The 4am is a mixtape file containing nothing but music donated directly by new and/or unsigned acts. The 4am is of no set length and is released on no set schedule. The 4am is mixed down to 128kbps. The 4am will live forever. But The 4am is so cold and it does not know why.

The 4am needs music: If you want your music to be played on The 4am, email your 128kbps-plus mp3 files directly to warrenellis@gmail.com.

8: Staging For Tomorrow

Be warned, there’s some long ones in here again.

Hate In The Box stick a used needle in that metallic vein of electro/goth/industrial/IDM that I think Deathboy once tagged as “futurepunk.” I like sawing guitars, hails of tinny breaks and girls singing about bad things. And I like opening up with something with a bit of pace.

Otto DeFaye’s “Murder One” has been hypnotising me for days. The bass thumps and the fog of guitars interact in bizarre ways, and do strange things to my chest. It fascinates me, and I find myself kind of wandering around inside of it. A great squalling beauty.

“Death Machine” is in demo state — thanks, Holoscene, because I love it. I’ve liked stuff by Holoscene before, but I find the raw condition of this distant, melancholy postrock study gives it a vital human skin and pulse. Holoscene say: “If you can think of a genre for it we would be most grateful. Using the term ‘chamber music for the end of civilisation’ is both a mouthful and pretty crap!”

I always liked the term “Transcendental Etudes” — an etude, or study, being a piece of music designed to hone and express virtuosity, and the Transcendental Etudes being twelve compositions by Liszt so ferociously, brain-incineratingly difficult to perform that, it was once said, probably only a dozen people alive on the planet at any one time are qualified to even attempt to play them. Which does Holoscene no good at all, but the datum amuses me, and we’re full-service entertainment here at warrenellis.com. Where was I?

NAVEL4EVE provides “The End Of A Planet” from her last EP, a collection of crookedly pretty, sinister and timecrossed antipop songs. The strange girl in the back of the club whom you know you really shouldn’t talk to, but that voice…

Got an email from Cory Brown from Absolutely Kosher Records, saying: “We just released the debut record by a trio from San Francisco called 60 Watt Kid (the record is self-titled). I attached an MP3 of “Ocsicnarf Nas” off the record because I thought you might like it. There’s also a video here.” And then he went on to discuss the peculiarities of his balls, concluding with: “When I started writing this, I never intended to discuss my balls. Sigh. It always comes back to my balls.” Therefore I had to play this rather wonderful piece of ten-dimensional rock-n’-roll broadcast from the same kind of ether inhabited by (for example) latterday Animal Collective. I mean, I would have played it anyway. But I’m worried that if I didn’t, I’d get treated to another treatise on the supernatural aspects of Cory’s scrote.

It’s New Year in a couple of days (as I write this), so ending with a drinking song fits. I have a terrible weakness for The Poxy Boggards. I know it’s wrong, I know I shouldn’t, but… I have to. I also put this at the end because some of you may listen to this at work, or at home with aged and infirm relatives in earshot, and not everyone will be enthralled by the choral bridge. But fuck it, make them listen anyway, because, in its wrong, awful and deeply uncool way, it is absolutely fucking glorious. Happy New Year.

– W

 

 The 4am: 8 - Staging For Tomorrow [29:11m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (7661)

Hate in the Box – “eLECTRIC dOLLS” (3:05)

Otto DeFaye – “Murder One” (5:53)

Holoscene – “Death Machine” (4:04)

NAVEL4EVE – “The End Of A Planet” (3:45)

60 Watt Kid – “Ocsicnarf Nas” (8:25)

The Poxy Boggards – “Drink Til I Die” (3:40)

If you enjoyed The 4am, please spread the word, linking back to this post.

(Originally written in Bad Signal, 15 October 2007)

The Chemical Brothers do this thing that fascinates me, and so I’m going to bore you with it too.

When they start developing the sound for a new album, they release these things called Electronic Battle Weapons. These are 12-inches that they circulate to DJs containing experimental or work-in-progress pieces; the idea being that the sound can be tested on audiences and DJs both, to sonically prepare the way for the new album.

This fascinates me. The idea of freely distributing experimental pieces just to prime an audience for what may be coming next.

In a way, I suppose I might have done some of that, with the experimental short fiction I used to put on Livejournal, that was eventually folded into DOKTOR SLEEPLESS — much of that stuff, I saw as I was doing it, was starting to lock into each other and becoming the suggestion of a whole.

