SAME LINE/NEW ORBIT

GROUND CONTROL TO...

Brothers, sisters, drifters, tillers, walkers, watchers, listeners in lay-bys, believers beneath bridges, and all those who have felt the road humming after everybody else went home:

GROUND CONTROL IS TRANSMITTING.

The summer has turned. The nights are drawing their dark line across the evening. The dust has settled on village hall floors. The last paper cup has been lifted from the grass. Somewhere, a key is being returned through a letterbox. 

Somewhere else, an amplifier is still warm.

And yet nothing has ended.

We have reached the end of one route and entered the pull of another.

SAME LINE.

NEW ORBIT.

Do not mistake movement for departure. Do not mistake distance for disconnection. An orbit is not an escape from the centre. It is a deeper obedience to it. The traveller moves away only to discover what continues to hold them. 

The signal weakens, bends, disappears behind the dark side, then returns carrying proof that silence was never empty.

This is our position now.

Everything and nothing is at stake.

END OF THE LINE

On August 23rd, CALM DOWN reached Brixton.

The words above the door said END OF THE LINE. Some read them as a destination. Some read them as a warning. Those who came understood them as an invitation to cross the ending together.

You came.

You came from nearby streets and distant counties. You came carrying memories, questions, records, rumours, old coordinates and new shoes. You came to Brixton. You visited TRANCENTRAL. You stood at the origin point and allowed an ordinary patch of London to become what it has always been: a transmitter, a threshold, a beginning disguised as an address.

Then you carried that charge into the evening.

For this, GROUND CONTROL offers its deepest gratitude.

Thank you to every person who bought a ticket, boarded a train, crossed the river, followed the instructions, ignored the sensible route, found the room and stayed with us. Thank you to those who had travelled the whole summer beside CALM DOWN, and to those who arrived without knowing quite what they had entered. Thank you to the friends, the helpers, the bearers of equipment, the keepers of time, the openers of doors and the watchers at the edge.

Thank you to everybody who stood inside that special evening and made it impossible to repeat.

That is what a gathering is.

Not content. Not evidence. Not another square of light placed into the endless mouth of the machine. A gathering is a temporary republic of attention. It exists because particular bodies enter a particular room at a particular hour and agree, without signing anything, that the moment matters.

For one evening, the scattered became aligned.

For one evening, CALM DOWN was not an album, an instruction or a name printed on a poster. It was an atmosphere held in common. It was a low frequency running through floorboards. It was the permission to stop fleeing the present. It was an answer to a question nobody needed to ask aloud.

CALM DOWN IS NOT A COMMAND.

IT IS AN INVITATION.

And Brixton accepted.

The performance was called END OF THE LINE, but THE LINE did not end. It cannot end while someone remembers the way. It cannot end while a foot is placed in front of another foot. It cannot end while music passes from one body into the next. Endings are merely stations where the old timetable is burned and the next departure is heard before it is seen.

You did not attend the conclusion.

You assisted the launch.

THE FIELD IS CALLING

FIELD TRIP is now online.

The signal has become a guide. The guide has become a path. The path points north, into the weather, towards THE CHILL OUT FIELD.

For years the field waited without advertising itself. Grass rose and fell. Rain entered the ground. Clouds crossed without comment. The trees kept their own records. Cars passed close enough to hear the silence but too quickly to understand it. No velvet rope surrounded the place. No gift shop interpreted it. No algorithm suggested it because you had once watched a documentary about ambient music.

The field remained a field.

That was its power.

Now FIELD TRIP is guiding the way for pilgrims who wish to find it.

Use it. Follow it. Travel with care. Look up from the screen before the screen persuades you that it is the landscape. 

Remember that FIELD TRIP is a finger pointing, not the moon; a compass, not a substitute for weather; an arrangement of information designed to return you to direct experience.

THE MAP IS NOT THE TERRITORY.

