011: "THERE ARE SKELETONS IN THE TREES!"

EMBRACE THE WEIRD

Good morning from Yeovil, South Somerset, where the trees are turning into a glorious autumnal rainbow of yellow, red and…

Oh.

Meanwhile, we’ve been breakfasting in the ruins of Dunelm, which dramatically burned down, as related in a recent ish of HUMANE DEBRIS. No new local pyromaniac incidents to report, but my wife just told me that someone tried to ram-raid Argos in a Seat Salsa on Babylon Hill. So, yeah: welcome to Yeovil.

Earlier in the year, Eleni Poulou and Hilary Jeffery (aka the mighty Organza Ray ) kindly invited me up to Bristol to jam / record with them the next time they visited from Berlin. So, in September, I hoofed it up to Easton to hang out in the studio with them, Tom Bugs (the modular / electronics wizard behind Bugbrand, who used to do the live sound at The Cube cinema back in the 00s when I was in Ice Bird Spiral), producer-facilitator, Jim Barr and Guenther from Leipzig.

It was a wonderful day. Great company and great fun. It felt particularly significant for me as it was the first time I’d played music with other people since covid lock-down in 2020. Back in the late 10s I went through a phase where I was semi-regularly playing Improv shows locally, mostly round the Taunton area - though we’d also occasionally do spontaneous guerilla gigs in Yeovil (in town with a drum-kit!) and regularly meet up and jam / record on a piece of waste land next to Yeovil Sewage Works. But my Improv chops - if I ever had any! - had grown rusty, so I had to do some warm-up exercises at home to get myself match-fit. But I needn’t have worried: playing with Eleni, Hilary and Tom was super-relaxed and fun. I’d forgotten how easy it was to get lost in the Moment when you’re playing with other people like that. The room seems to slide away and you drift off into some sort of Group Mind thing. I’d also lost sight of the wonderful social component of doing creative stuff with other folks. The hanging out in the kitchen, the chatting and drinking the home-made perry (pear cider) Tom brought along to share. The forming of connections / bonds / experiences, is as important as the creative stuff, perhaps more so. (I love that Tom’s Instagram is as much about perry-making as building modular synths).

Memories of that day will stay with me for a long time. I’m told the recordings are being edited and will be released on a Bristol-based label somewhen in the future.

Autumn - Spooktober, in particular - seems to be the time when us weirdos and lifers come into our own. Normies all start dressing up as witches and ghouls and parade around in public, demanding high sugar confectioneries from total strangers. Hey! What the Hell - that’s our racket! Goddamn fair-weather weirdos! In October, our own niche interests and, uh, outré behaviour are not only tolerated, but are adopted by the general population. For a month or so, we become the norm. Are culturally camouflaged. Now, that’s weird, if you ask me.

Anyway, the point of this little postscript to just say that whatever you do - be it art, music, lit or just being yrself - that might be a little Stage Left for most people: don’t be discouraged, keep going, keep doing, keep being you - all year round.

Remember: a skeleton ain’t just for Halloween.

Keep climbing the trees.

Yer pal, Kek

I’m Kek-w. I write comic books, films, TV and books. Social media is exploitative, brane-numbing and toxic, not to mention dying on its feet - the HUMANE DEBRIS newsletterzine is my ham-fisted attempt at creating a tiny nexus-node of individuals whose interests in art, music and lit might overlap with my own. And who might, like me, just want somewhere safe to hang out and have a lil fun. So, please point any potential recruits at the Subscribe Page here: https://humane-debris-ed6dfb.beehiiv.com/subscribe.

But if this ain’t yr bag, don’t sweat it - you can unsubscribe at the bottom of the page. Thx for taking a look.

