Alright you twisted freaks! I had to jump through hoops of fire to try get hold of this stuff. Here's the low-down:

Swamptrash were a Scottish bluegrass/psychobilly band formed in 1987 in Edinburgh. They split in 1990 when several of the members went on to form the wonderful Shooglenifty.

Swamptrash only released one album and a six-track EP during their short career. Fronted by vocalist and banjo player Harry Horse (real name Richard Horne), the band came up with an innovative way to bypass all the bureaucracy of having to phone or send tapes to clubs and pubs in order to get bookings. Basically they spun a wonderful yarn about them all being brothers from Missouri, and Horse - who was really from Coventary and a successful political illustrator for many major UK broadsheets - fitted into the hillbilly role impeccably by turning up at venues under the name Billie Joe and asking them to "pass the hat round". As the routine proved to be quite successful it began to get incorporated into their performances and it wasn't long before Horse was drawling on between songs about "daddy getting his leg bitten off by a gator" or "how mamma had gotten sunk in the swamp".

After Swamptrash split, Horse continued his career as a successful political cartoonist. As well as having his work appear in books as diverse as a centenary edition of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde and children's book Magus The Lollipop Man, his illustrations would also regularly appear in The Observer, The Independent and The Sunday Herald. In 1993 he wrote a cult computer game for Time Warner called Drowned God - a graphical adventure game with a plot involving human history and the belief that "everything you know is wrong".

For Harry Horse the story ends tragically and somewhat mysteriously with the peculiar circumstances surrounding his death and that of his terminally ill wife Mandy in 2007. What was originally reported as a Romeo & Juliet style suicide pact later turned out to be something more grisly with Horse allegedly stabbing his wife over 30 times before turning the knife on himself and subsequently bleeding to death from multiple slash wounds.

Clearly distraught by his wife's rather aggressive form of multiple sclerosis, it is assumed that the incredible stress Horse was under manifested itself in bouts of deep depression and disturbing fits of rage.

Today, the recorded work of Swamptrash is exceptionally rare and difficult to come by, however, here at the Media Underground Nerve Centre I've managed to get hold of both their album and EP in mp3 format. Whilst I would love to acquire higher bitrate versions of this material, these recordings are available nowhere else on the internet. Appreciation and thanks go to Lesley Robertson for sending me this stuff and for going to the trouble of asking former Swamptrash members for their permission to do so.

Note: To download these mp3s you'll need an account with our BitTorrent tracker. If you haven't got one yet, you can sign up for free here.

Swamptrash - Bone (torrent).
Swamptrash - It Don't Make No Never Mind (torrent).

Additional resources:
Swamptrash on FSD
Swamptrash on Halfway To Paradise
Lazy Pict's History Of Acid Croft
Times Article: The Man Who Loved His Wife To Death

media-underground.net

'Sometimes, you meet people who simply seem to "get" life better than the rest of us, who act as a reminder that being alive is more than simply continuing to breathe.

'They negotiate it like skilful acrobats on a high wire, exhilarated yet instinctively balanced, undaunted by the inevitable wobbles, and the remarkable thing is that their innate confidence is usually its own sure-footed reward.

'They are often achievers, yet somehow achievement is only a by-product of the way they live. It's their dreams that single them out. They scale the mountain of those dreams, reaching distant pinnacles, while the rest us stand muttering in the foothills that it's all right for them but we have responsibilities and proper jobs to get on with.

'Mark Beaumont is 27. Already he has set the record for cycling round the world (knocking 81 days off the previous time) and has just returned from a nine-month cycle across the Americas, from Alaska in the north to Argentina in the south. His route took him 13,000 miles through the Rockies and the Andes, stopping off to climb the two highest mountain peaks: Mount McKinley in the north and Aconcagua in the south. He also made a BBC documentary of his journey, the camera becoming his confidante during periods of intense isolation on remote roads and among Spanish-speaking communities.' (Scotsman interview).

media-underground.net

This sourced from Dangerous Minds:

'Touted in their day as the next Stooges, Death came to an abrupt end after refusing to change their name. But renewed interest in the proto-punks is ensuring their incendiary legacy lives on.

