022: UFOS OVER ILMINSTER

Good morning from Yeovil, South Somerset. I’m not on Facebook, but my friend, JM, recently sent me this screengrab:

(I love that there’s an FB group called ‘Chard’ - Christ knows what would have been posted on there in Chard’s Wild West days back in the 80s. More recently, Chard has rebranded itself as the Birthplace of Powered Flight and / or Articulated Prosthetic Limbs, and is currently home to Numatic, who make ‘Henry’ vacuum cleaners ).

Unsurprisingly, JM said all the usual sorts of bizarre quasi-conspiracy slop was being posted in response: claims of chemtrails, cloud-seeding, meteorological warfare, while others testified to witnessing fireballs / meteorites / UFOs / etc. Ilminster is only a little way down the A303 from us, so I asked my old pal, Rich, who lives round those parts, if he had seen it. In response, he dryly quipped: “I’m afraid I have nothing to report on this, but I think we can rule out the Iranians.”

I saw a UFO many, many years ago back in my long-lost yoof - or thought I did, and for many years I would dutifully trot out the following story: I was walking up St. Andrews Road in my teens when I saw a strange flying object moving fairly slowly across the Yeovil skyline. My eyesight has always been lousy, but it was better back then than it is now, though I still couldn’t make sense of what I was seeing. It was a bulbous disk or ovoid, yet seemed to have various bits of mechanical paraphernalia sticking out of it - antennae, etc. It was close enough for me to make out some details on it, but was definitely not any recognisable form of fixed- or rotary-wing aircraft. I remember thinking it looked more like a satellite than anything else. The spooky thing was that I cricked my neck from watching it, lowered my head to rub my neck and when I looked back up again, it had disappeared. Cue: The Invaders intro. “David Vincent has seen them…”

I was a big UFO nut as a kid - loved the lore and peripheral strangeness of it all. UFO / paranormal books were BIG in my childhood. Mainstream culture. Newsagents / bookshop shelves were full of ‘em. I had read enough of that stuff to know this object didn’t quite fit the usual flying saucer tropes, but I had also grown up in Yeovil, home of the UK’s last / only helicopter manufacturer and was familiar with all sorts of aircraft buzzing in and out of its airfield. This was, well… an Unidentified Flying Object in the strictest sense of the word.

Fast-forward to a few weeks ago, and JM sent me this pic:

Yep, reckon this is what I saw in the skies of mid-70s Yeovil. Either that or its successor, “The Wideye”. Though I never saw or heard any rotor blades. But it explains the ‘bits’ sticking out and the prop which probably looked like a weird aerial from my vantage point. And, of course, it presumably ducked down behind some trees or houses on its way back to the airfield, thus seeming to ‘disappear’ when I lowered my head. ‘Cos, yes, of course they were building a Top Secret drone for the British Army - a world first! - in my home town. Sure, drones and unmanned flying vehicles are pretty commonplace these days, but not back then. So it’s understandable how a small town boy might be startled by the appearance of something like that.

The cover of UHF, the second album by Hacker Farm, an electronic group I formed some years back, is actually a still from 70s test camera footage from the Wideye drone.

But until recently I had never pieced together / connected that fact with the ‘UFO’ I had seen in my teens. It’s like some weird circle suddenly doubled back on itself, a circuit created / triggered by JM randomly sending me a picture. When these things happen and slot into place, they merge into a sort of Self-Lore, a Personal Mythology. It’s odd, looking at this image now: it feels like the Past is looking back down on me from above, from an obsolete drone camera. Temporal entanglement. Concentric / overlapping circles of Retro-causality.

Two or three weeks back, I decided to experiment with some water colours so started hunting around my studio for an ancient, barely-used water colour sketchpad I knew I had put somewhere or other. When I found it buried in a dusty corner and opened it the first thing I saw was the last thing I’d done: a water colour reproduction I had made of the UHF cover, 13 / 14 years ago.

