Doctor Who and the Weetabix Cards of Infantile Neurosis

I don't know if there's a specific commandment that states: 'thou shalt not covet thy neighbours 1/72 scale Airfix German Ski-Troopers'...... but there should be..... A decade of friendship with the kid over the road was tainted by my desire to possess his carefully horded little troop of Bavarian bad-weather belligerance. I wanted those little fellers badly. They plagued the alpine regions of my psychic hinterland - allowing no ceasefire or amnesty. I had to have them..... Years later they were still there out on patrol, one of those deep under the skin zits on the otherwise smooth face of our friendship. Even down the pub it'd be: 'How much do you bet she'll go out with me? Would you risk yer german ski troopers..?'

But as Freud tell us, civilization is based upon the denial of such desires...... I am quite a civil-minded chap so y'know......I got over it...... eventually...

But then, years later, Gutta posted THIS POST....... I couldn't help it. All those feelings came flooding back: Doctor Who Weetabix cards...... individually crafted little bits of loveliness.... beautifully drawn renditions of all the classic bad-guys..... relics from my childhood.... all there in a biscuit tin beneath his bed.

So it starts : Pah.... a biscuit tin..... probably never even looks at them... let's his kids crease 'em up...... fancy hangin' onto them like that...... mind you, he's looked on ebay hasn't he?.... he'll probably.... ulp..... sell them.... pah....

And the poison creeps in..... never acknowledged..... never mentioned down the pub..... But it's there...... Not exactly the elephant in the room, but certainly the Giant Robot in the room.... I wanted those fellers - badly.

Still, I thought I was now a better student of human nature than I was back in the day, what with the university and all that. I knew my civic duty. Dads such as Gutta and I must restrain our aggressive, acquisitive instincts else society shall flounder. Thus I displaced my neurotic desires into something more productive and made my very own Weetabix cards, which now accompany the second release on the Bleepfiend label.

It's important to understand - this wasn't just some pointless bit of sad Dad doodling.... this was the salvation of a friendship. An attempt to even the odds and restore the air of good-natured Dadblogger mutual linkage that had prevailed before.... (Go and have a look, I spent ages on the Ice Warrior).

But then, and this is the good bit:........ out of nowhere ........without discussion or warning - Gutta gave me some of the cards IN A FRAME.... Good ones too. He made sure there was a Cyberman in there. A nice couple of Daleks. A lovely little Yeti...... sweet.....

so, seems like I'm not such a good student of human nature after all.......

(But, just to be safe, if you've got Cyborg and Muton, or Stretch Monster, just don't mention it to me ok?......it's for the best...)

BFND002 - "Soundtrack To The Lost Episodes"

In our postmodern age, where even the most obscure cultural artefact is revisited, remixed and remastered before ebaying, youtubing and torrenting its' way to global immortality, it's almost impossible to conceive that a major broadcasting corporation would throw away… for good… for ever.. episodes of its' longest-running and most iconic sci-fi show, but of course that's exactly what the BBC did with the first glorious decade of 'Doctor Who': Daleks, Cybermen, Yetis, Ice warriors, all casually tossed aside to make way for a bright new future. (Which was what? Blakes Seven?...). 108 episodes incomplete or missing …. discarded, unloved and unfashionable….

Forget Davros or The Master, this act alone makes the BBC the greatest villain in the Doctor Who universe….

But, like the Master, nothing stays dead for long…. Doctor Who fandom, in an act half exorcism, half exhumation, over the years slowly brought the stories back from the dead: Treasures were unearthed under beds and in garages across the globe, squirreled away by staff and storemen. Shards and fragments were found embedded in old episodes of 'Blue Peter' or 'Tomorrows World' – ten seconds here, fifteen seconds there. Long before i-viewer or bit torrent, people had pointed film cameras direct at the telly screen. Others had lovingly balanced audio mikes precariously against the TV speakers and in this low-tech, fuzzy way, the ghostly voices of every lost episode remain to haunt us…. Slowly and hesitantly, clanking, creaking and hissing, many of the past episodes lurched into incomplete half-life and walked blinking into the sun…the living embodiment of the bleepfiend excavational aesthetic.

