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"Cold grey void electrically operated by mantis-eyed humans" is a verse from Kosmos, by Philip Lamantia (1927-2005), and the title for Escupemetralla's new 2022 album.
In this album, the abrasive war-ambient dark music usually practised by Escupemetralla is modulated by early Pink Floyd tracks. Can you imagine such a breeding? No, they are not versions, remixes, plunderphonies, mashups or re-orchestrations. PF tracks have been scourged, scavenged, repurposed, twisted, excised of instruments, rethought and twisted again so they sound like charred belches and cries from creatures and machines from an outer space that Syd Barrett probably experienced some time ago. Every track shows and hides, at the same time, a good deal of humour and surrealistic perspirations. We challenge the audience to discover the rich tapestry of connections that we have weaved in this work.
Cold grey void electrically operated by mantis-eyed humans was a project that Pink Floyd discarded in 1975, when they had already become strangers to each other. Strangers passing over the street were motionless upon their air conditioned apparatus, their voices were pitch-shifted into the digital blood-red of a blinking modem. There was a mural of Godzilla adjacent to a gas station. Chameleons were browning fast in the lower boughs of a tree that were getting larger. The sun was angrier, more vibrant, more dejected and, frankly, more of a stone shit heater in this solar system.
Everything was bleeding out then, infrared halos were swirling around phosphorescent fingertips like flames and a guy in a pickup truck was a Jesus and Judas drawing tattooed on his hands, Nick Mason was barfing out of a window on the digital infinite striporama of a mirage. Rick Wright was laughing in the backseat, his brace was complicated. Both were still wearing their glasses, their soft wide lips were fucking beautiful, the marmalade mops on their heads were sparkling. They were ecstatic.
They found Melissa’s cat buried alive along the road of the FM radio station, but as it had been raining steady for days then and thunderstorms had been drifting across the valley between the forests and the cities, always at night, no traces of the burial site could be found but in marks left on the soil. And, of course, the cat’s prints were buried deep into the ground. In fact, that land was unfit for cat’s claws. Even the memory of cat dust felt like a wild drug is a comfortably numbing reality.
The land of the five-eyed mantis, where Syd Barrett once was king, is now a strange and wondrous place. Roger Waters had five eyes and was thus a five-eyed mantis. His young light skinned buddy, David Gilmour, was a wood satyr, trying to escape the clutches of the five-eyed mantis. He was once a pizza deliverer in East Germany, and now a popular campaign poster is a modest Himself, holding a pizza box, with the slogan, "David will deliver".
For all this, and for something else that we will not reveal, Escupemetralla decided to recover this project anchored in the depths of time, purify it of its most anodyne and old-fashioned parts, and launch it on the music charts of the 22nd century.
1. Ravens are all watching from a painting by Dalí
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(This track is based on Pink Floyd's "Cymbaline" and "Wot’s… uh the deal")
Are ravens really watching you from a painting by Dalí? Did you have your morning cymbaline today? How about your evening cyanide? Are you aware of the number of surrealists who have died in fires, decapitated, or underwater? Is that a mole on your cheek? Is that a Burroughs on your neck? Probably you had read the first half of this paragraph at least ten times and had no idea what was going on. But then you’ve read it five times more, and you've decided that you like it. It's the perfect example of a sentence that is going to make you read the rest of the paragraph even if you hate it, because you want to figure out what the hell is going on in it. That’s exactly what happens with Cărtărescu’s prose.
You’lI also like the way the paragraph switches from present tense to past tense. These sentences are not for the faint of heart. They are strange and creepy in a way that you can't remember ever encountering in a text before. It's like the difference between reading a book about serial killers and actually meeting a serial killer. Now you find yourself reading very quickly, and you are definitely not comfortable numb with that. The writing is at times very beautiful, and at other times very incongruous. The writing is like an alien landscape, full of bizarre and fascinating detail, but it's also a place that we all feel very unsafe in, something like being watched by ravens from a painting by Dalí.
2. The nihil song
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(This track is based on Pink Floyd's "The Nile song")
Standing by the World Expo of Cosmic Nihilism, she spread her wings to fly for a while, farther and higher and further away from a cosmos that is distinctly hostile or indifferent to humanity. But this cosmic nihilism isn’t a challenge to which humanity has to rise in order to transcend the possibilities of nihilism. We can see Roger and David as making that claim more or less explicitly: they represent the best of psycho-fiction, defining what we can and cannot do when faced with the inevitability of alienation by means of rock music. So many desires that humanity might have are made realizable only through psycho-fiction, or they become the promises of psycho-fiction rather than the promises psycho-fiction makes true.
