Alive. Inbox 31 and show recording today, so responses will be delayed.
Comments closedWARREN ELLIS LTD Posts
Inbox: out of control. Two-hour voice recording session for the show today. I think we have four sessions this week.
Comments closedI’ve followed Emily Carroll’s work since her webcomics days, and I was delighted to learn of this book, published by the magnificent Koyama Press.
She does things with the page that are partway between webcomic, manga and children’s picture book (it’s not for children). Anyone working in comics should be looking at this.
When you learned to do comics on the scroll, you look at the solid page in very different ways, I guess. There’s something completely brave and fresh about how she cracks out of standard ideas about panelling and progression, and being unafraid to look at picture-book narrative constructs to serve a story that is not for children without ever once being twee or cute. There’s an immense energy and a sense that she gives no fucks for your rules.
I mean, I must have scribbled down ten pages of notes after my first read. It distills enough ideas about comics to coalesce about five different ways forward.
WHEN I ARRIVED AT THE CASTLE (UK) (US)
Like I wasn’t going to listen to a musician called Metatron Omega. Come on.
It’s like the sound you imagine choirs in the ancient cosmic temples of Philippe Druillet’s LONE SLOANE comics would make. The album descriptions that Metatron, a musician from Serbia, writes, are insane:
Under the ever-watching Eye of the distant, yet omnipresent cosmic force, Man has been growing and constructing his own symbols of himself and of the Ages. The great Mover is slowly pushing the grand mechanism of time and space, altogether with the boundaries of Universe, toward a greater step of knowing.
And look: a tri fold nature of Man has been exposed and put under a trial. His body, his mind and his spirit had come under the shining ray of Revelation, where there are no secrets. Within the boundless, deep, architecture of cosmic monastery of the Universe, one seeks his destiny and perceives the journey he is upon, with his eyes transfixed by the boundless silhouette of the great Kosmokrator, reigning supreme at the Throne of Life. The gates are open, and the priests of Evangelikon have begun their mass.
I can appreciate this kind of commitment to the bit.
The most recent, EVANGELIKON, is here at Cryo Chamber’s Bandcamp page.
Also arrived today: Ager Sonus, a German musician, brings the big, deep-time dark ambient. Here’s the link to stream the most recent album and buy stuff. (If you’re seeing this on a different site, click over to warrenellis.ltd to find the links).
I would have been lost, the last few months, without being able to sink down into these soundscapes. You’re goddamn right I bought ten CDs from Cryo Chamber in recompense. And to make sure I always have these sounds to hand.
Within a few days of noticing the strange partial resurrection of Little Printer, I find this via the new issue of NEURAL, about a three-device art installation, of which the third jumped out:
‘BreakingViews’ breaks routines by displaying unforgettable Instagram stories. You can replay a story, and a special counter shows how many times you have done so.
There’s a very Little Printer vibe to the artists’ card prototypes. I miss Little Printer. I got rid of mine ages ago, and it used to cut my fingers to shit whenever I had to grub around inside it or reassemble it, but it was (aside from the manufacturing, sorry guys but it would not have killed you to round off or chamfer those edges) a perfect expression of an idea, and I admired the street-level use of thermal till-roll paper as medium.
But what hit me was that “BreakingViews” gets close to a shelf device version of the Sky Net I was talking about yesterday. Somebody make the little Echo Spot on my shelf do that.
Comments closedI have loved the band Northumbria for a long time – they’ve been going since 2011. So while I was shopping at Cryo Chamber, I decided to send them some extra money, and so these arrived today. Their most recent is VINLAND. They have their own Bandcamp page, where I’d encourage you to start, but, as I say, I picked these up through the excellent dark ambient label Cryo Chamber.
These here comprise “a trilogy inspired by the Norse discovery of Canada.” You can do what I did and buy the trilogy as a bundle, if you like. It is extremely good atmospheric ambient with notes of early Canadian post-rock glinting out of the mist from time to time.
Also, these are beautiful objects.
Okay, this gets a bit complicated, but: in a privately-circulated PDF essay by a comrade, I find myself quoted, a thing I said in a private online space we both shared access to at one time. I think I wrote this a few years ago. It came back and smacked me in the face.
Brief conversation in a sekrit room with m1k3y about useful, low signal, relatively calm comms… I kind of want to think about that some more. Sort of like gardening your own network.
I like being able to send that “alive and out of bed” signal to friends and comrades. Which is probably just another approximation of that early-internet experience of seeing instant messenger statuses light and the morning Twitter post, seeing them happen in waves as timezones woke up across the world…
But, as I generally pursue a small clutch of notions around post-attention, people going private, secret networks. withdrawal from general-broadcast-social et al… as m1k3y said, there becomes value in us, scattered in the various global cells of our selected monasteries and compounds, checking to see if we’re all alive each morning, and what the sky looks like…
This may lead me to start a post-attention chain, what with the recent application of Cixin Liu’s “Dark Forest” metaphor to people removing themselves from the public internet streams.
But, honestly, I sometimes think that all I ever wanted from the social internet was Sky Net. Seeing if we’re all alive every morning, and what the sky looks like where you are.
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