Following in the wake of his debut novel THE GREAT IMMUREMENT, which we serialised during the summer of 2020, Vukovar helmsman (and book reviewer collaborator to the Monolith Cocktail) Rick ACV now follows up with the surreal, esoteric and challenging Astral Deaths & Astral Lights. Although after seven year he’s announced the final death of the Vukovar project, Rick will be back with a new musical project in 2023.
But for now we will concentrate on the literary, with Rick playing with format, language and font, his half-thoughts of waking hours, death and the occult merging dream-realism with a languid sense of discomfort: a sorry state of existence, where angels do indeed dare to tread. William Blake and Austin Osman Spare meet Kōbō Abe in the hotel lobby portal of the never-world: personal and universal. Parts One & Two were debuted during August, followed up by Part Three and Part Four. Part Five was published earlier this month. We now continue with the concluding chapters: VI, THE DUKE PAOLO AND LITTLE K., VII, THE SYMBOLS WILT and THE TURIN HORSE
VI
We are born with the knowledge of everything that has come before, as part of an ever-expanding hive mind. The last Astral Death taught me as much. But with being shown the spaces between spaces and what is across everything beyond (and including) the veil, and with becoming all of these people, I have to wonder if the threads and webs all come from my mind. I’ve given life to it all.
But this trail quickly runs cold and I notice the scent of my sex, sweat and smoke – the three s’ – has become too pervasive in all corners in this room. It used to be my pride but now it has taken form as a repulsion, growing and expanding and it can’t be stopped.
The Partner sees me but only as if through a cracked mirror on a strange angle. I know this because that is how the whole world and beyond appears to me, how we witness each other.
I wander freely into the loving arms of a loving life as if a tottering child, and then, diverted at the last moment, stumble instead into an open and long abandoned mine, never to be seen in this form again.
This lucidity is not wanted. An Ascending/Descending Godling such as this self in the usual-world should not be anchored in any world that can believed to be a usual-world.
It will soon pass.
THE DUKE PAOLO AND LITTLE K.
- I absorb everything that absorbs me. These lives and these places are alive, like art, like the death rattles in the dying, like the purifying fire into which the bodies are thrust.
I appear to now be transporting what leaves these bodies. St Pietro? The Duke Paolo. Lost souls that need guiding.
………..
Don’t feel control over this one. V v v little influence for now.
There is a woman walking along a country path by herself. It’s a bright, sunny day, all made up of natural silence and the subtle sounds of breezes through bushes. The bushes seem crooked and ready to pounce on the woman. She stops to bend down, collects an extraordinary looking flower, stands up and breathes it in deeply. After a pause, she smiles, pauses again and continues along the path.
We feel coiled and ready to strike.
She notices us approaching as she crosses the rickety bridge but she is not alarmed by our furious pace. In fact, she smiles and politely greets us.
She waits for a response and doesn’t have time to be shocked as we carry on towards her and grab her by the throat. She struggles, we strangle. What Should-Be death, but isn’t, manifests itself as a strange motion within the centre of us and though the body with the fist around its neck stops moving, the same body emerges from within us and continues on its path, still walking. We arise and continue on OurSelves.
I know not how long we travel for but that doesn’t seem to have any significance here. My self and this other self become closer and close to becoming fused in some way I have never experienced before.
Eventually we come to a stop. Darkness is heavy and oppressive on all sides and all we can make out is a faint showing of what may be concrete walls which surrounds us completely.
Hello?
A bright bleaching light whitens everything in every direction and we must shield ourselves to it. It hurts even through the cover of the arm. But, it gradually fades to reveal our setting. We are standing in a field and the colours of the woodlands and the streams are strange and saturated; everything is covered in a haze and the bright light is making everything unclear. We look around and spot movement and set off towards the stream.
The movement is that of three nude women – three bathers – and they acknowledge our distant presence as they smile warmly to one another and cast brief glances our way. A gentle and sweet singing floods the place and weaves between the trees, filling us in totality with an old and sinister folk song, The Twa Magicians. We come to a stop about ten metres from The Bathers. A light mist appears and disappears before another bright light takes us by surprise. Once more we lose and then regain orientation. The Bathers are beckoning us and laughing, frolicking in this sticky sweet place. We go towards them with faint hope of some depraved sexual abandon but our path is blocked by nothing at all. We cannot pass. The Bathers become hysterical as we commit to a sort of mime routine. We can get no further and are disappointed. But not too much; depravity can be had everywhere and everywhen.
We turn to leave and beside us is a door. We trust nothing in our existence but commit to everything. Through the door is a tiny square yard with extremely high walls, decorated by paintings depicting bathers such as the ones we have just departed. As our eyes come across an old telephone, it rings.
Hello?
Hello dear Paolo.
…
You do know who this is?
…
Cut the call and think no more. Back through the door. Bathers now on the opposite side of the stream and carry me, as though on thread, towards them and I cross the stream for them and to them. I fall in the water and see hidden depths without sinking to them. Try to get up. Head held in place by a Bather. All becomes frightening and insides are chilled. A young drowned boy is amongst the secrets held by these hidden depths. The other Bathers swim down and mess with the corpse. Rise from the water, sit on a rock and think.
The return home must be made.
Suburban estate in severe disrepair. Everything is dark and the buildings shift, moving close together and grow tall, crowding the streets to trap me. Fighting, mania, conversations in silence and in dog-barks along my way. My house is the last house, the one dead-centre of the nightmarish maze of alley ways and streets that surround. Trees block the view of the ground floor of my house and I slip between them into the darkness and may now rest.
This is the place. Flatlands by the sea with small grassy hills every immeasurable amount of distance. There are no people except one, the all-important one; Little K. I watch him, far from me on one of those hills, the one with two Dead-White Trees. The trees are crooked, brilliant white and are burdened with no life and weighed down with only a few branches. I move closer and Little K., the young drowned boy, runs tirelessly between and around the trees, no emotion whatsoever rests in his dripping features.
He stops and faces the sea. I see what he is looking at.
A huge pane of glass stands upright with no support, equidistant between him and the sea.
It smashes.
I look up to the sky and sink into the ground, further and further, and water rushes in to cover me. I see Little K. at the top, staring down at me, still emotionless.
I know where I need to go.
In the morning I sit at my oversized desk and light a cigarette. My book is already full but I write over the already-written words until my thoughts are exhausted.
The boy is doing exactly what he ought to be – waiting for me. He waits on my rock on the bank of the stream, the woods heavy and constrictive, caused by the saturated ever-summer. His clothes and body are soaked, his face is expressionless and his demeanour is impenetrable. Water continually falls from this unpitiable young man. I am drawn to him and do not know why. I know he is important. Vital. Vital to what, I do not know. How he is vital to this unknown thing… I pretend to myself that the answer is hidden deep within me.
How do you do? I’m the Duke Paolo, pleased to meet you.
(I put my hand out. Little K. grips it and gasps as though he has just emerged from the deep. His eyes are blank but bulging. Some seconds pass and we let go of one another.)
Would you like to come with me? I’m very busy but could do with a friend.
He stands up and looks right into me.
I show Little K. around my home and get him settled in. The usual incoherent radio chatter with constant interference hisses away in the background and I sharpen my knives. I catch Little K. looking emotionlessly at the scattered bodies and explain that they are empty now. They are just spare parts. I like to be reminded, also, of the fate we surely must all face, even beings-in-suspension such as myself.
The bodies, I mutter after some silence, keep me company, too.
If I am to learn what all this is about then I must show the workings of my existence to Little K. It is constant and does not rest. On the way to the pub unnatural fog brings with it lost, bloody, confused souls, but, we press on. We are surrounded by dull conversation but enjoy the alcohol; my young friend does his unblinking best to keep up with me. I sit myself uninvited at the next table opposite a man quietly reading. I look at the clock, look to him where my gaze is met then un-met, and I reach up and slash his throat. Little K. laughs in his seat. I walk away from the bloodless scene and my friend follows. On the way back we play pooh sticks but he doesn’t seem fond of this.
Time continues at its unmoving pace and shape. Little K. becomes a little acolyte of mine, witnessing all of my severe actions and assisting in any way he can. I take him to see Messalina and Agrippina to fuck, both of whom are sad to see him go. Little K. also in this time completes his own rounds. He does this alone but tells me in great detail of the necessary yet ghastly exploits, writing them into stories of the grotesque, even, non more so than ‘The Ghosts Of The Apaches’. This is a story of schoolchildren who play on farmland and fall prey, one after the other, in horrifying ways to the hazards around them.
There is something that unnerves me, even though we have become so close. I have never wanted for answers here; I accept my role. Now that there are questions unanswered, however, I am struggling to accept all that is around me.
I have become lost in this being within being within being, with all of our voices combining to shout in unison over our own noise “what is this life?” – but we, as The Duke, there is so much more and we may never escape, as though we ourselves are Little K., a drowned voyeur, submerged and surrounded by a corporeal liquid of all that we do not understand, of all the questions our Creator leaves unanswered. If we are worthy, then the answers are there for us to piece together.
Me… us… The Duke… we exist within and without the borders of this/these recollections.
Little K. is disarming us. It must be nearly time. I wish that it wasn’t so, I wish that I didn’t have to keep losing friends. Myself, I would like to stop turning friends into Dead-Friends.
…..
I come upon the stream from as before, but now it is still and sullen, untouched and undisturbed except for just one of the nymphs. She is a powerful presence by the stream, brushing her hair and sitting still. It’s as though I am watching old, grainy footage. She looks up to the top of a hill and sees The Duke Paolo standing there, though this me is silhouetted by a blinding light from behind him.
…..
The scene shifts; we are all of us in a darkened warehouse. The Nymph is sat in the same position, doing the same thing with an obvious ‘film set’ that has been made to look like the stream where she just was. There is a low rumbling hum with the intermittent sound of metal on metal. There is somebody a few yards away from The Nymph, that is neither me nor the other me, painting her on a canvas. She looks deeply saddened. She begins to sing gently:
The lady stands in her bower door
As straight as a willow wand;
The blacksmith stood a little forebye
With a hammer in his hand.
“Weel may ye dress ye, laidy fair,
Into yer robes o red;
Befor the morn at this same time
I’ll gain yer maidenhead.”
“Awa, awa ye coal black smith
Would you do me the wrang?
To think to gain my maidenhead
That I hae kept sae lang!”
The Painter coughs and splutters really quite horrifically. I can’t bear to pay witness to this. Almost as if I will it to power, all falls silent and we are back next to the stream. Paolo’s silhouette is moving slowly towards The Nymph. She smiles and continues her song.
Then she has hadden up her hand,
And she sware by the mold.
“I wouldna be a blacksmith’s wife
For the full o a chest ‘o’ gold”
“I’d rather I were dead and gone
And my body laid in grave
E’er a rusty stock o coal black smith
My maidenhead should have”
But he has hadden up his hand
And he sware by the mass
“I’ll cause ye be my light leman
For the hauf o that and less”
We are back in the warehouse, only now, The Painter is preparing to hang himself. He gathers his death quickly and with no feeling. As he hangs, expression unchanging, The Nymph sings on.
O bide, lady, bide
And aye he bade her bide;
The rusty smith your leman shall be
For a’ your muckle pride
Then she became a turtle dow
To fly up into the air,
And he became another dow
And they flew pair and pair.
She turnd hersell’ into an eel
To swim into yon burn
And he became a speckled trout
To gie the eel a turn.
I am purely observer now. I am there without really being there. The Nymph is sitting on a chair in a room made from mirrors. As the song goes on, she gets up, walks around examining her reflection tenderly and dances in a strange type of ritual way.
Then she became a gay grey mare
And stood in yonder slack
And he became a gilt saddle
And sat upon her back.
Was she wae, her held her sae,
And still he bade her bide;
The rusty smith her leman was,
For a’ muckle pride.
Then she became a het girdle,
And he became a cake.
And a’ the ways she turned hersell’,
The blacksmith was her make.
She turned hersell’ into a ship
To sail out ower the flood;
He ca’ed a nail intill her tail
And syne the ship she stood.
Was she wae, he held her sae,
And still he bade her bide;
The rusty smith her leman was
For a’ her muckle pride.
Then she became a silken plaid
And stretched upon a bed
And he became a green covering,
And gained her maidenhead.
A thumping, percussion-heavy ritual type music builds in volume and speed gradually with The Nymph’s dancing getting more and more manic.
Eventually she collapses in exhaustion.
We briefly see her silhouette embrace the other Paolo’s. Where is Little. K? Where am I? Everything fades. I Continue.
VII
How close we are to the precipice. I have brought us here, I have guided us along the path that The Spinners have already chosen for me.
Sleep should never be had.
Its grasp, its groping grasp always wins in the end. Here, though, it is keeping this victim from its welcoming arms and embrace, and instead, holds The Ascender/Descender by the throat, holding us over some bizarre cliff-edge, forcing the hand of chance to lose its hold for the slightest, smallest moment. It may not be its intention, but it is what will happen, and the now-empty chokers of sleep will just watch, emotionless, as we ascend/descend in the strange airless and windowless hole, with no before or after. Nothing to see, nothing to feel. Nothing to breathe, nothing to scream. Just nothing.
There are a lot of unconnected but significant dots flying around. Sometimes it’s hard to fathom. It should be understood that it is not for us to fathom. I don’t feel sad for all of these deaths, the deaths of friends and family, though I recognise the sadness and sad nature of them. These are the worlds I exist within and there is no much light in these places. I accept that. The constant present offers more. One of the few happy gleams and twinkles from a time full of dead stars.
Everything must have a centre. What is the centre here?
I will survive forever, a cockroach existence, parasitic maybe.
All in the name of extreme aversion to and fear of death.
THE SYMBOLS WILT
The actions of a life simply passing itself by.
Breathless after my journey to this frozen and unloved graveyard that hides in the hills, I place my hand upon a collapsed section of icy dry-stone wall and hold it there. I can feel the moss and the smoothe edges of the stone but none of the cold. In this moment, I am more certain of myself than I ever have been. I cannot be found here. Not even by myself; that isn’t what I am looking for. I know I’ll find what it is I’m looking for and I do.
There is a wild and uninviting halo formed by the overgrowth and in its Dead-Centre is a gleaming white frost flower with its deep, bloody eye.
On every petal, a love-letter… and held in the bloody eye is my unwavering belief that I wrote them all when I brought the seed to its final home to begin again.
I know all of these words. They read like a love-letter of several collapsing disordered minds.
The delusions of Dante are and were ill founded and unfounded… Hell is one step back from finding the way to break eternal recurrence, starting afresh in a new body and all that new living and new life entails… 1000 torn anuses… Here comes the ferryman with flashing eyes, to take me to my killer and claim the reward – my everlasting soul for a song. It wasn’t a waste…
…Thyself and myself- the patron saint of the archaic, king of the concrete fantasy – never was as immortal as thyself and myself now cause upon one another; just as never was the western sky as blue as it was in the 19th century, when my number is and was bleak, is and was blank, is and was empty…
…This confusion, this dark backwards, this failure in the duty of mothers, this burying of liberty’s putrid corpse is my misinterpretation of the immortal hour and the purity of my love, of my sex and of my fetishes – my fetishes of and for fetishes… the transference of energies after the golden death of the body is the cause of all this. Some (like myself and thyself) have masses of unaccountable energy and scientifically, energy can only be transferred; it can’t be destroyed. I want to wonder about that, moving between bodies. Not really ‘woman trapped in a man’s body’ and vice-versa, because that’s impossible to know for sure… the people without these powerful energies – i.e. everybody not me and thee – are parasites. Wasteful piles of stolen, irony blood and flesh with nothing between the eyes. For these vermins who inhibit our private world, our over-garden, to have a soul would be a travesty…
…deady deady dead will be the white noises, interfering with everything and offering nothing. As thine anger rises like a scorpion, remember that the joy of black black moods and being at war is that when it passes, the white is whiter than it was before and the peace is more peaceful than it was before. Necessary annihilation…
…Now the symbols wilt and we can make and remake them in our own image…
I think about gripping the stem in my fist and wrenching what is clearly my degenerating heart from the ground but I choose to leave it. I vow to never return here again.