But it’s interesting to me to imagine doing that in a more structured way. All the Electronic Battle Weapons are numbered. (Which may play into a previously-mentioned half-drunk notion to start giving everything I do Factory-style catalogue numbers, for no other reason than that I found the idea amusing.)

Because theatre is only ever pointless when there’s only five people in the room. And Tony Wilson would rise from the grave to argue with me about that, even — his formative cultural influence being that Manchester Sex Pistols gig where there were only forty people or something in the room (though if you asked around in the 80s, you could find five thousand people who’d swear on a stack of Bibles and porn that they’d been there for it).

(Or the other old saw — only 500 people heard the first Velvet Underground album, but every single one of them went out and formed bands afterwards.)

(Wilson: “Archimedes was on his own in the bath.”)

Wow. That went off the rails fast, didn’t it?

(Additional, 29 December 2007: Tony Wilson, of course, died in poverty. Also, as a tangent of interest, comics artist P Craig Russell has been giving his work “Opus” numbers since, I think, the late 70s. The Chemicals are up to EBW 9, I believe. Tony Wilson’s excellent book 24 HOUR PARTY PEOPLE: WHAT THE SLEEVE NOTES NEVER TELL YOU is FAC 424. His coffin is FAC 501. Theatre, see?)

(It occurs to me, too, that Bill Gibson releasing snippets of SPOOK COUNTRY in his blog had a similar effect. Priming the audience for The New Sound.)

(Originally written in Bad Signal, 24 September 2007)

I first encountered the idea of Monty Cantsin around ’88, though he was created around ’77. Monty Cantsin is a Neoist construct: an open pop star. Because in ’77 they didn’t have the term “open source.” The idea being that artists could choose to record under the name Monty Cantsin, thereby generating a fake oeuvre for a fake pop star, confusing the fuck out of the uninitiated. (See also “Karen Eliot,” “Luther Blissett.”)

There’s no derogatory side to Monty Cantsin – he doesn’t do the work of, say, Alan Smithee, or Harlan Ellison’s damning Cordwainer Bird pseudonym (a name he applies to work that’s been fucked over, allowing him to retain rights and royalty payments regardless).

Monty Cantsin is an artistic joke. Anyone can be Monty Cantsin.

And while having a drink or two last night, the notion came to me: it’d be amusing if comics had one of those. If music has a Monty Cantsin, maybe comics should have a Nemo Woodbine. An open source comics creator. Sometimes she’s a cartoonist. Sometimes he’s a writer.

And the best thing about Nemo Woodbine might be that she’s granted her copyright and royalties in perpetuity to the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund or something. Anything he earns beyond his page rate, and the rights to whatever she did, live with the Fund: her gift to the medium.

Just throwing the idea out there for someone to do something with, or not.

(Additional, 28 Dec 2007: yes, I mean an opensource creator, not an opensource character)

I got hit by that “24-hour” puke-then-fall-over virus early Boxing Day morning, and have spent from then until now mostly unconscious. As I sit here, everything’s starting to go wobbly again, and so, before I submit to Brain-Go-Away once more, some work links:

Interview with me about the GRAVEL series by Newsarama:

It was actually Garth Ennis’ idea. William Christensen at Avatar went to New York to get smashed with him over the summer, and at some point during the binge Garth said to William, “Why doesn’t Warren write an ongoing series with William Gravel? I’d read that.” And, you know, it’s nice to give your mates something to read…

ANNA MERCURY: new miniseries announced, details and more art etc buried somewhere in this column:

And now I’m going back to bed.

Searches for the term “end of the world” on Jamais Cascio’s OPEN THE FUTURE have gone up eightfold in the last couple of months.

Happy New Year.

(photo by Mer)

• When Will Amy Winehouse Die? – Predict it here!
  (tags: web game heartwarming)

As found in the otherwise maddeningly frustrating first few pages of Barry N Malzberg’s BREAKFAST IN THE RUINS:

“Science fiction is a way of thinking about things.”

– Frederik Pohl

Which may seem like a small notion. But it’s possibly the best working definition of sf I’ve yet come across, insofar as it does the crucial business of inviting the body in front of you to consider sf as a tool with which to understand the contemporary world.

I need this.

Meatpaper is a print magazine of art and ideas about meat. We like metaphors more than marinating tips. We are your journal of meat culture.