I had completely forgotten I’d ever done this. Back then, people were bootlegging our music, etc so we decided to pirate ourselves and release a fake ‘Chinese’ bootleg of our own album - on a 3” CDr or a MiniDisc or some other obsolete mediaform. I rationalised that since the original UHF had a primitive low-rez digital camera cover-image, then I should Go Analogue for this, and paint a copy of the cover. Which I did. But the band broke up before the bootleg release ever actualised. It was weird, opening a misplaced painting pad and discovering a small painting that I’d forgotten even existed - and right after connecting my teenage UFO sighting with a music project from decades later, etc. It was like another layer was added to it all.

When you think about it, our lives are a series of strange connections; a rich meshwork of unlikely coincidences and convergences. A wiring-diagram that should be incomprehensibly chaotic, yet tends toward self-organisation and order. Teenage Me, not only loved cheesy UFO books and Pulp Sci-Fi, but also spent hours drawing and drawing and drawing. It’s been lovely finding him again.

“Keep watching the skies!”

Yr pal, Kek

Hiya. I’m Kek. A multi-genre writer. I also enjoy making music and art. I have a Ko-Fi that I’m using to raise cash to fund my next chapbook. If you buy anything from my Ko-Fi Shop or donate, then you’ll get a shout-out / credit in the intro to the next book (and maybe more - this is currently a work-in-progress self-seeding literary experiment).

My most recent book is UNNATURAL SCIENCE: A Compendium of Weird which is an anthology - 30k / 200ish pages - of Weird Fiction and Uncanny Horror for those of you who (like me) enjoy that sort of thing:

SLATE UPDATE

Why, yes, I am still writing comics. I was focused on getting a couple new prose books out for a while, but writing comics is still very much an ongoing thing. In fact, there was a flurry of new stuff dropping back in Jan / Feb. Three Young Death strips appeared in 2000AD, each with a different artist, an approach I very much enjoyed seeing. I had no idea who these tales were being farmed out to until they were published, but It was some top tier artistic talent…

Clint Langley:

Mike Dowling (who I’ve not done anything with since we did 1947 some years back):

And Tom Foster (who illustrated the cover of a Commando comic I wrote a little while back):

Ouch!

This was quickly followed by a three-part mini-series - Money Shot: High Stakes - with artist Rob Richardson, which was one of most fun things I’ve done. It came together pretty quickly. Rob was great to work with and I’d do something with him again in a heartbeat. Set in the 1990s, it started off as a fun homage to 90s Action Movies (love Rob’s retro / vaporwave colour palette here):

But that was a Trojan Story Horse and the series quickly turned into something unexpected and different (and monochrome), which included the return of some forgotten 90s 2000AD characters. including this one:

If you enjoyed Money Shot, please write’n let The Mighty Tharg know, as I’d loooove to do more of these and, yes, there is a bigger / wider / stranger story being set-up here involving pistol-packing accountant, Carla Dietrich, one that I hope I have the chance to tell some day.

Meanwhile, I’ve just delivered a couple more Young Death tales - one a 10-pager! - and am gearing up to write some more in the next few days. David Roach has finished illustrating the second series of Nightmare New York (10 parts), and Dave Kendall is on the last 2 or 3 episodes of a new series of Fall of Deadworld (12 parts). I’ve no idea when either of these are appearing - later this year, hopefully. I also just wrote / sold a new short story to AHOY Comics of Syracuse, NY, a few days ago. Again, not sure when that’ll be published, but you’ll read it here first.

I also got tipped off a few days ago by my one of my readers that a Fall of Deadworld omnibus is being published by Rebellion this September:

Und, finally: this saturday (18th April), I’m appearing at the Invasion 2026 Comic Expo at Taunton Library - always a fun, chilled experience! - courtesy of the legendary Mike Allwood and his daughter Susie - with a host of other comicksy folk. Hope to see some of you there! John Higgins, innit.

And since I’m trying to get this newsletter out before then, this is a probably good place to wrap up this section. Next time round will hopefully feature the return of the occasional WRITING COMICS WITH KEK feature. Yay!

