Mindless Ones

A HARE CALLED LUCIFER!

The Drifting Reviewniverse gifts The Beast Must Die, Lord Nuneaton Savage and a rather muffled Gary Lactus the hands down, straight up, no word of a lie best comic so far in this chance-led odyssey, Batman and the Outsiders #8. The fearless reviewmonauts pour over every page until they run out of time. Part 2 is already on our Patreon.

Find Lord Nuneaton Savage on Instagram and on the Savage Beast Substack

Enjoy The Beast Must Die on his website

Gary Lactus also exists

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Guitar/not guitar: Life Without Buildings, Whin, Guisers, Even Sisters. His latest solo album, The Vallum, is released 20th June 2025.

What have you learned about making music since Life Without Buildings finished?

There’s a few different ways I could answer that. I was talking to a friend who’s a visual artist a while ago. He had stopped making art for a while, and I’d stopped making music for quite a long time, and we both found that when we stopped making things we went a bit mad. And so he was sort of forced back into making stuff, and in a way that helped with things like impostor syndrome, because he had the excuse that he had to make stuff or his mental health went down the pan. And it was a bit the same for me, I discovered I was actually just a lot more healthy when I was making music. I’d filled the hole with other stuff but it wasn’t really working.

In more practical terms, over the years I’d tried various times to get music theory to stick. I’m a typical guitarist, completely self-taught and I only had the most basic theory necessary to communicate to other self-taught musicians – you know, ‘play E here’ or whatever. So the Lwb stuff comes out of that post-punk tradition, which I think is a very rich thing where musicians really invented their own ways of playing.

But at certain times I’d found that to be a bit limiting – you tend to sort of plateau and start boring yourself. And I’d started to listen to a lot of jazz, and to want to understand more about it. I particularly wanted to understand how harmony works – how chord progressions are built, that sort of thing – so I started reading a bit about jazz harmony for the guitar. And quite quickly I came across these things called shell chords, which are sort of cut-down chords with just what you need to play rhythm over a band, like two or three notes. And the shapes were really really similar to a lot of the stuff I’d been playing in Lwb (although I used open strings to make sort of ringing drones alongside the notes that created the harmonic movement). So that was a route into understanding a bit of music theory, and from there I was able to build on that and develop a more confident understanding of what I was doing, what approaches I could take, how to teach myself stuff when I got bored. That’s been the major change I think, that’s most affected how I play and approach music.

A few years down the line, how do you feel about Lwb’s ‘The Leanover’ having its TikTok moment? 

Well in part it helped to buy the equipment I used to make the more recent records, so I’m grateful for that! But it was nice, it coincided with the 20th anniversary of the record, so there was a bit of press and stuff. I think the nicest thing was what Sue said about it: at the time Lwb were active, the music press and really the whole scene was very male-dominated. Sue got a fair bit of stick, and we got bored to death with people comparing her to Björk and Clare Grogan, as if the salient feature of what she did was that she had a high voice, you know. But for Sue, who has a teenage daughter, to see young women taking control of a piece of work she’d made and using it as a tool for self-expression was I think really nice for her, maybe even changed how she’d thought about the whole experience.

What’s been the most surprising thing about your more recent collaborations in Whin, Guisers and Even Sisters?

Really just that collaboration can be such an enormous joy. I remember when we were doing the Whin track ‘Kris‘, very early on, we thought it needed something else and I asked my friend Fritz Welch, who is a percussionist and improviser, to contribute something and he sent us this absolutely incredible percussion track. I was literally jumping about the room with joy when I heard it. That’s happened a lot with Whin – we’ve used other musicians a lot, especially a guy called Craig Mulholland I know who’s a visual artist but as obsessed with music as we are. He’s contributed a lot of amazing synth parts; he’s always quite nervous about it because he has no musical training at all, but they’re always amazing. He also produced the Guisers version of Patti Smith Group’s ‘Easter’, which I absolutely love.

The core of Guisers is me and Isobel McKenna, who’s also my bandmate in Even Sisters, which is a very purely collaborative thing and can be really exhilarating when it takes off.

