Fishscale/V/: New.Entry-Transmission.Whatever.Wetnightmares.
Screamscapes.and.corporal.malfunctions//The movie theater has gone dim. The Kodak camera has lost its reel. The Mall is shuttered. The video store is closed. The soundtrack plays on the tape deck, scrambled. The Pyrex takes a nap for the evening. The national anthem plays after dusk behind a scrambled pornographic transmission. The ICE is out tonight and the night is on fire. The sky looks like a dead screen. No stars in the sky. No whistling wind. No connection. No firmware in a pushup brazier to tune into the right nocturnal frequency. Just dead space and a static filter, not even the air could be trusted with authenticity. Media never sleeps. The television stays on. It’s always on and watching us, omnipresent and instigating, a rabble rouser and a shit talker galvanizing the masses into herds and stampedes at the press of a button. A planned reaction to the insurgency of law. What have I walked into? They say revolution is out in the streets but, it’s all a mixer, a munch, a social fellatio, what have I walked into, a gaggle of geeks, gooners, meat pacifiers and skin socks – repeating what the TV eye and the cardboard says. All in step and out of order. For sincere reasons and free will – although dictated in silent vibration from the overseers Morse code. Engineered resistance to a problem that will be solved and locked down with dystopia and monitored by A.I. screws. Then. Here come the star fuckers and the vampires the celebrities and leeches. Lead by the pimps. The publicists. Celebrity cameo appearances in the back rows of protest. Kissing babies. Shakin’ hands. Only there for the photo-op and never joining rank at the frontline. Pretenders; actors; slaves to corporate rations and privilege; no gunplay, no backbone, just a game in the end. A hologram of a leg-wit-ammo, a box of blanks, rambling his gums into the void for a star on the avenue. Not here. It’s just another dead night and about this same dead time every night. They reenact and replay the same playlist and cosplay their childhood dreams. A boulevard of vapid dreamers, chipping away at the surfaces and hurling the city like feces at pigs, drones, naysayers and the npc. Nothing more but performance art against the machine. Showroom Dancers. With color commentary by your favorite content creators; jesters and critics feeding off the algorithm. Crossing their palms with silver traded in from your attention and likes; bunch of Svengalis and pied pipers in the new preachers clothes not like them but living a karaoke life in sheeple skin. A generation nursed on instant gratification through an umbilical usb cord detached from the contaminated coarse weather of reality and living one TikTok moment after another in some perverse REM sleepwalk. All copyrighted and sponsored by your elitist fascist overlords full-throttling their plans into a doomsday reset scenario and the birth of the new religion. Sponsored by oligarchs. You are all sleeping. Make it a better dreaming. Get into your phalanx formations. Red Dawn. Bravehearts. Look to your brother-in-arms. And behold leading the ranks. Not random protagonists. Imagine, just imagine under those hoods in the front. A fantasy.  – unveiled is the avengers or at least those that play them. Imagine yourselves rejuvenated with angst and righteous rage as those performers now possessed by the spirits of the IP that propelled their public image holding the line. As Christ Evans with trash lid in one hand and the stars & stripes in the other raised high; RDJrD2 in his aluminum foil iron armor inspiring courage in you. As descending from the rooftops with karambit gloves and fury in his teeth screaming to the heavens that “this is our ENDGAME!” is Hugh Jackalman too. Tears in your eyes and love swelling up in your frail chest and throats, “They’re here!” “The Avengers are here”. ”This is it!” A moment of our lifetimes when all men can lock shields and crush the oppressors under the tidal wave of change. freedom. and a better tomorrow. Something Aragonidus would say. What a dream that could be, Teen Wolves. Fleeting. Transitioning. Remixing. Getting carried away on a channel surf. The sequence again scrambled. The channel switched on everyone. All because the common man has lost his remote control. It’s been in the hand of the bad men this whole time. The bloody bag men. The usurpers. The adversary. The ones who remake, mutilate and remaster our memories and script our futures. The sky is a dead screen. The stars are blacked out. It’s just us in here and the movie rolls on. The show goes on. The empire strikes back. As everyone plays Sophie’s Choice every week on which Hot Topic to rally behind next. From the killing fields to local inconvenience. These aren’t freedom fighters this is the mob. And Rome knows its mob. How to fatten them up and keep them occupied with spectacle and gossip. The enemy knows the system. And the only responsible response is too crash the system. Crash N’ Burn. Hack the dream and make it yours.
Then. Then, I woke up. And the theaters were screening, the video store was open, the soundtrack restarted and the sky was in high resolution. What a beautiful sunset. The TV dinner smells amazing. That’s when I woke up. And forgot what I was dreaming about. //////….then WW3 began.
SamHaiNe

• Bonus: Chinatown (visual video) HaiNesVille:

10.

