RIP BOBBY COLOMBO

Very sad to hear that Bobby Colombo has passed away.

Bobby - or Peter De Ceulaer as many folks knew him - was a mainstay at the wonderfully anarchic Radio Centraal in Antwerp - in fact I think he was ceo in recent years - but he was a lot more than that.

I think his friend Denis Tyfus described him best a couple years back: "He is a visual artist, a carnivore, a radiomaker and a musician, he made a bunch of film soundtracks, music for theatre plays, made music in the past with Sandy Neis of The Hybrids and does all the music and soundwork for a satirical radioshow at Radio Centraal with his wife and his brother called Colunst; he also plays in Space Cactus with Daniel Renders (aka Cassis cornuta) and with Ludwig van Hove in Bob & Lou. Again, these are people that never released anything on their own; they hardly played live but they have the best archive of weird music and satirical plays."

I interviewed Peter / Bobby over the phone a few years ago and he was just such a lovely guy to talk to. Really warm and friendly, enthusiastic and...well, inspirational.

He left me thinking: I want to be like him when I grow up.



If anyone who knew him well wants to leave any stories in my comments-box, then please - be my guest.

NO SLEEVE: "NO SLEEVE"

After years of crate-diggin' I finally stumble over that impossibly-rare copy of "No Sleeve" by No Sleeve on Ember. The sky opens, angels descend, etc. Records like this you'll never, ever find if you actively look for them. You have to...just...let go...give up all hope of ever physically encountering them - embrace the sheer impossibility of them even existing, forget the idea of ever touching them, of them actually being there in front of you.

They are like...a mist, a state of mind, an idea. Something...impossible.

They. Do. Not. Exist.



What's it sound like?

It doesn't sound like anything. Are you stoopid? You can't...you can't play this.

It...it has no grooves.

Actually, No Sleeve is just one stepping-stone, a Glass Hammer-like Stopping-off Point in some Much Longer Game whose eventual terminus is the eventual attainment of "No Song" by No Artist on No Label (Year Unknown). The song - the track; the sound - that no one can ever have or own.

My own personal Zen-Reaper Encounter.

The End Game.

You pick it out of some mouldering box and the kindly-looking old lady - the charity-shop volunteer who was doing her knitting a moment earlier - is suddenly there, smiling down at you as you crouch over the box. Her face shifts, as if your vision has blurred slightly, and she says (a sweet-sounding purr more than a voice): "We've got some more records like that...out in The Back Room. Would you like to have a quick look?"

And she gently leads you through the bead curtain into a stock room that goes on...Forever.

But, No Sleeve...well, it's a different kinda deal to that Unfame Thing I was talking about recently - y'know, that gradual inversion of celebrity; that faded-product boot-shop infamy-leading-to-ubiquity - whereas: this is an erosive process, the gradual erasing of a cultural.object's identity until it becomes an Unthing - a What-The-Fuck-Is-That? Object whose provenence / history / content is uncertain...and that, my friend, is when I really start to get interested. The Not-Knowing-What-That-Is is what catches my eye.

I probably have some sort of DRD4 7-Repeat Allele Thang goin' on. And that...that will prove to be my eventual downfall.

The bead-curtain beckons inside my head - threatens to part - like a looooong string of nucleotide base-pairs.

SYLVESTER ANFANG II UK TOUR (THE RETURN OF PER OYSTEIN)

My good friends Sylvester Anfang II hit the UK in an explosion of sparks and pictures of naked witches. Glen, Bram and Ernesto'll be takin' point in various, er, permutations.



It'll all be good. It'll all be cool.


