FICTION: Undo Their Flow On This

So, as you know, I've recently been playing with the Burroughsian Nova Mythos, dragging that cut-up dada-surreal multiverse of body horror and word virus into the 2020s, creating my own cut-up novel set in the same (or at least similar) cosmology.   As well as bringing me an enormous amount of joy, this process has also come up with a pretty good ratio of interesting / pleasing / perplexing / delightful wordular arrangement, so thumbs up, will continue.

Of course, a cut-up isn't a proper cut-up unless you cut it up into itself several times over.  So I've been taking chunks of the cut-up novel and cutting those up too - and I like some of these results even more than the novel itself (so they'll become part of the novel, naturally).  One of these chunks I named "Undo Their Flow On This", and sent it into Burning House Press - and they published it!   

That's right!  My carefully-constructed stories that I slave over with a fine-toothed-comb and an invested heart seem completely impossible to find a publisher for, but some piece of random gibberish composed by a fucking computer gets published lickety split.  Which is awesome, of course, but still.  

Eep.

ANYWAY, point is, I got something published.  And here it is:

READ "A VISION - UNDO THEIR FLOW ON THIS" BY CLICKING HERE.

REVIEW: Amalgamated - Solvé et Coagula

Weirdness abounds, in my favourite Amalgmated release so far.  Review written for Heathen Harvest, meticulously monitored by Sage Weatherford.

"Rather than striving to capture a particular nostalgic vibe, these pieces are busy using old tools to explore new ground. Each side is a seamless flow of sections and subsections without any clear divisions, so I honestly have no idea what bit goes by what name. Indeed, because neither side is clearly labelled, I can’t even say precisely which names refer to which stuff on which side. Which is fine, of course, because an experience like this isn’t about the labels, is it? It’s about the vibes, daddy-o—the vibes."

Read the whole review here! 

 

NEWS: BRUCE IS NUMBER ONE!

BRUCE HAS JUST BEEN CROWNED BEST WEB SERIES IN THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE EVER!

REVIEW: Little Songs of the Mutilated!

This is not an album review, but a review of a series of albums.   It's the old Exquisite Corpse surrealist game, but musical rather than visual.  This was a series that I loved so much that, after I wrote the article, I wrote to the honcho running the series and asked him if I could join in on the fun.  And he said yes!  So now, even though I was completely unassociated with the collective at the time of writing, now I've actually played a live gig with them and am featured on the next album to be released (but still unreleased at this stage).  Cool and exciting world!

Review written for Heathen Harvest, and probably edited by the tireless and unflagging Sage Weatherford.

"The diversity of sounds here is amazing, ranging from synth-driven electroscapes to percussion-heavy abstract neo-shamanism, and from full-on noise to cut-up media shenanigans to reverb-drenched plink-plonkiness, and everything in between. Yet, this breadth of palette is restrained—and made even more powerful—by the game-structure, which sees ten or fifteen seconds of one fragment directly influence and inspire the next, meaning that these pieces each flow with a beautiful fluidity. Tonal washes rise up out of beds of clanking, noise sections erupt up like lava from landscapes of tinkling, acoustic sounds emerge from a fog of synthetic ones, and all of it is perfectly natural. The Game framework of these pieces means that every sound that occurs makes sense in the context of the previous ones, as players take the sounds of the artists before them and warp them into something new–and, because of the strict time limits placed on each piece, this all happens in the space of a fucking pop-song." 

Read the actual full review here!

 

REVIEW: The Cray Twins - The Pier

If you dig distorted field recordings (and who doesn't?), this may be the project for you. Review written for the staunchly diverse Heathen Harvest, and lovingly edited by the sleep-deprived Sage Weatherford.

"Honestly, it’s hard to go wrong with a combination of dark-ambient drones and field-recording textures ... and the Cray Twins do everything right on this release. There’s a great sense of restraint here, with everything given the room it requires for maximum evocation, and there’s never too much going on at once. It’s full when it needs to be full, but it’s empty when that’s what it needs; when focus is required to notice the textures in their fullest detail; when the ear zooms in like some kind of aural microscope to properly sense the small changes in tone or grain that the Cray Twins want us to appreciate. Like they say in the press release, ‘we make instruments out of the landscape’. But it’s not like this is all tiny sounds and minimal ‘sound art’ stuff:  The Cray Twins also know when to crush us beneath the weight of distortion."

Read the full review here!

REVIEW: Hattifnatter - Barometrizm

 

Review written, as all of them have been so far, for the increasingly eclectic Heathen Harvest, and meticulously edited by the tireless (and perhaps superhuman) Sage Weatherford.

"Crackling, dripping, pulsing, rippling, burbling, creaking, whooshing: this album has it all, layered with distant chiming, granulated voice noises, bowed things, and tidal ebbs and flows of tones, both warm and cold. It’s not quite ‘dark ambient’ or its hippy cousin ‘meditation music’, but it definitely sits (strangely, ghostly, mysteriously) in that same spectral ballpark."

Read the full review here!

