Thursday, September 28, 2006  11:00 pm 

A Space Odyssey (A True Story In 3 Parts)

Alien, whos name cannot be spelt out on a puny Earthling keyboard, is bored of his home planet (again too impossible to spell), so he is on a one way trip to Earth, hitching a ride to our fair planet on the back of a passing meteor. He hurtles through quasars and nebullas until he enters our solar system in a blinding white star-studded flash, all the while listening to the Avida 12″ he got on import. He is particularly fond of the title track:

Avida - Il Grillo E La Formica

Such hopes and dreams Alien has of Earth and the wondourous times he will have. He’s seen ‘The Man Who Fell To Earth’ so he knows how not to go about it, he’s wishing for a nice ‘E.T.’ styled adventure with a kicking italo electro soundtrack.

Unfortunately the meteor he latched onto lands slap bang in the middle of Hackney Marshes, damn, he was hoping for LA. Oh well. As he saunters bleary-eyed through the dingy streets of E9 a curious sound strikes at his ear hole from a council estate window; Grime.

He likes grime, the way its all dangerous and weird sounding, like two alien sounds stuck together in a way neither he nor anyone else has never heard before. Like Super Mario Bros. having a gunfight with Pacman with the sound of internet dial up dialling and fax machines sending information put to a beefy bass beat. He immeadiately rushes to the nearest record store and picks up a Skepta dub plate, standard.

Skepta - Private Caller

He has the time of his life at Grime raves, he gets into MCing, the grime warriors going crazy for his freaky language styles. He cuts some records with Jammer and JME, but when the XL Recordings deal falls through he’s old hat and its time to try something new, and besides Hoxton raves are crap anyway. So he moves from Hackney and heads to the seashores of Shoreditch-on-sea, or Brighton as people who actually live there prefer to call it.

He’s heard from all the property TV shows that Brighton is ‘funky’ and he wants to soak up that Bohemian lifestyle, maybe opening up a juicebar in the lanes cos apparently theres a gap in the market. He picks up a copy of the new NME Student Guide and gets clued up on the cool places to visit, so he heads over to The Freebutt where he rubs shoulders with 80’s Matchbox and The Macabees. Here, through the shoddy speakers, he hears all manner of deliciously evil and nasty kitten slaying sounds: the infernal rantings of wizards over walls of acidised guitars, bone crushing EBM sirens and rave tunes torn to shreds and fed through fucked noise boxes to create stuff like Die Princess Die:

Die Princess Die - Lights Of The Night

With a glint in his singular cycloptic eye he grins and thinks to himself: ‘I’m finally home’. He also thinks, fuck the juicebar theres too many anways.

-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-

Continuing the general malaise of cool that the NME have bestowed upon The Freebutt, its upstairs bar known as The Penthouse has a Best Of The Penthouse nite on Saturday 30th September hosted by Melting Vinyl as part of the Brighton Live events. The following people will be taking it in half hour turns to hurt your ears so come and get drunk, its free, loud, abrasive and vicious all at the same time:

International Colouring Contest/Nihon Go Go
20 Jazz Funk Greats
Piss On It
Heidi Heelz
Lilo Feast
Miss Pain

After, go to the Volks to see our beloved Sam Devenmiles doing a rare Brighton set, the kids from Tramp and Dave Lightyear downstairs woo yay sorry this is not a very good zineflyer but I gotta run to watch Husbands playing live woo yay x888

labels >> xxjfg