Hi there. Genuine Guy here. On occasion, my merciful masters at 20jfg allow me a self-indulgent, first person persona in order to recount to you the real life yarns of my missionary adventures, and to bringeth ye the musics of my real life friends.

When not firing around their hive mind as series of electrical pulses, my earthly vessel is inclined to be a musician of sorts. Recently, said vessel was packed off to the mythical town of Berlin, on the new Government program of Compulsory National Service for Aspiring Artists (CNSAA).

A citadel of legend amongst the grubby peasants of the British villages, many pilgrims have returned with tales of a fantastical megalopolis floating in the sky, where every man, woman, child and animal speaks the empirical mother tongue with more eloquence than Stephen Fry. They say it could be easily conquered. They say that there, rhythmical foreign musics devoid entirely of melodic content pour out of every tavern, and when combined with the magical powders of the Polish alchemists, can enable a man to go without sleep for 3 whole days and nights.

Many also claimed to have bought an entire manorship for only one groat and, word has it, that a wondering minstrel can make a fine penny, without the humiliating supplementation of cleaning up pig swizzle. So without hesitation, I threw down my mop and set sail for the promised land.

As we step off the transport, I am greeted with a most terrifying sight. Soiled, famished artists are scattered across the streets amidst a clutter of human debris. Rabid sub-humanoid creatures, believed to have once been musicians roam dark alleyways. Intangible blobs of monolingual DNA with decent record collections ooze under club doorways. Crimson-eyed expatriated beasts, once handy with a pencil, hunt for warm flesh. Now only suitable for extras work in a David Cronenburg movie which is never going to be made, these once bright, creative souls scurry about trying to find a mouldy crust of bread to eat. A tear wells up in my eyepiece.

Concerned, I sit down next to the most apparently lucid of these specimens. Frothing through his blackened teeth he tells me that he was once a very rich man, earning several gold pieces from entertaining the king’s court. But since the invasion of the Troubadours he has not been able to earn so much as a thruppence happeny, and his only form of sustenance is from the scraps of unidentifiable, cylindrical meat he find traces of in white paper on the street.

Suddenly, we are set upon by a pack of ravenous conceptual artists. Too weak to move, my new friend tells me to save myself, as he is done for anyway. I run and I run and I stop, briefly to turn my i-pod up to 10, to drown out the horrific noise of them tearing his corpse apart.

Bad move. As the rest of them close in, I think about how much i miss my pigs and I prey that if I make it out of here alive, I will return to, and embrace their swizzle. I turn Sigor Ros up to 11. A feral man who looks likes he might once have been an actor takes a swipe at my face with his unsheared nails. I manage to dodge. Having never bothered to sort out health insurance, he raises his disease ridden arm again in order to end my naive existence. He is about to lunge when an arrow pierces his rotten torso. He drops to the ground to reveal a native girl, who proceeds to take every last one of them out with her bowstaff.

I thank her for saving me. She speaks English. At least one part of the prophecy was true. She tells me that in order to not perish here, I must learn the language and the ways of her people. We travel back to her village on the u-bahn, and I learn of a land once divided that has now learnt to live in relative peace and unity. If only my people could do the same.

Over time, I slowly integrate into her tribe and we fall in love.

Just as we are about to kiss, my earthly vessel becomes lifeless and drops to the ground. I wake up in a control room in London. I am surrounded by guys from the CNSAA wanting to know what they can glean from this place, and how they too can score with the natives. Turns out the whole operation is a huge Government conspiracy, and they are planning to ship every single creative in the UK out there so they don’t have give 2 swizzles about them themselves.

I tell them where to stick it and manage to escape to Clunes house.

Artwork by Tim Hill

Clunes is a band consisting of members of The Human RACE and Tom James Scott. Steadily, they entertain the London improv circuit and beyond, and you can occasionally see them at shows put on by our pals Upset the Rhythm. Operating in the same eccentric sonic realm of the British Empire first colonised by the Radiophonic Workshop in the late 50′s, it is our pleasure to present them to you today.

Clunes – Thru the Weeds

Thru the weeds is the sound of Black Dice awaking in 60s London. Hoping on the routemaster bus they attend a lecture by Unit Delta Plus. The result is this charming psychedelic banger that would like to be friends with you here today. An intense, insectoid stomp that, if nudged up a few beats per minute, wouldn’t sound out of place in the abstract techno clubs of Berlin. They asked me if I could do this for them, but it already sounds like a finished classic which I would only ruin through tampering.

So instead I did this with something from the parcel they gave me. This is a demo, incidentally. Its destiny is as yet unknown.

Clunes and Genuine Guy – Finality 2

We are presenting this to you today as the first step into a new, collaborative phase for 20jfg. Here, through a process of filesharing we have unwittingly managed to produce something we would never have come up with on our own. Whether or not the resulting piece is a success, is entirely up to you. But the very idea of this kind of collaborative process thrills me in a way conventional remix does not. Because in the words of my benefactors, we can learn much from each other. And, when we engage directly with each other’s ideas and techniques in this way, we can learn even more.

More details on this project to come, but for now, as we are currently in the radiophonic realm on this most radiophonic of webzines we must pay homage to its creator.

Daphne Oram’s slight omission from the legend of electronic music development is a mystery to me. Maybe it was because she was forced to leave the Workshop and spend the rest of her career tinkering in her bedroom. Perhaps it is because she was not also an important academic like Pierre Schaffer (although she did write books and give on the subject). Maybe it was because she was a woman working in the male dominated area of musique concrete in the male dominated area of post-war Britain. Whatever the reason, I leave you with the notion that this lady was a total genius. Here, her rock n roll tinkering ultimately bringing us some kind of proto drum n bass.

Daphne Oram – Snow

Snow is taken from the definitive compilation of her work ‘Oramics’ which has been out for a couple of years now but is well worth getting hold of. Check clunes myspace for a discog and you can probably buy some things direct from them.

This post is dedicated to all the good people of Berlin and Jacques Attali.

Epilogue -
This post is tagged with Genuine Guy prog radiophonic rave