Right now we are at the chrysalis stage, an as yet undisclosed shape metamorphosing inside a pulsating cocoon, perhaps to become Slake Moths, feast on human, animal and xenian souls, and shit bad dreams over the spires of New Crobuzon.

Or maybe something else.

Stare at the black slate that we are and wonder what will come next. But while you do so, impatient with the absence of some basic usability features in our minimal skin, do ask yourselves why the hell would you need more. We have always been about the music and the words that they inspire, we appreciate the potential of the other many platforms into which we can project our tentacles, but at the same time, we enjoy our basic niche, it’s cosy here. It requires more work on your part, we know, the holy books of the internet tell us that for every additional click needed to reach the aleph state, a fraction of our potential audience fades into the ether of somewhere else.

Are you like that, whimsical amoebas floating in the multimedia ocean, forever pushed by ADD winds into whatever source will give you more zeitgeist bang for your temporal buck?

We don’t think so. This was never meant to be easy. This was always meant to be for the seekers.

But don’t worry, we will change. It’s going to take time. In the interim we revel in our purposefulness and simplicity. And keep doing what we have been doing since day one.

Planet Earth is hollow, under its surface lies another black sky illuminated by the proto-sun at the core. During the cold war, the clashing super-powers experimented with inter-tectonic ballistic missiles meant to cruise these underground spaces, and destroy enemy bunkers from below like blind sharks incensed by the scent of ideology. In the same way in which our forebears stared at the sky with fear, those aware of this secret walk the streets staring at the ground, terrorised by the potential rapture, like a claustrophobic version of Tyrone at Gravity’s Rainbow. This feeling of precariousness has inspired a whole gamut of cultural expressions and novel twists in well-known modalities of psychosis.

Of course, California is ahead of the game.

Turrks-Varicose Alley

The anthem for urban death valley ’19 is brought to you by those old friends Bipolar Bear, reincarnated into Turrks in their forthcoming album, Bisbee, out soon in Deleted Art.

Staring with alien eyes into the masses as they march down underground corridors, we become aware of the patterns that underpin this mundane ritual, parcels of energy and information carried by drones fighting a losing war against entropy. This is the daily clash of a decentralised empire where a low signal to noise ratio sends one hand against the other most fratricidally. Via parallel lines embroidered in an illusion of complexity we advance, in monotonous dirge.

But we have the advantage of a collapsed infrastructure and sonic beacons leading us to strange places like a predator hunting in a decaying jungle. It is Thread Pulls who guide us today down orthogonal folds in the belly of the beast with their martial barrage, mechanic yet alive like a neubauten dream set in Nocturnal Arcadia, like This Heat rearranging their Twilight Furniture for some spirit dancing.

Thread Pulls- Weight

We look forward to listen to their debut album in September.

I recall teasing you about the eventual presence of one of Philly’s finest, King Kong Ding Dong, in the pages of this your most dedicated blog. Well, here you go, they have a new album out, it goes by the name of Youth Culture Index and you can download it for free here. Do it, but also buy the CD because what they do deserves strong and enthusiastic support.

And what is it that they do?

They craft epic pieces of psychedelic pop music- if Espers broke into Phil Spector’s manor somewhere in the hills of LA, they would eventually get lost in the labyrinthine and baroque corridors of this haunted place, tired and hungry fall asleep in whichever bedroom they happened to stumble upon first, surrounded by statues of grimacing satyrs and hyeratic nymphs, and they would sleep, and they would dream of the revenants of black ghostgirls with astonishing afros shimmying across the room to the tribal stomp of a heartbreaking ballad. And when they woke up they would go back to their van, grab their instruments and make music beautiful like this. This is what they do.

King Kong Ding Dong- Hot Train

The good folks at Kill Shaman/Bipolar Bear sent us a treasure trove of goodies, we will be dropping them here and there like bread crumbs which are booby traps in the bloodsplattered paving stones of the Minotaur’s Lair.

Let us begin with one off Bipolar Bear’s recent Manbase 7’’ on Labil. Check them out once again punching the metronome off the top of the piano and getting on with it. They have the oscillation in them and not that many bands can say that, it’s all about that fat stumbling, shuffling and pounding towards the erection of a cage of barbed wire where you find yourself trapped with a swarm of beautiful feral beasts intent on shredding your face off, fly like a Butterfly and kick like a mule, there is no other way out.

Bipolar Bear- Manbase

Fabulous Diamonds’ was 20JFg tribal ghost dance album of last year. You can imagine our excitement when the nice people at Albert’s Basement sent us this version of Cemetery included in the Warm Cupboard LP, where the original has been pumped with even more echo and wobble. It sounds as if someone had made peanutbutter with the sounds of the No Wave compilation, spread it over a nice slice of organic bread, dipped it in a fat jar of codeine syrup, taken a bite and gone to have a chat with the spirits. Yummy in that special kind of way.

Fabulous Diamonds- Cemetary Dub

We love the sound self-harm messthetics of the glue wave massive as much as the next guy, you can believe it buster. We also love it when bands go for the big soulcrusher ‘give us a stadium so we can tear it to pieces like a prehistoric lizard with Zenta laser eyes bitch’ sound, which is what Bipolar Bear do in their new release, Harlem Pripyat on Mexican Summer. It hits hard and, as I said, fucking big. You can feel the bassline coiling like the rings of a boa constrictor about to crack your chest in true Mudhoney/Hot Snakes styles. Yes, they are that good. Just check out the party jam extraordinaire Goth Time Rag which kicks it all off, kowabunga, this is the sound of the Cowboys from Limbo cutting through green goo mist over a pretty metronomic steed which would have made Wipers go ‘yeah kid, that’s the way you do it’. The fact that the vocal harmonies seem to harken back to the good old days of girlie 60s garage rock in spite of the fact that these dudes are dudes has the psyche proto-punk bearded vinyl fiending drop out that lives inside us flipping his shit like it was 1964. ZANG

Bipolar Bear-Goth Time Rag

We hear Thee Fair Ohs have something going with Sex is Disgusting, and that makes us happy for both parties. Well, their music generally makes us happy- we are that old cadillac which cruises through the avenues of life eating smoke and being scratched by motherfucker teenagers, constantly overtaken by evil sound blasting convertibles and SUVS piloted by women with the eyes of dead dolls, the Vader on Board sticker a constant source of amusement for a modern world that plainly doesn’t understand our style. It’s not surprising that, by the end of the week, we have turned into road raging hate-mongering devils keen to crush animals under our spiky wheels, pick up the roadkill and feed it to old ladies. Not so nice. Well, listening to Thee Fair Ohs music is the equivalent of a visit to a tunnel car washer of absolutely dope good vibes, out of which we come all shiny and humming a catchy melody, mutt with a bandana sticking its head out of the passenger window and all. Nicest stuff we have heard since Abe Vigoda’s Skeleton, get with it.

Thee Fair Ohs- Summer Lake