My head has never looked so happy.
THE TURIN HORSE
For all my reticence
For all my refusals and restraints
For all I have given and ungiven to stray away from this, my final choice…
I retire to bed.
I wait for death and do nothing else.
I die, once and for all, in totality.
Sleep.
Following in the wake of his debut novel THE GREAT IMMUREMENT, which we serialised during the summer of 2020, Vukovar helmsman (and book reviewer collaborator to the Monolith Cocktail) Rick ACV now follows up with the surreal, esoteric and challenging Astral Deaths & Astral Lights. Playing with format, language and font, with half-thoughts of waking hours, death and the occult, Rick merges dream-realism and a languid sense of discomfort: a sorry state of existence, where angels dare to tread. William Blake and Austin Osman Spare meet Kōbō Abe in the hotel lobby portal of the never-world: personal and universal. Parts One & Two were debuted during August, followed up by Part Three and Part Four. We now continue with the next three chapters in the opus, Water, V and The Nurses below:
WATER
To ‘sleep’
to then, to this
X X X
6am. Saturday. No work today. I can indulge in my one true passion: inventing elaborate and complicated water features. I pull myself from the bed with little fuss, excepting from a little resistance from my well-worn joints, and enter the bathroom to begin my morning routine.
Whilst brushing my teeth I stop short suddenly. I stare at my reflection, mouth open, brush still in hand whilst foam of toothpaste drips onto the floor. I stare at the man staring back. Same thinning grey hair, same deep wrinkles around the eyes, same strong jawline; essentially the same person this myself has known all of our lives. But something is different and undeniably so. I stand still as a corpse.
Is my presence so obvious?
A few moments pass but the suspicion remains.
After completing my morning tasks I sit down. Dark wooden floors mopped. Dishes clean and put away. Overalls on. Each and every room clean, fresh and empty save for the necessary furniture, the only evidence that somebody exists here. My mind feels free enough to plan the day ahead.
I step out of my back door, my back door to paradise, and into the cavernous hangar-type building I call my laboratory. It’s a separate world. Scattered chalkboards full of equations and diagrams… unique tools of my own invention… blueprints… countless sculptures and prototypes varying drastically and dramatically in size… Dead-Centre is The Clearing.
The Clearing is home to my masterpiece.
My masterpiece:
A model of an unrepentant imposing concrete tower, hexagon shaped – looking from a bird’s eye view split into four equal parts, formed by a cross-like walkway. These four parts are huge open-top water tanks whose depths reach down a quarter of the height of the building, and, in each quadrant, a colossal tap.
This is the object of my attentions and affections. All is perfectly detailed and dimensioned. It is a work of art.
Today is the day I contact the Mayor to commission this magnificence. I sit down and begin my letter.
The phone rings.
I frown.
I answer.
There is no immediate response.
I hear somebody breathing and so wait patiently for the silence to be broken. Though it seems as no reply is to be forthcoming, I can’t bring myself to put down the phone, but I don’t seem to be able to speak.
So I simply wait, transfixed by nothingness.
All I can do is stare at my creation. Hairs stand up on the back of my neck.
Hello? Hello?
It’s a lady’s voice, gentle and kind. I don’t recognise it.
“Hello? Is that XX?
Speaking?
Hello dear, my name is XXXXX; I believe you did work for a friend of mine – XXXXX? She recommended you. Well, anyway, my house is flooded and I was wondering if you could come and sort it out? I’ll pay double for the labour.
No, no… that’s okay XXXXX. I normally work on a Saturday so it’ll be normal rate. I have nothing else booked in today so I’ll head straight out. What’s the address?
XXXXX said you were a gentleman! The address is [REDACTED]. Do you need the postcode?
No. I know where it is.”
I gather and check my tools, exit the hangar through a solid metal door straight into the garage and set off in the van.
The day is a grey one. The light fog drifting through the damp, empty city and the build up of clouds prevent any sort of meaningful light brightening the place up. Autumn by the sea and mountains. However, the closer I get to my destination, the more aggressive the fog seems to get.
This is ridiculous.
I slow to a stop; I can barely see less than a metre ahead of the van now and I’m fearful of hitting somebody.
It’s fortunate I know this district well. The pipework in the surrounding streets is growing increasingly unpredictable and giving me a good source of work and a greater source of Sisyphean toil. All is illogical… perverse… obstreperous…
I arrive only a couple of minutes late at the large, traditional home of XXXXX. The fog makes the short walk from the back of the van to the front door of the house a task ludicrously more difficult than it has any right to be.
I knock loudly upon the door to which there is no immediate answer.
Again. Again no answer.
A slow, low creaking noise creeps behind me as I head to the van to check my notes. I turn quickly expecting to see XXXXX but do not do so. All that greets me is a growing uncertainty; my loud greeting into the aether beyond the door, the empty darkness, responded to by silence…
…then – now – a distant thumping of metal on metal, hidden away by a thousand walls.
I step inside, suddenly into light. There is no XXXXX but there is a note:
Dear XX,
I’ve had to leave to tend to an urgent matter. Please, conduct your work as normal. I should return in time to pay you, but if not, I have left out some cash in the office.
The issue seems to be coming from the loft so I’ve unlocked the door for you.
Yours,
XXXXX
Ps. Please help yourself to food and drink – I have set out a lunch spread for you in the kitchen.
I put the note back in exactly the same place I took it from. I am aware of myself, deeply, and the significance of every movement that is departed, now, long since decided for us and long since distributed unto us all.
In the loft there isn’t much light; in fact it is as though the fog has drifted itself into every corner of everywhere. My torch offers no guidance, only a lazy uninterested flickering which soon subsides.
I look for CXJXXXZXNSLEKPWMD
SDJFO)JEPWOF$_)R@UEFJ
This is RVOJFJ{WRPMF{PE)${RU)@£UF
THIS IS ALL WRONG SXXXXXJPOCJQ
wrong
This is all wrong. What is this pain?
I am bowled over in agony.
Somebody is inside my loungs, pushing outwards with all their might, stretching the membrane as if forcing a whole new world into and out of my chest. The distant industrial thumping is drilling its way into my eardrums; the thin, sharp, absolute point of the bit teasing and slicing at the sound-dam entrance to my brain. Flesh on flesh. Metal on metal. Bone on bone. A blinding magnesium fire-light and I am gripped by something momentous, so comprehensively, and everything is excruciating. I slump, begging for release.
A ghostly voice sings to me, just to me, from a world away.
It gets louder and the growing spectral choir now reaching a crescendo. Abrase and unrelent
Pain seeps in and seeps out from every pore, ebbing and flowing for-ever and ever-more.
Circle-come-Cycle mania blood and shit
Body broken against wall
Mind, Spirit
Everything else capitulate
The pain dissipates as though it was never there at all, awaiting another day, another place, another time, Another Self to attack once more.
I heave myself up off the ground and make my way to the water tank on the other side of the loft. The fog has, like my pain, dissipated into sudden nothingness. Everything dissipates into nothingness. I find the leak in the mass of copper pipes leading into and away from the tank. Or at least I think I do. Under closer inspection and after some confused attempts at stemming the steady flow, I follow the pipes along to the connecting wall between this building and the next, having to crouch under the beams, on this, my great voyage into an oceanic mystery.
Something, some dust in my eye
Fall…
Make contact with the wall and try and use it as a support to keep upright
Fall through …. Frail plasterboard?
This body follows the whole of This Self
This is a shock.
I’m in a new place, dark and cold. I gather my thoughts and survey the wall; it is a solid brick thing, the only fragile part of which is the exact small square I fell through.
[DISSIPATION
THE DROWNING HAD TAKEN HOLD; WOULD HAVE SOONER HAD WE BEEN A LESS PERSON
THE LAST BREATH, HEAVENLY SO, FELT,
OR CAME, AS. A
WELCOMING
RELEASE…
RELIEF…
TAKE
ME
AWAY FROM US.]
The eyes that looked, that stared – even – were careful in their judgement, though a lack of light was somewhat of a deterrent. No sooner had XX thought this, and taken a tentative step forward, some dull, flickering light bulbs alighted. They hung very low from a ceiling that was at least four times XX’s height. Only a handful of the lights worked – no matter how (un)reliably – just enough for him to make out his surroundings. He was stood in a shadow filled corridor that stretched out a fair distance ahead of him, though he could not see beyond a tight bend, and behind him stood an improbably large set of heavy, wooden doors. The industrial thumping XX had heard throughout XXXXX’s house was more prominent and exaggerated with a powerful, echoing reverberation. The air was damp and dank, the concrete walls, stacked with rotting leaden pipes, appeared wet, soaked in fact, with huge patches of mould spread out intermittently along the narrow and claustrophobic passageway.
As the body of the surging river forces its whole self into such a cosily fitting gap – the mouth – it spreads out into the great, open void of egotistical pleasure; a reward for the hardships and energy expended in getting there. This is a cycle. Aptly so, XX had forced himself into – or out of – a new place.
He had reached the end of the corridor and was now in a sort of darkened lobby which contained only one door, the room organized around it as though this was the main feature. An unmanned desk sat to the left hand side of the room, though XX didn’t stop to examine it, and what appeared to be a cordoned-off museum exhibit sat to the right. He was sure the place was abandoned. He came to the submarine-like steel door which would not open as easily as he would have so wished.
His fingering of the cold steel brought about a momentary lapse in his newly found focus, causing his mind to drift to a place not dissimilar from the one he was stood in. Charcoal greys. Rotting pipework. Dampened mouldy walls, air, breath, flesh and all that came with it. Regaining himself, XX fought with the door that locked him from his unfortunate discovery, gracefully heaving and ho-ing, fighting their way to a mutually impossible conclusion; the door wanting to remain shut and the old man wanting safe passage through it. He stopped to consider all-things and all-passages and all-events for a moment, possibly two, and cast his cautious eye all the way over the door, though the half-light made it difficult. He gasped and took a step back. An astounded ‘What the…?’ escaped from his hung-open mouth.
A mighty, wrought iron plaque stood proudly above the door, announcing to the world its gratitude for the grandeur that its creator bestowed upon it. There could be no mistaking the names written in gold, though they were shockingly aged and faded:
XX
How could this be? The light bulb directly above him awoke from its deep rest and illuminated his immediate surroundings so comprehensively so that it revealed more questions than answers. On the museum exhibit wall was another plaque. This plaque had on it two illustrations – one portraying XX in an impressive stance, the other a picture of the apple of XX’s eye; his brutalist concrete high-rise, still an unborn foetus back in the laboratory to his mind. He must be the new life, growing, in a manner of speaking, in the womb of his own magnificence. Underneath the illustrations was some writing from an unknown author:
“Today, I fully realized, for the first time in all my lives, just how far from the ground I really stand, and, perhaps more tellingly, just how wide the breadth of my shoulders span. I am power, I am might. I am the wits of man and I am the strength of concrete. The complete understanding of one’s worth is not to be underestimated and I give these words unto you in the vain hope that you, too, find your ultra-place:
Small is beautiful. BIG IS SUBLIME.
I will be there behind you, casting my Colossus shadow over and around you.”
XX wasn’t sure what to think of either the words or the premise, though he could feel it strike a primeval chord deep inside. He lightly touched the smooth, handsome plaque, admiring the handy work. His touch met that of the building.
XX heard urgent sprinting footsteps. He saw only a dark figure running furiously at him. For the first time the poor old plumber felt a stabbing panic breach his chest. He threw his full weight at the previously immovable submarine door, which now lay open, and passed through.
‘Wait!’ was the shout, begging as though all life depended on it, ‘Please! Don’t go up there! Listen to me! Come back!’. A big man, the guard was short of breath and panted heavily. Sweat dripped from his forehead to the floor. He reached the door. He stopped. He bent over. He shouted limply up to XX: ‘Mr XX, please…’
XX, in his unfamiliar state of terror, had not heard any of this. He had bolted through the door and didn’t stop to look back.
Through the submarine door was a staircase. It led only up, was narrow and dark, and after every 10 steps it would turn 90 degrees to the left; XX did not know what could have been waiting for him around each corner, but he did not pause to dwell on this. And so, running – limping – as fast as his ageing and stiffened legs would allow, he duly followed his ascension.
The Guard sat back down at his huge mahogany desk in the now-lit lobby; he didn’t know what else he could do, such was the magnitude of the shock he felt towards his neglect of duty.
After what felt like several hours, but in reality was no more than five minutes, XX realized that nobody and/or nothing was following him. So he stopped. He sat down and rested his head against the dry, but still warm, concrete wall. He sat silent. Almost sleeping.
The strange, alternating lights and shadows perplexed XX. There were no windows, no lights or candles. He couldn’t tell how far he’d come up from the lobby, and it was equally impossible to estimate how far he was from the top because of the closed-off nature of the stairs.
XX climbed higher, he didn’t stop, and he was fully committed to that until he reached the next floor – if there was one. Sweat had begun to emerge upon his brow and his lips and mouth were crusted and cracked with thirst. The feet that gave themselves completely to their owner, his will and his command, were now just pools of blood in their work-boot home. The owner himself was nothing of substance anymore; he had sweated and walked and suffered so much. XX wearily placed one foot in front of the other. It was automatic. He was stooped, his eyes barely open.
XX took his last breath. He stumbled a step further. Just one, for that was all he could muster. He swayed gently; a reed in the wind. The violence would come later. A hand, outstretched… the strain found something. A jutting out of something… cold, calculating… a handle to a door, a door to a rebirth. XX let his weight fall against it and into another new world he fell. Instantly, XX recovered, his exhaustion forgotten, his death postponed. The echo from his boots upon the metal floor was something new; beauteous tinny waves lapped against him in what was a change of tidal formalities from the dull thud of subdued concrete.
The old man stopped in the centre of… it wasn’t exactly a room… he felt he should know each nook and cranny of this building… He was in the centre of what would have been the cross section of two corridors, had there been a ceiling. The corridors cut the hexagon shaped building into four equal quadrants. The same steel of all the other parts of the building were here disturbed by huge windows looking into each quadrant. They were colossal water tanks and if XX squinted, he could see he was still a long way from the top of the building and the gigantic taps that stood proudly up there. Each one as imposing as a cathedral.
XX opened the door to a new, better staircase. One that would hopefully oversee an altogether more peaceful journey. It went up in a spiral, made of more charcoal grey steel, the walls that shut it in made of glass. All of the four taps turned and the sound of crashing water drowned out all, any and every thing else. Immense oceans of water fell all around but not touching XX’s little space of sanctity. The tanks began to fill up. Curiously, they followed the exact pace he went as he made his way up the new staircase. He felt like a child again, bounding upwards to the roof – he would look and try and see if he could spot his house from up there, he decided.
XX finally reached the top; there was a ceiling to the corridors after all. He climbed through the hatch. It wasn’t as expected.
…
This is a town. Low buildings, trees, dirt roads, and, in the middle distance on all sides, hills all coming together to build the impression of a real place. How can there be land in the sky? Or: how can there be another land underneath this land?
…
There is no way back. Stairs sealed. Tanks filled and deeper than imaginable.
…
All is becoming lost.
…
A meeting with The Governor:
They sat in silence. The heavy emptiness of all things rested unevenly upon XX, and the glare across the desk from his compatriot, which grew fiercer every time he tried to begin to say something and end the torture, made the unease all the more unbearable.
Finally the strange official spoke, seemingly fuelled by the tension he himself had built in all the glory of cycles and circles. He addressed XX severely.