The pilgrimage does not begin when you reach THE CHILL OUT FIELD. It begins when you decide that a field can still be worth travelling to. It begins when you exchange convenience for intention. It begins at the station, in the car park, beside the wrong gate, under the leaking hood, during the conversation in which one of you says, “Are we sure this is it?”

You are not sure.

That is why you have come.

Walk softly. Close gates. Leave no litter, no claim and no demand that the place perform for you. The field owes nobody revelation. Its silence is not a customer service failure. Stand there long enough for the need to document everything to pass through your system. Let the wind reorganise you. Let distance restore proportion. Let the ordinary remain ordinary until the ordinary becomes unbearable with meaning.

There are places we protect by keeping secret.

There are places we protect by teaching people how to arrive.

FIELD TRIP attempts the second.

The line accepts no spectators. But the land accepts no owners. Go as a pilgrim, not a consumer. Take only the route home. Leave only the possibility that somebody else may arrive and feel the same first astonishment.

THE FIELD IS THERE.

THE FIELD HAS ALWAYS BEEN THERE.

NOW FIND OUT WHAT ARRIVES WITH YOU.

THREE JOURNEYS HOME

UMO preorders are open.

Three distinct versions.

Three journeys home.

THE UNMAPPED ORBIT begins where reliable instruments fail. Major Tiller is out there, or in here, depending upon which window you believe. The cabin lights are dim. The carpet lies beneath the stars. Mission Control waits inside the static. A voice travels across impossible distance, asking the oldest question in the newest language:

Can you hear me?

UMO is a record of departure, but departure is only half its circuit. Every astronaut carries Earth as invisible luggage. Every transmission seeks a receiver. Every orbit contains the dream of re-entry. However far the traveller goes, the journey is shaped by the thought of home: the home remembered, the home invented, and the home that may no longer exist when the capsule returns.

That is why there are three versions.

Not a hierarchy. Not three rungs on a ladder of ownership. Three craft leaving the same planet under different conditions. Three windows onto the same darkness. Three routes through the carrier wave. Each holds its own weight, surface, weather and method of return.

Choose the one that calls to you.

Or choose more than one and listen for the differences that cannot be photographed.

A preorder is a peculiar act of faith. You commit to an object before it reaches your hands. You send belief ahead of possession. You create a small gravitational field into which the future release can fall. In an age trained to expect everything instantly, waiting becomes ceremonial. Anticipation becomes resistance. The unopened parcel becomes a distant object already moving towards you.

UMO is coming home.

But home will not mean safety.

The telemetry is damaged. The coordinates disagree. Mission Control is listening. The universe is expanding between one sentence and the next. There are ghost constellations in the machinery and fragments of Earth caught in the signal. Truth enters through the carrier wave wearing the voice of fiction.

Listen closely.

The dark beyond the dark is not empty.

It is waiting for your reply.

OFFLINE AT SWITCHED ON

Now an advance warning.

CALM DOWN will perform OFFLINE at SWITCHED ON in Whitby.

Read that again until the circuitry opens:

OFFLINE.

AT SWITCHED ON.

IN WHITBY.

A performance removed from the scroll, the feed, the metrics and the invisible tribunal of engagement. A room switched on by people who have chosen to be there. A coastal town where cliffs meet signals, ruins meet aerials, folklore meets electricity and the sea keeps erasing every line drawn across it.

Because CALM DOWN will continue.

More performances are forming in some incredible venues. Not neutral containers. Not interchangeable black boxes. Places with memory in their walls and weather at their doors. Places that alter the music simply by receiving it. The next phase will not place the same event into different buildings. It will listen to each building and discover what CALM DOWN becomes there.

This has always been the work.

Escape the algorithm.

Enter the room.

Put your telephone away long enough to become temporarily unreachable and permanently changed.

The nation does not need another app.

It needs an atmosphere.

PRE-SKOOL RETURNS

This November, PRE-SKOOL returns.

