Near Andromeda
Somewhere out near Andromeda is a world of dusty parking lots in the sun. Dusty and mostly empty because it is easier under local conditions to manufacture car parks than to manufacture cars.
Near Andromeda is now available as paperback or ebook from Polyversity Press.
segways drurgs & fucked midi
The Entropy Circus ended in 1995, and then again in 2000 and 2014. The end of the project was marked in 2014 by a track entitled The Entropy Circus which was intended as the apotheosis of everything that the title had represented.
To a disinterested observer the distinction between the Vitreous Enamel Development Corp, The Benelux, The Benelux Circus, Royal Free Electric and Zali Krishna were Rizla-thin. To the disinterested observer they were little more than Krishna’s sense of history and discontinuity played out over almost thirty years. But from the perspective of my colleague, Solomon Kirchner, and I there was a longer political game afoot.
Finchley in the Rain
So here at last is Solomon Kirchner’s debut release “Finchley in the Rain”. Solomon has been my long time sideman on over two decades of Entropy Circus projects as well as being half of Europe’s favourite sitar’n'synth duo, Raagnagrok.
And it’s a strange choice for a debut, being a cover version of a lost 1974 recording by Bromwich Ham (not to be mistaken with the near contemporary German fusion act Brummagem). Bromwich Ham were a progressive three piece put together by the notorious kaballist Rayne Keller as a “ritual instrument” for political, spiritual and harmonic revolution. Keller designed their costumes, their stage sets and wrote their lyrics, but preferred to remain behind the scenes pulling the strings.
The only existing version of “Finchley in the Rain” we have is from a BBC live session, where an embryonic version of the track appears as the first part of “Folk-Soul Medley (In G)”. The full version of it was intended to make up the first half of their debut album “This is Bromwich Ham”, but the band split after a studio fire which destroyed all of the tapes.
No-one was injured in this accident but frontman Brent Cunningham cut ties with Keller after the fire feeling that he had escaped from some kind of hypnotic trance that Keller had placed upon him and the rest of the band. Solomon worked with Cunningham, now a catholic priest, to reconstruct the song as it might have appeared if the tapes had not been destroyed.
This might have caused friction between Solomon and Rayne Keller, who has penned numbers for us in the past including “Kids Breakin’ the Law” and “Str8 to Video”, if it hadn’t been for the intervention of Sally Kitchener who did most of the programming and arrangements on this recording. In spite of it being Solomon’s voice on this track, there is as much of a case for this to have been released as Sally’s debut.
Anyway, that’s enough from me. Without further ado, after over forty years behind the veil, here’s “Finchley in the Rain”.
Enjoy!
Zali Krishna, Colindeep Prefecture, 2015
Near Andromeda – Radio Series
Somewhere out in Andromeda is a world of dusty parking lots in the sun. Dusty and mostly empty because it is easier under local conditions to manufacture car parks than cars. You drift from place to place getting easily entangled in unhappy polyamorous clusters, ignoring the telepathic messages and increasingly irrelevant 3D blockbusters from Earth.
Weekly episodes on YouTube as they arrive:
BRAND AMBASSADOR
Following his victory in the 2014 Eurovision Song Contest, Krishna found himself in a changed world. Within twenty-four hours both the stylist and hairdresser had left the team. “They were awful careerists,” Krishna told us, “both of them left for Japan. A band called Vow Wow had poached them from under my nose.”
This betrayal gave Krishna cause to re-evaluate his life.
“The spirit works in strange ways. There was something out of balance inside of me; at a fundamental level. I toured the cloud reefs in a Cessna Sky Yacht reading CS Lewis. I was looking for new insights and ways of seeing through nature, through art.”
After experimenting with watercolours, which he found unsatisfactory, Krishna decided to focus on the next generation. “Not children, or not in the genetic sense. I built a race of sentient creatures from the DNA level up.” The research facility on the site that had previously been the Aeroville estate in Colindale, which had been silent for so long, was now alive again with polyphonic voices and elegantly reimagined limbs. “Intelligent design is so important to me.”
When Krishna returned to the industry to record this new album, Brand Ambassador, things had changed across Europe. The micro-balkanisation on a regional level that had carried his success as Nova Grendoza’s entry to the Eurovision had granulated into ever smaller nano-states. “And there were more of those anomalies: why had Israel ever been in the Eurovision? So many regional departments of former North Korea wanted a slice of the cake. Europe has become defuse and indistinct; like Middlesex or NASA.”
As a reaction to this multiplicity of global singularities, Krishna work became once again increasingly local; he focussed on the specific. “It’s easy to generalise. Everyone is an expert these days. The dilettante who knows his backyard like the back of his hand, and can evoke the genius loci beneath every rock, has been sidelined for a lot of wafflers.”
