Loki's Child

Loki's Child reads like the unholy offspring of Robert Anton Wilson's Shroedinger's Cat trilogy, and This is Spinal Tap.

Some of you - especially those who've delved into the surreal alternate history / worlds next door of the Illuminatus and Shroedinger books, will justifiably see that as high praise.

Those familiar with Spinal Tap will wonder if anyone can capture the insider knowledge and sheer ludicrousness of the music biz.

It does.

If anything, Spinal Tap demonstrated that there are things in reality as weird and surreal as a RAW novel.

Loki's child takes that, and dials it up to 11. Take this description of a piece of music recording hardware:

The secret of the Gromko’s sound is a mysterious circuit sealed in black epoxy. It contains a dereciprocator, a hypothetical component first proposed in 1948, which uses the Graffenmuller effect to inversely transduce the electrical majestance. To build this hypothetical component, you need a hypothetical transuranic element that doesn’t exist on Earth. Luckily, the Soviets retrieved a quantity of a mysterious glowing green metal from an asteroid crater in Siberia, and they were in business. It also took care of that imperialist lackey in the blue tights who kept stealing their nuclear missiles and throwing them into the Sun.

So what is it? It's the story of a record producer who excels at taking incompetent bands and making them sound good. He's tasked with a new band, Fatal Lipstick, an all - female group and the epitome of self-indulgent art rock, dialed, of course, up to eleven. One day though, he discovers they are not merely competent, but outstanding, when no - one is looking.

And then he finds out why.

What follows is a wild ride through Magick, pagan gods, Japan, the seedy underbelly of the music biz, and a deep love and appreciation of music, musicians, and the technology that makes it possible, in a world next door to our own in a very weird way.

And it's worth word read.