Sdtrk: ‘Friends of the heroes’ by The Aislers Set

Hello! Or as my Missus says, Hallo! Yes, despite posting on average once a year, ‘Shouting etc etc’ is still a thing, especially in light of modern social media collapsing into a fascist singularity. Ahem.
As always, a Proper Update™ is due, particularly in regards to our lives, but very very quickly: not only have Ursula, Dyanne, Miss Winter, Elena, Sidore, and I moved to a larger, more aesthetically-pleasing home (still in Michigan) as of December 2023, but we fled Twitter last August and are now on the much-saner social media platform known as Bluesky; I direct you to the lefthand sidebar of this very blog for links to our accounts. Also, Dyanne was understandably ecstatic to receive a brand-new silicone body on (or around) her birthday this past April, manufactured by Normondoll! She’s still very much an airhead, but she’s cheerful, knows her onions when it comes to films, and as sex columnist Dan Savage would say, she’s GGG. Photos of our glorious new digs, known as Deafening silence Towers, are forthcoming, but here’s a few that fulfil the obligation of teasing a fraction of the place, as well as allowing you to see Dyanne Mk.II.

But this post isn’t about all that new stuff, so put that from your minds! The list you see below is more for myself than anyone else — which can arguably be said about half the posts on this blaug — but due to my love of lists, as they help to bring Order to a chaotic and random universe, I’ve made one of my favourite artists, photographers, and graphic designers, with links where applicable. There’s no particular order here, so I’ll add new artists when I discover ones that strike my fancy. It’s my hope that you’ll either be like ‘ohhh so that’s who that is!’ or ‘wow, their work is pretty cool, I’m going to have to look up more of their stuff!’ In any case, rest assured it’ll be interesting. Fact.

Also, you know how it is with the Internet: sometimes links don’t work when sites fall into disrepair, so if you run across that sort of thing happening in the future, give us a shout in the comments section, eh?

+ Peter Saville
+ Gustav Klimt
+ Gerhardt Richter
+ Vaughan Oliver / 23 Envelope
+ Hajime Sorayama
+ HR Giger
+ Zdzisław Beksiński
+ MC Escher
+ Robert McGinnis
+ Helmut Newton
+ Peter Phillips
+ Deborah Turbeville
+ Vilhelm Hammershøi
+ Ed Ruscha
+ Robert Longo
+ Richard Savoie
+ John Atkinson Grimshaw
+ Edward Gorey
+ Alex Colville
+ Julian House / Intro
+ Romek Marber
+ The Designers Republic™
+ Nicola Kuperus
+ Erin Cone
+ Syd Mead
+ Fitz & Van
+ Barbara Kruger
+ Gilbert & George
+ Margaret Keane
+ Stanisław Szukalski
+ Victor Vasarely
+ Bridget Riley
+ Barbara Brown
+ Clemens Gritl
+ Otl Aicher
+ Julian Montague
+ Melanie Pullen
+ Do Ho Suh
+ ‘Kynaston Mass’ aka Ian Hodgson of Moon wiring club
+ Dave Gibbons
+ Jack Kirby
+ Jim Steranko
+ Alex Ross
+ Phil Noto
+ Jamie Hewlett
+ Kazuma Kaneko
+ Devin Leonardi
+ Saul & Elaine Bass
+ Paul Rand
+ Mark Robinson / Teen-beat Graphica
+ Max Ernst
+ Dan DeCarlo
+ Pol Bury
+ Kenichi Sonoda
+ Yasushi Nirasawa
+ Betty Brader
+ Akiko Stehrenberger
+ Masahiko Ohno / Works Fatagaga
+ ???

Astute readers looking this list over may note that Andy Warhol is not in fact included here! That’s cos while I dig Warhol to an unnatural degree, I like him more as a pop culture personality and trendsetter than as an artist. The second part of the post’s title comes from something he’d once said, incidentally.
Would you have any favourite artists or graphic designers that you think would be in my wheelhouse? Why not mention them in the comments below, there’s a good person.

N.B: I’d also given some thought to adding a thumbnail image for each entry, but that would be absolutely mental

Sdtrk: ‘Art today’ by Peel dream magazine

Under normal circumstances, I don’t make announcements on ‘Shouting etc etc’ whenever I post new additions to Galerie ECHO, as the blog would rapidly degenerate into a series of ‘oh snap, check it, peep the new art that just dropped in the Galerie, yo!!’ posts. Which would be, arguably, more continuous posting than I’ve done in years, ho ho. Also, if I’m writing like that, clearly I’ve experienced a stroke. But the fact that I’m developing an original character — which is a project in and of itself — should be mentioned, I think!