‘There is no necessity in small talk; forming the words and sounds, using the mind’s power to do so to fit them into an order so that I may understand, is a heinous waste. Much like the solution you so dearly crave to a problem that doesn’t exist. You are here, you are not there. There is there and is not here. The paths do not cross. They intertwined once and you were stupid enough to be present at the juncture. Now, as ever, beyond here is not there, but instead is nothing. You cannot be here, it is not allowed, but if you do not fight to remain, you shall be nowhere. This is my first and final warning.’
The meeting was concluded.
Holed away in this internment of confused longing, XX could barely face the non-containment and non-existence of his so-called mission any longer. It was as if he had trapped himself in this invisible prison; not so much not wanting to be here and not wanting to escape (nor having the want to do both either) but that some force – the will of the town and its inhabitants perhaps – had applied itself to trap him without meaning to, and resented its own inability to set his poor, extinguished soul free.
What caused him most anguish about this was that a man of problem/solution, punishment/reward (somebody who could even pre-empt these problems and punishments with such a logical defiance) was left at the mercy of no-things and all-things with no room to manoeuvre. Never one for philosophical grandeur, XX disliked that he had lifted the veil and saw what lies behind the world a little, and disliked the glimpse that seemed to him to be bludgeoning him mind, body and soul, repeatedly, to a mass of bloody pulp. He discovered, now, that it was not possible to break these parts of being without dying, to experience the complete loss of subjective self identity.
Enough. Should he continue in this vein and vain… He was sure he could end this, no matter how delusional, he could, he swore to himself. There is a way out and the will has to be done. It could be done and would be done with no triumph and no glory. This most complicated of contusions would be and should be confronted with the simplest of thought and therefore simplest of consequences. He began his work. He would use an aid dive to the bottom of a tank and force his way through.
X X X
All the fight has left my body. I feel all the lighter for it. All the thoughts and panicked urges are drifting away, just as my limp torso is now doing. I’m sure I can even see them all
leaving myself. I allow the gentle floating to carry me
away anywhere to
peace. to death to nothing
anywhere.
The Guard marches with officious duty, footsteps from the heavy black boots thundering, echoing off the damp concrete and metallic walls, following him to his scene-of-action and making him grow, as though these blows of noise adds to his height and breadth. He wanders like this through the maze he has been assigned, knowing all of the right corridors and how to open the impenetrable doors. With the reverberations accompanying him through my masterpiece, all forgotten, all decayed, he can’t help considering himself as some blind and unknowing St. Peter. He isn’t as important as all that, but his imaginations help fuel the passage of eternal time until one day he can leave.
Without prejudice or needing to alter his stride, he comes to the door he was searching for. It’s a curved door at the bottom of one of the four impossibly huge tanks. He turns the handle exactly so and the seal breaks. He steps with agility, almost wary that the powerful echoes of his gait could deafen him in this most cavernous of places. He finds the body – my body – where expected, hoists it over his shoulder and sets off once more with no moment nor pause to consider the drowned body lolling like a puppet under his control. Now even more imposing, with this second flesh upon his own and the noise of his boots still thundering, The Guard makes his way to his given destination. He opens the door, steps inside and puts my still-wet carcass down amongst the piles of other bodies, all in the same state. The sound of piercing radio static floods everything and everywhere and The Guard shuts and locks the room of resting death and continues onwards along his path.
V
Pier Paolo Pasolini, as Giotto, says “Why produce a work of art when it’s so nice to dream about it?”.
Pasolini, by being Giotto, is an Ascender/Descender. Maybe I will awaken to find myself as himself. Maybe he is Giotto being Pasolini and re-being Giotto. Or maybe I will awaken to find nothing, nothing at all. These things and links and contrivances are so easily spotted when you/me/we spend more than half the time living as others. Angels climbing and reclimbing and declimbing Jacob’s Ladders.
Sleep please let me sleep
Detach and disassociate to a disappearing degree. There is trouble, sometimes, observing the things around me, as though everything is not in its proper place. The edges of everything just ever so slightly out, agitated in the atmosphere, not quite fitting, outlines blurred, making the presence of this world around me sickly with the soft pillowy aura surrounding everything within it. As a child – though now I’ve come to realize I was never a child, it was just the same body but containing a different being – I recall vividly the feeling of a dream where everything was like this, the pillowy soft air, invisible but encasing everything. I woke up laughing hysterically and deeply confused. I vomited almost instantly, as I have started to frequently do now. The Partner and other background cast members that support my existence are convinced I am sick. There is not enough evidence to prove this. How can I be sick or dying when I am living everywhere and everyone? You are dying and will die. All of these people cast members are dying and will die. All of the people I inhibit are dying and will die. But I will not.
This is discovered, nailed to my own calf:
“If we keep the eyes open in a totally dark place, a certain sense of privation is experienced. The organ is abandoned to itself; it retires into itself. That stimulating and grateful contact is wanting by means of which it is connected with the external world, and becomes part of a whole.”
I wish for Goethe to be dying and dead.
THE NURSES
My body has hit the water. My body has been submerged by the water. My body is part of the water. The water is part of my body.
My Water Body moves on and on with no sense of direction but with a clear sense of destination.
The moment is stuck in time, an Immortal Hour, and is happening even now. Only subtle changes with each Immurement, each eternal recurrence; this time I hear the sweet voice cooing to My Water Body along the threads of The Spinner:
“The locked-air is freezing, but the Immured is not left wanting. Except a change of mind, though the heart will stay the same. And that heart now has to feel nothing; unaware of the suffering, of all the pain… of everything outside those enclosed walls… of anything except the Great Immurement… of nothing except nothing, nothing ever again… nothing but nothing ever again.”
This eases the journey of My Water Body this time, and then for all-times after it. The Body Of Water erodes My Water Body, it empties all of the heaviness and empties all of the emptiness.
The immortal spirit comes clear from within My Water Body and I hum happily:
“Destroy yourself. Whatever comes next will be better.
Erode me, O dismantling waters, and carry me with that emptying tide.
And carry me to me, I to I, mine to mine.”
I am living underwater. I am drowning in slow motion – all the while following the length of thread as decided by The Alotter.
I come to The Unturnable point of the journey. The Nurses, led by The Three Fates, all swan-swim to, through and then away from my bodies…my body’s place of rest, where the emptying tide ceases to be. The dismantling waters have stripped it to the soul. The Nurses, they gather me safely in.
This is where the rainbow ends and now into the Hymns to which I am faithful:
The Nurses will finish all things you left half-finished.
The Nurses will never let thy works diminish.
The Nurses will deliver your little love notes.
The Nurses will erase from memory all the cruel things you spoke.
The Nurses will return your body to its former glory.
The Nurses will make sure it’s no longer bloated and watery.
The Nurses will overlook your fixed stare and filthy laugh.
The Nurses will undo all the bad things you did in the past.
The Nurses will listen to all the things you are not saying.
The Nurses will focus thy mind whilst you are praying.
The Nurses will think you unblemished.
The Nurses will tell you you don’t need to be quite so apologetic.
The Nurses will reach out to you with no pity.
The Nurses will softly whisper to you a little ditty.
The Nurses will wish for something greater, always.
The Nurses will listen even though you’ve always got something to say.
The Nurses will…
In their hospital I see them spin everything and everyone and everywhen onto webs. All these things and all things more are interconnected this way. The suspension of lives and of stars, of accidents and of coldness, of happiness and of surgeries; everything IS everything else. All matter is all of us and every myself. The Fates as The Nurses have cut my thread in just the right places, in just the right way to leave me suspended and unended, that I may observe this secret of the universe and I thank them. I find my thanks are just another thread and they already know.
With thanks to them, in return, I am threadless, I am lifeless and I am free.
Serialisation: ‘Astral Deaths & Astral Lights’ By Rick ACV (Part Four)
September 21, 2022
Following in the wake of his debut novel THE GREAT IMMUREMENT, which we serialised during the summer of 2020, Vukovar helmsman Rick ACV now follows up with the surreal, esoteric and challenging Astral Deaths & Astral Lights. Playing with format, language, font, with half-thoughts of waking hours and occult merge with dream-realism and a languid sense of discomfort: a sorry state of existence. William Blake and Austin Osman Spare meet Kōbō Abe in the hotel lobby portal of the never-world: personal and universal. Parts One & Two were debuted during August, followed up by Part Three. We continue with the next chapters, EVERYONE IS ENDED and IV below:
EVERYONE IS ENDED
“Now I live in a ghost world, enclosed in my dreams and imaginings.”
Images flash by.
A hidden backstory to be deciphered, hands reaching out to grasp at them and to them and put them all-together.
There are 3 things, 3 beings and they attempt a film … but there must be death, Real-Death. Even though the world that has created these people… the person or people in that world… there has been Real-Death there.
And so in this imaginary world with these 3 imaginary filmmakers, their imaginary friend, as a result, is now a Dead-Friend and their only purpose in life cannot be completed.
They exist in a limbo far crueller than their eternal recurrence.
Images become clearer.
They were written into a script, that’s their existence. When the film opens, theirs and every other character’s in that script’s life begins. The film finishes, the credits roll; Everyone Is Ended.
And it begins again. But this now can’t happen.
IMAGES COME YET CLEARER.
They stop flashing and moving.
…
.
……..
..
…………………………………
.
…
I am frozen by a cerement of despair; the morosity and monstrosity is shared by all three of us, but not Charon, who awaits us further on. His flashing eyes gleam through the mid-winter, mid-morning, mid-mourning fog, directing us towards him.
We know this scene, Grey, Nancy and I, but it feels as though Something Has Changed. Our collective De Ja Vu is not as nauseating, our futile existence not as repetitive.
We walk silently side by side, exchanging solemn but reassuring looks now and again in place of the usual vindictive and often tedious words that blight our many conversations, funny as they may be to those who Witness Us.
It feels as though we have wrestled back control from our Creators, from our destiny, from our all encompassing Purpose.
In reality, we have simply been forgotten about and left forever to wander and wonder.
The fog moves quickly and we can barely make out the lake, the perimeter of which our path naturally follows, and, so too we are blinded to the woodland that surround and are usually so beautiful and full of life. This is a cold, dark day.
Limnal hymns haunt our every movement and direction.
The hard, coarse stones underfoot that form the ever-widening beach – itself an estuary to a barren Stone-Sea, which is our destination – occasionally pierce our feet; the pain is a mild self-flagellation to punctuate our silent affirmations that this is the Truest Of Choices.
We move towards Charon and Place To Rest.
Place To Rest for our Dead-Friend whom Nancy carries in an old, battered tin. She has to be strong as the ashes have been fighting to emerge for an eternity now.
Place To Rest for all of us.
As we come ever closer to Charon, we take formation; Nancy a couple of paces ahead with myself and Grey flanking. Nancy holds the tin with outstretched arms to warn Charon that this time…
…this time it is different.
I recall from the usual world, and then imbibe all of us in this one, of a passage:
“‘Noone will suffer. I’ll save them all.’
Creators now become Cremators.
The daylight as strong as the potent meph these grievers snort whilst the salvaged and salvated body drifts through the air into the Chapel Of Ash.
There are many people but people-as-props for this – our – final attestment to thy testament.
Surrounded by voices. Surrounded by seers. Surrounded by voices.
The smoke into the atmosphere as the only real thing. Even though we must craft in clay, we first dream in smoke. The smoke envelops this whole Immortal Hour, this whole celebration, this whole play; A play that the cremated’s smoke itself has written and is now directing.
The smoke is the metaphysical embodiment, entombing us, immuring us within The Great Immurement, to be held within until the crafting begins and the clay can take its place. The ashes are a physical monument, but nothing more.
Besides, there are no differences between ashes.”
Our version and vision of Charon is a crazed old man, deranged and unhinged, seething with malevolent playfulness. But not today.
Today, he still rows his little wooden boat, gnarled with eternal age, but immune to external damage, and it is upon the wide expanse of stone and pebble on the water’s edge that he rows.
We climb aboard, our Dead-Friend and ourselves and we sit, together.
All is quiet; the liminal hymns are at one with the atmosphere.
We huddle.
The sun sets.
Soon we will all die and this time, never live again.
Everything fades.
Everyone Is Ended.
IV
There is often fear of ‘The Bed’. The fear is growing of ‘The Bed’.
I’m not there. I can’t go there. Is the partner on it? Trying to coax me to ‘The Bed’, as though it’s some normal thing, some normal place to go to at the end of the day?
There is no security, not even a false sense. ‘The Bed’ should be avoided at all costs. There is no rest there.
How can it be sleep and rest when all I do is see through other waking eyes, in other waking worlds?
Another note from Another Place:
“As we get older and more time has passed, we become attached to the ideals of people rather than the people themselves, as we understand that they cannot fulfil what we require of them, and learn how to find fulfilment, instead, within ourselves. Then we become more detached to those things that mean nothing, turning instead to nothingness, the things and places that lie beyond the Veil.
These things and places are not wondrous. It is a crushing vastness that is impossible to navigate but exciting to explore, and, in return, to be explored by.
When the crushing vastness decides we can neither offer nor fake any more of ourselves, our life is taken from us and given to something new.
This is not our decision.”
One more here in fact… this by another’s hand… all battered and bruised… blood drips…
“I am scared to death
Scared to death of death;
to unexist after all i’ve lived learned loved … the thought of this
is a source of great depression
of cut hands
of night falls fast
PLEASE GOD
XXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXX MY GREATEST WISH IS TO
NOW LIVE EVERYONE IN EVERYTIME EVERYWHEN AND EVERYWHERE
until unexistence is escaped and I may always
be.
Just to be, forever, is all I want.
STEPS HAVE ALREADY BEEN MADE.”
Did I write this?
Please, God.
Written by Rick Clarke/Illustrations by Andrzej Klimowski
As you may know if you’re a regular follower of The Monolith Cocktail, we’ve been serialising a number of new novels and writings from debut authors over the last two years; beginning with Ayfer Simm‘s Istanbul pyschogeograhy A Rumor In Üsküdar in 2019. Following on Ayfer’s heels we’re now serialising the Lynchian semi-biographical and incomprehensible jukebox set wanderings of Dan Shea (Bordellos, Vukovar and Beauty Stab infamy) and Rick Clarke’s (bandmate of Shea and rallying beacon of the band Vukovar) new novel The Great Immurement: The previous twelve chapters of which have appeared over the last two months.
We continue with those semi-esoteric imaginings below and bring you next trio of penultimate chapters, ‘Moonlight’, ‘The Silent Surgeon’, and ‘Trial By Fly; illustrated as always by the illustrious Andrzej Klimowski.
MOONLIGHT
And so to the Moon The Great Immured did non-look. He stared and wished. A spectral figure appeared and approached. He told:
The symbols have now shattered.
I was free. I probably lived an unremarkable life and probably still do. But the symbols did shatter, and they shattered for me and my Otherlands – the space between spaces.
The backstory:
It could be described as a romance. Lunar. A silent romance. We started to notice each other from afar, as these things normally demand have happen. I learned it could’ve been because of the connection between the dripdripdrip of the bloodbloodblood in the absence of Motherhood.
In vials I collected this space between fertility and held it up to the space between day. With a desperate, knowing affection we bathed in each other’s appearance. It became an obsession to the point where I refused to acknowledge its solar non-equivalent – convinced was I that this was an imposter, evil in its way, casting light on things that ought not be lit.
When I thought about my moon, I would think about the mechanics and likeliness and consequences of its perforation.
I could grow a penis. I would sharpen the very end into a point with the veil’s blade and gently press it against the tough silvery surface, like against an eardrum, and hold it in a position just before its desecration. My limbs would twitch in a glorious anticipation. I would enjoy that position for a lifetime; neither in life nor crossing the threshold into death. Its skin, a leathery elastic, at peak indentation.
