“Castrate God – I’ll fuck the world.”
— Moyamoya
Moyamoya is like an experiment gone wrong. And I mean that in the best of ways. Whatever was injected into the original glob of cells, whatever chemical was added to the Petri dish in which they grew, whatever DNA was spliced into its own — I have little knowledge of. Suffice it to say that something happened; and the result — the wailing beast, its body plan gnarled with excess, a leg here, an arm there, and there, and there, and there — is a horror of brutal proportions: teeth where no teeth should be; eyes everywhere, oozing a black and sulfur-smelling ichor; its breath a cloud of rage and pain and violent tremors, as if with each inhale it was taking in all the torment of the world, and with each exhale came a promise to destroy it all.
This is Moyamoya. This is how Bodies begins. The monster breaks out of the laboratory — the place of its birth, its childhood innocence — and wreaks havoc upon its white-coated creators. Limbs are torn from torsos and added to its own; the flesh of research assistants, of security guards, of janitorial staff are, under Moyamoya’s strength, sluiced off; their bodies turned to a pulp. Of course, it can’t be stopped, and so after the cries cease — after the facility falls silent — the monster that is Moyamoya seeps out of the broken bay doors and into the open air. Trees topple as it pulls its bulk behind it; it is a hulking abstraction of an animal; and lumbers into the nearby lake, and disappears under the water.
Not to die, no; though its blood drips from its body, leaving thick slicks of it lapping against the shores. It rises again near a small town, and leaves it in ruins. Town after town is devoured. Nothing can stop it. Schools, orphanages, hospitals — to say nothing about the stores and churches and surrounding farms; all had its flesh stripped from the bones. In its wake, Moyamoya leaves behind nothing; and as it does so, it grows stronger and stronger, hungrier and hungrier, angrier and angrier.
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To read the rest of this review — and more by Steve Schmolaris — visit his website Bad Gardening Advice.
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Steve Schmolaris is the founder of the Schmolaris Prize, “the most prestigious prize in all of Manitoba,” which he first awarded in 1977. Each year, he awards the prize to the best album of the year. He does not have a profession but, having come from money (his father, “the Millionaire of East Schmelkirk,” left him his fortune when he died in 1977), Steve is a patron of the arts. Inspired by the exquisite detail of a holotype, the collective intelligence of slime mold, the natural world and the suffering inherent within it — and also music (fuck, he loves music!) — Steve has long been writing reviews of Winnipeg artists’ songs and albums at his website Bad Gardening Advice, leading to the publication of a book of the same name.
