Tuesday 5 October 2010

Missing Transmission



Monday 27 September 2010

Tales from the Asylum: A Steampunk Compilation

 Yes it's finally here, the Steampunk Anthology with my own humble contribution... and with three glowing reviews and counting!

A short excerpt and other links coming soon!

Buy it here on Amazon.com

Or

Here on Amazon.co.uk

Sunday 19 September 2010

The Psychogeographical Commission - Patient Zero


Patient Zero - new album from the Psychogeographical Commission - released Sept 27th reviewed here:- http://bit.ly/9ggKIC

Friday 10 September 2010

Dark Age Music 1 - Forest Silence


Not quite dark ambient, not quite black metal... Forest Silence



Monday 16 August 2010

Strange 2 - The Vrillon Hijack

The Vrillon Hijack was a broadcast interruption through the Hannington transmitter of the Independent Broadcasting Authority in the United Kingdom at 5:10 PM on 26 November 1977.

The transmission itself claimed to be from an extraterrestrial being.

Judge for yourself....

Strange 1 - The Vela Incident

From Wikipedia
 The Vela Incident (sometimes referred to as the South Atlantic Flash) was an unidentified "double flash" of light that was detected by an American Vela Hotel satellite on September 22, 1979.
In his 2006 book On the Brink, the retired C.I.A. clandestine service officer, Tyler Drumheller, wrote of his 1983–88 tour-of-duty in South Africa:


"We had operational successes, most importantly regarding Pretoria's nuclear capability. My sources collectively provided incontrovertible evidence that the apartheid government had in fact tested a nuclear bomb in the South Atlantic in 1979, and that they had developed a delivery system with assistance from the Israelis."
It may have been a nuclear detonation near one the worlds most remote places Bouvet Island, which is the tiny yellow dot in the centre of this Orthographic Projection:-



Bouvet Island was probably discovered on January 1, 1739, by Jean-Baptiste Charles Bouvet de Lozier,

It's difficult to land except by helicopter and 90% of it is Glacier



It's about 1700 miles to the nearest human and about 2500 miles to the nearest shops.

In 1964, an abandoned boat was discovered on the island, along with various supplies;

...the boat's passengers were never found.

More Vela info from Steel Hip

Wikilinks


Saturday 10 July 2010

Sacred Selections 5




Sacred Selections 4

From Workplace gallery Blog



Brighton Festival - Manic Organic - Thursday 15th May 2008


...Matt Stokes Sacred Selections, performed and transcribed by Paul Ayres and William Whitehead.
 
...Mixing up the medicine throughout in a series of mind-bending organ excursions is Sacred Selections, a brave music venture curated by Beck's Futures prize-winner Matt Stokes. Here, the high-octane break beats of rave-era Happy Hardcore and publicly selected tracks from Brighton's recent musical output are transcribed and performed live by renowned concert organists Paul Ayres and William Whitehead.

Pull out all the stops - its time to get Manic Organic!

Sacred Selections 3

From Vimeo by Mot

This is a brief excerpt from Matt Stokes' 'Sacred Selections' at St. Giles' Cathedral, Edinburgh. 'Sacred Selections' is a programme of Northern Soul, Happy Hardcore and Black Metal songs performed on a church organ. The song you hear here is Happy Hardcore, er, classic 'Braveheart' by Joining of the Clans, transcribed for the organ and performed by John Riley.

 

Sacred Selections from Mot on Vimeo.