I now feel that sickly feeling in the very pit of the stomach whereby I want to do something with all my might but with all my might know I shouldn’t, like holding something fragile and valuable out of a high window, or stepping from the chair with rope-tight-round-neck. Eventually it’s going to drop, by accident or perpetrator’s design.
I press that little bit further forward with grown, sharpened penis and it begins. A warm ooze coming over me, sticky and thick. It’s only a small opening so I drive myself in and out and in and out and in and out again and the scent is of… the feel is of… the sound is of… the taste is of… the sight is of… I can’t speculate on this.
After a few encounters I lost everything there ever was except for my love’s glow. “I am the light” said it, and “The Light Is My Leader” said I; LVX MEA DVX.
It got bigger and bigger.
Each previous encounter it was flirting with other things, dancing with the formless smoke and clouds. But I didn’t mind. However, one clear night it had eyes only for me and me alone. That was the night…
I rose, PM. I would soon be feeling the true force of nature. I don’t know much about so-called cosmic forces and I find ridiculous the way people talk about them. But I felt what I felt.
It was the moon, my lover, my king, my queen and all things in between.
I stepped outside into our eternal garden – I didn’t feel the cold.
I looked up and saw the moon, full, in all its glory.
The clouds were moving unusually quickly.
A hole remained in them, connecting me and my love so that its gaze would not stray, connecting us personally, speaking to me.
I finally managed to give myself over almost completely, ignoring the dark symbols surrounding and being formed by clouds, and, after seeing and feeling the earth upon which I stand moving, I shut my eyes. I felt the pull. I didn’t quite leave the ground. Had I tuned in wholly I’m convinced I would have.
I felt totally at peace.
The being collapsed into the atmosphere around itself. The Great Immured, briefly, saw the moon’s glow through the thick impenetrable walls of his Immurement and continued with his self-sacrificed placement with few other questions.
THE SILENT SURGEON
The once-partner and now nevermore makes an appearance through a photograph, through mind’s eye, through misunderstood hazy recall.
The Lady Of The Otherlands convinced herself she was now too weighty. Too much indulgence and ingestion of filths, she thought, that’s the reason the things of the Otherlands no longer caved into her charms… but that wasn’t true. She had gotten older, her face and body less structured. And the other things she thought of around her were just figments of the ever greying fog that clouded the rooms and ante-chambers of her thoughts and living arrangements.
In her area a very famous surgeon now resided. So celebrated were his soul and hands that he was rewarded with being kept hidden from the outside world. His skills had not been tested thoroughly in a while. He was unable to practise on himself as his infatiguable enthusiasm had rendered his own body almost useless. So when the Lady presented her broken specimen before him, were he able to express his delight, he would’ve done.
“I need an operation.”
“…”
“It’s for my wellbeing, sexually and physically.”
“…”
“Can you not just slice some off or whatever you do?”
“I can pay you.”
“Please, no. Medical well being only. None other surgery.”
The lady went away knowing what must be done. Flesh must be gone. She would grow flesh that must be cut away, as the uncontrollable growth would be considered harmful to the well being.
It became all in her power to cultivate and farm the little things that become bigger things until the black mass was in charge of itself.
The rumours that the great surgeon had disappeared or moved on were not true. She found him in the same place. His non-movement and non-breathing meant that the Lady had to undergo the operation by her own hand, under the silent guidance of The Silent Surgeon.
A long and not painless time later, the Lady emerged from her desecrated operating table, clutching the carvings against her breast, tightly and darkly. It represented the heaviness of the weight she had successfully lost. She felt attractive once more and spent her time trying to quench her unyielding thirst for all things to be inside her.
TRIAL BY FLY
A strange noise. Familiar but reminiscent of almost nothing at all.
The ceilings tall.
The windows tiny and infrequent.
The rooms infinite.
Everywhere would be white but for the flies and the tape – the tape yellowing on white surfaces no longer visible, covered by masses and masses
and masses and masses and masses
And masses and masses and masses
x7
of flies… tiny little things forming the decoration, little black bodies everywhere.
The purpose? The purpose…
Experimentation. No. Engineering.
To build a set of wings from their wings but the power and size to fly a thing of this power, of this size.
Shaped angelic like.
To fly!
No other material is so abundant. No other material is so suitable.
It’s all about appropriation.
Or re-appropriation.
The collecting of flies has taken a long while. But that isn’t something to notice. The ideation is nearly intention.
The process is what it is. Every piece of tape needs to be checked for the newly-captured-still-winged.
A snip and a slice later and the wings to a new place have grown. Heavenly is the warmth of pride and promise of completion. Satisfying is the rip and parting of torn wing from now-torn body.
X X X
Only one more set is needed.
A furious search is conducted; hectics, urgent; all previous patience dissipated for this search for new patients. This search feels an eternal thing.
…
…
…
X X X
But now the search is over. A winged fiend. No, a winged friend… is splay on its front, spatchcock, given itself to the triumph of the will.
This last one is to be s.a.v.o.u.r.e.d and savioured.
A martyr for O murta.
Thumb and forefinger are positioned and the operation is begun.
But a quiver.
A quiver?
A quiver and a noise. A tiny noise.
A quiver and a scream?
No.
Pain? Torture?
Everywhere around in this impossible place… flies flies flies… destroyed.
Oceans of it.
Suddenly, very suddenly, it all becomes noticeable at once. A cacophony of minuscule screams rises until the brains feel as though swelling to burst.
There is no repentance that can be done, only a gesture.
X X X
A collection of still-winged flies are manically sought, freed and message conveyed.
The wings of sin are now finished.
This product of despicable engineering and this engineer of despicable engineering are now let loose.
The Otherlands and the sensation of flying is a total peace, a total manifestation of ambient.
X X X
Flies form a convoy.
They know their seeker of forgiveness will follow wilfully, and follows just so into the nest of exaltation.
The once angelic-wings are torn from flesh, from grace, and taken apart.
The body follows soon after.
Previous instalments:
Parts 1 – 3
Parts 4 – 6
Parts 7 – 9
Parts 10- 12
Written by Rick Clarke/Illustrations by Andrzej Klimowski
As you may know if you’re a regular follower of The Monolith Cocktail, we’ve been serializing a number of new novels and writings from debut authors over the last two years; beginning with Ayfer Simm‘s Istanbul pyschogreograhy A Rumor In Üsküdar in 2019. Following on Ayfer’s heels we’re now serializing the Lynchian semi-biographical and incomprehensible jukebox set wanderings of Dan Shea (Bordellos, Vukovar and Beauty Stab infamy) and Rick Clarke’s (bandmate of Shea and rallying beacon of the band Vukovar) new novel The Great Immurement: The previous nine chapters of which appeared last month in July and early August. We continue with those semi-esoteric imaginings below and bring you next trio of NSFW chapters, ‘The Door To A Broken World’, ‘The Lost Sheep’, ‘Absorbing Genius’; illustrated as always by the illustrious Andrzej Klimowski.
THE DOOR TO A BROKEN WORLD
A knock upon the door? Answer it. No. No I can’t be doing that. I can’t be letting the outside mix with the inside. What if it’s important? It can’t be that important. But you don’t know that. I do. No you don’t, it could be an emergency. From the tip of my head to my furry cunthole, and then down again to the floor-space, I know it isn’t that important, and besides, if it were so bad, they’d knock down the door and come in unasked and uninvited.
I shrink away and slink away from the door, happy that my fetid home-place remains without contamination. The aromas have become so that I struggle to tell apart my groin-scent, my sweat scent and any and every-scent else. And I like it that way. To not be able to differentiate between filths; rot, body, mould, waste is to be clean. Everything is equal, everything is one, everything is cleanliness, everything is godliness.
I have earned my divine right. My divine right is to be allowed to remain with my divine right, earning my divine right and forever may it remain that way, to be able to enjoy my divine right.
Eat. But what shall I have? Shave a little flesh from the bottom of your foot. I’m afraid. Afraid?Afraid of disappearing, not of the pain, that doesn’t even come into it. Once you eat it and digest it, it’ll return back to its rightful place. That’s how it works, you are your food, this is the joy of being a person. I don’t know, I’m unsure. I look at the rest of me and see bumps and ditches where my flesh has left me forever. I told you about the dangers of not ingesting your egest. Sometimes I’m not hungry. Then you will disappear, death to cowards! Alright.
I acquire a cutting instrument of some description. It probably isn’t a grater. But it’s dyed a dried blood- brown and it’s still just about sharp enough. I hack it into my lower heel and there it stays for a second, wedged. There is no blood and there doesn’t need to be. I wriggle the cutting steel up and down a touch to get a hold, but I do it too enthusiastically and it comes out. Without touching, I can feel the separation between the two kingdoms of dried up skin and sinew, and I can feel the flap-flapping of half-island that’s trying to escape into a full republic; the grotesque ridge of discontent.
Eventually I have my meal and then I stand in a space and wait there. My body shuts down – I don’t need it.
I think for a while. I think of well dressed ladies looking at their twat in a hand mirror, sitting in a carriage on a train. Maybe they’ll masturbate. I look down at my own naked body and my own dirtied breasts and my own dirtied twat but there is no stimulation. The filth is ingrained deep into my skin.
My mind shuts down – I don’t need it.
A knock – a THUD – at the door. I mustn’t answer it but I mustn’t not watch the door from the hall in case I miss anything. This is all very strange. I don’t know how to deal with it all. I just stand, swaying on the spot in an alien attempt to balance a new imbalance, constantly trying to right my wavering stance.
I know something is going to happen.
I know something is going to happen.
I know something is going to happen.
I KNOW SOMETHING WILL HAPPEN.
I KNOW SOMETHING WILL HAPPEN.
I don’t know what.
I find out what.
A beam of light forces itself through a new rectangular hole in the door; it blinds me. It blinds my precious muck and stink, each being reintroduced to each other in this evil half-light, the second impressions being made are those of repulse and repugnancy.
The light vanishes as quickly as it appears, only it doesn’t feel like it, and in with it comes something… else. It lands on the floor like an intruding leaf, so light that it skims across the floor surface first before coming to a dead halt.
I sneak my way to the shape lying, unmoving on my floor. I keep my distance though. Pick it up. I don’t think being so cavalier is wise. How else will you find out what it is?
Now here I kneel, paying respect to the shrine I did construct for the paper-shape. The grime around me doesn’t seem so sterile now, and I feel uncomfortable being stuck under the weight of the heavy air that is all around me.
The paper is my new life and I’m now curious as to its source and how it came to be with me. I wonder what that second contains, that second of light. I wonder what’s inside it. It must be something tangible or it couldn’t appear in my eyes. Is it a place? I want to know more.
I forget my allegiance to dirt. I want to go where the light goes. I think about it every time my body and brain isn’t off. How do I do it? It’s a mystery and it makes my skin crawl with anger. My forearms open and bleed. Still I kneel at the shrine, at all times.
A KNOCK UPON THE DOOR. I run. At the door, I speak and the figure speaks back. He will wait there. He opens the letterbox and the light comes in once more, only for this time, it’s there for longer. I bask in it, eyes close and arms open. My legs weaken. I touch between my thighs and bring my sex to my nose and my mouth. I have to go, I have to get into the hole of my new joy.
I persuade the figure to help me; he doesn’t want to but I use my persuasion and I convince him.
I hear machinery.
A piece of string comes through the letterbox. I tie it around my waist, very high so that it cuts into me. I stand with my front to the door.
I hear machinery, I hear it grind.
I hear machinery and the string pulls me up against the door. Its strength and vigour cause me to acquiesce happily and I smirk with my mouth.
It keeps pulling and pulling and grinding away. It wants me so badly to come into the light, into the
better-place but it seems to be difficult. I’m against the letterbox but my shape isn’t right and my shape is too big. The string is cutting me until it cuts to the bone where I can feel it finally get a grip after scraping a little. I rub my clitoris on the splintered wood of the door and tingle.
It’s pulling more.
I snap.
I now look at the ceiling with my heels as a headrest. I vomit up some stomach acid all over my front, uncontrollable and done so as a subconscious expression of my cathartic experience; the act of the vomit is almost an ejaculation, forced outside of my mouth upon seeing my pubis completely broken. The shattering means my vagina is now split up to my belly button and up to my coccyx on the other wise and I imagine how much pleasure this means I can have when I get to the light outside. The top of my leg bones have found a new home no longer inside their homes of blood, sinew and skin. I’m sure I can smell the exposed bone and cartilage of my hip. It’s like a damp towel, left on the bathroom floor for too long. Yes, that’s it. I start to think about my new way of walking in my new home. I picture the comical sight and snigger; at least I will make others laugh, I will surely make lots of friends. I keep being pulled in a regular rhythm. Pull, pull, pull, pause on an infinite repeat. It’s a little too forceful but I take it with a good nature – maybe the machinery is eager to see me.
My broken midriff is now in the light-land. I get a pang of jealousy that it’s out before me but I let it pass as I won’t be long after it.
The light gets more intense. I’m so close.
I get down to my breasts, but combined with my knees, I can’t fit. I dig my nails furiously into the join between my breast and upper stomach and it creates tears. After the pause, the machine pulls again and my breasts are torn off from the base and, hanging on by a bloody hinge, they come back nipple-down on my shoulders.
I’m almost out, the light almost bleaches my whole vision.
I’m out.
I’m in the light.
THE LOST SHEEP
Who is the one who is living him now? Keep themselves to yourself.
I am a little lost sheep says I – this is violent. I can’t find my way back home. I have lost the trail that I put down myself, for myself, for myself to reach the beginning of the path I started down.
Everything moves itself around here. My shepherd cannot see me and equally so, I cannot see him. My shepherd is my Father is my teacher is my lover is my victim is (sometimes) my own self. Nothing stays the same.
I’m so tired – this is violent. Things are split in half in an almost automatic way; a production line of symmetrical brutality. In the village, where doggers unrelenting and unrepent, I found a peephole of sorts in an old moss covered, discarded length of timber around the back of a row of garages, which belong to the block of flats that then-existed, now-don’t (moved to the Inner Otherlands.)
The peephole showed me my home… but only sometimes. I couldn’t see the way back, though.
Also through the peephole stood another lost sheep just like me. It tried to play to my sympathy… I watched as it did creepeth… crept… creeped… it did creepers in an insectly way, out of sympathy and into repugnance. I took breaks between my peeping so as not to lose myself completely.
I saw many things and many things repeated. In my breaks, I took to keeping food/warmth/shelter with a handsome man who appeared – but not to himself – to be the King Of The Strangers.
The handsome man only appeared in sight as a visual aura, descriptions could follow the course of a tumoural warning; a prelude to death, or at the very least, a distortion of the living, such was the visual aura. I was not his most recent freedman but more like a friend or companion.
(He nursed me back to health as it wasn’t my time. He insisted the old piece of timber – peephole and all – were for the temptations of another and not for me. I was a lost soul, not a dead one.)
I am the little lost sheep, says I. I stand and I watch and I wait for my shepherd so I can bleat myself back to his loving protection – this is violent.
And now The Great Immured recalls:
Experience the world as I experience the world.
I thought it was of importance, of significance,
That thinking what I thought and existing as I exist held coherence.
But now I see it’s ridiculous and I’m ashamed.
Every thought I have dissolves to nothing.
So exist as I exist.
Cunts splay open like wildflowers
And the scent of their labian spring
But no colour
The moistening into grey mist with pleasure, but no feeling.
Man made stones dance,
Casting shadows as intangible monoliths
In permanent winters that bleach the vision into delusions.
Accidental opiates rise from black puddles
Rise in flesh from inherent coldness.
Exist as I exist.
I am the little lost sheep says I
And my shepherd is fucking;
Fucking bodies into bodies
And surroundings into nothing,
All decayed and barren.
My rose of blood
But I still don’t know who sends them.
Exist as I exist.