After such an epiphany, Ummagumma's dystopic future feels a little too close for comfort; the fear of an onset of sexual or agonic nihilism, put into play by a cosmic sense of the deterministic nihilism that would seem to confront every relation traced from above, off-stage, is palpable and clear. Both more and less than a Pink Floyd album, the creative problem Ummagumma proposes is exactly how to account for this world, this variation of the void, that makes it at once different from other worlds and merely one of those with which we contend.
A great deal of that was subsequently expanded upon in the follow-up album, Ummagumma for Kids, whose name is an astrological answer to the standard leitmotif query of an initial LP: Who Is Pink? Vaguely unifying six tracks from four musicians, Ummagumma for Kids transformed space rock into something astoundingly stinkier than before. There, did the perverted potential of a psycho-fictional catharsis present the emergent symbols as the means of liberation from determinism itself, the same gimmick of the old albums, of the Floyd name, of the Floyd walls lining the walls of bourgeois homes?
3. Quartering a unicorn
(This track is based on Pink Floyd's "Flaming")
Quartering a unicorn with an axe is a bad idea, but if you succeed you get a lot of (probably magical) meat. So, the key is to take four quarters and join them together again, producing a compounded steak, which has a lot of magical meat-ness. You can eat the steak to restore your health or use it to create a fantasy sausage and use it to cook a fantasy stew.
4. Nauseating (parts I, V, MIX & MMMDCCCLXXXVIII)
(This track is based on Pink Floyd's "Echoes")
The Return of the Son of Nothing is nauseatingly violent and gripping; it is experimental, ambitious and deeply disturbing. There are echoes of the darkly claustrophobic horror of the early novels of Mrs. X or the even more disturbing short stories of Mr. Y and the tortured imagination of Ms. Z. The song is set in the bleak and frozen wastes of a post-apocalyptic future. Humanity has been devastated by the Great Swollen Grubbiness, a devastating plague that has destroyed the Earth's population. The few survivors are scattered across the globe in small communities of singers.
The song is the story of a young man, W, a member of the last surviving tribe, who joins a band of traveling player-actors. The troupe is led by a blind man, who plays the electric fiddle. His name is David Gilmour, and he is old, wise and very powerful. The only surviving copy of the world's only song, The Return of the Son of Nothing, is kept in his possession. This is the song that is passed down to each generation at the time of the Great Swollen Grubbiness. Gilmour is a prophet, a shaman and a storyteller. He is also a psychoanalyst, who is driven by a lust for possessing many minds, and his actions bring about the violent collapse of the tribe.
5. Green and submarine
(This track is based on Pink Floyd's "Echoes")
Submarine albatrosses swim extremely well underwater and are able to stay submerged for up to several days. They have been known to cover tens of miles in a single foraging trip. In order to catch its prey, the albatross has to open its mouth of diamonds and feed it to the filter net in the labyrinths of coral caves of its throat. The filter net is a tube, nearly as long as Minnesota, and contains microscopic eyes, which are trapped by mucus and are funneled through the mouth and into the infinite. And it is you and what it sees is it.
Albatrosses fly around a green sun as well, but the light is so bright and phosphorescent that they can no longer see the earth or the water. As a result, they think that the continents are islands in the sky and this is the reason that albatrosses cannot land on land and are ambassadors of mourning and ecstasy.
6. The splashing of the kingfisher
(This track is based on Pink Floyd's "Grantchester Meadows")
See the splashing of the kingfisher flashing to the water, and a river of green is sliding unseen beneath the trees, and a bittern is booming from the reed-bed, and a heron is flapping heavily away, and the air is almost gay with the butterflies that flit about the grassy banks of the river, and the river is still curving, but the country is changing, and the hills are getting higher, and the trees are getting bigger, and the river has become a loch now, and the hills are getting steeper, and the shores are more rocky, and the trees are bigger, and the mountains are looming nearer, and the clouds are piling up in the west, and the loch is widening and deepening, and all around us golden sun flakes covering the ground basking in the sunshine of a bygone afternoon, but the trees are big, and the mountains are nearer, and the clouds are greyer, and the hills are higher, and a bittern is booming from a reed-bed in a distant bay, and the clouds are ugly, and the loch is as grey as granite, and the mountains are terrible, and the sun is disappearing, and the wind is chilling, and a heron is flying heavily by, and the clouds are black and menacing, and the sky is dark, and the trees are eating people, and the wind is howling, and the mountains are grim, and the loch is rushing on in an angry whirlpool.
