KID SHIRT

KID SHIRT'S ADVENTURES IN THE AFTER-LIFE

2011-01-27T19:18:00.002Z

200 YEARS OLD

2010-12-18T00:07:00.005Z

Tbh, I wasn't planning on posting here any more - the blog felt like it had come to a logical end-point - along with a handful of other things in my life - how fickle am I to renege on a self-made 4am promise?...but, well, I couldn't not comment on Don van Vliet's passing.

Actually, I heard "Lick My Decals Off, Baby" before...before the, uh, the other one. I was in my mid-teens and...well, if I'm honest, hearing it really didn't change my life or nuffink - I'd be a liar if I said that it did - I think I was already well-and-truly doomed by that point. Hearing Beefheart just sort of, well, confirmed what I already suspected about...things. It was like someone sort of slapped me on the shoulder, really hard, and sent me staggering down the garden path slightly faster than I intended.

I was exactly, totally, absolutely...ready for it, y'know?

After that I could look certain people who were older than me - people like Rob Bacon - I could look them in the eye. I was in on the joke, I thought I knew what's-what (I didn't, of course; still don't...but...). They'd smile and nod slightly if they caught you checking out "Safe As Milk" in the rack. They wouldn't take the piss out of you.

Liking Beefheart or Nico or whatever in a small provincial town in the Mid-Seventies was, like...well, it wasn't like Punk; there was no gang - no mates to back you up - it was just one or two Others... then slowly, you meet another Other, then another...a couple mates get into it too and become Others...blahblahblah...

I'm still meeting Others.

I still define people by whether they're an Other, or not. I know I shouldn't, but that's engramm'd into me now...

Beefheart was a calling-card, a gentle nudge-down-the-garden-path, a nod-and-a-wink...

BY HIM WE SHALL RECOGNISE YOU.

WE SHALL KNOW YOU.

The music was pretty fucking good too.

Why, when Kid Kid Shirt was kneehigh to a grasshopper, I...I was pretty ill round that time, but when I was well enough I used to bottle-feed her in the early evening and sometimes I used to sing-talk this song to her:

Said the momma t’ the baby in the corn
You are my first born
You shall here on in be known as The Spotlight Kid
‘n the mornin’ cry of the rooster
The baby lay alone
‘n the old cow in the green grass
Shed white tears in the red hot sun
‘n The Spotlight Kid stood under the moon that evenin’.

Nobody knows that 'cept you. Ssssshhh

My choice of song is not 'classic', canonical Beefheart, but it's my choice, my song, so humour me, huh? Actually, I always liked "Upon The My Oh My" for reasons that I'm not - ever, never - gonna share with you. Somethings will always remain mine. So, no, it's not that, but...

Thank You and Goodnight.

"YOU'RE A GHOST, LA LA LA"

2010-12-11T23:25:00.015Z

"There is nowhere anything lasting, neither outside me, nor within me, but only incessant change. I nowhere know of any being, not even my own. There is no being. I myself know nothing and am nothing. There are only images: they are the only thing that exists, and they know of themselves in the manner of images...I myself am only one of these images." - J G Fichte.

I was reading these very words in a cafe when - in one of those moments of unexpected superimposition - John Cale suddenly started singing over the house sound-system: "You're a ghost, la la la / You're a ghost / I'm the bishop and I've come / To claim you with my iron drum / la la la la la la..."

I should explain (because this makes the moment doubly strange for me, okay?): they normally play noodly post Kenny G Jazz-FM type cack or bland US Indie/Singersonger fodder that was already pretty embarrassing even back in the era of Friends or Buffy...and the Cale microcast was, in fact, completely bookended by the usual reheated 8th-gen digi-Stan Getz drool. There was no warning, no indication, that reality had temporarily skipped a track. I immediately got goosebumps - I mean, reading those words as the soundtrack switched; woah! - and when normal service was resumed I actually sat there for a minute, looking round the room, thinking: fuck, did I just imagine that...?

Of course, I now have to ghostdump that moment out via HTML - via an image - a moving one, with sound, but an image nevertheless - to all you imaginary people - to all you...images that I have in my head that pretend to be people.

I made you all up, didn't I? It's okay: you can tell me; I don't mind.

You're not real. And I'm not really here anyway.

You imagined me; you made me up.

Projected me out onto your non-existent inner eyeballs.

We're all contingent.

If I was a real person, I'd almost certainly now tell you something comforting - something familiar and in keeping with my character - something real - like, errrm: "Paris 1919 is probably one of my favourite albums..." that it scores pretty much a straight 10, though "the title track isn't my favourite song on the LP."

Little details like that...plausibly-familiar character tics filtered through a writer's eye and squirted down a tangle of copper-wire; HTML / XML compressed into data-packets and reassembled as images - as wordtext...a couple sentences of needless detail designed to lure you into thinking that I actually exist, that I'm not a ghost, not an image.

La, la, la.

NOCHEXXX: CONCEPTO MIX #15

2010-12-09T23:14:00.001Z

Yas, here.

"...direct-from-vinyl mix, built specially for the good folks at Concepto Radio, smelly-scratchy-black-moles-tunnelling through-dank-funky-detritus, with cheap needles type trax."

Yep, roger that!

Also, an interview.

MOOMBAHTON

2010-12-09T20:46:00.004Z

Moombahton, innit.

Undownpitched / De-Afrojack'd "Moombah":

COMPANY FUCK (SLIGHT RETURN)

2010-12-09T20:12:00.004Z

Our old friend Scott - aka Company Fuck - recently hit the UK for a few spontaneous happenings / shows, but since I've been away and, uh, otherwise occupied with various...things, I completely forgot to give his tour a shout-out.

Apologies, Scott! So, to try and make up for this, here's a montage of various CF, er, events...

CF - you'll be unsurprised to hear - will be appearing on the long-anticipated "Local Horse Artist" CD from 19F3.

DRIVE BY TRUCKERS: "DANKO / MANUEL"

2010-12-08T22:04:00.004Z

Had this song going through my head all day. Not sure why - it's five years old - but it's come back to haunt my memory today.

Well, actually...

It feels oddly...Of-and-About-Now: an opaque wasteland of a song; an almost pitch-perfect soundtrack to a freshly Assangesised World.

The Anti-"Hotel California".

"Something else you can't believe."

ROCKETS FALL ON ROCKET FALLS

2010-12-06T20:24:00.005Z

Awww, come on....

Who wouldn't want to see Godspeed You! Black Emperor three days in a row with three of the best people in the world?

(It's vaguely conceivable that there might even be two or three of you out there who are unfamiliar with their music, in which case I kinda envy you if you're hearing this for the first time.)

Three two-hour sets.

I am tired.

Me go to sleep now.

OKKYUNG LEE

2010-12-02T20:45:00.003Z

Okkyung Lee.

Improv cello, innit.

ZARJAZ #10

2010-11-30T21:33:00.005Z

Thanks to Dave 'Bolt-01' and Rich for sending over a comp. copy of Zarjaz #10:

Inside are some v. cool 2000AD-spin-off thrills, wrapped up in an awesome Flesh-themed Leigh Gallagher cover. Actually, I did a Future Shock type thing with Leigh some years back. He's good.

Yep, this is a pretty damn good ish. I particularly like the Flesh: Extinction story and Neil Roberts pulls off a niiice Redondo pastiche in a nano-sized Al Ewing thing.

As precogged a while back Z10 features "Unfinished Business" - a new Rose O'Rion short.story written by, uh, me and featuring some totally wunnerful illos by Dylan Teague, whose Thoroughly-Good-Eggishness goes waay beyond the call of duty.

It was a lot of fun to do.

You can snag yrself copies from comic-shops like Forbidden Planet or directly from the Futurequake Shop here.

Go! Buy!

THE FRANK ZAPPA ADVENT CALENDAR INCIDENT

2010-11-27T20:07:00.004Z

In a cafe today, with wife and eldest daughter Kid Kid Shirt (aged 10), talking about Advent Calendars.

Me (enthusiastically): "What I'd really like is a Frank Zappa Advent Calendar...you know, one with a little chocolate guitar under each window..."

Wife (mock grimace): "Yeah, I bet you would..."

Kid Kid Shirt starts playing air-guitar and sing-talks an atonal Zappaesque run of noises...

Encouraged, I also start playing air-guitar, attempting an off-key approximation of the start of "Black Napkins".

Kid Kid Shirt starts following me, playing imaginary air-guitar-licks and repeating my sounds 0.7 of a second after me, creating a weird echo-effect.