REVIEW: Twilight Circus and Edward Ka-Spel - 800 Saints in a Day

A review for Heathen Harvest, about the strange pop-weirdness of Twilight Circus and Edward Ka-Spel.  Really not sure where this music should live.  Edited by Sage "Overworked But Happy" Weatherford.

"You never know exactly what the next track will bring, nor what direction a single piece will go in. The starts are rarely like the ends, and there are few signposts along the way to guide you. A piece might start with a tribal-style bongo loop, travel along a path that seems almost Krautrockish, and end with a noise that is somewhere between a deflating balloon and a saxophone solo. ... In nearly every piece on this album, I found myself making assumptions about ‘what kind of song this was’, only to have my assumptions completely pissed on, and found myself going from self-assured critical superiority to slack-jawed awe in the space of minutes, again and again."

Read the whole review here:

Twilight Circus and Edward Ka-Spel - 800 Saints in a Day

INTERVIEW: Me on the ABC, talking Beef and Bruce and Wealthy Benefactors

The trouble with talking on the radio is they ask questions that I have no answers for ("So, what's your career plan?"), and I, being the socially-wrong terrifyingly-honest person that I am, have to answer them on the fly ("I have no plans - I'm just hoping to one day meet a wealthy benefactor and become some kind of creativity-slave.")


INTERVIEWED ON ABC RADIO


Do I appear awkward or strange?  Do I appear Aspergery or amusing?  Do I appear boring or irrelevant?  DO I APPEAR AT ALL?

You be the judge.  Eep!

REVIEW: Lustmord - Things That Were

A review for Heathen Harvest, about the perhaps-better-forgotten release of Lustmord's early works, "Things That Were".  Neatly edited by Sage Weatherford.

"Perhaps I should be trying to contextualise it all properly by pointing out that, at the time, this music was probably quite influential and powerful and worth listening to. But at the same time, here we are in 2017, and saying ‘hey, listen to this, it probably sounded awesome in the eighties’ isn’t really much use to anybody."

Read the whole review here:

Lustmord - Things That Were

REVIEW: Andrew Liles - Animal Magick

 

Animal Magick!

A review for Heathen Harvest, about the wacky magickal misadventures of Andrew Liles.  Animal sounds meet Dadaist vaudeville meets Subgenius-style chaos magick.  Unlike much else I've ever heard.  Precisely edited by Sage Weatherford.

"Animal Magick feels utterly deliberate and complete, which honestly makes it all the stranger. The whole album flows together beautifully:  with each short piece being made of strange isolated ideas smashed together, it’s often impossible to know where one track has ended and the next begun. To give you an idea, the second track alone (‘Pink Toed Ungulates’) includes:  no-holds-barred goose honks; a one-man-band calliope-style section, overlaid with guttural bestial grunting; a section of minimal keyboard meets bird calls; a few bursts of snarling growls, forward and/or backwards; completely asynchronous hand drums; various unrelated peeps and poops; a frenzied tribal section; weird moments of Indian or African stringed drone instruments; maybe two seconds of flute; rising and falling synth noises; and one small moment of classic mountain-peak yodeling."

Read the whole review here:

Andrew Liles - Animal Magick

REVIEW: Todd Anderson-Kunert - Almost There

 

A review of Australian sound-artist Todd Anderson-Kunert's piece made from musical vibrators and the moaning of people who listened to them with bodyparts other than their ears.  A fascinating idea, perfectly performed, that brings to mind a world of ponderings.  Reviewed for Heathen Harvest and tenderly edited by Sage Weatherford.

"On one hand, there’s the ear experience, but I found myself constantly re-evaluating the quality of the music in terms of how the vibrations themselves, divorced from the hearing of them, might feel when applied to very different organs. A high tone might be painful, but transferred away from the act of hearing has entirely different qualities; a low tone might sound ominous, but feel amazing. Given that this piece was created with the physical feelings in mind, rather than simply to be heard, it kind of has to be judged in a different way to a regular musical release. But, of course, at the same time, it has been released as a musical release to be listened to, and not as a series of specialised art dildos to be felt..."

Read the review here:

Todd Anderson-Kunert - Almost There

 

REVIEW: Merzbow - Life Performance

A review of Merzbow's rerelease from 198fucking5, when I was still in primary school.  It's Merzbow.  And it's interesting.  Written for Heathen Harvest, and precisely edited by Mr Sage Weatherford.

"This music has not aged one moment, while everything around it has shifted and slid through cold wars and cocaine, wrinkle cream and botox. When these clanking and crunching monstrosities (all entitled ‘Nil Vagina Mail Action’, for no reason that is clear to anyone but Masami Akita) burst through one’s speakers, they have absolutely no idea what year it is, and really don’t care about context; these things live in their own universe, with their own timeline, and only ever intersect with our cosmology if and when their demented creator deems it appropriate."

Full review HERE.