Sacred Selections 2

Copied and Pasted from Woebot



"A series of pipe organ recitals featuring experimental transcriptions of underground music"
 
Northern Soul
Thursday 27th April, 2006 at 7 o'clock
St Paul's Chruch, Bedford Street, Covent Garden
Music selected by: Ali Duff, Tam McClymont, and Alan Watson
Transcribed for the organ by: Andrew Macintosh (Royal College of Organists)
Performed by: Daniel Moult (St Peter's Church, Eaton Square) and William Whitehead (Royal Academy of Music)

Happy Hardcore
Thursday 4th May, 2006 at 7 o'clock
St Matthew's Church, Great Peter Street, Westminster
Music selected by: DJ Sy (Quosh Records)
Transcribed for the organ by: John Riley (St Paul's and St George's Episcopal Church, Edinburgh)
Performed by: Paul Ayres (St George's Church, Hanover Square

Black Metal
St Dominic's Priory, Southampton Road, Haverstock Hill
Friday 12th May 2006, at 8 o'clock
Music selected by: Bruno Frenguelli and Grim Reality
Transcribed for the organ by: Andrew Macintosh (Royal College of Organists)
Performed by: Andrew Macintosh (Royal College of Organists)


Matt Stokes's is one of the favourites to win this year's Beck's Futures art prize at the ICA this year. His 'art' is often inspired by documenting or interpreting informal movements or 'rave' culture from an anthropological angle as a means of placing and understanding contemporary culture. His piece in the exhibition is a beautiful crafted 16mm film, 'Long After Tonight', which recreates a Northern Soul Event in a Dundee church. The religious setting and cutaways of icons seen through the swirling skirts and stylised forms of the dancers makes explicit and amplifies the 'worshipful' collective nature of such events whilst acknowledging the importance of faith and belief - however that finds expression. Three organ recitals take place as part of the 'performance' elements to his work, whereby 'dance' music (northen soul and anthem-ish rave tunes) and more bizarrely black metal are transcribed for the organ and performed in churches to lend a new but not unrelated sensibility to both the music and listening experience. These 'Sacred Selections' featuring acclaimed organists, will take place at three central London venues, on 27 april and 4 and 12 may.

Sacred Selections - 1

I'm obsessed with this CD so here's the few scraps I've found on the 'net.

Tuesday 6 July 2010

A Boot to the Head

Very silly but makes me laugh every time....

Sunday 20 June 2010

David Jason - Black magician

In this very odd episode of Childrens ITV Dramarama... David Jason assisted by David Rapaport attempts to earn a black-glove (!?)

Wednesday 2 June 2010

Wild Palms - 2 The Reader



From Wikipedia
...The Wild Palms Reader was published by St. Martin's Press before the series aired. It included time lines, secret letters, and character biographies. ABC, concerned that viewers might get "hopelessly lost in the tangled story line", arranged for the primer to be published. It also included writing supposedly from the “world of the series." Contributors included:

Wild Palms - 1

Mostly forgotten this little mini-series suffered from comparisons to Twin Peaks, but was a very different animal constructed by Oliver Stone in one of his few forays into TV.

From Wikipedia

Wild Palms is a six-hour mini-series, which first aired in May 1993 on the ABC network in the United States. Written by Bruce Wagner, who (with Oliver Stone) was also the executive producer, Wild Palms was a sci-fi drama about the dangers of brainwashing through technology and drugs. It was based on a comic strip written by Wagner and illustrated by Julian Allen first published in 1990 in Details magazine. The mini-series starred James Belushi, Dana Delany, Robert Loggia, and Angie Dickinson. The episodes were directed by four people known more for their feature films: Kathryn Bigelow, Keith Gordon, Peter Hewitt, and Phil Joanou.
And a great summary of the comic from Dot What
The strip version of the story is that Harry Wyckoff, an entertainment lawyer, sitting in a posh Hollywood eatery, sees a fellow patron dragged outside and beaten up, ignored by everyone else. He learns of and then goes to work for the mysterious talent agency Wild Palms, which turns out to be the public face of a conspiracy called The Fathers, whose aims are never really clear. Their leader is Senator Anton Kreutzer, who had founded the popular religion Synthiotics. He had also killed Harry's father in the late 1960s, the real inventor of virtual reality. In the present, 2008, Kreuzer and friends control Church Windows, a VR television network that immerses viewers who buy the home projector and take a drug called Mimezine, in their favorite programs.


The writer of Dot What also draws some nice PKD parallels... in the full article


The Creepy Marconi Deaths?

