getting there... new musics...

Two new albums dropping... by Rod Warner and his alter ego Figure of Outward...

on Bandcamp... here and here

Two new albums from Figure of Outward and Rod Warner

New Music...

 I've been sitting on a stack of new music while finishing the second part of The Vortex Trilogy: Butte Magic. With my usual embrace of the sporadic muse... these will hopefully be essayed across the internet from their relative Bandcamp sites... soon... 

The Avatars Of Paradise… almost there… last extract…

      Alice dreams. Snow. Sharp white. Disorientation in the field. A horse and rider appear. Black. She watches them move across the ground. A blank flat white landscape. Her vision shifts. From the window’s vantage point. Like a drone, swooping suddenly, point of view vertiginous, lurching. She is on the horse, clutching the rider hard to stay on the speeding animal. She looks forward over the rider’s shoulder, a juddering jumping like a hand-held camera jerking. Just the white ground. The sky at the horizon a slightly differentiated pale grey. Image of nowhere. She cranes her neck to try and glimpse the rider’s face. He turns and turns back. A face of nothing. She senses he is smiling. She does not feel afraid. Later when she wakes she shudders at the memory of the smiling no face. Sits up in bed and hugs herself tight as if to squeeze in the memory. Fix it hard. She thinks of death, of the deaths she has seen. Her son in the funeral parlour. A memory that recurred through so many nights. Now it seems at a remove from her present experience. The smiling no face - how does she know he is smiling? She doesn't, she senses it on some deep level. As she assumes he is a man. The memory of holding his body is still vivid. But he is a stranger. Tennyson's poem comes to her: ‘I want to see my pilot’s face/when I cross the bar.’

     

     Brigg regained consciousness. Or, he thought later, another consciousness. Coming back to the diurnal in a brilliantly white room, sunlight streaming through windows that overlooked the city. Sterile, static, the modern house of healing. On Heron's tab, of course. Who sat in an armchair, peering intently at him.

     ‘I owe you the biggest debt. Hush,’ he lifted a hand as Brigg started to speak, ‘I  know the Brit code of deprecation. It’s true. Whatever I can do, whatever you want. Medically, you seem in good shape, luckily. A few bits of shrapnel in your body, nothing serious, and easily removed. The bang on the head was the most worrying but your doctors seem confident there was no lasting damage. Your speed in reacting took us both out of range, it seems. Sergei was not so lucky, of course, the crazy old fart.’ Heron stood and approached Brigg, coming close and sitting in the chair next to the bed. Brigg lifted his head, replied, abruptly. 

     ‘I'd like to go home. Retire from your employ, get out of the whole game. Could that be arranged?’

     ‘Whatever you want. Retirement, no problem. All aspects, I can fix that. But I don't think of you as an employee. You're a valued member of our floating circus. And a friend.’ He put his hand towards Brigg who lifted himself to offer his hand in return.

     Stoned. She looks out at the early morning. She scans the view left to right and back. Woods. Hill. Irrigation ditch. Farmland. Machinery. Beyond, the village and church and tower. She sits down eventually. Considers the horseman and his mount. Could he be a hallucination? A ghost? A possibility I have conjured that bursts into the real. Related to my return from the desert?

The Avatars of Paradise… coming VERY soon…

 And all these characters.To celebrate them with sporadic scribbled memos into notebook or tapped into smartphone. Impressions grabbed in haste or brooded over, accompanied by beer and whiskey. Back home at night, he resisted the temptation to cram them into some over-arching metaphor and tried to remain true to the scattered ambiguities and improvisations and startling jumpcuts of the glimpsed lives on parade. Follow any one and you would have a deep narrative. A chaotic celebration of individuality.

     All the craziness in the world could be found here, looking inside and out. Extend. A networked planet connects all circuits. The new digital powerlines, sanctioned and otherwise, built on top of the old linkages, often and usually hidden deep in the natural world. He tried to visualise an image for Brackhage but was unable to create anything concrete. The A.I. eluded concept. Yet Sergei had seen something that he feared. Genius twisted into senility and paranoia? He tried diagrams, words, shapes connected by lines that grew into a complexity that defied interpretation. So many variables. He saw how someone could go mad contemplating the contemplations. Maybe that’s what had happened. Sergei overloaded his ageing brain. Maybe he had travelled back, to stand with his father and Makhno against the coming tyranny. Visionary or reactionary? But Brackhage, according to Heron, was far from being a murderous machine of enslavement. Sergei had got it wrong. And he had always trusted his former boss and friend.

The Avatars of Paradise… coming soon…

Murder

Attempted Murder

Art

Sex

Death

Grief

Temporal Disruptions

Small Town Follies

Wide World Intrigues

Artificial Intelligence Anarchies

Getting nearer to publication… another extract…

      

The perpetrators of the Italian airport bombing that killed his mother and six others were never found. Officially.

