THE CURSE MARKET: OUTLINE + 36 CURSES

No Monday Music (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) because my tinnitus is acting up but I did write up a rough outline of this place called 'The Curse Market' + 36 curses over the last couple of hours (which I may or may not post more about in future, who knows):

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Many cursers in the curse markets are themselves cursed and are in fact cursed to sell curses (although they’re forbidden from saying this). Scholars believe this is all because hundreds of years ago when the first cursers set up shop they set up curses to curse those who attacked them, stole from them or otherwise wronged them to sell curses. Over the centuries the ratio of cursed to non-cursed cursers has gradually shifted in favour of the former, although it's pretty hard to tell because they're all so quiet about it.

A long history and a bevy of ablative curses have produce a kind of perimeter wall of grotesqueries warning incomers effectively of what awaits them if they put a foot wrong. Of course the curse-market also needs customers so the cursers are quick to equip them with geas-bound guides with comprehensive knowledge of local curses who are willing (geased) to throw themselves in the way of said curses to keep the trade flowing. Due to this there’s a continual need to replenish the geased guides, so you’re recommended to come in and at least pretend you’re going to spend big if you want to stay off the shortlist for geasing. As a result the curse market itself is a very upmarket place, with lots of satellite markets operating outside the main curse perimeter.

The whole place is tied up in so many curses there’s a kind of Mutually Assured Destruction situation going on and no one would be dumb enough to break the detente and anyone who attacks the place is without fail carried off by one of any number of ablative curses. If anyone tries to interrupt business or just gets unlucky, roll on the following table (2d6)

1. 
   
1. Purple streamers of flame erupt from their eyes and a violent ear-splitting keening is heard and then their heads explode into a glittering crystalline vapor
2. They shit out their entire skeleton immediately
3. They are rooted to the ground where they become all stiff & woody and aggressive hornets make a nest of them. They are alive forever
4. Their clothes come to life and strangulate them and then pilot the body for kicks til it rots
5. They shrink and shrink and shrink and scream higher and higher and higher until the sound becomes inaudible which is also the exact point at which they become invisible to the naked eye
6. Their entire skeleton and system of organs gets drunk into one limb which becomes the size their body was and which the other now-atrophied limbs hang off like cartoonish homunculoid twigs. (2:Leg 3:Arm 4:Tooth 5:Tongue 6:Eye 7:Head 8:Torso 9:Ass 10:[REDACTED] 11:Toe 12:Finger)
2. 
   
1. Their entire skin melts off to reveal a blackened skeleton which runs North, immediately
2. Spectral hands and sticks smash them to pieces like a pinata & greedily gobble their innards with phantasmal muzzles
3. Their right leg swings up at an impossible angle and kicks them in the face until they die and their right foot’s embedded permanently in the gelatinous mass of splintered bone which was their face. If they don’t have a right leg, lucky them
4. They sneeze and keep sneezing until they’ve sneezed out their entire brain, emerging all at once through a distended nostril or gradually like a very thick strand of sphagetti
5. They rise (very) gradually and inexorably into the sky, never to be seen again. This takes about an hour so the local kids often throw rocks at them
6. An array of many-jointed bone-white arms with many-jointed fingers burst from the ground and cover mouth and eyes and drag the cursee screaming down into a hole they very neatly sweep surrounding dirt onto and pat down smooth before retreating
3. 
   
1. They begin to unravel slowly from the top down in micron-thick layers until they’re a pair of shoes running and trailing a very long strand
2. A 16-ton anvil falls out of the sky and right onto their heads, pretty much vaporising them
3. Everything that touches them abrades them slightly. There is no action which can be taken to prevent the abrasion which does not make things worse.
4. A hurricane sweeps by and sucks them and no one else up and then departs
5. A small hole in the ground appears a few miles away. Circumstances will conspire to move them toward it and keep them from moving away from it and when they’re inside it they can’t move at all.
6. A giant bird sweeps down and grabs them in its claws then flies away. This all happens faster than you’d expect
4. 
   
1. A small face (with nose) appears under their chin and keeps laughing and whispering lies about them and every time it embarasses them their face gets a little smaller and moves up towards the forehead and the small face gets bigger and moves to replace it
2. Every sounds becomes loud and unbearably intense and sounds roughly like the first thing you hear when you wake up but forever until their ears liquefy and they kill themselves just to be free of the noise
3. They melt down into a primordial soup from which slimy teratic (insectoid, amphibian, etc.) forms crawl
4. Crows fly down from out of sight and attempt pluck out their eyes & tongue. This all takes longer than you’d expect, much to their detriment
5. With lightning speed they’re chopped up, hurled into the air, flambéed, and then their flambéed chunks fall into an exquisite china bowl.
6. They sink slowly into their shadow which after the fact burps and snakes off toward the horizon
5. 
   
