Welcome to another edition of the nothing here newsletter. This issue, Lucy Swope of GHOST COP has come along to tell us a little about the band's latest album ONE WEIRD TRICK. As well as that, we've got an array of articles, and all the rest.
Lucy Swope (LS) - Lucy Swope, strategist by day, angry synthpunk chanteuse on nights and weekends. One half of GHOST COP. NYC-based (but hatched in the cold, dark waters of the Maine coast).
Corey J. White (CJW) - The VoidWitch Saga. Newsletter facilitator. Naarm/Melbourne. Tweets @cjwhite.
Marlee Jane Ward (MJW) - Writer, reader, weirdo. Author of ‘Welcome To Orphancorp’ and ‘Psynode’. Host of Catastropod. ADHD, spec fic, feminism, cats. On Wurundjeri land in Melbourne, Australia. @marleejaneward
Austin Armatys (AA) - Writer/Teacher/Wretched Creature // Oh Nothing Press // MechaDeath physical edition available now // @0hnothing
m1k3y (MKY) - Wallfacer / Apocalyptic Futurist / #salvagepunk / @m1k3y
CJW: How to Build a Low-Tech Website (via Ospare at Restricted.Academy)
A solarpunk af low-tech website, with downtime expected after cloudy days and/or during winter.
MKY: HAWT!!!
OMG Preeeeeeeaaaaaaach!
A second reason for growing Internet energy consumption is that we spend more and more time on-line. Before the arrival of portable computing devices and wireless network access, we were only connected to the network when we had access to a desktop computer in the office, at home, or in the library. We now live in a world in which no matter where we are, we are always on-line, including, at times, via more than one device simultaneously.
“Always-on” Internet access is accompanied by a cloud computing model – allowing more energy efficient user devices at the expense of increased energy use in data centers. Increasingly, activities that could perfectly happen off-line – such as writing a document, filling in a spreadsheet, or storing data – are now requiring continuous network access. This does not combine well with renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power, which are not always available.
And now I’m staring at this in horror and feeling guilty af about netflix binging during heat waves [hands up if ur also old enough to remember the joke on ALF being that his homeworld was destroyed when everyone plugged in their hair dryers at the same time (iirc)]. Given that, and the slowly tightening firewall around this country - like srsly, I can’t even download subtitles rn - and, well, everywhere, leaning hard into something like Cuba’s “El Paquete” network seems timely.
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MKY: Computational Landscape Architecture (via Justin Pickard)
What interests me here is the possibility that we might someday begin landscaping our suburbs, our corporate campuses, our urban business parks, according to which species of vegetation are less likely to block WiFi.
[…]
You can imagine, for example, vindictive foreign governments purposefully surrounding an American embassy with trees unpermissive of signal propagation, even deliberately donating specific indoor plant species known for their negative effects on electromagnetic signals. A kind of living, vegetative Faraday cage.
“Living, Vegetative Faraday Cage” is my new band name. The partially online future is green af. I’m gonna need a list of those indoor plant species at some point too ;) - hopefully there’s an intersection b/n that and my list of houseplants that clean the air etc (why such a list?).
And you know I’m looking forward to ecological restoration efforts having to be filtered through the Ministry for the Always Online for approval first. Because, priorities…
Which brings us to this bit of dark euphorism:
You could soak a forest in electromagnetic signals—yes, I know this is not the greatest idea—and measure those signals’ reflection to count, say, active birds, beetles, badgers, or other participants in the wilderness. It’s WiFi as a tool for ecological analysis: you set up a router and watch as its signals reverberate through the forests and fields. Animal radar.
CJW: There is easily three SF books’ worth of speculation in this article. A planet covered in thick forestry that is actually a massive supercomputer?
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MKY: Into the Zone: 4 Days Inside Chernobyl’s Secretive Stalker Subculture
Our destination for the night is a small village left uninhabited for 32 years — bar the occasional stalker. The road has long disappeared below the forest floor; bungalows emerge as angular shadows from between the trees, like witch’s cabins in a cartoon nightmare. Foliage reaches into open windows and paint crinkles away from brickwork. Most of the roofs are sunken or collapsed, having succumbed to the weight of three decades of decay.
#sext
This is so well written I haz a jealous.
CJW: I always forget that Tarkovsky’s Stalker came out a few years before the Chernobyl disaster. It’s an amazing bit of prescience.
