Kali, Doggess Of Destruction

Meet Kali, my folks' very large and deeply stoopid puppy. Yes, puppy. Personally I think she may actually be a cross between a wolf and a horse but they maintain she's a dog. This beast is just over a year old and shows no signs of either stopping growing or becoming more intelligent. Proof of her foolishness can be seen in the photo below where she has just tried to bat me round the head with her enormous paw, totally oblivious to fact that I was taking the photos behind a closed patio door...

Non-Euclidean Footwear

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu's slippers R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!

Las Guerras De la Cocaína

Crom. A band so stunningly stupid that they transcend genius and come out the other side. Eccentric, sloppy, routinely attacked by audiences appalled at what they were hearing, wildly incoherent, possessed of a collective attention span of approximately 3 seconds and world champion copyright law flaunters - their attitude to sampling would put Culturcide and Negativland to shame - but mainly notable for producing possibly the greatest cover art for an LP ever. Sadly 'The Cocaine Wars 1974-89" was their only release. But, fuck, that's what I call a FuckenEavyMetalCuvver. Amazonion warrior chicks wielding huge axes riding giant polar bears across the snowy wastes of Hyperborea? Not a bad start, but it's the gatefold that makes it really special. And if you click on the album cover you can see why too...

Fuck Me, I Can See

Today is the first day in fucking weeks both eyes actually work properly. No pain at all, both contact lenses in, fuck it's nice to be actually able to see the world again. It's also the first day my brain's started to work properly in a while too. 'Cos frankly, it's fucking hard to maintain any normal kind of perspective on life when y're in constant fucking pain. I can't thank the people at Moorfields enough for the care I've recieved there, not just for the treatment and operations, but for actually giving a shit about their patients, really taking the time to explain what's going on, but mainly for reassuring and looking after me, with no bullshit or false hope, during a deeply fucking frightening few weeks. Thank you so much.

So, now I'm not half blind, bleeding and crying, and can think straight again, perhaps I can have a life again? It would be nice.

Música Repugnante

I see that Vice Magazine have made the new Whitehouse cd, Asceticists 2006*, their album of the month. Yeah, I can really imagine them listening to that in the office. If I end up in the Old Blue Last (not that I particularly want to, but if...) and I don't hear at least one classic bit of mindrot like Never Forget Death, Shitfun, Lightning Struck My Dick or Viking Section (no one does titles like Whitehouse) I'm going to be sorely fucking disappointed.

*Even by their standards, this is one fucking nasty, difficult and gruelling listen. Like shit speed, it leaves you feeling like you haven't washed in years.

I Have Injured Myself Laughing

Of all the places on the interweb you would expect to find this sort of thing, Maja Ratkje's website didn't leap to the top of the list, but that's exactly where I found it. Damn she's cool.

I Demand To Have Some Booze

Smirnoff Norsk, as I may have mentioned in passing, looks like toilet cleaner. It's fucking good stuff though, and unlike Zubrowka (my other favourite vodka) the bottles don't spontaneously and catastrophically implode*, which is good. It's also not stupidly expensive. Much as I like Grey Goose and Penka, I'll be fucked if I'm paying over £30 for a bottle of something that doesn't taste that much better than freezing cold Smirnoff Black and is probably only priced that high because people with bad asymmetrical mullets in shit bars are actually fucking willing to pay that much. Twats.

As far as I'm concerned, the only clear spirit worth paying that much for is Knockeen Hills Poteen which, in addition to being fucking delicious, comes in 3 strengths; 60% (Farmers Strength), 70% (Gold Strength) and 90% (Roman Strength, sorry, Extra-Gold). Careful with this shit though, it's makes absinthe look like shandy when it comes to motor function impairment, even knocking Old Rosie scrumpy off the top of the"I don't remember doing ether" charts. I particularly like the warning on the website that the 90% version should never be drunk neat. This is sage advice as it eats through metal quicker that Aqua Regis and if you burped whilst smoking after drinking it you'd probably scorch yr face off.

*NYE last year, a bottle of Zubrowka, which hadn't been knocked or anything spectactuarly imploded in my hand as I lifted it out of the bag, spraying the entire contents over a fairly large area. Bastard.

