Ponycore/Broniecore

Late as ever to the party but...

Yeah. A My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic based continuuuuum. Eating all, spitting them out in multi-coloured goo; replace acid with skittles and here's your audio toxin, a Brasseye slab of cake...

In fact, simply add skittles (& maybe a sprinkle of magic dust) to acid and then start fucking around on Fruity Loops... this is the music FL was designed for; this is the music in FL's bad bones...

You have to love humans. This is perhaps another meta-genre /non-genre, a mere s(l)ideshow and circus, but I like that the collective can just take something and run with it, vomiting all the way. The lightning quick, feeble-minded stew of 4chan is brilliant at this kind of thing; inspiring bad trips and lost hours in bedrooms all over the world. It strikes me that the producers responsible for these minorly brilliant atrocities will have super-short half lives and the names will disappear almost as quickly as they've arrived (as Zizek says, it seems harder to image a ponycore revival in 2023 than the end of capitalism) but this is it's prime strength... the imagination run wild, stuffed with bad tidings and loosely tied ends.

This is, I guess, analogous to the kids' TV sampling debacles of the late 80s, early 90s (Sesame Treet, Charly, Roobarb) but with an elan and an elasticity that seems less cynical and more, well, if there's a internet meme-based definition of polymorphously perverse....

And yeah, you'll hear a lot of Rustie in there too if you're as old as me...

But oddpop exists...

It's mostly dubstep, 8bit, techno-popping, electronica of course, but the genre is elastic enough to include death metal as well:

These are not necessarily exemplars but there's ome demented mixtapes here, for starters. Tread carefully. As Lautreamont said, at the beginning of Maldoror:

"This is not for you."

The Execution of Gary Glitter

Well, Channel 4 can hardly say they're ducking the punches. This was a tiny scratch of insanity writ large (could they have stretched it to a mini series or a phone vote? - I'll bet anything that was on the cards at some point, just grab someone from Ofcom, feed them a few drinks, and make them tell all). It started many bombs ticking; made people think about the death of TV, the death of the remix (the moment where Gary bug-eyes at the crappy remix is seventeen times more funny than intended), the death of the News, almost anything except the death penalty itself.

You watched, kept watching, felt your mouth creep open and hang there. This was coke spritzer in television form, a head bigger than Nikolai Valuev's, a head designed to punch. Channel 4 used to court this kind of controversy all the time; they clearly felt the need for some more. They clearly felt the need for a good kicking. Maybe they watched that programme on Mary Whitehouse and got a burst of vanilla-scented nostalgia for the good old days, when people could be relied upon to care enough to march on things. When people would do their cardies right up to the top and storm the barricades.

(The crowd / protestor scenes btw: pitifully empty. The budget needed thousands of extras; without them it was just some spinning cameras and a few people wandering around aimlessly. If they were trying to portray a surge of emotion then...)

I'm guessing at some level I enjoyed this; it acted like a counterpoint to A Short Film About Killing, a comical flipside, a film about death that didn't feel like a film about death. But, at some level, I enjoyed this because it's nice to be offered fresh meat now and then, it'll be interesting to discuss in class, it'll be a worthy addition to the the end of year WTF? lists and talking heads; it'll be on New Year's Eve again, attempting to catch in the throats of the post-pub crowd.

The remix will be out before Christmas. Is probably out now. Chris Moyles will be playing it.

It made me think of how understated I was being when I suggested the Young Gods version of Did You Miss Me ought to be playing from huge speakers on the clifftops as he crawled back to Britain. It made me think how, as a child, I used to think the phrase 'fact is stranger than fiction' patently absurd. It made me think of a time when Brasseye and The Day Today were surreal and over the top. I've already heard people gossipping that maybe this was a Derren Brown stunt; the sun didn't really disappear, this really wasn't on TV last night.

Does it matter that he's not dead? Is there anything to be gained in the rhizomatic linkage that has the other major drama on TV last night feature a literal car crash?