Wife begins talking about something else, but struggles to get our attention: "I saw so-and-so on wednesday and she...she...I, uuh..."

Wife (loudly, frustration boiling over): "Will you two please stop...jamming !!"

The cafe goes quiet.

RUIS MAGAZINE (DECEMBER ISH)

2010-11-23T20:31:00.002Z

The latest ish of RUIS is out.

Which reminds me: I'm falling behind in my Flemish lessons.

Already.

Er...Goedenacht.

GALA DROP, er...DROPS

2010-11-22T19:46:00.003Z

As previously predicted by the Ominously Itching Scalp of Kid Shirt, the new Gala Drop twelve "Overcoat Heat" has arrived via Golf Channel Recordings.

Here's a video-edit of the track "Drop" which was 'spontaneously' created by Antonio Contador:

DROP (from Gala Drop) from Antonio Contador on Vimeo.

LIL B: "BITCH, I'M BILL CLINTON"

2010-11-21T18:30:00.002Z

#RARE! #BASED! #SWAG!

The Hardest-Tweetin'...er, I mean, Hardest-Workin' Man in Rap - The Based God, himself - dropped his #ULTRARARE! #BITCHSHAKETHATASSONMYDICKWOOWOOSWAG! #NEW! #MIXTAPE! #REDFLAME a week or two back.

Regulars will be aware that we're rather partial to bit o'Lil B out here in the storm-wracked wilds of South Somerset. Here's my favourite cut:

DYLAN ETTINGER

2010-11-21T15:56:00.005Z

People in the street often confuse me for Dylan Ettinger. They stop and point, say "Hey. Ain't you - ?" A couple times I've signed autographs, just to get rid of irksome town-centre stalkers.

Nope, I'm not Dylan Ettinger. I'm a bit skinnier than him, but I understand why people sometimes get us mixed up.

It's flattering, of course, but a bit of a drag when you're out eating a meal with your wife.

Anyway, here's the real Dylan Ettinger. I doubt if anyone confuses him for me.

ENSEMBLE ECONOMIQUE

2010-11-20T11:39:00.004Z

Ensemble Economique: Brian Pyle...blahblahblah....Starving Weirdos...blahblahblah....etc, etc...various reccids on Amish and Digitalis (which I really must stock up on)...blahblahblah...then the newish one on Not Not Fun...also: RV Paintings. And, uh, fire-walking.

All of which += the sound of many boxes being ticked for me right now.

THE MECHANICAL BRIDE (1951)

2010-11-20T11:12:00.001Z

"The ordinary person senses the greatness of the odds against him even without thought or analysis, and he adapts his attitudes unconsciously. A huge passivity has settled on industrial society. For people carried about in mechanical vehicles, earning their living by waiting on machines, listening much of the waking day to canned music, watching packaged movie entertainment and capsulated news, for such people it would require an exceptional degree of awareness and an especial heroism of effort to be anything but supine consumers of processed goods." - M M.

§ђ∆ZzV⇂∆: "INVOCATION OF MY POSSESSED SISTER"

2010-11-19T20:40:00.003Z

LAKE R▲DIO: "HEAVEN'S GATE"

2010-11-19T20:38:00.001Z

SUN ARAW (AGAIN)

2010-11-19T17:28:00.003Z

So, then, I don't suppose anyone would loan their helicopter to ferry The Remarkable Doctor Circle Brophy and myself to the Sun Araw show at The Croft in Bristol tonight? Mine's being serviced.

No...? Didn't think so.

He'll prob. never play the UK again. Ah, well, never mind.

My APB for local drivers willing to deliver us to the venue has fallen on stoney ground. The most encouraging answer I got was: "Sunn O))) are playing The Croft...???!!!"

"No. Sun Araw."

"Oh. Who?"

So I shall content myself with, uh, doing whatever thankless task it is that I do on a friday evening, punctuated by the occasional James Brown-on-his-knees style weep. Which is pretty much what I did when I found I couldn't make it to the Dolphins Into The Future show a few weeks back.

But enough! Self-pity doesn't suit me. Besides, you can't buy it in purple. Well, not in my size.

In other breaking Bad News, I found a Hudson-Ford single this afternoon that I didn't have. Oh much joy!

But it was scratched to fuck.

Bring on the dancing horses...the ones with people inside them.

STARTLING ADVENTURES MAGAZINE #2

2010-11-16T19:31:00.005Z

Yeah, what he said.

The second ish of Brazilian Pulp mag Startling Adventures rams the zeppelin mooring-mast at full speed. Contains an old short story of mine - "The South Will Rise Again" - which is actually part of a larger thing - a Zombie Western, fer sure - though this works as a standalone story in its own right. No zombies in this section, but instead there are...well, you'll have to read it and see.

Hail to the ever-excellent Mo Ali who supplied an illo for my story and a v. cool short story of his own. Some other pals of mine put in two-fisted prose appearances, incl. Fritz and the afore-mentioned Anthony Whuddafugger.

Kudos to Dan for his efforts - for pursuing his seemingly-endless dream-quest and finally getting this out, live-to-paper. But it was also a group-effort; folks coming together from all round the globe to make a mag that's both by the people and for the people. Everything is author-owned. Please support this endeavour by buying or, at least, spreading the word about it. Dan's wallet is on the line here.

Issue one of SA is still available here.

SPARKS: "EQUATOR"

2010-11-14T20:01:00.006Z

Had this song going through my head all day; don't know why. Haven't played it for yonks.

Always felt this somehow succeeded in reaching out towards some vague, ill-defined form of self-prophesised disappointment; auto-predictive unrequited something...

The Geography of Rejection. Destination recast as Kiss-Off.

The song's protagonist decides he's been spurned in the flimsiest way imaginable - and you sense he knew that it would happen along; that he was complicit in his own rejection by accepting the terms of the deal: "the equator"...how non-specific and nebulous, how curiously circular...now he's left chasing his own tail; caught in-the-round as the song - simultaneously an expression of both his half-arsed ardour and his own ill-focused disgruntlement - finally fades into gaseous exasperation and evaporates. Peeters out.

"But I thought we had an agreement. But you said..."

But, really, he knows that they never did. It's himself that he's angry at (though "angry" is too strong a word) for not being good enough...it's his own standards that he fails to meet - not hers - being dumped merely confirms what he always suspected and which he now knows. The world's not big enough - the equator not wide enough - for him to escape from himself.

She left, but he can't.

A weariness slowly envelops the song, settles over it and threatens to smother it; the vocals - initially a baroque, elongated sigh - a mild protest - eventually run out of steam along with the song. He's looking, looking...not for her, but for a way out. An exit.

To their credit the Mael Brothers never allow the song to sink into maudlin despair, so the feeling they've created persists - it hangs in the air, still cycling round and round - long after the last note has departed.

Yeah, it's a good song. A great one.

Let's push it out into the air - out into the world - and let that feeling finally dissipate.

SHAKY KANE: "THE BULLETPROOF COFFIN" / BREAKING THE FOURTH WALL / ETC

2010-11-13T23:40:00.015Z

Well, of course, you've ALL been reading Shaky's new comic The Bulletproof Coffin...

Of course you have...haven't you?

HAVEN'T YOU!?

Best comic / floppy (or whatever we're calling them nowadays) of the year - or I'll tear up my collection of Jimmy Olsen 80-page Giants!

It's what every comic should be: FUN...engrossing, synapse-ticklin' good fun; fulla lurid candy-floss n freakshow colours, recognisable-yet-trickmirror-distorted archetypes and brain-bending retrofuturistic concepts that fold back in on themselves; if it's PoMo, then it's PoMo-by-default because Shaky's own peculiar obsessions (and the way he bends them to fit his own imagination) will always remain Shaky's obsessions and m.o., so any referentiality comes purely from the fact that he's constantly referring back to his own interests / reference-points / body-of-work, enhancing, updating, re-mutating it / them...the Shakyverse is a constantly-expanding, yet oddly hermetically-sealed Personal Event Horizon - a weird bending of light and logic that hints at fresh cosmic vistas while somehow - via some loophole in the laws of comic-book physics - looking at the back of its own head.

He's never - ever - stopped being Shaky Kane - has always remained true to his game - and that's what counts.

