It isn't very good a lot of this crap they're peddling as drum'n'bass these days. A reminder from the originals.

DJ SS
Dylan
More DJ SS
Ganja Crew

Reflecting on my time in Shen Zhen and Hong Kong, I can only say that it's beyond expanded my mind. The rate at which China is modernising and capitalising is frankly unprecedented. I'm a kid of the concrete jungle, and as I said in my emails to my buddies back home in the UK: "This makes London look like Venice." And I couldn't be more frank. I ain't seen nothing compared to what China is buiding right now. I'm very worried about what will happen. Sure, urban life is an upgrade from the rigours and harshness of subsistence. They're enthralled, and grateful. They live in warm new homes, wonderfully convenient. But beware of those tower blocks and factories, they're uncontrollable. They decay and morph into new things over decades. They form their own culture over time, the migrants children are natives. These behemoths are set on a course. In their shadows breed High rise Hi Fi ghostly ninjas. Anarchists. I know this world, I'm from this world. I'm streetwise & fearless. They are a dense landscape which can home the most cut-throat strains of humanity. The hood-rats of London, the ghettos of NY, the banlieux, seriously, this is complex. This is real. And it happens 30 to 40 years after their construction, and it grows in native urban kids. They form clans and gangs. They deal in that which is prohibited. Anarchy. Money makes the world go round in the city, and there's different ways to get it. Cities go poorer and darker than any peasant. A city is naturally famine conditions: no crops grow there. It's a desert of termite mounds. New lives are reared starved of beauty, and starved of identity. Knowing nothing but faceless millions, concrete more concrete, car after lethal car and the TV. Successful kids take to the streets, and set about owning them. The government cannot touch them, they are shadows. The sight of uniform or 'reform' makes them evaporate, only to return tomorrow in greater number. They can move faceless amongst the crowds. It's blade runner, it's judge dredd, it's urban. I've grown up around the dystopia, and I'm schooled on it. Neuromancer is a book I recommend. Come to Daddy doesn't scare me:             Judge Dredd is a story of the Mega Cities, cities which have become so big and so dense and so uncontrollable that the government has resorted to doing away with the legal system, and instead has super soldiers dispense justice directly in the field. The fictional world drawn on the pages of this little indie comic are amplifications of what we see today. Control is only barely achieved, drugs, insanity and 1000 forms of black market thrive in the dense environment. Dropping gum is a prisonable offense. Sugar is a controlled substance. Illegal ring fights of "fatties" with chainsaws draw black market audiences in the hundreds of thousands. And the simple little people hide in their apartments with every mod con they can buy. The super rich live on the top under sunlight, and go hunting celebrities for sport with high power weapons, happily above the law. The media is an entertainment circus, neon cartoon clowning with zero serious content. The population eat munce, a bacterial sludge flavoured in millions of ways to be mock turtle soup, or a hotdog. These comics kept me in stitches for years. The artwork in places defies belief. They got 15 years of mileage out of the world, and wouldn't have stopped if it wasn't for Warner Bros. buying them out and firing the artists for having integrity. They turned it from a thinly disguised adult art form right back into sanitised pacifiers for the kiddies, complete with McDonalds ads on every other page. ______________________________________________________________________        Curiously, the finest art & expression also grows like an orchid in these strange forests of concrete and commerce. It feeds upon the anarchy & discontent. It feeds upon the underground, the invisible, the scrawly graffiti, and the concrete nightmare. Forging new understandings, and new visions. This new world will not be ignored, brushed under the carpet. We must learn to deal with it, to recognise the subtle nuances, to extract difficult morals from difficult stories. ______________________________________________________________________        And Nowhere is this growing more than in China. Shen Zhen is bigger than London. It's new. 17 years or so. The underground is not yet grown. The population is not native urban, you can see it in their eyes. They're wandering wide eyed and blissful amongst these hulking high rise giants. They see nothing but progress in this modernity. They're curious where this leads. ______________________________________________________________________        And more strangely, the philosophies that I use to keep me sane and peaceful in my metropolis are Chinese derived. There's a culture there which offers an attitude which is compatible with my condition. I thought that I might learn more in China. I discovered that I've been privileged to experience that which was hidden away from the Chinese: Lao Tzu, Confucius. You just couldn't get the books in the 70s. In some ways, I'm more educated than many Chinese in that culture which I approach as a disciple, as a foreigner. Curiouser and curiouser. ______________________________________________________________________        What makes me think that China's metropolitan worlds will turn out different to the western ones? Well, this is no experiment. It's been done before. There is the benefit of second sight, of Take 2 version 2.0. Worryingly, the design of these cities is, well, exactly the same brutalist concrete nightmare that bred the ghettos. Maybe cutting a few more corners than before. It's like nothing has been learned. It's the job of us westerners to take the now 50 year old stories over. It's noticeable how keen HK'ers are on absorbing all that Hip Hop has to offer, albeit in a cursory and slightly laughably insincere and fashion victim manner.  But I respect the drive, to get ahead of the game, to know urbanity in both its dark and lightness. ______________________________________________________________________        But the people who will live in these, will they renounce their heritage as those in the west did? I don't know. I think they might resurrect it. I hope that there will be an urban counter revolution of Daoism, not hip-hop, drugs and guns. Of kung fu kiddies practising buddha nature, fearless and safe, dressed in 21st century re-workings of Han priests' uniforms. ______________________________________________________________________        Because that's what the creatures and souls of the urban jungle desire most. A sense of belonging and fearlessness in this inhuman concrete jungle. A sense of place, a sense of identity. To be respected not as a cog in the great machine, but as individuals. What better way than by stealing back their own culture? Authentically, from the underground. ______________________________________________________________________        Will I be wiling or inclined to help with that? Hell yeah. Show me the Tao. I come carrying stories. I'm pretty sure that few of the street DVD sellers, those anarchist pirates, will be able to give you a copy of La Haine.