NOTHING LEFT BUT THIS

It’s Autumn / Fall and I’m feeling kinda Black Metal atm, so a few days back I released NOTHING LEFT BUT THIS, an album of Blackened Dungeon Synth. It’s cold, morbid and wracked by anguish - a perfect soundtrack for these dark, rapidly-shortening days - something to get you through the dank nights and the frost-haunted days ‘til we start setting fire to stuff and chanting. It’s available as a super-limited dual-coloured black n red cassette tape. Dungeon Synth was meant to be played on hiss-smeared tape (or a cursed hurdy-gurdy). Or you can get a thrice-damned digital download if the cost of international postage scares you more than the sleep paralysis hag that’s standing at the end of yr bed. Either way, you can snag a copy here:

JOHN M BURNS / NIGHTMARE NEW YORK

Nightmare New York continues in 2000AD, with David Roach and Peter Doherty taking over the art and colour-art duties from the Great John M Burns. We’ve already had one cover - this one a couple weeks back by Andy Clarke:

…and we’re about to get another one (or maybe it’s just come out, depending on when I send out the next HUMANE DEBRIS). This time by legendary cover Art Droid, Cliff Robertson:

If yr enjoying Nightmare New York, then please feel free to tell The Mighty Tharg that you would like to see another series. Drop a comment on the 2000AD Facebook or Instagram.

Next time round, I’ll be talking in depth with illustrator David Roach about stepping into JMB’s artistic shoes - how he approached this difficult task - and his love and appreciation for John’s work in British comics. We cover some deep and personal topics in our chat, so you might not wanna miss that one!

WRITING COMICS WITH KEK

If it sounds like I’m more of a creative cheerleader here than offering detailed technical know-how, then yr darn right! There are plenty of decent books, podcasts, etc dealing with story structure, construction, narrative techniques and so forth. Instead I like this column to touch on some of the more personal stuff those guys leave out, the sorts of things I wish someone had told me when I was starting out. Like everyone else, I read Robert McKee’s ‘Story’, but It didn’t teach me to be a writer. In the end I had to find my own way there by trial and error. Mostly error.

Last time round we talked about building resilience and sustainability in yr creative practice. One aspect of this - and something that isn’t often talked about - is the messy topic of Dealing With Rejection.

Whether yr a pro or a for-fun writer; an artist submitting work to a physical or online gallery, or presenting a funding proposal for a project; a musician showing a new song to peers, bandmates or a label, it doesn’t matter: we’ve all come up against it. If there’s any difference between this and, say, applying for a non-vocational job then it might lay in the notion that people supposedly put ‘more of themselves’ into a creative endeavour - ‘heart and soul’ is the phrase often used. Whether that’s true or not, I don’t know. Any form of rejection is potentially ego-bruising as it’s often tangled up with self-image, self-worth, etc. Which might be why it’s often left undiscussed or is considered a prickly topic.

“Rejection is part of Life” is a phrase that’s often rolled out, usually followed by a shrug. It might be a cliche, but it does have an echo of truth about it. Some ppl are better at dealing with rejection than others, and that might be down to personality, neurotype, etc. We can’t help who we are, but maybe there are strategies that can help us navigate the issue better if does cause us problems. If you find that you don’t bounce back quickly from professional rejection it can potentially limit yr options in moving forward creatively. So let’s explore some potential strategies in handling it - and if it’s not an issue for you - ways of minimising getting rejected in the first place.

From purely a writing perspective, “it [rejection] comes with the territory” is a phrase I sometimes personally use, but it doesn’t make it any less easier, especially if you’ve put a lot of time and effort into presenting a project. For every story I’ve written that you might (or might not) have read, there will be a number of others that got strangled at birth, shot down by ack-ack guns, or just casually batted away.

Not replying at all seems to be the standard default response mode in modern publishing. So Tomb-like Silence is something you might have to get used to if yr crazy enough to want to get into this game. Now, whether getting nothing / zilch / nada is personally preferable compared with a reply that might contain honest or even blunt criticism is down to yr own temperament and personality. At least with criticism you can learn, gain insight and wisdom about yr own creative failings (and thus improve) or obtain another layer of understanding about what it is the editor / publisher is really looking for, thus allowing you the opportunity to fine-tune further / existing pitches. The Silence of the Void… it’s, well, less helpful. Editorial triage. Yes, I know they’re busy, etc, but there’s less potential for learning and growth. In that instance, sending a polite follow-up mail, say 4 - 8 weeks later is completely reasonable imho (yr submission might have been lost or their backlog is so huge they haven’t got there yet)… but silence, in my personal experience, is usually followed by more silence, so in that instance it’s probably best you steel yrself, start formulating Plans B, C and D, and move on in a no fuss manner.

