Arrangements of Bach, Schoenberg and Faure
Dashanka Junction
Soma Jones is waiting for a bus. Countless iterations ago he was shot with an ascii-iser by a mysterious woman called Wilhelmina Carrow. And it’s the end of the world. Again.
Reduced to his component phonemes, Soma Jones undergoes an aeon long journey back to critical reevaluation through utopias and lost backwaters. Places that are not places locked into a gridlock terminal gravity around Dashanka Junction.
Civilisations come and go. Identities rise and fall. Nested within each other like matryoshka dolls. Fractally recursive and each claiming to be the centre of the universe.
Which layer of the onion is this?
How deeply parenthesised is the world?
The Puntigamer Hypothesis
Mestostadt Garden City Checksum Hintergrund
Oida!
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