Woah…stumbled across this one on Bandcamp. Up for sale for 25 cents! It’s called Space Load. They also got songs called Wife Meat, Eyeball Potion and Escaped Goat! From the first picture I saw (left) it looked like somebody’s Dad forced his family into playing in his garage space rock band. Type of stuff I used to see at the Strange Daze fest in Ohio. That turned out to be way off. Nones is just way out! Drop the quarter into the cup, buy the ticket, and take the ride. Nones? Get into it.
Created just a scant four years after the legendary, world-renowned Japanese cyberfreak classick “Tetsuo (The Iron Man)”, the manic-panic industrial horror of Pinocchio 964 owes plenty to its berserk tinfoil terrorism predecessor, from the grinding soundtrack to the crazed roboguts creatures. But while Tetsuo ultimately played out like a faster-louder punk rock parody of Monster Island super-rumbles, Pin964 is more of a supersized vomit-porn loop with an art-brat twist.
I have read about 665 plot synopses of this film, and they all seem like doper babbling to me. This one probably will, too. See, Pinocchio is a sex robot, owned by some awful, Phyllis Diller-ish shrew, who throws his boner-less ass on the street when he fails to perform up to the standards set by her other toy, a pneumatic, insatiable porno-nurse cyborg-ette. So ol’ Pin’s wandering the streets of Tokyo in his PJ’s, dazed and confused, and drooling like a mental patient. With his Ed Grimley shock of forehead hair and his ghost-white pallor, he looks like a lost cartoon ghoul. The residents of this near-future megalopolis are so disaffected, they just let this mess of a semi-human stagger around the sidewalk, until he finally collapses into the arms of a weirdo chick named Himiko, who lives in the tunnels under the city. She drags him into her hissing underworld, where they almost connect, in a queasy, misfit-love kinda way. Their schizoid bliss is soon shattered, however, when he starts imploding like the Incredible Melting Man, and she suddenly develops this psychotic meanstreak, yoking her pal with an iron collar and a thick rope of chain attached to a giant rock.
Um, I forget if it’s before or after that part, but they fuck at one point, too.
Somewhere amidst all the puking and pissing and cumming and screaming, Pin figures out exactly what sort of hell he has been damned to, and decides to seek either salvation or revenge – whichever comes first – from the maniac that invented him. Cue the gore gags, and ready the credits.
I’m making this film sound more linear than it actually is. Really, Pinocchio 964 plays like a deftly edited performance art piece, something acid-eating German hippies mighta concocted with a big pile of freshly slaughtered meat and a broken piano in 1967. If you reach far enough, you just might grasp onto a wispy metaphor, some suitably Cronenberg-ian nonsense about mind-body transformation and rebirth through self-mutilation and the death of the ego, but if you enjoy thinking that hard, then I suggest you read an actual book or something, because Pinocchio 964 is just a big messy goof. The melting, molting sexdroid stuff is utterly repellent, the herky-jerky high-velocity freakout scenes drag themselves out forever, and the really creepy stuff is the same creepy stuff as in The Begotten, and you tell me – you wanna see thatdisgusting thing again?
Hell, maybe you do. Pin 964 has enough shocking imagery to keep the splatter kids happy, and it fakes allegorical depth enough to swindle a few intellectuals, too. You just can’t dance to it, and you probably won’t be able to muster up a decent erection for a couple days afterwards. But if you wanna suffer for art, you’ve definitely come to the right place.
Sure, you know what's cool. But do you know what's really fuckin' FAR OUT? That's where Advanced Demonology comes in. Every week, (K)en and (S)wilson trudge through the murky waters of the pop culture hellscape, dredging up sparkly morsels of wonder. These are the results of our latest foray into the world of the weird, our wildest, wiggest-out picks of the week. Call it our 13 Point Program.
13. Herbert Mullin. A california crazed serial killer from the early seventies who murdered people as a sacrifice to the gods to stop an earth quake. Here's the thing. It might have worked. (S)
12. Raymond Guiot - this motherfucker can jam on the fuckin' flute like no other fuckin' flautist around. MAXIMUM FLUTE JAMS MOTHERFUCKER. (K)
11. Zolar-X: “Timeless”. A collection of outer spaced bizzaro rock, from the nineteen seventies Los Angles, Glam damaged proto-punks. (S)
10. Proto-cosplay. Do you know how hard it was to find girls like this in 1980? (K)
9. Murder By Contract - Ben Casey (Vince Edwards) as a psychopathic hitman. Great guitar score! Big inspiration on Scorsese for Taxi Driver. (S)
8. Cast King recorded his first album in 2005. He died in 2007. He was 81 at the time. His album, Saw Mill Man, was recorded in his shack in the wilds of Alabama. It's full of songs about women and whiskey and regret, belted out in a fearsome croak. (K)
6. Resurrect Dead: new documentary about the Toynbee Tiles, hundreds of weird, tar-based tiles inexplicably embedded in highways and sidewalks from Boston to Brazil. Every tile contains the same message: “Toynbee Idea in movie 2011 Resurrect Dead on Planet Jupiter”. Who created them? And for what purpose?
A trio of cellar-dwelling amateur detectives meet up and go on the hunt for the elusive tiler. Startling twists and turns abound. More sad than creepy, really, but still plenty creepy nonetheless. (K)
5. "Better than Something" - Jay Reatard documentary playing in theaters everywhere. (S)
4. Alkana - Freedom Lady - I thinkthis dudebasically wrote the blueprint for glam metal in the late 70's and then who knows what happened. It fell into the wrong hands, clearly, and they botched it terribly.
3. Creepy Fingers "Pink Elephant" Effects Pedal- A reproduction of the legendary ampeg scrambler made by the bass player from Fu Manchu. Now the "fifth member" ofSwilson. (S)
2. Lee Hazelwood & Ann Margret – The Cowboy and the Lady
Everybody knows Nancy and Lee, but ol' Haze teamed up with another one of Elvis's vivacious leading ladies, too. In 1969 Lee and Kitten-with-a-whip Ann Margret released the frequently amazing Cowboy and the Lady, full of purr n' holler and goodtimes for all. (K)
The new Bevis Frond record is an awesome endeavor. For those of you not hip to Nick Saloman and company this is a great entry point. The entire Bevis Frond catalog dating back to 1986 is now available on band camp. Lucifer the lord of light!!
The Swilson band needs another member in the live Act. I would settle for a keyboard player who can double on electric guitar, or I would be into some wild haired, leather wristband wearing, acidhead who wants to Larry Wallis and Wayne Kramer himself all over the proverbial Polyester Shirt Polyester Pants. They gotta be the right fit for a band. They gotta share the Swilson blurred vision. I just assume that the more we play out the right man will come along. Chuck Berry on acid.
Sometimes for fun I comb the criagslist “musicians” page. It’s usually a really depressing task. With guys who want play in bands that are “serious” and “pro”. Sometimes you come across an incredible manifesto that someone writes about being in a band. Like if Carl Marx had written a book on the philosophy of what a band should be. I thought of copying some of them into a word document and putting them up on the blog because they can be amazingly entertaining.
Rarely in my search on criagslist do I find a great record? Spencer Jacob moved down here to Los Angeles from San Francisco and he’s looking for some cats to play with. He included in the ad a link to a record he made called Never Home. It's an authentic slab of loner, downer folk, that would fit into any Advanced Demonology podcast very nicely. The songs are simple and to the point. Mostly acoustic with just the right amount of electric freek out when needed. I doubt Spencer Jacob is the Larry Wallis I’ve been looking for, He has a will all is own worth checking out.