I could talk about meta-narratives that arc back across nearly 30 years of work, of themes and cross-associations and linkage; of how certain tropes or characters or situations re-emerge at points, bisect themselves, turn into something new; of how X and Y relate back to so-and-so or the fact that Scene Z in Bulletproof Coffin is, errrm, a reference to blahblahblah; that I've got paintings - paintings, goddammit - in my wardrobe of proto-incarnations of Red Wraith and Coffin Fly that date back 15 years; or tell you stories of him sending me sketches and finals of The Hateful Dead Bubblegum Card Series sooo long ago I can't bear to think about it...but I won't.

It makes it sound like the guy is just endlessly reworking old ideas from his sockdrawer or approaches his Art with some degree of contrivance, which I can assure you is certainly NOT the case. Shaky is just Shaky; he does what he has to do - usually with absolutely no thought whatsoever of who / what his audience might be...and that's why it's so fucking gratifying to see him (finally) get some serious kudos and exposure via this series. I know him well enough to be able to say he would still do the things he does - furiously drawing away in the small hours - even if they were to be never seen or read by another person. It would be heartbreaking if that were the case, but it's true nevertheless. I mean, those bubblegum cards...who in their right mind would've done that in a pre-Internet universe?

Well, he would.

He did.

That's why, if you've not bought this series, then you should.

Here's another five reasons:

Sorry, but I can't help pointing out that I (kinda) make an appearance in #4:

I've always wanted to appear in an Image Comic. Fourth Wall n all that. It's a reference to...ah, knickers - who cares. It's just v. cool. Screw Grant's "Fiction Suit" - I didn't even need to get out of bed and put me socks on for this. Thanks, Shaky.

Now I just want Rob Leifield to put me in the next reboot of Youngblood.

If there are any similarities between the Shakster and Kirby, then it's the fact that he (also) spits out more concepts-per-minute than just about anyone I know. So, so much for the self-referentiality / meta-narrative jag; just as well I didn't mention it, huh? I've been lucky enuff to hook up with him a couple times in recent weeks and, well, he spins more ideas in a casual conversation than most people do in a month, a year. That's why he's Shaky and we're not.

He's also one of the funniest / warmest / loveliest guys you could ever meet. He makes me laugh. A lot.

(Yes, yes, I know I promised Part Two of the Official Kid Shirt Shaky Kane Interview ages ago...I recorded an hour-long tape over the phone, but 80% of it was just the two of us messing-about, laughing, chucking silly shit around, in-joking, and the rest was, uh, salacious unprintable tales of bad behaviour by Comic-Book Pros that would put Bleeding Cool out of business. Sorry.)

A few weeks ago, Shaky introduced me to Dave Hine - the poor fellow who has to make sense of The Shakyverse - the Stan to S's Jack - and he's an extremely nice bloke too. Amazingly, our paths have never crossed before. Taunton boy, I think. He's writing some character called Batman that you might have heard of.

Hine and Kane: the best four-colour team-up available right now.

2010-11-13T10:59:00.001Z

A dinner-table doodle...

HOMEMADE SPACESHIP

2010-11-12T20:27:00.002Z

I expect many of you have already seen this, but it's incredibly cool.

Homemade Spacecraft from Luke Geissbuhler on Vimeo.

It reminds me of - memory's a bit hazy here - a very old Bruce Sterling story in which stoner lo-tech balloonistnerds ascend to reclaim abandoned US and Soviet spacestations and create an off-surface society / network.

D HARLAN WILSON: "CODE NAME PRAGUE" EXCERPT / "THEY HAD GOAT HEADS"

2010-11-08T20:12:00.006Z

"The Nowhere Incident": a chapter snippet from D. Harlan Wilson's filthcoming novel Codename Prague leaks out as part of Dream People #34.

Now this is weird: I can remember posting a picture of the book's cover-art ages ago, when it was first announced, but couldn't seem to find it anywhere in my blog archives. But then when I Googled on it, I found it.

Phew! Thought I'd imagined that for a second.

Also convinced myself I'd run something on D Harlan's recent collection of short stories - They Had Goat Heads - can remember downloading the cover n everything. Wondering now if I accidentally posted it on another blog...?

Now I'm wondering whether I'm just absent-minded or whether DHR's fiction auto-erases references to itself. Which sounds oddly feasible. Either way: here's a nice colourful picture for you to look at.

Now go n buy the words to go with it.

THE ASSOCIATES: "WHITE CAR IN GERMANY"

2010-11-06T19:45:00.008Z

Salvaged / restored footage; not seen this film before. This and "Q Quarters" were always my favourites...(this is Remodelled Bowie, I guess; and that one was Prefigured Scott, maybe. Always loved the coughing at the end, but not going to post it though; not tonight).

Re-edited for afterthoughts:

Can't leave this post alone for some reason - peripheral thoughts keep cycling around in my head, along w/ the song. I expect I've even posted about this before (it's a perennial fascination to me). At the time, it *ahem* felt like The Associates had picked up a ball that Bowie fumbled (or rather, refused to carry any further; a new manager, a New Career in a New Town beckoned...) and which Scott could've picked up after "Nite Flights", but instead continued to watch from the Subs Bench before ambling onto the pitch with "Climate of Hunter" and playing a different game altogether...

*shrugs*

Those two songs in particular are beautifully hollowed-out, numb-yet-languid; an unlikely collision of minimalist precision and baroque swirl. The production's awesome in its sheer wrongness - press a button and see what happens - druggy and expansive, yet simultaneously claustrophobic, insular and hermetically sealed: a self-contained, self-referential soundworld, oblique but oddly emotional. It's all surface - hints and glimpses of some deeper interior, yet the listener feels trapped inside of something. A jewelled mirrorball of possibilities or frozen expectation? The fascination is in listening-to - witnessing - these seemingly oppositional tensions.

NumbGlam.

They were bonkers live.

I keep wondering: where's that ball now? Does it even exist anymore and - fuck it! - does it matter if it doesn't?

STEREOLAB: "FRENCH DISKO"

2010-11-06T19:32:00.000Z

FRITZ BOGOTT: "SIXTEEN TONS"

2010-11-06T17:57:00.004Z

"Sixteen Tons" by Fritz Bogott. Weaponized, innit.

HACKER FARM: 2010.fl.1

2010-11-05T21:22:00.004Z

Nope, not an audio track, but a film! Yes, that's right: a goddamn film on a floppy!

Believe me, The Glitchster has excelled himself with this one. It's awesome.

Hacker Farm sooo fucking rule, right now.

Forget The Mighty Marvel Comics Group, we are the new House of Ideas!

HELLVETE / U.S. GIRLS / SYLVESTER ANFANG II SPLIT REVIEW

2010-11-04T20:33:00.007Z

Preluude: Tom Bugs walks past and I flag him down.

"Who's playing? Oh, the Kraak Records boys..."

"You going later?" I ask.

"Nah, I'm rehersing." He shrugs and laughs. "Always rehersin'..."

He walks off dn Stokes Croft, half-muttering to himself: "Always rehersin' for something..."

Part One: Thee Sicke Minstrel's Tale.

Despite battling a nasty bout of flu, Helvete kicked off the proceedings with a solo live-extrapolation of the psych.medievalism he explored on his excellent "De Gek" LP (which I've been meaning to write about for nearly a year, dammit!! But I'll def. be pickin' over it soon in a one-off special 'Vinyl Picks' wordcast): building up a constantly-shifting spectral structure constructed from layered keyboard drones - a soft mirage of a building glimpsed from different angles, different points in time, a composite memory / Venn audio-overlap of...tones from the intro of some Germanic ballad from 1464 blending in with a sour-sounding 1966 Cale viola-drone, Warhol's Factory remade as some sort of broken Grail Myth sound-poem. Or that's how it seemed; ghostly and indistinct, solemn yet tender, each layer decaying and falling away from under three or four others.

Behind him, footage of a vintage Dream-Machine endlessly rotating on-and-on; a MemoryDredger tm, the OST to Reptile Brain Invocation #3 ("We filmed it for an hour," said Glen, laughing. Or maybe it was Ernesto.); a few weeks ago I tried one of those internet d-machine simulators wh/ gave me a bad headache within two minutes and eventually induced a bowel-movement rather than some Eternal Archetype; this time I saw imaginary typographies - pseudo-Cyrillic glyphs, woodcuttings of Rammellzee-like word-forms, snippets of some made-up left-brain language; Gothic-looking ghost-characters and alien fonts that seemed to be a lyric-sheet, a libretto designed to accompany Helvete's musical descent into something that sounded foreboding, yet stately and beautiful. ("Hahaha. Well, you are wired differently, dude," said Ernesto, laughing - yeah, it was definitely Ernesto who said that, when I told him I'd seen words, not animals or nebishes or whathaveyou. Ernesto's done this...this re-imagining thing where he's made his own version of a Konono No. 1 track - not a remix - on the forthcoming "Tradi-Mods Vs Rockers" LP and I can't wait to hear that!)

