Dread at the Controls:

In which our hero reveals that we’re fucked and we’re all going to die.

Here’s the good news: The Beast isn’t coming. Here’s the bad news: He isn’t coming ‘cos we scare him too much.

Blind Willie Johnson: Dark was the Night (Cold was the Ground)

Yeah, it seems that despite some of our more fervent wishes, the earth isn’t going to end in a hail of scalding ice, to a soundtrack of inhuman piping played in blasphemous paws. No. It’s going to go by accident, alone and unloved, sniveling in the corner of an empty universe: unwatched, unguarded, desolate.

It’s a monster bummer, to be sure. But, search down deep inside your cavernous maw of despond, and you’ll find something cold and hard and imperious. Something that cannot be destroyed by fear because it is chisseled from fear itself. The rastafarians have known about it for years, but it remains useful to those of us not connected with any particular faith. The dark matter of which I speak is Dread.

Dread: the spirit loa of inevitable destruction. The cavern at the bottom of a deep sea, encrusted with black crystals and guarded by shining eyes. It’s in the chanting of monks and the throb of dub. The knife on bone scraping of metal over a steel stringed guitar. It’s a howl so silent it shows in the reflections of skrying mirrors. Wolves use it to hunt, priests to pray. It’ll keep you sane and drive you backwards. A symbiote: it feeds off you even as you feed of it. It’s nourishment, kidda. Reeeal tasty like.

It sounds like this:

Popol Vuh: Vuh

This is something you’ll have felt before: You’re in the supermarket and you’ve reached the till. Just as you’re about to go for a plastic bag in which to wrap your lovingly picked organic produce you stop.

Voiceover: Now, that produce would fit perfectly well into the bag you’re already carrying, wouldn’t it?

*Nods to camera*

Voiceover: You would be doing the environment a favour, AND making yourself feel good at the sametime, wouldn’t you?

*Nods to camera*

Voiceover: Well what are you waiting for? Do EVERYONE a favour!

Grinning, you shovel your items into the bag and walk from the supermarket swinging your hips. Damn, this DOES feel good! Why didn’t you think of this before? Why, if everyone did something like this at least once a day…well, there’s a chance, isn’t there? We can make it after all!

You stop dead in your tracks as the last aeroplane flies overhead. As the last car roars by in a cloud of black static. As the last mobile phone spastically squawks into life. As the last christian blames you for the death of the first child. As the last polar bear carcass washes down the centre of Oxford street.

What’s that feeling? Not fear. Not despond. That’s Dread, kid. Heavy as lead. And its eating you alive.

But Dread is POWER. It is imperious. Holy. The ghost of a king haunting a church organ, blastin the same three notes over and over and over and over and over. ‘Til the walls shake and the ghost king takes off his crown and stands imperious atop the tallest tower and yells:

I FUCKING TOLD YOU SO! I FUCKING TOLD YOU SO! I FUCKING TOLD YOU SO! I FUCKING TOLD YOU SO! I FUCKING TOLD YOU SO!

And then comes the greatest of all reckonings and recognitions:

Mankind is going to get the shit kicked out of it: Good.

We’re all going to die. Good.

You’re not special and you’re not clever: Good.

If humankind is a virus, as has been postulated by some of our more sci-fi minded thinkers over the years, then we have reached the end of our lifecycle. We have eaten and destroyed our host body and have turned upon each other. Viral cannibalism. Yum. And yet, many of these thinkers go on to state, does that not simply mean that the human race is about to enter another state of being? A heightened, more liquid state of emotion and play, wherein the basic building blocks of life can be taken apart and rearranged at will? Do we dare to hope? Do we dare to dream?

Of course we fucking do.

But what nourishes us as we wait for this awesome transmogrification? As we sit out the darkness before dawn atop the burning hill? Dread, my friend. In Dread is strength.

The children of Dread are doing their waiting. They will wait ’til the end of days. They’re not sad or despondant. They have sickles for eyes and wear armour made of human tears. They are waiting patiently for the games to end and the business of real life to begin. I believe that children are our future. To be honest, it’s not like I have much of a choice.

Death Comes Along: Children of the Death

The rest is…silence.

LINKS

Blind Willie Johnson
Popol Vuh
Death Comes Along
Grant Morrison
Vernor Vinge
Arthur C. Clarke

FRIDAY 17th of August DIY promoter/ record label Upset the Rhythm take over the DO

CORE CLUB 11-4
£4 REPLY TO THIS POST BRUV
BRING ID (NUS card is enough)

HEALTH play live: trio of Los Angeles noise maniacs who use drums to build a fucked up pyramid of bones inside which fierce wild-eyed monsters, say Liars, Boredoms or Deerhunter would be happy to throw a party, call up the ghosts, paint the walls red, you know the score.

HEALTH- Triceratops

Recently remixed by Crystal Castles, bound for very great things.

Do & UPSET THE RHYTHM DJ play the party tunes that rock the summer, donna.

LOVE & LIZARDS