Five Reasons Why Bal-Sagoth Made Me Laugh So Hard I Actually Puked (Eldritch Vomitoria Upon The Descent Into The Dread Caverns Of X'Lithdrii'chm)

1. The vocalist, Lord Byron is actually sponsored by a company called Battle Orders Ltd to ponce about in their armour and wave their swords around onstage. Like that's going to make sales go through the roof. The average Bal-Sagoth fan generally isn't allowed to use a knife and fork without expert supervision, let alone a 5ft claymore.

2. One of their songs is called 'The Dark Liege Of Chaos Is Unleashed At The Ensorcelled Shrine Of A`zura Kai (The Splendour Of A Thousand Swords Gleaming Beneath The Blazon Of The Hyperborean Empire Part II)'. This comes from the disappointingly titled 'Battle Magic' LP and is the second chapter of a song from their previous opus 'Starfire Burning Upon the Ice-Veiled Throne of Ultima Thule'.

3. They really sound like Jeff Wayne's War Of The Worlds gone black metal. Pompous doesn't even begin to describe the impossibly shit quasi-orchestral wank of the keyboards, let alone the astonishingly dense muti-character spoken word (with black metal interludes) parts telling of battles against The Great Old Ones, the rediscovering of ancient books of power and magic and all the cthonic shit one could wish for. Lyrics like this:

"(The Sorcerer) By Klatrymadon and Zuranthus! They come! They come, wielding The Circlet Of Night! The dire warning issued to me as I stood before Vygothia's Master Wizard has been proved no idle boast! The Citadel's spells of containment breached...the Black Crown is upon us!

(The Emperor Koord) It is as I have forseen! Be Spry, my sorcerous lackey... join the Iron Phalanx in entertaining these latecomers while I prepare a reception worthy of their audacity"

Acres and acres of it. Six fucking albums, (or Hexology, as BS prefer) of this shit.

4. The lyrics are just the start. When you open the cd booklet, it's full of maps of Earth's mythological past, runic alphabets and the songs are expanded into amazingly badly written short stories. Sorry, myth-cycles. It's like Magma for virgins.

5. Go to their website and look at the picture gallery and scroll down all the way until you find the picture of them all dressed as Darth Maul. With light sabres. And scary poses.

Just Admit It, You Think This Is The Coolest Looking Band Ever Too, Don't You?

Now that's what I call putting a bit of effort into yr stage costumes. Demon Burger and Cradle Of Piss please take note.

Toneladas de Sollozos

Normally I'd still be in bed at this disgustingly early time on a Saturday morning, but I've been somewhat insomnia prone the last few weeks, mainly cos it ain't easy to sleep when it feels like some cunt is sticking needles in yr eyes everytime you close 'em. But anyway, the right eye's totally cleared up now and the lump on my left lid exploded in spectactularly disgusting fashion a couple of nights ago during the funniest night of druggery I've had for a while - salvia and the right company is too fucking funny, more of which later - it looked like I'd been shot in the eyelid with an air rifle at close range for a couple of days, but it's healing up nicely. It still hurts like a bastard, but then again, I've got a fucking hole in my eyelid so that's not too much of a surprise really. Apart from that I'm in a damn good mood 'cos I can once again rejoin the human race and not scream at the burning when daylight or some bastards headlights hit my retinas, I no longer have to wear sunglasses just to look at a monitor. Which is nice.

So instead of being fast asleep in a big comfy bed, I've been drinking serious tea and smoking some rather nice weed and working my way through the most unacceptable section of my record collection. Not the skullscraping psychedelic noise, or the black metal or even the free jazz. Nope, it's a blues-rock Saturday morning. The Groundhogs, early ZZ Top, Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac, Ten Years After, Taste and Free at arsequaking volume. The first Free album, Tons Of Sobs, is a fucking masterpiece. Listening to it, I find it hard to believe that it's the same band who ended up churning out shit like All Right Now, but than again, in 1968 Paul Kossof hadn't discovered smack and was still one of the finest guitarists around, fiercely emotional in his attack, and with a sound to die for. They're still the only band who've got away with covering Goin' Down Slow (apart from Howlin' Wolf of course, but that's untouchable, possibly the single greatest blues recording ever) and that alone would redeem their later horrors, even if the rest of the album was shit. Which it ain't. If you like yr blues smothered in fuzz, drenched in sweat and crammed with some of the finest piano this side of Otis Spann or Laffayette Leake, then I suggest you go and get a copy pronto, and fuck anyone who thinks it's naff - life's too short to have guilty pleasures in music.

