Black Cat Music Factory

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Here you can find links to free music, videos and literature by Mike Dickson, Systems Theory, Greg Amov and the Ashley-Dickson Immersive Experience.

20th January 2025: Just skimming over a book retailer online has (accidentally) revealed to me that there must be upwards of 100 biographies of Jim Morrison.

How can you write so much about a single dullard? Do any of these books say anything 'new'? Who the hell is buying this?

Finally removed Threads, Facebook and Twatter from the column on the left of the page. I'll be replacing them in time with music sites, probably.

Also, trying not sound overly like Yoda, but I just sensed a huge shift in BlueSky yesterday, and not in any way for the better. Maybe I am used to everything on the Internet falling apart, but I think it's inevitable.

Good one from The Oatmeal:

19th January 2025: What the bent twats at Ali Express advertise:

What the bent twats at Ali Express actually sell it for:

Elvis on Ed Sullivan.

Stones in Gimme Shelter.

Beatles at Shea.

Pistols on Grundy.

And this. A thousand times, this. 'Thus confronted, rock and roll becomes irrelevant'

Dance, dance, dance to the radio.

Radio, live transmission

Listen to the silence, let it ring on

Eyes, dark grey lenses frightened of the sun

We would have a fine time living in the night

Left to blind destruction, waiting for our sight

We would go on as though nothing was wrong

Hide from these days, we remained all alone

Staying in the same place, just staying out the time

Touching from a distance, further all the time

Dance, dance, dance, dance, dance, to the radio

Well I could call out when the going gets tough

The things that we've learnt are no longer enough

No language, just sound, that's all we need know

To synchronize love to the beat of the show

And we could dance

Dance, dance, dance, dance, dance, to the radio

And here is another style of poetry entirely...

17th January 2025: Following on from yesterday, which follows on from reading John French's book again...

Sorry to its many followers, but I have never managed to get into this one, really. It seems to suffer from a combination of near-wilful obscurity, a lack of any real tunes, and (above all else) some terrible, muddy production. In the case of the latter issue, that has of course always been a problem here. Safe as Milk sounds pleasingly lo-fi at times, but Strictly Personal is wrecked by phasing, Trout Mask Replica sounds better but was recorded on unfamiliar equipment that ran at very high tape speeds and hence gave a brittle edge to it, and then the next two were apparently recorded at the bottom of the LaBrea Tar Pits. It's a pity as a lot of the good ideas were either lost or modded into obscurity.

Clear Spot was far better recorded, but was the first step on the painful journey into the first two Virgin albums, which were abominations. Arguably, Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller) was the first album that contained good material and which was well produced and recorded, and that was probably surpassed by the superior Doc at the Radar Station, which I think might actually be his best album of them all. (I will gloss over Ice Cream for Crow as it seems to be less of an album and more of a sweeping up of ideas and recordings that had been around for years)

The problem with this one, though, are the songs themselves. They are all pretty short, but they crowd around the centre stereo spot and are often obscured by Don's voice which - again - only has a vague sense of synchronisation with what else was going on and which occupies the same place. So what is missing?

When it came time for Don's vocal overdubs, Dick Kunc took every type of conceivable microphone and set it up in the studio in a big cluster. Don had been saying he wanted his voice recorded correctly 'for a change.' When Don asked what this was all about, Dick replied, 'Since I have no idea what kind of vocal sound you actually want, I am going to have you sing and I will give you samples of every conceivable sound you can achieve.' Then, you can decide which you like. I thought it was a great plan. Don did not seem to understand, and thought it was some kind of joke on him.

Dick appeared to be oblivious to this, but I could sense that Don was building more and more of a case against him. Finally, Kunc was fired, but in typical Don fashion. If I remember correctly, Artie and I were the ones who actually had to tell him. We both apologized and said that we had no idea what it was about. Dick was obviously hurt and shaken by the decision. I enjoyed having him at the house, and so did Helen. She said it was nice to be around someone like Dick, who got up whistling and read the paper in the morning.

I went to the Record Plant the next day to watch as Don overdubbed his voice. Unfortunately, he was never easy to work with in the studio. Phil Schier, however, was a more non-threatening type of guy and Don trusted him. However, it was apparent that Don was not prepared again and was winging it on several pieces. It wasn't a comfortable experience, and we left after a very short time.

'Beefheart - Through The Eyes of Magic', John French

Well, a second guitar for one thing. Harkleroad and Boston play a load of notes to compensate (or so it seems) but missing Jeff Cotton meant that a gap had to be filled, and whilst the addidtion of ex-Mothers man Art Tripp on marimba to play second 'guitar' is without doubt a USP of sorts, it doesn't have the same level of noise about it. The effect is to make the sound rather weedy by comparison, especially when the moments arrive that would have been a dual guitar break, only to feature a single guitar and some rather strange plink-plonking from the other side. It's an idea that might have stretched to a couple of songs, but Don was likely alienating so many people by that point that word had gotten around that joining his weird band would also mean joining his even weirder personality cult. (Elliot Ingber eventually doubled lots of Tripp's parts which actually solved on small problem and created a third: it beefed up the second sound, but introduced a level of simplicity, when a third instrument could have given a real sense of depth)

I don't imagine that the TV advert did them any favours down in Squaresville, USA either.