If they do reply and the answer is ‘no’, then thank them for their time and for replying. If they do offer feedback / advice, then listen - soak it up and apply it. Again, thank them: if you’ve found an editor who has actually read yr work and taken the time to offer you feedback, then you have been truly blessed. Listen to what they say. Even if you don’t agree with it: it doesn’t matter, it’s their perspective - they’ve just offered you a lifeline, a potential future Way In by giving you clues about what they are looking for. This is the best form of rejection: try and take it as a positive. It’s not a slap to yr ego or a personal attack: that person has actually given up their time to show you a way to improve yr work and has sketched out the beginning of a road map towards them accepting a submission from you. See it as a success, because it is.

Make sure you follow any Submission Guidelines to the letter. Some editors / companies will trash submissions that have ignored their guidelines, used the wrong file type, incorrect manuscript formatting, etc. The more effort and obstacles you create for an editor, the higher the chance of getting rejected - and that’s what we’re trying to avoid here, right? They are looking for someone who’s professional, who they can work with. It’s not just the quality of yr work, yr ideas, etc they’re parsing, they are also checking yr suitability - auditioning you, if you like. If you can’t follow simple, basic guidelines, then why are they going to read yr submission? I remember reading a great quote from an editor a few years ago - I think it was DC’s Paul Levitz - whose advice for aspiring writers trying to break in was “solve problems for an editor, not create them”. And that’s stuck with me down through the years.

These days, my own pitch acceptance rate is higher than it was a decade or two ago, but that’s probably because editors that I’ve worked before now trust my creative judgement / decisions; they’re familiar with the quality of my work, know I’m reliable, can deliver on time, etc. In some instances, it’s been a long and hard slog in order to earn that trust, etc - but that’s no different to most other jobs. So, be aware: if you are trying to break in / become a pro there will be an initial slow / low uptake curve, and by ‘initial’ I probably mean several years, so (and not to put you off) you might need to be prepared for a low-level artistic siege until you can ‘prove’ yrself to editors. Remember: it’s a relatively small world. Word can get round about you, so make sure that word is ‘reliable’ or something similar, and not that you are a high maintenance diva or a bit of a dick to deal with.

I first started out, like many other writers, in what we used to call the Small Press, but which is now, less condescendingly, known as Independent Publishing. It’s a good way of learning yr basic chops as a writer and building up a bit of confidence: as in, ‘Hey, this ain’t so bad - maybe I can actually do this stuff!” Unsurprisingly, the rejection rate in the old Indie sector was as high as when I first started submitting work to professional publishers. Some of the indie editors were very picky and quite prickly to deal with on a personal level. One editor of a long-defunct Horror magazine, in particular, springs to mind. Looking back, he definitely exhibited some low-level sadism in his rejection letters, yet despite it all I kept going back for more. The take-away from that is that patience and quiet persistence is a quality well worth nurturing in this game. Each rejection letter from him stung less and soon they started striking me as funny (some of the reasons he gave were odd, arbitrary and occasionally self-contradicting; Older Me now realises and understands that he probably didn’t really know what he was doing or what he wanted, just as I didn’t know what I was doing or what he wanted either). We were clearly wasting each other’s time, but the rejection process quickly became less unpleasant to me and more like an amusing game. After eviscerating my latest submission, each of his letters would always end with the same words: “But you can subscribe to (I’m making the name up, but now that I think about it…) DOGMEAT magazine by sending £10 cash or a postal order to P.O. Box 666. Make cheques out to Dave Bastard, etc, etc.” I soon realised that he would probably never actually accept a piece off me. There was nothing ‘personal’ about being rejected; he almost certainly treated every wannabe writer as a potential reader / subscriber / cash-cow. So I wrote one last short story - a humour-horror piece - about a writer who was perpetually rejected by horror magazines and makes a deal with the Devil, but it goes horribly wrong. Something odd happened while I was writing this one: it was a lot wittier and more playful than what I usually wrote, very different in tone to my other submissions, and contained passages that felt personally satisfying, fun and linguistically rich. I remember really enjoying writing it because, I guess, I felt I had nothing to lose, so I wrote something that was ‘truer’ to myself, perhaps. Either way, it felt like I’d finally found a ‘voice’ that worked for me. It had a flavour similar to the satire-snark humour pieces I would write for AHOY comics 35+ years later. Remember how I said: “Everything is a practice for something else”? Well, this is a prime example: what I thought was an frustrating go-round with an indie editor ended up helping me climb up a step, improve, and find a more personal voice. Also: it was FUN to do.

