Doc Savage & Chris Clark

I used to have a phobia about quicksand. I think it could have been a result of watching Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze and imagining colons where they were none.

I'm mentioning this only because earlier today this memory came back to me as I looked up at the mottled sunlight from the bottom of a ditch that somehow, through misfortune and malpractice, I'd fallen into. Maybe it's the way the mud gurgled and sucked at my Design Classic Converse or maybe simply because some neural circuits had been accidentally triggered by the thorns and part-smoked bracken that I was now popping out of my skull.

Somewhat dazed and with a head like a bucket of cum(in) - i.e. a Middle Class variant on an old Tauntonian strain of epiphany and exultative - it took a while to notice that my i-pod had fastforwarded to a track I'm sure I've never heard before (one of those terrible vices of buying/downloading everything and listening to comparatively nothing):

Chris Clark - Holiday As Brutality


While obviously Warp, the way it wraps up/collapses in the middle seemed a little beyond most other Warp artists who tend to play the quiet/loud dynamic only in infinitesimal stages and let things depart only by sliding volume knobs and ever-decreasing waves... perhaps modulated by the old (new?) Warp ideal of music with humans sucked entirely out. I mean, you only have to look at Maximo Park to understand how wrong the Refbots at Warp can be when they try and work with humans...

Maybe the machines are scared of sudden change because it gives them a circuit bennding reminder of the on/off switch. Perhaps tyo them it's the equivalent of us regaining consciousness on a filthy, carpetless floor and looking up to see a naked man in a Mickey Mouse mask dragging his thumb across his throat and skidding one of our ears across tbe floor towards us.

Or maybe it's just that the machines don't have to stop in the same way that humans do. After all, would you go back to your ten fucks a night youth?

Oh.

Maybe not a good example - I'm putting it down to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and the fact that, even as I write this, I'm coming round to the opinion that somehow some of those thorns got inside me and are working their way around my internal organs, looking for a cosy place to spend the night...

Anyway, as I tried to clamber my way up, Doc Savage villains in my head, this track seemed to worm it's way into my head - hardly my thing at usual times, a little too Boards of Canada twee for my tastes, though with a welcome lo-fi council-kids-getting-kites-off-the-electricity-substation feel and a faintly malevolent undercurrrent that reeks, well, of quicksand.

I may listen to some more.