That said the guy that played Gary, played a blinder; he must've known what a weird one this was going to be and he looked and sounded like Gary Glitter, threw himself into it (eye-popping remix moment notwithstanding); this was a performance worthy of a better stage, a better script... Gary Bushell and Anne Widdicome played similar blinders; you really believed them, every nuance, every bombshell... they might have been one of the 54% of British people who favour the death penalty (but then they wouldn't be allowed to act on TV, would they? Well, I guess once Nick Griffin gets on, anything can happen). Anne and Gary B's performance was a twin-set of evil; some of the great screen monsters of our time - pity they couldn't get Jedward on the screen, doing a pro-death dance, singing an amended version of John Barleycorn...

Gary Glitter Memorial Society

I'm looking through Gary Glit-ter's eyes, looking through Gary Glit-ter's eyes....

Gola Trance (Screen Test Degradation) Redux

With [] to the likes of Kek, Doppel[], K-punk...
The secret of Hauntology lies in the corners, the liminal frames of the photographs. No, it's not what you're thinking; nothing remotely Ligotti or even The Dark Is Rising about it.

Nothing Green Knowe.

Memories from the Haunted Ballroom is a series of soft-focus delirial-oneiric versions of Twenties and Thirties tearoom pop tunes, the original numbers drenched in so much reverb that they have dissolved into a suggestive audio-fog, the songs all the more evocative now that they have been reduced to hints of themselves. Thus Al Bowlly's 'It's All Forgotten Now'

It's no surprise that[ ] hid at first because it's only [ ] you suddenly understand where they are coming from. The critics who argue that hauntology is nostalgic are missing the point entirely; this is not at all about looking back fondly but rather the desire to reanimate SOMETHING [ ]; a kind of rose tint in reverse.

To understand, you need to look at the(ir) trainers.

The picture of [ ] (etc) in the June edition of The Wire [ ]; Gola trainers, even now partially hidden.

The Caretaker - what a world, what a life, what a love

Simple, classic styling with a nice bit of suede or canvas, possibly a gum sole here or there and you won't go far wrong. If they look like they've been stolen from a school gym circa 1979 then you've hit the jackpot. We've been campaigning for Gola to introduce some retro "heelies" but we don't think they're gonna deliver the goods. Bottlers.

Yeah, now they've found a way to be cool; even made a virtue of their [ ] (instead of the Adidas Littbarskis you were after). Everyone living in the hinterlands of the 70s and 80s, the upper reaches of the classic 'Ghost Box era' (from Gutterbreakz) will recognise The Gola trance, the slipped disc look [ ]. It's something that would have shaped most kids* around the classic [ ] Steel, Children Of The Stones, Screen Test era and it's not surprising that it's these sounds that find themselves worthy of excavation. By reclaiming these sounds, The Caretaker, The Ghost Box boys et al, can also reclaim the false consciousness that pretended that these [ ] were okay, had something about them, were somehow non-conformist.

((([ ] non-conformity didn't have the same allure then, did it?)))

And this angst runs deep; keeps wrecking dreams way after the individuals have come to terms with their own status, keeps haunting....

If the Anterograde sessions used Kubrick’s The Shining as their conceptual kick-off point, then the Death of Rave series occupies another sort of haunted ballroom. Kirby wiped rave music of its musical signifiers to create something that sounded hollowed-out and spectral, a sort of MDMA-depleted snapshot of a 1990 Leeds warehouse party. And, somewhere along the way, he managed to make ambient music sound cool again.

Cf; Burial - the lost spaces being the music. Burial hid like hell because of the Gola Trance he found himself remembering... you hardly need mdma-depletion...

And anyway ---- MDMA damage is neurologically aligned to STM rather than LTM i.e. the inability to create new memories rather than the loss of exisiting ones... a theme which was mentioned in the liner notes to The Caretaker's first collection but then gradually, ironically, degraded into a whole other beast...

A shame, because anterograde amnesia explain hauntology as a theory better than anything (of course people are looking at reinventing the past; they've forgotten that the present exists - a kind of awful reversal of that John Peel dictum:

"People ask me, ‘what was the best year for music?’ I always say, 'This year is the best year for music. Prior to that it was the previous year"

I also get a little twitchy re: the nuum(b)ness that seems to be pervading the blog hallways these days...

And as for (often the same) people wishing for the heady days of the early 1990s... when rave crossfired into jungle.... well, in my experience that's when music also started to reassert it's masculinity again; the early days of Jungle round these parts saw girls heading for the hills while the boys spasticked along to the beats in sweaty, disconcerting waves...