Makeup and Vanity Set & Sferro – Memory Screen

9.

Neon Nox x LukHash – Midnight Run

8.

Neilio – CYPHER (feat. Kaarin Zoe Lee)

7.

Preston Knight – Human (feat. Hello Meteor)

6.

Wice – City Nights (Feat. J+1)

5.

Dreamhour – She’s Everything (feat. Dokodoko)

4.

House Of Serpents – Ritual (feat. Battlejuice)

3.

Timecop1983 – Read My Mind (feat. Josh Dally)

2.

Kid Moxie & NINA – Electric Kiss

1.

PYLOT x Tyler Lyle – Time Bomb |Visualizer|

In the four years that have gone by, something cold, alien and deadly has been frantically cutting through the fabric of reality.

As the night grows ever darker a brutal, systematic rhythm can be heard coming from a distance.
A sound of metallic heels colliding against black basalt stones, the hissing of a blade gleaming wildly through the shadows, a low, regular rumble that amplifies the vast darkness that surrounds us.

Previous FISHSCALES:
Fishscale Prt. 1 – https://newretrowave.com/2018/11/20/fishscale-a-retro-flash-of-fiction-part-1/

Fishscale Prt. 2 – https://newretrowave.com/2021/08/30/fish-scale-part-2-a-nostalgic-flash-fiction/

Mad Bull 34 was adapted into a four-part original video animation released from December 21, 1990 to August 21, 1992. A sequel manga, Mad Bull 2000 (マッド・ブル 2000) began in 1999.

Daizaburo “Eddie” Ban, a Japanese-American police officer assigned to the 34^th Precinct located in the Washington Heights neighborhood of NYC. Daizaburo is young, ambitious and soon to be partnered with John “Sleepy” Estes otherwise known as MADBULL.

The pairing seems like a mismatch from the get-go.
Mabbull is a take-no-nonsense, hair-triggered, maniac with a badge. He runs a prostitution ring and has no hesitation to murder suspects and criminals. That being said he isn’t a complete sociopath. He takes the earning from the Prostitution ring to donate to charity and he does after-all look out for the little guy. He’s the typical cliché late 80’s antihero with a shotgun and a grenade jockstrap. Madbull as a character and anime is a critique of western culture and entertainment; violent, misogynistic, amoral and full of raunchy language.  This is what anime once was. No BS. No restrictions. No rules. Anything goes. Amen.

Not as violent as Genocyber or ANGEL COP but, the realistic setting and over the top action is the icing on this cake. The english voice acting is just as over the top as the action. The accents are thick and at times cartoonish, even for a cartoon. The villains are run of the mill Streets of Rage bad guys and the buddy cop dynamic helps to sell the story. There’s nudity and sex and drugs and bullets. It might as well be a 42nd street anime. The four movies are a hoot. Not for the squeamish.

I can see why this anime is both revered by those old enough to have seen it and never heard of by casual fans today.   

 Mad Bull 34 (マッド★ブル34, Maddo Buru Sanjūyon) was based on  a Japanese manga series written by Kazuo Koike and illustrated by Noriyoshi Inoue, serialized in Shueisha‘s Young Jump between 1985 and 1991, and collected in 27 tankōbon volumes.

ALL FOUR OVA’s can be seen below.

Link: PART 2 SCANDAL
https://youtu.be/uYEWBrMEkvc 

Link PART 2: Manhattan Project
https://youtu.be/Ra0Wn0S4a1s

Link Part 3: City of Vice
https://youtu.be/mQ9-RVJ7QeA

Link Part 4: Cop Killer
https://youtu.be/kMQge6te_v8

Stay clean and keep your finger on that REWIND button.

Disasters do not exist, they are elsewhere.