There is still much missing of course…. Yawning gaps in the material…. But these are not dead spaces… Like time itself they are fractured and fluid and fecund with creative possibility, as animators and voice artists and others struggle to reanimate the host bodies. It is into this mindspace that we pitch the "Soundtrack To The Lost Episodes"

…. Revisted….. remastered…… REGENERATED….

With FREE GIFT! - (more on that later)

Just got back from Spain - jeez, what the hell have you lot been doing? Stroll back in mi flip-flops to find it tipping down... rain all over the place, everywhere, buckets of it....


And I do blame you lot.... There's this thing in creative writing, the 'pathetic fallacy' - You're not supposed to let non-sentient objects or processes reflect human emotions. You can't have thunderstorms everytime there's a fight or have fog rolling in everytime someone feels sad.... it's bad form and all that, apparently...


Stuff that - everyone knows that the weather is a psycho-reflexive mechanism. It rains because we think it might... indeed that's all we talk about. Yer average Spaniard regards it as his god-given right to zip about on a scooter wearing only a pair of Speedos, giving not a second thought to wind-chill factor or chafing issues, but we expect it to rain, so it does.


It's a quantum phenomenon... the weather wave collapses into rain particles the moment we observe it.... the sheer act of observation pushes it into that state from it's previous indeterminate uncertainty.


More than that, the weather reflects the collective unconscious. It not only rains because we think it might - it rains because secretly, in our fear and self-loathing, we want it to... This is why Glastonbury is always a washout - a straightforward reflection of unacknowledged deeply-rooted national aggression towards smug media freeloaders in wacky wellies hyping dreary pub-rockers... Wimbledon? National shame at post-imperial decline manifested as low pressure rolling in from the west... Those snazzy roll-out lawn covers? Psychic defenses made real...


The silver lining to this psychometreological cloud formation? - we can change the weather..... all we have to do is grab a t-shirt and shades and not think about it too hard. But not a scrappy old t-shirt... a nice, shiny, new, 100% cotton, 220gsm, specially interlocked t-shirt with an exclusive Doppelganger design as supplied by the forward-thinking HighRise online fashion emporium, overseen by that nice guy Chris from Rooted Records and modelled fetchingly by the two chaps below:

Go on - grab the shirt, link to the site, spread the word..... together we can do this

Heh..... I only doodled this pic on a train a few weeks back 'cos I knew Kek would have to overcome his extreme antipathy towards the Mp3 format in order to deliver the next instalment in the blogariddims series .... and here it is - it's a corker - themed around 'Ontological Hysteria':

The tracks " all display some sense of impending pandemonium, either real or imagined…all the artists or songs here reveal some level of inner tension that manifests itself in the form of all sorts of batty symptoms from low-level teeth-grinding to full-on howling-at-the-moon midnight bareneck nekkid dancing. Songs on the Edge of a Nervous Breakdown, basically"

I listened to the first ten minutes on my way out down the Indian last night - there was a thunderstorm brewing, Russia is replaying the 19th Century in Georgia, my ontologicals were playing up something terrible already....but jeez..., if that's the sound of impending doom, what's it gonna be like when it actually gets here?

Remember that episode of Doctor Who - the good one with the statues where you couldn't blink or they nabbed you? And there's a bit where a girl goes into an old, spooky abandoned house and peels back a bit of flaking wallpaper to find that, decades earlier, the Doctor has nipped in and written 'duck!' in big letters on the wall cos he knows that all those years later at precisely that place, at precisely that time, the girl would be standing there reading the message and someone would lob a rock in through the window?...... Well, beneath my mouldy old 70's wallpaper Nick Gutterbreakz has written' YOU WILL GET INTO TECHNO'......... and here we are...... so that either makes me a slavishly predictable conformist, or him a smug bastard.... or probably a bit of both......

