(Image by Ian Miller)

In our own special way, we recreate the cliché of the lone resuscitant marooned in a post-apocalyptic scenario– the current affairs perceptual chasm explained by a Purification Festival where we retreat to the innermost vaults of our manor and listen to hermetic discographies for months, we flip tarot cards too, disconnected from the outside, our posts scheduled in advance or drafted by a Lovecraft-conditioned coterie of winged monkeys with a penchant for ‘something wave’ premieres (and not used to replying to e-mails, that explains it all).

Everything is gone when we return, wide-eyed and cleansed. Our domotic AI recounts a heavy-duty redux of the financial crisis, traders doing trampoline jump from the top of their golden cathedrals, riots and mob violence, chaos, eventually Plan Omega is implemented. The government releases a harsh cocktail of tranquiliser drugs into the water supply to cool things down.

However, there is an unexpected chemical reaction. Vampirisation, mutation and amnesia. The knowledge base of the human race is wiped out. New gods step into the breach. Emergent tribes configured around random mythologies, brands and memes. Cricket furies, groupon zombies, twitter bees, Kiwanis bastards, frappucino hurling Apple fanboys and k-pop elfs, they fight for territory and devour each other, they can smell us. We gaze from our ramparts and count the ammunitions.  We see their fires burning in the hills, we gasp at their rituals, we blow their heads off, two at a time if Dan’s shooting.

The worse ones in our neighbourhood we call the bowlers because of their haircuts. They are worshippers at the altar of the original harbingers of the altered state, riders of the satanic storm and wearers of the Mysterian tunic. Their life is a creepy Ghost Box stolen docudrama, their game is chicken. They play it when night is at its darkest, burning asphalt around our booby trapped perimeter, shouting gibberish at each other, over the sixties charivari that blasts from their speakers, they illuminate the night with their cyan lightning bolts and hypnotic holograms.

We know they are just playing, they are only naughty kids. Naughty kids with a wild attitude backed up by psychic guns. They are ineffable romantics, and soon they’ll be coming to get us, culminate their sickly courtship with terminal defilement. There’s little we can do about it. We will burn in their inevitable bonfire of explosive plastic, transfixed by the mighty vibration of their unimpeachable drone, they will feast on our charred bodies, and our flesh will dissolve in their lysergic bloodstream. Which is where we were headed from the beginning anyway, it could be worse.

Tropical Popsicle -Always Awake in Shadows

Where Tropical Popsicle display, over a velvet sheet, an array of souvenirs from certain legendary spots along 20jazzfunkgreats favourite psychedelic route – most specifically, mementoes from the Velvet Underground’s funeral of dissonance (also attended by Spacemen 3 and Suicide), skulls off the garage gothick boneyard (pumping up the bass for that extra-syrupy feel), and lumps of satanic coal such as those that power Wooden Shjips stoned locomotive. Name your price!

Their ‘Beach with no Footprints’ 7 is being released by Volar Records (get it there!)

…or perhaps we escape, like Ken Foree, not up into a rattling helicopter,  rather, inside the amniotically flooded belly of a mothership where le ballet codeinique is the only possible dance, protected, warm and safe, aimed at the convergent point past the gate where space and time began, a disintegrating beach where the last survivor of a mirror universe hurls pebbles into the pond of nothingness we are leaving behind, to spawn the stars which are our origin.

Future Shuttle – Rain Source

Future Shuttle’s ‘Water’s Edge’ is a cosmic tapestry, or map, where subtle shifts in tone, pitch, harmony and melody mark the many spots where  a multitude of life-forms will incept in perfect synchrony when the time is ripe, aeons away from each other, so many of them, as many and variegated as pastoral, curved and soft, and also blinding wonders await within this EP, which is also a radio, to stave off their loneliness until they are reunited.

If Espers had orbited Solaris, and listened to its revenants, they would have sounded this way.

‘Water’s Edge’ is out in Holy Mountain.