Just drove back from seeing two friend’s bands play in Brighton down by the piers. The night was strange and like an off-kilter merry-go-round and the show was perfectly demented, delivered in a basement that was straight out of Berlin 84. It reminded me of the Lower East Side back when it was the Wild West and hadn’t been colonized (high-colonic’d) by the Beige Brigade. Queen of the Trucks, dear friend Stuart who splays in The Dirty Cakes, uncorked a solo set of damaged Berlin cabaret via Klaus Nomi-does-Metal that was smoky and cocky and licky and delicately feather boa’d. Wonderful in hi-heel deceleration. Another friend, Andy Huxley, ex of 80’s Matchbox B-Line Disaster fame etc, kick out glass shards with his latest greatest, a thing called Vile Imbeciles. It was angular and splintered through a James Chance-fists-Elliott Sharp spyglass. Spectacular scree of car-crash proportion.

The whole night was capped by the drive back, through the pitch black. I listened to my favorite radio position which is Long Wave band 152. It essentially falls in the perfect intersection of a catalog of actual stations and produces a miasma of sounds that I just can’t get enough of. The main aspects of the non-broadcast tonight were two different forms of static, one of them a very lo-mid range repeating 2-second pulse, and the other a stuttering wash of noise waves that periodically broke into shards and tatters of hi-end tearing crash that scrolled up and down in volume. Layered throughout this melange was an almost constant, low-volume perhaps Czech soap opera broadcast. Then, depending on where I was on the journey through the ink of night, there threaded in undulating portions of “Harlem Nocturne”, some Flamenco guitar solos, a jazzy quartet and some opera singer of stature, Carreras or the like, singing (really) “Yesterday” in terrible earnest. Every now and again some feedback bleeps and tones came cascading through like shrieks from the throats of dying animals. It was so spectacular and other-worldly that I found myself rocketing aimlessly onward for the sake of it, past my turn, just to hear what would be mix into the crucible next. My 15-minute drive took me almost an hour. It was fascinating and riveting and soothing and rending all at once and there are countless post-Cage artists that would have loved to be able to claim that as their finest recorded moment on vinyl or optical beam. One of the best non-broadcasts I’ve caught yet.

http://www.myspace.com/dearbritch
http://www.myspace.com/vileimbeciles

Just had a fascinating meeting with Daniel Baker (no relation to Dave) in Brixton. We met to discuss a collaborative project that we'll be working on over the next couple of months and executing over one of the last weekends in September.

Daniel's a visual artist with a strong scientific cant that informs much of his work. He has recently built The Little Theatre of Disease and Desire and displayed it at The Old Operating Theatre Museum along with a slide show of images that either stand as frozen tableau (often disturbing cut-out images) inside the confines of the theater itself, or as actual slideshows and films. The theater is a collision of 18th Century toy theaters and autopsy theaters and explores the delusions, dreams and fevered imaginings that vent from that intersection. Stimulating realm of ideas and one that meshes with my own interests as well.

He's been commissioned by the Wellcome Trust to develop a more interactive version of the theater that'll become the framed setting for a series of student interpretations of illness and desire via charcoal, pencil, watercolor, smudge/smear and other materials possibly. These tableaux will be shot in sequence and dropped straight into Final Cut Pro to be shown there at the museum during the run of each workshop.

I'm really excited about this project. Besides collaborating with him on execution and logistics, I'll be spontaneously storytelling throughout each session, and the shards that I improvise as stimulated by the materials and the student's ideas will be used as intellectual engines to help facilitate the flow of creative juices, acuitive descriptions and interpretations of the material and what the students want to do with it. It's one of the more challenging and complex projects I've been involved in a while and looks to be a blast. it also feels like it's a sign post for future projects.

This is the link for Daniel's Paper Theatre:
http://www.papertheatres.blogspot.com

Here's the site for the Wellcome Trust's collection. Go exploring, it's rich and profound. I've had a chance to work with some of their extensive medical collection before and it's staggeringly broad and stupendously gruesome and only a minute portion of it is on public show.
http://www.wellcomecollection.org

Tasty, crippling treats.

Black Sun rise in the solar lodge.

What the fuck?! One of the weirder things I've ever seen on the street.

Seldom a better sight seen.