Back in 2017, I commissioned my favourite artist Yaruku to draw an illo of my Missus sitting atop a pile of discarded Gynoids. You’ve seen it before. As much as I love my Synthetik partners, they’re Dolls, not actual Gynoids, and I wanted to eventually have commissions made with Gynoids in various states of mechabare, which is a Japanese term (of course) that describes Gynoids and Androids wherein the fact that they’re machines is highlighted. So to that end, I came up with the original character, Annett, named after a Goth mannequin I used to have back in the late Nineties.

photo from roughly 2000. Annett didn’t play croquet; she just liked croquet mallets

SIDORE: ‘Annett’s a bit rude, she’s not said anything to me since I’ve moved in.’
ME: ‘She could just be shy!’
SIDORE: ‘No, I’m shy, she’s rude!’

The fact that I lopped off the E at the end of Annett isn’t just some typical weird Davecat-spelling fumfuh; I took the name from a German fetish fashion model I had photos of named Anette Kellendonk, aka Anette K. And in looking her up on Google for that link, it’s only now that I’m seeing, twenty years later, that her name is spelt with one N and two Es, so… lawsuit bullet dodged.

There’s three versions of Annett that I’ve created: the Mk.III is the one you’ve seen in the illo linked above that looks arguably the most Organik; the Mk.I looks like an updated version of die Maschinenmensch Maria from ‘Metropolis’, and the Mk.II, my personal favourite, is somewhere in between, having artificial skin with exposed mechanical joints. They’re mass-produced by Deafening Silence Robotics, the (unfortunately) fictional company that my lasses and I are executives of. And they’re my original characters, meaning that if anyone with the artistic skill to do so would like to draw them in whatever situation, they can!
As of this writing, I’m in the midst of having a friend of mine work on not only the reference sheet layouts of all three versions of Annett, but the standard issue uniform that they wear as well; once that’s done, they’ll be uploaded into a Google Drive folder, so if anyone wants to have a go at drawing an Annett Mk.II holding a Corgi, or maybe a Mk.I getting an autograph from die Maschinenmensch Maria, or etc, then by all means!

In the meantime, you’ll find all the pieces I’ve had of the various Annetts drawn so far interspersed chronologically within Galerie ECHO. Not only will you find art by the usual suspects such as Yaruku and Sthev, but new and equally talented collaborators such as CartesianCoordinator and Amondetauro as well. Will YOUR art of (the) Annett(s) — man, that’s confusing — be amongst them as well?? I mean, eventually and not right this second?! Send me an Email, and find out!!

N.B: I should also add that the addition of these new illustrations makes Galerie ECHO more NSFW than ever before! Under normal circumstances, the Annetts are semi-autonomous drones, so they literally do not care if they’re clothed or not. That’ll be another aspect to add to the backstory I’m developing for them, already in progress

Sdtrk: ‘Didascalies’ by Luc Ferrari

Hey! How are you doing? You’re looking taut, fit, and svelte! Good on ya.

Currently I am in the midst of attempting to type up a brief (‘brief’, he said, his fingers agonisingly carving inverted commas into the very air) summary of What I’ve Been Up To Since Roughly Early 2017, so until that’s done and dusted, my gorgeous RealDoll wife Sidore suggested that I go ahead and write the official announcement post regarding a new feature on ‘Shouting etc etc’: Galerie ECHO.

‘New what??’ you splutter, your tumbler of scotch crashing to the floor and startling your cat. Yes, new! And go calm your cat! Galerie ECHO — the spelling convention helps give it a European flavour — is a special page on this blog that collects all of the artwork we’ve received, commissioned and gratis, of the residents of Deafening silence Plus. Unofficially it’s been up since September of last year; astute readers have spotted it in the lefthand sidebar, I’m sure, but I simply never got round to making a public announcement concerning it. Which is what you’re reading now, so there’s that issue sorted.

Additional illustrations will be posted there as we get them, displayed from newest to oldest, so maybe scroll to the bottom and start from there, if this is your first visit. And hey! You good at drawing? You’ll find details about proceedings in the Galerie, but feel free to send me an Email if you have any artistic ideas, as we would love to hear ’em!

That being said, please enjoy Galerie ECHO! I should warn you that some of the illos posted there are NSFW, but throughout history, you’ll find scores of examples of artwork that’s not safe for work. Unless, of course, you work in a gallery or a place that makes Synthetik partners; in which case, it’s just another Friday!
…That being said, please enjoy Galerie ECHO!