By this point, Hellvete had added a bowed banjo to his arsenal of Burgundian-flavour'd drones, soursweet sombre overtones that sounded like some ergot-smeared fugue - the smell of woodsmoke was drifting thru the venue now, rotting pendants blowing in a bitter wind; women wept, clutching at their rags for warmth while The Velvet Underground played at the funeral of Duke Louis de Mâle.

Banjo-as-timemachine: it's 1730 now, or maybe it's 1927 and Hellvete's plucking at his strings, playing the years - the decades - blurring time and space as he transmutes the music into a sad Appalacian ballad cum dirgesong that summons up the dreams of lonely French migrant workers, the broken mountains and ridges of a pre-coaltrawled Virginia - timeless and untainted by everything except regret.

Lovely.

Interluude one: Bart Sloow, he s'funny; he makes me laugh - a lot. His beard is back, but not as bushy as before - he had a full-on Flying Dutchman at one point; a ghost clipper-skipper's sproutage that made him look as if he'd just stepped out of an old painting (you almost expect him to have flaking oil-paint pigments instead of skin)- he mades my face feel nude, makes me wanna grow a stop-film animation beard, like now. Sloow's putting together another fest. - by accident this time - when he gets back from tour I'll mail him and post some details about who he's got playing; it sounded pretty cool. He has some new tapes out and kindly gave me a copy of the new Majutsu no Niwa one - "Ecstatic Crystallization" - I'm gonna give that a biig blast tomorrow. I'll let ya know how I get on.

Part Two: "Just Flew in From Philly".

Megan Remy catches me sneakily checking out her pedal-array. Embarrassed at being busted, I sorta semi-apologise: "Sorry, I'm, uh..a gear-nerd. I'm curious about other people's set-ups. What pedals they use. I can't help myself." She's jet-lagged; but graceful. I make a vague wasn't-touching-anything, honest type gesture. She laughs and says it's okay. Sad Boss delay-pedal anorak does gurning face and the bullhailer in his head scrzzzes "Hands in the air and step away slowly from the artiste's equipment!" Busted, but extremely pleased to see she uses cassette-tapes as part of her live set-up. Cassette tapes are good; I use vintage Walkman players and 25-year old tapes myself, but nowhere near as well as she does.

Live, U.S. Girls sound like a somnambulant radio-show, all ether-hiss and station-drift, Megan singing thru a gauzy veil of pedal-treatments over (randomly-selected?) tapes from her css-stash. It's like she's her own DJ, picking out song fragments from a broken jukebox in her head and then broadcasting them via a phantom transmitter - herself - selecting sounds that hang in the air, invisible - inaudible - to all but a few. A Radio-Medium who channels ghostly whitegospel and Spector girl-group tropes - the micro-mixer and pedal-maze acting as an electrical ouija-board.

Intermittently, Megan switches cassettes while her pedals pump out wispy swathes of hisssss or fuzzed-out signalmulch; she pitchshifts tumbling squalls of feedback, softening them, taming them; and each tapechange sounds like an invisible hand moving the dial on some vast imaginary wireless-set...re-tuning itself, sifting down thru the spectral output of distant Radio-Stars; collapsing nebulae that use hydrogen clouds as their call-sign. “This is Radio Free U.S. Girls broadcastin’ on 6562.8 Å...”

She plays the mixing-desk like a piano, rapid flurries of hand-movements, tweaking FX-levels, EQs...flattening, fattening, expanding, dragging-out sounds, changing their shapes, pulling them apart...attenuating, diminishing...it is like a radio-show...ghostly, flimsy, tenuous, fleeting, ever-shifting; only allowed to exist by the sheer grace of Megan’s will...sounds woven in and out of each other like strands of phantom silk. “Beauty is tenuous,” her music seems to say, “grab each tender moment while you can, spin it out, transform it into something else...listen ...remember...”

Electronic beats arrive, sounding like Some Other 1982 – Soft Cell haunting the airwaves of Radio Afterlife...some brave souls start to Almost Dance – me included...the past is forgiven, reaffirmed, celebrated, transmuted into The Present somehow. All at once, but in a small, almost silent way.

Sometimes, music just begs to become something else.

Interluude two: Bram chuckles a lot and smiles. He reminds me of Chris Giles, that soft, inwardly-embedded geniality. "They've spelled our name wrong on the poster," he says, or maybe it was Tommy. No it was definitely Bram. "Silvezschter[unintelligible] Anganganganfang-an-an-angfan-agang. Huh?" He shrugs, like, whatchagonnado? Smiles and draws on his cigarette. Like: Life's too short.

"They called me Hell Vet-t-t-t-T," says Glen. He pulls a face and looks vaguely unimpressed. "Gah."

Life's too short.

Part Three: Cassetten Commune Comrades.

Sylvester Anfang crawl out from the spaces between the frames of their own back-projection; they assemble in the shadows; Children of Fenris in rollerneck sweaters. This is the Full Monty, the fourteen-horned Goat of Brabant, cloven hooves and sharpened guitar-picks at the ready. It starts with something that’s a distant-cousin to Hawkwind or Neu, a home-brewed Motorik soup that eschews the incisiveness of Rother or Circle and replaces it with something looser – a baggy suit of clothes that runs down the road, floppy arms a-flailing, empty of any human occupant: Lo – and Behold! – there is no one inside, but see how it runs! - its armless sleeves pumping at the air, footless trouser-cuffs ruh-ruh-ruh-ruh-running in time to the drums. If Motorik was all about The Drive - the pulse of engine and heartbeat of driver syncing with landmarks as they flash past outside - then this is the sound of the driver removed from his car, his body dissipated – evaporated – from inside his Byrne-sized suit - running on ahead of himself; all corporeality abandoned – the trouser-legs a physical afterecho of the post-physical 'him'...they’re trying to catch up, his legs and arms, jogging in time to a headless-chicken rhythm that only he can hear in his non-existent head. It’s the pulse of Life that animates his bodiless clothes, his invisible heart beating inside his head.

Behind them, on the screen: kaleidoscopes and prisms, cascading lights, galaxies exploding in slow motion. The music’s a clattering pulse, a gaseous swirl of synths, a bruised fog scythed open by Sterling Morrison guitar rattle. We clap and woot.

(Instant DistortoMix courtesy of cheapjack mic on £30 pay-as-yer-go-fone)

Instruments are swapped, band-members repositioned. They play something from the Fifth Side of "Yeti", a jam positioned at right-angles to the tuff pre-Prog riffage of seites 1&2 and the Sandoz klaaangstruft of 3&4; at points, the interlaced guitars carrying an almost.echo of the less shrill / hectic moments of "Phallus Dei", and also that sonorous not-quite-raga chime of late 60's psych; there's a bit of the VU about the guitar-lines too, the accidental dissonance that comes from the interplay of different gauge strings, different playing styles, micro-tunings; Bram's firing off delicate little Blues-flava'd volleys underneath it all, while footage of naked witches frolick behind them and anarchocommune members play the bongos in their birthday suits.

Glen straps on a bass and takes point, shaking off his cold, tapping his foot and willing the band to get Into The Zone behind him as he stomps out a fuzzed-up Garage Rock nugget. And in come the chiming guitars, the droning guitars and the drums and they're off again, but this time its some smoky, dimly-lit basement in '66, a homemade light-show shining on the wall, stoned teenagers misquoting some English Beat Band, playing their guitars too loud, shaking their puddin'-bowled heads and shining for one brief glorious moment.

Anfang play psych.music as it was meant to be heard and seen, in a small intimate room w/ friends and like-minded souls: raw, messy, jammed-out n in-the-moment. Fuck The Big Score.

They stop for the 11pm kerfew but "the crowd call out for mooo-ooo-oore..."

"Just one more! Just another Five minutes!" someone yells. "We love you!"

"Ha! Five minutes'll turn into fifteen!" laughs Tommy (I think). By this point they'd all turned into one another.

"It doesn't matter - Time doesn't exist! It's all imaginary!" shouts another punter, everyone laughs and the band play a crunching, k'zoned-out Boogie jam and everyone lived happily ever after.

