SILENCE! #101
April 29th, 2014
NOW THAT’S A GOOD IDEA, SHE SAID SHE SAID
And what costume shall the poor Disembodied Narratorbot X-15735 wear
To all tomorrow’s SILENCE?
A hand-me-down dress from who knows where
To all tomorrow’s SILENCE
And where will Disembodied Narratorbot X-15735 go and what shall Disembodied Narratorbot X-15735 do
When SILENCE comes around?
Disembodied Narratorbot X-15735 will turn once more to Sunday’s clown
And cry behind the door
Yes, it’s that time when the party goes sour, when the brave and the beautiful have gone home, or on to wilder more fabulous parties, and all that’s left is the desperate dregs and the too far gone. The man that no-one knows who smells of milk. The broken, the twisted and the boring. And Gary Lactus & The Beast Must Die of course, sat in the corner pretending they have a podcast, shouting at the wall, laughing, singing idiotic jingles about imaginary people and talking, talking always talking.
Time to go home.
<ITEM> Admin time, with Batman Eternal, start at the middle, Hollyoaks vs Game of Thrones, Dinner Dance on Douglas Mountain, jingles and PREMIUM BONUS CONTENT.
<ITEM> The 100the anniversary self-congratulations continue with another gruelling session of The Quizzlertron! Think that scene in Clockwork Orange, but no-one’s wearing any clothes and there’s a lot more comics lying around. The ramblings include: Image comics jam session, De LA Soul’s Fallin, Judgement Night, Jack Kirby and Bernie Wrightson, The SILENCE Comic, Brightonandhove, The Secret Origin of Silence, Young Love, Fame, The Full Gronch, Penis Fancy Dress, Joe Sacco vs Frank Quitely HOTTTT, 2000AD Prog 626, Frank by Jim Woodring, Dave’s and Gosh, Micronauts, ROM, James Stokoe, The homo-eroticism of Johnny Alpha, the hunkiness of Rogue Trooper, Rob Liefield on Wireheads, Fantasy 2000AD, 21st Century Tank Girl Kickstarter, Geoff Darrow & Pat Mills on Flesh, Vincent D’Onofrio, Ryan Gosling, Claire Balding, Eric Stoltz, Steve Gerber, jack Kirby’s Fourth World, 1986, Little Nemo, Krazy Kat, Gleat, Machines taking over, and so very much more.
<ITEM> A brief dip into the Reviewniverse to talk about Evan Dorkin’s excellent Eltingville Club, then it’s home for tea and biscuits.
So stop grubbing aound those ashtrays looking for stub-ends, stop mine-sweeping those half-empty beercans, and plonk yourself down next to Milk guy for a nice listen to…SILENCE!
Click to download SILENCE!#101
Contact us:
[email protected]
@silencepod
@frasergeesin
@thebeastmustdie
This edition of SILENCE! is proudly sponsored by the greatest comics shop on the planet, DAVE’S COMICS of Brighton.
It’s also sponsored the greatest comics shop on the planet GOSH! Comics of London.
SILENCE! #100
April 21st, 2014
BLANK FRANK IS THE MESSENGER OF YOUR DOOM AND YOUR DESTRUCTION
Happy Birthday to SILENCE!
Happy Birthday to SILENCE!
You look like a monkey
and you smell like…Brian Blessed’s beard…?
I think that’s how the song goes anyway. It is the return of original and best of the Narratorbots, Disembodied Narratorbot X-15735! No fractal distillations of self, or parallell versions, just the real motherboard-flipping deal. Back to celebrate 100, 000, 000 episodes of reality’s most beloved poddlecaste, SILENCE! What once was a mewling, quivering babe, is now a stooped and saggy old man, with low slung testicles and a shuffling gait. And it’s all because of you enabling those two Radio Hams Gary Lactus & The Beast Must Die in continuing to fool themselves into thinking the world wants to hear their unwelcome opinions. So congratulations dear listeners. this is all your fault.
What we need is an intervention.