And they get major respect for coining the term fleischgeist:

Fleisch?geist (flish’gist’) n. From the German, Fleisch ?meat? + Geist ?spirit.? Spirit of the meat. From Zeitgeist, ?spirit of the times.?

Spirit Of The Meat. Yes.

The alternative heading for this post was “Eat Bear Cocks In Hell, Godboy”:

The Archbishop of Wales, Dr Barry Morgan, has described a rise in “fundamentalism” as one of the great problems facing the world.
He focused on what he described as “atheistic fundamentalism”.

Dr Morgan’s Christmas message comes after the general director of the Evangelical Alliance, the Rev Joel Edwards, compared militant atheists to King Herod in their intolerance of religious faith.

Welcome to Great Britain: a post-Christian country where prime ministers only get elected by not mentioning your invisible space daddy. Of course, not everyone’s gotten the news, as the prime minister who got elected by not mentioning his affection for rumoured deities –

…the former prime minister told the BBC that he had avoided talking about his religious views while in office for fear of being labelled “a nutter”…

– has converted to Catholicism (because there aren’t enough Catholics being born every minute, we presume):

Last year, Mr Blair, who is now a Middle East peace envoy, said he had prayed to God when deciding whether or not to send UK troops into Iraq.

And didn’t that work out well for everyone? One hopes that Richard Dawkins will be along to shank everyone involved soon, if he’s yet stopped laughing at pathological liar Pastor Ted Haggard turning out to be a whoremongering tweaker.

I’ve been answering this question a lot, but word doesn’t seem to have gotten around. The long hiatus on NEWUNIVERSAL has been down to us waiting for the right artist for the job to get free of his other commitments. That artist is a guy called Steve Kurth, and he’s just turned in the pencil art for the first issue of the next arc. A tiny preview of Steve bringing the explodo (see everything kind of bending around the guy in the top panel?):

I put him through the wringer on this first issue, and he responded brilliantly. Here’s a small look at the page of the YOUNG JUDGE BAO manhua I made the poor bastard draw:

This stuff is really going to sing in the inks. Steve’s got another couple of scripts to go before he catches up with me, I think…

Found by a friend on Amazon:

I seem to be in midly disturbing company.

• Ecstasy of St Theresa – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  (tags: dok)

Odd thing. I guess it’s kind of a very slow, social-ranked in-browser Sim City?

Tons of preview material for the upcoming GRAVEL series, background, interview links, script excerpts, just a whole bunch of stuff.

Funniest thing I’ve read all day — a true story from novelist Lucius Shepard:

…Gordon was given a pair of boxing gloves and ushered into the pit. He was in good spirits. A few minutes later, a half-grown chimp was shoved through a door in the pit wall. The chimp sat on its haunches, making “ook-ook” noises, while Gordon circled, his gloves held high. When the chimp did not attack, he said, “This is bullshit,” and demanded his money back. The owner, a lean, balding man, told him he had to anger the monkey to make it fight. Gordon adopted a boxer’s stance and nudged the chimp with his foot, whereupon the chimp leaped up…

Here’s an idea I float out there every couple of years. Was talking to Eliza earlier and it came back to me:

Years back, I stole a term from Bruce Sterling, “ideological freeware” — this predated Creative Commons — and applied it to the notion of web distribution of printed matter.

We were talking in terms of the dearth of good writing about comics, at the time. Simply put, one could create a small magazine about comics and format it for cheap copying in black and white, and free it so anyone could print off copies. And then put it in comics stores. Viral distribution from pixel to print. SAVANT was the one that took up the entire idea, and the first twenty or so numbers of that were fireworks. (I’m talking specifically about web-to-print here, rather than the mags where the PDF was the end result, not the intermediate form. BORDERLINE was the one that did that form best in comics, I think.) Anyway, I covered all this in a column at the time.

What occurred to me after that, that I don’t think anyone picked up, was the broadside format. The single sheet.

The broadside has a centuries-long history as a device for disseminating news and ideas. I mean, flyers go up on the web to be printed off, sure. But it’s not quite the same thing. Getting an idea, or a piece of writing, on a single sheet and saying, yes, print this off, copy it and distribute it wherever you like — that’d be interesting. In web terms, the costs are tiny — host the image on a free hosting site if you’re worried about the bandwidth hit. Use Livejournal or Blogger for the whole thing.