Epiluude: In the Qu-Junktions Office we talk about the Pros n Cons of Dubbed Wrestling Matches Vs Wrestling Matches in their native languages; "the wankiness that is Oasis"; the fact that Bram once had to sit thru a four-and-a-half hour soundcheck (!!!) by a Danish band, knowing that he would set-up his stuff and check in under 10 minutes. He's very patient, is Bram. And Ernesto has a very wise head on his shoulders - he made me think about a whole bunch of stuff - and Sloow is Sloow. They're lovely fellas, alla them, and i worried that I kept them up too late...

"We're not girrrrrrls," says Ernesto.

"I'll remind you of this at 9am tomorrow," says Tommy.

We record a jingle for Tommy's Dub-Lab podcast, Ernesto beatboxing into my phone and going "Tommy...Tommy..." in a squealy teenagegirl voice thru a pretend echobox. I will mix this down at some point and send it to them.

A final cigarette with Bram.

Bedankt voor het spelen, fellas.

THE DREAM'S DREAM

2010-11-04T08:40:00.004Z

In the dream the girl-woman who worked in the club told me she was quitting work for the night: Was I reaaaaady to dance, she asked, laughing as she disappeared through the door to the staff area. She looked a bit like Eleanor Whatserface from Fiery Furnaces, but prettier; early / mid-thirties.

I looked in the whole-wall trick-mirror, momentarily aware of my age. Hmmm, not too bad, I guess, I decided. I liked the way the trick-mirror lied. I'm a terrible dancer now, tho; a dad-dancer.

On my scalp I found an adhesive label which I peeled off; it was stuck up under my hairline where my skin-cancer had been ("You heal really well," the oncologist told me a few weeks ago when he gave me the all-clear and I was surprised to hear that; and for a second I thought he was lying: what, me, good at healing? But no, he's right, I came back from the near-dead about 7 years ago; maybe I am...good at healing.)

So, me and the nameless girl who looked a bit like Eleanor Whatserface danced - me in my lumpen elderly way; her more of an easy swing, a hip sway...then we're walking on the beach, feet crunching on shingle and the sunlight is almost dazzling...there's a lagoon bordered by shingle (a bit like Abbotsbury / Chesil Beach), but the place has a pseudoCeltic-sounding name that's impossible to pronounce, let alone write. And I'm very happy here. I feel 'forgiven.' She points down the beach; we're on a penninsula made from piled-up shingle; there's a building there, but everything's in the shape of a map - a drawing - rather than 3D and this is where we need to go: into History, into Memory; "This...this is where things get interesting," she tells me, laughing, and locks arms with me...

Then one of my children wakes me up to say she had a nosebleed during the night.

HACKER FARM: FILMS AT THE BREWHOUSE, TAUNTON, TONIGHT!

2010-11-03T08:37:00.003Z

STOP-PRESS!

UNFORTUNATELY, TONIGHT'S FILM-PROJECTION THINGY HAS BEEN POSTPONED DUE TO STAFFING TYPE PROBLEMS BEYOND OUR CONTROL - ONLY FOUND OUT THIS AFTERNOON; WILL HOPEFULLY BE RESCHEDULED FOR THE 20th.

MORE INFO WHEN I KNOW MESELF.

SORRY FOR ANY CONFUSION.

Won't be around much today; so only have time to say this:

HACKER FARM.

BREWHOUSE. TAUNTON.

TONIGHT.

BIG (ASTRAL) PROJECTION.

FILMS ON SIDE ON BUILDING.

OTHER STUFF INSIDE.

US MAKING FOOLS OF OURSELVES IN PUBLIC.

TALKS. DRINKS. CAKES.

THAT SORT OF STUFF.

SOMETIME FROM ABOUT 6pm ONWARDS.

CAN'T BE ANY MORE SPECIFIC THAT THAT.

S'ARTWORLD, INNIT.

2010-11-02T21:14:00.001Z

The Doozer has a blog.

BRADLEY SANDS: "SORRY I RUINED YOUR ORGY"

2010-11-02T20:33:00.004Z

An X-ray of a moose takes its teeth out.

Ha! That must be Bradley Sand's new book, then.

A riotous assembly of words running (carefully) amok. Each in their proper place, though not always where you'd expect them to be. Sometimes they're happy, sometimes they're sad; sometimes both / neither at once.

[In Sorry I Ruined Your Orgy...] "the pope gets sued, a headless man falls in love with a bowl of rice, and architects dismantle the earth. A war breaks out over greeting cards. A suicidal amputee tries to kill himself. William S. Burroughs becomes an amateur archaeologist and Tao Lin drinks an ape-flavored smoothie.

"Between a breakfast of clocks, a lunch date with Adolf Hitler, and breakdancing in outer space, anything is possible in the work of Bradley Sands. Just never wear a bear costume to an orgy."

Contains the prose-poem / story "The Adventures of a Small, Ceramic Giraffe in Tudor England" which first appeared in the prestigious (Bradley's word, not mine) journal - The Kek-w Quarterly.

"There was this one guy," said Bradley, riding a stegosaurus side-saddle, "who wanted to get the poem tattooed to his chest (actually, it was Eric Robinson, a(nother) proud alumnus of your quarterly), but he realized it would be too long and, the last time I heard about it, plans to get a tattoo of one of my shorter poems with an entirely different giraffe."

BTW: the KW.QUART is not dead or on afterlife hiatus, just currently running on glacially-slow Kektime (can't believe I haven't posted since July - what happened to all the time inbetween? (Oh, Yeah; I remember: I had my house demolished!)) Basically, other stuff keeps demanding my attention; but fear not: "IT SHALL RETURN!" he intones in a booming reverb-soaked voice. I do have a post ready which I'll put up sometime...soon.

Longtime readers will remember that I contributed a story to an anthology a while back called Bradley Sands is a Dick in which all the stories were called "Bradley Sands is a Dick".

Well, Bradley most assuredly isn't.

His previous book My Heart Said No, But the camer Crew Said Yes! is available here. And I believe he has another one available fairly soon.

Bradmania!

U.S. GIRLS

2010-11-01T10:51:00.001Z

U.S. Girls.

Great version of "Bits and Pieces".

2010-11-01T10:42:00.002Z

Tim Gabriele / Wild Corrective / 555 Enterprises blog.

RIP BOBBY COLOMBO

2010-10-31T19:52:00.002Z

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"

2010-10-31T00:13:00.007+01:00

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)

2010-10-30T09:40:00.005+01:00

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"

2010-10-29T20:57:00.004+01:00

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

2010-10-26T20:54:00.007+01:00

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

2010-10-26T20:18:00.004+01:00

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)"

2010-10-25T09:36:00.002+01:00

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

DOCK BOGGS: "O DEATH"

2010-10-25T09:31:00.000+01:00

RIP MIKE ESPOSITO

2010-10-24T20:54:00.005+01:00

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

2010-10-24T19:31:00.002+01:00

Elekseveneks: "Desolation"

Elekseveneks: "Torture"

Elekseveneks: "LX7X"

2010-10-24T18:03:00.004+01:00

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"

2010-10-23T20:26:00.004+01:00

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

2010-10-22T09:17:00.002+01:00

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.

2010-10-22T09:08:00.002+01:00

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

2010-10-21T23:16:00.005+01:00

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.

2010-10-21T23:01:00.004+01:00

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

2010-10-21T22:48:00.004+01:00

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!

2010-10-20T18:43:00.001+01:00

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

2010-10-20T11:07:00.018+01:00

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"

2010-10-16T22:50:00.022+01:00

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

2010-10-16T09:57:00.003+01:00

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.

2010-10-15T20:14:00.002+01:00

Rucker Vs Sterling.

Hacking Reality since 1977 ce.

ULTRAPHALLUS

2010-10-14T20:56:00.002+01:00

Ultraphallus.

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

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

2010-10-14T20:05:00.003+01:00

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"

2010-10-13T19:57:00.008+01:00

(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

2010-10-12T23:30:00.003+01:00

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

2010-10-12T23:13:00.004+01:00

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

2010-10-10T13:55:00.023+01:00

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

2010-10-07T20:37:00.006+01:00

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

2010-10-01T20:58:00.009+01:00

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)"):

HACKER FARM @ COTLEY BARN (FLIER)

2010-09-30T21:16:00.003+01:00

A flier for sunday's event, courtesy of Natalie P (who says: "It's official! Tithe barns are IN!"):

Liz, Natalie and Gary have all done some really amazing work at the barn over the last 2 or 3 weeks. And the venue is pretty damn awesome too. You should see the vaulted roof. I've been to smaller churches.