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I can't do this beat-matching lark: skillfully coaxing all the of disparate parts into a seamless whole, all fecund and newborn and shiny. Instead, I look for the unassuming, quietly quivering bits, that will juxtapose without undue complaint. A quick snip and I offer the bloodied stump of one part up to the gaping wound of another in the hope that the host body won't reject it and my creation may walk blinking into the sunlight. All done with audacity.... audacity indeed... and thus I thought let it be so for the blogpost.... a dozen separate parts....

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Blogariddims 46 is here (right clicky save as).... or it should be soon.... (duck!)

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Thematically then, I thought Cybermen..... hardly original for me of course..... but a cold, lost, machine-like groove.... a humanity traded for piston-power and repetitive precision...

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There's an interesting psychology to mixes.... I've only ever done mixtapes for girls I've fancied at school and I promise you I don't fancy any of you lot (If I did, I wouldn't have mentioned Doctor Who so early on in the conversation). The idea of doing a post to accompany it is even more interesting. Normally you have to get this kind of thing across in just a few casual sentences: 'yeah, just thought you might be interested - only took me half hour, no big deal - some of it's a bit old - like really last summer, but there's a coupla bits in there you can only get on white-label or import 12's...'

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Here's the tracklist.... I put it in minutes, I like it when they do that.... otherwise you have to listen twice and count the tracks and what if you've got one of those MP3 players that never returns to the part of the track where you switched off? I don't want any left-brain counting in this mix ok?

00.01` The Shroud – Breakage
02.30 Kemancheh – Moving Ninja
05.01 Crosswaves – Duke Spook
08.15 Nospheratu (Echospace Reduction) – Pulshar
16.15 Handwerk1A – Add Noise
23.30 Steingarten (Shackleton mix) - Pole
29.30 Panoramix – Laurent Garnier
33.01 Uprise – Djunya
39.20 Cokernut – Patchwerk Man
44.01 Gone To The Dogs – Claro Intelecto
46.45 Tense Past – Gatekeeper
49.49 You Will Become Like Us……..

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I'm not gonna tell you about these tracks... it's not my intention to inform you about them or anything. Derrida seems to say that the act of teaching - master to disciple or master to slave, might always be about power imbalance - 'an irreversible and asymmetrical address' - an act of power - an act of violence. I lack the conceptual and linguistic weaponry to do you much harm. My arsenal is depleted. So, if you want the theory, the conceptual groundwork of the dubstep / techno interface, I respectfully refer you here to the grandmaster K-Punk for a right good kicking...

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I started off with such grand aspirations:.... an architectonic mix... a psychometric reckoning... a map... a narrative of the psyche. The return of the repressed in the form of the 'Theme from Joe 90'. A hint of the Lacanian Real in 'Power Rangers - Mystic Force" (surprisingly good). 'Voodoo Ray' exhumed from the collective unconscious. A fragrant Kruder and Dorfmeister - smelling more of cred than sweat... representatives from the psychotopographical corners of the inner globe... a cathartic purge of my musical unconscious....

But there's a reason for repression: assembled together in the exercise yard - lined up like a Colditz count with a couple of dummy prisoners thrown into the line-up, those boys looked ugly....

So I went for one note: Not a neurotic exhumation of the past, but a single psychotic present. A Deleuzian walk in the sunshine..... a dark yodel.....

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With Derrida of course it's all about that which has been excluded, rather than included . Bugger the tracklist, who's been left out?:

Burial didn't fit the theme, far too human in his urban melancholia, he'd never cut the mustard as a Cyberman - 'cept maybe as one of the early ones - the ones with human hands....

Bass Clef was out for similar reasons: too eccentrically individual, too playfully creative. There is no room for a trombone in the world of the Cybermen..... (That one where lonely robot Yeti stalk the underground, that's the one for Bass Clef...)