Sylvester Anfang II / Ignatz / Hellvete / Bear Bones, Lay Low – UK Tour 2010

31/10 - Bumbles - Bournemouth (w/ Ignatz, BBLL, Hellvete, Andrew Perry/Dead Wood)

01/11 - The Croft - Bristol (w/ U.S. Girls, Hellvete)

02/11 - Head Of Steam - Newcastle (w/ U.S. Girls, Ignatz, BBLL, Hellvete)

03/11 - Cargo - London (w/ U.S. Girls, Gary War, Hellvete)

04/11 - Rammelclub - Nottingham (W/ U.S. Girls, Ignatz, BBLL, Hellvete)

05/11 - The Portland - Cambridge (w/ The Doozer, Hellvete)


Thanks to Pete Um and the folks at Bad Timing for sorting the Anfang Gang out w/ a Cambridge date (with The Doozer!!) - I really fancy going up for that one and hanging w/ the Cambridge boys, but it looks like I'm on dad.duties that night. Def. be going to the Bristol show tho...

VANILLA FUDGE: "YOU KEEP ME HANGING ON"

This vid is ridiculously quiet - so turn it all the way up! - but this is the performance I really wanted to post; It's just so 'right' on so many levels. Sure, it's (selfconsciously) hammy, showbizzy and theatrical, but - holy fuck - it certainly hits a spot for me tonight, fusing Hard Rock n Blues with a quasi Soul Review sound, a semi-futuristic / Mod-SF version of Spector's Girl Band Look and some guys dressed as, uh, Wizards. Puts the 2010s to shame.

BURNS Vs. TINTIN

Funny that Mister Warren Ellis should mention the Herge linkage in Charles Burns' "X'ED OUT" (and cool to hear him namedrop the cruelly underrated Yves Chaland too); by coincidence, Shaky Kane and I were riffing on the same topic, earlier today:

For example, this is a kinda post-apocalyptic remix...



...of this:



Shaky also pointed out that "X'ED OUT" had a red border that referenced the bindings on the old Tintin books (tho sadly missing from the image above).

I have a big soft spot for Burns' work, but (what I saw of) this one was particularly beautiful.

HACKER FARM @ THE BREWHOUSE, TAUNTON

So, yeah, we're part of this multi-artist exhibition thing at The Brewhouse Theatre in Taunton. There's about four different artists / groups involved and over the next couple weeks or so, the cafe-space'll gradually fill up with a mixture of their various work, incl. ours.

Yesterday was a kinda set-up / in-house production day for us. We gotta a lot of stuff done, but there's still a bit o'tidying-up / finishing to be done. Another group had blagged the main video-projector, so we've been loading a bunch of audio-video stuff (archival live footage, The Moovie, animated junk, etc) onto SD-cards and hustling / hosting our work on a series of digital picture-frames...

It's looking pretty cool, though.

Farmer Glitch is, I haveta say, some sorta Jedi Master on the ol' Final Cut Pro.

For anyone thinking of swinging in and taking a look, I think some more wall-mounted bits'll be going up in the next coupla days and maybe also the sound-piece we presented at The Octagon, Yeovil, tho thru the house system this time, not the bespoke speaker-churns and so forth. It's a gradual finishing-off type thing, but I'm guessing it'll mostly be there by the weekend.

On - I think - November 3rd (next wednesday), they'll be projecting a film-piece of ours on the outside of the theatre during the evening; some time between 6 and 8-ish, I believe. More info when I know myself - we're all kinda making this up as we go along.

Thanks to Katie & Co. for inviting us to show our work.

A Hacker Farm Flickr site should be along shortly...

STEELY DAN: "BROOKLYN (OWES THE CHARMER UNDER ME)"

This is mainly for Darren - any major dude knows why - Lee hates 'em tho. But Nick's in two minds.

DOCK BOGGS: "O DEATH"

RIP MIKE ESPOSITO

Or, "Mickey Demeo" - the pen-name he used at Marvel during The Silver Age.

I've got fond memories of the inks / finishes he did on The Hulk in Tales To Astonish, usually over Kirby. It's one of my favorite mini-runs.



And, of course, he was the great Ross Andru's long-time sparring partner. Wonder Woman, Metal Men...ha! Crazy, fun stuff. So many things I've still yet to read, so this world's not done with you yet.

Bless ya, Mickey.



Bless ya.

ELEKSEVENEKS

Elekseveneks: "Desolation"

Elekseveneks: "Torture"

Elekseveneks: "LX7X"

A Nicola Roberts' solo album?

