008: OF SEAGULLS AND ZOOMERGAZE

EVERYBODY KNOWS THAT DA BOID IS DA WOID.

Good morning from Yeovil, South Somerset, where a seagull just pee’d on me as I walked out of Marks & Spencers and crossed the road eating a bag of Flame Grilled Steak Ridge Cut crisps.

Well, I think it was a seagull - it was certainly too high up to have been one of the drinkers in St. John’s churchyard. It was a fine, mist-like spray that sprinkled down on me from upon high. I looked up - luckily I was wearing a bucket hat (though its camo pattern clearly hadn’t made me as inconspicuous as I’d hoped; perhaps I should have worn a tarmac-coloured hat instead?) - only to see a lone gull, a hundred foot up, in an otherwise empty blue sky, fleeing the crime scene. Perhaps it was an anti-capitalist gull - I’d have to dig out my Brooke Bond Wild Anti-Capitalist Birds of Britain card set to figure out how you might identify one - that mistook me for a stereotypical Tory Blue Rinse exiting M&S with my weekly six pack of Mixed White and Red Wines. But I forgive my avian comrade: it’s an easy mistake to make. I’m told that, from a distance, I’m a dead-ringer for Mollie Sugden. In my defence, I’d just like to say that I only popped in M&S ‘cos I was bloody hungry and needed an urgent snack refuel. That’ll teach me, right?

I realise now I’d let my defences down for a moment. Took my eye off the ball. Careless moments like that can prove fatal. I remember chuckling to myself as I emerged into bright sunlight, my shoulders relaxing as I opened the bag of crisps. I thought it was funny that “Steak Ridge Cut” sounded a bit like “Stan Ridgeway” and as I crossed the road, I found myself hum-singing Stan’s 1986 breakout hit, ‘Camouflage’: “Woooo-ah, camouflaaaage, things are never quite the way they seem…!’

And then the first wave of piss-mist hit me from above.

Clearly, my own personal camouflage had failed me. If it had been a sniper or a professional assassin targeting me, not a herring gull, I woulda been a goner.

There was nothing for it now but to sheepishly re-enter M&S, ride the escalator up to the first floor toilets and wash gullpiddle from my hands. If that seems like an over-reaction, let me remind you that celebrity steeplejack, Fred Dibnah, once ended up bed-ridden from a disease he caught from the pigeon poop that soaked into his unlaundered trademark flat-cap. A few minutes later, as I crossed Silver Street for the second time that fateful day, it became apparent that I smelled of pee even more than usual.

Later that afternoon, I burned the offending plaid shirt in the garden in a ritual ceremony attended by sinister-looking robed figures who chanted in a strange arcane language (English). It was a bit like The Whicker Man, but with B&Q garden furniture.

But, oh no, that was not the end of my avian travails. Out for an evening walk later that week a pair of gulls started following me, squawking and shrieking hideously from above. I couldn’t shake the buggers off. It was like an Edgar Allan Poe story, but with seabirds instead of a nevermore-quothing corvid. They circled aggressively, following me all the way down Legion Road, occasionally flying on ahead to settle on a rooftop where they eagerly waited for me to catch up, screeching and glaring down at me like beady-eyed gargoyles. I tried crossing the road - “Zig-zag! Move erratically, randomly! Make it impossible for your opponent to get a clear shot at you!” - as Arnie Hammer, my old survival-tutor at Vigilante High, used to yell as he beat the shit out of me with a length of knotted rope for punctuation - but it was to no avail: the birds merely altered their flightpath and locked back onto me like heat-seeking missiles. Arnie was wrong.

As they chased me down the hill, taunting me from above, I know knew that, any second now, they would unload their lethal payload. Game over.

It was like a scatological version of Daphne du Maurier’s The Birds. The ornithological mayhem in Hitchcock’s movie adaptation had terrified me as a child, but these days it’s the depictions of early 1960s American small town life that sicken and unsettle me. Why had I been targetted? I wondered with mounting dismay. Had I been cancelled by the Gull Kingdom? Did it have something to do with that ill-protected portion of chips in Lyme Regis a few days earlier? 

