A little piece of deep time, from way back in my formative past. Good night.

The weekend doesn’t stop strange people saying things on the internet, oh no:

* Solstice Night Open Mic (21jun09) – indeed, this is the weekly open thread for people to say things on the internet, usually ranting about their lives, declaiming peculiar manifestos of the future or showing inappropriate photos of themselves

* Unconventional Recipes – some of these are just worrying

* Tumblr – feed your tumblarity

* 8tracks Mixtapes – because you like music and so do we

Fucking hell, that’s savage stuff.

That is yes nine fucking percent of someone basically gathering eight tons of hops and punching you repeatedly in the face with them. This beer is just fucking madness in a bottle. There are tones of toffee and chocolate in there, but mostly it’s just successive regiments of evil and vengeful hops detonating landmines inside your head.

Possibly shouldn’t have sunk half a litre on an empty stomach no.

If you like bitter, Hardcore IPA is essentially the uber-bitter. In terms of sheer brutality, it has cut the heads off all other bitters. There can be only one. And it is in my stomach, beating up antibodies, as we speak.

It’s a good day: "musical travel agent" Philippe Petit has new sounds up on his MySpace player.

For some months I have been working on soundtracks whose focus be upon the use of sound and dimension. "Cordophony" is a series gathering contemporary/acoustic "stringed grandeur" + wing instruments with movements of masses of sound, filled with collected field-recordings, vanguard soundscapes, manipulations of glass and vinyls…

I am not a musician and even if I create some original music I’d rather be introduced as a "musical travel agent" than a composer. I try to tell a story, with a beginning and an end, invite you to share my world for a while. I edit and cut "sound-images", to process textures and their resonances into vertiginous travellings of tones ; conjuring up flashes of black & white grainy timbres, behind-the-sound close-ups, addictive stop-motion harmonic effects…

And, if you haven’t already seen it, Petit’s description of his DJ work is worth consideration:

a DJ is not only an instrument for dancing but as a living musical library I should also take the audience to a new cultural trip / discovery. I want to entertain listeners and to open new "doors of perception"…

1. beware of dog and bears, 2. bodies aligning, 3. look up

• Went To The Forest
  darkfolk
  (tags:music )

Kieron Gillen just got published in MARVEL HEROES, a British-created Marvel anthology kid’s comic for the British market. And it’s published in the British tradition for such things, as Gillen explains:

…it’s a proper comic. That being, a comic with a free gift on the front. A gun which fires a foam rocket! People often wonder how they could improve Watchmen. My answer would be to attach a foam-rocket launcher to the front. Hell, it’s a way to improve anything. I dug Anna Karenina, but I’d have dug it more with a model train tied to the front.

There is a photo at the link, but I warn you: I think Gillen’s growing his frightening hobolicious hedge of a beard back.

Via Chairman Bruce, this is actually a bit creepy. Stweet: a fusion of geolocative Twitter and Google Maps, utilising Street View wherever possible. Fascinating.

Happy Solstice Day, internet scum. Weekend broadcasting commences.

(Madame Zo)

Tonight, a brief piece from La Musica Notturna Delle Strade di Madrid by Luigi Boccherini: Passacalle, as performed by Le Concert des Nations. Some of you will remember this in a slower, differently arranged form, appearing at the end of MASTER AND COMMANDER. Which is, in fact, the first time I heard it, and I ended up hunting down mp3s. It’s a quiet recording, and needs playing quite loud for full effect, I find.

Good night, internet.

BDSM JESUS DRESS-UP. Via Slinka, naturally enough.

Now it’s time for BDSM Jesus Dressup! Dress Jesus up in any of these exciting outfits and punish Him for all your sins! You can dress Him up again and again until He can’t take it any more! Just drag the items to Him with your mouse and they’ll snap right into place! Don’t be so shy, you know He wants it just as bad as you wanna be forgiven for it!

Molly Friedrich:

Well, I had been intending to talk Vodafone UK into upgrading me from my beloved-but-battered Nokia N95 8GB to the long-coveted Nokia N97. But I’ve just read a bunch of reviews, including one by the sainted Stephen Fry, and they’re all awful. It’s a resistive touchscreen that comes with a stylus? If I want one of those I can necromantise the old Handspring Visor with phone module that I have mouldering in a drawer somewhere. And that hideous, unfunctional-looking keyboard? I am very disappointed.

The iPhone 3GS is of no real use to me: I’m neither an Apple user nor an iTunes user. I’ve fiddled with a G1, and the build quality felt a bit flimsy to me (I’m used to Nokias, remember, which are sawn out of Finnish girders). The Pre isn’t going to get her fore some while, and, as an ill-used old Treo user, I’m kind of cautious about any new Palm phone anyway.

Any recommendations for a clever new phone?

Brew Dog’s Trashy Blonde beer has caused a split in our household. I liked the hoppy bite, but thought it came down too hard on the bitter tones and had a sour finish. My daughter Lilith, however, a beer connoisseur ever since she was old enough to yank a pint out of my hand and say "bugger off, old man, it’s mine now"… she actually likes Trashy Blonde better than Punk IPA. She says that sometimes simpler is better, and that Trashy Blonde is big and fun and incredibly drinkable.

Why, yes, I am aware that I’m doomed, thank you.

I’ve been neglecting the internet hole this week. Let’s see what’s happening in there:

* FREAKANGELS Episode 59 – endless discussion of Luke’s junk

* Wizard Philly show this weekend – the men of Avatar Press are off to molest you in darkened corridors

* PHONOGRAM 2: The Singles Club – there’s a new issue out

* Moving To Detroit – Trixie Bedlam’s started a trend (to pedants: this is a joke)

* UNDERGROUND by Parker and Lieber – preview of Jeff Parker & Steve Lieber’s new comic

InfraNet Lab is regularly mind-blistering, but its coverage of an exhibition called Out of Water: Innovative Technologies in Arid Climates is just fascinating. Land-stamping, sietch infrastructure and plans to save LA by letting the ocean eat a chunk of it, which also produces this lovely quote:

Los Angeles is a managed fantasy defined and sustained by its aging infrastructural legacy…

X Planes is basically your one-stop shop for weirdarse historical technoporn. Discovered it while I was doing research for IGNITION CITY.

experimental aircraft. exotic aeromachines. oddities. sleek silver cigars. pedal-o-trons. soviet hive-mind bombers. aerial joy. the olden days.

"Using humidity, temperatures and electromagnetic and sonic frequencies that parapsychologists have associated with haunted spaces, this project aims at building an environment that feels "haunted": a non-visual architecture…"

Because it’s Friday and we love you.