itch.io

I appreciate it Rat King 🙏

Perfect for any noise fan's Last Will and Testament!

⚔️THE FIRST VIDEOTOME DOOM METAL ALBUM 🌋

Salty out here salting the earth. Quake and quail, mfers!

Have you ever played Snakes and Ladders? I mean REALLY PLAYED? The Ventroliquist and the Snake has set a new standard for Hermetic notation of what I can only assume was a perverse, one-person session of the common board game gone harrowingly wrong.

HE’S JUST A FUN GUY is the FU equivalent of a Y2K era cooking show. As with all media that comes under the intense scrutiny of Shem, however, it has been cruelly and directly INVERTED such that all that was banal, helpful, distracting, and low-stakes has become a SARDONIC, PAINFUL, NOISY, ALL-CONSUMING WAGER… And one that smiles back. Highly recommend to any neo-flagellants for clearing out distracting thoughts of joy or ease.

The Bone Scriptures read like a para-funerary papyral fragment dug up in the desert of the real, containing some vaguely unsettling implications with regards to the exact nature of its authors. Certainly this forms either a scrap, or worse, the WHOLE of some heretofore unknown Book of the Dead (™), certainly the grimmest on record now. For whereas most Books O the D focus on the optimum staged transition from body to bones, this text seems to imply a HOSTILITY between states, an actual screed against the flesh from the clean ones. The theodic implications are disturbing, to say the least.

The ever-relevant ROMONDE CONTRERAS brings us another platinum-wriggling “news???” report from wherever and however. A rather Ballardian Terminal Beach scenario in keeping with current events (or should we say, prefiguring them?) The black iron prison, cages within cages, hierarchies of ghouls… So many taxonomies of disrepair! And yet somehow there is as always with ROMONDE a kind of cosmic buddy-cop relief in just seeing the guy screaming in action, if only to the void.

FLOOD SACRIFICE strikes me as either a proposition for a scientific study, a guerilla marketing piece for a suppressed new wave album or Charlie’s Angels derivative action series, or maybe even an invigorating bit of Chaos Magic slapped onto an esoteric point of a tube station wall.

Finally, in a bit of very practical Home Advice (or even perhaps a “life hack”) Shem gives us a tried and true methodology for Banishing and Cursing the spectacular from our quotidian writhings. I for one can attest to the efficacy of this practice, not only hygienic but in fact a much needed form of PEST CONTROL against the most odious of invasive species. Well sprayed, Shem!

Cryptic and compelling little reports from some mysterious dateline service. It really works!

Thank you!!! Accurate to the point of diagnosis. You know I think in retrospect I probably did just that to myself this winter…

sincerely thank you (from my side of the mirror to yours!)

Just watched a deck I am working on halved in size after saving in this update. Incredible!

This works so well! The "noise" aspect of a mermaid is somehow really palpable... Maybe invoking the sirens of yore?

Thanks so much! This is a great jam  and am super pleased to participate 

Disembodied emanations will LITERALLY eat deep fried void smiles rather than go to therapy.

Thank you for sampling!

So glad you liked it!!

I love this fragmentary petrie-dish! It's like Edward Young's "Night-Thoughts" reincarnated into the zine dimension.

EXACTLY!!! 

This is incredible. What a convincing format to |situate| the dérive in a totally fresh way! Very impressive, really distills the high points of your "findings" while preserving the pace, mystery, threat of the adventure. On-foot and inter-subjective perspectives somehow carried-over really well. And above all, acknowledging the many layers of the experience (locus, atmosphere, occurence, association...) through the different simultaneous on-screen elements. Hats off!

Insurrection interruptus! Amazing

and violence loves you!

Thank you so much! I keep a thorough dream journal and was just waiting for something like nswengine to come along and give me an appropriate excuse to release them!

This engine is so evocative with just the right amount of arbitrary constraints that really make it a dreamlike experience.  

My first  instinct was to make use of this oneiric engine to present some dreams of my own, so I made this little zine: Violent Dream Games

I recognized the Cineforum poster on the pole right away! Those would survive into the dystopian GTAscape. Fantastic work.

Conspicuous auto-consumption with an eternal, almost omnscient paralytic style! Terrifying and charming 

The broken gif at the end of time and space 

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!

Ah, thanks so much for tuning in!

You can’t tell because of the invertebrates crawling all over my face but I swear I am blushing! But seriously thank you, it’s very gratifying to hear the “melding” worked, and from a multimedia wizard like yourself!

Evocative and fascinating, like dissociating while fossil hunting.

Ah, thank you! I appreciate it a lot. Do take a leech for the road.

This was really compelling! The conceit of a dream recording device that only outputs letters is, somehow, the most dream-like idea of them all. It definitely works.

Very much enjoyed the Osamu Sato-like symmetrical compu-weirdness and non-sequitur transitions. Very nicely done!

This was punchy and frightening at the same time. Like Waking up in a coffin...meltdown imminent, there’s no light but your mind’s eye (or "mind/screen" as it's called in here!) becomes a projection surface for distorted half-remembered subtitles you recall from existential arthouse films, games, etc. The result is a panicked concrete poem of slipping away into metallic nil. Chilling and effective!

The gingerbread gave it an extra kick for sure!

Ultimate mallardian outcome!

This is such a clever way to do a kind of journal or any kind of storytelling really. I love tying some kind of memory to different body parts. In this case it's extremely wholesome. (But also maybe just me reading into it but something pleasantly menacing about a gingerbread figure whose "eyes are for watching"...)

Thank you I am really happy the combo of the two worked for you! Was a bit of an experiment 

oh, thank you for the creeture feature!

metaphysical, ambiguous, achievable!

fantastic

Yes!! Just a few more decades and change to go!

the world’s first semi-vertebrate!

And now you have ape-sludge to use on the furniture!