I'm not saying that these boys had difficulties with girls and were grateful when they all left and started listening to happy house and psytrance but...

;)

(((maybe not))) - i'm still stuttering; at the unfortunate My Generation stage of development; can't feel that the past needs to be better because i had Puma and, annoyingly, I still have Puma.... though once they were black and white and now they are pink and purple... the analysis of that shouldn't be too difficult...

Rave didn't die, perhaps?



Yeah, Sapphire and Steel was scary, for a zeitgeist [ ] hugging child [] slow for slow's sake []

We shouldn't be [ ] unknown here (((((((())))))))) isn't ontological, it's just logical; an extension of the way TV worked back then. S and S is creepy and unfinished, a real stare into the abyss... [ ] 3-2-1's arcane symbolic systems meant to be - Levi-Strauss would have struggled with Ted Roger's semiotic ((((())))))

The conceit of The Caretaker's Memories from the Haunted Ballroom has the simplicity of genius: a whole album's worth of songs that you might have heard playing in the Gold Room in The Shining's Overlook Hotel.

Being in a Gola Trance [ ] those savage Green Flashes a while back [ ]

You go round to Ghost Box HQ and look at their trainers, you know what you'll find.

*[]

Moon Wiring Club

Losing slowtime to Moon Wiring Club, the best dressed sleeves in town. Imagine Stuart Maconie's Freakzone show on 6 Music, compressed and slightly de-boned, de-clawed from the occasional lapses of jazzspunk and run through with some Quatermass imaginings (i.e. what people like me who have never seen Quatermass imagine it's like). It's a world which ground to a halt sometime during the 3 day week.

A world of teeth grinding and blank colours. A world definitely, definitively pre-punk and proud.

Obviously, there's now a whole scheme to fit this kind of thing into and I guess this sits most neatly alongside the Mordant Music take on the H word rather than the TV noodles of Belbury Poly (whose latest I'm just not sure about - in part, their best work, in part their worst). I guess MM's Dead Air is the most obvious reference point - though this is smoother and less hurried, less frenetic, less needing to lurch towards the next surreality or soundbite. Moon Wiring Club have a grainier soundfield and this is reflected by their League of Extraordinary Gentlemen-like cover (contrast with Dead Air's angularities and dead spaces)...

It's also the closet any of the Hauntological clan have come to Hip Hop; some of the longer tracks could easily be an alternate universe take on the kind of sludgy instrumental hip hop that DJ Spooky saw off back in the late 90s, just this time the samples are the kind that sound like a just-dead Johnny Morris, sending a thought-shiver to Valerie Singleton.

This is the kind of thing that Ian Penman heard in Tricky's Maximquaye.

Picking up on the DJ Spooky, Olive axis, Illbient works better for theseguys. There's a woozy illness to lots of Moon Wiring Club's music, a sort of benevolent disease, one which sees you under the covers, watching the taught surface-tension struggle between Calpol and air, hooping coughs into the air and waiting for them rebound off the walls.

Tardissing

Missed this somehow. Mark Wallinger's thrash at a mirrored tardis.

A New Sitcom

This from The Sun.

I think I once pitched a sitcom to Channel 4 featuring these three. Jimmy, Pete and Frank flatshare with hilarious consequences / jogging disasters / hammerheading.

Now, in a metatarsal snapping bit of hyperstition (do people still use that term? Is it a term? 2004 seems a long long time ago), the three fellows are locked together at Broadmoor (actually, that might be the tag line for the script I'm about to send to Channel 4, no BBC 4, perhaps Fiver...) and waiting for camera opportunities.

As Big Black once said: Jim'll fix it; alright...

Bob and Anti-Man

Evil twins, both Jeckyll and Hyding in their way.

The Curse Of Reality (Or A Post That Wasn't)

Here's a post that never was. I was flicking through some old posts on the blogger dashboard and found some that I never published, due to forgetfulness or loss of heart or whatever... since this blog has recently re-animated I figured I might air a few of these (and there are others that I swear I've never written - anyone own up? That piece on Nico?) in their original, unfinished, unvarnished form...

This one comes from three years ago when the world was very different. I think I still believe what I was saying but some of the phrasintg and the spelling is just... well, maybe something told me back then that this shouldn't be out there, not without thought and research and rigour but, I dunno, research and thought and rigour is never what this has been about and won't be. It's about half-remembered events and theories and ideas and songs, it's about knowledge as it's actually used; half-arsed, semi-thought, attenuated:

So, several things coincided.

