The Restitution Of Decayed Intelligence

Well, here's some Remote Viewer style Coil grumblings and moans, twitches and groans from Coil's long deleted 12" on the ever-wonderful Beta - Lactam Ring records, a Coil ember that's not dissimilar to the grunts and stones of the live King Mong stuff I post periodically (Peter Christopherson was apparently suspended in horse girdles and bad tidings about the 'hanging tree' at TS Eliot's East Coker cottage of King Mong circa 1989 so I'm guessing this isn't an accident of reason or a petty synchronical or a slapped timestream glitch)

Anyway, make sure to pre-order your Jhonn Balance inspired ltd edition Absinthe case (just the kind of sick joke you'd want from Coil, two years on from the imBalancing act), say hi to Sleazy and then go here for a .rar file of this fine auralation, in my opinion one of Coil's best sludges - odd sniffs of vocal, pretty vibes appearing from electronic hazes and all the transforming elves, vulture references and slurred consciousness you'd expect from Coil...

Tomorrow I'll probably be back with some comments on Jodorowsky's Santa Sangre because I'm just about to go and watch it with a few litres of Fruit Cider and a coupla mouthfuls of animal tranquilisers....

†rap ∂oor

Er, digging this at the moment - creepily silly, slightly off, wigtastically funky etc etc (cf hippy crap but good hippy crap) - stolen from Crotchbat (aren't they all?) and then sunk into the bowels of i-tunes where it's been playing while I try to mark Philosophy essays. I gave up, got the kids to make up their own psychedelic spoken word intros for a bit "Today...the most amazing spectatickle, the world is upside down!" etc played a few games of totalcontact footie in the garden and then took them on a 'midnight' (i.e. 5 o'clock) ramble with torches, a hurriedly packed picnic, Cyberman footstomps, creaking Krillitanes, subzero winds and then lots of "I don't know but I've been told. North Petherton at night is very cold" army chants to keep the little uns moving...

Bring on the †rap ∂oor gang...

A SA CH AN G (PANDA)

ASA CHANG soundtracking the following conversation, to the extent that one merged into the other. I'm becoming a juxtaspastic:

- Yeah well. Fucking Pandas. Some things are just asking for extinction, y’know?

- I like them. They look kinda like domestic abuse victims...

- It's a good look. Council estate chic. Very now. Can’t refuse to eat anything other than fucking bamboo and then start crying when it’s all sold out.

- I think it’s a little more complicated than fussy eating...

- Boo Hoo...the cupboard's bare. Fuck sake...Eat a peach buddy... And they have the cheek to put them on the World Wildlife Fund badge. May as well have an obese heroin addict fronting for the National Health Service.

- I can just see all these kids lining up outside the zoo...

- All those hot lady pandas shipped in from China and they still can’t be arsed to get it up. At the very best it's laziness...

Asa Chang - Hana

A Yousendit tablathonic Soundrage

Later, I'll have a go at dolphins, if only because my film script about the media storm surrounding the President of the USA getting caught fucking a dolphin got rejected nine years ago and I've never got over it...

And besides, how intelligent can you be when you always hang around with those autistic kids? - drive yer mad, I reckon and, before anyone says it - idiot savant blah blah; you still breathe air and live underwater you bottle-beaked little tarts...

Those people who want to swim with dolphins need a good seeing to...




NORMAL SERVICE WILL RESUME

Spiked

...taxi ride home last night after an evening wandering around an almost empty college during my cryptically named 'evening duty', listening to The Slits second album and some Death Chant downloads... the taxi had an oddly hyperboreal smell inside it, as if the cold from outside had been sucked in and kept there, just to shake the molecules down... temperature reduced to raw olfaction.

Actually, I'm not sure what hyperboreal means but it seems to fit. Later, I'll look it up perhaps, though I like not knowing what words mean and just imagining - spent a great deal of very funtimes in my early teens with an Anthony Burgess novel and no dictionary...

I was tired but if you blinked too fast tiny crystals of nicotine floated through the air... playing very loud in the car was The Fuhrers Face by Spike Jones and his City Slickers, a song that seemed to make the car into an tiny encapsulation of the Kubrick version of the The Shining, a sensation enhanced by the taxi driver himself - who looked like Gandalf squashed against William H Macy in a one person lift-shaft...