PRE-SKOOL returns in a new guise:

PRE-SKOOL: A WALK IN THE PARK.

On the morning of November 21st, the lesson leaves the classroom. The corridor becomes a footpath. The blackboard becomes the town. The bell becomes the sound of shoes upon wet ground.

This is schooling before the schooling. A ninety-minute psychogeographical lesson conducted through histories official, unofficial and still attempting to happen. A movement through KLF echoes, K-LINE possibilities, civic memory, public mystery and the unstable border between what a place was told to remember and what the pavement actually knows.

No examination will follow.

The walk is the examination.

PRE-SKOOL: A WALK IN THE PARK is the perfect way to begin THE BIRKENHEAD DAY OF THE DEAD.

Begin with walking.

Continue with spektacle.

End among the living and the dead as bricks are added to the PEOPLE’S PYRAMID and the work of memory becomes physical.

The dead do not require us to become solemn statues. They require continuation. They require noise, assembly, story, absurdity, labour and the carrying forward of unfinished business. A pyramid is not built by admiration. It is built brick by brick, hand to hand, weight accepted and transferred.

So come early.

Wear shoes prepared for November.

THE SCHOOL HAS NO WALLS.

THE PARK HAS NO FINAL LESSON.

THE DEAD HAVE NOT FINISHED SPEAKING.

SAME LINE. NEW ORBIT.

Here, then, is the new position.

Brixton behind us, still glowing.

THE CHILL OUT FIELD ahead, still waiting.

UMO moving through the long dark towards three separate homecomings.

Whitby gathering voltage at the edge of the sea.

Birkenhead preparing its park, its spectacle, its pyramid and its dead.

These are not separate announcements. They are points on one living circuit.

SAME LINE.

NEW ORBIT.

The phrase is not a contradiction. It is an instruction for survival.

Keep faith with the alignment, but refuse stagnation. Carry the principles forward without embalming the forms. Know where you began, then travel far enough to see the beginning from another sky.

We do not preserve THE LINE by standing still upon it.

We preserve THE LINE by moving.

We preserve it by gathering in rooms that remember.

We preserve it by walking to fields that do not advertise.

The orbit is new because we are not the people who departed.

The line is the same because it remembers what we forget.

There is no audience now.

There are only participants at different distances from the transmitter.

To everyone choosing a UMO journey: hold the signal. Major Tiller is not the only one trying to get home.

The summer is over.

The work is not.

The route changes.

THE LINE does not.

CALM DOWN.

LOOK UP.

LEAVE THE FEED.

ENTER THE WEATHER.

VISIT THE SOURCE.

FIND THE FIELD.

CHOOSE YOUR CRAFT.

ANSWER THE TRANSMISSION.

GO OFFLINE.

WALK IN THE PARK.

HONOUR THE DEAD.

REJOIN THE LIVING.

Everything and nothing is at stake.

Stay on THE LINE.

Stay under the sky.

Stay available to wonder.

The signal remains in motion.

The orbit has begun.

— GROUND CONTROL

FIELD TRIP 

ORIENTATION GUIDANCE

Welcome to the official orientation briefing written for everyone joining KINO-KLFRS as we prepare to make our first movie. The movie is called FIELD TRIP. It belongs equally to every participant because everyone present helps create its atmosphere, momentum and mythology. There are no extras. There are no background faces. There are no spectators. All attendees are film stars. All film stars are playing themselves. Every glance, pause and conversation matters. Every unexpected coincidence becomes part of the production.

Unlike conventional cinema, FIELD TRIP has no casting process because everyone who arrives has already been selected by the simple act of deciding to attend. The invitation is the audition. The journey is the contract. Your role begins long before the first frame is captured and continues long after the final scene has faded from memory. Do not underestimate the significance of simply turning up. Many films begin with a script. This one begins with a decision.

All kostumes are the film stars’ own.