<ITEM> As a special 100th birthday reward, The Dear Listeners have provided the twosome with a list of questions. You can guarantee that the important issues of the day will be cogitated over, digested and thoroughly dissected… there are so many quizzlers that we JUST HAD to call this Step Into The Quizzlertron, part 1! Comics Dialogue – John Ostrander, Del Close, Garth Ennis, Chris Ware, John Wagner, Wolverine deathcamp, Danny Beastman & Gary Lactenberg – where are we now?, Alex Ross, American Horror Story, Superhero movies, Jeff Goldblum, Gary eating eggs, Dr Strange movie – Burt Reynolds, Sam Elliott, Widescreen comics, Samuel L Jackson, Beano, Dennis The Menace, Early comics memories – missing Knight Rider tied to a tree, 2000AD, Ro-Busters, Secret Wars, Dredd mug, Flaming Carrot action figure, Comics day breakfast, Bob-Z, Ronin, Fantastic Four, Stan The Man Lee making breakfast, James from Twin Peaks made of plastic, Digital comics v analogue comics, Copra, indy vs superhero, Flaming Carrot, the rules of writing questions, Synth pop, Nu-Rom Antics, Lemmy, Keif Llam and so much more…
<ITEM> A sideways crab-like slide into the Reviewniverse to uncover the contemporary delights of Doop, Batman Eternal, weekly comics, Avengers Undercover, Stray Bullets, Auteur, Starlight
And this is just part 1! Aren’t you EXCITED? Couldn’t you just SCREAM?
Well go on then.
No-one’s listening.
Click to download SILENCE!#100
Contact us:
[email protected]
@silencepod
@frasergeesin
@thebeastmustdie
This edition of SILENCE! is proudly sponsored by the greatest comics shop on the planet, DAVE’S COMICS of Brighton.
It’s also sponsored the greatest comics shop on the planet GOSH! Comics of London.
Mindless Mad Men: Time Tells
April 17th, 2014
Last season Don Draper disappeared. This season he’s trying to come back.
Mindless Mad Men part one: Time Zones
April 16th, 2014
Adam and I have decided to reroute our Mad Men musings back to our spiritual home at Mindless Ones. This is the first of what will likely be many posts.
Hope you enjoy them.
The Weegie Board Presents – The Talent
April 13th, 2014
SILENCE! is 100 YEARS OLD*
April 8th, 2014
That’s right gentle listeners – in lieu of any special content, nor even the slightest effort on their parts, those two feckless podders are turning to YOU to provide them with questions for their upcoming 100th wedding anniversary spectacular.
IN NO WAY is this a copy of what other more noble poddists have done when their anniversaries have come to pass. No sir! This is 100% original thought!
So please add your questions to the comments section, or if you’re too shy email us at [email protected]. Or shout at us on twitter, whatever you fancy. Then we will answer these questions using our very limited abilities as part of our Centennial mega-celebrations next week.
And if we don’t get any questions we’ll just makes some up and pretend they’re from f*cking Batman or something.
YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY!!!
*Of course we’re not 100 years old, dear listeners. It just feels like it. It is of course just the 100th episode of “the world’s worst podcast” (Stan Lee), so come join us next week, and spread the word.
Mindless Defectors on True Detective
April 5th, 2014
Still fired up from February’s discussion of what’s worth watching on American TV, Mindless twinset Mark (Amypoodle) and Adam (Adam) have written an Experts Guide to HBO’s ‘True Detective’ and weird comic book fiction for Comic Alliance.
There’s a lot of great stuff about Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, H.P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti in that post – if you’ve read any of Mark or Adam‘s stuff before, you’ll know what to expect, and if not you’re going to enjoy finding out!
These recordings represent the point where the tastes of the Brighton Mindless meet with those of their Scottish counterparts. The Brighton boys generally like to listen to recordings of ghostly mops being thrashed till they whimper, while their friends in the North prefer a mix of hip-hop and rock that can only be described using words that start with the letter “A” – arty, angular, American, or just plain old arsey will usually do the trick. [1]
It was one of my Southern friend who first introduced me to Hype Williams’ One Nation, a collection of electric dreams that sometimes sounds like the work of a mind trying to think its way out of existence. If the strangely absent sound of the instruments on album opener ‘Ital’ provide a suitably morbid build-up to this concept, then the pitched down narration that runs through the second track ‘Untitled’ literalises it:
The people who are still alive when you die might hurt because you are gone. That is okay. People love other people and usually it hurts when people we love die. We even comfort ourselves with those stories that the dead person is… not really dead, and that is okay too.