So here, wafflers, is the new album. It’s a little over forty minutes long and contains eleven tracks. Ten recorded at Nova Grendoza West and one recorded at Nova Grendoza East. “And a big shout going out to the Searchin’ posse: Tom, Doig and Gemma. Yeastflakes is a reboot of the Searchin’ number Whipsnade, but it could never have happened without those guys.”
Enjoy.
Solomon Kirchner, Alperton North-East, 2015
Pesi Lao – Out Now!
“Pesi Lao, where are your people now?”
Lao had been considering this problem for some weeks in the only way she knew. She walked the alleyways of her side of Nova Grendoza, keeping a careful account of the discarded empty beer cans, and bottles but mostly cans, that she found either crumpled amongst the leaf litter or hung in carrier bags, blue of black in colour, from railings and broken tree branches.
She sounded the subways for evidence: the tags on the damp walls, a big metal door halfway down the subway unlocked and waiting for the unwary, the ubiquitous fisheye mirrors at each entrance.
Following the courses of muddy streams, clogged up with shopping trolleys and unwound VHS tape, she found new vistas; the pulse of life, Italian furniture, Halal butchers, the Saturday Market, but where were the fixies? Where were the latter-day baxboys snapping selfies? She was not a hundred miles from Grokiztan but she was at a loss to account for their absence.
“Vous avez suffisamment?”
Lao had to admit that she was busy enough, and while she had taken a pay cut and her income was no higher in any real or imaginary sense, the spiritual feeling that the concrete ogives of what the local rag, unreasonably in her opinion, called a “sink estate” gave her was something of an epiphany. It could all be saved. It could all be recast in her own image.
Perhaps these people, here on the sink estate, there in the municipal synagogue, everywhere unseen in the alleyways leaving their beer cans like vapour trails in a clear blue sky, were her people. And the skies were still blue once in a while.
“Und du bist ein Sonderangebot!”
She picked up the video-CD, its cover depicted a smiling girl, a young man in the background wearing a fawn-coloured pullover draped casually over the shoulders of a night blue shirt, a sports car parked beside him. She couldn’t read any of the writing other than the number 95 and the words “video-CD”, it might have been Chinese or Taiwanese, it might have been her sister from the other side.
Everything was going to be tickety-boo.
Bossa Boogaloo!
On Christmas 2013, I sent out almost fifty messages to musicians on three continents giving details of some rules, and the rhythm tracks that had been allocated to them, for the second Add Rhythm Sampler compilation…
Arrivederci
You might know Zali Krishna for his schlager crossover hit Windmills of Amsterdam, or perhaps for his acclaimed soundtrack to Miyazaki High School, but here are a few things that you might not know about Zali Krishna:
* For many years Krishna was a professional golf coach to the likes of David Niven and Jack Palance.
* In his spare time he buys up patents for some of the key inventions of the twentieth century. Amongst his collection are the Corby Trouser Press and the IBM 3340, better known as The Winchester hard disk unit.
* His first job in the music industry was as a page turner to the legendary Acker Bilk. Bilk described Krishna as “indispensible” and “a good lad”.
I have known Krishna for most of the sixty-five years of his illustrious career and I am willing here and now to put my hand on my heart and swear that it is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth when I tell you that Arrivederci is the finest thing that Krishna has ever recorded. You might say to me, “hey, are you forgetting about the classic Manchurian Manstopper album of 1963?” And I would say to you that Manchurian Manstopper is indeed a fine album but there is nothing on that masterpiece that achieves the solid gold perfection of every cut on Arrivederci.
The opening number was originally commissioned for a pantomime of the same name which ran for fourteen whole months at Bournemouth Playhouse. The hit single Benny Gesserit (Are You Geddin’ It?) was chosen as track of the month in the Official Suzuki Q Chord Users Gazette. And many of you will remember Splatterlight from the scandi-drama (Klyvning Ljus) that achieved seven nominations at the Bodil Awards.~
And the list goes on. There is not a track on this album with a pedigree any less prestiguous than the three I have named.
You’d better believe it!
So before I sign off and leave you to enjoy the show, let me say just how much of a privilege it was to be asked to write this little appetizer for the Arrivederci album. Those of you who have never heard it before are in for a genuine treat. I envy you, and if they ever invent a machine that can selectively wipe the human brain without any terrifying side effects, I shall be first in the line to wipe my memory of Arrivederci over and over again so that I can savour it for the first time.
Over and out!
Solomon Kirchner
(recorded 4th to 26th January 2014 by Zali Krishna in Hoxton)