Across seismic tidal waves on the most dangerous oceans in any parallel universe you may care to mention, Captain Dandi Wind sails her neon viking boat to lands ripe for plundering. Her fearless crew of indie-brute oarsmen row to the crisp beat of a Korg drum sequencer. Dandi stands fast at the helm, fluorescent tube spear with the head of a non-believer skewered to the tip in one hand, and blood stained smiley face shield in the other, torrential rain lashes her rave-panda painted face but she stays in place, strong and never faltering.

The ship crashes onto the beach and the crew of Nordic neon are lead to certain victory over boredom by their elastic limbed queen of pantomime synth-rock hellfire. Later, they roast their defeated adversaries and praise the Lord Viking Robot for the delight of this cannibalistic meal.

Dandi Wind – Searching Flesh (Revision)

This particular battle cry is taken from the cheap as chips remix album, Sacrificial, which you may pillage from Summer Lovers Unlimited should your viking hearts desire it.

In a separate camp under the SLU flag, Twin Crystals are about to release an amazingly limited edition 10″ of demos, entitled No Clinics. Our brother-in-arms, Sean Orr, felt compelled to write this from the front-line after seeing Twin Crystals do it live:

“Our hero awoke. He was somewhere. He had just returned through the shapeless void of nowhere, and now here, the only thing he knew, was that he had to be somewhere else. He tried to move away from it, but it would follow him. He kept moving, at first through the maze of the dirty village streets, then towards the sea.

A crowd had gathered, there on the shore, as unsure of why they were there as the man striding so apparently with confidence towards them. But it was not, as we now know, a stride that begat confidence. Only a stride that begat an opaque void, a vast shifting semi-nothing; at times clear and purposeful like the work he had done on the fields, at others a menacing glitch, an image ill-formed and muddled. There was a boat waiting for him, he had seen it before. The crowd could very well be an angry mob; they could very well be the ones to take him from his dream state to the shores of reality. They, of course, were both, and neither. It was clear now that they were all there to row the battered skiff, but why and where were not. Our hero graced the helm, ignoring the mass of figures behind him.

The image was sharpening. A girl. A woman. A princess? The last person to enter the boat was a small boy, disguised earlier by the confusion, and yet somehow not affected by it. He had a drum, and beat it as purposefully as the rhythm of an unfinished dream. The crew, unbeknownst to themselves, began howling, chanting, yelling at the hero. He stood stoically at the helm, taking it all in with an air of grace not suited to his farmer’s rags. He closed his eyes. There she was. The howling swirled and coalesced and formed and mixed above an eerie ocean mist forming shapes and breaking off. Maybe a week had passed. Maybe a month. The howling never abated, the hero’s visions never appeased. They had reached the shore, but it was a non-event.

They laboured through the dunes, but it was meaningless. They shouted through swamp and crag, eating their screams for sustenance. A clearing; an army without general gathered above a banal brick castle, as grey as the skies and neutral as a stand of oaks. For the first time the howling ceased, the mob lay still on the moist earth. Princess. Our hero stepped forward, the mob collapsed in exhaustion, except for one: the boy whose beat had drove them into a frenzy. The two marched victoriously down the slope towards the army. Some rumbling amongst the shine of armour, then more. Then tears, and screams and moans of relief. They had been gathered here for months, maybe a year. They started to break off into what appeared a well rehearsed formation, but they had never done this before. Princess. Closest to the wall the men, once as brave as lions, now naked and exposed climbed onto each others shoulders. Closer to the hero a wall of shields was raised, and angled, shining like angels. The soldiers, although unaware at the time, were making some sort of ramp up to the castle walls. It took only minutes. The beat whipped them like slaves. Princess! The hero stepped onto the first shield, rickety. Then the second, sturdy. Then the third, a vision. Then the fourth, clarity. And so on, as the boy stayed behind, crying. For this was not a tragedy. This was pre-destined. There was no army behind the wall, no wizard or chimaeras. Just a girl locked in a room. Princess.”

Twin Crystals – Princess

Epilogue -
This post is tagged with rave