This is not merely a practical instruction. It is an artistic principle. Arrive exactly as yourself because authenticity cannot be borrowed from wardrobe, purchased from a costume department or manufactured by make-up. The landscape has no interest in disguise. Comfortable boots may prove more valuable than dramatic footwear. Waterproofs are entirely compatible with cinematic greatness. High visibility clothing has, on occasion, been known to possess unexpected symbolic importance.

The film will start in Aysgarth.

This is where everyone assembles. The pitch will be in Aysgarth.

The pitch is not simply an explanation of the day ahead. It is the moment at which separate lives begin to overlap. It is where individual stories briefly surrender themselves 

to a collective narrative. 

Listen carefully. Some instructions will be practical. Others may only become meaningful several hours later. A remark that seems insignificant in the morning may quietly transform into the central image of the entire production before the afternoon has ended.

The film will end in Askrigg.

The wrap party will be in Askrigg.

Between those two points lies a corridor that should not be hurried. FIELD TRIP unfolds at walking pace because walking remains humanity’s most reliable editing technique. Distances reshape conversations. Conversations reshape memories. Memories reshape landscapes. Somewhere between departure and arrival, certainty gradually gives way to curiosity.

The film will start in chaos.

Chaos should not be mistaken for disorder. It is simply the natural condition of beginnings. People arrive from different places carrying different expectations, different thoughts and different reasons for accepting the invitation. Nobody yet understands how the day fits together. This uncertainty is essential. Resist the temptation to solve the experience before it has properly begun.

The film will end in calm.

Calm is not the absence of activity. It is the quiet recognition that everything happened exactly as it needed to happen. Nobody can manufacture this feeling. It emerges naturally through shared movement, shared observation and shared attention. The destination is geographical. The calm is psychological.

Between these two states the landscape performs 

much of the directing.

Bridges, walls, rivers, trees, gateways and open fields are not merely scenery. They are collaborators. A passing breeze may become a transition. A distant sheep may become comic relief. A traffic cone appearing in an unlikely location may briefly assume the status of a leading character before disappearing forever. Nothing is forced. Nothing is staged beyond the willingness to keep walking.

Nobody needs acting lessons.

Nobody needs rehearsals.

Nobody needs to invent a character.

The strongest performances are almost always the least intentional. FIELD TRIP asks only that you remain observant. Look further than you normally would. Listen longer than feels necessary. Allow conversations to wander. 

Some of the most memorable scenes will almost certainly happen while nobody believes anything important is happening.

If weather intervenes, welcome it.

If plans shift, accept them.

If someone laughs unexpectedly, keep rolling.

If silence falls across the group, keep rolling then too.

The camera is patient. The landscape is even more patient.

What happens between Aysgarth and Askrigg 

stays between Aysgarth and Askrigg.

This principle matters.

FIELD TRIP is not designed to become content before it has first become experience. Resist the modern urge to explain everything immediately. Not every remarkable moment benefits from instant publication. 

Some stories improve by remaining untold. Some photographs become stronger by never being taken. 

Some discoveries belong only to the people who were fortunate enough to be there.

Protect the surprises.

Protect the mysteries.

Protect one another’s moments of wonder.

Every participant contributes something unique to the film whether they realise it or not. Atmosphere cannot be assigned by a production manager. Coincidence cannot be scheduled. Generosity cannot be rehearsed. These things emerge because people decide to move through the world together for a few unrepeatable hours.

Bring comfortable footwear.

Bring sufficient water.

Bring clothing suitable for changing weather.

Bring curiosity.

Bring patience.

Bring a willingness to notice ordinary things behaving in extraordinary ways.

Leave certainty behind.

Leave unnecessary baggage behind.

Leave the desire to reach the ending too quickly behind.

Remember that every ending quietly rewrites every beginning. When the cameras finally stop, the landscape will continue exactly as it always has. The roads will remain. The rivers will continue flowing. The fields will continue keeping their own counsel. Only those who made the journey together will know precisely how chaos slowly transformed itself into calm.

