019: 'TIS THE SEASON...

Good morning from Yeovil. South Somerset, where it’s Giant Spider Season…

I grew up in an era of only two TV channels - then a third one arrived in the early 70s - yet Giant Insect SF movies seemed to be on the telly all the time: Them!, Tarantula, etc on Sunday afternoons, along with cheapo drive-in movie fodder that, for me, weirdly ‘glamorised’ rather than weaponised societal anxiety about The Bomb, atomic radiation, etc. Then later, in the 70s, there was a wave of Eco-Horror / Nature Bites Back movies featuring everything from bears to birds to killer bees to… rabbits. Happy days!

I’m writing this intro just before Halloween, of course - and just before the Beaver Moon (My God / Ess, I wish there wuz a Nature Bites Back Giant Beaver movie!) - but you probably won’t get to read this nonsense ‘til sometime after. I love this time of year: the slow October / Autumnal slide into Halloween is the one time of the year when us weirdos get to blend in and become less conspicuous. As the days shorten and the nights close in, mainstream culture temporarily veers off-course and starts to overlap with ours. The world gets weirder. But in a good way. I also love how Nature shifts gear: the leaves changing colour, toadstools, fungi, rot and decay. I’m a regular lil Judge Mortis.

Down here in Somerset, October and November are Carnival Season. Like the pub game of Skittles, I think this is primarily a Somerset phenomenon (One or two towns over the Devon border also join in), though maybe you know better. If so, write and tell me. Most of the towns around here have a carnival night. Yeovil used to have one, but then they stopped a few years back. I can’t remember the local politics surrounding it, but I strongly suspect it involved money. I have fond memories of being terrorised by children dressed as dice cubes and their Dad in a human-sized pack of John Player Blue (only in Yeovil could people dress up as a packet of cigarettes!)

Carnival is Somerset’s modern, mechanised continuation of old Pagan festivals and rites: a way for us common folk to give Evil and Darkness the Vs-up, to auto-induce a much-needed serotonin and dopamine re-up in the face of encroaching cold and hunger. Once we would have set fire to stuff and offered up prayers to the Ancient Ones while we danced in fanciful costumes that represented animal spirits and sprites, and got completely monged on nasty home-made hootch and psychedelic mushrooms. But enough about the 1980s.

In that unrepentant spirit of resistance and defiance, here are some photos of Glastonbury Carnival. I went with my wife, oldest daughter and her boyfriend, and we had a fab old time. Some of the carnival floats were utterly nuts with a zillion moving / rotating parts and more illumination than Paris in the 1890s. It was trippy af. People work all year round creating these insane mobile theatre platforms, stitching costumes, choreographing dance routines, etc, then give all the proceeds to local charities. It’s like a weird, luridly-lit form of pagan-socialism with a cheesy euro-rave soundtrack. It’s uplifting, heart-warming and totally bonkers. A blast of heat, light and fun as Winter starts to draw down its chilly white curtain.

And, finally… apologies for the lousy photo, but I had to go to High Zoom to capture an image of this maniac who was dressed as a giraffe:

When things get dark around us, carry on celebrating Life, Light and Laughter!

Yr pal, Kek

Hello. I’m Kek. I write stuff for a living. Mostly comics, but I also write books and other stuff. For fun, I make music and art.

As error-prone, energy-devouring AI slop-assistants replace search engines and turn the internet into an http-cemetery where it’s impossible to find any sites made by humans or anything remotely resembling a truthful version of reality, and social media becomes a bot-driven range-war designed to stoke up hate-engagement (and, remember: all of this is happening By Design in order to further enrich the super-rich), give your poor brane a much-needed break and step away from it all. HUMANE DEBRIS (the clue is in the name) is a personal attempt to create a sort of Calm but Fun Zone, a zen retreat for fellow weirdos who, like me, are into comics, music, art and other cultural oddities. If you have friends who might dig HD too, or who maybe need to get the Hell offa Facebook, then please point ‘em at the HUMANE DEBRIS Subscribe Page: https://humane-debris-ed6dfb.beehiiv.com/subscribe