Georges Perec

There exists a jarring paradox: silence is at daggers drawn with language, yet it breeds – in a gemmating fashion, thus with hardly any fuss or gidding – a demand to justify itself WITHIN boundaries of the latter. Therefore, it concocts a cumbersome cocktail of common courtesy, whipped with a whiff of whimsical whining: “Mr. Language, why are you being so strict? Are you trying to puzzle my well-being, sending me mixed signals? Why wouldn’t you let me have my own mode of expression, a means to communicate without your enforced necessities? Oh, Mr. Language, would it be too much to ask if you keep an eye on my previous duties, while I am going to try and be beside myself?”…

“Beside oneself” – taken as literally as possible here – is perhaps the key phrase which you may attribute to Georges Perec’s novel A Man Asleep. It has lodged on the same plane of mis-ontologized referentiality, sprouted up in the same kingdom of metaphysical stiff-upper-lipness, just as Wittgenstein’s Mistress and I’m Thinking of Ending Things had, the latter two simply occupying different hmm… “marches” of monstrous calamities, presiding over other “fiefdoms” of fiendish dread. Ensnared while crossing the impossible space between two sides of the looking glass (bizarre-wise, I suppose I don’t have to remind you which looking glass is it, do I…), the book neither pays heed to your reading comfort, nor makes any excuses for itself. It isn’t illegible, unapproachable, yet is inexorable, ineluctable to those who are just as beside themselves as protagonist of Perec’s second novel is.

A nameless 25-year-old sociology student – you – for the Frenchman uses 2^nd person narrative throughout the whole odyssey of how to make oneself scarce – not figuratively, but metaphysically speaking – realizes he is unable to cope with blatantly pointless mechanisms of life itself anymore. How does he feel? Disillusioned? With what? Rejected? By whom? Dejected? Why? Extricated? From what? Forget about questions. They are the most loyal lackeys of language anyway. You, on the other hand, are more, or less…or…well, “beside”. You have slipped through the crack in reality, into the crevasse of self-revelation so brutal, yet so numbing it cannot make anything more nor anything less than etherize and cut you off from this paradoxical notion, reduce you to shards of silence, turn you into mechanical wretch of a human shadow, becoming flatter and flatter on the ever less insignificant surface of reality.

For, in contrast to Kate – maltreated by no-other-wayness in Wittgenstein’s Mistress – and Jake – the Arctic wolf of ultimate loneliness in I’m Thinking of Ending Things – you accommodated yourself on the thin line of retaining your sanity (you wish you had lost it; would make life easier, wouldn’t it?…) while not being necessitated to perform a counterstroke against the vapid void of ever the same days and nights of walking and looking. Days made of verbs and nouns. You have turned into Verbman, a Noun monster. No qualities – just doing, listing, discerning without acknowledging. Lacking flair, bland, squalid seconds of sore scrapes, splinters of previous habits, now meaningless and, thus, at the verge of being nonexistent. Dis-endowed deeds of derring-do without any dare. You have become so homogeneously tautological you are no longer able to belong in general. Full stop. You are the end of a sentence nobody wishes to utter, yet, out of linguistic spite, vile bile or other despicable phenomenon, has been phrased. You still retain your consciousness, your sense of reasoning. You are an invisible slime at the threshold of proper, self-inflicted basket case conditioning you would love to fall for irrevocably, irreversibly, which, nevertheless, flees from your incapacitated mentality, existential inconsistency. You possess neither will to live nor will to death. You cannot continue and cannot cease to carry on. You are a nightmare of every classical logician. You are so beside yourself you are turning into a dream of becoming something else than a human being. What would you like to become? I bet my bottom dollar you would reject your human form in favor of the whole new reality, with an alternative set of pristine premises. Or, perhaps, you would not. All in all, keep dreaming, sleepless boy, keep dreaming…

What is so riveting in A Man Asleep? Is it the language, curt and mundane, full of enumerations, with verbs as main building blocks of narration (nouns coming a close second)? Does reality of a man who has been slashed with the “neither/nor” exclusion genuinely succumbs to verbal abuse (here, again, in a literal meaning) that badly? Is it the assertion you are prone to bestow: of all senses, sight is spatially the most passive one? Hearing almost always entails some sort of movement (finger drumming, leg bouncing, full-blown dancing routine, etc.), smell and taste – the underrated duo comprising hedonistic holism, with touch as their sidekick or, rather, the power behind the throne of sensuality – are, too, in complete cooperation with the body and its fidgeting around. But sight is different. You may just sit and keep your eyes open, perfectly motionless, be still and still be able to observe as many things as your pupils would allow you to. There is nothing that should convince your sight to give way for anything but its own self-centered continuation. Thank god you have eyelids. You would have been unbearable without them. But I digress, as usual.