Sdtrk: ‘Favours in the beetroot fields’ by British Sea Power

A happy new year to the very small handful of readers who still haunt ‘Shouting etc etc’! We here honestly appreciate your bloody-mindedness! Linus’ devotion to the arrival of The Great Pumpkin has nothing on you lot!

Doubtless you’ve noticed that there’s been nothing new on this blog since March of last year, apart from the post regarding the passing of Lord Bowie. I mean, there’s creative dry spells, and then there are droughts, right? Well, it wasn’t so much a case of me being unable to write, or whatever it is that I do for this site, but I can honestly place the blame on technical issues. Yay, it’s not me! Well, not 100% me. Heh.

Back round late January of 2015, I’d noticed that no-one was leaving comments. There’s been a dramatic drop in reader contributions for a while, which I attribute to Fecesbook being the pervasive and vacuous filth-hole that requires the least amount of thoughtful interaction that it is, but I found it strange that absolutely no-one was adding anything. I figured my audience’s interest had finally run its course and transformed into long-awaited indifference, until fellow iDollator Mahtek sent me an Email, saying he wasn’t able to submit comments. Well, shit, I thought to myself. Exactly how long has this bollocks been going on? This was corroborated a fortnight or so later by another fellow iDollator, Peter Synthetik, who’d told me that fact over the Twitters. Praise “Bob” for Twitter, eh? This is the part where you nod and agree with me.

Wanting an immediate, free, and relatively painless solution, I assumed that the blame lay in my blog’s theme. After all, it is quite old, although I prefer to call it ‘vintage’. So I set about the arduous task of selecting a new one. As you’ve probably noticed, I’m not the sort of bloke who’s keen on arbitrary change. For one, it took me months to tweak the theme into something that I found appealing, and then, when I finally had shaped what would’ve been the new theme into something not entirely appalling, I discovered that it wasn’t the theme that was the issue. Errm.

I contacted my server hosts, and they told me they could have their crack team of IT specialists get onto the problem, at a cost of $65 per hour. Funny thing is, even though I dithered about it for months, I was going to throw in the towel and pay ’em, when I arbitrarily checked on my WordPress dashboard a couple of days ago, only to discover that the problem had somehow sorted itself out. See? It’s like I say: if you sit around for months fostering a mild sense of worry and do absolute bugger-all, everything will work out! Fact.
So yes, comments are now re-enabled! Feel free to leave a charming reply on any post, no matter how old!

Anyway, that’s quite enough explanation. What, you ask, have the residents of Deafening silence Plus been up to since two zero one five?
+ We’d participated via Skype in an interview in November for a podcast out of Toronto called The DarkRoom, and the experience and results ended up being quite good: Episode #2 – Davecat
+ Nick van der Kolk of the podcast Love + Radio took up residence at ours (not really) for a week-end, also in November, and interviewed me at length. On Saturday, apparently I spoke for nearly seven hours straight! And boy, are my arms tired. Nick told us that our episode will debut this September, and if you’re at all familiar with Love + Radio, you know it’ll be worth the wait
+ Still fully employed at Great Job Industries™, and now that I’m a permanent employee, it makes for a better overall experience! The commute still sucks, though. Why can’t they simply move the building a mile away from my home; or better yet, move the facility to Toronto, so I’d have no alternative but to move to Toronto? Must I think of everything??
+ I’ve been playing a metric ton of Destiny. I probably should be ashamed of how much time I’m putting into it, and yet I remain unrepentant.

#warlockmasterrace (pardon the dodgy photo)

Finally, we’re very pleased to announce that there’s a new silicone lass who’s joined our ranks: do give a warm welcome to Lucy Winter! I should advise you right now that she hates her given name as much as I hate my surname, so call her Miss Winter, or just Winter. Made by Doll Sweet, she’s a Snowy head/160plus body, and we’re all completely smitten with her!

Lenka is especially keen on her, as Winter is hers. Remember: Miss Winter is Elena’s Doll, and Elena is Sidore’s Doll. I only have one Doll, Your Honour!
Miss Winter’s been here since 05 February, and you can expect to read a review about her and my experience with Doll Sweet on this here blog here sometime relatively soon. You can find her on Twitter in the meantime, of course…

And you are all caught up! I tried to make getting you lot back up to speed as quickly as possible! Clearly I have failed. But it’s okay, as your standard bearer for Synthetik Living has returned! I am invigorated! Invigorated, I say!! *tries to do 100 pushups, collapses three pushups in*

Sdtrk: ‘Some days’ by Martial Canterel

Don’t we all, insidious cash register; don’t we all.

