Screaming but Silent

Non-Fiction | Milo

My days and nights have one constant: my love of music. Whether on the bus, train or my very feet my ears are always plugged into my phone, as I go about my business. This is a short piece I thought up whilst listening to "War" by The Blood of Heroes. Milo out.  

The bus arrives on time, and courtesy of the free, yet often laggy, app on my phone I know I am lucky; the next bus isn't due for another twenty minutes. I wait patiently for those around me to get onto the bus first, not due to any sense of manners or decency but simply because I am engrossed in the track I am listening to.

“War!”

Justin Broadrick's recognisable snarl, hoarse and bastardly curls my lips and quickens my pulse. Nobody else can hear the madness and swirling guitars, the sparse ambient sounds punctured by the screams of a man transformed by his artistry. Nobody knows of the pounding of my heart as I try to climb the stairs normally, as though my mind wasn't being ripped from the present and deposited somewhere else, somewhere in a fetid and desperate future, where man ravaged by his excesses lives in the remains of a nuclear fallout...I am slipping in and out of a daydream. It is egotistical but also productive, I want to write a story or read one that reimagines the scream.

I am upstairs and sitting on the left hand side of the top deck, right behind the stairs. As the beat stills and Dr Israel's disembodied voice rehearses a chant of some sort, I am stilled and the flush of feeling is no more. In a sudden fit of self-consciousness, I feel embarrassed, could anybody hear the music as it increased in volume and fury? Was my face visibly twisted by the track, and were my eyes glazed and distant? Would I appear stricken, with a perfect glob of drool pendant on puckered lips, by the security camera? The music picks up once more and I am carried off again.

“War! War! War!”

I hear screaming, I hear my blood, I feel my heart quicken and grow bold and busy. It wants to move me, no, it wants to move itself. The song comes to an end, and the next track that comes on isn't an appropriate fit for my current mood. The “War” is over but the journey continues and as the bus passes from stop to stop, and my fingers push "next" on my unresponsive phone again and again I hear the echo of a scream, despite the silence around me.  

The Dinner Party: Oggy's Chosen Six

Podcast | Oggy

It is with disappointment that I was unable to attend this week's edition of The Patient Approach, due to a nasty cold that has left me incapacitated (funny word isn't it? makes you think of those talking heads in futurama). Below are the six people who I would have invited to the dinner party.


Skanderbeg - Albania's national hero and a strategic military genius. He rejected a top position in the Ottoman ranks to liberate his supressed Albanian countrymen. And despite destroying Ottoman opposition for 25 years, in the end he was biten by a mosquito and died of malaria. Such is life.


Ghengis Khan - One of the most powerful short men in history. His reign of power was such that his main depression in life was that he could not achieve immortality. He spent a significant time consulting shamans and trying to find some kind of 'elixer' which could make him live forever, as he was not sufficiently content with conquering half of the world and impregnating possibly thousands of women.


Ike Ibeabuchi - Whilst most people instantly imagine Mike Tyson when thinking of a crazed heavyweight boxer, Ike was a respective alternative (don't we all love knowing of an alternative to the standard?). Standing at 6"4' and with a herculian physique, he remained undefeated but would become insane during the later part of his career, believing, amongst other things, that he was THE president(??). His mental deterioration did not require a psychological assessment any more than it did a quick viewing of his close and extremely brutal fight with David Tua, regarded by many to be a classic. Although correlation doesn't mean causation, he just so happened to have developed symptoms after a fight wherein he took hundreds of power punches to the head. Mike 'I'll eat your children' Tyson versus Ike 'I am seeing demons' Ibeabuchi remains a fantasy fight of the highest order.


Angelina Jolie - She has long maintained her image as the sexy hollywood sweatheart. But behind her on screen performances I sensed a more sinister character. Indeed, my instincts were confirmed when I read about her younger years and how erratic and highly psychopathic she was. For instance, in her earlier relationships she would cut her scared boyfriend with a knife. All I want to say here is that if you had done that to me, Angelina, I would have joyfully cut you right back, and thrown you around the room, and possibly even punched you in the eye before tapping that psychopathic ass of yours.


Cam'ron - Cam'ron AKA Killa Kam is a rapper hailing out of Harlem, New York. He was the leader of the rap group 'The Diplomats' AKA Dipset and is to be noted for his laid back and comedic rapping style, as well as having personally coined the phrase 'no homo' (which has since gone global). He was also fashionably brazen and was noted for his use of pink furr.


Stanley Kubrick - In a few words, a film director who we can objectively say was ahead of his time, possibly by a generational margin. Few can deny the brilliance of his works, which continue to impress modern viewers even today.


So there we have it. Those are my six. Who knows how they may have interacted in this fictional dinner party. Would they have attempted a conversation, however difficult, or would they have simply sat there, and eaten their food, like in some kind of dazed, post humanistic trance, sort of like the ending scene of 2001: A Space Odyssey. We can only imagine.

Follow us on Soundcloud 
Follow us on Twitter
Follow us on Stitcher
Follow us on iTunes