This is maybe a bit tangential, but there was a sort of ‘aha’ moment in Whin when we played the track ‘Morning‘ together. I’d never considered myself a good enough musician to improvise with other players, but I’d sort of realised that even if I didn’t have a lot of control over melody, harmony etc, I could control things like touch, pacing, timbre. And that opened up the more directly collaborative stuff, like Even Sisters (even though I don’t play guitar in that project). 

You’ve talked before about playing music as meditation – can you say more about the sort of space you’re trying to create?

I should say I’ve never done any sort of ‘formal’ meditation, so I don’t want to be presumptuous. I mean meditation in a couple of senses: one in that particular pieces quite often start as sort of meditations on something, a chord structure or a little melody; and two that the experience of music both as a listener and a musician has always been about that feeling of being ‘inside’ it, for me. So that’s what I’m chasing, really – can I disappear into what I’m playing, be emotionally moved by it, be carried along. So I suppose that’s the kind of landscape I’m trying to create for listeners – something immersive, deep, involving. 

It’s harder to talk about, but there is a sort of devotional, sacramental aspect to it as well. There’s a moment at the beginning of Mark Hollis’s solo record that I’ve spoken about before – about 20 seconds of silence where he’s just … preparing, I guess. And that feels really important to me, that you would be mentally, spiritually preparing yourself to engage in a sacramental act. I think that came out in at least a couple of tracks on The Vallum –  a devotional aspect, if that doesn’t sound too pretentious.

I don’t always want that though, of course! Once I’d finished mastering the new record I’d pretty much had as much Serious Music as I could take and I just wanted to listen to really lightweight, fun stuff for a while.

How does your new album, The Vallum, develop your approach? 

There are technical developments, in that I’ve got more confident in my playing, and that I have a beautiful amp that my Whin bandmate Martin Henry built for me (in the chassis of the Fender Concert that I used in Lwb). So I think there’s a bit more power and assertiveness in the sounds and the playing. There are also overdubs on almost every track – there’s only one ‘solo’ guitar track. I got a Hohner Pianet and a Yamaha YC20 combo organ and they’re used a lot on the record, rather than the VST instruments that I used for the overdubs on The Rain Room; there’s something really attractive about playing and recording real, old instruments. I also got a 1962 Dynachord tape echo, so that’s on there a fair bit as well.

Other than that I think it shakes out quite similarly in terms of the shape and content, but it’s sort of taken further in each direction: there are quite highly-worked things and then things which are very pure performance on The Rain Room, but on The Vallum that equates to something like the track ‘Spiral’, which is very long, very worked-out, lots of overdubs, and then something like ‘Witch’, which is about as pure a performance piece as you can get, almost a Fluxus thing really.

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AT FIRST I THOUGHT IT MEANINGLESS UNTIL I REALISED YOU WERE SERIOUS

The drifting Reviewniverse brings Gary Lactus, Al To Astonish and His Bleak Majesty Douglas Noble in close contact with Ex-Mutants #3 (vol. 2) from Malibu, 1993. Synergy! Action sass! Batteries! Bottoms! Dive in!

Find Al To Astonish on Bluesky and at House To Astonish

Find His Bleak Majesty Douglas Noble HERE

Bother Gary Lactus HERE

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Weekly broadcasts on art, magic and politics from a group of old nerds with good taste.

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Writer/art-witch, Macbeth (2023), Sycamore (2024), Triskelion (2018). Their New Chapter Tarot is spectacular – creators are struggling to get money from Liminal 11, but you can find readings and more on Briggs’ Patreon!

What power do you find in old stories and archetypes?

Mystery. The power of possibility and unknowability. I find comfort in old stories that were written before things like capitalism took hold of culture. There’s something about an archetype that came about in a world I have no context for, but somehow still speaks to me as a human having a human experience. And thru the process of retelling old stories, the teller leaves a mark; they are shored up by thousands of mends and alterations.

How do you determine what shape your work should take?