He still didn’t accept it, though. But maybe that wasn’t the point.

Of course, not everyone was like Dogmeat Dave. There was the Indie editor who rang me up to tell me how much he loved one of my pieces (instances like that are pure motivational gold when yr starting out), the editor who unexpectedly sent me a fiver for one of my stories (everything had been unpaid up to that point) and the editor who accepted everything I sent them, regardless of length or quality. I mention this last one only to point out that, in many ways, it was worse than the editor who rejected everything because I never learned anything. I had no feedback on what was good or bad, what worked for them; they were just looking to fill pages. So: the take-away from this is that rejection is often a Good Thing. It can spur you on to Do Better (or, even, Do Different), to learn and to grow. If you struggle with rejection then try and reframe it in yr head as a potential positive, as something that may help you in the long run. And this is about the long run, the Bigger Picture, right? ‘Cos yr going to keep on doing this creative thing you do, aren’t you? And dealing with this is another way of building resilience and sustainability, another arrow in our quiver.

Remember what I said before about you have to really love doing this, because that will propel you through the humps and troughs, the uncertainty and the self-doubt. Yr passion for yr chosen creative field is yr biggest asset, the seed that will fuel the work. Making the process fun is one way to maintain momentum in the face of adversity - ‘gamifying’ it, if you like. If you reframe rejection, replace it with a softer word like disappointment, so that you merely become ‘disappointed’ when you get that email or the Great Veil of Editorial Silence descends - disappointed in the same way as when yr favourite show doesn’t get renewed or yr fave comic gets cancelled - it kinda mutes or blunts any self-flagellation you might be inflicting on yrself. If you get useful feedback, great! Either way, move on to the next magazine, story, whatever.

Like any profession, writing can be a mixture of exasperation and delight. Whenever possible, try’n ramp up the delight levels, enjoy it. Exasperation is only temporary. If writing / art / music / making stuff is Your Thing, then it’s forever. Personally, I really love creating new things, bringing them to life, concretising ideas, teasing ‘em out into the physical world. It’s what floats my boat. I get great joy and pleasure from turning an idea into words, then (if it’s in a visual medium) seeing how collaborators turn that into a three-dimensional project-object. Everything else is either navigation, diplomacy or a pipeline. So when stuff goes wrong or grinds on me, I try and remember the aspects that I really enjoy doing and I double down on doing that. All the other crap soon gets lost in the rear-view mirror and recedes into the distance.

Keep movin’ forward!

KID SHIRT’S CRATE DIGS

Oh, this looks fun! An all-dayer at The Cube promoted by Margin Forever. My old pal, Yol, will be there, making the trek down from Hull to terrify the locals and chip away at the consensus norm with his found sound-object-word tool-kit. Gonna try to get up for this. Think I saw Harpoon a few years ago at a Noise all-dayer at the old Surrey Vaults (now Mickey Zoggs, but not much longer by the look of it), but the rest are new to me.

Robert Ridley-Shackleton’s Cardboard Club label celebrates its TENTH (wow!) anniversary by releasing ‘Welcome 2 Cardboard Club’, a compilation containing some of the many and varied artists whose work they’ve released over the past decade: SPRAT, The Tea Towels, Newcastle’s dictophone-manipulating wizard Joe Murray aka Posset, Zero Gravity Tea Ceremony, Yol and a cast of dozens - a veritable who’s-who of the UK’s sub-underground. Grab yrself a copy and Get Card!

My old Flemmish pal, Bart de Paepe aka Bart Sloow (or just “Sloow” as ppl called him) has a new solo album called Sprokklehour out on the art-meets-music gallery-label, Astres d’Or. It’s super-limited: each vinyl copy is hand-cut and its cover is made using found pieces of tree bark, “a small tribute to the tree spirits of yesterday”. Bart beautifully described it to me as:

“Late night meditations on the local nature spirits with a silver saucer of the full moon reflecting in their mind's eye. Silent shreds of broken piano in the key of aum. Covers made of wood gathered in the mossgrown forest under the influence of fernseeds just before it fell apart.” The music is soft, meditative moonlit psych: gorgeously tranquil, gently-swirling 4am melatonin visions. Each copy is unique and hand-made. Says Sloow: “It was quite a task to glue all that wood and make sure it stayed there on the covers.”