1. Everywhere they go they seem to end up lower down than they were before and the Sun seems further away and they get colder and wake up sometimes covered in gravedirt and spiders until one day they’re just gone
2. They are condemned to dance the most exquisite dance they’ve ever danced until and even a little bit after they die of exhaustion
3. They are struck by lightning about 5 or 6 times
4. A circle of 7 skeletons arise around them and perform the skeletarantella at a very rapid pace, gradually flensing the flesh from their bones until they’re an immaculate skeleton joining the dance and they all fade to invisibility in dusky light
5. A candlewick sprouts from their head and it catches alight with a (1:purple 2:blue 3:green 4:rainbow 5:black 6:red, screaming) flame and they melt away pretty fast
6. The Sun reaches down a long flaming spoke of light and grabs them and pulls them up into it and there’s a faint sizzle (”TSSS”) and a wisp of white smoke if you like.
6. 
   
1. A witch doctor rises up out of the soil, shoots red magic at them which makes their head wither & shrink and then rushes over & beheads them and then departs with the head
2. A huge human foot steps on them then lifts as if walking on (its leg towers up out of sight)
3. More blood than could possibly be in their body geysers from all orifices and they fly away like a deflating balloon, spinning wildly
4. An huge iron maiden swings up from their shadow, shuts on them, then rumbles and rockets off into the sky
5. Spiders swarm from their mouth & eyes and bite them & keep swarming until they’re covered and the chittering has drowned out the screaming and then they disperse leaving nothing
6. A beam of moonlight arcs down from the moon and blasts them and causes uncontrollable fungal growth which engulfs them in moments

MONDAY MUSIC #2 - PADS, DRONES, CONSISTENCY

[The Three Degrees - The Heaven I Need]

Transcendent. Song glides with no interruptions from start to finish - no discontinuities. The tape fuzz is essential to this (this I think explains the dreamlike sense of old recording partially - this is why lo-fi is dreamy - you have this bubble of tape fuzz tying everything together - you glide in, you glide out -  immerse in it. This is also why I think this era is so rich in that old psychedelic nostalgia - the tape hiss! It ties everything together in a dreamy consistency wherein things flow in and out of each other, within which they're reconciled). This plus the harmonies (ie. the harmonies harmonise with the tape-fuzz). A plateau.

You can explain the sense of Boards of Canada with this: "Warm" = "Organic" = "Soft" = "Continuous-Consistent" (as in the consistency of a pudding) - no edges. Maybe this sense of consistency speaks back to early childhood when life is an undifferentiated blur of sense & sensation.

The tape-fuzz blurs the sound - blurs destroy boundaries. For me, I always think of things which destroy boundaries as Dionysian and things which make boundaries as Apollonian. S/A/W's music is very Apollonian, intricate . A good example of what I consider Apollonian music is the riff from Video 2000's 'Phantom (It's Like This)' [Which itself is from Tatsuro Yamashita's 'Music Book']. The Apollonian moment is everything clicking - meshing, interlocking perfectly. 0:46 - 1:00 on Video 2000's 'Cruising'. Dionysian blurs, Apollonian integrates.

[Darksleep - Harvest Breed]
Organic data-storage unit British military installation on the coast attaining self-awareness Strobing grotesque scenes of body-fusion with The General's Son (A consummation) and escaping into read-of British countryside pastoral reveries (for the machine, reading is dreaming) naive reveries & visions of the British night of stars & broadcast satellites & open air & rolling hills dissolving fitfully into escape scene visions of the countryside so dreamed of close enough to smell & taste & touch the hallways dark & metal concrete buzzing lowlight KLAXON KLAXON tumble into tall grass & horizon spreading soft light barking at the heels stars sharp twinkling and clinging cleansing air the soft night under stars & freedom looming under soft night gunshot clinging gunshot in elation body numb with feeling body spilling onto British countryside the beach the sky slow shutdown.

[Drinking Their Own Nectar]

Contrast between the oceanic pads (sharp enough they feel like the rocky coast - like dolphin song), the breakbeats of machinic pulsion. Hybrid of Aphex Twin's Fenix Funk 5 & Come to Daddy.

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Same as a sauce ties flavours together, pads & drones & strings provide a beautiful consistency - but how? My working theory is the sauce provides a kind of node or locus, hub through which awareness travels smoothly from one sound, one taste to into another. Imagine a small archipelago - the pad is ocean floor which shows us they're connected. The pad is a broth in which all of the sounds are afloat intermingling and which infuses them then with this new, intermingled flavour. Lastly, the pad is a canvas, a backdrop on which sounds occur - a contextualisation. This is simple enough to explain: The pads, happening less frequently than the other noises and so the faster noises are perceived as happening within them, as within their context, hence the sense of a night looming over the scenes of the military installation. So! A theory of backdrops, sauces and pads.