During this time, we rehearsed more often over at the Trout House. Elliot and Don also had brainstorming sessions in which basically Elliot gave Don ideas that he used almost verbatim. The most vivid memory I have is of Elliot describing in detail the promotional b&w film for Lick My Decals Off, Baby. This happened at Don's house while I was there.

'Beefheart - Through The Eyes of Magic', John French

Sure, take the ideas and suggestions made by others, but don't steal their credit...

Art Tripp: But the thing that never ceases to amaze me even to this day and I've told this a hundred times to other people, is I actually thought, and I think some of the others actually thought that this was a commercial effort. (laughter) I mean, Trout Mask was just too far out and now we're going to do Lick My Decals Off, Baby, which we expected to hear on AM radio. That to me just shows how goofy we all were.

John French: Well, I am going to say this and you may not believe me, but I never believed that stuff was going to be on AM radio.

AT: Yeah, well I didn't either, but going in to it...

'Beefheart - Through The Eyes of Magic', John French

A review at the time made the difference between this album and its predecessor around one being music and the other being songs. I'm not sure I can share that opinion. Trout sounds like it was recorded in white light in a studio, whereas Decals sounds like it was recorded under a big wet bridge.

Still really enjoying this record after all this time. I cannot really put my finger on the reason why, but it plays with a sort of confident swagger that a lot of their counterparts could only fake, and fairly badly at that.

Now working on an update for the Decent Sampler version of the Mellotron Mk V. One happy bit of news is that I have found a suitable font for the logo: Gacor Regular. Looks okay from here anyway.

16th January 2025: Love the music, but the guy was a fraud of the first water. His occasional forays into brilliance were at the hands of the bands he recruited. That was perhaps his greatest talent.

The Labour Party - as weak as slittery cat shit. The slightest voice of criticism from the Tories or Musk and their arses got into a collective collapse. What spineless non-entities we have to choose from.

Working on Flux now and then. There is some great stuff happening here...


	Flux 02
	Endless change. Eternal transformation. The slow movement between something and nothing and back again. Flux eternae.

12th January 2025: I don't know if I entirely agree with this, but it's a take on a new subject by someone who has been around for a while now:

So does the prospect of [AI] taking your music worry you at all?

Actually no, not at all. For very personal and complex reasons.

Can you summarise them?

Well, I'll try. I'm now at the stage in my life where I am essentally a hobbyist musician and am only making stuff up because I want to, rather than because I have to, to make a living. So if people want to help themselves to that material, then please feel free. If they want to go after the older stuff then they would have to contend with old school labels and publishers, so they are likely to transform it into something that is unrecognisable from the original anyway, so we will never notice it anyway.

Yes, but what about the original idea being yours? Does that not bother you that...?

Look, we have stood on the shoulders of others for centuries, maybe as long as art has been around. If we don't build on what has gone before then what we will have would be unrecognisable to the audience, so we steal and pinch and borrow an transform. It's been going on for years and years. Decades. Centuries.

But you don't claim it as being your own though, do you?

No, of course not. That's the Led Zeppelin problem. I assume they must have had some sort of meeting where they decided that no one had ever heard of Willie Dixon, or something. But at the same time you don't entirely confess either. You're just better off saying nothing at all. Plant and Page said nothing but their issue was that they didn't transform the material enough. Some of it sounds like a cover version, it's that close. So you are better off just saying nothing.

But would that not kill creativity?

Of course not. In the 70s home taping was going to kill music. Then it was file-sharing. Then it was AI. Music lived on past all of that stuff. I'll tell you what might kill music, though: streaming. Why bother to invest talent, money and effort into something that is going to pay you back a fraction of a cent for every play? Why bother? And that's not artists or the consumer stealing - that's the industry doing it to itself.

Why would they do that?

Oh that's easy. Thanks to the internet and cheap music production software you can make stuff up in your home and - assuming people want it - can sell it direct via Bandcamp or whoever. Who needs labels?

To fund stuff being made?

Through what? Advances you have to pay back to them? And what else? They insist on you handing over copyright so they can republish it. They insist on you financing everything out of your own sales so you can sell tee shirts at a stall, and people wonder why you have to charge $40 for a screen printed tee? These people are the worst kind of parasites you can imagine. What they do is easily replaced by another model which is now available to everyone [who] wants to use it. The thing is that they are now fully aware that this is the case, so they seem to be trying to scuttle the fleet before the torpedos get them.

Hasn't the death of the traditional record label been reported before, though? I seem to remember similar arguments back in the 1990s about this.

Sure. But now it's actually happening. For too long they convinced us that doing without them was unthinkable, and that people would have to go to them voluntarily to further their intentions. Now it has all changed.

So...how come they are all still in business?

Erm...

