It is night time as I write this; very early in the morning in the UK. I also have a very young kitten sleeping next to me. The song above is one to be played late at night at very loud volumes. Something that in my present situation I cannot do. However, I do recommend you do this. Especially if it will cause structural damage to your home.
I first heard of Zola Jesus via the omnipresent blogging of Warren Ellis. He’s written many kind things about her music, so when her latest EP was released last month I finally bit, and gave her a proper listen. While I suspect that the audience for Ectoplasmosis and Warren Ellis’ writing overlap quite a lot; I still think your attention needs to be brought to her music if you’ve managed to miss her somehow.
This track, “Night”, is the one that sold me on her. According to my Last.fm stats this is the track of hers I’ve played most in the month or so since I bought her EP “Stridulum”. On her Last.fm page there are a couple of free mp3s for you to download.
Having taken a short sabbatical from the tubes it is good to rediscover them. Often I have found that the internet becomes something of a perverse, personal litmus test for me, a private game of one-upmanship between me and myself comprising a back and forth of “You think that’s twisted, take a look at this!”; and while this game is fine for a while it gets old quickly. Before long your mind becomes one big callous, a mass of dead, scarred neurons impervious to all but the most horrid of visions, and by the time you realize what the sparse growth on your face signifies it’s too late and you’ve become Warren Ellis. At which point what else is there, really?
It was nice then to find this Flickr group whose sole purpose is to bring the world of Gary Larson to life. The Far Side was one of my favorite comic strips as a child. His surreal world was ceaselessly amusing to my young mind and, simultaneously, there was something about “getting” a Larson strip that made me feel wise beyond my years. It also ignited in me a passion for writing small, absurd vignettes for photographs, a device I often employ to help myself write and which I have subjected you poor Ectomites to on various occasions. All in all, a fitting way to come back.
The esteemed photographer Vanessa Yaremchuk puts on the ritz, just for me, in Whitechapel’s Self Portrait Image Thread, a rogue’s gallery of talent, piss, and vinegar.
In sheer defiance of the World Wide Web Consortium's will, Ectomo was designed using a non-web-standard font. Luckily, it is included in the excellent font pack released by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, which can be freely downloaded in Mac and PC formats here. Ectomo should still look fine without it, though.