I grew up in St. Patrick’s Road, one of the roughest areas of Yeovil back then; having skinheads and football casuals follow me down the road squawking abuse was an almost daily ritual. Thankfully, though, these days most of my detractors are now either dead or work in traditional publishing.

But this was seriously unnerving, like some low-budget, suburban 1970’s Nature Strikes Back / Eco-Horror movie. Would I end up, flat out, on someone’s unkempt, yellowing lawn, my eyes pecked out, with a blancmange-sized dollop of guano left on my head as my aerial murderers’ calling-card? Well, apparently not. My feathered persecutors, like the bovver boys from decades earlier, eventually got bored and disappeared off in search of fresh victims. Or maybe they were scared off by the traffic noise on the main road. Who knows? Either way, I had survived to write another day.

I’m not sure what the moral or message of this long rambling story is, but… no, wait, I’ve got it:

As you go along your chosen path in Life there will almost certainly be those who will piss on you from upon high - or from on low.

Ignore the idiots and the haters. Sponge yourself off and keep going. Do what you love. Do what you have to do - what’s important to you.

But make sure you wear a tarmac-coloured bucket-hat.

Yer pal, Kek

I’m Kek-w. I mostly write comic books, but not exclusively. I’ve also written films, TV and books. I hope you are enjoying my HUMANE DEBRIS newsletterzine. If you have any pals who might like it too, then please let ‘em know about it, ta. Let’s grow our weird little tribe.

But if it ain’t workin’ for ya - no worries, amigo! - there’s an Unsubscribe button laying in wait for the unwary at the bottom of the page. Thanks for giving us a go.

SLATE UPDATE

Sorry to short-change those who’ve come here for all the hot comic-book goss, but I’m currently knee-deep creating new episodes of the apocalyptic Dark Horror series, FALL OF DEADWORLD, so the part of my brain that’s writing that doesn’t want to also write about it in-parallel. Plus: it’s difficult to talk about anything non-spoiler-y at this stage in the proceedings. Since me last newsletter I’ve plotted the first six episodes in detail and the first script from that tranche has just been signed-off this morning - and we can add to that the one-off 10-pager wot I wrote last month. Tomorrow, I’m back scripting FoD again and developing a new series of… something else. So my brane needs some micro-breaks from all that.

I’m in the middle of a big swirl of listening to and getting excited about music atm, and what was meant to be a short newsletter piece about, you know, this n that has turned into a bloody essay! So that soaked up a load of brain-bandwidth in recent days, but also provided me with a much-needed (and very positive) distraction. This edition of HUMANE DEBRIS is already a bit overlong, so music trumps comix this time round, but you know I like to mix things up n keep it fresh.

(People who know my work from comic-books, horror stories, whatever, might be surprised to know that I’ve written for a wide range of music and life style magazines (and sites) over the years. I first wrote about music for zines in the late 70s / early 80s, then started doing it professionally about 20+ years ago. Less so in recent years, but it’s still a writing itch I occasionally like to scratch. Here’s a typically daft story: I recently ran an online search on The Caretaker (for reasons I won’t go into) and pulled up this piece; started reading it and thought, ‘Hm. This isn’t too bad. Better than some of the guff written about James…’ only to get to the end and discover that I wrote it… ! Well, it was 15 years ago, apparently).

More comics-y stuff next time round - I promise. Honest!

MERCH ALERT

I recently released an eBook version of my historical horror conspiracy thriller novella, THE RECONSTRUCTED MAN. It’s available here from the KOBO store. It’s also available to read via a Kobo Plus subscription, along with a zillion other titles. If you like the grim horror of my work on Fall of Deadworld and / or the historical fantasy elements of The Order, then THE RECONSTRUCTED MAN could be right up your dark, cobbled, piss-puddled street!

If, like me, you prefer physical books, you can score a paper copy directly off me from my Bandcamp.

