Sing A Long A Wickerman

O, Lord! O, Jesus Christ!

Sidney Cohen: Drug Pusher

Well, it's been a while since I posted one of those. This one was found via Radiophonic-botherer, Cabs fetishist and polymath Nick Ekoplekz, soon to be in End Of Timeschart near you...



We really need some good music to reappropriate all these old 50s/60s acid clips - them pesky psytrancers cornered the market in these kind of samples (I blame The Shamen) and it'll be on 3 bargain bucket Psytrance compilations by the time you reach the end of it.

A Dream Of Wessex

I'm about 40 pages short of the end so don't know what's going to happen but that seems an appropriate place to review the book - the end might not be, after all.

Cheers to K-Punk for the heads up on this one; it really could be the dreamtext for Inception - I'd be surprised if it hadn't been swallowed somewhat by Christopher Nolan. Maybe not swallowed whole but...

This is Inception if they'd decided it didn't need to be an action film.

It's a simply disconcerting ride; nothing wild-eyed about the prose - I like Priest's matter-of-fact style; things lollop together and then slowly ease apart. There's no quick about turns, even in a novel where allthings are clearly not as they seem... it reminds me a little of John Fowles, though without the uneven sense of literature that Fowles brings...

But A Dream Of Wessex really reminds me of Haruki Murakami's The Wind Up Bird Chronicle - both books seem to share a character: Noboru Wataya in Murakami, Paul Mason in Priest... both of these characters are peripheral to the story, even if the story is largely about them... the main characters' journeys are inconceivable without them, they act as terrible distorting/distorted mirror images...

Both books deal with sex in an uniquely realistic way: we see it as a gentle union and a brilliant desecration, an (actual) violation of consciousness which shudders Julia (and David) with self-loathing, obsession, yearning, fear, hatred and love... people are drawn together for reasons they don't understand; loss is felt literally and symbolically...

I wonder if Deleuze (or especially Guattari) might have read this? I think they'd have smiled.

...you could say it's about Virtual Reality and Dreams and the Collective Unconcious but you wouldn't be right... they are the subject, the great Jungian theme that perhaps just about tips this into the realms of Science Fiction but it's about memory and how it invades the present and sends us scuttling towards the future with imperfect background knowledge...

It's about how other minds are irretrievably tangled with ours and the contortions we'll go through to try to extricate ourselves from the past.. it does hold hope for collectivist dreams, but only just... Soviet Britain dissolves almost as quickly as it arrived... read this now and wonder that, in 1977, the future looked like Mad Men looks now... only with the American sheen-suits taken off and replaced by...

Ghedelia Tanzartes

It's that sort of day:



Not every sort of day:



It might not be this day again, for awhile:

Inverted World

Semi-spoilers. Perhaps. Maybe not. It's right there...

Christopher Priests's Inverted World is a savage, now times novel. It's a gentle form of savagery; moving slowly, inexorably, towards what we already know but perhaps fail to comprehend; a sleight of hand trick that keeps you guessing despite the truth being out there, for all to see.

The pace matches the context; the dragged city, the blinding sun...

It's a perfect pace.

Consider too the renewed popularity of Leo Strauss: the aspect of his political thought that is so relevant today is his elitist notion of democracy, the idea of the ‘necessary lie’. Elites should rule, aware of the actual state of things (the materialist logic of power), and feed the people fables to keep them happy in their blessed ignorance. For Strauss, Socrates was guilty as charged: philosophy is a threat to society. Questioning the gods and the ethos of the city undermines the citizens’ loyalty, and thus the basis of normal social life. Yet philosophy is also the highest, the worthiest, of human endeavours. The solution proposed was that philosophers keep their teachings secret, as in fact they did, passing them on by writing ‘between the lines’. The true, hidden message contained in the ‘great tradition’ of philosophy from Plato to Hobbes and Locke is that there are no gods, that morality is merely prejudice, and that society is not grounded in nature.