I often like to talk about where I live (Yeovil) in my introductions. Bear with me on this ‘cos it’s not only just about me: every small town is someone’s ‘Local’ - a place full of strange stories and characters, alive with its own magically bizarre folklore and word-of-mouth history. You don’t need to live in a city to have adventures or experience odd stuff or create music-art scenes or whatever. I write about my home town in the hope that it might make you think about where you live - your own locality - and how you might embrace or mine its own inner richness and, as a result, improve the quality of your own life and those around you. S’gotta be better than doomscolling all day on a corporately-tethered electronic device (a phone), right? Write and tell me what weirdness you find on your own doorstep. You might be surprised.

This issue-episode’s banner was made by my friend, the changeling, and photographed in situ in one of the pop-up ‘installations’ created by local street artist **** who featured heavily last time round in our urban-rural exploration of the old Mermaid Hotel. Here’s one he made recently (and, yes, that’s smelted metal in the banner image).

SLATE UPDATE

I recently made an EP of electronic music with my friend Paul Maskell, who runs The Beat & Track record shop in Sherborne. Paul releases music as Outtract, and we’ve teamed up to make a 25 minute collection called RELAY ‘cos it’s like a cross between a Relay Race and a Surrealist Exquisite Corpse with Paul and I remixing each other’s remixes, forming a musical audio-chain based on an original ‘seed’ piece.

It’s available here as a physical CD with a printed disk and cover in a proper-job jewel-case, and also as a digital download for those of you who live abroad and can’t afford outrageous international mailing charges:

I also have a track “Vent Three” on the most recent Endogenic Noise compilation. I set out to make a Deathdream style track, but it came out sounding more like a Slushwave-y Industrial Air-con type thing:

I did this under the name ONEIRIC HARDWARE, which is also - Conceptual Continuity Alert! - the title of an album I self-released in 2009 using “Manipulated field-recordings sourced entirely from server-arrays, hard-discs and PC peripherals from Belo Horizonte, Brasil and Yeovil, Somerset.” The Brazilian recordings were provided by my old friend, Prof. Dan Werneck. The CDs I made are loooong sold-old, but you can still grab a digital copy here:

Hm. Maybe I should now do an ONEIRIC HARDWARE album of Industrial Air-Con slushwave and abandon my original idea.

I had a great time at the recent Taunton mini comic-con. Thanks to reader, John Glinsman, for the bottle of cider. Much appreciated! Cheers, John. Man, I have the best readers.

I have now finished the prose book ‘sequel’ to my book of Weird Fiction, THE NEW ABNORMAL. It features two long short stories and two short short ones. All very much within in the Weird Fict wheelhouse. The writing and copy-editing are all done. I’m currently trying to get the collation and artwork stuff sorted prior to getting it printed. Am hoping to get this out before Christmas, but already dates are sliding as the end of year rushes toward me like an out-of-control milk-float on an icy road.

Not content with all that, I have also finished MEET THE SHRIVELWOODS, a chapbook type thing containing two short humour-satire Gothic Romance stories. In the introduction I describe the stories as “Poe on nitrous oxide meets Dark Shadows, The Addams Family, Wuthering Heights, Gormenghast and Sir Henry At Rawlingson End.” Readers of my short stories for AHOY Comics will know what to expect: absurdist humour that borders on the surreal and is full of word play and sight gags. I have similar ambitions about a pre-Xmas drop-date (especially given that one of the stories is called ”Christmas With The Shrivelwoods”), but have just spent a chunk of this week wrestling with the cover art and text. The layout builder I was using just didn’t wanna play, so I’m probably gonna do it in Gimp instead (which had been my original inclination) and hire a different printer.