Prepare for the most Art School answer possible. I’m making art in collaboration with the materials themselves. This is why I prefer analog methods; absolutely no shade to digital art, it’s just not my cup of tea. The found collage materials, shitty quality markers, bits of detritus I found on my desk all contribute something I can’t control to the work. Which I love. The other thing I think about is “what is this piece really about?” There’s what is said or intellectualized, and then what is felt. The form of the work is trying to express what is felt.

You’ve talked about how you cast yourself in the “best part” for your adaptation of Macbeth. What was the most enjoyable part of that performance, and was there any aspect of it that was daunting?

Honestly, the Self-Indulgent Time was great. When I started adapting Macbeth I didn’t have a publisher and there was no guarantee I’d land one. So why not be Lady Macbeth and fulfill a teenage daydream? Why not pack the pages full of references to my favorite medieval art?

And then the most daunting challenge: the Self-Indulgent Time. A comic creator, self inserting into their comic; groundbreaking. I’d oscillate between “I’m having so much fun!” and “I’m so cringe!”. With some distance, I can accept both as true.

Can you see yourself adding more autobiographical stories to Sycamore in the future?

Yes! I’m doing it now, actually. After a long period of creative burnout I’m making short auto-bio comics again.

What helps keep you going in a world that won’t stop piling EVENTS on EVENTS?

SO MANY EVENTS. After the last US election I decided to focus on building community, and I’m so glad I did. Making meaningful connections with folks in my local community has kept the horrors at bay and given me concrete actions to take. There’s a dash of “fuck you, I’m surviving this” in the mix, as well.

Finally, and most importantly, what’s the best thing about cats?

Their WHIMS. You know a cat trusts you when they start making weird little demands of you. My cat Malkina needs ice in the water fountain, to be praised for being excellent at business while walking all over my partner’s desk, and is inconsolable when I can’t make the squirrels appear outside her favorite window. I love how you can see them crunching the numbers in their little walnuts about how to communicate to me, a sub-par cat, their latest whim.

Island of Secrets comes to an end more amazing and incredible than the wildest dreaming mind could ever conjure in a million years.

Dan and Fraser’s Starlight Adventures can be supported on our Patreon where (at time of posting) you can listen forward to Episode 25 and hear two episodes of us tackling a pretty bad Gladiators game book.

IT’S SO GOOD, BABY WHEN YOU’RE AT THE WHEEL

HOW WAS THIS ALLOWED TO HAPPEN?! Well, it’s done now. Ghost Rider 11 has been fully digested by Gary Lactus, Maid Of Nails and Al To Astonish, who accurately said after recording, “I feel like I have advert poisoning”.

Find Maid Of Nails on Bluesky and Patreon

Find Al To Astonish on Bluesky and at House To Astonish

You can support SILENCE! using Patreon if you like.

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Caroline’s fancy free exploration in the ruins on Surprise Island finally starts to pay out some of its Indiana Jones promise – ALL SPONSORED BY JUST FLIP A COIN DOT COM!

THIS is the sound of ADVENTURE!

THIS is the sound of STARLIGHT!

THIS is the sound of Dan and Fraser having a LOVELY TIME thank you very much!

Dan and Fraser’s Starlight Adventures can be supported on our Patreon where (at time of posting) you can listen forward to Episode 25 and hear two episodes of us tackling a pretty bad Gladiators game book.

LOOK AT THIS!

WHEN I SAW MUSHROOM HEAD, I WAS BORN AND I WAS DEAD

It’s the Drifting Reviewniverse #3 and Gary Lactus, Al To Astonish and Maid Of Nails are supposed to be examining Ghost Rider #11 (Marvel, 1975). Unfortunately Maid Of Nails has gone missing and the adverts are far too interesting to concentrate on the comic itself. Despite this and quite amazingly, what you have here is an hour and a half of enthusiastic dissection that covers less than half the comic! We’re going to have to dive back in for Part 2 next week. OMGR!!!!!!!

Find Maid Of Nails on Bluesky and Patreon

Find Al To Astonish on Bluesky and at House To Astonish

You can support SILENCE! using Patreon if you like.

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