After a flurry of recent activity in slot-land, I’ve been absent again for a few days. This post will expound upon why-in addition to a few other things. However, in the interest of forthrightness, I should probably predicate this post with the admonition that it will touch only tangentially on the slot car theme central to this blog; as the “Out of the Slot” title indicates, this is one of my more “human interest”-type posts, and is intended more for those who know me personally; thus my throngs of loyal readers who stop by here for updates on my Thunderjet projects may want to skip this one.
I’m recovering from a nasty illness that has kept me in a state of partial dysfunction for several days. While still not fully recovered, it does appear that the worst of it is over; days of high fever resulted in hour upon hour of delirium: waking dreams, bizarre thoughts, conversations with ghosts. Now, in spite of my small stature (actually, probably because of my small stature) I have oft been somewhat cocky about some of my physical attributes, one of them being my iron-clad immune system. “I don’t get sick,” I used to say, and I was right for the most part, as I would often go for years on end without so much as a cold. Unfortunately, something seems to have changed, as this is now my 3rd illness this year, including the one I rang in the new year with when I was stricken with every symptom imaginable after my trip to Arizona to visit family for X-mas. That was understandable, as travel and sickness go together like airlines and frustrations, but that wasn’t the case this time around nor was it the last time, either; in both these cases, whatever took me out does not appear to have been a viral infection I picked up out in the world but instead something of a bacterial nature that affected only my gut, and it came on intensely fast and strong, with no warning and no apparent cause. How fast? Try this: I turned on my oven after coming home from work on Wednesday afternoon to warm up something to eat, and then staggered down the hall with the worst chills I’ve ever experienced; minutes later I was in the shower under water so hot it made my skin pink, and I only exited when I had depleted the supply of hot water in my 40 gallon tank. From there I stumbled into bed, teeth chattering, climbing under a foot of blankets where I fell into a fitful, sweat infested sleep, only to find when I awoke the next morning that the oven was still on!
The Mechanized Sound of Hell
For some reason I can’t fathom, when I am this ill, I tend to seek out the most discordant, most violent, and most disturbing music I can find! This I cannot explain; one would think that someone in such a state would want to be surrounded by something soothing, like baroque chamber music or pan pipes. Not your humble blogger! When I’m in a state of fever dream, I go for the industrial noise of the 80’s. Of course the term “industrial,” applied to music, has been broadly used and misused, so it means many things to many people, but to me the definition is somewhat clear: it is music that is made with instruments fashioned from hammers, power tools, scrap metal, and mechanical sounds. While many will argue this phenomenon had its birth in Germany with the likes of Einstürzende Neubauten and some of their followers, I will argue that it actually started in England in the middle-late 1970’s, and its true progenitors were the seminal Throbbing Gristle, and the many bands that followed in their wake. In the last decade, similar bouts of illness-driven delirium have delivered me deep into the catalogs of Psychic TV, Foetus, and Cabaret Voltaire, but this time I went all-in for one my favorite artists of the genre, Coil. I have owned the band’s terrifying first EP “How To Destroy Angels” and the shock-fest that is their 2nd LP “Horse Rotorvator” since my early 20’s, but during this latest dip into the infectious swill, I wallowed in the depths of their subsequent efforts, including “Gold Is The Metal With The Broadest Shoulders” from 1987, and the magnificent “Love’s Secret Domain” from 1991, which I left on “repeat” for an entire day.
Nothing about these sounds (the word “music” may not always apply to these bands) is relaxing, and as I began to recover I was left to wonder what dark psychological forces are at work-or play-in my head that drives me to these hellish sounds when my consciousness is altered by fever. All I can come up with is that my obsession with machines manifests in my brain so completely that even the way I process music becomes inseparable from the interplay of crankshafts and camshafts, with the spinning of oil pumps and the grind of timing chains; in my fever dreams I can “see” engine and driveline parts in my mind’s eye, and I crave a score for the sounds they make.
Many of these bands-and Coil in particular-went even farther than this, wrapping their depraved concepts of sex indelibly with pain, violence, and mechanization. Your humble blogger is going to stop at that dark edge, however I will offer the wicked smile of a link to one of my favorite tracks by this band which says as much as I ever could on that topic! Sadly, since the turning of the 21st century both members of Coil have shuffled off this mortal coil, but the noise they left behind can still strip the paint off a fender and scar the enamel on your teeth if you crank up the volume!
Anyway, that’s about all the pontification about music I feel comfortable with here on my blog about slot cars…at least, for now. So now you know why your humble blogger hasn’t blogged for a few days. I am still recovering and still not operating at 100% capacity, and what’s worse, missed hours at work are going to result in a backlog of projects and a lot of catch-up time, so the next week is going to suck at work, which is likely going to result in more silence on these pages for at least a few more days, but I wanted to post something because, after all, you want to know I’m not dead…right?
OK, are you sitting down? Make sure you’re ready before you press “play” and for just over 4 minutes let’s go straight to HELL!
The angels kiss our souls in bliss
Measure the extent of a dizzying descent
Down the anal staircase
Down the anal staircase
Put just one foot on the staircase
And the next step you’re down here on this face
Down the anal staircase
And the rapids of my heart
Will tear your ship of love apart
And we’ll end up wrecked
We’ll end up at the start
Of the anal staircase
And the angels kiss our souls in bliss
Measure the extent of a dizzying descent
Down the anal staircase
Take a hollowpoint revolver
Right down the rapids of your heart
Blow the fucking thing apart!
Blow the fucking thing apart!!!
One step, two step, three step, four step
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