X X X X X X X

I've seen a fair few of these folk around - that's what you get when you are 'that bloke who hangs round with Gutta'..... It's like Tanelorn round here .... Moving Ninja, Gatekeeper in his little baseball cap, the inscrutable Punch Drunk Peverelist- a nexus for these fine folk. I've got sorcerous Appleblim summoning powers.... stick the Skull Disco comp on yer headphones and there he is, like Mr Benn's shopkeeper, appearing in the door of Somerfield... Doubt it'll work when I move to Colchester.... a shame....

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I have to say thank you to Droid.... what a sound chap.... heh... look at me out here with my blogariddims mix.... how nice to be asked...

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finally- it's just a jump to the left:

Let's do the Timelord again.....

..

self-portrait

Ah well.... sorry about that.... you know I couldn't even be bothered to say anything about Doctor Who in the end... so anyway, I thought sod it, I'm leaving town anyway... might as well start to blow the old secret identity. Last time I saw Kek, I tried to interest him in an idea based on an old issue of Justice League, where a particular peril compels everyone to simultaneously reveal their alter-ego to the rest of the team. I dunno, maybe if we all posted a pic of ourselves at some rearranged time... then we could delete 'em later...? In the comic book Superman grabs some 'amnesium' from the Fortress of Solitude and everyone retreats back to blissful ignorance and the comfort of anonymity again at the end of the issue.... hmmmm.... anyway, he didn't seem very interested and started banging on about Kraftwerk line-up changes.... so I guess that's that.....

(PS... on blogger the spellcheck options for 'Kraftwerk' are 'groundwork' and 'gravedigger' ...?)

I'm saying nothing.....

(link)

BFND001

is here

Got tagged by the Mighty John :

‘List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your spring. Post these instructions in your blog along with your 7 songs. Then tag 7 other people to see what they’re listening to’.

I won't be taking the opportunity to reveal much anticipated tracks from forthcoming albums someone slipped me on advance preview cd-r in a pub, 'cos I ain't the sort of blogger that ever gets that sort of stuff.... (though I could be if anyone is listening...)

Actually not a bad week this week - Birthday next week, so can purchase stuff guilt free on grounds that my Mum and Dad are sending me some cash, so here you go:

Peverelist - Roll With The Punches - On the Soul Jazz 'Steppa's Delight' Compilation - Bought from the man himself in Rooted Records. I know Tom's only really barely humouring us vinylphobes, but it's nice that some of his stuff can be picked up via these CD Dadstep compilations.

Electronic - 'Get The Message' - got a 'best of' CD comp for three quid in Fopp today. Worth it for 'Get The Message' alone - a standout piece of class workmanship from the Marr/ Sumner 80's supergroup that turned out better than it should have. ("I always thought of you as my reward, built like an angel - six feet tall...")

King Tubby - Father Of Dub - three CD compilation - I dunno - pick a track.... got it for a fiver in Fopp - I know I shouldn't do it - but I spent more this week in my local neighbourhood independent record store Rooted, so it all evens out in a ying-yang kinda fashion....

Acute Bronchitus - on 'At Home With No. 1 Astronaut' - one of the first treasures unearthed by the Bleepfiend Project (basically, Gutta dons an Indiana Jones style hat and risks life and limb to unearth long-buried techno relics from days of yore for net publication.... I'm the fat guy in the fez running along behind with a packet of crayons...) This particular gem was found beneath the bed of Bob from West Norwood Cassette Library).

Laurent Garnier - Panoramix - from the 'Back To My Roots' EP - bought from a download website in Germany- I only bought the B-side as I didn't care much for the other - how many vinyl purists can say that...?

Flight of The Conchords - Sellotape - Didn't buy this as such - watched the DVD over my sisters - never seen these guys before. Pretty funny - I never click on youtube in blogs, but have a look (no picture for first ten seconds - dunno why) :
"Brown paper ! White paper! Stick it together with the tape... the tape of love!!"



Last one is cheating as haven't had time to listen yet....... still need to check out Jon Rowett's re-animated hip-hop.

