A banner appeared online in February 2019, announcing the third Ramblings of a Madman zine. And a week later, the zine itself was released, accompanied by the now usual six track download EP and optional one-of-a-kind art print and hoodie combo.
You know the score with the zine by now: Vit and the Accelerator font on the cover, 96 pages of stories, images and press cuttings collaged together with logos and strange text. Some highlights of this third volume:
- A photo of Gaz and Riz on Albert Square
- An advert for the (still forthcoming) HALia synth
- A flyer for a 1988 event featuring “Live acid by Stakker”
- A possible forthcoming track title, ‘Viewed from Configuration’
- Art for a single of ‘In Solitude We Are Least Alone’, with ‘Source of Uncertainty’ as B-side
- Unseen Earthbeat photographs
- Amorphous material in a zine for the first time
The 14 stories this time are:
Top of the Flops. The band go on Top of the Pops to perform ‘Papua New Guinea‘ and, predictably, things don’t go to plan.
Vit. From the old EBV website. Vit is less than impressed with the ‘Far-out Son of Lung‘ cover.
Lizforms. A lengthy tale about the recording of the ‘Lifeforms‘ single.
Headstone Lane. From the 2001 official store, a description of the Headstone Lane album.
Stakker Humanoid. Gaz ‘fondly’ remembers the Humanoid era, as first seen on the EBV site.
The Day the Electricity Died. A long story from Gaz’s Facebook about time spent at home during an unexpected power cut.
ISDN. EBV site story about the limited edition album.
Party Political Broadcast / There Now Follows a Party Political Broadcast. 2001 official store entry describing each track from Papua New Guinea Translations.
Papua New Guinea. EBV site story about the band’s most famous track.
The Most Expensive Restaurant in Town. Gaz at his daftest, with a story about the band’s diet during the making of the Lifeforms VHS. Includes the revelation that Brian’s main culinary contribution at the time was tuna bake with crisps.
Explosive. From the 2001 official store, on how ‘We Have Explosive‘ killed off FSOL in the late ’90s.
Room 208. A bizarre, possibly fictional, story from the EBV site which seems to end with Brian and Gaz about to engage in a threesome with a stranger.
The Oldest Trick in the Rock n Roll Book. Another EBV site story about how the band were screwed over by The Orb in New York.
Accelerator. EBV site description of the band’s debut album.
The EP comes with its own embedded artwork labelled Book Three Music. The six tracks are largely as expected, in line with the previous volumes and mostly very current, with the IDM and textural ambient sounds of late ’10s releases all present. The only outlier is ‘Take Umbrage’, the only Ramblings EP track to be clearly from the archives.
Although ten books in the series are promised, this third is the last to be released at this point in time. There are still stories remaining from the past – Earthbeat and Chile of the Bass Generation from the EBV site, The Stakker Sessions and Zeebox from the 2001 store, the first three chapters of Gaz’s 2001 ‘Ramblings of a Madman’ mini-site, a track-by-track of Alice in Ultraland, plus numerous Facebook tales – and many more to be told, no doubt. Whether the remaining seven volumes will come along – and when – remains to be seen.
Release date: 6th Mary 2019.
Tracklist
1. Turbulent Haze
2. Restricted Conversation Between Occupants
3. Take Umbrage
4. Outsourced
5. Viewed from the Pedestrian’s Angle
6. Disseminate
Credits
All tracks written by Dougans/Cobain.
Images created by FSOL, Yage, Buggy G Riphead, Lysa Bartlett, Diane Harris, Peter Yorke, Alan Dougans.
Book published by EBV 2019.
Fractional Difference 