Tender Trap feature the singer from Talulah Gosh and the drummer from Magnetic Fields. “Talking Backwards” is the lead song out of their new EP, LANGUAGE LESSONS. As you perhaps might expect from the presence of Talulah’s Amelia Fletcher, it’s the sort of oddly biting, dizzy, chiming, Sixties-inflected indiepop like they don’t make no more. I got it in the post on Thursday, put it on the mp3 player and have listened to it about a dozen times, for the weird joy and sweet incision of the words. It’s fun.

You can get it in the US through Amazon: Tender Trap – “Language Lessons”. It’s on amazon.ca too. If you’re in the UK, please use my favourite record shop, Piccadilly Records (just put “tender trap” into the search box there).

The file’s good for seven days, unless I’m asked to take it down before then, and is presented for review purposes only.

“Talking Backwards” – Tender Trap

Skid Row, a 50 square block human dumping ground in downtown Los Angeles… Because of the abundant social services Skid Row is a magnet for the drug addicted, the mentally ill, the criminals, and the helpless. It’s also a magnet for other cities who don’t know what to do with their own problems, so they bring them here and dump them…

William Gibson
on JT Leroy

I guess this is the literary equivalent of phantom limb syndrome, but now that I’m pretty much convinced that J.T. Leroy never existed, I catch myself regretting never having met him. I think that might mean that he was America’s first idoru, in the fullest Japanese sense, paradoxically manifesting mainly on our oldest mass-media platform, the printed word.

All details here

Headed into London on business later today, not back until Friday afternoon or thereabouts. Try not to destroy all life on Earth until then. Ta.

– W

Digitalis Recordings say of Keijo:

Keijo hails from Jyväskylä, Finland – a small town in the north that claims to be the center of the universe. In the sprawling Finnish underground, Keijo is the wise sage who everyone admires. In his 52 years, he has travelled the world twice and seen his share of turmoil. He was nearly killed in a motorcycle accident and still bears a metal plate in his skull as a constant reminder. But these experiences have been essential in shaping the sound world he constructs with his fingertips.

Through the fine Digitalis, I obtained a copy of Keijo’s limited edition EP “Palla, Blown From Here.” It’s a strange and wonderful thing; tranced, stranged-out and complex acoustic compositions sung in a combination vocal style that moves between folk and Tuvan throat singing. The following mp3 link is good for seven days:

Keijo – “Palla, With The Cattle.”

Digitalis have sold out of the EP, but a quick look on Google shows that some other retailers seem to have it.

All details here

Mer’s right, Lana — you’re supernatural.

http://www.wolfskin.ws: minisite for the forthcoming 3-issue serial WOLFSKIN. Barbarian fantasy, the Viking sagas and Samurai fiction fused into a single story of weird history and apocalyptic violence. Written on a dare from the publisher, who loves all that manly Conan stuff, and illustrated by Juan Jose Ryp, who did ANGEL STOMP FUTURE in the Apparat Singles.

Renowned scientist James Lovelock says he believes the world has passed the point of no return for climate change, and civilization is unlikely to survive.

In an extraordinarily pessimistic new assessment published in Monday’s Independent, Lovelock suggests efforts to counter global warming cannot succeed, and that, in effect, it is already too late. Lovelock now believes Earth and human society face nearly complete disaster, and sooner than nearly anybody realizes.

He writes, “Before this century is over, billions of us will die, and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic, where the climate remains tolerable.”

(and here’s Lovelock’s article.)

Researchers studying supplies of copper, zinc and other metals have determined that these finite resources, even if recycled, may not meet the needs of the global population forever. According to the study, if all nations were to use the same services enjoyed in developed nations, even the full extraction of metals from the Earth’s crust and extensive recycling programs may not meet future demand…

(In other news, writer requests that planet’s name be changed from “Earth” to “Retard Club”.)

Apple Computer has requested a set of trademarks for a mobile telephone service featuring music, video, email, and Internet functions, according to applications at the US Patent and Trade Office.

The Cupertino-based company asked to lock in the “Mobile Me” name for handheld devices as well as accompanying mobile telephone service, according to the trademark applications. The telephone service would provide “digital music from local or global communications networks” as well as online databases “in the fields of music, concerts, videos, radio, television news” and more, the applications state…

The US Supreme Court has upheld a law allowing doctors in the state of Oregon to help terminally ill patients die, in a defeat for the Bush administration.

Justices voted 6-3 to back the law, under which doctors are thought to have assisted with at least 208 suicides. The ruling could free other states to pass laws like Oregon’s, which is the only one of its kind in the US.

New Chief Justice John Roberts was in the minority in the court’s first major case on ethics since he joined it…

All details here

(Sent to my mailing list 28 March 2005, god only knows what I’d been drinking:)

Nature is filth. It smells of animal shit and rotting things. Streets can be rinsed by the agency of small vehicles with washing apparatus. Rinsing the world’s wildlife would be incredibly awkward and time-consuming.