I was re-watching Children Of The Stones with 8 year old middle Loki, sorta discussing the pagan/christian war (add in delusion and minus proud Dadness here for detail; his grasp on pre-Christian theology isn't as good as it could be...) and then I came upon this post from the ever-synchronous Kek and everything started to slide together...

When did film-makers, producers, directors etc start demanding that people needed TV and films that were about something? When did they suddenly feel the need to explain everything? Nowadays it's like we're slowly retreating, returning to midperiod Hitchcockian values where every little psychological detail is neatly tossed off at the end, just in case we missed it...

Actually, that is more or less true in Hitchcock except from The Birds. They don't explain about the birds do they? Wonder why? The film is very explicit about there being no apparent rationale behind the attacks - I seem to remember the characters discussing that vrey issue - which perhaps suggests that Hitchcock regarded the Freudian motifs sufficiently out there to render further explanation uneccessary. Certainly, my experience in A Level teaching suggests that Freud is best experienced intuitively and that the understanding can be clouded slightly by looking too closely... but that might be just because I'm shite at explaining things...actually, this is probably a post in itself: Freudian Themes of Goddess-baiting, Oedipal blindings and the immanent chaos of femininity in The Birds...

(to follow)

(perhaps - but it sounds like something that has already happened)

Anyway... I don't want reality to start intruding too far into my entertainment; the nasty pull of the real has a terrible, analgesic effect on viewing; I can happily spoil an hour and a half's senseless fun with a badly placed "but they'd never do that" or "can the Doctor be so lonely when he simply has to go back before The Time War began..." etc and I can't see how this can be good.

I want to shake Rationality off a little but people keep insisting I need it because I'm human.

Rationality, the need to know, to understand (I can hear colleagues whining Verstehen behind me, even as I type) is a terrible addiction because it gets you gripped so deep that it's only very rarely that you even think to surface. Before you know it, you're watching Donnie Darko and you're thinking: Is this internally consistent? Can I find the flaw? Where is it? and then, too late, you remember it's a film, an entertainment, a kind of brain-stretch that doesn't require an answer.

Rationalisty is a form of Schizophrenia. A nagging auditory hallucination that doesn't seem to want to go away.

Who is it that wants us to have all these answers? Why does the guy in Life on Mars have to be in a coma? Why can't he just fart around in the 1970s having the time of his life? I mean, the least mysterious sections of the whole series so far is the mystery is-he-isn't-he elements, the ghost sections, the spooked-out Testcard girl... you wanted to skip those bits too didn't you?

The end of Life on Mars lets us come full circle. We always knew it would. The story circle, not the character arc is all in film and TV. Or maybe the arc is a rainbow...

The curse of reality permeates through everything, even football matches have to be endlessly explained, as if they could somehow be controlled or manipulated by the ultra-expensive software tactical mapping packages that the major teams seem to use. Reality clings to a game when chance can take everything away because the blandness of USA style batting averages is eating away at the pleasant misunderstanding of belief. We know that Chelsea will win. It is all over.

And yet, there is still the lure of the dionysian, the abyss of the FA cup, the beautifully empty myth of the impossible underdog - a myth that every fan clings too as if it were a Pagan Goddess... "it's only 11 vs 11. Anything can happen...."

We need more of this ridiculous belief. I know that Yeovil Town will be destroyed by pretty much whoever they play but that doesn't stop the almost certain knowledge that will rise within me, a Warp Spasm that nevertheless makes me believe despite everything.

It's as if there's an unknown seat of consciousness, just beyond our measuring devices, an electrical

Thought Trains

...by a process of tired cerebral scrambles, writing the stuff below and posting the picture set a chain of events into motion which made me think of this:



which I've never seen but always like the video sleeve in second-hand shops and then that made me think of:



Which I watched one night on late night TV because I thought it was the remake (it was during the brief period of time when I only watched remakes of earlier movies, an experiment abandoned forever with the release of the Nicholas Cage version of The Wicker Man).

