squirm

letter from a deadman

"I'm a guy that likes to get his mail..."

glitchcraft

 

finally made it to staalplaat working space in neukölln last night to see glitchmaster phillipe petit scratch it up with schneider tm and four more dronesters. i've been trying to get more out of staalplaat after hearing them perform years ago at an electronic festival in budapest. that evening's soundscape featured a dozen or so tiny speakers splicing together sounds from at least as many sources with the help of some sort of disturbed algorithmic intelligence. in the charged darkness of the hungarian club it seemed a soundtrack created to accompany the dying dreams of an errant astronaut. but the best laid plans of mice and men to get down to the old staalplaat space on torstrasse came to naught, so i was pleasantly surprised when they resurfaced in neukölln last year. last night's performance was a swelling river of bells, bicycles and digital artifacts drowning an electric violin and guitar in the humming detritus of glitch city. many dreams were hatched and then abandoned as the onlookers watched petit and his fellow pioneers attempt to claw through the chrome creased crust of their own excitatory neurons. the staalplaat store itself is filled to overflowing with inexplicable graphic novels, noise 'zines and extensive recordings on various media. i took the opportunity to snatch up their last copy of romain slocombe's 'japan in bondage', a collection of his paintings on the same subjects he so lovingly depicted in 'city of the broken dolls'. thus, at the end of the evening, i was able to pedal my way northward with not only the crumbling blips and fractured bleeps of the performers ricocheting through my skull, but also the fractured femme fatales clutched close beneath my coat. 

through a window, darkly

it's a valid question

an ill wind blows atop devil's mountain

spent a few hours yesterday creeping around the abandoned cold war listening station atop teufelsberg. energetic vegetation overruns the remains of the western allies deepest penetration behind the iron curtain, now the playground of graffiti artists and local dopers. the site's spacious domes once sheltered the most sensitive of technological ears as they eavesdropped on enemy communications, but today the entire site is dominated by the sound of the relentless wind tearing through the industrial textiles and prefab structures as they fall to ruin.

brown control to major tom

 

two weeks, two cat mummies

this one in Kassel's Ottoneum

and this one in the window of Maud Piquion in Brunnenstrasse

how not to see your feline friend

horror head goes cold turkey

we have always filched in the kassel

arrived in kassel just before noon to find that my room at the stadthotel was not yet ready, the lobby crowded with an outgoing tour group.  the desk clerk encouraged me to leave my bags next to his office and return in two hours.  i took a few necessaries out, double checked that he would be around to keep an eye on things, and wandered down to the ottoneum, kassel's natural history museum, to wonder at their collection of taxidermy and an 18th century library of 'books', created from the woods of native trees.

a grey screen of showers slowed my advance as pushed back to the hotel at the appointed hour. completing the formalities and acquiring my cardkey, i dragged my bags into the elevator and punched the button for the fourth floor. thats when i noticed that my bag had been opened and i was peering into a nylon lined abyss where my laptop used to be. 

drat and double drat.

now, a police report, several hours of online hassle, and a chinese buffet later....i am left to fend off the gathering shadows armed only with my phone, a blackberry and alan clarke's tale of the disastrous clash of monstrous armies on the plains outside moscow some sixty odd years ago. 

poor bastards. now i know how they felt.