Yes, please.

Personally - and this is just me - I'd love to see her do a track with oOOoOO.

"THAT PRECIOUS AUTO-ALCHEMY OF A MOMENT ALREADY GONE"

Tidying up various loose scraps of paper, I found something I'd scribbled down in a cafe months ago - notes for a blog-post that I'd long since lost / fogotten, so thought I'd type it up and finally post it, if only to throw the scrap of paper away. It ties in to a bunch of stuff I've been thinking about more and more, recently. I doubt I'll have the time to augment / extrapolate it tonight, but here's the raw notes:


Another instance of this today: a song I kinda know / knew, but was unable to fully identify: female vocalist singing (something like): "In New Yoooooooorrk..." over the hiss of Expresso machines and generic conversational hub-bub; too loud to be truly 'ambient', its detail mostly lost in a blur of coffeehaus chit-chat, k'chnnking cash-registers, latte-froth. Drums and bass barely present, just a solitary voice poking its head over the audio parapet, and then only for the chorus - the frequency response of the in-house speakers roughly equating to / being cancelled-out by all the mid-range flotsam swirling around me. A Cage-ian Moment; transfigured Environmental Pop.

I don't want to know what it is - what it was - I'm only interested in what I thought it was I heard. I rarely hear such...yearning - such a sense of a song wanting to be physically somewhere else (and succeeding in translocating itself) - in Prefabricated Music any more. Instead, I'm more likely to encounter it in The Realm of The Accidental.

The transposition of meaning - the suspension of Time and evaporation of Place - that precious Auto-Alchemy of a Moment Already Gone: that's all I really care about in music right now.

IRISH ARMY ARMOURED CARS

And with absolutely no sense of irony whatsoever - or is it??? - here's an unbelievably cool self-published microbook I found in a junk-shop earlier in the week. Long-term readers'll be aware that I have a fascination with little books / pamphlets on arcane narrow-parameter subject-matter (preferably self-published or involving 50s / 60s rocketry), monographs, crank-n-conspiracy.lit, cult.pulp, blahblahblah.

Hahaha...the BBC's political editor Nick Robinson in off-camera action...

(Shame about the spelling, though. "Looses". How're you seriously going to bring down The Man if you can't spell...or maybe it's an, uh, ironic comment on education slash-backs)

RIP ARI UP

I was very, very lucky to have seen The Slits in...um, 1980, I think.

They were brilliant and inspirational - they remain brilliant and inspirational, in all of our hearts - and Ari was a big part of that moment, part of an impossibly-thrilling uprising that burned ever-so briefly...

Nuff Said.

Actually... speaking of Sam Kydd, I can remember watching him in "Orlando" when I was a kid. I think the character was an ex-sailor or had something to do with boats. In fact, didn't the end-credits show a speed-boat going round in circles or something similar?

*strains brain to pull back the temporal curtain"

GIN GOBLINS

Caught the end of "The Quatermass Xperiment" last night - first time I've seen it in years - but did that woman gabbling in the police station to Sam Kydd really say (something like): "So it wasn't a Gin Goblin after all...?"

A Gin Goblin?

Aww, thank Gawd f'that, guv'nor, I thought I was the only one 'oo could see them Gin Goblins!

As an Addendum to the previous post, it should be noted that the "Groovy Kind of Love" 12" and the Buster soundtrack often appear alongside the duets; unsurprisingly, since these are also instances of Diluted.Phil.

Also, a lot of Simon and Garfunkel records have been sliding into 2nd.hand bin focus recently. Not the early stuff, but the mid-period; far, far more than, say, Art Garfunkel solo LPs.

