As I can feel unconsciousness coming on, I leave you with this:

Photo: Tazlimur
Costume, Hair/make-up: Jessica Rowell
Model: Zoetica Ebb
Couch courtesy of Allan Amato

I love Moon Wiring Club. And not just because I got their new record this weekend, which I am going to play tonight because I’ve been sick and/or unconscious with some weird bug since Friday morning. Oh no. (What if it cured me?) No, I love them because they do things like this, too:

In 1982, Gelographic RadioTelevision co-broadcast a test transmission for the tentative BBC5 channel.

Although the station idents were deemed a massive success, sadly the only known survivors of this viewing were unable to be traced, due to radiation issues. This archive footage has been recently unearthed, and provides a tempting glimpse into what those who watched through the smoked glass were able to see.

The musical accompaniment, acclaimed in some quarters, features on the new Moon Wiring Club album ’Striped Paint for the Last Post’, due ’sometime’ November. Certainly before the feast of Syllabub in any case.

Remember: confusing electronic music is a great British tradition.

Simon Reynolds is one of my favourite writers. It’s funny, really: I agree with what he writes maybe half the time, at best, but he says it so fucking well, and in such a way that I always have to think about the subject again.

He’s now doing notes on the decade at the Guardian, beginning with a piece on "beard rock." I was, I admit, hoping for a clue as to why I find Will Oldham so inexplicably creepy, but, you know, it’s a fun piece anyway:

…beardedness is tantamount to a visual rhetoric, almost a form of authentication, as though the band are wearing their music on their faces…

THE SPOILS by Zola Jesus is one of my favourite albums of this year.  But it’s kind of hard to find on CD.  (The mp3 download is easy to find, I’ve even seen it on Amazon, and got mine at eMusic.)  But now there’s a store open at zolajesus.com, where you can buy it, her other records, and a t-shirt that I’m going to pick up for Lili.

Too much to do, so I’m bailing out of warrenellis.com for the night. Tomorrow, we go live with SHIVERING SANDS.

I am being played off tonight by NEU! and the phenomenal "Fur Immer." Been dragging out, dusting off and re-playing all my Krautrock since watching a pretty good documentary on those days by the BBC. I shouldn’t call it Krautrock, mind you, they didn’t like that term…

G’night.

Spent the evening listening to this. Nadja, a well-known drone metal outfit from Toronto, and Pyramids, a postrocky noise band from Denton once described as like "someone disemboweling a Radiohead record." PYRAMIDS WITH NADJA is an immense collaborations, four long soundscapes that also bring in members of several other bands, including Khanate and The Cocteau Twins.

And you can stream it here.

Fused together, they make a sound that approaches, particularly in the later tracks, a sort of Berserker Mushroom Viking Meditation. It flows like river water on the verge of freezing, under a sky that is very slowly exploding, and your heart is hammering but the drone of the world is still and all-emcompassing.

Should probably have been a Night Music entry.

Grouper’s DRAGGING A DEAD DEER UP THE HILL was a high point for 2008 for me, an album deeply stoned on its own doomed beauty. I’d like to be seeing Grouper (which is actually just Liz Harris) live this week, but I don’t have the time, and it’s pissing me off immensely. The only improvement on my mood has been discovering, just now, that a new EP is due this winter. And here’s a piece from it:

Grouper - Hold the Way from Weston Currie on Vimeo.

“Hollow Life,” from the record THEE ONLY ONE, is available for your listening pleasure at last.fm.  Click through. Perfect music for a misty night, the way it is here in Southend right now.

I am informed that a new Moon Wiring Club record approaches. Make merry and throw another dog on the fire, for we will have cold visitors from a place beyond weather.

This is warren ellis dot com. Good morning.

And this is "Clay Bodies" by Zola Jesus.

"I Want Your Love."

Good night, internet.

It’s that time of the day where one needs a sound like this. I’ve only heard the one album by Cymbals Eat Guitars, and I’m hoping for a second one where they’ve swept out the nervousness and slight insecurity and just focus on blowing off the backs of people’s heads. "…And The Hazy Sea" is from WHY THERE ARE MOUNTAINS by Cymbals Hate Guitars. It’s a little bit like the Arcade Fire got sent to Hell and discovered the place is run by Frank Black.