Vaguely remembering this caught me in a moment which from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to(etc):



an album I bought for 50p but never really heard since it was warped and bowed beyond even the careful application of curling tongs and a hairdryer, unless that is the warps and pops and slow-slow-quickquick-slow grooves really were part of the record and Jane were further out than I thought...

Crystal Castles on Skins

With music TV dead in the water, maybe this is the way forward. Get bands to play on your favourite TV shows or films. The best example of this must still be Nick Cave's on-stage thoughts during Wim Wenders Wings of Desire which ought to have opened some floodgates. How difficult could it be to slip the odd member of Hollyoaks or Eastenders into the back of an Ice Bird Spiral gig? I'd have thought that the Ice Birds keeling, blurred, unheimlich sound might work really well as a backdrop to the latest Ishereallygoingoutwithher? trauma on the Square and perhaps better still if they played, unmentioned, in the background as a disorientated, blood-drenched, soon-to-be-Casualtied stab victim lurched around in the foreground, knocking over drinks and grunting into a mobile phone...

The Summer Special could always have that dozy pair from Hollyoaks in the City lurching around some Wolf Eyes curated noizefest in Austin.

In other news, Kempernorton's first CD is out now in all good shops (actually, from just the one, less good shop), though the bugger hasn't got round to sending me one to review yet...

Crystal Castles - Magic Spells

Crystal Castles - Untrust Us

Alan Vega Interview (Part One)

More or less transcribed from an accidental interview in a Cowboy Bar, East of Butlins. Exclusive to An Idiot's Guide To Dreaming.


Me: Alan, don't you think that TV could be improved?

AV: Vietnam is the new Gulf. Tanks coming round the cor-ner...

Me: I mean, everything should be more related - don't you think? That everything should be related - so that the actors are really characters and they drift through various types of programmes, doing their thing, being themselves and seeing what happens...

AV: I'm not sure-

Me: I dunno. I guess I mean that, say the Lucy Liu character from Ugly Betty... what if she were to pop up in all programmes, once in a while? The Ugly Betty appearances would be more often because currently that character is where she's at, if you know what I mean...

AV: No.

Me: Well, she might turn up in Tikkabilla or something but be the same character, have the same issues and so on... She could relate to what happened in the Ugly Betty storyline but also remember her past life in Ally McBeal, that film with Mel Gibson where she was kind of a dominatrix.

AV: I... Blast First?

Me: Yeah, and she'd hook up occasionally with other Ugly Betty characters playing it straight in other shoes. Shows, I mean. Other shows. People turning up in Coronation Street or Friends re-runs... I think she's work well in Dr Who. I can't believe they haven't thought of that.

AV: The timezones wouldn't work out... The Costume Drama Fuck Machine.

Me: One example among many. I always liked that phrase, is it from Beckett? - "he kicked him amongst the balls..." - I can't remember.

AV: And you'd be stuffing popcorn, watching Supernatural or something and Johnny Vegas as the guy in Ideal would stumble on.

Me: You're near namesake.

AV: Exactly.

Me: And people could follow characters through various shows, rather than follow the shoes themselves... It would be a new way of watching TV. People would watch anything with the Lucy Liu character in, whatever it was.

AV: What's with Lucy Liu?

Me: It's just an example.

AV: I always thought someone should make a film with the entire cast of another show, acting differently - context-dependency, if you will - but still being them. Consistent.

Me: It's a good idea.

AV: It's a great idea.

Me: After all, as it is, the characters aren't even that consistent within their own shoes. I hate that in Eastenders, when people suddenly go evil.

AV: I hate it when anyone goes evil.

Me: Exactly.

AV: We should write that film. Get the entire cast of Hollyoaks.

Me: Put them through the mill.

AV: A different mill.

Me: Maybe something like Lucky Number Slevin.

AV: [INAUDIBLE]

Me: Or the Transporter, with Jason Statham. I think Max from Hollyoaks would make a great getaway driver. Eyes close together.

AV: You may be right. I hope he is the new Doctor Who.

Me:

AV: Jason Statham. We need more high kicks.

Me: The more the merrier.

AV: Get him kicking his way through Dalek teeth one day then pulling limbs from Where The Heart Is extras the next.

Me: I'd like to see that.

AV: We'd all like to see that.

Alan Vega - 13 Crosses, 16 Blazin Skulls (edit)

A Yousendit Brokenbacked Electronia