2004: The Year that Bled Oil into the Scaly Belly of Moloch

Ia! Iak Sak’kath! 2004 was not what we expected. With a decade of P.O.D to celebrate, a Mars Landing to ponder, the Beatles and Michael Jackson still everywhere we look, and the grisly Tsunami-deaths of millions of innocent people to contemplate, 2004 was more than anyone bargained for... so, the bargaining begins now.

Here, for your revisionist pleasure, the intrepid and dilligent researchers of the InterwebMegalink present to you, the year 2004...

January:
Again, like lemmings off a cliff or flowers all simultaneously opening at some secret airborne pheremone, thousands of otherwise normal people celebrate the new year at exactly the same time... Nasa’s Mars Rover ‘Spirit’ lands on the red planet after seven months squeezing through several Crystal Spheres, and, within hours, beams back “its first images of the red planet's barren rockstrewn landscape...”¹ And, by combining the vocals from Jay-Z’s “Black Album” with musik from the Beatles’ “White Album”, DJ Dangermouse accidentally reveals so many decoded secrets of the Greys that he names his album “The Grey Album”, and immediately makes a couple of thousand copies...

February:
The Beatles' record company, EMI Music, stop Dangermouse from mailing out "The Grey Album”, threatening to tear him limb from limb, shred his body, and burn the pieces; but Earth Patriots fight back, with more than 150 websites of memetic metaterrorists, including Illegal Art, offer the entire Grey Album for download on February the 24th, in an action named “Grey Tuesday”; more than 100,000 copies of "The Grey Album" are downloaded on Grey Tuesday alone... And “Lucy” and her celestial Diamond Throne are sighted in Marybirnong, Preston Central and Mitcham within 24 hours of each other².

March:
An Islamic group “with links to al Qaeda”³ detonate explosives on three train stations in Madrid, days before the country's elections, inspiring the Pig Slash Rhino song-title “Nobody Does ‘The Locomotion’ in Spain Anymore”... Several spontaneous humyn combustions occur around the Niddrie area⁴, and the Child Sacrifice Index skyrockets⁵...

April:
Prompted by the Ancient Ones (the evidence points to Pazuzu), avantcore biorock duo Pig Slash Rhino perform live for the first time, on the cosmically-enriched 23rd, with envelope-posting Go Genre Everything; totally coincidentally, David Bowie decides to release a whole lot of his own material as source for plunderphonicists worldwide... The Stabs tour New Zealand, returning with drunken tales of arrest, dangerous climbs upon disused machinery, lascivious fraternisation with Carnies and Wives, legally-enforced bunches of flowers, and drug-and-adrenal panic-runs from the law... On the 29th, a series of photos of US soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners-of-war in Abu Ghraib finally emerge, proving what the InterWebMegaLink had assumed all along. “The graphic images showed naked prisoners being terrorised with dogs and forced to simulate sex acts. The guards involved with the alleged abuse face prosecution but some have questioned whether personnel further up the chain of command also knew what was happening...”⁶

May:
Sad old man A D macHine releases his self-deprecating “Whinge” album instead of shooting himself; Pig Slash Rhino continue their numerologically-significant series of gigs, with a show on the 5th (again, with the remarkable Go Genre Everything)... Meanwhile, the “State of Emergency Conference, Carnival and Be-in” was held in a “reclaimed” warehouse , turning it into a public “meeting-place, bar, cafe, cinema, music hall, accomodation, play space”⁷, pirate radio station, jelly-wrestling ring, and miskatonic laboratory for four continous days; delegates from the InterwebMegalink attended, performing a 3 hour live cut-up set before running a forum on cryptozoological hypergeometrics... needless to say, the IWML forum was poorly-attended, being up against the vegan jelly-wrestling...

June:
Mind-controlled half-reptile and former US President Ronald Reagan dies, and his funeral is held in Washington, Illuminati Capital of the Western World... On the 28th of June, the US “formally hands back Iraqi sovereignty”⁸ at a secret ceremony in Baghdad, two days ahead of schedule... Prime Minister Iyad Allawi and his cabinet ministers were officially sworn in later that day “but even this oathtaking was held in secret”⁹... As if in protest, B’O’K releases her venomous and self-righteous “Heroes”, a Bowie-sample-based examination into the widespread abuses of power by soldiers in Iraq, by America generally, and by W Bush specifically... Pig Slash Rhino have a gig on the 20th, and are still working out exactly what cosmological significance the date has...