I struck me that I hadn’t seen Bart for 11, 12 years since I played a show in a squat in Den Haag with Hacker Farm. I had a memory of Sloow arriving after a cross-border drive and playing an MS-10 or 20 synth (which I think he used to sometimes also play in Silvester Anfang) with a guy playing hand-drums / bongos. I remember the synth was draped in fairy-lights (it was the run-up to Xmas) and I really enjoyed their set. I asked Bart if that duo had a name and if they’d ever released anything. He replied: “I don't remember that at all! Though if it's Den Haag it might have been with Manuel Padding. Haven't seen him in a long time. We were called Paap en Pudding, but never released anything.” A shame - I’d love to hear some of their stuff. Bart is best known for running the legendary Sloow Tapes label (primarily cassettes, though they also release vinyl, art, booklet-zines, etc) which was one of my favourite go-to labels in the 00s and 10s. A must-visit one-stop shop for psychedelia, old and new, of every imaginable stripe.

And finally: another compilation - this time, from the Finnish Magma Tones label based in Turku and curated by Jani Hirvonen aka Uton. MAGMATIC MUTATIONS is “47 minutes and several different aspects of experimental drone, ambient, free improvisation, electronic and acoustic sounds... and things between. Artists from Great Britain, France, Finland, Germany, Argentina, Australia, New Zealand, USA, Brazil, Canada and Czech Republic.” It’s available here as a FREE DOWNLOAD.

I have to declare a personal interest in this comp as I contributed a track - “Dark Pacifika” - using my Broken Skies alias, the name I use to record slightly dark and uneasy New Age music. I haven’t released any new Broken Skies material since about 2019, but this felt the right time to ease back into that project-persona. The compilation is great and features some old pals who, thanks to this, I’ve now reconnected with: Aphra, from Argentine psych-shaman-weirdsters, Vluba, and Michael Donnelly, from Brothers of the Occult Sisterhood, 6Majik9, etc, who put out my first Ice Bird Spiral recordings back in the 00s and inspired me to embrace my own inner musical noise-muse. It’s been great finding Aphra, Mike and Bart again. There’s definitely something in the air atm that’s making connections, joining up dots.

KEK’S AUTUMN COLD KURE

INGREDIENTS:

• A tin of RIFCO organic Sri Lankan Lentil & Coconut soup

• A bag of cheap Grape Tree tricolour Quinoa 

• Cheap turmeric from Grape Tree

• Ground pepper

Boil up a handful of quinoa for 15 - 20 minutes ‘til it’s nice’n slooshy. Drain. Put half the tin of soup in a pan and simmer for a couple minutes. (The other half is tomorrow’s lunch). Add the drained quinoa and stir. Add a sprinkle of turmeric (there’s already turmeric in the soup, but let’s Get Spicy, huh?) and a grrrrrnd of pepper. Stir until it looks like baby vomir. Serve with bread (gluten-free bloomer, in my case).

Mmm! It’s a really spicy / tasty mosh that will make yr eyes temporarily roll back as if you’ve been possessed by a minor Babylonian demon, but that’s good. This soup makes me sweat after 2, 3 spoonfuls, then I start to feel really great. I guess it’s akin to the mildly psychoactive effect of eating strong chilli peppers. I’ve been brewing a cold for the last few days, but a bowl of this instantly chases the symptoms away. Afterwards, I feel Tony the Tiger level great - like I’ve had a decent cup of coffee - and immediately want to write or do something creative. It’s a mild spice high, I guess. But it certainly puts the cold back in its box. Quinoa, like lentils, is protein rich: between the two you’d probably get a decent hit of the full range of amino acids. The picture doesn’t make it look particular appetising (I’m not an ad agency, spraying food with hair lacquer to make it shiny n appealing), but, boy, is it tasty and filling - a real Autumn treat and a total cold killer!

CHILL WITH KIKI

Find yr favourite spot and get comfortable. As Groucho Marx, in later life, used to say when saying goodbye to his pals: “Stay warm!”