From Phoned Up and Shut Up
“You know those strange deaths of Marconi scientists? There’s been a helluva lot of those of TV technicians, but they never get into the papers. Really bizarre, really strange methods of committing suicide, you know?”

“Yeh, that book by Tony Collins an’ all that? 25 Mysterious Deaths In The Defence Industry?”

“Yeh, that’s right. Well, when I first started as a —- TV technician, they walked up to me, friendly as anything, saying, ‘Wait ’til you see what we can do with very low frequencies man! Absolutely fantastic, totally incredible!!! You’ll never believe it! It was like they were bursting to show something really big off to me, then when they found out I came from Ireland, they instantly clammed up, went funny on me, wouldn’t even tell me the time of day, ignoring me on the lift and everything. And in the 18 months since then, there’s been four or five of these mysterious deaths, like those Marconi deaths, of —- TV technicians, really weird flippin’ deaths man, never being reported in the papers. It seemed to happen every time after they were taken into some funny room and to do with some funny frequency.”


Maybe none of it's true... but read Phoned Up 'n' Shut Up in full and judge for yourself...

Sunday 16 May 2010

The Black Knight Satellite Part 5

A discussion on the veracity of VG1991 [or BG1991] bautforum.com and whether it might be a Bracewell Probe*

And a Highbrow Harvard paper on VG 1991

and an image





*From Wikipedia

A Bracewell probe is a hypothetical concept for an autonomous interstellar space probe dispatched for the express purpose of communication with one or more alien civilizations. It was proposed by Ronald N. Bracewell in a 1960 paper, as an alternative to interstellar radio communication between widely separated civilizations. (Bracewell, 1960)

The Black Knight Satellite Part 4 - 1960 report

From the Newsday blurb 9/1/1960: By: Bob Caro

It’s not a satellite and it’s not a meteor. Any astronomer can tell you that. And he can tell you its color and, to some extent, its speed. [There's just one thing he can't tell you - what it is. He can't even guess.] That’s the status at the moment of the ”week-long nationwide attempt to identify the mysterious REDDISH object that has been circling the earth since last Thursday.” Astronomers all over the country admit that they’re puzzled. One, Frank Judson of Chicago’s famed Adler Planetarium says ”I’ve been watching it for days and I don’t have the faintest idea what it is.”


Even taking a picture of the object hasn’t helped. [ The Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corp. announced yesterday that a tracking camera at the Bethpage plant had photographed the object at 8:51 PM last Thursday. But, a Grumman spokesman added, "all the picture shows is a white line, so we still can't even begin to make an identification." ] The white line, difficult to detect, was barely visible even after the photo was enlarged.


Expert observers and just plain citizens have been catching glimpses of the mysterious object in Long Island, Chicago, Washington, Boston, New Haven, Chicago and points west. But the few conclusions that they are able to draw about its behavior only heightens the mystery of what it is.
Judson, who has been studying the object in conjunction with Robert L. Johnson, director of the Adler Planetarium sums up the conclusions about the thing this way:


“It’s not a meteor because it’s much too slow. And it’s not an artificial man-made satellite”…,

The Black Knight Satellite Part 3 - Sgt Clifford Stone

Watch the full interview at Disclose.tv

Especially at 25 minutes in :-
[In] 2016 I think that we’re going to have to announce to the world that there’s a probe that comes very close to the Earth every 15 or 20 years. And we’ve been calling it an asteroid. It’s not an asteroid. But it actually in reality is an artificial probe. In other words, somebody else put it here.... I’m talking about BG1991. Roughly 30 meters in diameter, highly polished surface. Asteroids don’t have a highly polished surface. It took corrective course changes to avoid collision with another asteroid. That don’t happen. This one it did.

The Black Knight Satellite Part 2 - The PKD connection

John Carter writing at The Excluded Middle.