This is from Zizek's Good Manners In The Age Of Wikileaks article at LRB, but he could be reviewing Priest's book. Maybe he is; sometimes Zizek twists and turns like he's got his showreels mixed:

I can see how Inverted World's bravura flips, even the change in narrative style (or, at one point, narrator) might be annoying but why it's annoying is fascinating in itself and the internal, secretive, seemingly unlikely yet unquestioned (at least initially) logic of the Guilds parallels the logic used to explain, for instance, why bankers need their bonuses or, more abstractly, why the world has to be how it is...

As if "Life's not fair; move on!" is the only response possible to our situation...

Again, Zizek could be describing Inverted World with his: It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism (here via Doctor Who...)



In turn, that phrase seems attributable to Jameson, whose mall-logic could perhaps also be inverted here; what could be more postmodern than a wooden city, pulled on rails, besieged on all sides and forever escaping a boundless terror which no one is sure of?

The third? world is also rendered well here; the savage is savage, even if at times it's just an attractive sexual savagery - contrast the odd sexuality between Helward and Victoria (a lights off for the territory) with his easy, light-hearted sexplay when he's taking the took girls back(we are all taken).

And it surely can't be a surprise that it's the girls who are disappearing into heavy gravity mesomorphs with every step away from the rarefied air of the city - this is going native in extremis, returning to the land, ending up immersed in a nature which nobody can agree on...

here there be tygers...

The sense of other is a permanent state for the city - the city literally can't exist without those outside it's boundaries... city dwellers literally can't perceive the world how they need to without those who can't perceive that way... they need others not to see... it's Them and Us and without Them there is no US.

Oh, shit, sorry; what was I thinking? I forgot to say: it's a great book...

High Wolfings

High Wolf is a little brain worm.

Been listening a lot to High Wolf, stands out in an overloaded crowd of dronescapers and murkrakers

(seriously; there's so much of this stuff... used to be you managed to track down a few Zoviet France LPs, maybe some HNAS cassettes, the odd track on a compilation of amplified washing machines and scratches; now you can live a lifetime of drone, a futility of slipped discs)

But High Wolf transcends the genre, I think; a lighter touch, more wholly psychedelic than the Ferraro(adkillers) contingent; less in thrall to the sources of the samples and loops, more deranged by the looping itself; the lightly propulsive power of the everloops and the ever-so-sleight of hand gearshifts...

And the tones are generally lighter too; less stomach sucked-in blackness, more pushed out lightbeams, digging right at your brains... sparkly, even.

Maybe, it's just me.

Anyway, there's a bunch of stuff up at the Winged Sun Records bandcamp site, including a little slice of High Wolf from the Japan Tour CDR; listen and then pay what you will...

If you're in the US then High Wolf is about to tour there and are apparently hooking up with likeminds along the way - Robedoor, Magic Lantern / Super Minerals, Plankton Wat, Sun Araw, Starving Weirdos, L.A Vampires, Deep Magic and many more...

These collaborations are always hit and miss but I'd imagine when they hit it's going to put the mental in transcendental...

Red Birds 2

Kind of companion piece to the post below, though don't think any of this is actually Paris, destroyed or otherwise...



In case, you're wondering, Red Birds 1 was here, though now mostly decayed.

Paris In The 20th Century

On a slight sci-fi kick right now and this little fellah came up on the steam-sonar...

Not read it yet but it's joining the list (Christopher Priest at the moment, as recommended by K-Punk) and it seems to be eerily prophetic... I'm guessing with all the University Humanities Depts closing and everything scurrying to be declared 'technology' or 'applied' less the cuts bite even deeper, this has to be rattling a few nerves...

Disneyland Paris will never be the same again.

Barry Bauman

The Star Thief. Born without any of the five senses. Senseless. Kept alive for 24 years. Started eating the stars with his brain.

This Warlock story has stuck inbetween my brains since I read it as a child. A sort of quiet, unspeakable, cosmic horror; unheimlicks...

To celebrate being reminded of this, here's some no-input mixing board shenanigans, courtesy of Toshima Nakamura, which seem rather apposite:

Toshima Nakamura - NIMB 19.1

Feel that lack of input; play around with it; fuck around... Millions of people now living will eat stars.

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