Ray & The Prisms, Hans Tanza’s foremost competitors in the field of analogue-cryptic management consultancy, recently launched ‘astrograph’, a distraction channelling API for business service providers in the creative industries – particularly product design houses and boutique architecture studios. Astrograph transforms the flow of information generated by social media networks, e-mail systems and behaviouralist web-browsing (which has been shown to decrease average employee productivity in the range of 20-30%) into a steady stream of warm & fuzzy trinkets.

Not only are these delightful in their own particular & self-standing ways – they can also be assembled into a consistent gestalt that some users have compared to ‘a guided tour through an 8-bit astral zone that intersects with Bruce Haack’s palace of trickery’ and ‘a visit to the lair of the inner child who resides on a rarely visited province of Hauntology’s subconscious, followed by an introduction and subsequent jaunt with his imaginary friends’.

Ray and the Prisms – Astrograph

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Isaac Asimov argued, in a 1963 article in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, that children should be tested for their ‘creative scientific aptitude’ on the basis of their fondness for ‘high quality science-fiction’ so that, we suppose, they may then be nurtured in special academies built following the blueprint of Charles Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters, or Ender Game’s military academy (sans the homophobia).

Along similar lines, we’d like to call for the educational authorities to broadcast curiosity and awe-affirming synthetic compositions on a daily basis through the Power Amplifier systems of kindergartens across the land.

Teachers should seek for the following reactions in the children subjected to the experiment: mild levitation, telekinetic episodes and holographic projections; scribbling of genetic sequences and organic chemistry structures; design and implementation of makeshift spaceship replicas using available materials. Those who display such symptoms should be referred to the Bureau for Terrestrial Exodus for induction in the Unified Theory of Everything Child Prodigy Programme (strapline = your species needs you).

*And so it begins*

Roland Sebastian Faber – Renaissance

Roland Sebastian Faber has done it again – another collection of sounds found far away, pristine and elegiac like a mathematic proof through Reductio ad Magnificum. We notice, in this case, the heart-expanding echo of a Morricone epic, vast Western vistas replaced by a majestic representation of the cosmos where the orbs continue their clockwork waltz, silent & pensive like weathered cowboys in an existential pilgrimage.

Renaissance is included in his new Gegen Den Strom 12’’ in Aube.

The Thinker knows everything that goes on this side of the Galaxy, and most of what goes on the other side as well. We arrange to rendezvous in one of those lawless bars set-up in the basement of a building somewhere in the ruins of Lower Manhattan, which I should find through a guide-pill that once digested creates a humming drone inside the skull that increases as you approach the destination. This is a slightly sadistic way of getting someone somewhere, but then the Thinker is quite devious like that. The pill, which the Thinker somehow manages to smuggle in my pharmaceutical supply whenever he wants to have a chat, is the key to a location that slips through the contours of my genetic architecture, and as such useless for anyone who might intercept it, something that seems unlikely to happen, but then the Thinker is quite paranoid like that.

So picture me hovering in the night above the Stygian ossuary of concrete bones into which Lower Manhattan was turned during the war with the Bugs, trying to determine whether the hum drilling in my head increases when I turn left or right, kind of funny, I have to admit. Maybe the Thinker is playing tricks again, but then he is, well, he is a bastard 100% certified, but he also has the information a freelancing exothenologist like myself needs to keep going in this bizarre line of business: retrieving alien artefacts from abandoned ruins in the boundary between the known galaxies and the gulfs of silence and mystery beyond. Places of opportunity for an entrepreneur, places the Thinker finds using two warehouses crammed with mainframe computers crawling through infinitely expanding data-feeds from the galactic grapevine.

The humming has become almost unbearable now, so I guess my destination lies below, I leave the Lexus flyer floating on standby at a safe height with seven lethal security systems on red alert, and descend hesitant, fires burn amongst the rubble down there, blinking more uncertain than the constellations light-years above.

I feel vertigo as always, not because I am walking down an invisible staircase of thin air supported by a pair of smelly second hand gravity boots, about to land in the midst of a post-apocalyptic scenario inhabited by mutants and primitives, nah, that’s just the context of the situation, my heart is beating faster at the prospect of another expedition into the unknown, I am addicted to this shit, what can I do.