KID SHIRT’S CRATE DIGS

I’m a bit late to Bar Italia. I’d casually dismissed them as another generic LDN Indie Gtr Band - not really my bag - but I was noodling around on the iPlayer recently and caught the start of their set at Glastonbury (It’s still there, last I looked) and was completely hooked. ‘Tracey Denim’ is a great album, packed with broody, broken, scuzzy-sounding songs of longing and loss. I kinda wish I’d bought it on vinyl now.

I’m picking up pick n mix echoes here of post-punk influences from across different decades and scenes: detuned Sonic Yoof dissonance, Yank slacker Pavement vibes, the flanged-out brittle Gothpop of ‘The Walk’ era Cure, even a little enthusiastically loose Raincoats / Swell Maps-ness on one track, but with Kitchen Sink / Slice of Life lyrics (shot through with more than just a smidge of bummerism) and sulky, downbeat, deadpan vocals. The band has three vocalists - Nina Cristante, Sam Fenton and Jezmi Tarik Fehmi - and most songs feature more than one lead singer. This constant switching back and forth of voice / gender / viewpoint, when combined with the elliptical, enigmatic lyrics, creates unresolved tension and oblique narrative interplay - blurry snapshots and context-free micro-soap-opera scenes from a series of imaginary lives. The effect is both voyeuristic and addictive, like listening in on a confessional or some heavy heart-to-heart exchange through an open kitchen window.

While there’s (almost certainly) some sort of post-pomo cherrypicking of styles going on here - the band are smart, articulate and funny, originally appearing on Dean Blunt’s World Music, a label that’s not exactly a stranger to self-promotional enigma itself - the music comes off as intriguing, vulnerable and strangely moving rather than arch. It’s worth the price of entry for the hauntingly fragile ‘Missus Morality’ alone. Fenton and Fehmi also make music that is even more fuzzy, hazy, sun-haunted and shoegazy as Double Virgo who I’m also majorly diggin’. ‘No Sweat’ is a great entry-point: it sounds like the monged-out 21st century nephew of A.R. Kane, somehow both intently pissed-off and indifferent at the same time. Drill down through the detuned strata of stomp-box frazzle n see where it takes you.

And speaking of Shoegaze, SEEFEEL returned a few days back with a pre-order drop of ‘Everything Squared’, their first new album since, what, 2011? I think there was a similar gap between that and their previous offering; that’s some serious Scott Walker level release scheduling, right there. But it’s worth the wait and is every bit as gorgeously distant and abstractively swoooosh-filled as you might expect. I now have a huge hankering to dig out some of me old Seefeel vinyls on Warp and Rephlex.

Ironically, Shoegaze has never been more popular than it is right now. In recent years, the most obscure, gtr-pedal obsessed 90s acts have been rediscovered and adopted by Generation Z. Sad to say, OG Shoegaze had a bad run of luck: just as it gained traction it was mortally wounded by Grunge, then Britpop delivered the coup de grace, though a small cult fan-base kept the flame burning in the years that followed. The genre’s unlikely rebirth as Zoomergaze was fuelled in the late 2010s by an even more unlikely, slow-burn super-convergence of Spotify, 4Chan’s /mu/ discussion board, Rate Your Music, TikTok, Slowcore, The Deftones (who never much interested me at the time) and Duster (who I’d never heard of). The gnarlier side of Indie Rock and Emo has been a necessary component in re-igniting Shoegaze’s fuzzy, ill-defined lo-fi pilot light. And we’ll get into that in a minute.

Miley Cyrus performing a cover of The Cocteau Twins ‘Heaven or Las Vegas’ in 2021 might have also inadvertently been another re-defining ‘Gaze moment, or maybe that only happened in some parallel universe in my mind.

