Brainleak Station 12

Um, no, I’m not entirely sure what I’m on about either.

“His beloved’s name is Eura.”

(after Dino Buzzati.)

Look: if you thought I was going to end on anything other than a bit of shameless self promotion then you’re even madder than you look. But this was always supposed to be a vague list defined solely by things I love: and I really love Visions.

It could have been worse, I could have plugged a little comic I did, or a series of drawings people seemed to enjoy, or whatever, but I figured that would be pushing it so I decided to stick to just the most important one.

Most of this music was written and recorded in 2010, but it finally came together in 2011 and we were able to hear it all and hold it and release it into the wild. So much went into these songs and I’m really fucking proud of them.

(And wait until you hear what we’ve got coming next year…)

Luke Haines, whose cohesively sprawling, ambitious, rather moving and proper fucking clever album, 9 ½ Psychedelic Meditations On British Wrestling In the 1970s & Early ’80s, spins such a disjointed web of musical and nostalgic themes before performing the near impossible by tying everything together, that it would have been a very strong contender for album of the year had this been a different kind of list, has been writing recipes.

I have to confess, I haven’t actually made any of the meals and can’t actually comment on how they taste, but if they taste half as good as they read then they will undoubtedly seal the deal if you’re attempting to pull. The recipes themselves are a rich stew of Luke Haines thoughts: music reviews, style advice, extended flights of fancy, drinking, reminiscence, turns of phrase and 50 Ways To Leave Your Lover style rhyming names, James. He even mentions food.

It’s a bit of an odd thing to stick on a list, but in the hands of a writer like Haines even something as functional as a recipe can be used as a vehicle for expression. And if that isn’t enough, they are really, bloody funny.

Unfortunately, he hasn’t written any recipes for a while and the blog has been mostly promoting his (superb) album, which actually leads us to tomorrow…

For 144 weeks (plus the occasional skip) Fridays meant Freakangels. A post-apocolyptic webcomic about a society trying to survive comfortably, starring a strange family and featuring some of the most evocative depictions of psychic abilities in a medium obsessed with superpeople.

Filled to the brim with the level of brilliant dialogue, interesting ideas and compelling twists I expect from Warren Ellis, this stands out as one of his best thanks to the atmosphere, pacing and heart. All of which worked largely because of the exceptional imagery created by Paul Duffield, Kate Brown and Alana Yuen.

Freakangels updated six pages a week, unfolding at a leisurely pace. This isn’t a comic concerned with stuffing as much plot onto a page as possible, instead building an immersive and atmospheric experience. I could linger on some of those pages for ages, just soaking up the imagery. Every page communicates so much without ever being less than utterly beautiful.

At the centre of all this is a utopian belief that problems can be solved, the world can be improved and ideals are worth holding onto. It’s easy to mistake Warren Ellis for a Cynical Old Bastard because of his mastery of the aesthetics of the Cynical Old Bastard - but reading a comic like Freakangels it’s hard to ignore the message that people can be better and that an intolerable status quo shouldn’t be tolerated. He also writes the occasional recipe, which is pretty much irrelevant, but is the only link I can think of to tomorrow…