Getting back on track with unquenchable charms of A Man Asleep, should the external nightmare of senseless activities, futile deeds, lackadaisical actions – bread and butter of Perec’s protagonist – be treated as a sign of general bankruptcy of the idea of personal identity? More than once, you are being exposed as someone whose life is something which cannot be equated with yourself. A perfect specimen of homo sapiens with stumps for qualities, a man curtailed. Not a single bad word may be said about you, the same goes for their opposites. You are Aristotelian golden mean incarnate. You are a perfectly balanced nothingness which evoke a sole connotation only – a drab individual with self-regurgitated life, having no strings attached to it whatsoever. You remain here and your existence went away. Better deal with it. Or, perhaps, don’t…

Perec’s novel – not yet subjugated to the literary rigor of OuLiPo – is another evidence of how unpredictable a flirt with skepticism (no matter whether inflicted by sheer chance or accosted deliberately) could be. In spite of not being in full bloom, and without ontological horror vacui, whose dire consequences might be witnessed in Wittgenstein’s Mistress and I’m Thinking of Ending Things, A Man Asleep remains their next of kin. It may be loaded with less conceptual “cargo”, with far less “ideas behind ideas”, nevertheless you are more than eager to forgive its literary faux pas. All thanks to the memorable, one-of-a-kind narration (the only other book I know of, which implements second-person point of view, is Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney and – partially – Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler) and for the underlying sense of inexpressibility – a blaring notion that behind being exempt from will to live and will to death, beside being beside oneself, there is simply something more, simmering underneath the rampant muzzle of words and many other oxymoronic expressions which are doomed to de-scribe you. What exactly is it? Why don’t you fall asleep and tell me. I am willing to prepare a glass of warm milk for you…

Amonne Purity

For those unfamiliar with your work: where are you from and what is it that first drew you towards electronic music?

Hi, I’m Miles Matrix, a Synthwave / 80s Electro producer based in Vienna. I’m also a Synthwave DJ. I’ve been living in Vienna for about ten years now. I was born in Gibraltar but grew up in Germany after our family moved around Europe including France for a while.

I’ve been into electronic music all of my life really. Some of my first cassettes were 80s Electro, or “breakdance music”. I also had some cassette compilations where some artists covered popular tracks as synthesizer instrumental pieces, so I got into the sound very early. My taste in music is pretty eclectic, I am a huge Oasis fan too for example but electronic music has probably been the most steady constant in my life. I remember in the 90s, in my teens, I used to listen to recordings from the Love Parade and dance on my own to all the Techno, turning my desk light on and off again, to imitate a strobe.

The liner notes for LA BOUM mention a mixtape that introduced you to “Breakdance Music”. What brought you to consider fully embracing this sound for this latest album?

Yeah, that was a cassette a classmate of mine recorded for me in primary school. He was into breakdance, and while I couldn’t dance myself, I loved the music a lot. It was only years later I realized that was actually old-school electro, basically one of the origins of the dance music we listen to today. I never stopped loving the sound, and after a couple of albums where I was going for a more traditional Synthwave sound, now was the time for me to go down this route. And I must say I feel pretty happy on this road and I can imagine exploring this Electro sound even more on upcoming releases. There’s something very refreshing in this sound.

LA BOUM by Miles Matrix

Can you tell us a little about the gear you used to bring the 80s’ Electro sound back to life?

So I think the most important aspect in production was dedicating myself to some minimalism. As a synthwave producer, you tend to go all-in on FX and soundscapes, trying to be very cinematic or dark, which very often results in a million tracks in the DAW. Obviously, this approach wouldn’t be very authentic for a sound rooted in the 80s. But far more importantly it actually boosted my creative energies having to work with a limited amount of tracks. It forces you to focus on the essential parts of a song. It’s a challenge from a composition perspective as you can’t cheat your way around boring parts with “more FX / more pads / more sounds”.