Therefore, we are supposed to pave over the world in washable materials and then go and find another one.

Saving the universe from the stench of dogshit one planet at a time.

We are Space Heroes.

And dogs smell bad.

The end. Applause. Send me speed and breasts now.

– W

I found this on a website containing vintage photographs of cowboys from the old West. And it just kind of struck me as…well, the guy on the right looks a bit like… am I fucking seeing things?

(Jabbering about futurity to my email journal, 2 March 2005:)

So, while some fuckwit was spoofing my account, I was laying in bed scratching my immense testicles and thinking about the New.

Last night I watched a bit of an old documentary about rave culture, BETTER LIVING THROUGH CIRCUITRY, wherein Genesis P-Orridge talks about putting together his pseudonymous early acid house project, Jack The Tab.

I was amused to note that the label on the first pressing had a John Byrne Superman drawing on it. Hard to imagine anyone less acid than John Byrne.

Old Genesis — then in the early days of his self-transformation into a hermaphrodite, looking and sounding like a posh middle-aged English housewife — was talking about the zeitgeist of 86-88, when acid house was starting to happen. Kind of existing as a massive potential charge in ideaspace/the superflow. He talked about how people were seeming to converge on the ideas from different places. He could see the future forming in front of him.

And then we were off. Acid house, rave culture, indie-dance, cyberdelic culture, all that.

Which brings me back to rainy March 2005. With retro-rock, “nu-metal”, electroclash and a handful of other mini-movements rotting in the street. Indie-folk is waving its tankard of carrot juice somewhere in the background, to the hideous howl of Joanna Newsome fucking a harp with a potato.

In any given place and time, there’s a bunch of little movements. Behind the splash of acid, there was also the best guitar music ever in ’88, for instance. With culture more fractured than it’s ever been, it only makes sense that there’d be more mini-movements than great groundswells. And, you know, it’s entirely possible that Devendra Banhart has enough things in common with Connor Oberst that we are in fact on a journey into the future that ends in a bedroom stinking of cheap beer and incense with tear-stained wankrags under the bed and a copy of Johnathan Livingstone Seagull on the floor.

But it doesn’t feel new, does it?

People like cLOUDDEAD and MOP are getting some new noises out of hip-hop, dance is still throwing out new mutations every few months, I love the surreal cabaret of the Dresden Dolls, the Nervous Cabaret and The Tigerlilies (who have been around forever), 8-bit Game Boy electro is still developing…

But, see, part of my job is divining the future. And I find myself almost missing those simpler days — perhaps pre-internet days? — when you could feel the place humming with the presentiment of a convergent temporary future.

Music is very quick to make, which is why it tends to signpost the future. Jack The Tab was nailed
down in two days. There’s really only one mass-communication artform that works at a similar
speed.

And that’s comics.

(A note to my mailing list from Feb 28 2005:)

It’s 6am in Los Angeles. And, somewhere in Hollywoodland, Martin Scorcese still prowls the streets, looking for a large man from Queens to fuck right in the eyesocket.

Still reeling from the impossible notion that an eighty-hour-long film featuring the box office gold
of Leonardo DiCaprio in a top hat was somehow not Oscarworthy, the man’s brain must be full of
blood bubbles this morning. How could the Academy reject the raw dramatic tension of an obscenely rich man and the insoluble problem of how to spend all his fucking money while looking for fresh milk bottles to fill with his thick green urine?

If only he’d played Katharine Hepburn himself. He did okay in his cameo roles, right? A pair of jodhphurs and a fine caking of carmine lipstick, and he’d have one of those little gold men to fondle too. And then he could beat Harvey Weinstein to death with it.

(Written to my mailing list, Dec 17 2004:)

I am listening to the Radio Clash Xmas podcast in the pub. And I have just heard the worst thing in the world.

It’s the vocals from Right Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy” put to the music from Kraftwerk’s “The Model.”

It is an entire level of hell more frightening than either William Shatner’s version of “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds” or Leonard Nimoy’s Bilbo Baggins song.

I will hunt these people down and put swordfish in their arses.

That is all.

– W

All details here

All details here

It seems likely that the world and all its continents were discovered by a Chinese admiral named Zheng He, whose fleets roamed the oceans between 1405 and 1435. His exploits, which are well documented in Chinese historical records, were written about in a book which appeared in China around 1418 called “The Marvellous Visions of the Star Raft”.

Next week, in Beijing and London, fresh and dramatic evidence is to be revealed to bolster Zheng He’s case. It is a copy, made in 1763, of a map, dated 1418, which contains notes that substantially match the descriptions in the book…

(Via 3Quarks)