I was also working on revising an old book I did back in the late 00’s. There was a 20k version of it and a 50k one. The 50k version was an attempt to add more back-story and flesh out the (fairly unlikeable) protagonist’s origins. But it sagged terribly in the middle. The 20k version had more momentum, better pacing. But I started hitting some of the tonal problems that had made me shelve it 17 years ago, so I put it down again a couple weeks ago. I may take one last swing at it again before year end, try converting a few pages from First Person to Third, and mute some of the internal monologues, see if it works better.

Meanwhile, I have instead picked up another book I bump-started 2 or 3 years ago but put down through lack of time. It was based on an idea I had over a decade ago. I’ve written and edited about another 1100 words in the last couple days, and hand-written copious notes for some new bits.

In terms of comics, I’ve just delivered the 7th part of a new series of Nightmare New York, a new one-off episode by myself, David Roach and Peter Doherty - “Hard Times” - having recently appeared in 2000AD a few weeks ago. Part #8 is outlined in biro and ready to go. I’ll probably type that up next week and tidy it up.

The Kickstarter for the first issue of A1 Deadline is fully funded and up and running. It will feature an unpublished short CAP’N DINOSAUR strip by myself and Shaky Kane. It’s nuts!

We’ve been asked if we can do some more, so I am currently writing a brand new Cap strip. Yay, me!

KID SHIRT’S CRATE DIGS

I was recently asked to give Wire magazine a list of my favourite albums of the year, along with my Pros and Cons for ‘25. People always grumble online about End of Year Lists, gatekeeping, subjectivity, etc, but it gives me a chance to signal-boost friends, acquaintances and allies making music and putting on shows in the sub-underground who might ordinarily get overlooked by mainstream platforms / press. Great art deserves to be heard and seen imho. I was also asked to write a 900 word article on a musician who has helped make my year considerably more bearable. That’ll all be in their Christmas issue, out soon!

I covered this EP by Marie McAuliffe as Hype-O last time round. Maladaptive is an extremely inventive and engaging amalgam of Metal, Industrial, Game Synth, Emo, Cybergrind, etc. But I’ve returned to it here as Marie has extended the concept out into a full length album called Forever Longing - a sort of sister album to Hypomanic Daydream’s The Yearning - which Marie kindly shared with me recently. It’s an absolute monster of an album, her most accomplished and eclectic so far: emotive and engaging, every track a banger. What surprised me was finding old school John Foxx and early Simple Minds euro-synth vibes in among the grinding Metal guitars and blast beats. Marie is taking Metal off into some thrilling new synthetic directions and the Maladaptive EP is a great taster for what’s coming. Forever Longing drops in early January. Miss it at your peril.

Marie’s friend, Texas-based Garry Brents aka Sallow Moth, Gonemage (and a host of other project-monikers) has just dropped two EPs of progressive-melodic, synthy (and, on “Ancient Cocoon Plug in the Outer Rim Dimensions”, occasionally even jazzy with a hint of Squarepusher meets early 90’s drum n bass breaks) Death Metal. The music is twisty and convoluted and brilliant, but has gorgeously floaty moments when it stops to catch its breath:

The opening track on Deformity in Ceremony - “Algae Brain Geist” - is like some mad collision of Zappa-esque snorks meets Metal grunt-growls meets NY No Wave meets Chip Tune meets an ominously doomy, haunted house version of The Art Bears. A miniature film for your ears:

I also love the covers of those two releases, by Indonesian artists, Unggun Yulianto and Rio Oka. The impact of artwork on a release should never, ever be downplayed, not just in Metal. I love Marie McAuliffe’s paintings and her home-brewed digital art for her own releases, but this cover art by Yam Lynn for this old Thotcrime album is a wowser too (the music’s pretty great too!):

Yeah, I really dig their aesthetic.