The barn is open FREE to the public friday (tomorrow), saturday and sunday, but sunday's event'll def. be super-special.

I'll post some taster photos soon as I get a moment - maybe later tonight or tomorrow.

2010-09-30T20:20:00.002+01:00

Actually, Loki, Jack-the-Treacle-Eater - the 'place' near Barwick / Yeovil Showground, not the, er, 'person' - turns up in my story "Tullis Immortalis"...

PAUL LAFFOLEY

2010-09-28T20:48:00.000+01:00

A brief cross-section thru the visionary diagrammatic-artist / skewed ideas.engine that is Paul Laffoley.

CARLY PTAK, ETC

2010-09-28T20:26:00.003+01:00

Also: Carly Ptak. (hypnotist, artist, food-gatherer-and-preparer, circuit-bender, forager, Radionics-ist)

An old interview.

Nautical Almanac, obviously:

TWIG HARPER

2010-09-28T20:21:00.000+01:00

Twig Harper: damaged post-acoustmatic / music of the wonky, lava lamp-like spheres.

Also here.

"I am [...] returning to recording new material for the end of time. Noore dual hobbit bleack poles for all. Recharged revamped and everything is all ways into its proper place..."

FAT WORM OF ERROR

2010-09-28T19:17:00.000+01:00

KEMPER NORTON: "LOWENDER" EP

2010-09-27T22:44:00.003+01:00

While I was away on saturday, old Kid Shirt pal and musical ally Kemper Norton mailed to say he / they had a new free-to-ether EP - "Lowender" - available for download.

And rather wonderful it is too. I'm particularly smitten by "Allantide".

The found-voices that appear on parts of the EP sound like a distant (but far more melodic) Cornish cousin of some of the drifting ghost-voices we caught on tape at car-boot sales and incorporated into our non-gig installation work.

Nice work, Kemper!

SUN ARAW: "MA HOLO"

2010-09-27T20:46:00.001+01:00

Pretty-much near-pitch-perfect Fifth World Musics.

19F3 FLOPPIES

2010-09-27T20:38:00.000+01:00

MPA: "ON THE SUNNY SIDE OF THE SKULL"

2010-09-27T19:53:00.003+01:00

Bummerism, or: the Internet-Only Release of "On The Sunny Side of The Skull" - one of a handful of lost 'mythological' albums (this one from 2006), by Medroxy Progesterone Acetate, one of my favouritest recording artists in the world.

This one was flummox'd / side-swiped by assorted labels-that-sunk-without-trace and a rip-off merchant who sold the master-tape on eBay as a "special edition of one". We have a Brit swearword specially designed for twats like that.

It's kinda quasi-tragic to me that this never came out on a 'proper' label. I woulda put it out (says the man who's taken two years to not put out a comp and is struggling to find 5 mins to put various other musical projects to bed, yet still finds time to blog instead of getting on with urgent work. Methinks me doth protest too much. *sigh*).

Anyway, here it is. You might not like it, but I certainly do.

On The Sunny Side Of The Skull by m*p*a

PS: Listen on headphones - it's awesome.

HACKER FARM @ "OUT OF CONTEXT" EXHIBITION, COTLEY BARN, NR. CHARD

2010-09-26T23:27:00.002+01:00

Somerset Art Weeks 2010 Special Event

Out of Context: Artists Talk & Live Performance
Event Date: Sunday 3rd October, 2010
Time: 2pm to 5pm
Venue: Cotley Barn, near Chard
Exhibition: 18 September to 4 October, open 11am to 6pm (Thur to Sun).

On Sunday October 3rd, the artist group, Hacker Farm will give a live performance at Cotley Barn between 2pm and 5pm, using hand-soldered electronics, circuit-bent toys and reclaimed local materials. During the event, Hacker Farm and artists Liz Fathers, Gary Dickins and Natalie Parsley will talk about their work in the ’Out of Context’ exhibition, most of them in response to the rural setting of Cotley Barn.

For the Out of Context exhibition at Cotley Barn, Hacker Farm have created a series of pieces designed to enhance and comment on the environment in which they are housed. The rear room has been converted into a makeshift medieval cinema showing modified footage of cows and milk-production - a post-modernist version of a tithe. In the main room, a “farm-yard sound-system” housed in rusting milk-churns and salvaged agricultural scrap plays extracts from Music For Imaginary Milking-Parlours, an audio-piece constructed from field-recordings made in local dairies and cow-sheds. The sounds were digitally ‘distressed’ until they became ghost-like and impressionistic, suggesting a spectral, sometimes unsettling post-rural landscape.

Elsewhere, an Atari Punk Console - a homemade noise-generator that emulates the sounds of a vintage 1980’s games-console - has been embedded in an old farm bucket, enabling visitors to create their own hands-on, site-specific soundtrack.

Liz Fathers creates two installations in response to the history and surroundings of Cotley Barn, including a cider apple spiral and 200 balloons. Gary Dickins will create new work using found objects from the abandoned farm yard. Natalie Parsley’s farm tools painting is inspired by her visit to her grandfather’s farm. By displaying her work, she gives the everyday object a new life.

For more information about the exhibition and artists taking part, please visit here.

About Out of Context...

Out of Context is an exhibition/project bringing together artists in Somerset to create new work in response to the environment, architecture and cultural background of a medieval tithe barn. Organised by Somerset Art Works (SAW), an organisation aiming to develop opportunities for Somerset artists, Out of Context aims to promote interesting contemporary art that is relevant to the wider public. Out of Context is part of Somerset Art Weeks 2010, a county wide visual art event featuring more than 300 artists in over 200 venues/studios across Somerset.

For more information about Out of Context and Somerset Art Weeks 2010, please email: artweeks [at] somersetartworks.org.uk

Somerset Art Works (SAW) is a non-profit making organisation promoting the Visual Arts and creating opportunities for Visual Artists in Somerset through advocacy, promotion and development.

2010-09-26T20:42:00.006+01:00

I'm looking for a publisher for my micro-novella "Tullis Immortallis" which - at 15k - is a bit of a bugger to find a home for. It's too long for a short-story antho and is too short to publish as a novella.

Stlylistically, it doesn't fit with my other 15k+ micronovellas (which could be categorised as 'hyperfiction' or something), so it doesn't feel right bundling it up with them and self-publishing or something.

This is a sort of West Country New Wyrd type thing, I guess. Very, er, 'English', I suppose. A bit quirky, but also fairly commercial too. Maybe I could try Weird Tales, but I doubt they'd bite. At this point an agent would be very handy, but I really don't have the sort of profile to attract one or the juice to reel in a mid-league editor / publisher.

If anyone is interested in putting it out, then mail me on my dumpmail address kekw10cc [AT] googlemail [DOOT] com. Some money would be nice, btw. You don't write something that long over a lunchtime, so would be cool to get some renumeration for my efforts.

Basically, the story follows the main protagonist thru 400+ years of life on the run from a secret cabal - maybe real / maybe imagined - who want to dissect him in order to learn the secret or eternal life. It's a mixture of dark pseudo-occult fantasy and psychological spy-thriller.

Here's a brief excerpt - a section set in (you guessed it!):

It was 1973 and they were tripping on acid down in John’s basement flat. John was playing something by Yes on the B&O deck and speakers he’d bought for thirty quid from the junk-shop on the corner. His pinched, weasel-like face was rigid with tension, lips protruding out in a half-pout as he air-guitar mimed a Steve Howe solo: breeanng-brakka-brak…pyoww! “Fucking ace, this bit!” he yelled, “Listen!”

Scott looked up from the electric bar-fire. He had been counting the glowing spiral ridges in the heating-element. It was like a tube of solid DNA or something. But a chord progression in the track had caught his attention. There it went again: a tricky, Baroque-sounding arpeggio that underpinned Howe’s fretwankery: m.1-I, m.2-V^6, m.3-vi&V^7/V, m.4-V…

Scott recognized it instantly. “I wrote that,” he said.

“Fuck off, Tully, you spaz…" John wind-milled his left arm, as if playing some monolithic, never-ending Pete Townsend chord. He made a strange, strangulated noise; a half-laugh that sounded like some new language. “You couldn’t have possibly written this. It was written by…written by…” He scanned the gatefold sleeve for clues. “Wakeman, Howe and - fucking hell! What the fuck’s that?” He dropped the sleeve and recoiled in horror from some invisible threat.

Brummie Dave grinned up at him from beneath the table. “You’re messing with forces beyond your comprehension, John,” he said, ominously.

