Jamais Cascio:

A piece in the latest issue of Science shows that there’s a considerable amount of methane (CH4) coming from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, where it had been trapped under the permafrost. There’s as much coming out from one small section of the Arctic ocean as from all the rest of the oceans combined. This is officially Not Good.

Here’s why: methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, significantly more powerful than carbon dioxide. There are billions of tons of methane trapped under the permafrost, and if that methane starts leaking quickly, it would have a strong feedback effect — warming the atmosphere and oceans, causing more methane to leak, and on and on. The melting of methane ice (aka "methane hydrates" and "methane clathrates") is probably the most significant global warming tipping point event out there…

Arrived today from darkest Yeovil, ONEIRIC HARDWARE:

…a CD of manipulated field-recordings sourced entirely from server-arrays, hard-drives and PC peripherals from Belo Horizonte, Brasil and Yeovil, Somerset. The resulting pieces are a curious fusion of the mechanistic and the organic: a series of REM-sleep sirensongs built from whirring servos, damaged cpus and haunted read-write heads. Ghost-Industrial Music.

Three quid if you’re in the UK, four quid if you’re not. All through the good offices of kek-w at this link here. I’m all set for the night: I have a bottle of whisky, six cans of Red Bull for between shots, a thing to write, and this to listen to. Cheers.

COILHOUSE 4 arrived today, a big sexy glossy thing (with the rounded corners, that I can’t find a good online image of, so:)

Have only skimmed the Grant Morrison interview with Zo and Ales so far, in which he seems to be in one of his playful Glowing Space Guru moods, and the piece on Kristamas Klousch, whom longtime readers of this site will recognise above.

COILHOUSE is, as ever, a huge slab of a cultural object, and a stone fucking bargain at $15 American plus postage.

You can find a more detailed look at the issue at this link here.

I received this today. I am not sure why. I am slightly afraid of it. It looks kind of contagious.

I must read it immediately.

Here’s an Amazon link to it, and here’s some back cover text…

It’s Monty Python meets Nazi exploitation in a surreal nightmare as can only be imagined by Bizarro author Cameron Pierce.

In a land where black snow falls in the shape of swastikas, there exists a nightmarish prison camp known as Auschwitz. It is run by a fascist, flatulent race of aliens called the Ass Goblins, who travel in apple-shaped spaceships to abduct children from the neighboring world of Kidland. Prisoners 999 and 1001 are conjoined twin brothers forced to endure the sadistic tortures of these ass-shaped monsters. To survive, they must eat kid skin and work all day constructing bicycles and sex dolls out of dead children.

While the Ass Goblins become drunk on cider made from fermented children, the twins plot their escape. But it won’t be easy. They must overcome toilet toads, cockrats, ass dolls, and the surgical experiments that are slowly mutating them into goblin-child hybrids…

OUT YONDER: Sick And Unseen In America is an excellent essay by Neil Shea, densely illuminated with photography by Andrew Cutraro, released in magazine form via POD operation MagCloud.

I’d read an article about this particular phenomenon last year, but Shea and Cutraro really bring it home in OUT YONDER: the plight of uninsured Americans trying to survive via the use of free healthcare clinics in rural Appalachia. It’s a sad and frightening read.

Issue eight of YETI magazine arrived today. I noticed it because it has a Zola Jesus interview, and I am fond of Nika and her noises. But it’s a monstrous 200-page thing packed with all kinds of interesting stuff. Also, an eighty-minute CD full of rare/unreleased music by shitloads of people. Here’s Yeti’s site, with the information you want. It’s USD $11.95, or USD $19.95 if, like me, you’re ordering from outside the USA. For the amount of content here, that’s really bloody cheap.

Oh, and I got this last week., but I want to mention it: Julianna Barwick’s sublime FLORINE, previously only available as an mp3 EP from eMusic, is now available as a CD. This was one of my very favourite discoveries of 2009, and I’m so glad to now have a physical copy to hand. Julianna’s mailing these out herself, and mine arrived with a nice little note on the back of the envelope.

Oops, bit late with this, so I’m backdating it to before midnight, haha. Fuck the future.

I came across this book a few months back, and was reminded of it yesterday. CYCLONOPEDIA: Complicity with Anonymous Materials, by Reza Negarestani. So I did a little look, and found the website. And, if the author will forgive me, here’s the entire, mental description of the book:

The Middle East is a sentient entity – it is alive!’ concludes renegade Iranian archeologist Dr. Hamid Parsani, before disappearing under mysterious circumstances. The disordered notes he leaves behind testify to an increasingly deranged preoccupation with oil as the ’lubricant’ of historical and political narratives.

An American woman arrives in Istanbul to meet a pseudonymous online acquaintance who never arrives. Discovering a strange manuscript in her hotel room, she follows up its cryptic clues only to discover more plot-holes, and begins to wonder whether her friend was a fictional quantity all along. Meanwhile, as the War on Terror escalates, the US is dragged into an asymmetrical engagement with occultures whose principles are ancient, obscure, and saturated in oil. It is as if war itself is feeding upon the warmachines, leveling cities into the desert, seducing the aggressors into the dark heart of oil …

At once a horror fiction, a work of speculative theology, an atlas of demonology, a political samizdat and a philosophic grimoire, Cyclonopedia is work of theory-fiction on the Middle East, where horror is restlessly heaped upon horror. Reza Negarestani bridges the appalling vistas of contemporary world politics and the War on Terror with the archeologies of the Middle East and the natural history of the Earth itself. Cyclonopedia is a middle-eastern Odyssey, populated by archeologists, jihadis, oil smugglers, Delta Force officers, heresiarchs, corpses of ancient gods and other puppets. The journey to the Underworld begins with petroleum basins and the rotting Sun, continuing along the tentacled pipelines of oil, and at last unfolding in the desert, where monotheism meets the Earth’s tarry dreams of insurrection against the Sun.

After reading that, I decided that I needed a copy — I mean, christ, wouldn’t you? — and it arrived today. I intend to get into this over Xmas, with a bottle of wine and Xela playing through noise-cancelling earbuds while my family spend a day trying to kill each other over possession of the tv remote.

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I am completely failing to keep track of the volume of stuff entering my house lately. I think I’ve even lost the last issue of THE WIRE, still sealed in its plastic bag. So I’m making Received Goods its own category, in an effort to force myself to at least log the physical objects being shoved through the door most days.

I pre-ordered this, and am looking forward to digging into it tonight:

Publisher Creation Books (so glad to see them still around!) have a nice little page on the book:

Starting with the guerrilla media tactics of Industrial music in the late 1970s, the author charts an ongoing trend in electronic music: an increasing amount of sonic quality, recorded output and international contact, accomplished with a decreasing amount of tools, personnel, and capital investment. From the use of laptop computers to create massive avalanches of noise, to the establishment of micro-nations populated largely by sound artists, 21st century sound culture is expanding in its scope and popularity even as it shrinks in other respects. The text of MICRO-BIONIC is built up from exhaustive research into the world of audio extremity, including physical travel to the various ‘hot spots’ where these new sounds are made…

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The author keeps a blog on the book, MICROBIONIC. He seems to be having a bit of a rough time at the moment, in fact.

I’ve always loved electronic music. I have a theory that anyone who lived in Britain through the same period as me has it kind of embedded in them, as it seemed like all children’s tv was scored by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop or their peers.