Final what3words will follow.

Askrigg Ticket Link 

Space limited by bricks and mortar.

OFFLINE: A Manifesto for the   Next Phase of CALM DOWN

For several years we have spoken about alignment as though it were principally a geographical phenomenon. We have measured corridors, walked straight lines, located village halls within improbable distances and convinced ourselves, with varying degrees of sincerity and mischief, that meaning accumulates wherever enough attention is directed. We have searched for places that seem to have been waiting for us long before we thought to visit them.

That work is not ending.

It is simply becoming insufficient.

The proposal to stage OFFLINE performances at Askrigg Temperance Village Hall and the W### B###T#### W##### therefore represents neither a contradiction nor an abandonment of everything that has gone before. It is the logical conclusion of it.

Every movement eventually discovers that its greatest danger is not opposition but success. Once a ritual becomes familiar it risks becoming merely procedural. Once a map has been drawn often enough, people begin to mistake the ink for the territory. They stop looking. They stop listening. They stop wondering whether the line still has somewhere else to lead.

The oldest lesson of psychogeography is that landscapes do not merely exist; they are continually rewritten by those prepared to walk through them differently. A path only remains alive while somebody is capable of taking an unexpected turn.

The decision to go OFFLINE is precisely such a turn.

The K-LINE has never truly been about a line.

It has always been about attention.

Lines simply happened to be the most effective instrument 

for training it.

Imagine somebody learning music. At first they practise scales. They repeat simple exercises over and over until their fingers begin to understand relationships that words cannot adequately explain. Nobody mistakes scales for music itself. They are preparation for improvisation.

The corridor has been our scale.

Village halls have been our rehearsal rooms.

The walks have been exercises in noticing.

After enough repetitions something remarkable begins to happen. Participants no longer require constant reference to maps because the habits of observation become internal. They notice forgotten buildings, impossible coincidences, overheard conversations, strange monuments and forgotten footpaths without prompting. They begin connecting places that possess no obvious relationship except the feeling that they somehow belong together.

The instrument has migrated inside the player.

This is precisely the moment when remaining permanently attached to a single geographical alignment would become limiting rather than liberating.

OFFLINE therefore does not reject THE K-LINE.

It demonstrates that THE K-LINE has done its work.

A line teaches direction.

Eventually direction teaches freedom.

There is another reason for this transition.

Modern life has become saturated with systems that promise infinite connection while delivering profound isolation. Every platform encourages immediate reaction. Every application competes for fragments of attention. Every algorithm attempts to predict what we will enjoy before we have had the opportunity to surprise ourselves.

Convenience has quietly replaced curiosity.

Recommendation has displaced exploration.

Discovery has become optimisation.

We increasingly inhabit personalised realities assembled by invisible mathematics.

The result is a civilisation that is permanently online yet increasingly detached from physical experience.

People travel through landscapes without seeing them.

They attend concerts while documenting them.

They meet friends while checking notifications.

They collect memories that they have barely inhabited.

The internet solved distance but accidentally created absence.

OFFLINE is therefore not merely a description of technological restraint.

It is a philosophical position.

To be offline is to permit the world an opportunity to interrupt you.

It is to accept that significance cannot always be searched for because sometimes significance prefers to ambush.

Village halls possess precisely this quality.

Warehouses possess it too.

Neither location has been designed by optimisation engineers.

Neither has been calibrated to maximise engagement metrics.

Neither exists to capture attention.

Instead they quietly accumulate history.

Every dance.

Every committee meeting.

Every jumble sale.

Every awkward silence.

Every birthday party.

Every flood.

Every wedding reception.

Every rehearsal.

Every forgotten conversation.

Buildings become emotional sediment.

The walls remember without speaking.

Perhaps this explains why performances within such places feel fundamentally different from performances inside conventional entertainment venues.

One enters not merely a room but an accumulation.