7. Eve’s insane swan
(This track is based on Pink Floyd's "If")
Eve's got an insane swan locked in a box in her room. "What is it?" I ask. "It's my mom's favorite bird." She sets the box on the table. "Oh." I think. "Why is it locked in a box?" "Because it's a swan." "Okay, but why is it locked in a box?" "Because it's a swan!" "You said that." "I want to teach it to talk." "Why would you want to teach a swan to talk?" "Because it's a swan!" "You already said that." "Because it's a swan! A swan! A swan! “ "Are you trying to say swan?" "Yes! A swan! A swan! A swan! A swan! A swan! A swan!" “If I were a swan, I'd be gone”.
8. Let there be more bass
(This track is based on Pink Floyd's "Let there be more light")
The mighty ship descending on a point of flame made contact with a bunch of nazis at the top of the cliff, forcing them to jump to their deaths. Just when we thought it was all over, a couple of enemies remained. It was time to change tactics: we tried to lead a Panzerfaust-wielding enemy POW into the burning wreck and turn the lights on. But nothing worked, and Stribor Kmak fell down the cliff and got stuck in the bush. Then, something even odder happened: an enemy sniper who was keeping an eye on our mortally wounded comrade made a run for it.
He jumped into a car and knew the road revealed to him, the living soul of Hereward the Wake tingled. Hopefully, our sniper was not asleep and headshotted the fleeing nazi before yelling: "naaamaaa! let there be more bass", while banging his machine gun on himself. Everyone celebrated, but a pink pig that was flying above us suddenly fell into a deep psychic emanation and killed itself and four retreating fascists who were having bacon and eggs at the shore.
Then, after a few hours of rest in the forest and playing fistball with a raving madman, we returned to the village. Not expecting any resistance at this (now) almost peaceful place, we were met by hordes of raging pink pigs who were flying around so fast that they created what looked like tornados. Stribor miraculously survived a few days of brutal violence and stayed alive, along with 85% of the white pigs, while the remaining 15% was torn apart by swirling pink pigs.
A few days later in Baden-Würtemberg, we buried our comrades (including the ghost of Stribor Kmak) and solemnly swore to avenge them before we returned to Transylvania to raid nazi infested villages. Nearly all of our specialists were killed in the field. We do not expect much pity or empathy from the pig-loving public but we are glad that we had comrade Tresh as always, despite his wounded ear and the dozens of bullet holes in his heart. It is a great shame that all those evil nazis got away from us, but next time we will show them who they are dealing with!
9. Several specimens of ruminant animals with large udders chewing grass in a Cambridge meadow
(This track is based on Pink Floyd's "Grantchester Meadows")
Several specimens of ruminant animals with large udders chewing grass in a Cambridge meadow, with a view towards the town, were painted by Constable in 1824 and 1826. These paintings are now in the Tate Gallery near the lavatories.
The first of these paintings, "A Cattle Shed in a Cambridge Pasture" (1824), is a view of the meadow from the south-east. The cattle are grazing in the foreground, with a group of trees and a small building on the left. The second painting, "A Cattle Shed in a Cambridge Pasture, 2" (1826), is a view of the same meadow from the north-west. The cattle are amidst a group of long-haired and naked youths who are playing cricket. The painting is a parody of the pastoral genre, with the naked youths representing classical gods and goddesses wearing masks of Roger Waters at eighteen.
The paintings were exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1827, and were bought by the Tate Gallery in 1894. The meadow is now a public park, and the cattle shed has been converted into a Costa Café. The meadow is now known as Constable Meadows, and is owned by St John's College. It is open to the public, and contains two sculptures by Henry Moore.
The first, a piece known as "A Two-headed Woman", was commissioned in 1967, and is a bronze statue of a woman with two heads. It was originally located in the grounds of the nearby Treloar School, but was moved to the Isle of Wight in 2010. The second sculpture, "A Two-headed Woman 2.0", was commissioned in 1969, and is a bronze figure with three heads, one of them missing. It is located near the entrance to the Phlegethon, a river of fire that forms the boundary between the sixth and seventh circles of hell.
10. 1oTD
(This track is based on Pink Floyd's "One of these days")
One of these tangerine days, the fifteen tons synthesizer that blocks up the Parliament entrance will be removed and cut into little Edgars, and the world will be a better place. The only reason I can think of for the government to have spent £15 million on this monstrosity is that they wanted to make it impossible for anyone to ever use it again, like the giant wooden horse of Troy.
The government's excuse for this monumental waste of money is that it was needed to provide a "state-of-the-art" sound system for the Parliament, one covering the whole building. The problem is that the building is not acoustically designed for a symphony orchestra, not to say for a psychedelic band of four hairy and scruffy guys, and the sound system has to be turned up to such a volume that it deafens everyone in the building.