I am greatly fond of Natural Snow Buildings, an experimental/postrock unit from France. And last.fm has a bunch of their stuff for free download. Good old last.fm — don’t know how it’s taken this long to root through their free-mp3 archive. Here’s the page you can grab this track from. It has superficial resemblances to, say, the peak work of Godspeed You! Black Emperor: but instead of GY!BE’s ascents (or perhaps escalantes, if you’re Matt Webb), they produce zones, spaces, still fields. Good night music. (And it’s dark here in Britain.)

I just noticed that Zoe Keating’s sublime "Sun Will Set" is offered as a free download by last.fm. You can click through to last.fm here and grab one for yourself. I talk to Zoe occasionally on Twitter. She is very nice.

I’m sure I’ve played this here before, but what the hell, it makes me smile. Nick Cave and Shane MacGowan doing "What A Wonderful World."

G’night, people.

stupid last.fm won’t let you embed their stupid last.fm player grumble mutter fuckit

To an old bloke like me, there’s a certain fond familiarity to the new record by The Medusa Snare, that puts me back in my bedsit in 1988. But, my god, "Slow Motion" is the pure strain. I mean, you can conjure up the influences as easily as I can — Velvets, seen through the fuzzed-out Spector of post-PSYCHOCANDY Jesus And Mary Chain and the autumnal rock romance of The House Of Love, etc etc — but the great shining tones of those opening guitar notes cut through like shafts of sunlight through cloud.

Somewhere, there will always be people making music like this. Because they have to.

"Slow Motion" by The Medusa Snare.

Good night.

Lucy’s Lost Her Head Again.

(I still have this on vinyl somewhere.)

G’night, internet.

Promo video for Bird From The Abyss’ forthcoming release "II."

Bird From The Abyss - II from J. M. A. on Vimeo.

From Portugal, a bit of fun from Zuramone’s THE SPIDERS DANCE ep.

Ennio Morricone speeding his tits off in Goa. Tranceabilly. Explosive breaks and gleaming spiked guitars. It just makes me smile.

By Low Lit Art. Drones and zone-out rhythms, and then, whoosh, time travel.

Utilizing found sound, sequenced percussion and washes of noise "The Sibley Family Tree" traces the lives of six generations of artists from the nineteenth century logging camps of the Pacific Northwest to the early sixties San Francisco pop art gallery scene to a future vision of the BosWash megalopolis and everywhere in between.

German Kosmische never really went away, did it? Emanating from a workshop in Riesa:

LHC -> Largest High Church, a particle-’enhancer’, which gets the missing blackhole generator activated, supported by the other dimensions headquarter - "Massive Dynamics". We activate this largest machine on earth, jumping to the next cosmic level in technology, also trying to proof the "Heim-Theory", which could lead to an amazing propulsion technology - 11 lightyears in 80 days!

This piece of music is a slightly changed rework of a liveact setup by Mr. Incognito. It was prepared for a final event of a workshop, of learning to make art out of special cosmic ingredients, who were explored to earth…

Vladislav Delay’s "Lumi," video directed by Timothy Jaeger.

End of September.

Topslice of the noises my computer’s been making lately. Includes Broadcast & The Focus Group, Fuck Buttons and High Wolf .

Mp3 previews of the newest release from Ghost Box. I love Ghost Box. If you don’t know the label, here’s their own description:

Ghost Box is a recording label for artists that find inspiration in library music, folklore, vintage electronics and haunted television soundtracks.

I’ve been listening to their last release, Belbury Poly’s LIGHT FROM AN ANCIENT STAR, all year.

Back to work, I have a treatment to kill before I can have fun on the inertnets.

The new collaborative project by Broadcast and The Focus Group.

I wonder why I never saw this before. Just turned it up on the end of a chain of search links. An unaired ad for Playstation. Apparently it was very expensive. Pulled for fairly obvious reasons. The music is an Alphaville song, "Forever Young," remixed by V/Vm. Interesting. Must find out more about it sometime.