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?

Available in paperback from Polyversity Press.

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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.

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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

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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:

“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.

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