MKY: Yeah, about that ;) Ghosts Of The Future: Borrowing Architecture From The Zone Of Alienation
CJW: That is a really interesting bit of games-adjacent writing from rockpapershotgun’s Jim Rossignol. And seeing as one of the photos at the top link reminded me of DayZ (and because of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.) I like that we’ve tied it all together.
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CJW: “As environmental catastrophe unfolds, we need architecture that is more than just green”
We need architecture that is not just green but modular and adaptive, that anticipates and responds to the changing environment. This will range from providing housing for the displaced, to the application of beauty and utility, to renewable energy, coastal defence and carbon capture structures.
The trials we face require the kind of colossal infrastructural efforts that were witnessed in the New Deal, the Marshall Plan and the Space Program, with more at stake. It will also require involvement in fields beyond the boundaries of each discipline.
I’m a little iffy on talk of large scale power and geoengineering projects that doesn’t take into account the unknown effects these could have on the environment - for instance, here there is no consideration given to how large solar power fields in desert areas could affect the ecosystem beneath the surface, which is a common omission and something I myself only recently came to consider. We tend to think that deserts are devoid of life because we ourselves could not live there, but there is always life, even if we don’t care to recognise it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for large scale projects to try and mitigate climate change, but if we don’t first address our addiction to consumption, we’ll find ourselves destroying the environment to save it (This recent episode of Ashes Ashes covers this in detail. I stand by my earlier comment that Ashes Ashes can be fucking depressing, but they’re always giving a well-researched multi-faceted view on these topics, so it’s worth it on the whole). Anyway, don’t let my iffiness on one very minor point stop you from reading an otherwise fantastic article - Darran Anderson’s work is always interesting, well-researched, and very well written.
And this all ties into this break-down of a number of geoengineering ideas put together by Exxon researchers.
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CJW: Arborists Have Cloned Ancient Redwoods From Their Massive Stumps (via Sentiers)
It’s Jurassic Park, but for trees. If that sounds flippant, this is the size of the trees they’re cloning:
MKY: I am extremely into this obvz.
MJW: That picture is fucking heartbreaking.
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CJW: Lies of the land: against and beyond Paul Kingsnorth’s völkisch environmentalism (via Dan Grace)
Appeals to ‘the people’ are common in political discourse and are a central feature of populist politics. But as a political subject (and actor), ‘the people’ never pre-exists such appeals. Rather, it is constructed through them; and acknowledging this can be an important step in constructing a politics to challenge the status quo.
This pull quote really grabbed me, but it’s not really a good summary of the article itself. Dan Grace reached out to me with this link after we (I) shared an essay by Paul Kingsnorth in the last issue of the newsletter. Whilst Kingsnorth may have started some interesting conversations with and around the Dark Mountain Project, this article details the nationalist/populist/proto-fascist rhetoric that underpins an essay he wrote in early 2017.
I guess the lesson here is, find interesting ideas and inspiration where you can, but be wary, and do the research. And have a community who can speak up to point out flaws and absences in your thinking. Speaking of: if you ever want to add something to the discussion, you can just hit reply to this email.
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CJW: Dropgangs, or the future of darknet markets (via Daniel Harvey)
Interesting article on the evolution of the digital black market economy. The description of private messaging and dead-drops reminds me of Charlie Huston’s fantastic novel Sleepless. Though it is hard to tell how much of the article is based on legit research, and how much is speculative.
MKY: Oh hai the everyday postcyberpunk spy-fi condition. So much goodness in here, and then they just casually drop in speculation like, forget taskrabbit and doordash et al…
More people will find their livelihoods in taking part in these distribution networks, since required skills and risks are low, while a steady income for the industrious can be expected. Instead of delivering papers, teenagers will service dead drops.
AA:
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MKY: Mw in the stack’s data wars: Facebook Project Atlas
Why darknets looking so appealing rn? Why isn’t everyone wrapping their smartphones in noise cancelling faraday pouches? Just… why?!
CJW: Honestly this sort of thing is the only way I see a UBI being instituted by our technocratic overlords. $20 a month for signing over any semblance of online privacy? Sounds great!
MKY: yeah, that’s the whole thing… they need the precariat to function. Right up until the point where they don’t. I can’t wait to see algorithmically calculated UBI turned fully-automated genocide tool. “I was right,” he screamed, as the robots crushed his skull.