I am getting closer now, once I step inside the vectors defining the X that marks the spot the prize kicks in, a piece of music extracted from the Thinker’s vaults which sets the mood for the rendezvous, ah, we must be the last pair of romantics left in this stinking ball of mud, or at least that’s what we like to think.

Discodromo- Cosmorama (Brennan Green Dromo Arigatoo Remix)

The Vangelis cruiser hides a couple of surprises under a mangy chassis tattooed with graffiti scrawled in ten alien languages, and the love-bites of a hundred asteroids. The most important ones are a K-class reactor enabling it to make quantum jumps across more dimensions that you would care to imagine, and a small black hole generator rather useful as a hiding place when one is smuggling alien goods past the stern rangers that patrol the frontiers of known space.

Ariadne, the ships’ Artificial Intelligence always says that when this miniature black hole is activated she feels a void inside, as if her navel had became a hole through which the sands of time and space slide with a hiss- Alas, she was initially designed to manage the archives of the English Literature Department in a forgotten University, and seems to be imbued with a taste for the poetic. This doesn’t stop her from being the most efficient AI I have had the pleasure of working with, plus hearing quotes from Homer, Nietzsche and Conrad when we step into the black voids of theoretical physics as a first step towards our destination makes me feel the way I want to be made to feel in those occasions.

Whenever I am in some dingey watering-hole in Earth, or Mars, or Cassiopea, or wherever, they are all the same, trying to describe to the drunk bum sitting by my side how it is to use the K-class reactor to jump across dimensions I find myself resorting to the same metaphor: you can’t see anything special happening, because your senses are not designed to see the reconfiguration in space and time which occurs at the Quantum level when the jump takes place. You can’t hear anything special. You can’t smell anything special. But you do feel something, you feel like a silver ball being shot into a three-dimensional pinball, hit by cosmic flaps and disappearing through rabbit holes to materialise somewhere else, suddenly you become ten identical balls all clinging and clanging hysterically, sometimes you stop in place static or become invisible but somehow keep hitting against the bumpers, tumbling down the smiling cardboard faces of Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg and Richard Feynman as the astronomical distances being undertaken accumulate chink*chink*chink in red LED numbers somewhere in the RAM of Ariadne’s subconscious.

You feel this at the atomic level, way deeper than the gargantuan synaptic distances between neurons, it is weird, knowing that your body and your conscience are dissolving and being simultaneously reconfigured, sometimes going back in time, a million times while the jump takes place, it gives me the creeps, but also takes me to the place I want to go.

Photonz- Shaboo (Andy’s Edit)

It was another operation to remember, death and craziness, battling the algorithmic traps which protected the alien ruins like ancient Egyptian curses, I lost two members of the crew then and there, and another one we had to jettison into space when it became obvious he had been exposed to a exo-virus that almost crashed Ariadne when she tried to analyse it. At that point he was too far gone into the space of evolutive possibilities to even notice. I think we should have burned it rather than leave it floating in the void, maybe alive and ready to board some careless ship, but then one never knows how will these things react to fire. Oh well, that guy was aware of the possible mess he was getting into when he decided to join the trip, I will make a good contribution to the Scavenger Guild as a gesture of good will, another name etched in the memorial plaques of their vast halls.

Regarding what we found, well, what did we find? We have been manipulating the Alien artefact with robotic titanium arms inside an isolation chamber strong enough to contain an atomic conflagration of medium intensity, but no idea yet. This is a very important step of the exothenological process: identifying the properties of our bounty shall determine the potential buyer- new materials and compounds for corporations and weapons for the army. Even if we can’t find any practical use for it, I am sure some rich collector will be happy to pay millions of credits for it once its origin is verified by an independent analyst, hang it in the walls of his zero-gee pleasure palace somewhere in Saturns’ Lagrangian orbit, like some piece of modern art designed for an intractable purpose, perhaps even art originally? Who knows what went through the brains, or whatever passes for brains of these extinct alien civilisations?