But of course everyone dies, and you will too…
There’s something of the live band about this, a sense that these songs are happening in the moment, the work of minds and bodies that are reacting to their immediate situation. A lot of this has to do with the halting, tentative quality of the synth playing – set against the generally spacey, metronomic thud of the beat, the melodies have an uncertain quality to them, a sense that they are being recorded before they have finalised. Consider, in contrast, the work of some of Hype Williams’ contemporaries – most Burial tracks aspire to the condition of field recordings in their attempt to chronicle the long, dark club night of the soul, while Actress tracks are more often than not are conceived like static landscapes, revealing detail through time and close examination rather than movement.
The tracks on One Nation are similar to those on Ghettoville or Rival Dealer in that they provoke the sense that you’re listening to something that is almost not there, but where those other artists strive through this effect primarily through tricks of texture and structure that elide the distinction between different sonic elements, Hype Williams do so through a mix of texture and performance that maintains their distinction.
To state it another way: ‘Come Down to Us’ and ‘Skyline’ sound like places that you may or may not have come into contact with, while the songs on this album sound like interactions that may or may not be happening now, in real time. This approach isn’t necessarily superior to ones deployed by Burial or Actress, whose distinct approaches I’ve come painfully close to blurring into each other here, for shame – their work is perhaps more immersive than Hype Williams’, but while you catch site of various Others on the edge of your perception while dealing with their work, listening to One Nation feels a lot like an encounter with a specific Other. [2]
Sometimes, this Other seems tranquil about its own potential absence, such as on the aforementioned ‘Untitled’ track, but my personal favourite run of tracks comes near the end of One Nation, at the point where ‘Mitsubishi’ immerses distressed, backmasked sighs into its in-out backing track, before exploding out into the wild whistle call of ‘Jah’, which recalls Archie Hind’s description of the death twitches of freshly killed cow in The Dear Green Place, “the possible moment of consciousness, when the head loosened and the animal took that last great breath through the chittering windpipe.” [3]
Stripped of the rap vocals for which they were (mostly) originally composed, the tracks on Clams Casino’s three Instrumental Mixtapes create a similar effect.
Strangely, given their origins as rhythms for rappers to ride, Clammy Clams’ production has perhaps more in common with the soundscapes of Burial or Actress than it does with Hype Williams’ snap and echo. Clams Casino beats tend to rise and fall as part of the instrumentation around them, with the snap of the drums sounding like the thud of a human heartbeat, an intimate part of the ragged exhalation that accompanies it.
Take, for example, the song ‘Hell’ from the third mixtape, which sounds so much louder and more distorted here than it did when A$AP Rocky and Santigold sang and rhymed on top of it, and which nevertheless has a gentle, organic feeling to its rise and fall – an effect not entirely dissimilar to the one produced by Hype Williams’ ‘Mercedes’. [4]
Other tacks like ‘Palace’ (from the second Intrumental Mixtape; also originally composed for A$AP Rocky) and ‘Numb’ (from the first Mixtape; otherwise unreleased) literalise this organic effect by drawing out samples of human voices beyond their usual span, and making killer beats out of human breath. Listen to these songs on your headphones while commuting to work on a hungover Monday morning and you’ll find yourself looking over your shoulder to find out who’s been whispering away at it – and trust me, I’m speaking from experience on this front!
The texture of these mixtapes matches the fleeting, performative quality of One Nation for the sense of fleeting individual mortality that’s evoked. And if it seems unlikely that such fragile records should draw so many rappers to them, just listen to the remix of Janelle Monae‘s ‘Cold War’ from the first Instrumental Mixtape and ask yourself what you hear. Me? I hear the sound of a lone voice, calling out in the darkness, demanding a response…
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