woebotnik, top, on speed versus slowness. i wonder whether Screw and Eno (who complained about the excess of events per second in pop music/video) would have related. in kpunkian terms, cough syrup and all the other downers are like ingesting a small dose of death. there must be some semantic connection between "stoned" and stone, as in turning to... Caillois-style mineral kingdom awareness... On Land actually features the sounds of stones and sticks (and rooks), doesn't it... funny that Matt mentions Tricky at the end cos in some ways the extreme torpor of trip hop relates to all this.... depression of all of pop's vital signs.... the approaching-standstill of "Aftermath" and "Ponderosa"... music that gives up the ghost, releases ghosts... the DJ Vadim stuff perhaps took this arc the furthest, an abysm of skunkanoid paralysis .... ah and on the Portishead first album there's some screwed-in-all-but-name sampled vocals, Johnny Ray the Nabob of Sob slowed down into this molasses mire of melancholy....