So, in terms of passing this on, As well as Dan, I'm passing the baton onto a few blogfolk I've not spoken to in a while, just to say howdy....

Astolath

Sigh9

Dem

Sean

Mike

Starbuck

Clone

and, last but not least , X (in the hope of tempting her out of her shell...)

"we witnessed Patchwerk Man's first public engagement in over a decade. The old codger gave a good account of himself, with an uncompromising set of driving minimalism that built to a crescendo of droney/noise-based intensity. He brought along some fresh exclusives on cd-r but the management hadn't laid-on any cd decks for him so he just span vinyl, and even managed to entice some of the early arrivals up onto the dancefloor. The young lady who kept blowing him kisses made him very happy. Let's hope he gets a few more opportunities to play out soon, eh?" (Link)

Yeah erh... what he just said... I reckon ole Patchwerk was settlin' in for a quietly meditative set grooving the loneliness of the long distance warm up DJ, when folk mucked it up by getting up and dancing - One young lady was even giving it a few of the old 'shag the bass-stack' moves. Still he responded well to the pressure to actually keep folk moving with a blinding set. (I like Native in this regard - a proper old communal experience - everyone in it together.... a big square - none of the L-shaped bar nonsense you get at Cosies - or that U-Shape lark at The Croft). A cracking warm up - thoroughly enjoyed it - but Pendle Coven didn't flounder when so effectively passed the baton, playing a superbly unapologetic set of techno bangers.... Gutta is going on about there being MCs over in his write-up - I don't remember any of that, I was up the back nodding away oblivious... lovely stuff - found it quite hard to adjust to Appleblim's characteristic cerebrality when he came on.... but hey.... as Gutta insisted on telling everyone, we got six kids between us, and it was 3am man.....

Good to see that Loki has stopped hanging around with youths on street corners long enough to give us an interesting post claiming that the collapse of the housing market has been caused by dubstep.... In a cunning reversal of conventional marxist economic determinism, he proposes that it is culture that drives economy, rather than the reverse:

"And now we're heading into recession. Of course, we are. Critics will no doubt suggest that the music is reflecting this change but I'm not so sure that it's not the opposite; that the music is in fact prefiguring the change. Without the dark recesses of dubstep's clattering, there would be no recession."

Superficially, there could be something in this - It is clear, for example, that the release of Blur's first album in 1991, not only heralded the start of Brit-Pop, but also played a pivotal role in bringing about Black Wednesday and the total collapse of the Major government's reputation for economic competence.... In a similar vein, maybe the fact that nowdays the Guardian is running reviews of grime, dubstep and other such unsavoury electronica directly presages the collapse of the housing market.

But it's total nonsense of course. It would just make this whole Boris affair a mere pointless sideshow. Why, all the Cameron's Tories would have to do to utterly undermine Gordon Brown's hard-earned reputation for fiscal responsibility would be to get a grime single to the top of the charts......

Quick Iron Man for Doppelkid's fourth birthday card....

I didn't bother explaining to him that Iron Man is the perfect piece of capitalist ideology : Millionaire weapons magnate Tony Stark realises that the weapons he created are being used by shifty foreign folk in Afghanistan who are obviously up to no good and takes a stand by soundly roughing a few of these unsavoury chaps in a tin suit painted the same colours as his sports car. If only individual capitalist arms dealers were like our Tone... if only they could all be good guys and only develop weaponry for other good guys.... instead of bad guys, who like are only in in it for the money and willing to sell stuff to other really bad people.... Evil is explained by the pathologisation of the actions of individuals , even though their actions are entirely rational within the dictates of a system which itself remains unquestioned. It happens in the real world too - It's like all this recent middle east arms dealing malarky.... the moral weight and preoccupation is subtley shifted from the last two words to the first in the phrase 'illegal arms deal'. Clever eh?

Still , it's a bloody good film.... even Gwyneth Paltrow is pretty good and I was amongst those pleased to see her go in 'Se7en'