The bit about Led Zeppelin seems to have ben true, at least in terms of Whole Lotta Love, as Robert Plant explained:

Page's riff was Page's riff. It was there before anything else. I just thought, 'well, what am I going to sing?' That was it, a nick. Now happily paid for. At the time, there was a lot of conversation about what to do. It was decided that it was so far away in time and influence that... well, you only get caught when you're successful. That's the game.

At last. Immortalised in Private Eye:

From the Independent:

A singularly depressing read if ever there was one. I know that nothing about Beefheart is all it seems, but to learn just how bad it was through the words of someone who dwelt within the Trout House is just staggering. I still think that TMR is one of the best albums ever made, but that seems to be in spite of Don Van Vliet rather than as a consequence of him. Some of the reading is genuinely harrowing, and gives a phenomenal insight into life beyond the music and deeper into the heart of what living within a cult must really be like and why it's so hard for some people to see a way out of it.

"I do recall the most obvious case of Don being out-of-sync, as Frank mentioned above. It was on Pachuco Cadaver. Don wanted to overdub some horn on the end of the piece. So, he assembled his soprano and took it out into the studio. Not wearing earphones, he became totally out-of-sync with the track. He came back through the door and asked 'how was that?' I was surprised at his asking. My thought was that it sounded like crap. However, two things were going on in my mind. Perhaps he intentionally wanted it out-of-sync.

"It wasn't me playing, so who cares?"

'Beefheart - Through The Eyes of Magic', John French

11th January 2025: Although some see it as a hope for the future, I can see shades of Twitter already appearing quite strongly in Blue Sky. It's ridden by 'sexbots' already, and this morning I'm getting Ponzi scheme notifications to increase the value of some worthless crypto. So far it is missing the egregious ads and the right-wing bots, but so did Twitter once. I have also seen that "As of January 2025, the social media company Bluesky is valued at around $700 million. This valuation is the result of a new funding round led by Bain Capital Ventures." (As reported on Cosmico)

If it trades then shareholders will be gagging for someone like Musk to jump onto it. I think this might be humanity finding its low water level, somehow.

Imagine if Harry Nilsson hadn't sold 9 Curzon Place to Pete Townshend. Who would it have claimed next?

Weirdly, the Rolling Stone article of August 29, 1974 repeats the story told so often about Cass Elliot:

Death was ruled accidental at a coroner's hearing the next day; the post-mortem showed that she died as a result of choking on a sandwich while in bed and from inhaling her own vomit. She had complained to friends recently of frequent vomiting, possibly the result of dieting.

It transpires that this was actually based on a lazy assessment of the doctor who attended the scene and who made the assessment based on there being ham opened in the apartment. So how did it get as far as a PM? An odd story to repeat.

Perhaps unsurprisingly the death of Keith Moon holds fewer surprises.

It was later revealed Moon had 26 undissolved Heminevrin tablets still in his stomach when he died.

Kinell

And this one is not so far from the truth...

10th January 2025: Just when you think the world could not get any more barking mad, this comes up:

Former Prime Minister Liz Truss has sent a legal "cease and desist" letter to Sir Keir Starmer demanding he stop saying she "crashed the economy".

Her lawyers argue the claim made repeatedly by Sir Keir is "false and defamatory", and harmed her politically in the run-up to losing her South West Norfolk seat in the general election.

Truss was the UK's shortest-serving PM, forced to resign after just 49 days in office when borrowing costs soared in the aftermath of her government's mini-budget.

The prime minister's spokesman suggested Truss should also write to "millions of people up and down the country" who, he said, had seen their mortgage bills pushed up by her economic policies.

Well Liz, if you didn't crash the economy, then who did? Your chancellor. Your choice. You were PM. You take responsibility for it. You endorsed it. And what an insult to the people of South West Norfolk. Are you saying they were blinded by what people were saying about her, and were incapable of making up their own minds as to whether you're a useless extrusion of used cat food, hastily stuffed into a twin set with a face drawn on it?

There. Done it. I look forward to being sued or something. Bring it on. Incidentally, that photograph of her above is so telling. Those eyes. Nothing functioning behind them except for ambition. No ability whatsoever to assess her own suitability for the job. Just like Rishi. Just like Boris. Just like Theresa. Just like David.

Should we drag this one out again? Why not? Here we have Crown Exhibit A where the defendant is cosplaying a Prime Minister. She knows what she wants. She even might know how to get it. But once she is there, she knows that we know she doesn't have the slightest idea about what the job entails. Just like Rishi. Just like Boris. Just like Theresa. Just like David.

We've now reached some sort of apex point, where it's just enough to want to be a Prime Minister and even play dressing up as one. The fact that you have no actual abilities is no hinderance to ambition. Just go for it. The country deserves you and you deserve it.

And if it all goes wrong? Then it has nothing to do with you.. You're the chosen one. Anointed.

I hope these people never get a sniff of any sort of power again. I wouldn't even have them as chair of the local neighbourhood watch. And let's not forget, Liz Truss is the same rampaging twat who wrote this:

2nd January 2025: Damned cold, damned wet and damned overcast which is frustrating when the Aurora Borealis is supposed to be at large this evening. Not only is it overcast, but everywhere is flooded with light pollution in the city, so even if you could see it you probably wouldn't...