So that I don’t have to let slip
Meaningless words from my mouth
Or act-out affection,
So the fucking is automatic
And the emptiness is shared,
That ruins stay ruined and don’t have to be sold.
Exist as I exist.
Now the symbols wilt
And all the lies can be true.
Mothers mothering without the cruelty
Their clouds loom
And skin melting skin.
Exist as I exist.
All the secrets align.
A witness to the feeding of the fool
Bone crushing bone
From the spool hangs limp
All that should.
Exist as I exist.
Sacrifice yourself on the altar of my glory.
Exist as I exist.
This is what is through the peephole, this is the figure you are and you aren’t.
ABSORBING GENIUS
The holes are funnels, channeling the strength of the creamy-white concentrated genius that is propelled out in their moment of weakness. Foolish to let go of essence of greatness, whether willingly or not. SEMEN EFFUNDIS VENENUM EST…
Wise are those who catch this purity in their canals, crafted by a theft’s ingenuity. It sticks to the sides of these canals, growing and pulsing, forming new layers over lost ones. Old, tired, retarded membranes now replaced by the immortal. Sometimes the giver gives through sacrifice. Sometimes pity. Mostly wilful ignorance borne to simple, ill-disciplined pleasure.
This interlocking and outerlocking circle and cycle can only come to those who acknowledge it, even if the forfeiter forfeits without having to have the knowledge. And so the internal bukake is knowledge, and knowledge is power, and power is all.
Author: Rick Clarke
Illustrations: Andrzej Klimowski
Parts 1 – 3
Parts 4 – 6
Parts 7 – 9
Perusual #012: The Singles, Tracks, Videos & Oddities Roundup: Ammar 808, Jon Hassell, Kamo Saxo, Itchy-O, Tony Price
June 16, 2020
New Music Of Interest Style Roundup/Dominic Valvona
The Perusal is my regular one-stop chance to catch up with the mounting pile of singles, EPs, mini-LPs, tracks, videos and oddities that threaten to overload the Monolith Cocktail’s inboxes each month. A right old mishmash of previews, reviews and informative inquiry, this weeks assortment includes Ammar 808, Jon Hassell, Itchy-O, Kamo Saxo and Tony Price.
Ammar 808 ‘Marivere Gati (featuring SUSHA )’
(Glitterbeat Records) Single/12th June 2020
“Except you, Divine mother, who else in this earth is to protect us ?
The ones who fall on your feet, giving up completely their ego,
you protect them, take care of them.
Meenakshi I believe in you.”
Dropping out of the nowhere, the latest trailblazing syncopation of transformed futuristic Pan-Maghreb languages, rhythms and ceremony from the leading producer Sofyann Ben Youssef expands the sonic horizons to collaborate with the Carnatic singer Susha.
Converging under Youssef’s most free spirited of electronic projects AMMAR 808, the signature propulsive TR-808 bass and warped effects of that alias meet with the alluring, buoyant spinning tabla driven devotional music of southern India, on the first single to be released from the forthcoming ‘Global Control / Invisible Invasion’ album. An ode to the goddess Meenakshi, who is an avatar of Parvati, the Hindu goddess of Fertility, love, and devotion, this hypnotizing throbbing fusion paves the way for an ever evolving and worldly sonic adventure.
Related from the Archives:
Ammar 808 ‘Maghreb United’ Album Review
Kamo Saxo ‘Koma Mate / Jagd (Feat. Jameszoo)’
(We Jazz Records) Single/12th June 2020
With a psychosis of breakbeats and prowling, jostling conscious jazz – the kind that channels the likes of such titans of the form as Sun Ra, Pharoah Sanders, Lloyd Miller, Leon Thomas and Albert Ayler – the exciting quintet Koma Saxo emerged last year as a new vehicle for a wealth of adroit European contemporary jazz musicians. Assembled by the Berlin-based Swedish bassist/producer Petter Eldh under the umbrella of the brilliant Finnish Jazz label We Jazz, the horn heavy ensemble includes many of the label’s stars, including Jonas Kullhammar, Mikko Innanen, and Otis Sandsjö on brass, and Christian Lillinger on the drums. The group made their performance debut at the label’s own festival in 2019, followed by a double A side single, the exotic flight of fantasy entitled ‘Part Koma/Fanfare For Komarum’, and a self-titled long player.
The latest double A-side single to drop from the ensemble refashions the conscious jazz swinging, double-bass tripping ‘Koma Tema’ performance from that debut album. Reincarnated as ‘Koma Mate’, the beats are dialed up, the skipping even more tripping, and the horns serenading. A sort of breakbeat abstraction with signs of melodious drifting, and cooing diaphanous spirits it doesn’t so much improve on the original as take it in a oft-kilter direction.
On the “flip” side, the Dutch producer Jameszoo is let loose to deconstruct and rebuild the Koma Saxo sound on the flexed and untethered tooting horn ‘Jagd’. Tenor sax floats and meanders over another tripped-up fluctuating groove to push the jazz group towards a hypnotized and fractured dancefloor.
Related from the Archives:
Koma Saxo ‘Port Koma/Fanfare For Komarum’ Single Review
Itchy-O ‘Milk Moon Rite’
(Commissioned by Onassis Foundation as part of the ENTER series) Performance/3rd June 2020
First aired at the beginning of June but recorded on May 7th, as the moon loomed large orbiting at its closest point to Earth, the grand gesturing esoteric Denver collective of Itchy-O executed its own “Milk Moon Rite” performance.
As the ensemble explain: “Earth’s only natural satellite has orbited our sky as a massive emblem for countless religious worshippers across the eons. Known to the Greeks as Selene, the Hebrew Yarcah, and the Hindu lunar god Chandra; Egyptians also associated the moon with Isis, to name just a few appearances across mythos. It personifies the mysteries of life and death, both scientifically and spiritually.”
The 13-minute film is part of ENTER, a series of new works commissioned from artists across the globe, created in 120 hours or less, and drawing on experiences and transformations faced through the COVID-19 pandemic.
“In a call to the gods for balance between opposites”, members of the drum driven art ensemble laid down a squalling friction of extemporized industrial ceremony and repetitive taiko beatings and hammerings: a vision that evokes Alejandro Jodorowsky conducting a unholy communion between Faust and Sunn O))) in a landscape in which the chthonian meets satanic. Settle down to the unsettling my children.
Itchy-O have in the past performed with David Byrne & St. Vincent’s band, shared the stage with experimental legends Devo, and anchored the world-renowned Dark Mofo Festival in Tasmania. Other performances include opening for Beats Antique, Melvins, and headlining Austin-based Fantastic Fest three years in a row.
Jon Hassell ‘Fearless’
Taken from the upcoming new album Seeing Through Sound Pentimento Volume Two/24th July 2020
Progenitor of the borderless and amorphous evocatively traced, hazy dream experiments, John Hassell’s transmogrified nuzzling trumpet and sonic soundscape textures have inspired a generation of artists over the last forty odd years. The composer and trumpet player’s pathway, from adroit pupil of Stockhausen to seminal work on Terry Riley’s harangued piano guided In C, encompassed an polygenesis of influences: a lineage that draws inspiration from avant-garde progenitors like La Monte Young, and travels far and wide, absorbing sounds from Java to Burundi. Hassell attempted a reification of what he would term the “fourth world”; a style that reimagined an amorphous hybrid of cultures; a merger between the traditions and spiritualism of the third world (conceived during the “cold war” to denote any country that fell outside the industrious wealthier West, and not under the control of the Soviet Empire) and the technology of the first.
Though an independent artist pioneer in his own right, his name has become synonymous with that of Brian Eno’s, the pair working together on the first ambient traversing volume in Hassell’s Possible Musics series of iconic albums, in the late 70s.
Though he has continued to produce futuristic amorphous peregrinations, his back catalogue has in more recent years been rediscovered through various reissues. As a companion piece to the first Pentimento series of albums, 2018’s Listening To Pictures suite, a second volume is being released later next month. Pentimento is defined as the “reappearance in a painting of earlier images, forms, or strokes that have been changed and painted over”; a process, a layering of coats that is reflected musically on this upcoming experimental vision, Seeing Through Sound. From that album, the foggy-headed mysterious lurking, fanning rayed, early Can metronomic ‘Fearless’.
Related from the Archives:
Jon Hassell/Brian Eno ‘Fourth World Vol.1: Possible Musics’ Album Review
Jon Hassell ‘Dream Theory In Malaya’ Album Review
Jon Hassell/Farafina ‘Flash Of The Spirit’ Album Review
Tony Price ‘Interview’
Track preview from the upcoming LP Interview/Discount/17th July 2020
Abstracted No Wave meets dream fuzzy sparkled organ jazz on the latest suffused nuzzled trip from the multitasking Toronto visionary Tony Price. The New York based producer, musician, and songwriter makes his debut on the Telephone Explosion hub with a new album; a couplet of traversed vaporous jazzy meditations that seem to have been recorded from behind a cozy if mysterious fog. Maybe not a veiled fog, but as the first track from this side-long duo of tracks, ‘Interview’, is described in the accompanying blurb “a meditative exploration of the tile-tunneled labyrinths of NYC’s subway system at night.” You could say a field recording of the most amorphous group of subway jazz buskers emanating thoughts and musings into the nocturnal ether.
Leader on this dial tone hazed peregrination, Price lends his fingertips to an assortment of eye-candy keyboards and synthesizers (Fender Rhodes, Hohner D6 Clavinet, Arp 2600, SP1200, Prophet 5), sketches out gossamer guitar strands and a repetitive lurking bass and also programs the drums. Flanking him on this distant recording are some experimentalist heavyweights: Giosue Rosati on fretless electric bass, blog stalwart and friend Andy Haas on signature untethered saxophones & effects, and Dan Pencer on bass clarinet.
The imbued fleeted spark of modal jazz, electro-funk and narcotic non-linearity of 1970s minimalism style LP is framed as “an electrifying collision of fractured jazz- concréte and combustible downtown funk that crushes the entire continuum between minimalism and maximalism into a hypnotic wreck of metropolitan sound matter.” In practice, to these ears, it sounds like a communion of the Cosmic Range and Zacht Automaat. A winner in my book.
Price has lent his expertise to a wide range of critically acclaimed records on labels like 4AD, DFA, Slumberland and Burger Records amongst many others. In 2017 he founded his label and creative services unit Maximum Exposure, which quickly became an in-demand entity, providing production and design expertise to the likes of Capitol Records, Pat McGrath Labs, Vogue, SSENSE, 4AD, and Night School Recordings amongst others. The new album will be released next month, 17th July 2020, but you can now sneak a listen of the A-Side.
Hi, my name is Dominic Valvona and I’m the Founder of the music/culture blog monolithcocktail.com For the last ten years I’ve featured and supported music, musicians and labels we love across genres from around the world that we think you’ll want to know about. No content on the site is paid for or sponsored and we only feature artists we have genuine respect for /love. If you enjoy our reviews (and we often write long, thoughtful ones), found a new artist you admire or if we have featured you or artists you represent and would like to buy us a coffee at https://ko-fi.com/monolithcocktail to say cheers for spreading the word, then that would be much appreciated.
Tickling Our Fancy 077: BaBa ZuLa, Junkboy, Jodie Lowther, House Of Tapes, Society Of The Silver Cross, Taichmania, Trupa Trupa….
August 8, 2019
REVIEWS
Words: Dominic Valvona
Photo: (of BaBa ZuLa) Emir Sıvacı
Freely traversing borders once more, Dominic Valvona’s regular roundup of discoveries and interesting finds this month circumnavigates Japan, Israel, Turkey, Poland before returning to the more chilled pastoral Estuary greenery of the Sussex and Essex landscapes. There’s a double-helping of upcoming releases from Glitterbeat Records stable with the return of the Turkish dub cosmology legends Baba ZuLa – their first studio LP in five years, Derin Derin – and a new album of post-punk limbering from the Gdansk band, Trupa Trupa. In a similar vane to the ZuLa, Israeli troupe Taichmania also fuse a cosmology of sounds, and use both the an electrified dynamism of the “oud” and “saz” to fuzz and amp up a merger of Middle Eastern traditions with jazz and prog. Their debut LP, Seventh Heaven is given the once-over. The trio of radio show host ethnomusicologist Matthew Nelson, Hopi musician Clark Tenakhongva and world-renowned flutist Gary Stroutsos come together on sacred ground to invoke a magical homage to the music of the Hopi people on the beautifully evocative LP Öngtupqa. Inspired by more Eastern mysticism the Seattle coupling of Society Of The Silver Cross release their debut long-suite, 1 Verse, and an amazing freefall-in-motion jazz exploration from Philip Gropper’s Philm, entitled Consequences.
There’s horror of a diaphanous apparitional kind with the latest solo album of invocations and ether siren sighed sonnets from Jodie Lowther, and the first album in five years from Junkboy, the marvelous scenic Trains, Trees, Topophilia, and, finally, the inaugural release from Ippu Mitsui’s brand new electronic music label, Pure Spark Records, the House Of Tapes two-track Embers Dreams.
BaBa ZuLa ‘Derin Derin’
(Glitterbeat Records) 27th September 2019
Stalwarts of Turkish cosmology dub, the Istanbul Ege Bamyasi acolytes BaBa ZuLa return to the fray with their first studio LP in five years. And what a time to make that return, as Turkey, or rather its increasingly apoplectic quasi-Sultan-in-waiting Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, continues a policy of conformism that endangers any form of oppositional descent, and threatens artists and critics alike with severe censorship. The once famous secular moderate bridge between Europe and Asia is growing hostile to the West as the administration errs towards a hardline form of Islam, and moves closer towards Putin’s Russia.
Maintaining a constant rebellious streak throughout their twenty-three year career, whatever the ruling regime, the recent turmoil propels the ZuLa to reconvene; raising their heads above the barricades in a creative act of defiance: Music for dangerous times.
Still led, in part, by the switched-on electric ‘saz’ maestro Osman Murat Ertel, the group weaves together another expansive soundtrack of vivid souk dub and sashaying rambunctious post-punk on Derin Derin. Inspired by a number of things, not just the current political climate, the album is imbued by BaBa ZuLa’s long-running collaborations with the late Jaki Liebezeit: who was himself in turn influenced by a myriad of Anatolian rhythms – which you can hear permeating throughout both the Can legacy and his own many collaborative projects over the decades. The Can metronome and drumming doyen sat in with the group on a number of occasions, and the resonance, at least, of those sessions can in part be felt on this newest album. Especially on the Krautrock pulse of the solo fuzzed saz-snarling ‘Kizil Gözlüm’, which runs through a gamut of Germanic sounds, from Can to Blixa Bargeld and 80s Berlin post-punk. There’s even an air of Michael Karoli’s signature cosmic flares and reverberating wanes, as played on an amped-up oud (or saz), on the Sublime Porte reimagined vision of King Tubby, ‘Port Pass’. In retrospect, the band considers Jaki as an unassuming mentor.
Another thread to this album is the group’s ancestral connection, with musical ties that stretch back generations: Ertel paying a special homage to his artistic forbearers, enthused by traditions but also the country’s psychedelic furors in the 60s and 70s. From the 150 year-old photographic plate process used to produce the album cover, to the inclusion of a song penned by Ertel, his wife and young son, ‘U Are The Swing’, there’s a deep sense of family and inheritance; BaBa ZuLa as custodians of the faith.
A third strand, the instrumental portions of this Oriental cosmic album grew out of a soundtrack commission; the group asked to record music for a documentary about falcons, created a suitably exotic echo of serene flight and soaring majesty, as they accentuated the bird-of-prey plunging and floating over evocative commendable heights. These do act as mini-branches, vignettes and interludes between the longer songs.
