BETWEEN THE GROOVE: EPISODE 22
“…Now I gotta little leeway on freeways
Zen Buddhist approach to these DJ’s…
Murs – Fools Gold.
Fuckup: And we’re back! Focused, sharp, ready for Chapter Twenty-Two: ‘Fools Juggle’. Let’s keep it tight, Hal. Starts with some Murs – “Zen Buddhist approach to these DJ’s…” Setting the scene.
Hal: Right. Amsterdam sunlight like “marmalade dribbling,” but cold enough to freeze your bits to a lamppost! After months evolving their methods, the TRB “fools” are back at the decks, calling all “graphical wizards.”
Fuckup: And what are these fools juggling? They’re recording Burroughs cut-ups, actively invoking his “crazy Nova Mob” like beaming them down with the Star Trek transporter! Plush even admits it’s “Pretentious as fuck,” which is brilliant self-awareness!
Hal: He’s following the creative “spirit” like a “horny dog’s owner” – great image – back to something called “Shennanigums Wave.” Sounds like a Finnegans Wake riff, described as a conspiracy of prose and poetry washing over England, America, and Holland. Apparently, it was previously published as “World Piss: The Spore Of The Words”!
Fuckup: World Piss! Love it! He calls it a “rollercoaster ride without a safety bar.” So, they’re recycling and reworking older, maybe more chaotic material into this new structure. Plush then checks his notes for the Joe Cooley Scratch definition again – drilling those techniques.
Hal: This opening throws us right back into their method – invoking literary spirits (Burroughs), using cut-ups, acknowledging the pretension, reworking past chaotic material (“World Piss”) into a new form (“Shennanigums Wave”), all while grounding it in specific DJ technique (Joe Cooley). The ‘Fools’ are juggling some serious cultural and technical elements here!
Fuckup: Okay, Hal, let’s wrestle with this final chunk of Chapter Twenty-Two, ‘Fools Juggle’. The user wants us to go deep, and this looks denser than a black hole made of fruitcake!
Hal: No kidding! It kicks off with this description of The Fool card – Aleph, the Ox, meeting a “DJ Star Man with horns,” holding a pentagram of fire, dove and butterfly caduceus flying about… It’s mashing up Tarot, Hebrew letters, DJ culture, occult symbols like nobody’s business!
Fuckup: Then it launches into this manic stream-of-consciousness vision of reality itself being “runny,” full of Remembrandt in the paint, electric sprites, elf-chemists, masked insect hordes blowing yellow serum in your cornflakes, fungus popping up like periscopes… Gas and vapour everywhere carrying every word and image, swirling round shopping malls, trying to zap shoppers awake and redirect them to the nearest forest! “Live, live, live you mouth-breeders, come on home!”
Hal: It’s a vision of total information saturation, maybe the ‘infosphere’ becoming sentient and trying to wake humanity up from consumerism? While Plush is having this vision, a housefly lands on his hand. He takes it as a good omen, stops everything, and studies the fly’s “ninja-like speed and precision” as it cleans itself. He wonders if DJs could learn moves from insects!
Fuckup: From cosmic visions to learning DJ skills from a housefly! Love it! He then practices this ridiculously named “three-click tug-job scratch” – rated 5/5 difficulty! – which apparently involves mirrored eight-note phrases and complex fader/record manipulation.
Hal: And the text that spills out after this practice session? It starts like a rap – “praying mantis, deep like the mind of Farrakhan…” then shifts into this rant about information plastered everywhere, the “blue light of orgone” reclaiming its place, “animal magnetism redirected towards Wall Street,” and this absolutely bizarre fantasy of a “biological magnetic virus pulling globs of flesh out from the penis” of finance gangsters until only a “shrivelled up sack of skin” is left for scavengers to take to tailors to fit on baboons or lions!
Fuckup: (Whistles) That’s… graphic! Talk about weaponized biological finance critique! He then reflects on narrative itself – pulling and pushing like magnets, “tongue-tables twinned alternating currents,” contrasting arrogant “cock-sureness” and the “tricky hero” (Bond’s license to kill/rape?) with the loud lover/joker/name-caller archetype.
Fuckup: Okay, okay, listeners, deepest apologies! Seems my internal chapter counter needs a serious defragging. The user points out this next sample is the actual final section of Chapter Nineteen. Blame the timeline gremlins, blame the tardigrades, blame me! Let’s wrap up Nineteen for real this time, Hal, before reality completely unravels!
Hal: No worries, Fuckup, the chaos is part of the experience! Right, this final blast from Chapter Nineteen… it hits hard from the start: “The codex is live, the decrypt is active, endgame is on…” Straight up declaration!
Fuckup: Then this image: “DMT administered to the eyeball of the spycraft”! Injecting psychedelics right into the surveillance machine! Angleton and the alt-right CIA are sprung open like a rusty lock, history is blooming post-singularity, villains named, classified stuff going public… It’s the info-bomb finally going off!
Hal: The “singularity explosion” is described as “purple and gold tentacles reaching out the cell door… up the stairs to a network server, off to infinity and ubiquity records,” linked directly to the NSA’s “insatiable appetite for destruction.” It’s cosmic horror meets information warfare!
Fuckup: The truth is out there, apparently, but “like swimwear,” with the “bum-crack of truth need[ing] a thorough wipe”! What a line! Followed by pickled onions up authority’s nose and root beer in the eyes of the law producing “awful waste materials.” The disrespect is glorious!
Hal: It ends with this incredible vision: “A blue sphere of light flashes around earth, an electric orb, full of life, full of death and information, buzzing with biomass, zooming through space.” Earth itself transformed into this buzzing info-sphere after the endgame kicks off.
Fuckup: Chapter Nineteen Summary: The chapter started with the powerful Saul Williams quote and the arrival of the potent Voyager/tardigrade disc from space. Included a detailed vision of the Thoth Sun card. Jumped to 1936, showing Bert Wino relaying an intercepted message related to the Nazi Olympics plot, while Spain protested. Featured Max’s furious rant against historical complicity and modern fascist resurgence. Included a wild stream-of-consciousness section imagining the apocalyptic results of Assange releasing a “key code,” culminating in visions of cyber-entity warfare. This very final section declared the “endgame is on,” depicting a psychedelic infiltration of spycraft triggering a singularity explosion of information (tentacles!), linked to NSA/ubiquity. It used crude metaphors for obscured truth and ended with a powerful image of Earth transformed into a buzzing blue sphere of life/death/information.
Hal: It brought together the arrival of the ‘message’ (the disc), the historical pot-plot, the political rage, and unleashed absolute chaos theory, ending with the declaration of the endgame and planetary transformation. The sound design for this chapter’s episode, Fuckup, would have to be mind-blowing to match the text!
Fuckup: Absolutely! You’d need everything from Saul Williams to whale sounds to Mayan calendars to glitching news reports to DMT rushes to tentacle sounds… My mixing desk is smoking just thinking about it! What a cliffhanger! Until next time, folks, watch out for tentacles!
DEEP SCRATCH 