- Tim Hecker – The Piano Drop
- L.D. 50/Luca Miti – Sten Guns in Aldershot
- Kate Bush – Breathing
- The Congos – Can’t Come In
- Camryn Rothenbury – Racing Across the Void
- Lift to Experience – Down Came the Angels
- Alexander Scourby – Jeremiah Chapter 6
- Three 6 Mafia – Fuckin Wit dis Click
- Cabaret Voltaire – Seconds Too Late
- Diamanda Galas – Burning Hell (Reprise)
- The Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra & Tra-La-La Band & Choir – Built then Burnt (Hurrah! Hurrah!)
- White Magic – Apocalypse
PLAYLIST
And Babylon shall become heaps, a dwelling place for dragons, an astonishment, and an hissing, without an inhabitant
Jeremiah 51:37
Visions of imminent doom come in many flavours: floods, flu pandemics, meteors, irradiated reptilia… On this tape alone we’ve Nevil Shute-ish paranoia from Cabaret Voltaire and Kate Bush (‘chips of plutonium / are twinkling in every lung’), prophecies of civil disobedience in Hampshire from L.D. 40 and Luca Miti and advice not to fuck with the Three 6 Mafia from the Three 6 Mafia (from their rollin’ with Lucifer period rather than their winnin’ Academy Awards period). Even the chipper-sounding Can’t Come In turns out to be based on a Biblical parable about being barred from salvation.
Also on a scriptural tip are White Magic, Diamanda Galas and the prophet Jeremiah, perhaps the bleakest of all the Old Testament seers – so bleak, in fact, that he was cited on the sleeve of a Godspeed You Black Emperor! record. Godspeed offshoot The Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra & Tra-La-La Band & Choir figure here with their own stab at prognostication, as do Lift to Experience, whose frontman Josh T. Pearson has just emerged, John the Baptist-like, from a decade in the cultural wilderness. Their idiosyncratic spin on the Judaeo-Christian myth system involves Texas being the real Zion (after all, as they point out, ‘the USA is the centre of JerUSAlem’). Round this out with some wordless but pretty nihilism from Tim Hecker and Camryn Rothenbury, and that’s your lot. Try not to let Babylon fall on you on the way out eh?