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AA: Behind Bars: After years of the UK banning music, attempts to censor drill break alarming new ground
Last week, the Lambeth Gangs Unit announced what they framed as a major victory in the fight against inner city violence. They handed out suspended custodial sentences to drill duo Skengdo x AM for the crime of performing “drill music that incited and encouraged violence against rival gang members and then posted it on social media.”
There is a long history in Britain of censorship in pop music. I spent enough time researching this as the case progressed to tell you the amount of tunes that have been legislated against by the establishment is 1) staggering, and 2) a great indicator of what people will still be vibing to a couple of decades later.
Two years. That’s how long you can theoretically spend in prison for performing music in the UK now. I can’t say I’m an expert in the UK’s Drill scene, but this story is terrifying as an example of heavy-handed state censorship and reactionary moral panic in our enlightened 21st century.
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CJW: A New Approach to Understanding How Machines Think (via Sentiers)
Interesting write-up and interview with a researcher who is working to make AI decisions interpretable by human users. In some ways this seems like a centaur approach to machine learning - in the example given, a doctor would be able to “work with” the AI to help alter its decision-making algorithms to do a better job than it would do on its own.
And here’s another AI link: even basic pricing algorithms learn to collude without being trained to, and even without communicating with one another.
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CJW: Apocalypse Is Now a Chronic Condition
[The Apocalypse] is a seductively easy vision of heroism and villainy. In the context of a crisis in which humanity itself is the threat to survival, the “good guys, bad guys” approach to things can seem at once too complicated and too simple.
This essay on the apocalypse in popular culture, touching on The Good Place (among other things) is a pretty good follow-up to the last issue of this newsletter. It would be easy to see all the parallels and come to the conclusion that the author, Megan Garber, is a reader here, but it’s more likely that she’s just tapped into the same pop-culture and apocalyptic channels that we’re plugged into.
MJW:
The recent pair of documentaries about the Fyre festival, an event that was a scam in the most classic sense, were generally interpreted not as new chapters in a tale as old as time, but rather as parables of a specifically millennial form of precarity. All our resources—attention, fame, money, the air itself—are exhaustible.
(I admit that I watched the Netflix Fyre documentary just to see a bunch of influencers go all Lord of the Flies, and my urge was rewarded manyfold.)
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MJW: This post, Revenge is a Hundred Dresses from Meg Elison, author of the incredible Road to Nowhere series. It’s an older post (April, 2018), less an article and more a memoir piece, but magnificent nonetheless. It explores poverty, bullying, and gender through the lens of dresses.
A dress is a small thing. A dress can be everything.
I can look back over my shoulder and see the rag-wearing kid I used to be, to the girl in “The Hundred Dresses” and the girl who had to endure its reading. I can reach across the closets of time and show them where we ended up. Who we became. What we get to wear. Bullies never go silent, but they do become irrelevant. I can remember every dress I’ve ever worn, but I can’t recall a single one of those kids’ names.
Dressing well is the best revenge.
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CJW: Behrouz Boochani’s literary prize cements his status as an Australian writer
For now, at least, Boochani is an “Australian writer” because Australia is morally implicated in what he wrote and how he wrote it.
Australia’s Most Important Writer Isn’t Allowed Into the Country (via Alan Vaarwerk)
Except after more than 20 years of mandatory detention, on- and offshore, and the speeches, plays, books, performances, artworks and protests arrayed against it, the situation has not budged. Art and artists can hardly be blamed for this state of affairs, but it is difficult to square crowd-pleasing writers’ festival speeches about how much writing matters with how little it has achieved so far.
[…]
“On its own, the award will do nothing, absolutely nothing,” Mr. Tofighian said. “But it has opened a crack. There is a collective movement, and we can use that crack to tear things apart. I think something can happen. Hope remains with this kind of event.” Perhaps. So far the Australian government has acknowledged Mr. Boochani’s win with only an embarrassed silence.
Marlee and I had the privilege of attending the VPLA ceremony (free beer, y’all!) and it was equal parts heart-warming and heart-breaking to see Boochani win. Heart-warming because the creative community banded together behind Behrouz, and heart-breaking because that doesn’t actually mean anything, and he’s still interred at our morally bankrupt (and unsurprisingly bipartisan) island prison for refugees.
MJW: From the second link:
The book is so unusual that Mr. Tofighian says it is a “non-genre,” and the author and translator have agreed on the umbrella term “horrific surrealism” to cover it.