My approach was to deconstruct what old-school Electro is made of. Essentially, it boils down to these parts: A groovy bassline, an infectious hook, reverb and delay, and most importantly: percussion. Electro gets its groove from an offbeat kick and the snare playing regularly on the 2 and 4. From there you can get really creative with hi-hats, cymbals, cowbell, rim shots and percussive effects. The percussion is the most important part of Electro.

In terms of gear, I had a hybrid approach. I composed a couple of my album songs on my Roland MC-101 and TR-08, giving them a finishing touch in my DAW. But also in the DAW I worked with authentic samples from the 808, 909, 727 and 505. The synths I used were nothing special because I was going for a raw sound, and based on the feedback so far, it really worked out.

Currently, I am working on translating the album to a hardware gear-only live set with my MC-101 and TR-08 and Monotribe. The concept is to have one continuous set and to that end, I am remixing every album song for a live performance to give it a bigger club touch. We are currently in lockdown but I can’t wait to perform the album live!

What are the aspects of NYC Club music and Breakdance music that hit you in ways that more modern dance or hip hop music fail to do?

I wouldn’t say “old music” is per se better or modern music worse. I listen to a lot of current electronic music. But I find myself returning to the “olden times” a lot. In terms of what I like to produce myself, this sweet spot in the 80s where acts like Newcleus, Egyptian Lover, Hashim and others were redefining electronic music, very much inspired by Kraftwerk on the one hand and disco and early hip hop culture on the other hand, this sweet spot really gets me. I love it.

Tell us a little about the songs ‘COUNTACH THIS!’ and ‘CUPCAKES’. What’s the story about these tracks about Lambos and Cupcakes?

Hahaha, it’s so funny to see the reactions to these particular songs. I know this is a very disappointing answer but there isn’t a huge story behind them, to be honest. Here’s the thing: When producing the instrumentals I tend to give them working titles, mostly some random word I come up with on the spot, which in this case was “Cupcakes” and “Lambo #5” respectively. And then I basically just started ad-libbing to the beats and that’s how the lyrics came about. I then sent them through a text-to-speech software and voilà. Countach this is of course a pun based on MC Hammer’s hit, but it just fit so perfectly. And Cupcakes, well, let’s just say I got carried away while ad-libbing…

If you were to book 5 artists from that classic 80s era for the perfect Breakdancing music night, who would you choose?

Damn, only 5??? That’s tough. I think I’d book Chris “The Glove” Taylor to DJ the night. I’d want Egyptian Lover, Newcleus and Cybotron to perform, with Ice-T emceeing the event. I think that would be so dope!

Closing off with the question I ask at the end of every interview: name one of your favorite albums, movies and books.

Tough again, haha. It always depends on the mood I’m in but I’ll give it a try. Album: The Crystal Method – Vegas. Movie: Jerry Maguire. Book: The Cartel Trilogy by Don Winslow!

Thanks to Miles Matrix for taking the time to answer our questions!

Miles Matrix ‘La BOUM’ is out now via Bandcamp and will be released on Spotify in December.

LA BOUM by Miles Matrix

The album strikes a clean balance between old-school Breakdance-oriented Electro-Funk and Club-oriented Dance beats and makes a strong case for one of the eighties’ more underappreciated subcultures, where style and attitude were the name of the game.  Whether you’re into flashy sportscars or have a serious (borderline psychotic) fixation on cupcakes, ‘LA BOUM’ has got you covered.

If your strain of eighties nostalgia includes memories of Afrika Bambaataa’s ‘Planet Rock’, Grandmaster Flash, Run DMC and Captain Rock, LA BOUM is most definitely the throwback party you’ve been waiting for. Standing still isn’t an option.

Favorite Tracks: KID MIDI, COMPUTERMUSIC

Miles Matrix ‘La BOUM’ is out now via Bandcamp and will be released on Spotify in December.

“Late night coming home from a temp job for some automotive corporation.

I was expecting the usual greeting and shaking of the hands with every graveyard shift hustler and loiterer that happened to be outside earning cash or just hanging out into the weekend. But, it was oddly quiet for mid August. Probably because there were three black & white patrol cars parked in front of my building. 

“Great, what now?”

The lobby of building 545 had smelled foul for almost a week. A really shitty smell; like dead rats behind a bodega wall. That stench reached a new level when I left for work, this morning. A Rancid, sweet, wet scent, almost inedible. A dozen pussy plugs in a sweaty soiled toilet kind of smell. And the summer humidity only exasperated that aroma. But, that was this morning?  It’s after midnight. What’s going on?