'The once-flawless credentials of Detroit's late-60s garage-rock scene took a considerable dent recently thanks to Iggy Pop's badly timed car insurance advert. And let's not forget the readiness of MC5's surviving members to exchange their manifesto of "dope, guns and fucking in the streets" for casual denimwear a few years back. However, one power trio from the city can claim 35 years without selling out - a feat made considerably easier by the fact that Death's debut album was nixed by the Man before it even made it to the pressing plant.' (Guardian article & Isohunt torrent download).

media-underground.net

'A major diplomatic and political scandal is erupting that could have significant import for French-American relations. It involves new research into the mysterious outbreak of “mass insanity” in a village in southern France that affected some 500 people and resulted in five deaths.

'According to reliable US sources, the US State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research has been given a confidential inquiry from the office of Erard Corbin de Mangoux, head of the French intelligence agency DSGE (Directorate General for External Security).

'According to the report the inquiry regards a recently-published account of U.S. government complicity in a mysterious 1951 incident of mass insanity in France in the village of Pont-Saint-Esprit in southern France.

'The strange outbreak severely affected nearly five hundred people, causing the deaths of at least five, two by suicide. For nearly 60 years the Pont-St.-Esprit incident has been attributed either to ergot poisoning, meaning that villagers consumed bread infected with a psychedelic mold or to organic mercury poisoning.

'Scientists with the highly respected British Medical Journal were quickly drawn in September 1951 to what it dubbed the “outbreak of poisoning.” After initial thoughts that the cause was bread infection, they concluded that mold could not explain the event or the afflictions that struck hundreds of people in the village.

'Scientists dispatched to the scene from the Sandoz Chemical company in nearby Basle, Switzerland also stated that the mold was the cause, but many other experts disagreed with them.

'Over time the mystery of the outbreak only deepened and no answers were found to be satisfactory. A 2008 book about the history of bread published in France by Professor Steven Kaplan emphasizes that the “mystery remains unsolved” and at the time, still continued to perplex scientists.' (War And Peace article & Rule Of Law Radio podcast).

media-underground.net

'As the Guardian kicks off a debate about ethics, tell us what standards you think are essential for the common good.

'Can capitalism be ethical? Or do you think we live in such a diverse world that we'll never agree on the common good or what the good life might be? And is religion a help, a hindrance or an irrelevance when it comes to shaping values?' (Guardian feature).

media-underground.net

'It's January 2009 and David Letterman is making a public apology. The American chat show king is talking about an error of judgment he made years earlier, a mistake, he says, born out of his own feelings of insecurity. He hasn't been caught with his pants down.

'No, the person he's making an apology to is Mary Hicks, the mother of the American stand-up comedian Bill Hicks, whose final performance was controversially cut from the Letterman show, making Hicks one of the first comedy acts to be fully censored on the CBS network. It's a decision that ultimately denied the American public what would turn out to be their final opportunity to see Hicks on mainstream television. Less than six months later, on 26 February 1994, Hicks died from pancreatic cancer at the criminally young age of 32.

'To be fair to Letterman, no one outside Hicks's immediate family knew he was sick. But considering the jokes had been pre-approved several times by the network's standards and practices committee, the decision to drop the routine was devastating for the comedian, who knew what he was facing and just wanted his material to have another shot at penetrating the American mainstream that had ignored him for much of his career. "It was a hard time for all of us. I just need you to know that," Mrs Hicks later told Letterman sternly on that January 2009 show, stunning him into silence. After screening the routine - in which a painfully thin and bearded Hicks takes hilarious sideswipes at the pro-life lobby, mediocre celebrities and peculiarities of religious iconography - Letterman acknowledged how timeless the material seemed and sheepishly wondered: "What was the matter with me?"' (Scotsman article).

media-underground.net

During the last few years of his life, Philip K. Dick lived in Orange County, a Southern California setting that made the life-battered sci-fi writer something of a stranger in a strange land. This is the sixth and final part of a series where freelance journalist Scott Timberg looks at Dick's final years.

'Financial security and widespread acclaim were things Philip K. Dick had spent his career waiting for, always on the verge. He compared himself to the tramps in Beckett’s Waiting For Godot.