UNFAME AND THE EVERYTHING SHOP

I don't get to hang with my wife w/out the kids very often, so yesterday we got in the car and went on a charity-shop crawl. Spent the morning sifting thru bins of manky vinyl and pinmould-speckled books. I love the alure of The Trawl, the The Sift, the combing thru shit in search of pearls: sometimes, a weird sort of pattern-recognition comes into play; for example, you find yrself noticing 'trends' in the Discardia - you may spot over a period of weeks / months, in different locations in different towns, that certain albums or artists suddenly become more noticable or prevalent in thrift-store / junk-shop bins, as if they've suddenly found some new, inverted form of fashionability. Last year, late-era Culture Club / Boy George solo records seemed to be everywhere; every box of Des O'Connor / Max Bygraves discards contained at least one. Some artists - like Paul Young, Terence Trent D'Arby and Five Star - seem to never go out of Unfashion.

Yesterday, I spotted a run on Phil Collins duet records - twelves, mostly - not his solo reccids, but the ones with Philip Bailey and Marilyn Martin. Phil Collins duets - not just one, but sometimes two or three seperate singles - sitting there in about 7 out of the 10 shops visited. Statistically, that seems curiously high. It's weird; it seems like Phil's Unfame is still in a tentative, almost fragile quantum state, as if the Discardia Market is still only prepared to tolerate his Philness in a diluted / attentuated state, ie as part of a duo. (Remember: everything is inverted / upside-down / backwards in the World of UnPopularity). I'm going to put on my big scary papier-mache Pundit Head and predict a major run on Phil Collins' solo-solo records in the bins early next year - twelve inches of every shade, followed in the summer by a plethora of vinyl LPs.

You might want to get in early here and start stockpilin', Unhipsters! Amaze yr friends: they'll be going "Wow, man, how did you know Phil Collins was gonna be so small...?"

I picked up Brand-X's "Masques" last year; it's okay, but not one of their best.

But you can see where this is going, though, can't you? "Masques" was the first Brand-X LP to not feature Collins on drums...but now, the Unhipster Market is peaking on his solo-duet material, so it's pretty clear to me that we can use raaaandom-sampling of charity-shop bins to extrapolate outwards and predict Reverse Untrends.

Steve Miller's "Fly Like An Eagle" LP has started appearing across multiple charity-shop geographies and demographics. Just though I'd throw that curve-ball at you.

My wife and I also found an Everything Shop. It was awesome - trick-mirror perspectives and everything. It went on...Forever: self-extrapolating, telescoping out into an impossible Tardis-like depth. A sort of Anti-Wilkinsons.

I left my phone in the car otherwise I'd've taken a picture. A million pictures of its Inescapable Actual Vs Apparent Size Ratio. Actually, Everything Shops are sooooo big that light cannot escape from them - nor customers - so the pictures wouldn't've come out anyway. I have only my memories now and they are already starting to fade.

I love Everything Shops - proper ones, mind you; not these shitty little regional chains - they have to be righteously narrow, so deep and looooong that the rear of the shop is lost in shadow or the mists of Time. I know where most of the good local Everything Shops are - or thought I did - but we kinda stumbled on this one and didn't want to leave.

Actually, we couldn't leave.

Then I remembered that I had a (very) short heartbreaking-yet-satirical story on the go that's about the malignant-inverse of an Everything Shop - an impossibly-huge macrocapitalist factory-as-retail-outlet that becomes its own brutal nation-state - and I had a sudden, inexplicable desire to finish the piece.

Maybe it was the coffee.

Instead, I have started work on a new Amerigo Verde story - since the old one was starting to look a little lonely and I had a growing desire to write some Science Fantasy again.

This one's about lost hope, Gnosticism, Baroque Fractals and the most appalling siege of a city imaginable.

NOCHEXXX: "RITALIN LOVE"

If Nick's twelve seems to play around with ideas of spiritual / technological attenuation, signal drift, futures-past, faded love-affairs with / hatred for The Machine (whilst also suggesting possible strategies for boosting the signal and re-establishing contact - restarting old dialectics and making The Ghost solid once more - without resorting to full-on nostalgia or squirm-inducing Hauntophilia), then Dave's twelve comes to the table (the dancefloor? the bed?) from the opposite side of the Man-Machine interface and reminds us of what it could once do when it was all domesticated and tamed back in the Futurity-embracing 80s - when the Fonkmaschine was still a benign and sexy idea and CCTV only existed in Cabs videos and we'd let the music grab us by the short n wiggly quarter-inch jacks and its guidance-system would make sure our pelvic phallodonics were nicely lubricated n ready for a bout of zero-G post-human luuuurve. Baby.

