The Skydivers by The Howling - The Wormhole [WHO24]

The Skydivers

The Howling

A 2 track plunderphonic ep (22m 31s) — released May 10th 2024 on The Wormhole

#alternative #plunderphonic

Just when you thought it was safe to back into the Spook House for the Late-Night Monster Show, The Howling return with their latest digital single. Fancy some cheap thrills, courtesy of Incredible Night Creatures of the Midway, their latest album on Wormhole? The Howling's got you covered.

Track A is their deadpan exposition on The Skydivers, a spectacularly lacklustre movie melodrama set on an airfield in sunny California. Backed by the throbbing of a customised street rod engine, 'The Skydivers' offers all the highs and lows of this moody soap opera in which people either fall in love or throw themselves out of airplanes.

Track B is a pounding live version of another track taken from The Howling's Incredible Night Creatures of the Midway release. 'A Picture of The Picture of Dorian Gray' pays tribute to a 1970s Italian soft-core porn adaptation of Oscar Wilde's classic novel. Using keywords scraped from the IMDB entry for the movie, The Howling reconstructs Wilde's narrative as a fragmented sequence of plot points, themes and images. This recording was made in the teeth of severe technical problems at the Horse Hospital in London on 3 November 2023 and turned out to be greatly enhanced by them. This live version also includes a spoken-word introduction not featured on the album.

Described in The Wire as 'the missing link between John Cage and Suicide', The Howling is a collaborative project started by writer Ken Hollings and sound artist Howlround devoted exclusively to their shared love of text, audiotape and trash.

The Howling have presented work at Iklectic and the British Film Institute; and their track 'David Gest, Liza Minnelli, Michael Jackson and Elizabeth Taylor' was prominently featured in the Loewe SS24 catwalk show during Paris Fashion Week. They're still not sure why.

Ken Hollings is a writer, performer and broadcaster whose work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies and been featured for BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4. His books include Welcome to Mars, The Bright Labyrinth, The Space Oracle, Inferno and Purgatory, which are all available from Strange Attractor/MIT Press. His latest book for them is The Trash Project Volume Three: Paradise.

Howlround was founded by sound designer and radio producer Robin The Fog in 2012 to create recordings, performances and installations entirely from manipulating magnetic tape on a quartet of vintage tape machines. Several albums later, his approach has increasingly exploited closed input tape-loops to create blistering noise and primitive techno.

The Howling – 'The First Name in Excitement!'
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