At Shouting to hear the echoes, the official blog of Deafening silence Plus, we do our utmost best to bring you the most information possible concerning artificial humans, 20th century architecture and design, and above all else, relevant news regarding Davecat, his wife Sidore Kuroneko, their live-in mistress Elena Vostrikova, and their flatmate Muriel Noonan. This blog has been chugging along for a wee bit over ten years, and it’s the visits of viewers like you that keep stoking the coal fire, as it were. Why, if you’re reading this post, that means that at some point very recently, ‘Shouting etc etc’ has had its 700,000 visitor gaze upon its countenance! That’s a lot of visitors! Heck, most people can’t even count up to 100,000 without taking off their trousers!

Anyway, we’d just like to publically recognise this milestone, with a heartfelt Thank You, to those of you who weren’t just here looking for photos of Synthetik women. And even if you were, we hope you enjoyed your stay, and sincerely hope you’ll be back for — as we like to say here — more of the same! Cos let’s face it: you really can’t get writing like this anywhere else

Sdtrk: ‘Structures’ by John Baker

No, I haven’t fallen in a hole somewhere, nor have Shi-chan, Lenka, and Mew-Mew tied me up and subdued me, ‘Faster pussycat! Kill! Kill!’-style. Although that’d be interesting. No, recently I’ve been reconciling my post-work free time, clocking in many hours of Earth defense force 2025 with goshou, SafeT, and Euchre, finishing Far cry 3: Blood dragon, and replying to Emails, cos I’ll be rolling that particular boulder up that mountain for eternity. O, and keeping up with this year’s World Cup! As of this writing, our favourites England, Japan, Italy, and the US are out, leaving a match with Germany going up against France. Those would be two of our other favourite teams, so having to choose between them was like choosing your favourite child, or pet, or pet child.

@Davecat Well, you know ma soeur @AnyaManikin is not in Germany. So there, I made it easy for you. 🙂

— Rachel Madison Wells (@mydollyvita) July 4, 2014

But you’ll be pleased as punk to know that I’m working on a new post! A Synthetiks-related one! And there’s so much info/effluvium in it that it’ll have to be split into two parts! So if you like your women rubbery, you’ll have those to look forward to. And who wouldn’t? Idiots, that’s who. Idiots.

For an interlude in the meantime, why not enjoy some vintage footage of some fashionable models amongst the amazing architecture of Sixties London, whilst a piece by John Baker of the BBC Radiophonic workshop plays in the background?

I’ll be back after the break. O, and looks like Germany won! *stands up and starts to sing ‘Deutschland über alles’, realises he doesn’t know the words, sits back down*

Sdtrk: ‘Russian snow queen’ by Fursaxa

Hello there! There’s been a bit of a sea change round here at Deafening silence Plus, and as change tends to throw me off, I’ve been growing to adjust to the new situation. That’s my latest excuse!
You recall that job I’d gotten, where I was Master of Data Entry? Well, that’s in the past, as of March. Eventually, the inevitable happened: I’d run out of data to enter. It’s funny; as I’d mentioned, the project was supposed to last until February 2013, but I performed my job with such wicked blinding efficiency that I’d had everything in the database by roughly the final week of December. Data entry master. As the place I was working at didn’t just want to chuck me out onto the street, they began training me to be on the phones, which filled me with a genuine sense of dread. Luckily, I managed to secure a better job at the beginning of March, where I’m now doing order entry at a local shop that manufactures drill bits and the like. It’s 10min from home, it doesn’t have me on the phone with slack-jawed cretins, and it’s the highest-paying job I’ve ever had, which will allow me to save up that much quicker for Doll No.3. So overall I’d say it’s a win!

The weather in SE Michigan is almost sort of slightly starting to kind of resemble something akin to Spring, so both Sidore and Elena wanted me to do a photoshoot with them when we got a nice warmer day. And that’s precisely what we did last Saturday, with the usual enjoyable results.

Lenka was more than happy to show off her new clothes, and the Missus was more than happy to show Lenka her foot massage skills; as she says, I taught her everything she knows. The downside was that I had to draw a line under it after five hours of posing, repositioning, and clicking, as I was knackered. Multiple Doll shoots take a lot more work than I thought they would!
Incidentally, that box on our coffee table next to Elena’s foot contains the as-yet-unassembled HRP-4C Miim kit that I’d ordered, so at some point, I’m going to have to build that…

And speaking — as always — of sexy robots, here’s this illuminating video from The Globe and Mail, wherein Aubrey Belford goes to Japan and interviews underrated genius Hiroshi Ishiguro.

Think of that as a teaser as to the next ‘Any Synthetik-related news…?’ post, cos you know there’s one coming! It’s been months, after all, and there’s loads of items to catch you lot up on