KID SHIRT’S CRATE DIGS

Okay, let’s jump right into this with some Finnish spookfolk witchtrap by Kuollut - not new; from a couple years back - and maybe too slooowdoomy / not chaotic enuff for some of ya, but this sure opens my Inner Forrest Eye. Dank rubbery atmospheric-y majik vibes: it’s like endlessly falling in slo-mo through a profane rural ventilation shaft pursued by rotating purple hex-sigils targeting yr soul. A morbid, static-smeared, moss-covered synthgrime soundtrack to a game you really wouldn’t wanna play.

Loving this collision of Blackgaze and Emo / Screamo by Abriction aka Meredith Salvatori, a one-woman band from Baltimore. Came out late last year; dig how the intro to this track sounds like The Cure circa their 2nd or 3rd album, with a flanged-out Post-Punk nod to The Passions (or, more recently, Drab Majesty) etc, before everything goes completely nuts:

Also looove Meredith’s tracks on her split with Sadness. A near pitch-perfect combination of emotion and musical texture. Sun-bleached Late Summer sadness. One for all you broken-hearted pedal heads:

This appeared on my t/l a couple days ago: a release of a couple EccoPlex© radio shows from 2013 / 14, a collab between Vaporwave musician-producer Alex Koenig (aka Nmesh) and Craig Gillman. Given the dates these were broadcast (ie still in the early / formative days of Vaporwave), it unsurprisingly features early adopters / heavy-hitters like Oheohtrix Point Never (whose glacially oneiric (and discrete) chop-up of Chris de Burgh is a haunted, reverb-smeared delight), Luxury Elite, ESPRIT 空想, etc. It’s both a great listen and a wonderful time-capsule document of a newly-emergent music genre.

Nmesh’s choppy, ‘channel-hopping’ mixtapesque production methodology also arguably positions him as one of the originators of the Signalwave / Broken Transmission sub-genre. My age and the fact I grew up in a small rural UK town means that many of the Vaporwave / Mallsoft visual signifiers have less of a nostalgic resonance for me than for Millennials. My own personal semiotic touchstones are shabby, windswept Brit seaside towns; spinner-racks full of comics and lurid magazines; decaying Edwardian arcades; faded splendour; dusty junkshops and second-hand bookstores; grubby end-of-pier venues that put on d-list Punk shows - but I still dig the smeary VHS tape / pastel neon / Mondo 2000 / bleached-out Atari advert vibe of Vapor. I was very much alive and active in the 80s; we were just mall-deprived down here. We hung out in record shops. Speaking of VHS, no mention of Nmesh would be complete without a nod toward The Molokai Compendium and, by proxy, the Triple-B movies of Andy & Arlene Sidaris:

That whole tropical / exotic beach vibe thing was a prime signifier-node in late-00s / early 10s Chillwave (or what Wire dubbed (ugh) “Hypnogogic Pop” - a Kennan-ism, I seem to remember). The origins of Chillwave and Vaporwave are inter-woven - they share ancestral DNA / DMT. Back in the day, some pundits tagged Vaporwave as an ironic / cynical / hipster kneejerk reaction to Chillwave - “Chillwave for Marxists!” hissed an hysterical The Wall Street Journal. Calm down, luv! The truth is likely far more complex and messier than that and would probably require a book-length piece to fully unpack, but The Beach / Neo-Tropical Vibe still persists w/in VWave, a sort of parallel slacker-stoner strand-locale to The Mall.

Returning to the EccoPlex© release, it formed a much-needed bubble of audio-calm round my ears when my regular cafe suddenly filled up with squawking babies later that day (some sort of impromptu and extremely surreal toddler group meet-up). And, afterwards, when I exited into a heavy Spring rain shower that was paradoxically accompanied by dazzlingly bright sunshine, the light sparkling in puddles and vehicle chromework was a perfect visual accompaniment to the gauzy, patchwork 80s flashback playing on my headphones.

“Sous les Pavés, la Plage!”

CHILL WITH KIKI

And, speaking of Chillwave, Kiki told me to remind you all to take some time out for yourselves. Keep reachin’…!