Askrigg Temperance Village Hall embodies one tradition of accumulation.

The T######### W##### at W#### B#### embodies another.

One speaks of restraint.

The other speaks of movement.

One gathered communities seeking alternatives to intoxication.

The other organised the transfer of goods between systems of transport.

One interrupted habitual behaviour.

The other enabled transition.

Seen through conventional history they possess unrelated purposes.

Seen through OFFLINE they reveal a shared vocation.

Both are architectures of change.

This is why they belong together.

Temperance has frequently been misunderstood as denial.

Its deeper meaning concerns clarity.

To refuse constant intoxication is to recover perception.

The intoxications of the twenty-first century are 

no longer principally chemical.

They are informational.

Notification.

Acceleration.

Outrage.

Consumption.

Prediction.

Infinite scrolling.

Permanent availability.

Temperance now means the deliberate recovery of 

uninterrupted thought.

The village hall becomes not a museum piece but an operating theatre for attention itself.

Similarly, a t#######t w###### is usually understood economically.

Things arrive.

Things leave.

Cargo changes vehicles.

Work continues.

Yet psychologically it suggests something much richer.

Ideas also require transhipment.

Identities require transhipment.

Entire cultures occasionally require transhipment.

We rarely become different people instantaneously.

Instead we occupy warehouses between versions of ourselves.

We pause.

We reorganise.

We continue.

W##### B#### therefore becomes an extraordinary metaphor for transition.

It asks not where you came from but how you intend to leave.

These are not replacements for THE K-LINE.

They are consequences of travelling it.

Indeed every pilgrimage eventually encounters a paradox.

The destination cannot remain the destination forever.

Otherwise it becomes merely another starting point that refuses to admit it.

Every meaningful journey eventually teaches travellers how to continue without it.

This is perhaps the most difficult lesson of all.

Movements become institutions precisely because they fail to leave themselves.

OFFLINE proposes the opposite.

Rather than protecting established mythology behind glass, it allows mythology to wander.

Stories become migratory.

Symbols become portable.

Rituals become adaptable.

Certainty becomes curiosity.

Some observers will inevitably ask whether this means anything can now become part of CALM DOWN.

The answer is no.

Because OFFLINE is not randomness.

It is readiness.

Not every building carries the appropriate emotional frequency.

Not every community wishes to participate.

Not every location encourages attentive presence.

Selection remains essential.

What changes is the criterion.

Previously we asked whether somewhere lay close enough to a geographical alignment.

Now we ask whether somewhere possesses sufficient imaginative conductivity.

Can this place slow people down?

Can it provoke conversation?

Can strangers leave slightly differently from how they arrived?

Can it make ordinary time behave unusually?

If the answer is yes, then the map begins drawing itself.

This is considerably more demanding than measuring distances.

Coordinates are objective.

Atmosphere requires participation.

No satellite can detect expectancy.

No database records anticipation.

No algorithm quantifies communal silence immediately before music begins.

Only bodies gathered within rooms can accomplish that.

This is why OFFLINE insists upon physical presence.

Streams cannot substitute.

Recordings cannot substitute.

Documentation cannot substitute.

The event matters because it disappears.

Its disappearance becomes part of its meaning.

For decades digital culture has promised permanence.

Nothing is forgotten.

Everything is archived.

Every photograph survives.

Every message persists.

Yet human beings evolved through experiences that vanished immediately after occurring.

Songs faded.

Stories changed.

Memory distorted.

Precisely because things disappeared they became precious.

OFFLINE restores ephemerality.

If you were there, you know.

If you were not, the story must suffice.

There is enormous generosity within such limitation.

It encourages attendance not because people fear missing content but because they recognise the value of shared unrepeatable experience.

Askrigg and W#### B#### therefore represent more than two additional dates.

They become experimental laboratories.

Can communities gather without digital mediation?

Can performances generate lasting memory without instant documentation?