When someone plays the synthesizer, it is impossible to have a conversation or even hear what someone is saying from more than one inch away. It is also impossible to hear the speakers in the House of Commons. The only solution is to cut it into little Edgars, which is what will happen, and the government is furious. The government had been warned that the world as they knew was ending, but they did not listen. Well, the synthetic noise prevented them from hearing anything, even from more than one inch away.
11. Atronadómina
(This track is based on Pink Floyd's "Astronomy domine")
Stars can frighten us to death if we are in their presence. Rock stars can be terrorizing entities, just as their songs are. As an example, Potato Man the astronomer can scare the shit out of you, his music has the ability to make you fear death around the icy waters underground, in the cold, dark, damp, dripping cave of the soul, or in the deepest part of the ocean. The music of Potato Man is the sound of blood dripping down from the ceiling, the sound of the wind howling through the bones of a dead man, and it's the sound of a lonely man in a lonely room, terrified of his own life.
For over fifty years Potato Man has been the singer of the infamous band of the same name and is known to have performed with such legendary bands as Carrot Lasagna and The Pict Groovers, as well as others. He has a reputation for being a universal vegetable and has been known to have many lovers and devotees. He currently resides in the west of Ireland, where he is known to play the guitar with a planet and sing for the local drunkyards.
12. Operasi koteka
(This track is based on Pink Floyd's "Wot’s… uh the deal" and "Absolutely curtains")
You don't know what a koteka is, so we will tell you. A koteka is a penis cover. All the men wear one. It goes over the penis and it hangs down like a codpiece. Even Barbet Schroeder wore one when we shot that boring movie, La Vallée. “I just tried to remember everything,” he says. “When I went to see the film again, I thought, ‘Isn’t that cool?’ It wasn’t just that I was wearing a koteka. I kept wanting to hear the sound effects. I kept wanting to turn the corner and see an enemy.”
Schroeder had a hard time making the movie, which was a low-budget, independent production. “There was no money,” he says. “The producers didn’t have a dime. So we had to rely on favors. I had to make a lot of phone calls to get the sound effects.” But in his heart, Schroeder knew that the film was going to be great. “It was a very ambitious movie for its time,” he says. “It was a big-budget film for people who had no money”.
“It was a war film with only two actors, Syd Barrett and Cyd Charisse. In the final battle scene, we had about 800 extras, but they were real people. They were all Mennonites.” The koteka was a big part of the movie. “I had never really seen a koteka before,” Schroeder says. “I had an idea, but I wanted to see one. Somebody gave me one. It was a beautiful koteka. It was a very interesting piece of cloth. I took it in my room and I put it on a chair. I saw it every day. I thought, ‘It’s a very interesting piece of cloth.’” Schroeder says that the koteka was not just a prop. “It had a lot of meaning for me, because at that time I was totally bankrupt and didn't even have money to buy a pair of underpants."
13. The most boring song I've ever heard Bar two
(This track is based on Pink Floyd's "See-saw")
The most boring song I've ever heard in my life. I can't stand this song. It's so damn annoying. I hate it when people sing this song in public. If you wanna hear some good music go listen to Eminem or Katy Perry. Not this crap. This song makes me want to kill myself. It's the most overrated song ever, it is annoying and I don't like it. I hope I made myself clear enough.
14. Careful with eugenics, Axel
(This track is based on Pink Floyd's "Careful with that axe, Eugene")
Axel experimented with plant eugenics, working to develop a plant that would provide more food with less land and labour. He was its first test subject, and was rapidly reduced to a skeleton.
This case is being investigated by the Cambridge Vegetable Police Department, which is unusual in that it was founded in 1856 by Charles Darwin and has yet to be disbanded. Even though Axel had been dead for several years, veganism was considered to be the main motive in the crime. It turned out that a super-intelligent carrot, who believed that carrots were intellectually superior to humans, was the culprit. He had hypnotised Axel during a lecture, and compelled him to turn to a vegan diet.
The Carrot League was disbanded after a loud, angry debate; it was decided that most carrots did not want to slaughter all humans, and most humans did not want to slaughter all carrots. Axel's wife, Bjorna, however, was disgusted by the turn of events, and committed suicide by turning into a carrot. The Carrot League was reformed soon after the tragedy and Axel's death, taking over the smooth running of this increasingly effective campaign.
Axel's theories were very important to the development of a carrot-approved worldwide society, and since his death the University of Oslo has become completely vegetarian.
Signed: Muhammad, Muhammad & a rhinoceros-paranoid non-human entity.