‘Horrific surrealism’ is such an apt description, and one that covers well the way it felt to watch Boochani accept his award via Whatsapp. The feeling in the crowd at the VPLA was this weird mix of happiness at his win, and hopelessness that not a single of of us could do anything to cease Boochani’s suffering, and indeed the suffering of all refugees on Manus, Nauru and in other detention facilities across Australia.
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MJW: Corporate America Is Getting Ready to Monetize Climate Change
Of course.
MKY: create the disease, sell the cure.
-keeps reading-
Oh wow, they’re literally doing that:
For one thing, more people will get sick. “As the climate changes, there will be expanded markets for products for tropical and weather related diseases including waterborne illness,” wrote Merck & Co.
MKY: VIPER ROOM (2018)
Somewhere in the top 1000 of the infinite list of things I don’t understand about the world is the cult of personality around Susan Sarandon. So props to whichever cultist came up with this pitch and tricked me into watching… then enduring this movie.
“a veteran emergency room nurse secretly struggling to free her grown son, a journalist, from capture by a terrorist group. After running into roadblocks with government agencies, she discovers a clandestine community of journalists and advocates who might be able to help her.“
They totally bait’n’switched me with that last bit. But… there is one scene, that isn’t loving long shots on Sarandon having feels or treating hardcore millennials as a bunch of bumbling kids, and that’s when you met “the advocates”, via Edie Falco’s %1 af character, and find out why they’re happy to go to extralegal lengths to rescue captured investigative journalists:
Chris and I have committed to a 100,000 each to secure Andy’s release. In order to have the right to have an opinion, I need people like Andy and Leo over there, to inform me what is actually happening in the most dangerous places in the world.
If only they’d pulled on that thread more. Oh and actually shown us the Viper Club in detail (ya know, the thing they named the movie after :P). Don’t watch this movie… but the next time you hear about a journalist being accused of spying, think about plutocrats funding (fake) news outlets and lobby groups to control the mainstream conversation, whilst also quietly funding their own intelligence networks so that they know exactly what’s going on.
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MKY: The Wandering Earth (2019)
Finally a Cixin Liu story comes to the big screen! You may recall that name from my raving about his Dark Forest books. This film is based on an earlier story (that I haven’t read) and - amongst a plot that contains elements of almost every western apoc scifi (think: The Day After Tomorrow meets Armageddon meets Gravity meets Sunshine meets…) - you can find early explorations of ideas he’d expand on/further develop in The Three Body Problem onwards: specifically hibernation and the high crime of escaping a dying world, rather than staying to help save it.
Most interesting of all is how this all tied together with very non-Western ideas: the tension between individualism and collectivism, between family ties and the State (which here is a World Government), and the nature of sacrifice.
Go for a guy shooting a minigun at Jupiter, stay for the heartfelt speech from the little sister who rallies the world for the Great Planetary Rescue Mission [and there’s a whole essay waiting for someone who wants to compare that speech and its (deep) impact w/ Idris Elba’s “we are cancelling teh apocalypse” speech in PacRim.
AA: Weirdly, as a middle-aged-ish man who generally claims to hold superhero comics in disdain, I’ve been finding myself consuming a bit of Spider-Man related media recently. It started with watching the truly incredible Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse, a film deservedly cleaning up awards left, right and centre. It’s a brilliantly written thing, with a dense but light-footed plot, and it’s actually funny. And not just “funny for a kid’s film” funny - it’s the real deal. Combine this with killer borderline-experimental animation and a great score and you get one of the best movies of 2019, flat out.
Enjoying that flick prompted me to check out Dan Slott and Ryan Stegman’s Superior Spider-Man comic, which was recommended to you (and me) in these pages by our dear, departed friend John. (He’s not dead, btw, he just got too busy with his real job to play newsletters with us.)
I’ve also been playing the crap out of Insomniac’s new Spider-Man game on PS4, which has the most satisfying combat since Team Ninja’s Ninja Gaiden on X-Box back in 2004. Seriously, no other recent game has included such enjoyable action mechanics - Spider-Man make web-slinging around NYC a really exhilarating experience, and I’m yet to become sick of beating up all sorts of thugs and super-powered miscreants in a variety of ways.
After all this, you’d think I’d be all thwipped-out, right? WRONG!
