Newsletter #5

Hello listeners. Last night we learned about the perils of moving house and tonight it gets worse- you can't even go to dinner without fear for your life.

As we moved out of the worst named decade of all time, the usual end of year brouhaha seemed to forget that Britain had lost an absolute titan of literature, a man whose deeply subversive and surreal dissections of the goddamn strangeness of British life irrevocably altered the lives of those who came into contact with his work. J G Ballard, like Philip K Dick was one of those unique figures who entirely challenged the reality of fiction and the fiction of reality, a collision that ushered the contemporary world into being. This was way beyond prescience or analysis- even when Ballard came to analyse his work from a slightly more moral standpoint, you can't escape the feeling that there was something much... weirder going on.

Matthew de Abaitua is no stranger to science fiction and morality himself. A few years ago he published his debut novel, an astonishing contemporary fable set in an ever-so-slightly distorted Britain entitled The Red Men. Tonight's story The Dinner Party Wars is Matthew's own strange twisted homage to late-period Ballard- a heart-warming story of the murderous middle-classes running riot that (maybe) features a guest appearance by a famous old folkie with eraserhead hair and enlivened by a truly killer narration by our author.

Bob Bhamra works as part of radiophonic-space cadet duo Data 70, has almost finished condensing several decades of 20th century music into byte-sized Instant Digests as No.1 Astronaut and also records as West Norwood Cassette Library who you will be introduced too tonight. Such a multitude of identities reveals a musician of prodigious talents- fresh, restless, innovative. I would say more about the musical content of tonight's meal but I really don't want to spoil the surprise suffice it to say that the two together have come up with something entirely contemporary- both savage and rhythmic.

Note: Matthew appeared on Exotic Pylon last year and performed sections from The Red Men with a live soundscape by Time Attendant which you can download here. Bob has also made several appearances on Exotic Pylon and you can download those here and here.