Art smash and the nail in the head.

What the fuck is this PRUDE thing? Funny you should ask. If the gasoline pool I’m standing in goes up the way I want it to, then PRUDE will be the next thing that swallows all of my time and energy and shoves its nasty barbed blade into your esophagus over and over. By the same token, if the blast-ring arcs the other way then I’ll be sitting in a pile of shit explaining why there are stains on my hands and slashes on my wrists. Let’s see where it takes us.

The story so far runs like this: before leaving for the Chemlab tour, work got under way between Matt Caustic the bomb factory girl and I. we tossed some ideas and a lot of similar reference points into the fire pit. Luminous? Blackly. Profoundly, and judderingly so. Ugly? Wonderfully. Once it became clear that we were actually going to record more than a few shreds of shard, it was decided to rope in Sean Cyanotic to add a criminal layer of nasty machine groove. To round out the group, my old friend and rock’n’roll shade here in London, Marc Plastic, has unlimbered his guns too.

I’ve been rocking Chemlab for years and loving it. Sean wields the merciless Machine Rock brass knuckles with Cyanotic, Matt utterly decimates the “noise-floor” competition and does it with a cruel and perfect sneer, and Plastic dominates London’s underbelly with Plastic Heroes. Prude isn’t any of these creatures yet it’s all of them and nothing too. None of us is interested in wiring up a band that’s going to head in the logical direction for any of us, the direction that’s expected when you cross-breed our bands. So, Prude’s the mistress we’re all gang-banging and she’s 3-D in four ways. We’re meshing Machine Rock Gainsbourg, Velvet Underground Revolver, 1000 Homo DJs via Gary Numan’s Smart car, Roxy Music subverted by Basement 5, Sly Stone does “Careering” from a hospital bed, and Throbbing Gristle spouting noise-scape brokenword nonsense, and on it swerves. It’s a challenging and stimulating construct that demands a lot of us all, and I’m pretty proud of what we’re doing.

We’re deep in the process of recording right now and it’s not clear when or where it’ll finally appear when it’s all done. There’s a myspace profile, but at the moment there really isn’t much there at all and there may not be for a bit. So, to get a sense of where we’re going and what the fuck this is all about, you can nail a copy of the sleazy treat “Darkroom” on the latest Bit Riot/Glitch Mode compilation. Here’s the info:

June 24th will see the release of the compilation "Cyanotic Presents: Gears Gone Wild". It features new, rare and unreleased material from Cyanotic as well as appearances from a number of friends and collaborators including 16volt, Acumen Nation, Prude (featuring Jared Louche of Chemlab, Sean Cyanotic, Matt Caustic and Marc Plastic), Rabbit Junk, Left Spine Down (Featuring Jeremy Inkel of Front Line Assembly) and more.

Pre-Order via www.bitriotrecords.com from now until June 24th and receive a sticker and pin at no extra charge with your order for getting in there early. Get it now, supplies won’t last, and the promo deal certainly won’t.

“Cyanotic Presents: Gears Gone Wild" will also be available on the 16Volt DENIAL HIGHWAY TOUR starting on the 16th of June: http://16volt.com/tour/.

We’ll have a selection of material up in due course as well as some irrelevant and irreverent artwork and a few video clips that have very little relationship to the neighborhood of The Expected. All questions will be ignored at the moment, as we’re all so deep in the mix of this and the rest of the musical fuck-fests we’re involved in that it’s impossible to devote the stream to anything more. There’ll be plenty of time for probing from you and from us, and the interviews will fly. With any luck, so will the tour dates, and since it’ll be more ‘back to basics’ than Chemlab, we’ll be sleeping on your floors and staying up all night and hanging out in your living rooms and talking shit.

So, spread the word about 16 Volt’s Denial Highway tour with Cyanotic and Bella Morte supporting. Get out there and make a bunch of fucking noise for me in the front row since I can’t be here to throw down, and pick up your copy of the compilation. It’s an excellently broad collection of talent. We’ll keep you in the loop with the developments on the Prude front. Until then: Banzai, motherfuckers!

www.myspace.com/causticmusic
www.myspace.com/cyanoticonline
www.myspace.com/plasticheroes
www.myspace.com/prudemusic

Just hanging out.




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