Because the other day I came across these awesome bootleg Spidey comics by Hannah Blumenreich aka @hblumenreich on Twitter. These things are funny, sometimes poignant, drawn with extreme charisma, and available in a pay-what-you-want format on Gumroad here. I’ll include an example panel below, which features Spider-Man tediously explaining the plot of Cowboy Bebop. Read the whole thing and tell me you’re not charmed. Go on.
MKY: LOOK AT ME - Ep 1
Do you like Benjamin Law? Do you like finding out gloriously kray much of nature is? This is the first ep in a six-part collaboration between The Guardian and the conservation charity, Remember the Wild, hosted by Mr Law. It deliberately focuses on non-charismatic species.
Featuring male giant cuttlefish crossdressing to sneak past rivals and pass along their sperm pouch, and the heartbreaking tale of a woman who nearly joined a female giant cuttlefish on a one-way trip to their final resting place.
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MJW: A hopeless true crime addict, I just binged Glamour’s Broken Harts, a podcast about a crime that may confuse and sicken you as much as it did me. Jen and Sarah Hart, two white women, adopted six black children in quick succession and it all ended horrifically on a cliff in California. This podcast explores their lives and tragic deaths, as well as child abuse, social media and white saviour-ism.
CJW: Lucy’s been kind enough to agree to do something of an interview, to give us some insight into GHOST COP in general, and their new album ONE WEIRD TRICK in particular. That’s a bandcamp link, where you can stream the album for free, so go put it on and listen while you read on.
So, Lucy, Marlee and I have blathered in these pages about the process of writing our fiction, so what does the process of writing a GHOST COP song look like?
LS: So I confabbed with my partner Sean, the other half of GHOST COP, about his part of the process, and it turns out we’re both very conceptual and abstract in our processes. Sean will start sketching out a song on the drum machines and synths, sometimes with just a mood or sound in mind. We live together, so I’m usually semi-listening in to this process and adding occasional feedback–nos or yeses to certain sounds or moves. I can tell very early on if a song is “a GHOST COP song” or not, call it a gut reaction. When the key component parts are there, I come in to help shape structure, and write lyrics and melodies and any additional synth parts.
My process starts out with feeling the vibe, which requires a lot of visualization. I need to either be able to see myself performing it onstage, the idea for the music video, or some other cinematic abstraction. Sometimes movies more than music are my biggest sources of inspiration. For Lay Down, I had a treatment for the video before the lyrics were finished (a video inspired by Atomic Blonde, that we will never have the budget to make, unfortunately). Then comes the hardest part, which is getting my abstract and rational brains to play nice–turning that conceptual vibe information into a verse format and imposing the logic of the written word upon it. I hate this part, not gonna lie. Often I’ll use the cut-up method with words and phrases from the notebook I constantly carry to help bypass my internal editor. I am not at the point yet where we can jam out as a band and I can extemporize–that idea fills me with so much panic and dread that I can’t open my mouth.
And then the songs STILL aren’t done, because we pressure test them out live. Sometimes it takes months of playing songs for them to be finished. In fact, right now I have two to rewrite before a show in six days…
CJW: I have to admit that I’m regretting not jumping on the OWT Limited Edition release when I had the chance - with “40 page full color zine with original artwork, lyrics, and micro-fictions by Tim Maughan, and a USB drive with the lossless files, housed in an anti-static Faraday bag”. How did you come to work with Tim Maughan?
LS: As with most of my friends, Tim is someone I came to know through the internet, particularly Twitter. We both followed him for the obvious cyberpunk reasons, and then we met him a few years ago at Theorizing the Web, where he was on the same panel as another favorite internet person, Damien Wolven. Or actually “met” might not be the right term–I think I was too shy to say “hi.” As it turns out, Tim and Sean have many mutuals through the techno scene as well.
The idea of the zine came about when we were trying to figure out what kind of physical object we could sell along with the digital download. It’s hard to get people excited about buying digital music, at least in our experience. Unless they need the file for DJing, most people are content to stream now. A physical album is one solution, but being an indie and trying to do a small run vinyl pressing is expensive and time-consuming, and we had a meh experience doing cassettes for our first EP. So we decided on this object d’art type thing, and thought having a collaborator would not only bring in new audiences, but also help us expand our storytelling through images and words, to complement the music. It was Sean’s idea to ask Tim, which we were able to do at his going-away party (miss you, Tim & Sava!!). We gave him an open brief, and he came back with these little near-future sci-fi vignettes that work perfectly peppered throughout the book, like flicking through channels or blips in a transmission.
