The street names are familiar, and remind you of childhood: Boardwalk, Park Place, Marvin Gardens. Long ago, proud businessmen arrived to this city with their carts, top hats and steam engines, looking to open lavish hotels and build their fortunes. You have other plans. Instead of building houses, your objective is to destroy them.

You’re one of the Great Old Ones – beings of ancient and eldritch power. Cosmic forces have held you at bay for untold aeons, but at last the stars are right and your maniacal cult has called you to this benighted place. Once you regain your full powers, you will unleash your Doom upon the world!

Good morning. Pretend for a moment that this is not, in fact, the Spring of 2012, but rather the Spring of 1982, now thirty years past. We’re in England. New Romance is budding. Rocky Horror is a’rockin’. The likes of Gary Numan, Spandau Ballet, and Klaus Nomi rule subterranean radio.

Under the banner of SHOCK, two young London lads with very excellent bone structure and pop ‘n’ lock skillz named Tim Dry (who would one day become Tik from the robotic mime duo Tik & Tok) and Richard James Burgess (who would go on to produce all manner of sophisti-pop) have joined forces with two young London lasses with very large hair and dovelike coos called Carole Caplin (who shall one day become far better known as the tormented fitness and fashion consultant to Tony and Cherie Blair) and Barbie Wilde (who is soon to be immortalized in celluloid as the creepyhot female Cenobite from Hellraiser II).

And they make this splendiferousness happen:

Via Brian Moroz, with giggly thanks.

If you enjoyed this darque ‘n’ tender morsel of obscure nostalgia, you may also appreciate:

• Teen Goth
• Poésie Noire: “Tragedy”
• The MegaMen
• Bristol Punks
• Tim Curry in “The Worst Witch”
• “Die Sonne”
• Crowleymas, LOLeymas
• Darque Dungeon
• Haysi Fantayzee
• Nosferatu Vogueing: A Symphony of Horror
• Going to MTV Hell With Nick and Blixa
• Lene Lovich

Guys, I’m gonna be real with you.

I may have just peed a little in my witchy-pooh panties.

And that’s all I have say about this:

The sprawling, quicksilver lyrics to this bilaterally symmetrical magnum LULZ opus have been posted below, because they’re… well, just read ‘em. And weep bitter crimson diamonds. Ov Darqueness.

[via DJ Dead Billy / Dangerous Minds]

Edmund Welles, 2010 press photo. Aaron Novik, Jeff Anderle, Jon Russell, and creative mastermind Cornelius Boots in the foreground.

Confession: I’ve been meaning to write a feverish and swooning rave-up of Oakland-based musician Cornelius Boots‘ absurdly beautiful and strange and intelligent and mischievous and sincere and meditative and heavy-as-fuck bass clarinet chamber music group, Edmund Welles*, for years now.

It certainly isn’t for lack of reverence for Boots or his compositions that I’ve lagged.  When suffering from blogger’s block, my editorial purview tends to be “when in doubt, crap it out.” But occasionally, there are those subjects that you can’t just casually hork up. You want so badly to do them every justice– to elevate and praise them to the highest and most lofty of misty, Middle Earth-worthy mountaintops. Boots’ ouvre definitely lives in that non-horkable category. Well, then! Having unburdened my guilty conscience…

Edmund Welles. 

Yes, Cornelius Boots and friends make music that I want throw a parade for. Or, alternately, throw my frilly undergarments at. While his group Edmund Welles definitely is not everyone’s cup of tea, it’s 100% my cuppa, and hopefully, it’ll resonate with Coilhouse readers who also love waaaay-off-the-beaten-path-no-srsly-bring-your-machete-cos-we-be-bushwhackin’ music.

Via their CD Baby page:

Edmund Welles [...] has the distinction of being the world’s only original, composing band of four bass clarinetists, they invent and perform heavy chamber music. The bass clarinet has a five octave range and a huge span of tonal, melodic, and rhythmic capabilities.

Drawing virtuosic precision from the classical realm; innovation and texture from jazz; and power, rhythm and overall perspective from rock and metal, the quartet’s sound is characterized by a thickness of tone, a density of texture, absolute rhythmic precision, and the extreme use of dynamic contrasts: a dense, pulsing sound capable of expressing and reflecting the full range of human emotions.

They ain’t foolin’. It’s a massive, meticulously structured bass reed sound like nothing else you’ve heard. (Parallels have been drawn between John Zorn’s more recent works and Edmund Welles, for sure, but Boots’ steez feels simultaneously more West Coast and Far East-steeped.) Weirdest Band in the World‘s assessment is pretty spot-on as well: “The bass clarinet is an inherently weird instrument. Put four of them together in one group, and it sounds like a chorus of demon cats in heat fighting over a chicken bone. A demon chorus whose eerie caterwaulings just happen to occasionally assemble themselves into passages from Pixies and Nirvana songs.”

In 2005, they put out Agrippa’s 3 Books, which offers up original compositions by Boots that reflect his abiding interest in the occult and his talent for interpreting uber heavy spine-crunching metal. (Hilariously, Boots calls this stuff an attempt to create “Muzak for conspiracy theorists.” ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED!) Additionally, there are Sepultura and Spinal Tap covers. Not to mention the most bewilderingly esoteric and brilliant liner notes you’ll find north of a Trey Spruance solo project. (Buy the goddamn CD. Seriously. No, seriously. Totally worth it.)

