who cares.

I like the little smears of crackle - like someone trying to Moonwalk in velcro slip-ons on a gravel path - and the tiny, almost unobtrusive Worrellesque mod.wheel synthfonk interjections: blink n you (almost) miss 'em. And there's a slooow dnwards-sliding organ glide that sounds, well - not ominous, but ever so slightly worrying to my ears: it's like some post-techno equivalent of a Laurie Johnson music cue from some old House of Hammer TV production...not so much "don't go down into the cellar!", but more a sort of shorthand for, "there's something a bit off about the next-door neighbour's wife". Which is nice n subtly creepy rather than heavy-handed.

"Subtle" is a good word for a lot of the production chops on show here: repeated plays uncover all sorts of things - sounds that you didn't necesarily notice the first few times. It's confident-sounding and forward-thinking, rather than flashy. Quirkily seductive. The bass pulls you forward, into the sound-picture without dominating proceedings.

I like the fact that someone seems to come home half-way through the track and take their coat off in the hall.

In someways I like the sheer lurchiness of the flip-side "Digest" more. I certainly didn't expect to hear that gong-stretched-into-a-flute sound. Like the A-side, the percussion programming is v. inventive - a real joy to behear - and there's some cool fake-electric-piano moves on show, but it's the rhythmic curve-balls - the unexpected staggers, shifts and sways that I'm digging here.

Good stuff.

ER, BRAZILIAN WINE LABELS

Dan Poeira just got me intrigued with his twittermentions of Brazilian wine-labels and their, uh, Robert E Howard book-cover tendencies.

He suggested that I Googled on "catuaba". So foolishly I did:

So, yeah, we - Junkcrunch, that is - are playing Worlds Unknown at The Perfect 5th in Taunton, next wednesday evening. I think things kick off about 8-ish...

Thanks to Tim Hill & co. for having us over to play.

Here's a show they made earlier:

JUNKCRUNCH LIVE: SHOW #2

Here's some live snippets of us in action on sunday night in my hometown of Yeovil - cheers to our pal Bren for shooting the footage and to Farmer Glitch for distilling it down to a manageable packet of noisemulch.

And, yes, we were showing video-hacked home-movies of cows. Rural Electronics, innit.

Towards the end, a very bemused-looking Design (a local band) wander on stage to start their set. Honestly fellas; it's really easy to jam with us! - just play a Neu!-ish Motorik pulse or try and sound like the first 4 or 5 Hawkwind LPs lol. Anyway, much fun was had by all. Thanks to all our friends who came out to have a drink and a gawk.

ORGAN!