Bathe in the gloom

I sadly missed the mighty KTL when they played the Cube as part of the Venn Fest this June, due to jetting off to Kos with the family for some well earned relaxing. Luckily though, Tom Buggs was on hand to capture the magick of this latest O'Malley side-project in full mystical swing. I’m listening to it now and the shadows seem to be slowly devouring, like a creeping ink stain.

Judas As Black Moth

Well, after the heteroceric shenanigans over here, I guess people will be expecting this.

Current 93 - Lucifer Over London

A Yousendit Lepidopteration

Blink

Well, I can't believe that Doppelganger hasn't mentioned Blink yet, maybe he's recharging his Psychodynamics....

It was good though, wasn't it? Freaked the hell out the kids in a way that nothing else has so far - blown to buggery our Winter walks in the dark where we used to play hide and seek in the graveyard ...

(Yeah, they'll probably turn out little goths but I'm trying to pretend it's a social experiment).

Very Sapphire and Steel, I thought - though without the elegaic pacing and the dripping ordinariness of that programme.

Didn't like the fangs though, didn't need them, preferred the blank beauty of the statues when they didn't turn nasty - the fangs detracted from the horror, especially because the murders weren't murders at all, or were Quantum murders, murders that readjust the timelines rather than the bloodlines.

More like accidents than murders and scarier because of it. That Coil phrase - "murder in reverse".



AnythingWill be alrightIf you come outIn the nightWith your life sewn openBreath inPut the bone back inBuried under the skinMurder in reverseOut of timeOut of placeOut of spite Swallow the spikeThe only thing to fearIs fear itself...


And those 2 new people, Sallow Sparrow and the guy, surely sidekicks in waiting: bet that bookshop they run becomes some kind of depository of arcane knowledge from all around the Galaxy, bet the Doctor keeps being in need of info. from that shop or something... maybe they'll get a spinoff series, investigating creepy houses and abandoned places (okay being Sapphire and Steel), a bit like those people who lurk around in old abandoned missile siloes nr Axminster.

maybe themed on those abandoned place people...


C'mon Doctor Who Turn the whole thing into a Thomas Ligotti ( Lovecraft would do - though then you tend to get more tentacles) novel, keep the Claws of Axos blankness, maybe even find a genre and stick to it... less of this skipping around from atmosphere to atmosphere, episode to episode, make it downbeat for a whole series then switch to sexromp in the next...

Jac’s Bicycle is music to my ears

Some things are difficult to ignore, and a freshly minted instalment of the Wounded Nurse Ensemble’s world domination tour is too tasty a treat to resist especially when the last track includes the gyro-matic re-working of Rock n Roll Station featuring none other than Jac Berrocal himself.

667th POST

You do realise, of course, that the last post was The Idiot's Guide's 666th?



The End Days are upon us, eyaaaaaaaaah, etc, etc.

The Dead Beachboy

When he first came out of the sea, his lungs popped like kelp. One eye kept staring out to sea while the other fixed beachside, waiting for the boys to sweep him up into their arms. He wanted endless love and knew that they could never provide it. His hair was salt and moan, sea and fortune. When he exhaled, he breathed out their names: Brian, Carl, Dennis, Mike, Alan - seamless and drifting, they looped in endless coils right the way up the beach and over the dunes, an odd plainsong that dragged even the wounded birds from their nests.

In time, he found rhythm and rhyme in the piles of sand and seaflash and made himself a voice - degraded perhaps, and pulsing but a voice nevertheless. He had one hand by the end, dragged himself around in crop circles like the wounded birds, found a way forward with the flaps of whaleskin and cuttlefish that bleached at the edges of the rockpools.

He made a crown of deep thorns and lichen and wore it proudly. He sang a song, still waiting for brothers he couldn't be sure were ever alive.

Fennesz - Endless Summer

But still they didn't come and so he curled into a shell, a mollusc, a tango in taupe and waited for the sealaps and the moon.

A threeday past.

The sea never ranged and roared; everything was ghostly still (the idea of a frozen ghost was still the only joke that made him laugh) and the wind went upwards to play in the trees a thousand miles inland.

Every cough was an oyster drop or a lampworm. Every hooked crescent he drew in the beach was a sign upstairs to where God lived or outthere were God played. He called again but got nothing except cools and cawls from the seabirds and Puffins (he didn't see Puffins as seabirds and told them so, in his way).

He scared some children but they were jammed and birdpecked and anyway were down beachscrobbling to feed asphalt and mandrake and yeast to the gulls. They saw his lone arm and sad eyes and burst into enough tears to fill a sandpool.

"Do you know my brothers?" he called out as they turned and fled but by then his sandpocked cheek had already puffed out to issue forth a final, desperate song:

Panda Bear - Ponytail

All Yousendit Denigradations

Duals and Triples And Quadrapaedics

For no particular reason, phrases such as this "The Dream/Aktion Unit were originally birthed as a side-project to allow Thurston Moore and Jim O’Rourke to fully explore the kind of ecstatic power blues that their work in Sonic Youth repeatedly implied." have started to nag at me, like an ulcer or a small blind child, waving a spoon.

It's the use of the word 'allow'.

'Allow' sneaks in there and seems to be seems to go almost unnoticed, a weird state of affairs in that it appears to be suggesting that musicians are not allowed to do what they want with their regular bands. It's not a new thing (and I talked about the beginnings of the latest wave here) but it's rapidly turning into a plague. Everyone's doppelganger has an alter-ego. I succumbed to the blogging version myself, forcing into existence the twin beasts of Tuche and Automaton and even the artbloated linkdump that became Subject A Obliterates.

And to what end? Couldn't any of that crap be safely posted here? Would I disappoint anyone if I diverted from my usual mp3 fare? Are blogs capable of disappointing in the same way that media you pay for?

One day I might come back to this. Or maybe not. As Coum used to say I "guarantee disappointment".

I can see perhaps why Major League playahs like, erm, Sonic Youth might not be able to dish out any old crap under their real names for fear of abusing their $1,000,000 record deals but what's with all the Jewelled Antlers and the Fonal folk's eternal twisting - and why does it even seem reasonable that The Tuss might be Richard James aka Aphex Twin aka AFX aka Caustic Window aka The Diceman?

I remember Mark Pritchard going on about how he needed all the different monikers to reflect the different styles he was coming out with - techno, ambient, drum n bass, electro etc - but couldn't one of the names deal with multiple genres? Is no name big enough to transcend its signifiers?

I remember Coil talking about the same thing just before the ElpH and the Black Light District period - the pressure to live up to a name (which seemed to have crippled the Backwards album), to not be a disappointment to all the t-shirt wearers out there.

Now everyone's at it. No names unwound. No names sacred. No names willing to carry the can. What's happening? Am I being bugged in all the wrong places or is there something sinister machining its way through the system?

The Tuss album? Really good. Well poppy. Best thing ol' AFX has done for ages.

24 hrs

Well, it may be blagged and blogged from various sources but I think Chris has done a good job. And here is 23 Drifts To Guestling the TG / PTV obscurity that the venerable/ venereal ( I forget which is which, or which was 'Chimed Rig') Beyond The Implode sent me a few years ago. Check out his interview with Joy Division's dead arch-eppy Ian Curtis and then try and work out if that 'Here are the young men, the weight on their shoulders' line really was about those nasty second-hand overcoats that everyone wore back then...