My, what a long sentence.

Nochexxx reccids're are misshapen, hairy, leery, squirty, shiney, chunky, hunky, squeaky, drunken, smiley, lumpen, bumpy, (cont. page 94). He turns strut into a syncopated lager-stagger (and vice versa); his beats sound like bones swivellin', drunken muscles flexing, like a mechanised digestive-system squirting a mix of acid n enzymes into a bolus of musical chyme; he inverts The Fonk, The Jack, The Schwing into something more... willfully slap-happy and haphazard - there's a gleam in his eye; a glint of cheek; but he's a romantic at heart, really...

On "Ritalin Love" he ramps up the rude noises, the parps and the phat, rumpy-pumping bass. The snares sound like a slapped arse. It sounds awesome on vinyl. I don't envy any DJ who plays this record: they look up from their instamatic-mix-beat-counter, only to find that Essex has turned into West Hollywood. There's a parade - an infinite limbo-line stretching through 4-dimensions (back and forward in Time simultaneously) - marching past the DJ-booth: Fonk-Freaks and She-Things with different-length'd legs, hands on each other's hips, swaying like land-locked sailors limping on their pegs, as they stagger-dance past the DJ - an endless parade of physically-remixed extras from old colour-saturated Peech Boys promo-films waving neon-tubes, wearing lurid woolen leg-warmers over unshaven legs, a sackcloth-and-ashes dress from Patsy Climate tm, zircon-studded headbands, just beggin' you to get it on, baby, one last time....

"There But For The Grace of God Go I..."

"And I knoooooow," sing-says a sample-that-knows-it's-a-sample (it's a sad sample, see? Sad samples always know they're just samples trapped on a hard-drive, on a reccid), "Whoooooo gets your love...." And it's heartbreaking to hear it talk like that; it's like an old flame asking for one last chance. A regret entombed in an 8-bit waveform.

In one way, Dave's and Nick's records are strangely similar in that they both allow the Past to access the Present; they let the Dead draw breath again and look at the world with fresh, newly-grown eyes.

Both these records are the musical equivalent of breaking The Fourth Wall. Unlike - and let's try and be truthful about this rather than unnecessarily cruel - so many contemporary artists who produce work that's merely a form of sonic re-enactment; puppeteers who just put old tropes through their paces again and pass xeroxes off as Spontaneous Generation or Oujia-Board conjuring - but here, here I get a sense of Music Wanting To Be heard Again, of Musician-Producer-as-Conduit, of voices-from-the-other-side willing themselves back to life.

Life loves Life. The universe rebuilds itself from peco-second to peco-second; newness springs constantly from collapse, from Quantum Uncertainty, from Death. The Past inhabits us; our nervous-systems are like antennae. The Dead speak to us; they force our hand, force us to make them new again. Old forms and cultural themes perpetually rise within us like dormant viruses.

I don't care it you don't get that, or don't hear what I'm hearing. It's not important.

I'm not a critic, just a listener.

I believe in these things so that you don't have to.

It's my right to be wrong.

But this...this is on white vinyl, sucker.

GENTLEFORCE ON EXOTIC PYLON

Our old friend Eli - aka Gentleforce - appears on Jonny Mugwump's Exotic Pylon Show tonight. Go'n check it out. I really like his last album.

Eli's an extremely nice fella. He and his wife are moving over to London from Aus in the new year, so we wish them both a v. smooth migration.

Rucker Vs Sterling.

Hacking Reality since 1977 ce.

ULTRAPHALLUS

Ultraphallus.



"Sowberry Hagan" out soon. Mastered by James Plotkin, apparently.

GROUNDHOGS: "THANK CHRIST FOR THE BOMB" (1970)

Title track of what's probably my favourite Groundhogs' LP. The guitar really kicks off around 4:25-ish, but I like the whole piece, the fact it's sectioned off into discrete parts. The second part sounds curiously Proto-New Wave / Post Punk in its starkness. Tony McPhee is such a hugely underrated guitarist; tragically neglected, almost a lost figure in UK music.