Saturday, November 29th, sees the last show by legendary Bristol promoters and label, Liquid Library. After ten years (!!) of promoting fabulously out-there alt-weirdo music of all shades and shapes with his mate, Charlie, Owen is taking a break. But LL is going out with a bang and a nutsoid line-up that includes my pal, Robert Ridley-Shackleton. See ya there!

READERS’ LETTERS

Been a while since I’ve done one of these, sorry. Last issue-episode’s account of me snooping around in the dark, abandoned old Mermaid Hotel, Yeovil, resonated with a handful of you. My pal, Cyrus Pireh (whose June-released album Thank You, Guitar is one of my personal 2025 favourites) weighed in with some reminiscences of his own:

“I have always had such a fascination with squatting. It was definitely a part of many of the "histories" of punk I was so into reading and watching when I first started playing guitar. With USA housing and laws being what they are, it was something that was hard for me to parse but that made perfect sense. The idea that if housing was being left unused that it is reasonable for people to just use it was one of many things I learned from Punk Rock that just seemed to make sense. I bet you already know there are maybe a few examples of historical squatting here the most famous of which is maybe C-Squat in NYC which led to the creation of ABC NO RIO. My friend in high school was very into this idea of squatting. This is my friend Tim of the song "Tim" off the record. He is one of these people who seemed to be able to get info on anything and was always introducing new ideas into the clique. Getting to play at ABC NO RIO and also creating an opportunity for him to play there as well is one of the things I was most proud of during my time living in NYC...”

From my own p.o.v. I have very fond memories of playing in an anarchist art-squat in The Hague a decade+ ago (and then, later, staying at another one elsewhere in the same city where they were building drones and modular synthesisers, and had their own radio station). I also love Cyrus’ little mantra / mission-statement of: “Humans in harmony liberate each other. Nothing is for certain. Music is the way.” Speaking of music…

My old school friend Doctor Garry - God, how long have we known each other now, Gaz? - mailed me a little while back in response to lawnmower-themed ish-ep #017: “That Klaus Schultz album, Body Love got my immediate attention (and the lawn mowers of course!). That Schultz album is one of my favourites of all time and I assumed I have it. Now, not so sure, but I think I have that album - in storage, so can't check. Used to chill to it after cycling on my daily circuit several decades ago… 1980s…! Argh brain circuit made (which is important to reinforce at my age)… will go find the album. Been in my head for at least 30 years… think you introduced me to it at Newton Road! Thanks!”

Possibly, even earlier! Reckon I scored my first copy of it back in the late 70s when we were both living in Bristol, so Gaz may have even heard it then. Garry is one of the smartest guys I know. Get this: he once got a visit from real-life Men-In-Black - US Airforce Intelligence guys complete with black suits and shades - who hassled him and a colleague (think I’ve got this right) in the hotel they were staying at during a visit to a scientific conference in Canada. They wanted to know how Garry and his team had accidentally parallel-discovered the top secret radar-reflective coating used on Stealth Bombers when they were pretty much working out of some Portakabins in Weymouth! Poor old Boeing - how many zillions of dollahs did they spend on developing that when my old mate - who was involved in early nano-tech research at the time - cooked it up in a shed in Dorset. I think he (quite rightly) told the MIBs they had no jurisdiction there in Canada and to piss off. Madness!

And a big belated thank-you to Mark aka Meemo Boots for sending me the latest ish of the arcane Blank Signpost zine ages ago.

Here’s the latest release by his band, The Teas Towels, from Leeds. It’s well worth a few minutes of your time: kinda slinky-freaky, but creepy. “I’ll Do the Juxtaposing” reminds me, in places, of a weird, improv-y, slowed down version of something by the really underrated 90s band, Tiger, if they had nicked a cloned TB-303 synth and half the group hadn’t bothered to turn up for rehearsal. Or the engineer had accidentally muted / deleted half the channels on the recording. Or… something.

CHILL WITH KIKI

Stretch out and get comfy / cosy like Kiki. You got this. Stay warm, you gorgeous people!