Record Label Samplers: Zang Tumb Tuum Sampled

This is a delightfully odd sampler from the delightfully odd mid-80s record label Zang Tumb Tuum. Yes, they of Frankie Goes To Hollywood. So you’d expect to find Relax here, right? Nope, we get a non-album track called Disneyland, and then a Bruce Springsteen cover.

We have a couple of “spoken word” interludes, which is Paul Morley telling jokes, like why the first Art of Noise album has a spanner on the cover: “Because a spanner is intrinsically more interesting than the lead singer of Tears for Fears.” And that’s not even the punchline.

It’s also got Anne Pigalle, Andrew Poppy, Propaganda and, er, Instinct, and it just flows so well… I’ve listened to probably a hundred times over the years.

Here’s the entire thing, or broken into separate tracks:

Closing by Art of Noise


Femme Fatale (The Woman With The Orchid)

Intermission (The Gods Are Bored)

Swamp Out (7" Swamp)

Egypt (Live At The Value Of Entertainment)

The Object Is a Hungry Wolf Extract 1 by Andrew Poppy

p:Machinery (βeta)


A Time For Fear (Who's Afraid)


The Object Is a Hungry Wolf Extract 2 by Andrew Poppy

This blog post is part of the Record Label Samplers series.

Destroy All Comics

I don’t quite remember where, but I was reminded recently that Jeff Levine’s Destroy All Comics was a magazine that existed back in the 90s. And I had almost all the issues! So I got the missing one from ebay, and now I’ve scanned them and put them on kwakk.info.

It’s a pretty interesting magazine… it was published by Slave Labor and featured interviews with a bunch of indie people.

Like an interview with Seth.

Or John Porcellino.

So now you can do further research into 90s indie comics, if that’s your thing. There’s just five issues, so I put them in the miscellaneous magazines section.

And while I’m blathering on here, I just have to brag about my scanning setup again. I’ve got a USB pedal to signal “next”, so I’m using both my hands (holding down the magazine) and one foot to do scanning. It takes, like, five seconds per double page spread when I’m in the zone and not watching Last Week Tonight too hard.

I should scan some more stuff now that I’ve gotten the scanner out again… It’s fun.

Random Comics

Here’s some comics I’ve read over the last month or so.

Finally Fantagraphics has reached the final Carl Barks volume, and it’s the first one.

Or rather, this collects the very earliest Barks Duck material, and Fantagraphics wisely kept that as the last volume to be published, because it’s by far the weakest material.

But it’s still Carl Barks, so it’s pretty spiffy anyway.

I remember when Fantagraphics started this project in like… 2011? Finally we’d be getting Barks in sensitively recoloured editions, and everything done right. But Fantagraphics were going to do these books slowly, and I wondered whether they’d still exist to complete the series. And they did! Hooray!

I’ve slacked on my French, so I’ve just read two issues of Spirou, and I’ve got a little stack now to read…

These are pretty nice issues — there’s a Back To School special, and the Knights of the Apocadispe are trying to cram in all summer activities into one day. It’s very funny.

The Lucky Luke here (he meets Louis Riel) isn’t as successful.

I bought more volumes of the nouveau Clifton (written by Zidrou).

And it’s the best Clifton has ever been.

These albums are actually funny now. Whodathought!

It is not at all clear to me why I bought this. I may have thought it was a collection of a new Phoenix series or something? Or… even a new edition of the classic series?

But no! This 1000 page monster collects all appearances of the “Phoenix” character from this millennium, or something. Eeek! I have zero interest in reading random Marvel series just because they feature a specific character… and the Phoenix isn’t even really a character; it’s more of a plot contrivance.

But the book starts off the the last half of the Grant Morrison New X-Men run, and I don’t think I’ve read that before? It’s pretty good!

But then the rest of the book is pretty bad. For instance, this ineptly written (by Greg Pak) and ineptly drawn (by Greg Land) series…

Speaking of inept art, I laughed out loud here — this is supposed to be a big reveal or something: They have his face hidden, and then we get a big picture of his face… and the entire audience goes “who?” It’s supposed to be Magneto, but the artwork’s so bad it’s impossible to tell.

Perhaps the worst issues of the bunch are the ones written by Dennis Hopeless. There’s something just so… perverse? is that the word?… about thinking about super-heroes too much. Yes, the original Phoenix storyline was very entertaining, but then you have decades and decades of iterations, where grown up men keep adding and adding a “mythology” to make things “deep and adult” for an audience of (presumably) moronic adults, and it’s just why. Just stop. It’s dead. There is no there there.

Fluide Glacial is a long-running French humour magazine, and this is a special issue I picked up at the airport. “For grown-ups over eight years only!”

Unfortunately, my French just isn’t strong enough to be able to read this. It’s jokes upon jokes, and I just don’t get it.

One day!

There’s even some Jack Davis here…

I read a few of the DC horror anthologies as a child, so I thought I’d pick this up and see what’s what. I remember quite liking them?