John studied him suspiciously. “Don’t say things like that. You’re freaking me out.” He bit his thumb nail and laughed nervously. “You’re like a fucking elf sat down there in your cave.”

“Elf? I’m bloody Sauron, you wally. I have pure evil running through my veins…”

“1687,” said Scott, resisting the urge to touch the bar-fire. “Blackfriars. That’s where I wrote it. It popped into my head. Just like that - ” He snapped his fingers and recalled the moment as if it were five minutes ago. The scene stretched out in front of him like a painting. He could even smell the horse-dung and the human excrement that littered the road. A Scratch ‘n’ Sniff landscape. Imagine that hanging in the National Gallery, he thought. “Now some fucking Prog band’s ripped me off….”

“I know you’re a mature student, Tully, but that’s just bloody ridiculous,” snorted Brummie Dave from under his “special table”. He looked like a pterodactyl now or the bloke on the back on that Amon Duul II album.

John put his hands over his ears. “Stop it, stop it - stop it! You’re sending me over the edge…”

“Watch out, John!" cackled Brummie Dave, brandishing a Yes album-cover. "You’re…Close To The Edge!” He laughed and the room turned itself inside-out.

2010-09-26T17:32:00.004+01:00

POST-PREVIOUS POST STOP PRESS:

Yesterday's radio interview was a LOT of fun to do. Simon Parkin - the breakfast-show host - was a really nice fella. We were chatting a bit off-air, before / after, during weather-updates, etc and he seemed genuinely interested in what we were up to.

I suggested to him that I might take an iPlayer stream of the interview (I'm told it's about 1hr 42 mins in - thanks, Nick!), mulch/mash it up and turn it into a track...and this is now definitely on my To-Do List.

In the end, we didn't play live, but we did demonstrate the Atari Punk Bucket (and use it as an amp to play a severely atonal John Cale-esque bowed-eukele skreeeeach). Simon also gamely re-played a slivver of our recent live performance on Jonny Mugwump's Resonance FM show. Which was exceptionally cool of him, considering his breakfast-time demographic.

Thanks to those of you who tuned in.

Afterwards, we went out to Cotley to do some work / prep on our installation and hold the fort while visitors wandered round the barn. Some much-delayed info on this later, soon as I get the kids to bed...

2010-09-24T22:15:00.000+01:00

PREVIOUS POST STOP PRESS:

We might even be playing live in the BBC studio in Taunton - maybe using a cut-back version of our live gear - or possibly demo-ing some of our toys / sounds.

On a breakfast show!

Crikey. What's the world coming to?

HACKER FARM ON BBC RADIO SOMERSET

2010-09-24T20:56:00.003+01:00

So, it appears that we - "we" being Hacker Farm - will be appearing on BBC Radio Somerset tomorrow morning, some time around 8:45-onwards apparently, talking about, er, whatever it is we do.

Is there actually a BBC Radio Somerset, or did I just make that up?

*Googles*

Nope, here it is.

I'll be honest with you - I've absolutely no idea who're we're talking to, where we're going or what the deal is lol. Suppose I'd better find out pronto; this cavalier fly-by-seat-of-pants attitude to life will only ever get you as far as the local corner-shop if you're not careful.

*Hands fly across keyboard* like...like, um The Flash checking out internet porn.

Crikey, can we really be on Saturday Breakfast with Simon Parkin? Nah. Shurely sum mishtake.

No, I'm up for that.

Farmer Glitch has packed his thermos, apparently.

It's a long way to Taunton. May have to take me waders.

THE ATARI PUNK BUCKET

2010-09-24T08:01:00.002+01:00

Courtesy of the ever-industrious Farmer Glitch. I give yooooou:

The Atari Punk Bucket. Taaaa-daaaa!

2010-09-23T21:29:00.002+01:00

Totally gutted - and I mean TOTALLY GUTTED - that I can't make the Dolphins into the Future / Ducktails / Woodtripper show at The Cube, Bristol, tomorrow. I think it could potentially be The Show of The Year. And at my favourite venue too.

Gutted.

But there's just too much goin' on around me right now, home- and work-wise, so unless I grow another body or three or bleb off my consciousness, like some weird bloated mutant paramecium-thing I'm jus' gonna have to let that one go.

As longterm readers'll be aware, I've been a big fan and supporter of Lieven Martens for ages now. I've waited, like, three years or more to see him play live. I nearly got to meet him in at Kraak in Brussels last year - he wasn't playing - but he'd vacated his stall in the main venue and had disappeared off half-an-hour earlier, so I hung around for a while and bought a few things - this was gone midnight by now (shopping for cassettes and old records at 12:15 at night - bliss!!), but he vanished. Prob. saw me coming or something. Leiven is a true one-off, an originator. I just love his whole schtick; his restless imagination. He's an honoury cetacean.

Ah, well, maybe another day.

But, ah...well, see: he let me interview him a few months ago - one of many, many things I've not got round to posting, that I really must sort (Incl. a big Hellvete interview) - so, in Lieven's honour I'll post the interview here soon.

I love being a total fanboy where certain acts are concerned; it's just soooo yeaaahhhhct. Heh.

But I've been thinking about this stuff the last couple days; maybe it's time I stopped living so, um, vicariously. I keep thinking: fuck, this is gonna be the Show of the Year and I'm gonna miss it. But then the mighty Farmer Glitch started talking about some of the things he's got planned for our forthcoming Hacker Farm super-show next weekend and I started thinking: hmmmm...you know, I like where he's coming from with this...we've got a nice bit of space for once, some room where we can stretch out our legs and go a bit crazy with our live set-up and our amplification gear...maybe we can get some tables and junk and weird furniture in, go a bit mental.

So, I'm thinking: nah: fuck it, let's make our gig the Show of The Year!

And if we don't quite get there, then maybe the next one instead, or the one after that.

Time to step up, I think.

Yeah.

2010-09-20T19:11:00.003+01:00

Today, however, I have mainly been sick.

"Complaining is a coward's drug." - D. Poeira.

2010-09-19T21:09:00.004+01:00

A slow week blog-wise - for which I apologise - but v. mucho going-on house rebuild-wise, plus catching-up-on-sleep from London Resonance Trip last wkend and then slowly ramping-up involvement in next Hacker Farm Installation-Project / Show (this will get increasingly hectic over the next few days, climaxing (ooo-er, missus) at the end of the month-ish).

I'll post on this fairly soon. For now, all you need to know is that Farmer Glitch is building an Atari Punk Bucket.

Mostly been trying to nail the last part of an episode break-down for a new comic-book project - the sort of thing that a Proper Comic-Book Pro would probably put-to-bed in the course of a quick 5-minute fag-break. This eluded me for a couple days, but then - as is usually the case - suddenly resolved itself, unbidden, in a rapid ideas-rush that I don't even remember typing.

A Synopsis Black-Out.

Open eyes, press SEND.

This afternoon I hung out with Shaky Kane (under the guise of looking-after-the-kids-while-wife-is-at-work) which is always an extremely agreeable way to spend a few hours.

LIL B: "IM HEEM"

2010-09-18T20:05:00.003+01:00

SAXANA

2010-09-18T00:41:00.003+01:00

70's Czech Teenage-Witch Comedy Movies via Breakfast in the Ruins.

Best. Haircut. On. A. Girl. Ever.

PS: Was pleased - yet, um, oddly unsurprised - that the Biba Look has recently re-emerged on fashion catwalks.

NAT WEST BANK, SEATON

2010-09-15T12:11:00.002+01:00

HIGH FIDELITY SOMERSET

2010-09-15T12:04:00.000+01:00

PAINTING WITH LIGHT

2010-09-14T20:27:00.003+01:00

Via Mister Warren Ellis and BERG:

Some rather wonderful iPad Light-Paintings:

Making Future Magic: iPad light painting from Dentsu London on Vimeo.

INNA SESSION

2010-09-13T18:25:00.028+01:00

Saturday: Ye Ancient Guild O'Blogs (Sou' West Chapter) meets Blog:net South:East; it was like some classic JLA / JSA Earth-1 / Earth-2 Team-up. Or vice-versa.

Roll-call:

Jonny Mugwump.

Loki from Idiot's Guide to Dreaming.

John from Uncarved.

Bob from West Norwood Cassette Library.

Matt from Woebot / Hollow Earth / Cybore.

2ND Fade.

Nick aka Gutterbreakz / Ekoplekz.

Farmer Glitch.

Time Attendant.

And, duuhr, myself.