'“If it does come for me, will it matter?” Dick wrote in 1976. “Will it make up for 25 years of shivering with fear as to whether, when I get up in the morning, the electricity will still be turned on?”

'During those years, Dick’s health problems continued, sometimes coinciding with money woes. After a 1976 heart attack that sent him to the county hospital and left him with a $2,000 bill, he had only 40 cents to his name. He was only saved from having his utilities turned off by a royalty check from France. “Here I am,” he wrote, “after twenty-five years of professional SF writing, getting notices that they are going to turn off the water and gas and electricity if I don’t pay in three days, and I say, What has it all been for?”' (L.A. Times article).

media-underground.net

Issue six of Paraphilia Magazine is now available to download. This issue includes a fascinating article on the Abbey of Thelema by Nick Louras. (Paraphilia Magazine pdf download).

media-underground.net

During the last few years of his life, Philip K. Dick lived in Orange County, a Southern California setting that made the life-battered sci-fi writer something of a stranger in a strange land. This is the fifth part of a six part series where freelance journalist Scott Timberg looks at Dick's final years.

'Though Philip K. Dick was not, on the surface, a writer of place - he was driven more by sweeping ideas than by locations or even local cultures - his time in Southern California had a profound impact on his work, in sometimes complicated ways. Dick wrote - in a 1973 letter to Polish science-fiction writer Stanislaw Lem - “there is no culture here in California, only trash. And we who grew up here and live here and write here have nothing else to include as elements in our work. The West Coast has no tradition, no dignity, no ethics - this is where that monster Richard Nixon grew up.”' (L.A. Times article).

media-underground.net

During the last few years of his life, Philip K. Dick lived in Orange County, a Southern California setting that made the life-battered sci-fi writer something of a stranger in a strange land. This is the forth part of a six part series where freelance journalist Scott Timberg looks at Dick's final years.

'Of course, for all the action of Philip K. Dick’s Orange County years - the marriage, the divorce, the birth of his son Christopher, the suicide attempt, the bouts of depression, the new novels, the development of Blade Runner - the most significant is surely what the author came to call "2-3-74". Those months of 1974 were when Dick either lost his mind completely or was visited, ravishingly, by God.' (L.A. Times article).

media-underground.net

During the last few years of his life, Philip K. Dick lived in Orange County, a Southern California setting that made the life-battered sci-fi writer something of a stranger in a strange land. This is the third part of a six part series where freelance journalist Scott Timberg looks at Dick's final years.

'While in Orange County, Dick often fell back on the reflexes of Bay Area types who move to Southern California. He joked often about the artificiality of it all, the local slang. “He kept comparing Southern California to Disneyland,” remembered wife Tessa Dick, “and said it was plastic, wasn’t real. He was used to real cities like Berkeley and San Francisco and Vancouver.” To a writer whose primary subject was the slippage between the real and constructed, the place surely also fascinated him as well.' (L.A. Times article).

media-underground.net

During the last few years of his life, Philip K. Dick lived in Orange County, a Southern California setting that made the life-battered sci-fi writer something of a stranger in a strange land. This is the second part of a six part series where freelance journalist Scott Timberg looks at Dick's final years.

'Philip K. Dick arrived in Orange County in 1972 by flying to LAX, where he showed up in a sport coat he’d outgrown, hauling the Jehovah’s Witness translation of the Bible and a cardboard box, doubling as a suitcase, tied closed with an extension cord. Dick - who has been described, alternately, as paranoid, hilariously funny, childish and deeply empathetic - was in some of the weirdest shape of his life.' (L.A. Times article).

media-underground.net

During the last few years of his life, Philip K. Dick lived in Orange County, a Southern California setting that made the life-battered sci-fi writer something of a stranger in a strange land. In this six part series, freelance journalist Scott Timberg looks at Dick's final years.

'When author Philip K. Dick called Tim Powers to ask him to come by his Fullerton apartment for a drink one evening, the Cal State student expected the kind of night he and other aspiring writers often spent with the science-fiction titan. That is, a wide-ranging bull session about religion, philosophy and the glories of Beethoven - along with some incongruous chatter about car repair - over wine and beer.' (L.A. Times article).

media-underground.net

'It hardly shrieks of billion-dollar glamour. The US nerve centre of the world's largest retailer, Wal-Mart, consists of a collection of low-slung prefabricated buildings along a four-lane highway in north-western Arkansas. Wal-Mart's head office is hundreds of miles from the nearest big city. It isn't even handy for the state capital, Little Rock, which is three and half hours' drive away.

