Another merciless raid on the psyche from Shem! This January punishment is biomorphic, kinetic, and somehow exceedingly fashionable, in its own way.
Are the “hidden horns” a negative result, artefacts of a failed ritual? They have the imagistic sense of an alchemical procedure, but I have never yet heard of this bleak, negative alchemy, an attempt on Shem’s part to push the glorious of the philosopher’s stone AWAY, it seems, to stuff it deeper into the void, allergic…
This leads us to the equally cryptic poser-proclamation that is NIGHT FLESH. There is something inspiring about this unnameable thing. It’s not quite a declaration, not quite a news item, the title crushes out the content, and vague interplanetary motifs hint at a wider, galactic sense of night. Shem is leading the way towards a TYPOGRAPHIC OCCULTISM that throttles the imagination, and rightly so.
And then a snapshot from a conquistador’s slideshow; the vision from a peak in Darien of the new world, and the short-circuit, an accelerationist time-saver in the form of an IMMEDIATE AND SYNAPSE-SMOTHERING RAGE towards its ugly inhabitants. A “yes we found it, now it must be destroyed!”--delenda est. One gets equal implications of an explorer as a scientist, looking in rage through the microscope at some eldritch implication of a sample tissue. Breathaking!
The ROMONDIAD likewise continues with its background light of pseudinspiration. I am particularly taken with sort of negative travelogue aspect of the first section, the “narrow routes that change”, which somehow feels both like a cozy trip and a harrowing psychological rebuttal from an ancient colleague. Or perhaps it is less reportage, and more a kind of deranged almanac? Locals act out local dramas, dowsers and fae line detectors, hobbyists of the cruelly stupid. It is soothing in its own way, this charming tour of deranged lay lines. We find at ASCOT an “Epigraphy of dead souls”--a byword for the entire FU project, don’t you think?
But perhaps it was medical tourism after all, because we are thereafter immediately subjected to the biodrama of the INDIVISIBLE OPERATION. This is a stunning bit of “inner cinema” (yes, it’s literally inside you, read the intertitles!) We are simple advised of the fact that something is “making adjustments” to our constitutions alongside footage of operational joy. It’s only a few coerced minutes but I would happily subject myself to this in a FEATURE LENGTH format, if Shem ever went there.
As a fitting coda, we get the LETTERS TO THE END OF THE WORLD! As if the (t)issue itself was ripping its own body apart and hurling it at a specific enemy, or at entropy in general. I can only interpret them as a kind of EPISTOLARY GENERALIZED DEFIANCE.
Spare us, Shem!