I've mentioned on this blog before about Groundhogs' influence on The Fall - as well as the couple covers they've done, there are all sorts of sidereal linkages and lyrical / musical steals goin' on...

Was talking to Matt Woebot about Groundhogs a few weeks ago - he digs this LP too. The CD reissue comes with some bonus early 70's live tracks. I'm not a fan of CDs - especially extended ones which distort the shape of classic LPs, but there's so little in the way early-70's Live Groundhogs performances around - and they were such a ferocious (and inventive) band during that period - that I can forgive it in this instance. Can't beat the vinyl, though.

McPhee was due to play in Yeovil about a year or so ago and I was v. excited by the prospect of seeing him play live, but he cancelled due to illnesss in the end.

EKOPLEKZ: "STALAG ZERO / DISTENDED DUB"

(Ekoplekz debut twelve on Punch Drunk drops Nov 15th.)

On "Stalag Zero" flanged data riddimsquirts navigate a snakelike flightpath through a cavernous maze of tunnels, accompanied by flashing-light blips that remind me - in the way they behave, not the way they sound - of Bit from Tron or those fretfully out-of-sorts microsaucers from Close Encounters. Oddly, though, the track creates a curious trick soundworld that's somehow both spacious and claustrophobic at the same time.

The music reminds me of the time I visited the underground WW2 field-hospital on Jersey that was built by Nazi slave-labour: mile-long corridors that disappeared into the dark; dusty, makeshift chambers that were intended to serve as 'wards' for the wartime wounded; flickering overhead lighting, slow-dripping water and trick perspectives: an oppressive labyrinth that acted as an accidental sound-carrier (you could pick up hushed conversations 50m away that made you think you were hearing voices; imaging things) and which induced a sort of self-oppositional tension within me - a mixture of intense, semi-addictive fascination ("where does this tunnel lead...? I need to know...") and a feeling of barely-submerged panic ("let me out of here!")...

Although my sad ol' reptile-brain is probably riffing on the title as much as the music, this also summons up a similar sense of labyrinthine abandonment, of navigating thru some twisted maze of archaic technology - a technology not much older than the rusting 40s pipework and surgical tools in Jersey, but one still very much alive, still ticking-over, still cycling through its unfathomable processes - an abandoned future-past - and not necessarily an alien one either; I'm picking up a sense of sad human servitude embedded in the mysterious-sounding blips, pulses and smears of sound, an afterecho of some long-forgotten intent. The exact details aren't important, but the 'feel' that I'm getting is - it's like a form of musical psychometry.

I like music that gives me a strong visual impression - it's one of my things - where the processes used to create it seem to give rise to imaginary structures that [themselves] seem to be creating the sounds heard by the listener. It's a sort of creative Moebius-loop - one that never fails to fascinate me - and Nick has managed to achieve that. Repeated listens continue to reward and open up new detail. Another plus-point is that the music is definitely 'Off-Grid' - I'm not hearing / seeing a Vst or Fruity grid of repeating beats or loops - the cyclical events created by Nick's kit are not subjected to the tyranny of quantising, a subliminal clicktrack / clinical braingrid; the flange and echo adds new curves, bends, micro-cycles and false rhythms to the piece (hence the sense of navigation and exploration invoked in the listener); it opens it up, adds quasi-fractal detail, rubs the edges off the underlying repetition, takes it Off-Grid.

Uhhh, reductive thumbnail description to leave you with: Forbidden Planet ost if it had been recorded by Cabaret Voltaire in '76-ish before they released their first EP, or maybe the soundtrack of some lost, early 70's Soviet or East German SF film.



"Distended Dub" deserves a more evocative name, I think, but it's kinda fun that it doesn't have one; it's more ominous, more overtly linear, is more of a, uh, 'tune'...