CJW: I really love that, and it definitely resonates with what me and Austin are doing with Oh Nothing Press - easy digital options but also cool physical artifacts. I was even thinking that the capsule after Creeper Magazine could come on a limited edition floppy disk, but maybe we should follow your lead and stick with a USB drive (no doubt it would be a million times easier than sourcing floppy disks and an external USB floppy drive). But enough about me…
What are your biggest inspirations, either as a band, or for you personally? I ask because you’ve got a varied sound across ONE WEIRD TRICK - cyberpunk synth would be the main sound that ties everything together, but you’ve got Lay Down which I could imagine as almost stadium pop, the cinematic sound of Enhance, and the album’s title track edges into dark goth/industrial territory.
LS: David Bowie is probably my biggest inspiration in life and art, although he may not come through in this album. But yes to all the things you mentioned–obviously other electronic bands from the 70s to the present day provide the most immediate inspiration, working with the same tools. I love the Downtown NYC sound of the late 70s/early 80s, where you had the tail-ends of both disco and punk mixing with art weirdos and early hip hop. Quiet Test is an homage to that sound. To throw together a laundry list of other influences on this album: Depeche Mode, John Carpenter, Peaches, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Gesaffelstein, Kas Product, Liquid Liquid, Light Asylum, Marie Davidson, Boy Harsher, Fever Ray, The Fall.
We have a lot of influences, and one worry when we were listening to the final mix of the album was if we’d put in too much. Our first EP had a simpler sound, and we were eager to spread our sonic wings a bit, and also wanted to avoid being pigeonholed as just another synthpop throwback. But still, I worry there’s too many sounds in there. On that note, the next record we’re working on is a stripped-back, 3ish-song EP of electro-bangers.
CJW: I think you’ve done a great job of having an album that feels cohesive while still being interesting and varied. Now, one for the heads - what tools do you and Sean use to create GC’s particular sound?
LS: The synths and drum machines by Elektron Music Machines (based out of Sweden) inform a lot of our sound. Add to those: Sequential Circuits Six Trak, TR-8, Korg MS2000, and a variety of vocal effects pedals–that’s our live rig (for now at least). On the album, we used additional gear in the studio, including: Prophet Rev 2, Moog Sub 37, Korg MS20, Roland JX-8P, Arp Quartet, SOMA Labs Lyra 8, Simmons SDS 1000, as well as a real piano and other random percussion instruments. Oh, and there’s some hidden electric guitar buried in a few songs, but don’t tell anyone…
CJW: How do you and Sean translate the GHOST COP sound for live shows?
LS: The GHOST COP sound actually starts as a live sound. There are only two songs on ONE WEIRD TRICK (Part 2 and Listen to the Sound) that have never been played live, just because they’re too odd to fit into a set. But we write only what we can play live, just the two of us, with our live rig mentioned above. Turning that into the full sound you hear on the album has a lot to do with what we can get our hands on in the studio for overdubs, and finding ways to add to the arrangement to fill the sound out. It’s a lot of experimentation.
With regards to both the process and our sound, I have to say though, that we’re hoping to change and evolve that in our coming projects. We’re both influenced by textural instrumentals, synth-heavy 70s movie soundtracks, and mid-century American minimal composers, so there may be a studio-only album of experimental soundscapes in the near future.
CJW: Okay, I need GHOST COP experimental soundscapes for my writing sessions.
A big thanks to Lucy for joining us for the interview. If you want more GHOST COP (of course you want more GHOST COP), Alasdair Stuart has written a fantastic review of ONE WEIRD TRICK, which you can find here, and everything else you need is right here: bandcamp | iTunes | Spotify | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | newsletter
MJW: The most recent episode of Catastropod is a sweet little interview with Alison Evans (guest in our last newsletter) on their new book Highway Bodies. Listen if you like zombies, queers or YA fiction, and please excuse the sound quality - I have no idea what happened.
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CJW: And that’s it for another issue. I’m currently neck-deep in novel edits and contemplating a change that will make the next week even tougher than the past three, but either way I’ll be handing in the revised manuscript on Friday, and getting a bit of a breather before the next round of edits starts. “Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life”. Bullshit. It’s still work, and it can still be tough, and if anything, you’re probably more likely to push yourself to burnout because you’re doing what you want to be doing, so look after yourself. The only difference is it’s work that’s worth it. Find your “work that’s worth it”, whatever that looks like for you.