Warren Ellis, author (Transmetropolitan, Global Frequency, Authority), pop-culture pundit and increasingly ubiquitous web presence, has been threatening for some time to release a spoken-word CD, in collaboration with Scott Lamb, programmer and leader of the goth-rock quartet Deathboy. A taste of what such a beast might resemble, “Revolution” (MP3 file here), was uploaded onto Ellis’ diepunyhumans.com website yesterday at 6:48PM London time, according to the blog’s index. He describes it as “a futurephoned rant by me folded into an apocalyptic piece of EBM” — “electronic body music” that is, four-the-floor dance-stuff. It’s housey track of retro techno, with Ellis’ voice laying down misanthropy by the yard: “You know who the scariest animal in the world is? Us. Because there are six billion of us, we are capable of anything, and we do as we are told.” And: “Human beings are scary because we are too stupid to live.”
All in all, more interesting is the scenario that led up to “Revolution,” in Ellis’ words: “The silly bastard literally just MMSed me at 1.30 in the morning asking me to record a ranty bit on the phone and beam it over to his so he could chuck it into his cauldron of tortured computer bits. And people ask if I really need a futurephone. How else could we make mad shit on the run?” Still, it’s a promising start, suggesting he’s headed in a different direction than the audio experiments of his fellow British comic-book writers, like Alan Moore, who goes mystic on a series of CDs, including Angel Passage and Highbury Working, and Neil Gaiman, who has fiddled with the radio-drama format (Two Plays for Voices).
More on Ellis at warrenellis.com. More on Deathboy at deathboy.co.uk. You have to admire a band that lists its members as if they were Dungeons and Dragons characters, in terms of Strength, Constitution, Dexterity, etc. How about Bitrate and Memory Cache?