My cross-eyed superintendent had the front door and the side entrance to the dumpsters open.  The smell was so bad you could smell it from the lobby entrance.

I walked in and was like, “Shit?!?”. The Super told me that someone subletting apartment 1B couldn’t take the odor any longer and knocked on a roommates bedroom door to confront them about the smell. Knocking and knocking before opening the door to find the corpse of said roommate.

The people on the lease never bothered to complain bout the smell beforehand because, they were illegally renting out rooms for a profit. So discreet, they were about things, that even the people renting in the apartment barely knew anything about or bothered each other. 

Shit tends to break the fan when you find the naked bloated body of your housemate in bed still watching infomercials; slowly decomposing on his sheets during a hot August heatwave with high humidity in the nineties. 

I’m not sure if I knew the deceased but my hunch is – it was this forty year old guy that rented there for years. If it was, he was a pervert. I knew this because he at one time offered a kid I once knew a few dollars for “Favors” once. …The kid said No. However, the youngbol and his older brother did grift the guy by luring him to our rooftop promising some “handoverfist” with “happy-endings”, and robbed the vic for whatever money they could shake from him. Then extorted him for a few weeks after that with threats of bodily harm and criminal charges.

If it was him rotting in the building, Good Riddance. 

I sat on the staircase listening to Gang Starr’s Mass Appeal album, smoking a few cigarettes, and watching the PIGS and EMT’s rub ointment under their noses and burn some incense to weaken the stench of rot in the air. I even watched our simpleminded super almost kill us all by mopping our hallway with a strong mixture of bleach n water. The chemicals were the worst. I could stomach dead body odor. After all it wasn’t my first time being near a dead body before tonight. 

I stayed there and just watched. I watched neighbors walk into the building and cover their noses in repulsion. I watched a few of them almost vomit where they stood. I listened in on the police taking statements from the roommates and the Super. I always liked recording witness statements when I worked for a private investigator a few years ago. So, I was kind of imagining myself interview all of them. 

The whole thing went on for a few hours. I saw the crime scene detectives arrive on the scene and the meat wagon pickup the body. But, all I kept thinking was –
What was he watching on television.?”

FISH SCALE PART 1 : https://newretrowave.com/2018/11/20/fishscale-a-retro-flash-of-fiction-part-1/

Natural City, the album is still available only at www.samhaine.bandcamp.com
A collection of short monologues and flash fictions highlighting some of the individuals that call Hainesville “Home”. These are stories about people who live outside the margins that define civility and exist in the moment on the edge of a razor-blade. This is a pulp future-present inspired by neo-noir, retro nostalgia and some cyberpunk aesthetics. 

Out now on Business Casual, “Emotion Engine” is a delightful blend of synthwave, future funk, nu disco, and vaporwave that plucks you from your chair and deposits you in early cyberspace. This exquisite blend of genres is pulled off perfectly – it’s really hard to understate just how immensely groovy these tracks are.

This album is the first full-length we’ve heard from Sferro, the Cleveland-based founder of Girlfriend Records, since 2018 – that is, unless you count “Interactive Sampler Disc” – an interesting release of 40 demo tracks that dropped in 2020. “Interactive Sampler Disc” is pretty sick itself, It’s an interesting concept I’ve only seen once before with HOME’s brilliant “Resting State.”

“Emotion Engine” features several singles Sferro has produced over the past few years, and loads of new material as well. The singles themselves were great, and I’m happy to see they’re finally gettting a physical release! The talented Mecha Maiko is also featured on ‘Modular Origami,’ lending some juicy-yet-meloncholic vocals to an already fantastic mix.

Perhaps the most interesting part of “Emotion Engine” is it’s aesthetic. Instead of focusing on 80s retro, it has an incredibly distinct early 90s sound. Listening to this album conjures images of REBOOT style early 3D animation  – or the mesh of multicolored tubes from the Windows 95 screensaver working themselves through a CRT. Something about the vaporwave influence on tracks like ‘Okay Regain’ combines perfectly with squelching synths on tracks like ‘Almost Caught A Break’ to recreate that unique transitory period right before the internet became commonplace.

