Their hearts are not hearts they're clockwork springs

How come so many of the things that spook the fuck out of us hold us utterly rapt in our dread? It's the curious little mystery that ensures horror films succeed. Fear seems to go hand in hand with a peculiar enjoyment. I might stain my chinos when I see a sodden Japanese devil girl strobing her way out of a telly, yet, at the same time, there is a giddy wrinkle in my amygdala going "awww class I'm actually pissing my pants here".


When's the *rattle Amon Duul II concert on? *rattle *rattle *clack SATAN!! *clack

I've broached the subject of my fear of puppets before. I don't quite know what it is about them exactly, but I have a theory or two. It could be the brief illusion of life being breathed into a lifeless entity. It's an alchemical sight that might easily put a deeply-held, minuscule ember of leftover Catholicism on irrational Satan-alert. Possession. Is this what the act of puppetry whispers to me? Yet, by the same logic, I don't find robots nearly as diabolical.

Maybe it's their woodenness? Or something about their quickness too? Hmmm. I'd also be a bit wary about how they jerk, chatter, and seem to both walk and float at once. It doesn't take much of a leap for me to imagine little medieval death squads of the wooden fucks flitting through ruins and woods, cackling wildly as they're chased by stinking winds through the waning light. Nobody is pulling their strings of course. The strings disappear upwards into low lying fog as they sometimes do in Jan Svanjemaker films. Off and away they skitter, as only wooden goblins with limited joints can. Off toward the dull red flicker of their home, the puppet pit, with their squirming knapsacks full of panicked thoughts sliced from the minds of those caught slumbering.

Scarier still, are Automatons. Automatons or Automata are mechanical toys of varying complexity that use mechanics to create the illusion of self-determined movement. They are often human-like. Think of the creepy funfair wizard in Tom Hanks' Big and you've got the picture. Automata have a long and rich history in human technology. Around the time of enlightenment when philosophers such as Descartes were drawing tentative comparisons between human actions and the mechanics of machinery, automatons whirred and creaked into the human imagination in a big way. As the following informative but unsettling video demonstrates, they reached their peak in terms of size and mechanical complexity in 18th and 19th century France. Watch, but be warned that there is a mechanical monkey who smokes a real fag with what the archaic voiceover describes as his "leather bellows". That's some spooky foetal position shit. Oh and just hear the music in this. It's classic TV workshop-style tape loops of synths. Wibble warble wibble warble splunk. Sweet.



Some people find automatons beautiful. I find them fascinatingly sinister, a reason I think I am so taken with the films of Guillermo Del Toro, who has motifs of clockwork powered people or contraptions in many of his storylines.

When I think of Automatons, I remember the remarkable astronomical clock in Prague. This unholy looking clockwork extravaganza of a building is full of strange little machinations that come to a head every evening at six. As the chimes ring out over the old city, death springs mechanically out of a door and ushers a procession of deceased saints into the afterlife. The deliciously evil little wizard who pops out of the contraption below (designed by Thomas Kuntz) fills us in a little more about what next happened to the celebrated artist who designed the clock in Prague. Yes, the macabre story told by the 7 inch puppet is apparently historically on the money, whether it is true or not.



By appropriating life yet being simultaneously inanimate, these things feed into the darker crevices of the mind. This alive-but-not quality is shared with puppets, dolls, and ventriloquists' dummies. They are the closest things we have to the living dead.

Here are MP3s from two very clockwork-sounding tracks with videos that are packed full of eerie imagery.

This Dead Can Dance track scared me frigid when it used to appear on No Disco, and, err, it still does and all. Fuck. No cheese for me tonight.

MP3: Dead Can Dance-The Carnival is Over



MP3: Aphex Twin-Nannou



There will be a few album reviews coming next. And I don't know where my last post, on Annie, went. It's just gone!? Edit: It came back. Hoorah.