The rest of the album oscillates and saunters between camel ride momentum Arabian Desert blues (thanks in part to the inclusion of an electrified oud), futurist Bosphorus reggae (via On-U-Sound and the Warp label) and even alternative rock. In the process they find an echo-y balance between the haunting and abrasive, and the elasticated and intense. A mystical union of the entrancing, sweeping and often chaotic, BaBa ZuLa ‘s hybrid of Turkish and Middle Eastern exotica straddles time and geography to once more create a fearless rump of defiance, yet also inspiring some hope.
Trupa Trupa ‘Of The Sun’
(Glitterbeat Records) 13th September 2019
The second Glitterbeat release to feature in my roundup up this month, the counterbalanced Polish band Trupa Trupa couldn’t be further apart, sound wise, from the more languid looseness dub of their label mates Baba ZuLa.
Freshly signing over to the German-based label, the multi-limbed quartet play off gnarling propulsive post-punk menace and tumult with echo-y falsetto despondent vocals and hymnal rock on their fifth album, Of The Sun. Feeding into the history of their regularly fought-over home city, Gdansk, Trupa Trupa create a monster of an album steeped in psychodrama, dream revelation and hypnotic industrialism.
In a perpetual tug-of-war for dominion with its Prussian, then German neighbors Gdansk strategic and commercial position as Poland’s most important post has seen the famous city become a sort of geopolitical bargaining chip over the centuries because of its gateway to the Baltic. After one such episode in a “convoluted” legacy, the city and much of its surrounding atelier of villages were turned into the Free City state of Danzig after WWI; a part compromise result of the Versailles Treaty in 1919. Famous son-of-Gdansk, philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer is credited as a major influence on the group and this album, and though not strictly born within the city limits, the infamous madman of cinema, Klaus Kinski – in one of his most wild-eyed legendary roles as the obsessive loon opera impresario, Brian Sweeney “Fitzcarraldo” Fitzgerald – is also mentioned in the PR spill: the “great effort of pathetic failure” and “strain sublimating into nothing” of that barely veiled characterization proving fruitful suffrage and inner turmoil for the group.
A sinewy, pendulous embodiment of that environment and metaphysical philosophy, Trupa Trupa write “songs about extremes”, but use an often ambiguous lyrical message when doing it: usually a repeated like poetic mantra rather than charged protest. On one of those framed “extremes”, the wrangling guitar-heavy post-punk-meets-80s-Aussie-new-wave ‘Remainder’ sounds like Swans covering The Church, as the group repeat the refrain, “Well, it did not take place.”
Though taut, industrial with ominous machinations, there’s a surprising melodious quality to the turmoil and free fall of Trupa Trupa’s proto-Gothic rumblings. In amongst the slogging, chain dragging of the Killing Joke, PiL, Bauhaus and Gang Of Four are echoes of a wandering angelic House Of Love, Echo And The Bunnymen, early Stone Roses, Pavement and flange-fanned Siouxsie And The Banshees. Strangely, however, the dreamy haunted title-track evokes Thom Yorke in a dystopian Bertolt Brecht theatre, and the stripped-to-bare-bones acoustic ‘Angle’ even sounds like a odd, if charming, folksy harmonics pinged missive from Can’s Unlimited archives: Incidentally, Can’s walrus mustache maverick, Holger Czukay, was born in Gdansk, or rather Danzig as it was known at the time.
The PR spill that accompanies this nihilistic-with-a-heart LP is right to state, “Of The Sun is an unbroken string of hits.” There are no fillers, no let-up in the quality and restless friction, each track could exist as a separate showcase for the group’s dynamism: a single. East European, Baltic facing, lean post-punk mixes it up in the Gdansk backstreets and harbor with spasmodic-jazz, baggy, math-rock, psych, doom and choir practice as this coiled quartet deliver an angst-ridden damnation of humanity in 2019.
Taichmania ‘Seventh Heaven’
21st June 2019
The second group in this roundup to fuse the “saz” and “oud” within a cross-border traverse of Arabia and Turkey, Israeli troupe Taichmania take a similar line to BaBa ZuLa in freely merging musical cultures.
Well-traveled founding member, and the man whose name appears so prominently in the band moniker, Yaniv Taichman has a rich and varied pedigree having studied jazz at the Rimon College Of Music, Turkish music with Professor Mutlu Torun in Istanbul, and Indian music with Pt. Shivanath Mishra in Varanasi. His band mates, Sharon Petrover on drums, Yoni Meltzer on keys and electronics, and Lois Ozeri on bass, are no less musically worldly in that respect.
Stalwarts on the Israel scene in various forms, together under the Taichmania umbrella the quartet limber across a panoramic landscape of Sufi funk, souk-rock, prog and jazz on their debut suite, Seventh Heaven. A veritable elasticated fantasy of both intense hypnotic rhythms and desert peregrinations, this heavenly bound odyssey entwines the traditional sounds and scents of the Arabian Orient with zappy cosmic electronic undulations of synth atmospherics.
Broadcast samples from Middle East radio linger through a kind of spicy exotic brooding mix of Natasha Atlas and the Transglobal Underground on the opening ‘Arabesk’, whilst other such exotic intensity as the contorting spiraling title-track, and post-punk bendy ‘Saba’ are whole journeys, sagas, in their own right; moving between progressive-jazz fusion and futuristic Arabian vapours.
Taking classic leanings to the heavens and beyond, Taichmania knottily skip, scuffle, spindle, echo, quiver and solo through their magical influences to produce a live-feel Oriental soundtrack: heavy on the Prog!
Junkboy ‘Trains, Trees, Topophilia’
(Fretsore Records) 2nd August 2019
Regular readers will (hopefully) be aware that we premiered the Hanscomb brothers’ vibrato-mirage-y ‘Waiting Room’ single last month. This Baroque-pop fashioned nugget, bathed in a halcyon shimmer, proved an idyllic introduction to a pastoral album of geographical traversing instrumentals.
As its album title suggests, public transport(ive) and a strong sense of place have inspired the brothers first album since the much acclaimed 2014 album, Sovereign Sky: Both relocating years ago from Southend-On-Sea to the south coast ideals of Brighton, Junkboy siblings Mik and Rich compose a twelve-track suite to the back-and-forth journeys they made between the two counties of Essex and East Sussex. The “Topophilia” of that title, a term wrongly as it transpires attributed to John Betjeman, can be roughly translated as a love for certain aspects of a place that often gets mixed with a sense of cultural identity.
Passing through a myriad of versions of this landscape, influences include the troubled World War artists of England who depicted the torn-up apocalyptic aftermaths of Europe and the results of bomb raids across the English topography (becoming the doyens of the English modernist movement in the process), to the passing glimpses of the versant downs, beaches and “splendor towns” from a train window, and (friend and Junkboy photographer) Christopher Harrup’s Thames Estuary photo album. The first of these inspirations offers both a colour palette and a semi-abstract empirical vision of that countryside; messrs Paul Nash, Graham Sutherland and John Piper, a triumvirate of influential painters, providing a suitable rich canvas: Just one of the guests on this charming LP (and no stranger to this blog) Oliver Cherer even helps pen a Nash homage, ‘A Chance Encounter’ plays with the light musically on a magical pop melody of slow jazzy brass, relaxed drums and flute-y forlorn.
Disarmingly chilled yet full of wistful rumination, Junkboy’s Brighton-Seaford-Southend traverse wonders what it would sound like if Brian Wilson was born and bred on the English Rivera instead of Hawthorne, California; the beachcomber vibes of Pet Sounds permeating throughout this quint lush English affair. You can safely add vague notions of Britpop era Octopus, a touch of the Super Furry Animals more folksy psych instrumentals, some early Beta Band, echoes of 90s Chicago post-rock, and on the dreamboat bluegrass lilted-and-silted ‘Sweetheart Of The Estuary’ more than a nod to Roger McGuinn and pals.
Trains, Trees, Topophilia is a peaceable musical landscape littered with the ghostly reverb of railways station interchanges, mew-dewed laced green hillsides, tidal ebbs and flows and Cluniac Abbeys – the millennia-old, Benedictine scion religious brethren, brought over in droves after William The Conqueror’s invasion of England, make a historical connection between both the album’s Essex and East Sussex locations; the orders’ priory in the Prittlewell of the same song title, originally set up by Cluniac monks from Lewes, just outside Brighton.
Pastoral musical care for the soul, Junkboy’s instrumental album is a beautifully conveyed canvas of the imagined and idyllic; a subtle ode to the Southeast cartography and painters, poets, writers that captured it so perfectly. This is an album that will grow on you over time, revealing its sophistication and nuanced layers slowly but surely: a lovely hour to wile away your time.
Jodie Lowther ‘The Cat Collects’
26th July 2019
One apparitional half of the surrealist Quimper duo, vaporous siren Jodie Lowther has been known to, on occasion, float solo. Her latest haunted diaphanous malady, The Cat Collects, is (as ever) a magical suite of dream realism and supernatural theater.
Between the characters of ethereal seraph and alluring cat lover, Jodie warbles, coos and entrances with a voice so fragile and gauze-y as to be almost an evanescent whisper: Jodie transmitting her vocals from the spirit side of the ether like a aria woozy Mina Crandon.
Drifting in a seeping cantabile sigh throughout this witchery spell of spooky misty songs and graveyard crypt sonnets is a subtle backing of feint melodies and stripped electronica – think Ultravox marooned on the Forbidden Planet or, an early Mute Records vision of 70s British horror soundtracks (Amicus, Hammer, British Lion). From invocations of Vampire lovers to black magic nuptials, The Cat Collects stirs up the right balance of scares and esoteric enchantment on an album of mysterious, creeping beauty and hazy Gothic soundtracks.
Society Of The Silver Cross ‘1 Verse’
28th June 2019
Over the last few months, and featured in previous editions of my roundups, the Seattle coupling of Joe Reinke and Karyn Gold-Reinke, under the auspicious appellation of the Society Of The Silver Cross, have presented us with a trio of evocative-enough Eastern death cult imbued video-singles. Making good on those mystical visions, the duo have released an album that both continues the Velvet Underground say “Om” Indian Gothic drone psychedelia of those tracks but also widens the musical palette to take in shoegaze, new wave and 90s alt-rock.
Still inspired by their spiritual travels to India, and adopting the invocation drone of the “shahi baaja” (Indian autoharp) and induced bowing of the “dilruba”, the Silver Cross explore the “transformative and renewing powers of death” as they flick through a bewitching songbook of Orientalism, Byzantium incense-scented opulence and bellowing sea shanty Edgar Poe scribed Gothic coastlines.
Leaving aside that run of singles (‘When You’re Gone’, ‘Kali Om’ and ‘The Mighty Factory Of Death’) the book of spells adorned 1 Verse piles on the melodrama of opiate arcane rites and woozy harmonium pumped esoteric atmospherics; opening with the repeated echo-y chanting ritual ‘Diamond Eyes’. In a similar mystical vain, distant tolled bells and the reverberations of a choral Popol Vuh creep into the holy processional lamented ‘Funeral Of Sorrows’. Yet, amongst the death marches and promises of spiritual release, rejuvenation and the inevitable there’s more radiant escapism in the form of spindled Baroque-psych (‘Dissolve And Merge’), alt-pop (‘Because’ imagines The Cars and Why? in holy communion) and even a bastardized Travelling Wilburys (‘Can’t Bury Me Again’).
Kneeling at the altar of a many-faced god/goddess the Silver Cross play freely with all those many influences; indulging in the Eastern arts but expanding horizons and even absorbing past Seattle imbued projects.
If you’ve only thus far heard the singles then much of the second half of this album will be a surprise. Dreamy mantra and morbid curiosity coalesce to produce a mesmerizing, hypnotic ritual; opening the door to further experimentation and proving a worthy new incarnation for Joe and Karyn to channel.
Tenakhongva, Stroutsos And Nelson ‘Öngtupqa: Sacred Music Of The Hopi Tribe’
(ARC Music) 26th July 2019
Breathing (literally) life back into the ancestral evocative paeans and spiritual communions of the Hopi people, the trio of radio show host ethnomusicologist Matthew Nelson, Hopi musician Clark Tenakhongva and world-renowned flutist Gary Stroutsos come together on sacred ground to invoke a magical homage.
First a little background. The Hopi, unlike many of their fellow communities of Native Indian tribes in the Americas, lived in more permanent villages, across swathes of South East Utah, North East Arizona, North West Mexico and South West Colorado. These dwellings, some very complex in their construction, gave birth to the Colonist appellation, the Pueblo People, but also because they were considered a more civilized, polite community; their concept of life based on a reverence for all things.
At the heart of this stirring earthy but often-transcendent project is the atavistic instrument that set it all in motion: the 1500-year-old Hopi long clay flute. Unearthed in the last century by the archeologist Earl Halstead Morris, who was leading a Carnegie Institute Expedition to the Prayer Rock district in North East Arizona in the 1930s, these hollow, reedless flutes were part of a thousand artifact haul of discoveries. Relatively remaining a mystery for decades to come, it wasn’t until further research in the 1960s that these flutes from the now renamed “Broken Flute Cave” could be confidently dated to around 620- 670 AD. What remains remarkable is that this sacred instrument was thought lost by the Hopi descendants themselves; disappearing hundred of years ago, until flute specialist Stroutsos with project instigator Nelson played a replica version in front of Hopi custodian Tenakhongva, who promptly invited him to play it in front of his entire family and then, at a later date, at a venerated spot near where the original clay flutes were found.
Part of the wider Canyon Music Festival in 2017, at the Mary Colter built Desert View Watchtower, the trio’s performance, with Nelson keeping rhythm on clay pot drums (keeping it all historically accurate, stretched-skin drums being out of time and step with the 7th century flutes), Strouthos improvising on flute and Tenakhongva singing whilst handling the percussive rasps, rattles and gourd, was filmed and recorded. An “approximation” of how the Hopi’s holy music would have sounded almost 1500 years ago, the Öngtupqa (the name given by the Hopi people to the canyon in which our trio played) nine-track suite remains untouched, unmodified or edited two years on.
Setting the atmosphere of both earthy soul connectedness and flighty astral mystery, the obviously talented and well-honed players perfectly capture the dream-like ritual and awe-inspiring panorama that surrounds them. If you were expecting the synonymous rain dance and powwow holler chants of much Native Indian music, think on. Öngtupqa is more entrancing, ambient in places, with the vocals, or chanting, graceful and often melodious but deep. Lifting out of the canyon to dizzying cloud-ruminating heights, you’ll still constantly reminded of the vast American outdoors and desert landscape: A rattlesnake shakes his distracting tail here, a panpipe flight of a condor or thunderbird over there on the mountainside.
An intimate tribute to the Hopi cycle of life (as Tenakhongva explains it, “…we were born within the Grand Canyon and when we are done, we return back to this place to rejuvenate life of a new beginning…”), the stories and music of that scared site are offered and opened-up to a global audience; a message of the communal, of preservation, being at the very heart of this vivid undertaking. The ancestors will be proud, as the two millennia old blessings and spiritualism of the Hopi is brought back to life.
House Of Tapes ‘Embers Dreams’
(Pure Spark Records) 7th August 2019
The Japanese electronic music wiz kid Ippu Mitsui has graced these roundups on a number of occasions over the years, and featured on numerous Monolith Cocktail playlists. Releasing a varied kaleidoscope of futuristic Tokyo electro-glides-in-blue and kinetic techno on a spread of labels, Mitsui originally came to my attention through his releases for the Edinburgh-based Bearsuit Records. Still recording ad hoc, Mitsui has now just launched his very own imprint, Pure Spark Records. Another one of Bearsuit’s extensive roster of mavericks, the inaugural release on that venture is from the experimental composer Yuuya Kuno, who under a variety of alter egos has prolifically knocked out a mix of the weird and sublime electronica.