He lay half-awake in the late night, thinking about the informal speech that Alex Heron had given at Hi Step, just before the attempt on his life:

        ‘One of our main interests these days is robotics, A.I. Research. Alternate ways of looking at medicine, for example. To a certain extent, these are interlinked although the company structures are tailored to the individual areas of research, still, the one thing they have in common is the fact that they are interlinked. As is everything. This goes beyond into other areas of course. Which has given rise to some concerns... ’

     

     ‘Some concerns.’ That provoked a hand grenade tossed by a suicidal geriatric genius...

      Brigg: things always change. Nothing remains static, just the illusion of stasis, which is usually cheap nostalgia, a mood of fear that resists the inevitable movements of time, the contemplation of which sends me into trances where I think I could follow everything intermingling simultaneously until I am falling through a vortex into some swirling dizziness that seems the precursor to full blown madness so I surface, riddled with vertigo and disoriented to hell. Continually wonder at this yearning for intensity, the surging emotion that sweeps me towards these attempts at an almost mystical ecstasy spinning out of philosophical speculations. Traceable to the booze I have drunk, hooking into flashbacks. And the drugs I sometimes take. And the echoes of the bombs, linked across time. Rare but intense. 

ENCORE UNE FOIS… extract from THE AVATARS OF PARADISE

      Framed by two explosions. 

     The first blew him forwards savagely into the future. The second blew him back into the past. Shielding Heron from the detonation of the grenade that Sergei shakily threw in one final thrust of elderly wasted muscle. Instinct and training. Split second. Grabbed him crashed into thepartition which folded immediately taking them down and low in enough time to dodge most of the blast. Crashing into enough space to live. Possibilities opening. Possibilities closed to Sergei hit by bullets just after the explosion hit him peripherally. Which he may have survived even given his age. The crazy old fucker. But a bodyguard dived low and shot at the same time. Training. Instinct. Heron sustained bruises, a couple of broken ribs. A sudden reminder of mortality. Random madness on his home ground. Brigg limped away with Heron's heartfelt gratitude, some scars, some short term memory loss which may have been caused by a sudden connection to that airport blast years before and short-circuited his synapses in a violent psychic attack. Lying in the hospital bed in his jolted mind he fell in and out of a landscape where his recently dead wife frequently appeared to him. Standing in front of his mother. Mary in the shadows. Michele in the distance. Alice somewhere felt but not imaged. A long gone possibility. The dead he had encountered professionally were present somewhere but beyond his consciousness, felt like an obscure pressure of the circumstances of being and career choices. He had never been haunted by them before: awareness of the consequences of power had never troubled him, the traumas of violence all being personal even as they had been the causes of his entry into that world, a swirl of possibility and causation bound by metaphysics or blind chance.

     He woke to see Heron sat beside the bed.

     ‘Been there long?’

     ‘Long enough, my friend. We were getting a little worried about you. The external injuries came from bits of shrapnel, some of it caught your leg and chest, hence the bandages. Flesh wounds, superficial. But you hit your head when you took us through that partition. Which saved my life, by the way.’

     ‘What I'm paid to do.’

     ‘Above and beyond, Brigg, you’re much more than a bodyguard, always were. But training will come through. But how are you feeling?’

     ‘Don't know. Fuzzy, suppose it's the drugs. How long have I been out?’

     ‘Thirty six hours. Approximately.’

     ‘Sergei? It was Sergei, I didn't dream that bit, did I?’

     ‘Sergei.' Heron said, sadly, shaking his head. 'Didn't see 

that coming down the pike.’

IT’S HYPING TIME AGAIN… a random extract…

 

You step into a bar. You step into a charged space where fictions, narratives collide, dance, importune, seduce. A random encounter can suddenly become meaningful. Or dissipate into irrelevancy. When the door closes on the street outside you enter another universe. Stay long enough and your trajectory acts on the adjacent trajectories. Your narrative engages with the other narratives. Even by not engaging, your silence becomes a mystery to be noticed, a topic of speculation. Sooner or later to be named, tagged. In a sense there is no escape if you remain.

     The phenomenology of drinking/alcohol fuelled narratives.

     A table. A couple of windows. Alcohol. 'Interesting' clientele. Ext. Day Ext. Night.

     Memory. A street. A church. A tower. A plain. A river. Rolling hills. Flatlands. Sea.

     Sea. Flatlands. Rolling hills. A river. A plain. A tower. A church. A street. Memory.

Hyping time goes onwards… The Avatars Of Paradise…

 Zeitkrümmung…