Think: The Future / early Human League but stripped right back to the bone - everything coated in a graphite 'fur'...ferrous microswarf condensing out of the air to coat the music...iron filings on a magnet...the air thickening around you - clammy, cold and metalic - darkening as the track progresses.

Music as aural cinema, a superconductor.

A single electronic-drum...an e-hammer beating out time. A countdown, a heartbeat, the factory-clock. Lives ticking away in never-ending repetition. Magnets, mag-levs, tape-drives...mindless tape-transports endlessly unspooling...ticker-tape, punchtape...swarf from a grinder...vast, endless, pointless, thankless, never-ending zombie industry...

"The uneasiness which keeps the never-resting clock of metaphysics in motion..."

Work as metaphor.

Work.

STEVE AYLETT STANDS UP

S. AYLETT STAND-UP:

On Oct 29 2010 at Roxy Arts House, Edinburgh, SF/satire author Steve Aylett reads stuff from his books, and demonstrates the many powerful elements of Jeff Lint's 'effortless incitement'. Includes readings from The Inflatable Volunteer, Toxicology, LINT and Smithereens, and probably an appearance from the unsettling Lord Pin.

Books on sale (and Caterer comics), including The Complete Accomplice and new book Smithereens.

Starts 7.30 on Oct 29, Roxy Arts House, Edinburgh. Part of their Death Weekend (for Halloween).

"the most original voice on the literary scene" (Michael Moorcock)

"the coolest writer alive today" (Starburst)

"utterly original" (SFX)

THE RETURN OF DOM ZERO

My old pal Dom Zero is back blogging again after a period in the wilderness being tempted by Satan, etc.

He 'fessed up that he'd been lurking on Facebook for a while. "You get more comments there," he explained. But I think he's finally come to the conclusion that facebook's a bit shit. Sometimes I think I'm the only person in the world who's not on Facebook. I think I kinda like that.

So go and leave some comments on his blog.

Nice ones, otherwise he'll hunt you down and kill you. Slowly.

(Sorry, I meant he'd kill you slowly, not hunt you down slowly. That would be a bit...no, actually, that's probably what he would do. He'd smoke a lot and think about what he was going to do when he found you. You can't hurry some things...)

Anyway, I think he hung Stewart Lee. With a noose or an old coathanger, I'm not sure which.

Actually, I've no idea who Stewart Lee is. Presumably, he's famous or something.

COTLEY FLASHBACK

Ye Gods, has it been a week since Cotley already?

Been busy polishing-up a script, trying to fend off a virus, that kinda thing. Anyway, we missed the really bad weather by just a few hours and the sun even came out to play, along with some old friends who it was really great to see. Plus: there was cider.


(Heh. We got off lightly with the "Fart" graf. The cast-iron sign-post pointing to the village got pulled down the week before the exhibition. Bloody thing weighed a ton, but someone chained it to a pick-up, uprooted it and dragged it down through Chard High-Street before ditching it. I don't think Jonny Mugwump quite believed me when I said it was like the Wild West around here. 25 years ago you would've been lynched for putting on an exhibition.)

There was a great turn out for the talks n stuff, despite the dodgy weather and the obscure rural location. A really nice mixture of people, ages, etc. I thought the talks were great - quietly inspirational and heartfelt, not at all dry.

Very interesting Hacker Farm show...quite different to anything we've done before. Actually, they've all been different; different contexts, emphases...

This started out kinda drift-y, ambient-ish; almost (unsurprisingly) a live installation - well, you don't wanna do anything harsh or full-on when families and kids're wandering around chatting, checking stuff out. Anyway, after a while, it started to build...but then my kids arrived, along with Farmer Glitch's, and - before we knew it - all those noise-making toys were just too much of a temptation and we started threading the kids' sounds through the mix...Hacker Farm Junior or V 2.0, as Farmer Glitch described it later.

Then all hell broke loose lol.

I think a handful of adults had just been dying to tinker with some of the Farmer's squelchboxes and so forth, so fingers of all sizes started pressing buttons and folks stared to 'have a go'...'cos, like, well, the kids are doing it....