Back recording under the House Of Tapes moniker in this instance (known as Swamp Sounds when passing sonic oddities through Bearsuit), Kuno’s two-track showcase, Embers Dreams, is a lucid, air-y and sophisticated affair. The “Embers” of that title is an inviting exotic amble through a moist-vegetated oasis of itchy, scratchy, woody and echo-y deep electro percussion, whilst the accompanying ‘Melted Ice’ offers a glass-y trance-y, robotics-in-motion slice of downtempo chiming soundtrack. A great subtle and deep piece of electronic manna and flow with which to launch Mitsui’s brand new label, House Of Tapes kickstarter is a serious piece of classy techno: an augur, a good omen I hope of what’s to come.
Philipp Gropper’s Philm ‘Consequences’
(Why Play Jazz)
A balletic jazz freefall in motion, the latest tumultuous suite from the acclaimed “David Bowie of jazz”, tenor saxophonist/composer/bandleader Philipp Gropper (and his Philm troupe), is a highly experimental reification of contortions and sporadic, spasmodic chaos: albeit a controlled, kept-in-check, vision of an avant-garde one.
The multifaceted title of this orderly breakdown in heightened tensions and liberating angst can be read in many ways: The “consequences”, for example, of our political divisive times can be heard and read loudly crashing throughout this six track album of disjointed intensity; the fallout from all sides of the societal divide causing enough anxiety, suffering and despondency to fuel Gropper for the next decade or more. In fact the whole course of “neo-liberalism” itself is on trail (or at least its knock-on effects of intervention), however abstract that might be.
Space expletory wondrous track titles aside, the filthy lucre spiral of dependency and spluttering wild ’32 Cents’, and funneling discordant interchange ‘Thinking From The Future (Are You Privilaged?)’ are both the most obvious proponents of that socially “woke” commentary – though whose privilege needs to be checked exactly in this exchange is open to debate.
The concerns of “interpersonal” and “interrelationships” within this charged political landscape are also a major focus for the Berlin-based jazz man; adding to a uncertain free flow of both centrifugal spinning discourse and more haunted, sometimes diaphanous, twinkling.
Escaping the atmosphere, orbiting the cosmology of deep space, Gropper’s most serene dance of glistened, starry majesty and mystery is the astral soundtrack to ‘Saturn’. Both the enormity and expansive uncertainty of this planetary titan is expressed evocatively enough by Gropper’s otherworldly Theremin aria like reedy breaths on the tenor sax, as his companions bounce and skip around the planet’s rings. Saturn holds a strong fascination for all of us, but it can’t have escaped Gropper’s notice that jazz music’s most celestial star, and progenitor of Afrofuturism, Sun Ra, claimed to have ascended to Earth from his Saturn home.
The musicianship is, as you expect, first rate, with Gropper’s sax totally untethered, squawking, fluting, brilling and even trembling, whilst his band of Elias Stemeseder (on piano and synth), Robert Landfermann (on double-bass) and Oliver Steidle (on drums) react decisively with limbering, elasticated reflexes. Together hey create an iridescent breakdown and reconstruction of digital calculus, science-fiction and the cerebral; merging contemporary European jazz with elements of Coltrane, Coleman, Billy Cobham, Stockhausen, The Soft Machine and the electronic and hip-hop genres. Futurism and avant-garde classicism collide in an oscillating and tumbling fusion of complex ideas: Consequences is a musical language on the verge of collapse. How it all stays together is anyone’s guess. This is a most impressive adventure in jazz.
REVIEWS ROUNDUP
Words: Brian ‘Bordello’ Shea
Brian ‘Bordello’ Shea joined the Monolith Cocktail team in January 2019. The cult leader of the infamous lo fi gods, The Bordellos, has released countless recordings over the decades with his family band of hapless unfortunates, and is the owner of a most self-deprecating sound-off style blog. Each month we end him a deluge of new releases on his virtual desk to see what sticks.
Toxic Chicken ‘Uncomfortable Music’
21st July 2019
I don’t apologise for writing another review of Toxic Chicken, as this is his 3rd LP in as many months, and this like the other two is a work of pure maverick pop genius: and not just because there is a four second track called ‘Brian From The Bordellos’ on it!
This LP has everything that I love about the magic and joy of music. It has humour and a madness that at times reminds me of the great Syd Barrett and the wonderful White Noise Electrical Storm LP. It is eccentric pushed to the extreme. Songs with the subject matter of eating politicians and love songs for cats and for Mother Nature and what is bad about England, but that track only being under two minutes long does not quite manage to list everything.
Uncomfortable Music is certainly an enjoyable and rewarding listening experience, and at times, the subject matter does live up to its title. But this album is a pay-what-you-want to download, so is well worth a listen. Another great album from a great artist: And I mean artist. And the track ‘Little Snail’ is the best dance track I have heard all year.
Snapped Ankles ‘Stunning Luxury’
1st March 2019
The whirring and exciting sounds of post punk circa 2019 coming at you like a extravagant wholemeal piece of chiffon scarred alternative disco meat; the sound of Devo fucking the brains and beats out of the B52s whilst the horny ghost of Mark E Smith watches on making cutting asides whilst stomping on the hopes and dreams of the not yet born love child of David Byrne and Lena Lovich.
This LP is one big extravagance of dark dance and post punk joy, the sort of album to soundtrack your wildest night out ever: sordid clubs, cheap drinks, hanging out with girls and boys who really should know better, the best musical electro porn one could ever hope to gorge oneself on.
Stunning Luxury is dirty, it is funky, it is experimental, it is blistering rock ‘n’ roll. A luxury indeed. One that should be enjoyed by all.
Anton Barbeau ‘Berliner Grotesk’
(Beehive Records / Pink Hedgehog Records) 19th July 2019
There is a dark playful melancholy I love about this LP, not the weeping into your hanky kind, or, the “oh I feel so sorry for myself kind”, but the, “I am middle aged and looking back at my life through the good and bad the happy and bad” kind. There is hope in the future kind, the kind of melancholy that Martin Newell thrives at writing. Even the cover of the Beatles ‘Love Me Do’ is enriched with a sadness the original misses; this version overcomes the familiarity by transforming it into a slightly electro reggae beauty.
But not all is sadness and tears there is also fine pop of the power variety: the sort Jellyfish so excelled at releasing. The Bowie Mott and the Fabs influences of course shine bright bringing a lovely old time Englishness that is so often ignored in modern music of today. This LP is a finely crafted pop album, with enough quirks and twists to make it a very enjoyable listen.
Simon Waldram ‘Into The Blue’
27th July 2019
Simon Waldram made one of my favourite LPs from 2016, the wonderful self released Insolation, an LP that dipped and swayed, taking in JAMC one minute and the next, beautiful swathes of psych folk. This, his new album, Into The Blue, takes off where that album left off, but is a slightly more subdued affair: Songs of darkness, love, depression and hope merge into a quite beautiful collection.
In these days when the acoustic guitar has taken over the electric, sales wise, there is certainly a market for LPs of softly strummed melancholia, and Simon does it far better than most; bringing to mind at times, the beautiful slowcore shimmer of Low (especially on ‘Breaking Waves’), at other times, recalling the magic of the Go Betweens and The Smiths.
The highlight for me though is the beautiful psych folk instrumental ‘Sea Turtles’: a few moments of total bliss.
Into The Blue is a fine LP and with the right backing and a bit of luck could well fight its way to the top of the overcrowded melancholic brigade, and could find favor on many late night radio shows. An album of real beauty and sadness and hope.
Moody Mae ‘Throwing Rocks at John E. Road’
2nd July 2019
Indie pop from Sweden is on the whole a wonderful thing indeed, and this EP/mini LP from Moody Mae keeps within that wonderful remit. Beatles like ‘Martha My Dear’ piano, lovingly could not give a toss female vocals, ba ba bas and lofi psychedelia join forces to force music lovers to nod their heads and grin like grinning idiots. And to think that this was recorded in 2005 and has taken 14 years to see the light of day. I think it may be time for Moody Mae to reform and record a full length waxing. For when a band has the gift of pure pop wonderment it is a shame not to share that wonderment with the less fortunate. A treasure of a release.
Radio Europa ‘Community Is Revolution’
(Wormhole) 19th July 2019
It seems like a weekly event that Wormhole Records release a new underground LP of chilled out darkness. This weeks release is by Radio Europa and is an LP of chilled out darkness with the odd offering of a glimpse of light appearing through the cracks of the drawn heavy curtains called life: The beam of light showing the particles of dust exploding and hovering around the thoughts of insolvent tomorrows and the broken promises of yesterday.
Gentle soft spoken vocals lilt into the wave of dark synth and drum beats that blanket you in the warmth of the cold that whispers sweet nothings whilst grinding a worn down stiletto heel into your vacant soul.
Community Is Revolution is an album to soundtrack these uncertain times; an album to close your eyes and let the music sweep over you and take you to the dark recess of your mind where devils and angels juggle with the happy/sad of your life.
bigflower ‘Night And Day’
13th July 2019
Another week another fine free to download single from bigflower. An explosion of post punk guitars do battle with horns and a bass riff so mighty it would make Jean Jacques Burnel want to call it a day and to take up flower arranging. When oh when are this mighty band going to be picked up by some label. For this is far to a fine a track to slip under the radar yet again. Blogs, djs of the alternative variety should be ramming this down people’s throats instead of some acoustic guitar charlatan whining on about how twee their girlfriend’s vagina is [like they have saw their girlfriend’s vagina! They saw an egg box and let their imagination take hold]
Bigflower are one of the most exciting underground bands around at the moment and we at the Monolith Cocktail will keep ranting on about their majestic take on modern life until the less with-it blogs catch on. Blogs, djs, record labels for God sake get your fingers out.
Why Sun ‘Frugte’
14th June 2019
Softly strummed guitars and deeply crooned vocals kick start this beautiful five track EP of softly strummed guitars and deeply crooned vocals; songs that bring the joys of Galaxie 500 and the Wild Swans oozing into my mind, and lovers of those bands and the many bands of that ilk should enjoy this. So give it a listen especially if you are hung-over or on the verge of doing fuck all.
Our Daily Bread 286: Vukovar/Michael Cashmore ‘Monument’
November 12, 2018
Album Review: Dominic Valvona
Vukovar/Michael Cashmore ‘Monument’ 16th November 2018
Another month, another three-syllable entitled grandly Gothic statement from Vukovar; on this occasion traversing the void with Current 93 stalwart and producer/composer Michael Cashmore, who appears under the guises of his Nature And Organization nom de plume.
A congruous in what is a melancholy harrowing romance partnership with the morbidly curious Vukovar, Cashmore leads with a vaporous, industrial and often godly (whichever God/Gods they be) brutalist swathe of sagacious moodiness and narration; adding to the already despairing lament that is Vukovar’s signature.
Deadly committed to the point of alienating everyone they work with, Vukovar’s fraught collaborations may end in acrimony, but the results musically are always first rate and dramatic; this latest breaking-of-bread partnership proving to be among their best work so far. It’s impossible to tell where Cashmore ends and Vukovar begin, and vice versa, and who’s album this actually is. Arguably inheritors of Current 93 and, even more so, Coil’s gnostic-theological mysticism and brooding venerable communions, Cashmore seems the obvious foil. Current’s The Innermost Light and Coil’s (and John Balance’s swan song as it were) The Ape Of Naples both permeate this conceptual opus.
As ever, reflecting the band’s reading material, monument is fueled by Hermetic occultists, despondent followers of Thelma, Dante’s visions of purgatory and redemption, and, to a point, architectural analogy. Inhabiting the concrete musically and materially, twisting post-punk, Kosmische, industrial and early British synth-pop, Vukovar and their partner in this gloomy trudge through the wastelands produce an apocalyptic hymn of gauze-y supernatural resignation and dreamy visages.
Straddling two slabs of vinyl, Monument’s indulgences are given ample room to haunt the listener. Shorter narrations and passages fade into more fully realized songs. Shorter pieces like the ‘This Brutal World’ feature a reading of a most despondent, mopey even, extract from Alice In Wonderland (the sad Walrus’ ‘sweeping away’ metaphor sounding even more plaintive read out in this setting) and fairytale surrealist, erring towards the unsettling, twinkled xylophone, followed by more expanded visions of yearning dark arts. When the band and their host do emerge from the ether, the Gothic experimentation features a more melodious, dare I even suggest catchy, quality; even in its most stark sleepless eulogy form, with a chorus like, “In a dream she’s always dying/One day she may awake”, taken from the Bauhaus swirling cathedral indie ‘Little Gods’, there is a certain surge of broody dynamism and anthem.
Vocally for the most part, both the voices of Vukovar and Cashmore’s dulcet, lower tones are layered over each other; some sung, though mostly spoken, uttered, howled and cried-out. On the middle section of the ‘Visions In Silence’ cycle (following the edict entitled nod to Rosicrucian championing physic and occult icon, Robert Fludd, ‘Utrique Cosmi Et Sic In Infinitum’) the “exist as I exist” mantra and ruinous decaying lyrical morose could be by Alan Moore, and the off-kilter jerking march of the no-wave ‘The Duty Of Mothers’ sounds like an unholy alliance between John Betjeman and Aleister Crowley.
From haunting melodrama to harrowing decay, unrequited love to radiant escape, the loss of innocence and youth to sagacious death rattles, Vukovar prove ideal torchbearers of the cerebral Gothic sound and melancholic romanticism. A meeting of cross-generational minds with both partners on this esoteric immersive experience fulfilling their commitments, Monument shows a real progression for Vukovar, and proves a perfect vehicle for Cashmore’s uncompromising but afflatus ideas to flourish in new settings, whilst confirming his reputation and status. Whatever happens next, this ambitious work will prove a most fruitful and lasting highlight in the Vukovar cannon; one that’s growing rapidly, six albums in with a seventh already recorded; another ‘momentous’ statement that affirms the band’s reputation as one of the UK’s most important new bands.
Dominic Valvona’s review roundup of new releases
As ever, another fine assortment of eclectic album and EP reviews from me this month, featuring new releases from David Cronenberg’s Wife, Kid Kin, Jack Ellister, Paul Jacobs, Quimper, Spaciousness and Paula Rae Gibson & Kit Downes.
In brief: I take a gander at new EPs from the cinematic post-rock artist, composer and producer Peter Lloyd, who releases his swathes of guitar-electronica under the Kid Kin pseudonym, and the Autumnal songbook of self-deprecating, sardonic love trysts and illusions from London’s bastions of antifolk, David Cronenberg’s Wife.
Album wise there’s the beautifully penned troubadour psychedelic folk and scenery instrumentals of Jack Ellister’s Telegraph Hill – his first LP for the You Are The Cosmos label -; the barreling scuzzy garage and synth psychedelic lo fi magnificence of Paul Jacob’s Easy; the esoteric surrealist magic-realism of Quimper’s Perdide, a new age ambient compilation; Spaciousness, from London’s Lo Recordings that attempts to praise and explore the ambient musical genre, in what is the first in a series of collections from the label; and the first, and challenging, collaboration between the experimental siren Paula Rae Gibson and British jazz pianist Kit Downes, Emotion Machine.
Paul Jacobs ‘Easy’ (Stolen Body Records) 19th October 2018
The very first sloppy collides of a track on this most fuzzy of hurtling and chaotic albums of vapour-wave pop, stonking garage and psychedelic twists and turns, could be, for all I can make out, a reversed bastardization of Bowie’s own ‘Holy Holy’. It certainly has the proto-Glam and strung-out rock’n’roll stomp of that record, but the maverick Paul Jacobs slurs and languidly warps, whatever it is, into a distortion-levels noisy Ty Segall.
