i could continue this weeks pseudo philosophic literary music theme by making reference to michael moorcock who had a ship in a book called how the clouds have meaning, who hung with the original crazy druid noise bastards hawkwind. a band who’s shadow in turn hangs over the radiation line.
i could mention aleister crowley and his pagan ways. his constant search for growth and change, experience and new energies. to stop swimming is to die. says the shark. no two songs the same. no two records the same. that’s the way of the radiation line. radioactivity, which for crowley put the glowing cancer cat amongst the mutant pigeons. scientifically speaking. which changed how we look at life and the structure and being of things.
i could quote bill bryson (found, not read): tune your television to any channel it doesn’t receive and about one percent of the dancing static you see is accounted for by this ancient remnant of the big bang. the next time you complain that there is nothing on, remember that you can always watch the birth of the universe.
i’d do this because the seven and a half minutes of lift off that opens this ep is all squeals and squalls of machine noise, electricity and the thrum of broken things and detuned radios, the sounds of fax machines over old telephone wires and ancient computers loading. it’s harsh and unsettling but oddly soothing and comforting. much like the hissing wombnoise of tv static.
radiation being the process in which energy emitted by one body travels through a medium or through space, ultimately to be absorbed by another body. this is how one might, nay should, experience the radiation line. as an act of aural osmosis.
absorbing:
the repeato chug and misfiring synth schzoom and vwaaah of now the clouds have meaning, that exists somewhere between earth and the aforementioned hawkwind. which builds not into doom but something approaching dionysian ecstasy, the monged stomping dance of jim morrison as a mountain of skullflower (the old stoned psyche stuff as opposed to the new harsh evil shit) topples onto him in a slo-mo death pact. there’s catharsis here, a joyous exhalation of bad shit trapped within;
the random swells of planetary om, unstructured groans and moans and hissing feedback of to rot in orbit. or the equally brief in reflection of the great mirror… which condenses tangerine dreams entire output into one minute and thirty eight seconds. or the gentle throb of synth and barely twanged clean guitar, like labradford caught in an autumn breeze that is as heaven was revealed;
spiral, as it brings things to a claustrophobic yet celestial climax. a minimalist jam of dial fiddling and (un)easy waves of oceanic crackle bringing to mind cemeteries, david lynch, planets, the cold dead unair of space, the kubrick monolith of 2001, that obsidian obelisk reflecting nothing yet everything.