'But hopeful merchants beat a path from all corners of the world to hawk their wares here, in a series of bare Perspex rooms along a "supplier corridor". Staff work in spartan cubicles and reminders of the retailer's low-cost culture are constant - in an employee lounge an honesty box invites payment for tea and coffee with a blunt message: "Drinks are not free."

'It was nearby, in the main square of the modest town of Bentonville, that Wal-Mart's founder, Sam Walton, opened a discount store, Walton's Five and Dime, in 1951. That shop, now a museum, helped spawn a retail empire that spans 8,100 stores in 15 countries generating $401bn (£248bn) of revenue annually. With a market capitalisation of $210bn, Wal-Mart is worth as much as the gross domestic product of Nigeria.' (Guardian article).

media-underground.net

'Americans generally like to hear good news. They like to believe that a new president will right old wrongs, that clean energy will replace dirty oil and that fresh thinking will set the economy straight. American pundits tend to restrain their pessimism and hope for the best. But is anyone prepared for the worst?

'Meet Michael Ruppert, a different kind of American. A former Los Angeles police officer turned independent reporter, he predicted the current financial crisis in his self-published newsletter, From The Wilderness, at a time when most Wall Street and Washington analysts were still in denial. Director Chris Smith has shown an affinity for outsiders in films like American Movie and The Yes Men. In Collapse, he departs stylistically from his past documentaries by interviewing Ruppert in a format that recalls the work of Errol Morris and Spalding Gray.

'Sitting in a room that looks like a bunker, Ruppert recounts his career as a radical thinker and spells out the crises he sees ahead. He draws upon the same news reports and data available to any Internet user, but he applies a unique interpretation. He is especially passionate about the issue of peak oil, the concern raised by scientists since the seventies that the world will eventually run out of fossil fuel. While other experts debate this issue in measured tones, Ruppert doesn't hold back at sounding an alarm, portraying an apocalyptic future. Listening to his rapid flow of opinions, the viewer is likely to question some of the rhetoric as paranoid or deluded, and to sway back and forth on what to make of the extremism. Smith lets viewers form their own judgments.

'Collapse also serves as a portrait of a loner. Over the years, Ruppert has stood up for what he believes in despite fierce opposition. He candidly describes the sacrifices and motivators in his life. While other observers analyze details of the economic crisis, Ruppert views it as symptomatic of nothing less than the collapse of industrial civilization itself.' (Collapse website & BitTorrent download).

media-underground.net

Ken Eakins of Right Where You Are Sitting Now has recently interviewed the editors of Paraphilia Magazine. Personally, I'd never heard of the magazine before, until I read this interview. What can I say? I've become an instant fan.

As Ken writes: "Paraphilia Magazine is one of those cool publications that you wished you’d stumble upon more often. A kind of art/avant/underground aggregator, published in a true magazine format, the mag is really coming into its own. I caught up with editors D.M. Mitchell and Dire McCain to get a bit more insight into the project." (Right Where You Are Sitting Now interview & Paraphilia Magazine website).

Note: right click and select "Save Target As" to download back issues...

Issue 01 - Issue 02 - Issue 03 - Issue 04 - Issue 05

'The Illuminated Thread is an ongoing bicycle-mounted research project with five primary objectives:

'1. Document and interpret the contraction phase of the industrial adventure with an emphasis on the landscapes and structures left behind.

'2. Piece together a viable image of a stable low-energy future.

'3. Identify and refine a skill set necessary to thrive in the transition to a new paradigm: practical techniques for living on the margins.

'4. Offer potential symbols and narratives of a new spirituality emerging on the heels of growing disillusion in the religion of progress.

'5. Encourage readers to accept the impossibility of preventing the industrial age’s conclusion, face the coming age with courage and begin mitigation activities in earnest.' (Illuminated Thread website).

media-underground.net