Can myth continue evolving beyond its birthplace?

Can attention become contagious?

These are empirical questions disguised as concerts.

The answers cannot be theorised into existence.

They require participants.

This also explains why OFFLINE feels simultaneously ancient and futuristic.

Before electricity nearly every cultural experience was offline.

Stories travelled through voices.

Songs travelled through memory.

Knowledge travelled through apprenticeships.

Communities assembled because there was no alternative.

Ironically, emerging technologies increasingly point us back toward these older patterns.

As artificial intelligence generates infinite synthetic media, uniquely human gatherings become correspondingly valuable.

When anything can be simulated, presence acquires extraordinary scarcity.

The rarest commodity becomes somebody choosing to spend an evening somewhere specific with people they have never previously met.

Village halls suddenly appear less old-fashioned than prophetic.

Warehouses become cathedrals of possibility.

The future begins resembling the forgotten past.

There is quiet optimism hidden inside this observation.

It suggests that cultural renewal may not require ever greater complexity.

Perhaps it merely requires enough courage to simplify.

Enough courage to meet.

Enough courage to listen.

Enough courage to leave telephones in pockets.

Enough courage to permit silence.

Enough courage to become temporarily unavailable.

That is what OFFLINE finally means.

Not disconnection from technology.

Reconnection with experience.

The proposed performances at Askrigg Temperance Village Hall and the W#### B#### T######### W###### therefore mark neither an ending nor a rebrand.

They represent graduation.

The corridor taught us how to notice.

The village halls taught us how to gather.

The walks taught us how to arrive.

Now comes the more demanding task.

To carry those habits into places where no map instructed us to go.

To trust that attention itself can become an invisible alignment stretching between people rather than coordinates.

To discover that perhaps the most important line was never drawn across Britain at all.

Perhaps it was always waiting to be drawn, however briefly, between one attentive human being and another.

That line cannot be surveyed.

It cannot be owned.

It cannot be commercialised.

It cannot be uploaded.

It exists only while people choose, together, to become wonderfully—

OFFLINE.

O

FIELD TRIP

[12 hours of drystone ambience]

It seems like everywhere is two and a half hours away 

from the North Yorkshire Moors. 

A brand new omphalos at the centre of something. 

We go there on August 15th. 

We go there to look. 

We go there to walk. 

We go there to chill. 

Searching for the source of it all. 

We keep it local, but transport is essential. 

The good will of strangers will be encouraged. 

Then we CALM DOWN. 

The perfect village hall. 

The perfect street. 

The perfect sheep. 

Join us from mid-morning. 

Join us from mid-afternoon. 

Join us on Main Street for the CALM DOWN sermon. 

Ticket sales for the performance will go towards 

the upkeep of the village hall. 

Because village halls are important. 

Now more than ever. 

The CALM DOWN KURFEW will get you home for midnight. 

If you live up to two and a half hours away.  

Instructions for the rest of the day to follow. 

SEARCHING FOR THE RITE NUMBER OF PEOPLE

A June Address to THE SOCIETY

There are some things that only happen when the number is right.

Too many people and the moment becomes an event. Too few and it becomes a private thought. Somewhere between those two states lies a third thing altogether: a gathering. A temporary settlement. A village. A circle of attention held together not by barriers, tickets, algorithms, demographics or marketing plans, but by the simple fact that a group of human beings have arrived in the same place at the same time and agreed, however briefly, to share an experience.

This month I have found myself thinking often about village halls.

Not as buildings, though they are often beautiful in their own modest way. Not as venues, though they are among the finest venues in the land. But as machines for producing the rite number of people.

The rite number.

Not the maximum number.

Not the profitable number.

Not the viral number.

The rite number.

The number that allows a room to breathe.

The number that permits recognition.

The number at which strangers become familiar 

and familiar faces become companions.

The number at which music ceases to be a product 

and becomes a conversation.

