the old guitar and plunger ruins

So much has been written about this Rogue Studio that it is hard to begin, and to know what you haven’t already heard a million times.  Still harder is it to come up with something you may not know at all, some clandestine nugget of shadowy import, some lesser factoid with which to astound you and paralyse the senses.  Yet such things must be done, if not for the InterWebMegaLink, then for the world.

The Old Guitar and Plunger Ruins, in the bustling metropolis of Carlton, was not just some crazy fantasy torn from a Burroughs cut-up of Hunter S and Boogie Nights; it was all too real.  A collective forming in 1994 under the misguided vision of accidentally-microtonal guitarist ADMacHine, the Old Guitar and Plunger Ruins, when in its heyday, was a studio that was unequalled anywhere in the world, from Carlton to Brunswick.  As well as home to well over a dozen yet-to-be-legendary “musicians”, electromancers, deprogrammers, cultural-management-assassins, and transrealist writers, the old Guitar and Plunger Studios was a landmark, even turning up on a postcard in the mid-nineties as a ‘Historic Building’.  When the Studio moved to Preston, and the Guitar and Plunger Ikon came down from its figurehead-like position on the balcony, the neighbours mourned; passers-by commented, total strangers asking ‘but why?’

A short and incomplete list of “artists” who resided at the Old Guitar and Plunger Ruins would feature: Mardy, Papa D, ADMacHine, nalan, the Urd, Millar, Maz, ‘Fig’ Newton, Sharkey, Asteroid, Buttress O’Kneel, and Josep El Croucho (who was there at the end, with Papa D, when there was nothing left...) – but so many other people ‘made’ the ‘music’, celebrated the Endless Jam, forced themselves through Smoking Ritual after Smoking Ritual... this little memory is for you.