Sferro himself called it an “…anti retro neon grid testerossa aesthetic city nights palm beach wayfarer hoverboard type number…” So the 90’s take makes sense, and I think this is yet another perfect example of synthwave artists moving away from that 80s aesthetic as part of the natural evolution of the genre.

Whatever the route, “Emotion Engine” still arrives at that all-important nostalgia factor, making for some supremely phat tracks!

Grab yourself a copy now here before they’re gone!

Listen to Emotion Engine on Spotify.

I like this particular feeling of solitary tears trickling sideways toward my ears, when the trail of delicate moisture gradually dries out, leaving a distinctive, ever so slightly existent line. I never wipe these. Never rub them out. I leave them be. They are those special lines that appear only when I read something truly remarkable. Something which stirs up the very core of my being, something which corresponds with me, something which harmonizes with my possible selves and their state of being submerged in an unrealized realm of impossibility. I like to lie, then, on my bed for a while (I always read in any kind of horizontal position), motionless, as those tears, this rarest type of tears, make an estuary out of the conchs of my ears. They always flow in there. I don’t know what those tears designate. Frankly, I don’t want to know. All I know is I want more of them to happen. More of them to flow. Yet, I am perfectly aware were they to occur more often, they wouldn’t be the same. They would weaken, water down themselves, resolve into some other liquid less noble. Less honest. Less “ever-so-slightly”. And I wouldn’t like that at all. What I would like instead is take your hand and walk you around the recent “spring” of my tears – Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere – for the next couple of paragraphs.

Neverwhere is many things. A peculiarly camouflaged, lightweight parable, Holden-Caulfield-like, memorable characters, a book which provokes your thoughts to flex on the very nature of what does it really mean to narrate, etc. It may be even more than you and I think it is. However, first and foremost, it is a story. Pardon my slip of the keyboard – a Story, with a capital ‘S’. To compare effortlessness of Gaiman’s language to concoct a well-defined and separate reality, with which he operates upon a reader, to a spry wizard waving his wand to summon up some kind of wanton wonder, would be the greatest underestimattion of the century. The Englishman’s sentences, paragraphs and chapters are crafted with solicitous nonchalance of someone who has topped the highest level of narrative prowess ages ago, without being subjugated to a nasty aftertaste of highfalutin style. Its candid simplicity prevents it splendidly. The linguistic viscosity of Neverwhere resembles that of a fine bread spread. It covers the porous, pumice-like surface of a slice smoothly, soothing its unevenness with a mouthwatering stickiness of its thawing-fudge consistency, yet retaining its down-to-earth incapability of adorning itself with borrowed plumes of Beluga caviar or Kobe beef. What are its ingredients, you ask? Well, let’s dip our fingers in this marvelous jar of balmy prose together, shall we?

Not many a time have I been eager to admit why I am not particularly keen on the story side of novels in general. Regrettably, the day has finally come to pour my heart out a little: I suffer form a rare literary disease called Astorexia Repetitivae. Its symptoms are pretty simple: every time I hear or read a story, I cannot help but deem it repeatable. “Oops, sorry, buddy, this one has already been told/written etc. Better luck next time”! Allegedly, every logically and linguistically cohesive piece of narrative prose could be assigned to one of seven general, let’s say, Story “Archetypes”: Overcoming the Monster, Rags to Riches, The Quest, Voyage and Return, Comedy, Tragedy and, last but not least, Rebirth. Quite a disenchanting assertion, isn’t it, fellow avantgarde literature freaks? Fortunately for you and me, I won’t delve into the subject, as the malady and the ensuing bias prevents me from doing so rather effectively. I possess, however, some blurry recollection of an encyclopedic entry, which would definitely enlighten you on why is it that we should not lose hope for an eighth story archetype to appear in the future. What I am able to distinguish clearly though is the fact that Gaiman’s gem is built upon at least three out of seven story archetypes, just like The Neverending Story is. That mere fact is enough to keep our spirits up and not succumb to the repeatable compartmentalization of not so “Magnificent Seven”. I know it may be a cutthroat business of cruel self-delusions, but there always are Stories like Neverwhere, in which you may find a misplaced ounce of solace. Or a vial full of potion which temporarily suspends the devastating effects of catching Astorexia Repetitivae.