Tripping On Physics

Huffing a fuckload of Salvia Divinorum extract is like going on a topologically impossible rollercoaster with a couple of dimensions too many.

If superstring and M-theory are right, and there are six extra dimensions curled up into a calabi-yau manifold orthoganal to every point in our four dimensional space-time which we continually pass through but never experience, (because our senses and intuition are tuned to the macroscopic, the classical, local world, constrained by the speed of light and confined to our four extended dimensions, instead of the microscopic, quantum, non-local and entangled base nature of the universe, we can only perceive the result as opposed to the process), then Salvinorin-A plunges you into a state of perception which is as close to physically experiencing such a higher dimensional space as I suspect y're going to get without a substantial rewiring of the brain and central nervous system. And when I say physically experience, I mean it. No hallucinogen I've ever taken before has so profoundly altered my tactile perception of the enviroment, or created such an ovepowering link between the visual and kinaesthetic elements of the trip. At one point, my TV screen bulged out like an expanding transparent membrane and slowly wobbled and snaked it's way across the room, passing through me with a very distinct sense of it stretching as it touched me, before moving through with a feeling of what I can only describe as gravity where the front of the membrane (event horizon?) was. Weird fucking shit.

If you ever read Einstein and wondered what time dilation really feels like as you approach the speed of light, or wondered what entering a wormhole's singularity would be like, well folks, this is yr smoke. The sensation of velocity, and of time slowing is palpable. The peak of the hallucinations only lasts a few minutes, but it can feel like days. Powerful fucking stuff. Go and watch this animation of the three dimensional shadow of a hypercube rotating through four dimensions The world on Salvia looks, feels and sounds like that, but more so.

The 20 Records Which Are Making Me Bounce Round The Flat On A Spacehopper At The Moment...

Om - Conference Of The Birds (Holy Mountain)
Mudhoney - Under A Billion Suns (Sub Pop)
Steve Reid Ensemble - Spirit Walk (Soul Jazz)
Witch - s/t (Tee Pee)
Chas Smith - An Hour From Desert Center (Cold Blue)
John McBain - The In-Flight Feature (Duna)
Darkthrone - The Cult Is Alive (Peceville)
Si Begg - The Directors Cut (Novamute)
Mirag - Black Temple Carved In Smoke (Battlecruiser)
Debashish Battacharya - 3: Calcutta Slide Guitar (Riverboat)
Twilight - Twilight (Southern Lord)
Heldon - IV: Agneta Nillson (Cuneiform)
Sunnyland Slim - The Complete Cobra & J.O.B. Recordings (Westside)
Tony Conrad - Fantastic Glissando (Table Of The Elements)
Th' Faith Healers - Peel Sessions (Ba Da Bing)
Ravi Shankar vs Ali Akbar-Khan - Master Musicians Of India (Prestige)
Vibracathedral Orchestra - Smash! Smash! Smash! (CD-R)
Kollektiv - Kollektiv (Brain)
Churchills - Churchills (B.A.N.)
Tony Conrad w/ Faust - Outside The Dream Syndicate Alive (Table Of The Elements)

Dilruba!

Tuning a Dilruba (the beast below) when y're totally fucking stoned is not the easiest thing to do. It takes a really fucking long time to get all 20 sympathetic strings dead on, particularly if you go and make a cup of tea and forget how many of the bastards you've already fucking done. Mind you, it didn't (quite) take 3 hours, which was the amount of time a totally pinned friend of a friend once spent attempting to tune a guitar that was perfectly in tune in the first place before slowly sliding off the seat they were sat on.



When you do finally get the fucker in tune though, it sounds absolutely fucking amazing, a bit like a cross between a sitar and a sarangi, but more spectral than a sitar and more buzzing than a sarangi. And much, much louder. When I get round to putting a pick-up on the fucker and introducing it to the pedals it's going to be a whole lotta fun. For me anyway...

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