Anyhow, the siren of the isolation chamber has started ringing, might this be some sort of breakthrough in our investigation, or have we started a chain-reaction that will blow up the continent? It is always exciting times in this future we live in!

The Thinker’s synthetic and I approach the portholes drilled into the thick walls, even the figure by my side seems thrilled in spite of being nothing more than an empty biological vessel being remotely operated from whatever dungeon the Thinker is currently holed up in. We behold the strange dance of the robotic arms juggling with the perfect cube which we retrieved from the labyrinthine ruins of the asteroid, small, finer and more precise appendixes being deployed like the fragile legs of a water insect, tracing lines in the smooth surfaces of the enigmatic artefact, identifying some sort of pattern which is repeated in the air like the passes of a prestidigitator, so that a mechanism can be suddenly activated, a crack opens in the side of the cube, a box with invisible hinges inside which a tiny ballerina has started to spin slowly while frail tones fills the sterilised silence of the Isolation chamber with a melancholic melody, picture us staring at our robot carefully holding in its mechanical hands a music box with a golden dedication to Elizabeth, a human memento saved from the voids of the forgotten by aliens to which we were aliens too.

What the hell are we going to do with this?

Roland Sebastian Faber- Molekular

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This post was inspired by M. John Harrison’s ‘Light’ and William Gibson’s ‘Count Zero’

Images: Ruins Ship Ballerina

About the music:

Brennan Green already showed that he could pull a Carpenter in the slow-burning ‘Escape from Chinatown’. Well, he’s done it again in his thumping remix of Discodromo’s Cosmorama, released by wonderful Internasjonal. You can imagine Snake Plissken sneaking around the ruins of NYC under the synthetic clouds of this nefarious thriller.

Dissident keep it phuture with Photonz’ Shaboo, a menacingly seductive hybrid of jacking acid house and bleepy old skool hardcore that should set the right dancefloors on fire with sinuous moves, killer!

Aube records bring us Wettkampf der Moleküle, the second release by vintage electronica wunderkind Roland Sebastian Faber, who continues on the beautiful path sketched by Vangelis and early Jarre with a blissful sequence of melodic chains written, in synthetic language, on the whiteboards of our imagination.

Nevertheless, our psychic tendrils still flex, and we have accumulated a backlog of tunes to write about, sufficient we hope, for you to forgive us our neglect, the theme today is one of synth love and sex, cosmic wonder and perhaps horror at the mystery that lies hidden beneath the tapestry of stars we behold when we stare into the starry sky.

So without further ado, and as the Devil’s Rejects would say, let’s get on with it.

The corpses of two teenagers were found last night in the lawns of Carpenter Plaza, their clothes were torn to pieces and their flesh had been pierced by a multitude of small yet grievous wounds such as those which might have been caused by the attack of a pack of feral children. Their eyes had been pecked out, bringing to mind memories of certain mysterious event that took place in the North Californian coast in 1963. After an arduous investigation, the police was able to reconstruct the events of that night, but the mysterious culprit, or more likely, culprits of the grisly murder, remain unidentified. It would seem that after the ingestion of several beers in the lawns, the two teenagers, whose names remain undisclosed, started harassing Crazy Mary, a supposed witch who has taken it upon herself to feed the flock of pigeons populating the area, and stole the carrier bag containing the bread crumbs she uses for such purpose. After these shenanigans they met with some friends in the centre of town, started a fight with a group of foreign students and escaped on the arrival of the constabulary. This is as far as confirmed fact go, the two teenagers headed towards the bus stop and that’s, as they say, ‘all she wrote’. Enquiries amongst the jolly group of tramps that sleep in the lawn’s bushes have raised certain curious hypotheses regarding the nature of the events that unfolded that night. According to them, ‘those kids shouldn’t have messed with Crazy Mary, the pigeons take care of her’. Leads regarding a possible association between a confederation of winged critters and the lady to commit murder have been, so far, ignored by the police.