All right, enough beating about the bush – The Story. One evening, Richard Mayhew – a typical 90’s Londoner, consciously entangled in and subconsciously mangled by heartless, soulless, mind-your-own-business, standardized, contemporary conditioning of the Western world (selfish, bossy, hoity-toity fiancée, mind-numbing, Office-Space-ish corporate job, one-dimensional, almost paper-cut acquaintances and colleagues, etc.) – decides to help a wounded, skid row girl with elvish face and odd-colored eyes, while accompanying his significant other to a dinner with her mogul boss. Soon after, his decision turns his whole life upside down, or shall I say upside BELOW, as he finds himself utterly out of his depth in a murky and mysterious London Below, which is teeming with lush alternative lives, real-deal-no-joke biographies and other fascinating existential continuities. There awaits an adventure, intrigue, fear, loss, pain and many other meanings tangible enough to be completely fictitious in London Above, yet ultimately desirable and even more destined for Richard to happen in its cracked, split and splintered mirror-image Below.

As almost always, I have resorted to certain vagueness about the plot. This time I am excused from not revealing more only by the tears I mentioned in the first paragraph. What do we have so far, then, as far as Neverwhere is concerned? 1. a tasty style of prose, compensation for the imprisonment behind the bars of the Seven Story Archetypes. 2. characters more real than the most vivid person you have ever met in your life. 3. a quite rare, three-ingredient cocktail of the said Archetypes. Is there number 4? I am afraid I am going to have to meander in the river Digression once again and barge into the novel through the back door of ruminations we are being left with, after the final page of the novel has been turned. Scope-wise, the ruminations are exceptionally narrow, though deep as an oceanic trench, and regard the following question: ‘How and why is it possible to construct the world out of letters?’. As an entity which isn’t particularly enchanted by a penchant for over-philosophizing as well as blatant theoretical beard-stroking, let alone impertinent drag of interpretations, I am going to use my favorite Hemingway quote, even though I do not fully agree with it:

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

Personally, in order to spice up the quote a little, making it a felicitous summary of Neverwhere in the process, I would modify only two words and specify the exact place you bleed from. Hemingway’s curtness here is very well-put, yet, to my mind, a bit too general for the hmm… modus vivendi of a 90’s novel. Swapping “typewriter” with “computer” is more than obvious (though e.g. Cormac McCarthy – an avid user of Olivetti Lettera 32 – would immediately object), “nothing” with “everything” in turn hits the sweet spot between grammatical error and wordplay show-off. But the paramount upgrade of the quote comes with the realization that you don’t just bleed, but you bleed from the life of your soul. When a writer draws “ink” from this special circulatory system, the resulting prose radiates one of the most immaculate flows of honesty, benevolence, almost a literary providence. This is the case with Neverwhere. Its bread-spread smoothness mentioned earlier manifests itself so painlessly, simply because it is written with this rare type of permanent ink. It is truly invulnerable, unshakable, indestructible, not only to those who are more or less akin to Richard Mayhew, the weak-willed wimp from the beginning, but also those who 372 pages later give a misty-eyed nod of wild satisfaction to how Richard Mayhew, the iron-willed Warrior now, realizes where his true destiny lies.

Then comes the tempest of questions. What constitutes the expressive nature of narration? Why is it so, that narration per se doesn’t have the immediacy of images and is therefore bound to rely on a specific yet inexplicable kind of delay in conveyability of sense? How may truth, half-truth, half-lie and lie affect the creation of potentially new literary tropes? To what extent are descriptions necessary in worldbuilding? Where does the form begin and where does the content end (and is it the same “place” vice versa?)? Why some narrations are more universal than others? How often does the shift of such universality in literature occur? I can go on and on with these forever, believe you me! I can but I won’t. Instead, I want you to go on on your own. For of all the superbly genius things literature has brought us throughout the centuries, this is probably the most fascinating one so far: the spark of will to explore. It never ceases to make me appreciate the sheer simplicity, with which literature incinerate the said spark of exploratory will and propagate the ensuing flame within readers. Those are the real impenetrable mysteries of reality! Those that are innately lined with positively puzzling phenomena. We all shall don as many layers of garments tailored with these as possible. We may look hobo-like and bulky – as if we raided the wardrobe of an eccentric 60’s psychedelic rock star – just like Door did when she fell down on a pavement in front of Richard and Jessica on that fateful evening. But what candor, what possibilities, what fortune before us! And, to top it all, with what ease do we open our own Doors of our own Belows in our own Neverwheres…

Amonne Purity