As with so many of these DC’s Finest collections, it just hard to say what the rationale behind the selection is. So this 550 page book collects about a year of the run of four different horror anthologies, and one story from The Phantom Stranger. But why? Are these all the horror anthologies DC did? Was this a particularly horror-filled year? Why does it start with The Witching Hour #3? Are they collected like this because they had the same editor or something? Are we going to get more of these, each collecting one year? WHAT?! USE YOUR WORDS!

Oh, and the font used here is the worst ever — 4, 5, 6, 8 and 9 look virtually identical, which makes it ever so fun when flipping back and forth to read the credits. Thanks, DC graphics dept!

In any case, it’s kinda fun. There’s a lot of really nice artwork — Wrightson, Toth, Williamson, er, Don Heck….

Jerry Grandinetti…

Unfortunately, most of the stories are really, really lame. There’s some good ones, but they’re far outweighed by the bad ones, so it’s taken me a month to diffidently get through this collection.

I have to say that the reproduction is phenomenal. It all looks like it’s been shot from original artwork. Did DC not give artwork back to the artists?

And then there’s this.

I wonder whether it was really meant to be reproduced this dark? I understand it was originally serialised as a web comic (over a decade)…

I like the artwork.

The story, though… it’s not just that it’s misery porn (but it is), but that it embraces absolutely all clichés possible when telling a story like this.

It’s totally amazing — it’s relentless cliché bingo time for five hundred pages. So it’ll probably win all the awards?

And that’s the comics I’ve been reading.

Book Club 2025: Du er hjemme nå by Per Petterson

I’m usually so slow getting to new books — it feels like I’m always years behind, somehow. Or centuries. But this one is new! So new that there isn’t an English translation yet, I think? Just a couple weeks old…

And it’s really good. It not as immediate as, for instance, Out Stealing Horses, but it’s totes gripping. Sometimes it felt like he’s careening from the personal to the private, and I’m like sitting here “OK, but why are you telling me this?”, but then the next scene would just be devastating.

I think it’s a really strong book, but I see that it’s gotten some middling reviews… which I understand, but I think they’re holding the book wrong. Sorry, I meant reading the book wrong. And I see that the parts of the book I liked the most are what the reviewers found the weakest. Typical! Why must everybody else always be so wrong!

Du er hjemme nå (2025) by Per Petterson (3.83 on Goodreads)

Record Label Samplers: Erased Tapes: 1 + 1 = X

This label sampler works well as a label sampler. At least it did for me — I wasn’t really aware of Erased Tapes as an entity before I got this album. I had bought stuff from a number of the people featured here — David Allred, Peter Broderick, Nils Frahm etc — but I had never made the connection before.

This made me pay attention, and whenever Erased Tapes release something now, I at least give it a go. They’re not as consistent as, say, 4AD in the 80s, but they’ve got a certain aesthetic and quite a lot of it’s good.

And as an album, this is really good — the sequencing is great; it flows well. But perhaps not surprising:

1+1=X sees Erased Tapes artists come together to make an album as a collective. Sharing the same space, instruments and each others’ capabilities during a residency at Vox-Ton studio in Berlin, they recorded 20 songs to mark the label’s 10-year history.

 04:19 Qasim Naqvi - Brutal Moderna
 04:20 A Winged Victory for the Sullen - Long May It Sustain
 05:10 Rival Consoles - Ritual
 03:06 Nils Frahm - Frau Dehlholm
 05:48 Daniel Thorne - Iroise
 05:11 Daniel Brandt - Blackpool Sands Forever
 08:13 Douglas Dare - Darling
 04:18 Michael Price - Eyn Hallow
 03:43 Kiasmos & Högni - Zebra
 04:45 Ben Lukas Boysen - Pending
 04:50 David Allred - Ahoy
 03:31 Anne Müller - Bel Tono
 17:04 Lubomyr Melnyk - Palisade 1
 04:44 Hatis Noit - Inori
 04:06 Masayoshi Fujita - Spaceship Magical
 03:57 Högni - Máni
 05:23 Peter Broderick - The Perpetual Glow
 05:36 Arthur Jeffes & Nils Frahm - Up is Good
 04:27 Daniel Brandt - Blackpool Sands Forever (Rival Consoles Remix)
 06:10 Penguin Cafe - Wheels Within Wheels (Greg Gives Peter Space Remix)

Here’s the full album.

Qasim Naqvi - Brutal Moderna

Long May It Sustain

Rival Consoles - Ritual Song


Daniel Thorne - Iroise

Douglas Dare - Darling (1+1=X)

Michael Price - Eyn Hallow

Kiasmos & Högni - Zebra (1+1=X)

Ben Lukas Boysen - Pending

David Allred - Ahoy (1+1=X)

Anne Müller - Bel Tono (1+1=X)

Hatis Noit - Inori

Masayoshi Fujita - Spaceship Magical


Peter Broderick - The Perpetual Glow (1+1=X)

Erased Tapes - 1+1=X

This blog post is part of the Record Label Samplers series.