Nimoy- Orca Reunion

Nimoy’s self/titled 12 is the latest release from bad-ass dark electroid La Hague zomborgs Bunker Records. In this black slab of vinyl which comes typically accompanied by a photocopy of a penguin our favourite Vulcanian shows a sick predilection for skeletal, atmospheric deadhead electro, which manages to, simultaneously, put the fear of cosmos in your soul and make you shake your scrawny ass through an elegant astrogration algorithm written in a dead language, it’s not that, ‘in space, no one can hear you scream’, it’s that, ‘in space, there are things that can hear you scream, and they are fucking enjoying it’.

Buy buy buy.

Last night, thousands of children between the ages of 4 and 9 escaped from their houses all across Europe and paraded through the moon-lit streets carrying banners and figures they had themselves created with cardboard and papier mache subreptitiously smuggled from schools and kindergarten. The text in the banners was written in a strange language which experts have been, so far, at a loss to identify. Although the capacity with which small children from all over the continent were able to co-ordinate their activities has raised concerns regarding the under-age use of social networking sites and the such, preliminary interviews with participants in these parades seem to point towards an altogether more frightful direction. According to these children, their nocturnal activities were undertaken in response to continuous and vivid dreams featuring ‘men from space’ who convinced them to come out in the streets and celebrate their imminent arrival through impromptu public celebrations, apparently the figures the children were carrying, amorphous collections of balloons and cones together with gaffer tape represent the physical appearance of these mysterious broadcasters from a dreamworld which seems to have access points outside our planet.

Roland Sebastian Faber- Hommage II

In his ‘Hommage and die Jugend Europas’, released by Aube Records, Roland Sebastian Faber creates a breathtakingly beautiful motorik disco soundtrack for the interstellar highway which brings to mind Jean Michel Jarre and spaced out Vangelis in the best of ways, if the ever so patient and enlightened Martians portrayed in Stranger in a Strange Land made music, it would undoubtedly sound like this.

An spokesman from the Massachusetts Institute of Technolology has declared that a small number of robotic mice escaped from the Cognitive Science laboratories three weeks ago. These small creatures, originally developed with funding from the U.S. Army, and to be used for reconnaisance and ‘neutralisation’ purposes in conflict zones were apparently convinced to escape from their cages by an Artificial Intelligence scientist with countercultural political leanings who is currently being interrogated by the CIA. The mice have demonstrated an uncanny skill at modifying other machines, hooking them up to create semi-sentient servants and tools in what might be the first demonstration of the singularity principle. These machines have been used to repel at least two infiltration attempts carried out by the Navy Seals in the wooden areas in the north of the state where the mice have apparently decided to establish their residence. An anonymous source at the MIT told reporters, off the record, that scientists in the CSL are working hard on the development of a squad of robotic cats to be sent with the mission of capturing the fugitive mice.

Greg Hawkes- Bee System

Synth wizard and Cars Member Greg Hawkes released Niagara Falls, from which ‘Bee System’ is taken, in 1982. We’d be hard pressed to find a better example of uplifting optimistic electro-pop drawing a quirky pyramid between Kraftwerk, Devo and Bruce Haack inside which all the robots can do the happy ‘Ahoy, that carburetor oil was so yummy mr. engineer!’ dance. As you would expect it doesn’t get any better than this.

A ghost roams New York City, you can see it reflected in the eyes of mysterious strangers, in the specks of light projected by street lamps far up, its silhouette advancing through a mist which extends its wistful fingers only to touch the void, the shadow slips away like a dream upon awakening and disappears down an alleyway, you can hear its voice while rolling in your bed sleepless, like the radio of a mysterious neighbour playing in the distance, a channel between stations bringing forth the spectral vibrations of our Lady of the Night.

Chromatics-Mask

Chromatics keep advancing, in Night Drive, towards the moment of shining radiance when the pulse of their music shall become night itself and all that lies therein, a satin dress slowly revealing skin stopping short of a scar you know is there, their humming synths and pristine melodies advance slow and merciless like love itself, or waves of black water washing over a beautiful corpse into the harbour, it’s all part of a psychosexual thriller that could easily become your life, a tempting alternative to the mediocrity that surrounds us.

Chromatics are building us a beautiful palace, the doors slide open slowly, we step inside.