S'funny, innit, when adults sheepishly use children as a cover for doing something they think that maybe they shouldn't be doing, heh. Anyway, a kind of random ambient jam broke out. We knocked the beats / pulses out of the mix - to minimise potential cacophony and leave space for people to join in, but then a woman told FG to play some beats 'cos she "wanted to dance" lol.

In an art- gallery???...well, whatever next! There'll be letters in The Times about this, I'm sure.

Anyway, I think we probably ticked all the 'inclusiveness / interactive' boxes in our mission-statement with this one. There was no real physical barrier between audience and 'performers', apart from the tables that our gear was sat on.

In the end, we just kinda stepped back and let them get on with it. Ha!

Hopefully, everyone enjoyed the entire afternoon's activities. I def. liked the whole easy-goin' sociability thing that was going on. We got to meet lots of cool new people.

We also got ambushed into doing a talk ourselves, which I think Bren - *eeek* video'd, damn his black west-of-Crewekerne hillbilly soul! I'm expecting blackmail demands from him any second now.


(O-Mon Glitch triggers some very disturbing TG-like synth patches (a chip off the ol' block!), while Kid Kid Kid Shirt calls the Transport & General Workers Union out on strike)


(Despite her somewhat startled expression (that's normal!), here she is doing what can only be described as some uncannily accurate early-70's Gilli Smythe 'space-whisper' impersonations.)

Since the exhibition has now been dismantled, here's a couple of badly-photographed glimpses of work by Liz, Gary and Natalie (who were all, it has to be said, extremely lovely / friendly people. It was a pleasure and an honour to share the space with them and I hope our paths cross again in the future).

POLLUTO #7

Issue #7 of Polluto magazine arrives in a blood-smeared ballgown and seaweed tiara, kicks down the door, yelling "Fuckrrrrrs!" as it sprays the room with cartridges of No. 6 magnesium buckshot. Debutantes cough blood onto their dance-cards; malignant-looking shrimp-like creatures emerge from the sherry-trifle and scuttle across the buffet-table, nipping at random body-parts.

"Let that be a lesson to you," sneers Polluto, slamming fresh cartridges into the breech of its puntgun.

Its favourite lipstick is Iced Moocha by CharlieGirl tm.


As foretold on page 476 of the Zann-Matt MoHokey, Ish7 contains my short-story "The Making of True Confessional #7".

Yes.

Soon as I get a comp. copy I'll post the cover in its full ultralurid glory.

Apparently, this issue contains: "...bone-crushing lovers; a cross-dressing hitman; the night-soil man of the gods and sex conditioning on squids; the dangerous desires of the diabolically large and the seductively small; body-swapping, gender-swapping, exploration, transcendence and re-incarnation; machines that are gods and machines that are cats..."

Come on, alt.lit.lover, you know you wanna...

COTLEY PHOTOS

A kinda Before n After type deal.

First up, some pics I took of the barn a few weeks back, when we did our first site-visit...



















Our original plan had been to make some speakers from abandoned tractor-wheels and oil-drums, but this line o'thought got derailed and we ended up focusing in on the Medieval Cinema and "The Moovie", a rebuild of the Octagon Sound Installation and the Atari Punk Bucket.

Here's a few 'After' photos taken last week, incl. part of the set-up for the live performance. (Farmer Glitch excelled himself in constructing a scavenged sound-system from an old Leslie rotating speaker, a Yamaha mid-range and a quartet of old, 70's vintage Celestion Hi-Fi speakers. The plan was to build a sort of surround-sound / quasi-Quad speaker array for the live show. The barn's natural in-built reverb gave the sound-system a really nice n spacious church-like feel.)

I've not included too many detailed pics of the other artists' wonderful work, just vague tasters for now, cos - well - you really should come n see them in the flesh, so to speak, just as the artists intended you to. It wouldn't be fair of me to turn this into a remote-control digital-gallery of someone else's efforts. The big pieces really do make you go 'wow' when you walk into the main room, and some photos would diminish that impact. The Real World beats the fucking Internet hands-down every time.













An, er, artist-in-residence ("Still Life (With Lunch)"):