INTERVIEW: Sam McAuliffe Asks Me About Improvisation

Reknowned guitarist, improviser, composer, and sound artist Sam McAuliffe asks me a bunch of questions about improvisation, and I answer them in ways that are long, rambling, overdetailed, verbose, and yet still somehow kind of empty - and absolutely riddled with both spelling and grammatical errors.  Sheesh.  But, anyway, Sam didn't seem to mind, and indeed published it all as is.  So now you can read it too, if you like, and learn the Blackwellian Improvisationary Secrets of Experimental Success.  Guaranteed!


READ THE INTERVIEW RIGHT HERE.

NEWS: 'Beef' scores Number One on Vegan Reading List!

Now, I'm not assuming here that the numerical value of my position is necessarily some kind of value judgment - it could just as easily be "the first thing on the list" as it could be "the very very finest wordular arrangement I've ever seen".  No assumptions are made here about the qualitative nature of this numerical listing, is what I'm saying.  It could be that I was merely lucky, or that the ordering was alphabetical (except then I would've been positioned at third place... but people do make mistakes).  It could be completely and utterly arbitrary.

But - regardless of the presence or absence of any sort of judgment-based ordering practices - 'Beef' is NUMBER ONE on this new and exciting list of "11 Best Vegan Books To Read This Summer"!  Woohoo!  Much awesomeness!

The complete list is over here:

11 Best Vegan Books To Read This Summer (Or Any Other Season, Let's Be Honest)



   

NEWS: Wok and I interviewed by Melbourne Webfest about 'Bruce'

Myself and Warwick were asked a few questions about Bruce, our motivations, our inspirations, our attitudes to improvisation, and how it's really fucking hard to get any money.

READ IT HERE IF YOU WANT TO 

ESSAY: In Love With The Monstrous: Why The Hell Am I Attracted To Such Horrible Things?

An essay about my love for the physically and morally repugnant, and some sort of weak attempt at justifying/explaining it, in the context of knowing with some certainty that not everyone considers this interest/attraction "normal".   Published on Heathen Harvest, gently edited by Sage Weatherford.

"Some of us seem drawn to ugly art, strange music, and real-life depravity, and some of us don’t.  I have an inkling that the two are related (being drawn to ugly strangeness in sound/vision, and being interested in ugly strangeness in real life), but of course nothing is ever actually that simple, and I definitely know people who refuse to watch scary/freaky movies but insist on weird/noisy music at all times, so I’m pretty sure whatever conclusions I come up with will be highly variable in their personal mileage, and the whole lumping-this-all-together thing I’m attempting here may very well be a terrible mistake.  But, well, I’m going to attempt it anyway."

 In Love With The Monstrous: Why The Hell Am I Attracted To Such Horrible Things?


 

REVIEW: Seirom - Mesmerized

A review of Gnaw Their Tongues' Mories' strangely soothing synth-ambient project 'Seirom'.  

Written for Heathen Harvest, and gently edited by Sage Weatherford.

"As suggested by the reversed name, it turns out the project Seirom is the very opposite of normal Mories.  For instance, the first piece (and title track) is almost the kind of uplifting indie electro shoegaze that wouldn’t be out of place on an advertisement for the latest ever-so-zippy (but oh-so-roomy) urban sportscar, complete with soaring lush feel-good harmonies and energetic techno drum sounds.  I could almost taste the car deodoriser."

Seirom - Mesmerized

ESSAY: Over the Wall: The Power of Fictional Activism

A short piece about the oft-overlooked power of fighting the establishment, not with angry placards and cold facts, but with engaging characters and immersive storylines.  Published by the very lovely Quo online zine.

"More people have heard, and really listened to, and can sing along with “Imagine” than have ever been to one of our protests.  And it works precisely because it’s fictional – like a sci-fi novel, it merely asks the audience to “imagine” a world without countries or possessions or religion, rather than trying to make an argument using facts or figures.  It’s not presented as a fight, but an invitation"

READ IT HERE.

INTERVIEW: LV Book Design ask me about Writing

We talk about heart-warming rejections, the vortex of the research/writing cycle, the pain of editing, and the slippery moments of inspiration.

"As far as I'm concerned, I'm a very normal person. It's just everyone else that's quirky and undecipherable and irrational and were told the rules of the game and when to start playing."

LV MEETS MAT BLACKWELL

REVIEW: Gordoa, McNab, and Myburgh - Passive Transport

Great experimental music by three stalwarts of the Australian experimental music scene (well, two and one Mexican Berliner), that is completely ruined by too many painful high noises.  Review scrawled for Heathen Harvest and mildly meddled with by Sage Weatherford.

"It’s not like I don’t like abstract sound clusters or expansive passages of non-music—man, they’re  some of my favourite things—and there are lot of really wonderful sounds on this release.  Unexpected clanks, richly timbral scrapes, rising waves of frictional textures, deep floor-warping low tones: they’re all there.  But whenever the trio finds a really awesome space, along comes this fucking high sine, like some kind of malarial parasite, determined to burrow into my grey matter and cause me sickness and discomfort."

Gordoa, McNab, and Myburgh - Passive Transport