Long forgotten in the mists of ancient digital systems, amongst the shamanic masters of Cybersyn, Telnet and Gopher, there was an ancient art... Instant message. Realtime Feedback. Telex to telex. Tesla was the magician, Marconi was the original founding father, Morse the original seer. This site has something really compelling on it. The shout box. 10 lines. Real Time. Free for all. Its restricted palette makes for some great verbal encounters. I've had fun on the shout box. I remember the days of yahoo's labyrinth of chat, and I know the jungle of stickam, but AnD has something special. One chat room, 10 lines. Totally egalitarian. Totally public. And what's more people respect it. They behave nicely. Occasionally there's a little heat, but nothing compared to a forum set to high flame. I'm probably the rudest currently in the ring, and that's me minding my manners. There's something wonderful about the shout box. It's so gloriously simple in this sprawling web of confusing and sometimes psychopathically detatched and cynical multi-protocol multimedia mashup. And it presents the user with an inviting blank canvas, and breeds real human encounter. Yay for AnD and the ancient art of shoutoboxing.

So I was tired, cutting corners left and right just to keep the pace. Exhaustion creeping up like a pack of hounds at my heels. High pressure work all over the place, money this, pressure that. Deadlines and dollars. And so, of a Friday the 13th there's a big gig curated by the record label that I'm involved in: Trepan Records. It's tipped to be a good event, 9 or 10 of the best acts in London Town, and the night tipping a big nod to Hunter S Thompson. It was brilliant, couldn't even watch a whole set for another incredible band appearing on the other stage. Everybody loved it. Unpretentious brillance all round. Projected visuals were better than ever, the crowd was a loving bunch of hard core friends, and goggle eyed newbs, and the music and drink was flowing beautifully. It was a family affair, and what a huge family! It's terribly satisfying when you see a project 10 years in the making jumping from strength to strength. We'd halved the entry, doubled the number of acts, and managed to turn over more than ever before, a record success. The venue was pleased as pie. Now that's what we call good business. And the whole thing is held on multitrack digital audio at studio quality, and multi camera HD. This is how you make a record in the 21stC. So we assembled a rag tag crew as the night drew to a close, and headed over to one of the after gig gatherings at my friend Christiano's pad. He's a proper music head, been in bands since a kiddie, now lecturing at LCC and generally being ace. He has a cupboard in his house which he straps himself into like a hairy fighter pilot and makes music at the speed of sound. Floor to ceiling musical instruments, buttons strings tape machines faders and computerised genius. More tech than you can shake a stick at. We picked up various provisions from the dodgy offie, including several bottles of wine and a bottle of Bushmills. I proceeded to make it my mission to drink that bottle, straight from the neck, down to the glass at the bottom. As the hard liquor began to kick in, my scottish blood started to fight back against the demons that had been haunting me. I became uncompromising in my humour. Christiano pulled out the double bass, I pulled out a guitar, and we started to play. And I remembered how good it is to start out on a journey without knowing where you're going. Neither of us really knew what note was next, nor did we really care. And out from the ether came good music. The semi circle of friends sat quietly, lapping up the magic. And so we