July:
The Enochian-Greys and their cosmological Reptile-masters try as hard as they can to stop New Horizons in Violence from releasing their War President Album, clamping down on their artwork and halting production, virtually blacklisting them from the CD-pressing community... Reviewer Walt Miller publishes glowing review of B’O’K’s album “Afraid of Enduring Freedom” (released by Illegal Art in the USA), calling her a “media guerilla, working from the underground trenches and subverting copyrights while creating politically charged audio collages from pop music and news footage... B'O'K's wit and strangled grasp on her subject lays a damning upper cut upon the current administration and what she sees as a hypocritical US jihad...”¹⁰ The “Butler Report” on UK intelligence used to justify the war against Iraq is published, revealing that “the intelligence used to justify the war was now in doubt”¹¹... Like, duh.

August:
Russian scientists claim that they have “found the remains of an extra-terrestrial device that allegedly crashed near the Tunguska river in Siberia in 1908”¹²... Synchronicitiously, Go Genre Everything release their album “Natural Disaster”, performing live dressed as dinosaurs... The Olympics begin on the Illuminati-Chronologically-Significant 13th, in the ancient and mysterious city of Athens; and, despite “preGames fears about the Greeks being underprepared”¹³, the Games seemed to run smoothly... perhaps too smoothly. As sightings of Shub Niggurath escalate¹⁴, Edvard Munch’s iconic painting The Scream is stolen from the Munch Museum in Norway by armed art-milititants¹⁵...

September:
Over 300 people, more than half of them children, are killed as the Beslan school siege ends. After three days of terror, Chechen militants holding more than 1000 people hostage in the gym at School Number One, “the school was rocked by a series of explosions and gunfire. In the carnage that followed hundreds of people most of them children died”¹⁶ in a massive Blood Sacrifice to the Reptilians... New Horizons in Violence, having finally found underground CD-pressing outlaws who are willing to risk their lives and press the CD with its controversial artwork, start their short-but-powerful blitzkreig of live performances; in reaction, the Angel-Greys cancel all street-press interviews with the band, and ensure the gigs are poorly attended... And it is no surprise that global sightings of Dark Young skyrocket¹⁷...

October:
Sage and O’Kneel finally finish the sequel to their much-acclaimed “Startless Threnody for the DragonKings of Space/Time” prog-sample project, combining the Audial Essence of dozens of prog-rock bands, filtering it, and distilling it into one Conceptual Concept Album, entitled “Zeuhlian Necromancy and the Relic of Moon Dreams”... and on 7 October 2004 the Iraq Survey Group concluded “there had been no stockpiles of WMDs in Iraq”¹⁸... The “SpaceShipOne rocket plane claims the 10m Ansari XPrize”, becoming the first private piloted spacecraft in hystory to “fly to the edge of space and back twice in less than a week...”¹⁹ And world-reknown collector and collator of the Dark Notes and Forbidden Beats, John Peel, dies suddenly from a heart attack while on secret miskatonik research-mission in Peru, ending more than 40 years of exposing The Notes to a mainstream world... The Gnome Creatures from the Hollow Earth are discovered in Indonesia, scientists announcing “a new species of human” (sic), a one metre tall species that shared the planet with us “until at least 12000 years ago”²⁰... And, gnashing his lizard teeth and clashing his scaly talons, John Howard wins again...

November:
On the 2nd of November, US “President” George W Bush matches his Australian counterpart, and wins not only the Electoral College vote, “but the popular vote too”²¹... On a blood-and-cocaine-fuelled power-trip, he orders a full-scale US-led assault on the entire city of Falluja, with “15000 US and Iraqi government troops... [b]acked by aircraft tanks and artillery”²² blindly mowing through the city streets, blowing apart anything that moved. A “spokesman from the Iraqi Red Cross said it feared more than 6000 civilians had died in the offensive”²³; more than double the number of civilians that died in the WTC attacks of 2001...

December:
Guitar and Plunger Studios resident Dodgy DJ Dave discovers an enormous wolf running wild in the streets of Preston, and brings it home, where it immediately bursts into lupine howls of song to accompany Dave’s piano-playing... Buttress creates her already-infamous exploration into the satanic illuminati, “There’s Nobody Following you... You’re Imagining It”, eighth in her Media Strategies series of groundbreaking audiodocumentaries... and, as if by “magick”, her short film with Clint Flicks, “A Deep Personal Love”, is shown on Rage, immediately followed by “War President” by New Horizons in Violence... The day after the Stolen Pagan Sun and Oak Worshipping festival, Xmas, violent tsunamis kill millions of innocent people, and the End Times begin...

...and the year ends.