Gen Z, like Shoegaze itself, was born at the wrong time: flung into the hostile, hyper-capitalist deep end of the pool with only their phones for company and left to mature against a backdrop of Endless War and Austerity. Growing up can be a lonely and alienating process at the best of times, but I can’t help thinking it must have doubly frustrating and isolating for Zoomers. The first generation whose journey to adulthood was spent in the baleful, dopamine-depleting, low attention span glare of the internet; fated to see everything that those who came before them had seemingly had or experienced, yet to feel like they had little to look forward to themselves. Their Future had been looted by hedge funds and one-percenters - had digitally dematerialised and been replaced by the Endless Wayback Machine of internet media. They had the whole world at their fingertips, yet it seemed like nothing was truly theirs.

Then covid hit.

Lock-downs, quarantines, home schooling, work-from-home culture. More alienation, more loneliness, more frustration. A future - a life - that seemed to be endlessly deferred. 3am Doomscroll Eternal.

But Zoomers started building their own musical bitmaps. They used Tiktok reels to cross-reference the history of, well, everything, and began creating their own audio-culture - one that quickly escaped the gravity well of the mainstream’s hyper-fixation on the 1980s. I’m oddly unsurprised that Shoegaze fuelled their imagination and resonated so strongly with many of them on an emotional level. There’s something comforting, consoling and otherworldly about Shoegaze, Dreampop and their assorted orbital subgenres - they somehow provide a sense of solace, an escape from this lonely and often uncaring world - a gauzy, cushioning, soft focus hug. A balm.

But this ain’t yer dad’s Shoegaze.

Given all the chaotic shit experienced during their march toward their twenties - a wide-spread sense of powerlessness or of having been cheated - it’s no wonder that Zoomergaze openly embraces The Gnarl as much as The Swirl: it has a lot of unresolved anger, cynicism and frustration that it needs to process and unload; it feels like it’s searching for a cathartic release as much as comfort. As such, Zgaze also soaked up some of the grottier, knottier, more abrasive-aggressive elements from old school Grunge, Nu Metal and Emo, then put ‘em all in a gert big guitar-pedal stew and left it to simmer and be sipped at whenever hunger makes itself known.

When decades of musical history - the History of Everything - are only an app tap away, old dadrock genre-tags are, by necessity, gonna get swept aside by passionate Zoomer music nerds. Boundaries, descriptors, historical ring-fencing and gate-keeping start to dissolve, take on new shapes. And that’s exactly as it should be. The emotional need - the looking to fill a lack - is the itch being scratched here by Gen Zs: not treating the Past as precious, something to be preserved, like some sort of, I dunno, musical heritage theme park. Just as in Elizabethan England, when language went through a rapid, explosive period of evolution where thousands of new words, ideas, concepts were added to popular culture, so Gen Z’s internet speed-grazing habits have fuelled an expansive, super-heated burst of creativity that has re-energised and redefined a number of near-dead or dormant music scenes.

Zoomers get that genres, like genders, are fluid. Zoomergaze is a broader cultural church; is more expansive, more inclusive - its borders are more porous, looser - than its 80s-90’s progenitors. The Zgaze constituency is based on feels, on emotional bonds and ties, on a need to express and heal, to feel less alone, rather than sheer immersive overload or digital sheen. If you don’t believe me, take a look at some of the comments left by listeners on Zoomergaze music clips: ‘I feel normal when I play this track’, ‘I lay on my bed and don’t feel lonely any more’, ‘This makes me feel like I’m sitting in the eye of the storm. I’m calm, it can’t touch me.’ It’s heartbreaking, touching, beautiful. But isn’t this the purpose of music - to make us feel more connected, less alone? To foster a sense of community and shared experience? In which case, Zoomergaze is succeeding admirably. One other trait it shares with earlier expressions of its genotype is a tendency towards mixed-gender groups. The de-masculinisation of Rock continues! But, Jesus, it’s sure taking its time.

