Time for a pulp countdown now, so here's my top 10 book titles that would make great prog rock album titles!
Everyone loves a 10 minute drum solo, right?
At #10: Murdock's Acid Test! Side one is mellow acid jazz, but side two is all stream of consciousness poetry and percussion...
At #9: Into Plutonian Depths! A concept album where Chinese war gongs, the Welsh harp and nine detuned Hammond organs evoke the legend of Persephone...
At #8: Bluebeard's Seventh Wife! Reminiscent of early Soft Machine this album includes an underwater piano AND an electric glockenspiel...
At #7: Thongo At The End Of Time! Trippy free-form eclectic harmonies interspersed with chants from the Upanishads make this album ideal for meditation and/or hot yoga...
At #6: Don't Tempt The Hangman! Old school folk acoustic songs with perhaps more hurdy-gurdy than is strictly necessary or bearable...
At #5: The Light Of Lilith! Unkindly reviewed by Melody Maker as "barely listenable" this album has found a more sympathetic audience recently, and is now rightly hailed as the ur-text of drum & bass lounge music...
At #4: Conscience Interplanetary! Ambient dub soundscapes melding effortlessly with the whispered poetry of e.e. cummings form themselves into an alarmingly intense ASMR cosmic head massage...
At #3: Death Is A Ruby Light! I hope you like post-minimalist interpretive percussion because that's basically all this is, and it's in mono to boot...
At #2: Space, Time and Nathaniel. Recorded live in Antwerp as a War Of The Worlds sequel, the lyrical Moogs and clarinet swirls depict the reawakening of the Earth as the Martian red weed gives way to daffodils and dragonflies...
And at #1: Epitaph For A Dead Beat! A cacophony of jazz fusion harmonies in 5/4 time, undergirded by Mellotron and the bells of St. Oswald's church in Lymington. A classic...
More pulp countdowns another time. Stay cool cats...
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If the spacesuit is the symbol of progress, the gas mask is the sign of the apocalypse. In popular culture it signifies that science has turned against us. It's the face of dystopia.
Today in pulp I look at the culture of the mask!
The first chemical masks were work by Venitian plague doctors: a bird-like affair, the beak stuffed with lavender, matched with full length coat and hat. It was a terrifying sight - the grim reaper come to apply poultices to your tumours.
But it was poison gas, first used at the Second Battle of Ypres in 1915, that led to the modern gas mask. At first these were cotton masks treated with chemicals. However their protection was limited.
It's now over half a century since 1970, and I'm starting to wonder if we should bring back its concept of gracious modern living...
You see we've grown so used to Swedish-style modernism that we've sort of forgotten that maximalism, rather than minimalism, was once the sign of a cultured abode.
The 1970s in many ways reached back to the rich ideas of Victorian decor: heavy, autumnal and cluttered. Home was meant to be a baroque and sensual experience, rather than a 'machine for living in.'
Given how many people have left - or are thinking of leaving - Twitter, I thought I'd reshare an old thread: what on Earth is this platform good for? And should you stay on it?
TLDR: nobody knows.
Most people's tweets (if they're really people) are a stream of consciousness, and Twitter itself is a daily flow of 500 million of these across the surface of your phone. You are currently looking at the collective unconscious of the planet in real time.
And like any examination of the unconscious you will see things on Twitter that fascinate you and things that disgust you. This was always part of its sales pitch, though there used to be some enforceable guard rails.