Dear 20jazzfunkgreats uncles,

How is everything going your end? I hope that you are in a better mood than when I last saw you, and that you managed to bring back the cat from the Black Place. That will teach you to be more careful when you attempt to rapport with the Ancient Ones.

It’s now been two months since the course started. Wizard College is not al all like I Imagined, I thought that it was going to be like in the films – you know, wizened wizards telling us super-creepy secrets in archaic English accents, talking owls and threatening tentacles peeking from oak doors ajar.  

Instead, we are being taught physics, chemistry, logic, design and engineering. According to Dr. Lauventius, magic is like hacking reality, so we need to learn algorithmic thinking to do it proper. We are not even allowed to wear fancy robes until next semester! I found a really cool one in eBay BTW, I’ll send you a photo later.

There has been a dream, however, which has made me think a lot about what’s to come, after we master the basics. It has made me impatient, but also a bit scared. I think it is a hint of the gift growing inside me, like a beautiful flower blooming – or maybe a malign tumour spreading.

In this dream, I am in a small boat, alone, sailing into the night, across a freezing sea populated by lumbering shadows. The aurora borealis reveals their true nature as I get closer – monoliths, towers and cairns, lighthouses and the carcasses of colossal mammoths surging from the abyss.

In their windows, roofs and balconies stand many silent figures, some of them taciturn and some of them grinning skeleton-like, some of them flailing their arms desperately, as if warning me of an unbeknownst danger. Some of them are human, some of them I don’t know what they are.

Past this cemetery of what I realise are defunct, corrupted and condemned traditions, rises a bay of white madness that encircles me, the event horizon for all those who have the gift. That’s where I have been sailing since I was born, but where am I to dock my little boat?

Then I hear a splash, I look behind and gasp at an army of fish-pale arms grabbing the sides of the boat, an army of sailors drowned in the wild currents of ill-managed lore climb into the boat, sticky locks of putrescent hair cover their faces, their bodies are a nightmare juxtaposition of emaciation and bloat.

They stare at me.

They are me.

They are where a thousand paths opening in front of me end, after a single mistake. They are a warning.

Tell me what to do, what not to do!

One of them opens its mouth, worms and worse crawl between its ruined teeth.

As it starts speaking, I wake up.

Ok, I got to go now, the guys are knocking in my door. As you see things are starting to get interesting. I hope it’s all for the best, otherwise, I am planning to haunt you until the end of times for telling me I should study to be a wizard. I’ll fuck you up big time.

Nah, I’m joking! J I love you! Can’t wait to see you over Christmas. Lots of kisses,

Helena

Today we are offering you two sound summaries of trans-phasic researches involving that shadowy savant Mr. Brian Pyle.

Let us begin with Starving Weirdos, whose Land Lines album out next year in Amish Records documents a pensive strut down the majestic avenues of a fantasy city (perhaps Lankhmar, or Viriconium) crammed with stalls and displays whence the avatars of a thousand true religions peddle their mystical wares.

From this marketplace of spiritual advance, disappointment and damnation, they have imported some choice trinkets – in ‘Periods’, a vial containing the thick blood of a totemic camel that completed the arduous pilgrimage between Irem of the Pillars and the Holy Mountain. Yummy and otherworldly in the same way that Prince Rama are, the best victuals for your psychedelic odyssey.

Starving Weirdos – Periods

The 20jazzfunkgreats coterie has long been a sucker for sci-fi stories where hardy scouts explore abandoned space hulks, derelict orbital stations and colonial posts in barely terraformed planets. We all know how the story goes – eventually, the alien jack-in-a-box springs from the shadows, and carnage ensues.

Ensemble Economique’s Crossing The Pass, By Torchlight follows this long-honoured tradition of xeno-archaeological rummaging, and the primal emotions of tension, dread and ominous wonderment are all present. What’s missing is that violent resolution.

The confrontation – or corruption, or coupling – exists, but it is cultural and metaphysical. Intractable artefacts are discovered, the psychic echo of a lonely cataclysm infiltrates the explorer’s unconscious.  In ‘Vanishing Point’, we slide down the alien calligraphy of a poem written in a tongue we will never decipher, found dancing in a zero-gravity ballroom.

Ensemble Economique – Vanishing Point