Many thanks to Jonny M and Paul TA for their wonderful hospitality and kindness. They were terrific hosts and I had a really great time. These guys are broadcasting week-in / week-out - sending consistently great shit out into the airwaves and digital substrata. This is a big personal committment. Support them.

The South-West crew are all good friends of mine - Matt's a lovely fella, but I hadn't seen him for about 3 years or so, so it was great to catch up. John, Bob, Jonny and Paul I'd never actually met before, but were terrific company, great fun and really easy to hang with. The grins in the photos say it all.

I've got nothing but love and respect for all those guys. Our individual niche.tastes are irrelevent; what really shines though is their enthusiasm and passion - not just for music, but for all the cool and righteous shit they're into. When you get a group of people like that together in the same room, the energy levels go off the map.

We're just nodes in a network, see? There's dozens - hundreds - of other similar-minded folks out there. Some are on my link-list, some not. When people connect, they become empowered; they get stronger.

Hats off to you all - whoever you are - wherever you are.

It sounds corny, but: Make yourself known. Hook up.

I thought Nick's set was really great: some sort of skeletal Dub thing going on there - imagine if a sort of minimalish proto-Dubstep vibe was applied to early Cabaret Voltaire drum-box patterns, along with echoes of Old School Industrial and 60's / 70's boffintronica. Yes.

We all had slight tech.hitches: Nick's guitar didn't wanna play; I couldn't coax any loops out of my box until the final jam and The Farmer's FX-buttons were playing at silly buggers, but the session vibe was sooo relaxed that it didn't seem to matter. We all just surfed the moment and got to where we needed to get to.

Audio Stream / download here.

ROAD-TRIP

2010-09-11T12:06:00.004+01:00

Packing ready to fuck off to London: spare pants, ear-plugs, rechargeable Marks n Spencers eco-batteries, plastic toy kettle.

To get to the Big City, Steve and I will have to negotiate several small unhappy dukedoms, pay tolls, trade beads, trinkets and hostages, show signed-and-sealed Royal Rights of Passage, climb a small mountain, barter our souls with Lord Vwi'vvuv'iii of Trowbridge, fight bandits, were-bears, monkey-men, trolls, etc, etc.

Apparently you have electricity in the houses there.

We've heard stories about the lights...thousands of them, millions. And horseless carriages too.

This is like...like magic to me. If we survive, then - oh! - the tales we will tell when we return.

SCRUMPY & WESTERN

2010-09-09T21:14:00.001+01:00

Via the mighty Dubversion:

Scrumpy & Western. A one-stop shop for West Country Music. Includes The Wurzels, Acker Bilk, Surfin Turnips and a few others that pop up on this blog from time to time.

The Cornish Wurzells (!!???) are a new one on me, though.

I like to think that maybe Hacker Farm are also part of the Cidernuum in some skewed way.

WE FEAR SILENCE: PEVERELIST / GUIDO / HYETAL / SURGEON

2010-09-09T20:09:00.005+01:00

After the J Mugwump Resonance Show on saturday, it appears there are plans afoot to go to this:

Main Room: Shed - Live, Surgeon, A Made up Sound, Bleep43 DJs.

Bar: Punch Drunk Records: Peverelist, Guido, Hyetal, Deadly Rhythm Soundsystem.

Well, it's just up the road @ CABLE, near London Bridge, so it would be rude not to cheer on our West Country pals in the Punch Drunk crew and buy them a few beers, eh?

2010-09-09T19:28:00.006+01:00

We were supposed to be playing in Wells, Somerset, tonight - in a theatre, as part of the opening of Somerset Arts Week. But it's been cancelled.

There were some concerns about noise-levels, apparently. But - hey! - we can do quiet.

I meant to wish Nick well for his set at Dubloaded, but I've been snowed in with various stuff and was also semi-labouring under the miscomprehension that he was playing tonight. Gah! Sorry.

Anyway, hope you knocked 'em dead, Nick.

Think I've got that Small Stone FX-box. Also got a Danelectro FAB somewhere, but a different one to those two. Mine's a darker red, though it might be the light in that photo. Can't even remember what it does lol. Maybe it was a flanger.

HOT CHOCOLATE: "EMMA"

2010-09-08T22:24:00.001+01:00

GALA DROP

2010-09-06T20:40:00.010+01:00

A couple years ago I wrote about an awesome Portuguese band called Gala Drop.

The link seems to have long-since disappeared from the FACT site - pah! but fear not: I will reprint the article here on this site in a few days and it'll almost certainly appear in an augmented / expanded version in Skullfood - my (eventually) forthcoming book of articles / interviews w/ assorted sub-underground artists (you're supposed to cheer at this point! Yes, yes, of course you're going to buy it; fill up my comments-box with drooling fanboy miasma, etc, etc).

To cut a long story short, I thought their debut LP was wonderful. It ticked a whole bunch of Fifth World Music boxes that I felt needed ticking at the time - and still do - (interesting to hear the 5W term getting picked up a couple times on the internet; and did I see it in Wire too? It's kind of an obvious n slightly cheesy term, but - well - sorry, but I got dibs on it.)

Well, anyway...they have a new 12" EP out very soon...Nelson from G D has just sent me some mixes of the new tracks and IT IS FUCKING FABULOUS!

No, really: it is seriously good.

"OVERCOAT HEAT" is less overtly, errm, Can-ish, but keeps that beautifully spacious, dubbed-out flavour G D perfected on their first wave of recordings. Fluid, light-fingered, skipping drum-work and liquid bass grooves; oodles of percussion and gtr arpeggios: like some weird fusion of Post-Punk dance and Latin/4th World Rock. With echo-boxes.

"IZOD" is just...woahhh! It starts off kinda Kraftwerk-with-a-swing meets Cosmic Disco: ooooh and when the percussion n drums come in: hairs sit up on my arms. Patrick Crowley goes off-road, deep down into the Amazon rain-forest. Gently pumping synthbass; just beautiful. I can't wait to play this out; I just know people'll be going: "What is...this...?"

"RAUZE" has some weird / vague afterecho of Cluster/Harmonia synthlines sitting behind / beneath it, but with acres of rattling / tinkling percussion and echobounced drums; it zigzags / transports itself through a series of percussive vignettes / episodes. Wailing vocals drop in and out, meshing with the keys.

"UNTITLED" starts with mutant bird-call sounds and a loping bass-gtr / drum-bounce, wooden percussion, layered keys and an intermeshed gtr-line...it kinda shimmers and glimmers. More forest.funk. Sunlight, a canopy of trees; log-drums, drum-synthesisers. The last minute or so sounds like, I dunno, like bits of it could've been recorded simultaneously in both the 70s and early 80s...

The band stretch out more on this release; they sound more confident, more assured...I hope they can continue to hold their nerve, keep ploughing on, growing.

There's a lightness, an airiness to most of the production. Like Eli / Gentleforce's recent album - which is miles away in terms of style - there's an honesty of intent about Gala Drop's music. They're just doing their thing and. most importantly, I believe them.

I'm not kidding, you really can't fake this kind of thing. I hear things, year in / year out, that - if you believed their accompanying PR-blurbs - purport to be this kinda music - some fantastic fusion of this n that. But when you listen it's always hollow and kinda shit.

Sure, I know I get kinda carried away and over-hyperbolic sometimes, but I can't help what I like. And I like this.

I like being a fan of stuff. And I make no apologies for that.

Anyway, I was v. chuffed for the band when Nelson told me: "We are going to play two shows in New York; one on September 10th in Chinatown, at a No Ordinary Monkey party organized by Golf Channel’s mentor Phil South; and then on September 11th at The Beach Concerts in Governors Island, invited by Panda Bear."

So, if you're in NY on the 10th / 11th of this month, then please go check 'em out.

The EP drops on Golf Channel Recordings in the States and on the band's own Gala Drop Records elsewhere.

Then - coincidentally or maybe not - the mighty Jon Galkin from DFA Records mails me last night about Gala Drop and says: "Remember 2 years ago u gave me their CD? Well..." He mentions the Panda Bear show and then says - and I guess I'm allowed to say this out loud - that they'll be putting out a dance twelve from Tiago (one of Gala Drop)...

Seriously, I'm soooo damn pleased that this band is starting to get the attention they deserve.

Somethings are just, you know, organic.

CATE LE BON

2010-09-06T19:50:00.000+01:00

Cate from "The French Quarter of Cardiff" (apparently). Has connections w/ Gorkys and Super Furry A; nice fuzz gtr; great video.