headed out into the blazing sunlight, walking in zig zags and giggling like kiddies, no... adults who should and do know better. We looked like pirates, or fairies, bounty hunters & pirates. Rock Stars each and every one. We took a bus to breakfast. My mean mood was getting meaner and funnier. I was yelling at coppers, breaking and bending the rules like a gurkha, machete in hand, whiskey in hand. Hunter S was watching from his cloud marvelling at the fact that there is nothing more depraved or as desperate as a man in the depths of an ether binge. Off the bus, and a touch more zig zag, we met a fellow pirate, a drug dealer who'd made the mistake of sampling his own class A blended wares too much. He was in a dangerous state, and demanding whiskey. But he'd met his match, we were more together than he, and dosed him something shocking. He begged to give us very serious drugs, we politely declined. We were on harder, more legal substances. He took our gift as a man, all macho and posing.  But he had to borrow a girl to clutch as the poison coursed through his veins. We sent him on his way, with a little concern for his future. But somewhat stabilised.  And so we sat down for breakfast. I gazed at the menu, and all was blurry apart from the one horrific line "the english breakfast". Oh dear. We're here. And so I ordered an english breakfast and wandered downstairs to hug the toilet and do some backflips. And so I was coaxed from my wildly spinning and somewhat vomit stricken toilet hugging position into a cab and into my bomb site flat. My memory at this point went on strike in reaction to my extreme behaviour, and I have no recollection of what happened. Now as the story goes, when you behave like this, you awake to find your head beating like a blood filled blister, your flat trashed and the police worse still the army at your door. I stirred from my pickled slumber to discover something very strange. I was lying in clean sheets. There was a fresh smell of laundry. And a beautiful girl explaining to me that my whole house was being cleaned. I couldn't quite get my head around it. This was not the home I recognised, this looked together, organised. Fresh. I was deeply suspicious of this development, but in no state to argue They even had a silly hat to further puzzle me. This is awakeness 3 minutes in. They tickled me, and I woke up to the fact that on that morning I was possibly the luckiest guy around. And so I stumbled out of bed, and witnessed the wonder of women on a mission. They meant business. Serious business. No stone left unturned. My flat was to be tidy, and there was no argument. Not that I was in any state to argue. Lady legs are brilliant. And they know it. Women are hungry creatures, so I fed them good food, with culinary expertise acquired in China. My whole existence from that particular point has felt a little calmer, a little cleaner, and a little happier. The cathartic poison sapped an unhealthy buildup of mean spirited nightmare from my spirit, and upon that blanked canvas, these lovely girls painted a little picture of kindness, and proceeded to live with us for days. We giggled at the brilliance of our ways. And so, the moral of the story is: women are great. Never let it be said otherwise. Now these women are not just any girls I'll have you know, they are a Ms Evi Vine, blindingly good singer, veteran on the London music scene, to be found playing the BBC's stage at Glastonbury, and a Ms Regine Mowill, fashion designer touted as better than Galliano by St Martins. It's funny, no matter who you are, however A list, nobody has had their house cleaned by more talented ladies than I.

a random lo-fi sketch tune off my server, all instruments by da bishop.