METALUNACY: A REVIEW OF VISION 2040 BY PRIES VERHON

It’s been a funny nine months or so since Welcome To The Dark Ages. I’ve published two and a half books myself, been featured in another alongside Discordian Royalty and had my blog cited in academic texts.

I also managed to convince a load of super talented people to make a double concept album. And people are buying it. Hundreds of them. Our charities are going to get a big cheque and then I’m going to have a lie down for a bit.

I won’t sleep though, because it’s the lying down part of the day when my head pulsates with a plot of my next book and it’s imaginary musical adaptation. It going to be an inch thick and yet I’m still writing it on my phone.

So I needed a distraction and Eris gave me one.

Vision 2040 by Pries Verhon.

It arrived, without fanfare in my inbox, like a mysterious white label marked with nothing but a pyramid and a tell-tale font. 32 pages long. A cast of legends. And me. I needed to give it my full attention. I printed it out, stapled the corner and poured myself a midweek glass of red…

If ‘Whatever’ was the result of reading too many conspiracy theories too close to WTTDA and Giles Perkins stunning ‘Between The Click and The Bang’ was intense group primal scream therapy, then Vision 2040 is the insane acid cut-up of the pair. A nugget of pure gold, that if it was a song would be tucked away on the B-side of the limited second twelve inch release, probably only available in Sweden. It would be twenty three minutes long. Playing it out in a club would carry a government health warning and just having it in your collection at home would make you happy. You wouldn’t play it much. You wouldn’t need to. The track would have a life of it’s own off the turntable. When you replayed it in your head, it would sound like nothing else, but it came nowhere near to what your heard when the needle hit the groove.

What Pries has created with words, is the literature equivalent to one of his iconic treated photographic images. Everything turned up to ten on the dial. Your brain recognises a reality within the frame, but the vivid, sensory overload is a trip of its own. There is a music to those images and there is music behind the stream of consciousness that is Vision 2040.

This review will he spolier free, but the character of ANDY GELL resonated with me. A man of few words, he simplify smiles. A lot. And so did I. Remember that grin that was still on your face at the start of last September? Vision 2040 will take you back to those mad few days of chaos and confusion. Chaos, confusion and unbridled joy at the simple things in life, like face paint and bonfires and Ice Kream Vans.

Vision 2040 is available as a Kindle edition through Amazaba now, with a paperback to follow shortly.

Dive in and reactivate the grin.