Edmund Welles’ second album is called Tooth & Claw, and it’s comprised predominantly of original composition that are as bizarre and heavy as anything Boots has ever written, but with more nuanced elements of avant jazz and modern classical woven into the dense sonority.

Yves Rossy, a latter-day Swiss Air Force fighter pilot and current full-time daredevil, has been working on this jet-powered carbon-fiber design with an engineering team for well over a decade. The most resent incarnation, seen above as the Jetman soars high above the Alps of his homeland, can “only” fly for ten minutes at a time. Pffftwhatever. This stuff is still nothing short of MEGA AWESOMEBALLS. (Incredible high-def footage, too.)

Wheeeeeeeee!

[via The Daily What]

Long white clouds in the sky above the southernmost tip of the North Island. Photo by Mer.

Greetings, comrades, from the Motu-Kairangi valley of Aotearoa. New Zealand’s north island is spectacularly sun-drenched at the moment– an unseasonably serene autumnal week, by Land o’ Long White Cloud standards.

Perfect timing, too, ‘cos Nadya‘s here! Squee! We’ve been talkin’ some SRZ COILBIZ (“Brainstorrrrm! Maaaaagic!”) and have decided to give ourselves a few days off from blogging and cat-herding to take a much-needed Coil-free road trip together. Coilhouse.net will probably be a bit sleepy for the next leetle beet. Consider this post our GONE FISHIN’ sign.

Speaking of fish, check out this jaw-dropping photograph of an immaculately preserved, exquisitely beautiful/fantastical Mola Mola skeleton:

A specimen housed in the Naturhistorisches Museum Wien, Austria. (Via Paul Komoda.)

Oh, our marvelous world. It is full of such fantastical things, both natural and unnatural. We hope you’re all reveling in the weirdness as much as we are right now!

Love,

Mer & Nadya

Robotic Lion & Warrior illustration by Greg Broadmore for Jess Nevins’ article in Issue 05.

Those of you who own Coilhouse Magazine Issues 03 and 05 will remember Jess Nevins’ pieces on Russian and Chinese pulp. You may have also seen Jess’ Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana, his many comic book annotations, or his writing on IO9. As a librarian and author, Jess has an uncanny skill for unearthing rare gems from the realms of pulp and sci-fi, such as the world’s first lesbian science fiction novel (published in 1906), the first cyborg horror story (“The Steam Arm,” 1834), and steampunk poetry from 1867. Jess Nevins can give you the entire history of mad scientists in the industrial age, provide a thorough overview of genderbending in pulps, and hypothesize whether Cthulhu appears on a 300-year-old gravestone. In short, Jess Nevins is a kind of biblio-archaeologist, discovering and preserving beautiful relics from fictional ages past.

His latest endeavor focuses on superheroes. Specifically, superheroes from comics’ Golden Age, which lasted from 1935 to 1949. The project is called The Encyclopedia of Golden Age Superheroes, and Jess is currently raising funds on Kickstarter to produce a book and a website (which will include a free download of the book’s manuscript) to catalogue 2000+ superheroes: everything from “floating eyeballs and centaurs” to “robot brains and super rabbits.” Jess needs to travel to Michigan State University in East Lansing to study up on all of these wondrous things, and estimates that it will take two weeks to get the research done. The money raised by Kickstart will go towards subsidizing Jess’ travel and building the site. The project may have hit its modest funding goal, but believe us, the bare minimum is never really enough. Plus, Kickstarter projects that raise substantially more than the required amount often have a way of evolving and deepening into even bigger, more beautiful work (for instance, Molly Crabapple’s Week in Hell or R. Stevens’ Diesel Sweeties e-book).

In celebration of Jess’ ambitious new project, we are releasing a full, free PDF of his article from Issue 05, titled “Sherlock Holmes vs. The Fox Woman: A Brief Tour of Chinese Pulp”. Lushly-illustrated by Greg Broadmore and Paul Tobin, the article provides a sweeping overview of Chinese Pulp from, from moon colonies to pirate queens. Enjoy!

Thank you, kid-named-Jav-dressed-like-Gandalf-and-doin’-the-mongo-longboard-thing-for-the-sake-of-a-very-silly-joke. Thank you.

Last night at the DNA Lounge in San Francisco, the wonderful Hubba Hubba Revue unveiled (hurr!) Jim Sweeney, Lara Miranda and friends’ How to Dance Goth– the first volume in HH’s Educational Film Dance Instruction series:

Via TouchTheSun.

Many of you are, no doubt, already familiar with these darque dance styles… or various iterations/amalgams thereof. (For instance, those “Cobweb”/”Cappuccino” moves are quite similar to an ancient SoCal spookypants maneuver known as “Pick a Penny Up, Put it Over There”. And “Step Over Your Dead Friend” is a kissin’ cousin to the time-honored “I Have Shit Myself and I’m In Distress” dance often seen in Atlanta, GA goth clubs shortly after a new shipment of ketamine has arrived in town.)

Well done, Hubba Hubba batlings! We await your cyber-industrial tutorial with bated breath.

Directed by Jimmy Marble and written by Marble and Doug Sacrison (who also wrote the original one-act play), Red Moon chronicles the sad, tortured life of famed submarine captain Alexei Ovechkin: hero of the former Soviet Union, and werewolf.

What follows is 15 minutes of amazing, cardboard and plywood sets, fantastic facial hair, werewolf suits, and terrible, terrible Russian accents. I loved every single second of it.