In Disneyland of the Gods, John Keel writes of the Black Knight satellite. Never mind the almanac. You won't find it listed with Sputnik or Explorer. Black Knight is the name given to a radar blip discovered in 1960. This mystery satellite was found in a polar orbit, something neither the US nor the Soviets had accomplished. It was several times larger and several times heavier than anything capable of being launched with 1960 rockets. It shouldn't have been there, but it was.

If that weren't enough, ham operators began receiving odd messages from the Black Knight. One operator decoded a series of these messages as a star map. The map centered on Epsilon Boštes as seen from the earth 13,000 years ago. Remember, stars don't move very far even after 13,000 years, and Epsilon Boštes is moving towards us. Only the neighboring stars appear different after that amount of time. Was the Black Knight an alien calling card?


Perhaps the strangest effect associated with the Black Knight is the Long Delay Echo (LDE). The effect observed is that radio or television signals sent into space bounce back seconds (or even days) later, as if recorded and retransmitted by a satellite. They didn't begin with the Black Knight, but they were part of its mystery. Keel places the earliest LDEs in the 1920s. It's not in Keel's book, but in 1974 another mystery entered earth orbit. No radar saw it. No ham operator listened to it. One man contacted it- or rather, was contacted by it. That man was science fiction author Philip K. Dick.....

Read the complete article at Excluded Middle

The Black Knight Satellite Part 1

Excerpted from Disneyland of the Gods by John Keel

In February 1960 the US detected an unknown object in polar orbit, a feat that neither they or the USSR had been able to accomplish. As if that wasn't enough, it apparently was several sizes larger than anything either country would have been able to get off the ground.


And then, the oddness began. HAM operators began to receive strange coded messages. One person in particular said he managed to decode one of the transmissions, and it corresponded to a star chart. A star chart which would have been plotted from earth 13,000 years ago, and focused on the Epsilon Bostes star system.


On September 3, 1960, seven months after the satellite was first detected by radar, a tracking camera at Grumman Aircraft Corporation's Long Island factory took a photograph of it. People on the ground had been occasionally seeing it for about two weeks at that point. Viewers would make it out as a red glowing object moving in an east-to-west orbit. Most satellites of the time, according to what little material I've been able to find on the black knight satellite, moved from west-to-east. It's speed was also about three times normal. A committee was formed to examine it, but nothing more was ever made public.


Three years later, Gordon Cooper was launched into space for a 22 orbit mission. On his final orbit, he reported seeing a glowing green shape ahead of his capsule, and heading in his direction. It's said that the Muchea tracking station, in Australia, which Cooper reported this too was also able to pick it up on radar traveling in an east-to-west orbit. This event was reported by NBC, but reporters were forbidden to ask Cooper about the event on his landing. The official explanation is that an electrical malfunction in the capsule had caused high levels of carbon dioxide, which induced hallucinations.

Sunday 2 May 2010

The only Tattoo

The only Tattoo I've ever considered having was this design, but something tells me it's a littl;e too teutonic for my tastes... all the same.. I really do like looking at it...

Sunday 18 April 2010

The Psychogeographical Commission



Two strange fellows wandered the streets at night and made music for wandering the streets...


Buy the album at


And on myspace

And even Facebook



Friday 16 April 2010

The Sisterhood - Giving Ground extended mix

A nine minute edit of The Sisterhood classic, interpolating the rougher Giving Ground (AV) instrumental edit blended with the album version. My full extended mix is over 12 minutes, hence the youtube edit...

The album hasn't been reissued for years so it's only available second hand at
Amazon.co.uk
and
Ebay.co.uk


Ambient Glam Metal

As promised here's Poison [Bret, Rikki etc] with the intro to their album Flesh and Blood... it's perhaps the only example of ambient glam metal...

Best of all if can be downloaded for a few pence from Amazon.co.uk

Good songs by people you'd never think did them...

Robert Palmer does Electro in Urdu



The original album hasn't been reissued but you can get the mp3 for a few pence











Paul McCartney and his maniac synth loop...






 











Neil Young's vocoder paranoia








And coming soon... ambient glam metal....