We can’t talk about Zoomergaze without mentioning quannnic. Inspired by 00s post-emo bands like Superheaven and (yikes!) Paramore, quannnic’s first album, ‘Kenopsia’ produced the break-out hit, ‘Life Imitates Life’, and made them the closest thing to a star produced by the scene so far. Follow-up album, ‘Stepdream’ has a really great piece of cover art imho - quannnic’s videos also have a terrific visual aesthetic, as darkly jarring and disturbing as they are dreamlike - but the music on album #2 seems to have drifted toward more of a, I dunno, pop-noise vibe. Whether that’s their own artistic-aesthetic decision or record company pressure to nudge the product toward a wider audience, only time will tell. (I recently read an interview with the Reid Bros. from Jesus & Mary Chain, talking about how their label had never ‘got’ them and were constantly bulldozing them toward a more commercial, cleanly-produced sound). Given that they are still only 20 and were making auto-tuned digicore music prior to ‘Kenopsia’ I suspect quannnic more likely just has a restless muse and I’m 100% down with that.

Quannnic is so zeitgeist-y that their lyrics have already been subjected to dumbass, prompt-driven online AI ‘analyses’ that make NME.Com look insightful (“These lyrics appear to indicate anguish and self-doubt…”) and their music has been given multiple slooweddoooownn Youtube reposts. The internet eats its own young.

I’m the wrong generation (and obviously reaching here) but, for me, the title ‘Life Imitates Life’ carries an odd call-back to both Warhol’s Imitation of Christ (with its moody, bedroom-dwelling Son) and Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life. Either way, it’s a wonderfully oblique and polysemic title that speaks to the post-covid Now in a number of ways. (Who knows what’s real any more? All we have left are our feelings, etc). The song’s lyrics are opaque enough to carry a broad universality that resonates with all outsiders of all stripes, Gen-Z or otherwise, though I can’t help thinking that lines like

If you walked in my skin
You'll feel the jail
Embed, it feels
Like eternal ache

were perhaps designed to carry a specific emotional charge given quannnic’s non-binary identification.

If there were some sort of Turing Test for Zoomergaze, then Bar Italia would almost certainly pass it. I’ve never seen them (or Double Virgo) lumped in with other Zoomergaze bands, but there is a video out there somewhere of Julie (a band I’m kinda partial too) wearing Bar Italia t-shirts. This version of ‘Lochness’ is great btw: it sounds like Eno’s ‘Third Uncle’ being jammed out by early Sonic Youth. I really like one or two of Wisp’s jams too: this one has a odd timeless oceanic quality to it. A blurry atemporality. Like, what decade is this, even?

Annnnd let’s not forget Doomgaze and Blackgaze.

Both these subgenres are exactly what they say on the can. Doomgaze’s gnarl content comes from a different, non-Grunge strand of ancestral DNA: Justin Broadrick’s Jesu project is one major influence. Also: Nadja might be another auntie-uncle on the Black Sheep side of the family. Palehorse/Palerider, Holy Fawn and Planning For Burial are some possible Dgaze entry-points. Oh, and Fuzznaut. But beware: burial, bummerism and minor-chord ecstatic sludge all feature heavily in this micro-genre. Blackgaze, as you might expect, fuses 4AD Records’ style enigma-shimmer with post-Norwegian blast beats, but eschews 90’s incel church-burning antics and operates, instead, at some pendulum point between darkly joyous ecstasy and deep melancholic immersion. Deafheaven might be one notable roadside mile marker in its angst-ridden development, Wolves in the Throne Room another. Altar of Plagues, Alcest, An Autumn For Crippled Children and some other bands beginning with “A” are among its best known proponents. But, personally, I dig the bait-n-switch-i-ness of ‘Pit’ by Charm* - it ticks both the Black and the Gaze boxes for me.

This isn’t meant as a Zoomergaze primer - just my own personal attempt to map the current state of play and find some new things to like. Thanks for making it through this lengthy piece…

CHILL WITH KIKI

Zoomergaze aside, sometimes, in this stressful, high-octane world we live in, you just have to take it easy n carve out some time for quiet introspection and meditational puss-thoughts. ‘Til next time, chill to the Max, groovers…