Skullflower - Exquisite Fucking Boredom

"By day fantastic birds flew through the petrified forests, and jewelled alligators glittered like heraldic salamanders on the banks of crystalline rivers. By night the illuminated man raced among the trees, his arms like golden cartwheels, his head like a spectral crown..."

In J.G. Ballard's 1964 short story "The Illuminated Man" and his 1966 novel "The Crystal World" forests are turning into a vast, brilliant, multi-colored crystalline mass which gradually expands to fill all space, transforming flora, fauna and man alike. This luminescent transfiguration is a reflection of a cosmic process in which the dimension of time is affected: "As more and more time 'leaks' away, the process of supersaturation continues, the original atoms and molecules producing spatial replicas of themselves, substance without mass, in an attempt to increase their foothold upon existence."

UK Noise Rock band Skullflower's 2003 album 'Exquisite Fucking Boredom' reminded me strongly of these two works of fiction.

Skullflower, formed in 1985, is one of the bands of Matthew Bower (Total, Hototogisu, Pure, Sunroof!). 'Exquisite Fucking Boredom' was produced by Colin Potter, a musician and engineer who worked with 'England's Hidden Reverse' luminaries such as Nurse With Wound, Current 93, Organum, and Ora. Two tracks were reworked by Neil Campbell (Vibracathedral Orchestra, Astral Social Club).

The first track on the album, "Celestial Highway I", introduces the stomping and stoopid yet incredibly catchy riff which takes center stage on the album, a Black Sabbath riff seen through a Krautrock kaleidoscope. The riff, repeated ad infinitum, measures time, is time: an 'equable', forward-propelling, motorik motion.

But as the album continues its trajectory through the musical spheres - Celestial Highway II and III, Saturn, Return To Forever, and Celestial Highway IV - time leaks away. Like Ballard's forests, the elementary, time-marking riff is slowly encrusted with glimmering, sparkling splinters of light, with shimmering jewelry, with spectral gems. Marked with so many prismatic, light-suppurating wounds and crowned with an aureole of needles and spurs of glass and quartz, the riff is slowly dragged down, transformed into an immortal, exotic, translucent baroque church, surrendering its musical and time-keeping identity. Gradually, all musical space is saturated with a brilliantly beautiful, multi-colored crystalline mass.

At the end of Ballard's 'The Illuminated Man', the protagonist is resolved to return to the phantasmagoric forest he has fled, seeking the gift of immortality through crystallization, seeking "an ultimate macro-cosmic zero beyond the wildest dreams of Plato and Democritus."

Likewise, this listener has been enticed to return to Skullflower's album again and again, succumbing to the enticements of its enchanted entropy, of its luminous ennui, of its orgasmic tedium.

"However apostate we may be in this world, there perforce we become apostles of the prismatic sun."