dalek and haze xxl: a purge of dissidents

ways to freak out people next to you on the train number twentyeight:

watch some cartoon mousemonkey stab itself repeatedly for seventeen claret spewing minutes on yr portablevideomejigger.

i realise this came out ages ago but i’ve only just got round to watching/reading/listening to the damned thing.

okay this is not dälek, the my bloody valentine loving mic-wielding hiphop guy.  this is dalek (without the umlaut) aka james marshall the paintbrush-wielding art guy.

in collaboration with haze xxl aka tom hazelmyer, the halo of flies guy, the amphetamine reptile guy, the ox-op gallery guy where musicians go to flaunt their fine art stylings.

for sheer goddam awkwardnessness they’re both on ipecac.

damn you patton.

so what it is, is this:

it’s a book of stuff what dalek drew.  the book itself is a nicely presented companion piece to the cd/dvd combo which are (probably for most of you) the main selling point of the package.  what you get is a collection of daleks graffiti-ish abstract-ish art.  he’s worked under takashi murakami and you can see his influence.  it’s wonderfully two dimensional.  it’s forty eight pages long on shinyshiny paper.

it’s a dvd of space mousemonkey stabbing animation.  how to illustrate the illustrations?  i don’t like to use the word psychedelic because for most people it’s now a term so bereft of significance that it can be used to describe a fucking mika record.  go back to the old school psychiatric meaning.  what you have is a green ralph steadman weirdeyed monkey stabbing itself to death, floating off in a river of blood, rising again and drifting around in some rainbow coloured coffin-house.  kandinski meets itchy and scratchy.  it’s some weird freudian abstract nightmare all clean geometry and primary colours, holes, stabbings, ejaculations, penetrations and insertions.  it’s pop art with dismemberment.  nods to steamboat willie except with blades and frogspawn teardrops and eyeballs (manymany eyeballs); guns shooting diamonds at evil dollar-sign-eyed balloons; foaming mouthed klansmen and spewing black muck.  it’s eleven episodes (there’s a bonus after the credits) and seventeen odd minutes in length.

it’s a cd of hazelmyer’s soundscapes (eccchhh what an ugly word) with input from various melvins, david yows, ex-husker du’s and current blues explosions and hold steadys.  you could listen to the cd on it’s own but it goes much better with the visuals.  what does it sound like?  it’s a bit like a less hysterical fantomas.  which is no bad thing.  it’s as weirdy-beardy as one might imagine hopefully from my description above and from who’s involved with the production.  david yow sings? on it for christsakes.  it’s not inaccessible or as bland and artsy as these installation soundtracks usually are (who decided that ponderous art and drone go together did i miss that goddam meeting?) but that’s not to say it’s green day neither.  it’s thirty tracks and thirty one minutes long.

hit hit (featuring craig finn):

so basically if yr interested in self-mutilating cartoon animals with an odd abstract pop art feel and vaguely rock aural attention deficit recordings then this is monkeystabbingly ideal.

purchase / label