We talked a little about Spike Jones and the similarities with the Bonzo Dog Doodah Band...he showed me the CD cover - Spike rattling the drums with a Joker suit and a smile that wrapped around his head - "You just get the sense that, it isn't a job, couldn't be...that it was just a guy having real fun with his friends... that's gone now..."

Outside, a man dressed as a Viking stumbles home while a Ghost Ship makes it's ways through Western-Super-Mud(Carnival Time in Somerset)...

SUDDENLY IT'S 1980

1980: The fulcrum between Industrial Culture and The New Pop. True, Numan was already riding high in the charts, and the original Human League were spotted performing their unlikely cover of Gary Glitter's "Rock 'n Roll Prt.1" on TOTP, but still the Futurist Movement had yet to gatecrash the mainstream en masse. That would occur the following year. Producers like Martin Rushent, Trevor Horn and Mike Thorn had yet to add that extra layer of studio-gloss required to propel the New Synthetic Generation to the top of the charts. By and large, Synthpop was still 'Pop 2', as K-Punk might say. It wanted desperately to be pop, but was still hampered by it's homespun, DIY ethics - a patina of tape hiss, ham-fisted punch-in/outs, eerie ambiance of kitchen appliance hum, thin Korg buzz and faltering hand-played electronic percussion.

Daniel Miller wanted to be pop very badly at this point. He had yet to discover Depeche Mode, so instead invented a fictitious group to realise his dreams. Observe the delicious results (and yes, that is Frank 'Fad Gadget' Tovey playing the role of lead vocalist 'Darryl').

Martin Fry and his chums were still a grey, dour electronic act from the frozen wastes of Sheffield. Barely 18 months later, they would be performing "The Look Of Love" on TOTP in one of the most radikal transformations in the history of pop.

Over in the States something was stirring in New Jersey. It sounded like all the above crossed with deadpan male & female vocals somewhere between Devo and The B-52's, with lyrical themes that reveled in cold war political irony. Unfortunately it disappeared without a trace shortly after, and would be completely forgotten by the world at large for nearly 25 years. Now, at last, like some New Wave equivalent of the Silver Apples, a degree of recognition.

Silicon Teens - T.V. Playtime


Vice Versa - Idol


Xex - SNGA

So who's upholding the spirit 1980 today? The Fins, apparently...

Slut Meat Tales

Listening to downloads of the Rising From The Red Sands compilations recently (courtesy of this fun new blog)it struck me why I don't own any Whitehouse / Ramleh / Sutcliffe Jugend CDs when once I used to trawl record fairs hoping to swap Visage white-labels for limited edition 7" singles with titles like Tit Pulp and Right to Kill (actually a double B-side, if I remember rightly) and badly photo-pressed Peter Kurten tribute albums, with vinyl heavier than a head.

Yeah, well partly it's because I'm not 16 anymore but that's not the whole story.

It's because these things don't work in an age where I can simply buy them on CD or download them from i-Tunes. The joy of a Sutcliffe Jugend album or a Whitehouse 7" was in knowing that someone went to the bother of actually pressing them in the first place. This fact made them far creepier, much more scary because you could always imagine that these people were somehow other than musicians, less than artists - these people didn't care if you bought their records, they were more than that. You could believe that you were tapping into the vinyl equivalent of snuff movies; genuine madness and depravity and evil, set down on record for a few 'special' acolytes. Of course they were unlistenable (though I still play Right to Kill everynow and then, normally before I go into my 2nd year A level class) but as a package they worked.

And it wasn't just about how hard the buggering things were to find. Exclusivity was obviously important but the rareness of the records and (perhaps more importantly) the lack of information on them simply added to the mystique which was required for the 'songs' to work. Without the mystery, it's just grown men with too much time on their hands. The records don't seem to work on their own; the devil is in the lack of details.

Hard to think this now but they did seem genuinely quite unnerving. No one had seen them play, all you ever read about them was in odd little fanzines, littered with pictures of Mengele hospitals and Nazi Sex Sisters. These bands were more mythos than anything, with tiny shrines being built upstairs in the Notting Hill Gate Record and Tape Exchanges.

Then... well, this just doesn't feel right at all, does it?

Sutcliffe Jugend - Slut Meat
A Yousendit I'veburnedtheSundayRoast presentation