Jacobs, who has already released eight albums of similar dizzying Kool Aid induced barrages (mostly on his own), indolently throws-up vague musical references throughout his latest album for the Stolen Body Records label; whether that’s turning on his best Lodger/Scary Monsters intonations and strutting messily but surely to an amalgamation of Liars and Blancmange on the cheque-cashing ‘Expensive’, or, whistling to the Native Indian backbeat of Adam And The Ants on ‘Laundry’, or, channeling PiL, the Killing Joke and Spiritualized on the Gothic spooked to deranged dreamy lullaby escape of ‘Trouble (Last Song)’. But you’re just as likely to hear passing shades of Sam Flax, Ariel Pink and Alan Vega swirling and bobbing about in the cycle wash of clattering sound clashes: It might all sound like a shamble. But it’s a most magnificent, bewildering and dynamic shamble.
Vocally Jacobs is masked under a lo fi mono-like production, which makes it difficult to catch what he’s on about at times. The odd whispered, crooned and melted lyric from these often mundane metaphorically entitled songs offer clues: a pop at the music industry here, soliloquy delivered anxiety, searching for purpose, there.
Layering a garage punk guitar with 1980s drum pad tom rolls, spacey chimes with vapours of post-punk, Paul Jacobs’ barreling, pummeling tunes are far more nuanced and sophisticated than I’ve described: Noisy of course, attuned as it is to a DIY sound, but brimming with riffs, hooks and splashes of radiant synth and psychedelic pop.
Cut from the same cloth as, the already mentioned, Liars, Ty Segall and Ariel Pink, Easy is an amazing record, a breakdown in motion, a racket that takes its core garage rock pretensions into the future.
Jack Ellister ‘Telegraph Hill’ (You Are The Cosmos) 27th November 2018
Penning a most placeable album, keeping it for the most part intimate, Jack Ellister’s latest collection of hazy troubadour balladry is turned down low and sweet, played out mostly on the acoustic guitar.
Normally associated with the Fruits de Mer label, releasing a string of singles and albums for them over the last six years, Ellister’s personable third album has found a new home on the You Are The Cosmos imprint.
An almost solitary affair, the multi-instrumentalist playing almost everything but the drums (played by long time collaborators Tomasz Helberg and Nico Stallmann), Telegraph Hill is an often lilted and twilled songbook of melodious psychedelic folk. The Telegraph Hill of that title refers to Ellister’s home studio in South East London, which can be read as an indication of his homely themes of belonging, of finding solace in the simple things and loved ones. The focus of many of these songs being the love-of-his-life muse, he expresses a joyful contentment throughout; wistfully and dreamily waxing lyrically like a lovesick Romeo.
Originally conceived as an EP bridge between albums, the nine-track Telegraph Hill is quite short in running time, and features a few instrumentals, two of which are more like passing interludes that seem to be added as padding; especially the final great American plains, Andes and Australian Outback merging, softened Native Indian stomp and gliding bird flight descriptive guitar peregrination, ‘Condor’. To be fair, the pastoral empirical ‘Maureen Feeding The Horses’, with its encapsulation of a rural scene (a moment in time) that captures a trapped kaleidoscopic sun shining through glass, illuminating this naturalistic aside, fits perfectly. ‘Icon Chamber’ however, seems an odd throwaway library music experiment from the laboratory in comparison.
Ellister is at his best when tenderly strumming a paean and singing; his fuzzy voice evoking a young Leonard Cohen on the Medieval chamber folksy ‘Roots’ (one of the album’s highlights), both Donovan and Tim Burgess on the trippy warbled flute-y and drum shuffling ‘High Above Our Heads’, and Syd Barrett on the Floydian via an enervated samba saunter ‘Mind Maneuvers’.
From pea-green seas of psychedelic nursery rhymes to 18th century inns, Ellister’s magical stirring atmospheres and folksy odes sound at any one time like visages of Caravan, The Incredible String Band, Fairfield Parlour, Spiritualized, Mike Cooper, Primal Scream and Roy Harper. Unobtrusive and unguarded, Telegraph Hill lays Ellister’s sensitive soul bare on what is, for the most part, a most assiduous halcyon earnest album of brilliantly crafted songs.
Kid Kin ‘Kid Kin EP’ November 2018
Never mind the worms the ‘Early Bird’ of the new EP from the Oxford multi-instrumentalist, producer, composer Peter Lloyd, has in this instance, caught the cyclonic glassy arpeggio rays of a multilayered crescendo instead. The third instrumental track from an EP of wide-lens anthemic post-rock visceral evocations, ‘The Early Bird’ features Lloyd’s signature ‘quiet/loud’ suffused climaxes and build-ups of various synth lines and descriptive, waning guitars.
Conceived as an encapsulation of his ‘connective’ ebb and flow live shows, Kid Kin is best experienced in its entirety, from beginning to end. Each track is separated – though ‘The Early Bird’ is followed by the Four Tet remix-esque radiant kinetic ‘Gets The Worm’, but in title split only – with no particular overlay or link. But squeeze them together into one continuous performance it would work well.
Saving his music from erring too close to Ad lands staple ideal of epic rock (U2, Coldplay), the opening ‘Jarmo’ vista sounds like a lost Mogwai soundtrack. The swelling, mindful but lifting towards the light ‘War Lullaby’ (which also features a strange 8-bit pinball ricocheting moment of electronica chaos) isn’t more than a fjord’s distance from sounding like Sigur Rós: a good thing in this case.
Confidently soundscaping post-rock panoramas, Peter Lloyd’s synthetic swathes and resonating layered guitar mini opuses are missing a documentary film. So descriptive is the drama and narrative. If immersing yourself in an ambient cinematic rock vision of moody and stirring expanses sounds right up your proverbial street; if you’re tired of post-rock’s old guard, then take a punt on the Kid.
Quimper ‘Perdide’ October 10th 2018
Curious oddities from beyond the ether and surface of Stefan Wul’s sci-fi paperback world of Perdide (the planet immortalized in the French author’s cult The Orphans Of Perdide) permeate the latest surreal musical séance from the beguiled Quimper duo.
A timely release for the bewitching hour, summoning up, as it does, vague vapours of Eastern European art house magical-realism, and imbued by both the 1970s library music and British horror soundtracks favoured by the Belbury Poly, The Advisory Circle and Berberian Sound Studios period Broadcast, Quimper once more occupy the esoteric heights.
Lynchian, peculiar, innocence turned into something otherworldly, the John Vertigen and his apparition vocalist foil Jodie Lowther (who also illustrates all their various releases) duo float, waft and shuffle around the most mysterious and kooky settings.
A whispery translucent cooed lullaby about the ‘Lovely Bees’, can eerily take on a most unsettling feeling, as Lowther’s vocals, or rather the most distant traces of them, channel a childish-like Japanese spirit to the accompaniment of a sinister dreamy sounding Roj. Elsewhere on this claustrophobic haunting soundtrack, Quimper imagine Mike Oldfield and John Carpenter communing, on the shivery spirit conjuring ‘Skin Without Size’; transduce an enervated vision of Richard James’ Polygon Windows through a ghost’s dissection, on ‘Vivisection’; dance to a mambo beat whilst a 1920s magic show opens a trapdoor to some snake god on ‘False Serpent Opens Doors’; and enact mellotron-mirage bucolic worship on, ‘Christ In A Field Of Caravans’.
They do all this from behind a gauze-y film of soft, wooing reverberation; only the essence, the air-y remains of what was once concrete, have been captured; broadcast, it sounds, through a Medium. Lynch should rightly love this stuff, especially Lowther’s untethered, so delicate and lingering as to not exist at all, nursery rhyme like siren calls. Perdide is one of the duo’s most interesting, realized albums yet, an illusionary surrealist world of creeping dreamscapes.
Various ‘Spaciousness: Music Without Horizons’ (Lo Recordings) 2nd November 2018
Tainted in part by its reputation for pseudo-hippie idealism and penchant for irritating whale song and the sounds of the rainforest – the soundtrack to countless holistic day spas -, new age music summons up a myriad of less than flattering connotations. Of course, as this first in a series of showcase purviews will prove, there’s actually much more to this often-maligned musical form.
In partnership with former Coil member Michael J York and musician/writer polymath Mark O Pilkington’s Attractor Press platform, Lo Recordings are here to celebrate its resurgence and more aloof, spiritual and philosophical highlights. As part of a wider project that will include writing, still and moving images and live events, the overlapping, multi-connective Spaciousness compilation provides an audio lineage; balancing peregrinations from both new age (but also embracing deep listening and post-classical) music’s progenitors and rising stars.
A leading luminaire, the divine styler of radiant transcendence, Laraaji, has by happy accident given this double-album straddling selection its title. Laraaji, who has himself, enjoyed a renewed interest in the last few years, especially for his ties to Brian Eno, and of course spiritual ambient quests, pops up partnering the Seahawks on the suitably aquatic undulated ‘Space Bubbles’ tribute to new age inspiration, dolphin-whisper, floatation tank and mind expanding drugs evangelist, John C Lilly. Another of the pioneers, Lasos, appears alongside the contemporary artist Carlos Gabriel Niño (one of the new guard, bridging the gap between the new age, the meditative, jazz and free form; signed to David Matthew’s – more of him later – expletory Leaving Records). The pair plays around with light on their majestic searing, glistening panoramic finale, ‘Going Home’. Lasos alongside another great doyen of the genre, Steven Halpern, were among the first artists to subvert and work outside the perimeters of the mainstream music industry; circumnavigating it by dealing direct with their audience through mail order cassettes.
Two of the already mentioned catalysts for Spaciousness, instigators behind Strange Attractor Press, also appear (under the Teleplasmite nom de plume) paying homage to a visionary muse, Ingo Swann. Propounding ‘remote views’, an artist and psychic, the duo construct a suitable Kosmische vaporous evocation on the roaming ‘Song For Ingo Swann’. Posthumous tribute is also paid to the late composer Susumu Yokota, with an ‘inter-generational span’ remix by DK of his dissipated ‘Wave Drops’ exploration; a soundscape of horse snorts, abstract saxophone, steam and Far East moorings.
The second wave of this new age movement is represented by artists such as MJ Lallo, who’s venerated, and equally expansive 2001: A Space Odyssey like, traverse, ‘Birth Of A Star Child’ is featured. Written originally for the Vatican in the 1980s, this version has been borrowed from a recent compilation of her home studio recordings, Take Me With You (1982-1997), this monastery in space choral eulogy was made by processing computerized drums, synth and Lallo’s voice through a Yamaha SPX 90 digital effects unit to produce an otherworldly, ageless sense of ominous awe.
Possibly one of the better-known figures of the last decade or more in his field, the renowned musician/producer and Tangerine Dream affiliate member in recent years, Ulrich Schnauss, partners with Lo Recordings founder Jon Tye on the jazzy desert wandering ‘Orange Cascade’. The duo’s diaphanous lulling visionary textures explore the intersection between live instrumentation (wafts of saxophone, sitar and flute in this case) and synthesized sound.
The most contemporary wave, so to speak, is represented by Matthew David’s (as Mindflight) Jon Hassell resonant stratospheric hymn ‘Ode To Flora’; Cathy Lucas’ ‘mating song of quarks’ primal soup bubbling and vague jazzy translucent ‘Chatterscope’; and Yamaneko’s ‘one big stare out of a bedroom window at 2 am’ sanctified, page-turning, mysterious ‘Lost Winters Hiding’. All these artists add to, or share, the vastness of space with their new ageism and cerebral ambient forbearers; a sign if any were needed that we could all do with a pause and a deeper purposeful meditative break from the divisive-ratcheted noise of our times.
In waves and cycles, the transcendent and deeply thoughtful search for peace and new horizons is gathering a pace. And what better example of its reach, scope and lineage (and future) than this inaugural Spaciousness purview; a collection that will do much to illuminate as push forward the limits of the new age and its various ambient sub genre strands and astral flights of fantasy. A great start to a wider investigation.
Paula Rae Gibson & Kit Downes ‘Emotion Machines’ (Slowfoot Records) 2nd November 2018
Amorphously set adrift into the abstract, untethered in compositional serialism, renowned photographer and experimental siren Paula Rae Gibson and collaborative foil, the acclaimed, award-winning British jazz pianist Kit Downes set out on a most challenging travail on the new album, Emotion Machine.
Already deconstructively – though also at times melodiously flowing – applying both equally stark and diaphanous vocals to a quartet of albums, Gibson’s minimal, but often striking, voice is in its element up against and submerged beneath Downes’ fine layering and often attenuate arrangements. Neither strung-out jazz nor avant-garde cabaret, the duo’s inaugural collaboration together is more conceptual sound design and dissonant drone than musical, with the odd flurry of neo-classical piano, some transduced cello and a splash of brushed-shuffled drumming offering the only traces or recognizable instrumentation throughout.
Re-translating their Delta Blues, Icelandic art-rock and early musical inspirations in a frayed somber and emotionally retching environment of uncertainty, they inhabit a miasma of toil and pained expression. In this gloom of uneasy, sometimes plaintive, surroundings the pauses, resonance and spaces are just as important as the minimalist instrumental accents and stripped-down-to-their-refined-essence-of-understanding fashioned lyrics: Gibson’s mix of concomitant couplets, stanzas and one-liners are left hanging in the expanses whilst Downes quivery, motor-purring snozzled and waned backing fades, dissipates or stops dead.
From the ethereal to the contralto, beautifully gossamer to ominously discordant, Emotion Machines is an efflux between the timeless and contemporary. Conceptually and artistically pushing the musical boundaries, as much a performance piece as cerebral exploration of the voice, Gibson and Downes interchange their disciplines to produce an evocative suite of poignant expressive heartache and drama.
David Cronenberg’s Wife ‘The Octoberman Sequence’ (Blang) 26th October 2018 (Download)/ 2nd November (Ltd. 12” Vinyl)
Weaponizing sardonic wit and despondency with élan, the antifolk cult London band, David Cronenberg’s Wife, offer up a signature serving of slice-of-life anxiety-riven and cross-signaled love derisions on their Autumnal EP.
Featuring a doublet of previously unrecorded resigned romantic numbers but fronted by the ‘live stalwart’ ‘Rules’ – two versions in fact; the single edit, a safe for the dour risk-averse airways, omits the only swearing word in the song: “Fuck around” -, The Octoberman Sequence is a most generous release from the DIY scenesters. ‘Rules’ itself is a galloping anthem that builds momentum and just keeps rolling on, pouring a hearty scorn on life-plans, the anguish life choices of the hand wringing middle classes, and Hollywood’s false platitude perfections as a strutting backing track of ? And The Mysterians/Sir Douglas Quintet organ stabs and proto Stooges (as fronted by Ian McCulloch) plows on. It’s easy to hear why this has become a live favourite. For one thing it dismembers the bullshit, spits out the unthinkable (the rules for s stress-free life, “Don’t marry”, tick, “Don’t have kids”, tick, being the first of the DCW’s seven-rule commandments), but above all, sounds great.
As for those previously unrecorded songs, the slumbered voice-over ridicule with lulled female accompanied ‘You Should See’ sets up our misdirected protagonist on a awkward date: So awkward in fact and indecisive, our lead’s inner monologue and own assured boastful knowledge of literature prompts him to spill the sexual predilections of Marcel Proust, before shuffling off home to “Masturbate over films made in the Czech Republic”. The other song, ‘The Dude Of Love’, is a 1960s good ol’ Freebird Southern boogie with a Kinks style chorus semi-stalker ditty. A rich, seedy, tableau of delusional creeps on the London Underground – one, a Lynyrd Skynyrd reject, the other, our awkward, but still egotistical, friend who seems to have totally misread the signals.
Nestled alongside these are the more serious intoned appendage love muscle punned ‘Love Organ’, and dour counterculture meets lamentable country blues troubadour ‘Song For Nobody’ – a kind of Dylan-as-pinning-cowboy paean turn disgruntled love rat finality that ends on a sour note.
Corralling the ditsy platitudes and unrealistic expectations of love in the age of #MeToo, DCW with wicked relish rattle and roll to their own unique post-punk, post-country and antifolk bombast on what is another clever and candid realized songbook of self-depreciation and protestation.
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