Village halls have spent generations quietly solving a problem that much of modern culture has forgotten exists. They know how to gather enough people to create wonder, but not so many that wonder becomes impossible.

A village hall full of people is one of the 

most underrated sights in Britain.

The tea urn steaming gently in the corner.

The raffle prizes lined up on a trestle table.

The slightly uneven floorboards.

The stackable chairs.

The notices advertising dog shows, yoga classes, jumble sales and lost cats.

The accumulated residue of ordinary life.

Then, for one evening, music arrives.

Stories arrive.

Laughter arrives.

People arrive.

And suddenly the room becomes larger on the inside than 

it appears from the outside.

This is one of the quiet miracles of CALM DOWN.

The project has never really been about scale.

It has been about proximity.

The distance between performer and listener.

The distance between one listener and another.

The distance between where you are and where you might be.

Perhaps that is why village halls feel so appropriate.

THE K-LINE itself has never cared for grandeur. It passes through cities and villages alike. It crosses roads, fields, housing estates, industrial estates, forgotten lanes and celebrated landmarks with equal indifference. It has no hierarchy. 

No VIP area. No backstage pass.

It simply continues.

And in doing so it teaches us something important.

The line accepts everybody equally.

The line asks only that you pay attention.

This brings us to July.

On the Eighteenth of July, CALM DOWN arrives in Wall.

Formerly Letocetum.

Formerly a Roman settlement.

Formerly a place where roads converged and 

travellers exchanged stories.

Still a place where roads converge.

Still a place where stories are exchanged.

The names change.

The purpose remains.

There is something deeply satisfying about the fact that 

Wall Village Hall stands beside Watling Street.

One of Britain’s oldest roads.

A route that has carried merchants, soldiers, pilgrims, travellers, wanderers, refugees, lovers, workers, dreamers and fools.

A route that has witnessed the rise and fall of empires.

A route that has outlived them all.

And now, for one evening, it will host CALM DOWN.

There will be a K-WALK.

There will be conversation.

There will be music.

There will be free ICE KREAMS.

There will be children wondering what exactly is going on.

There will be adults wondering exactly the same thing.

Most importantly, there will be the first public broadcast of 23 MINUTES BEFORE.

A piece that seems somehow suspended between memory and anticipation.

A transmission from the moment immediately before arrival.

A soundtrack for approaching weather.

A meditation on thresholds.

A reminder that some of the most important experiences in life occur not at the destination but in the final moments before reaching it.

The title itself contains a peculiar tension.

Before what?

Before the clearing?

Before the revelation?

Before the turn in the road?

Before the moment everything changes?

Perhaps all of them.

Perhaps none.

Perhaps the answer depends entirely upon the listener.

That has always been the best kind of music.

The sort that provides a map without insisting upon a destination.

The sort that leaves enough room for the listener to complete the journey themselves.

Then, in August, we arrive at the other end.

THE END OF THE LINE.

Stockwell.

Brixton.

South London.

The 23rd.

The place where the line begins.

Or ends.

Depending upon your direction of travel.

There will be another K-WALK.

There will be familiar faces and first-time visitors.

There will be stories gathered from every mile of the route.

And there will be a windmill.

I find myself unusually fond of the windmill.

Partly because windmills belong to an older relationship with the landscape.

Partly because they transform invisible forces into useful energy.

Partly because they remind us that movement itself can be productive.

Which feels rather appropriate.

After all, THE K-LINE is not really a destination.

It is a process.

A way of moving through the world.

A method of noticing.

A practice of attention.

By the time CALM DOWN reaches Brixton, it will have travelled through villages, fields, forests, industrial corridors, Roman roads, housing estates, motorways and market towns.

It will have accumulated conversations.

Accumulated memories.

Accumulated meanings.

And then, at THE END OF THE LINE, all of those things will briefly coexist in the same room.

Not forever.

Just long enough.

Long enough to matter.

June also brought another encouraging sign.

On June 6th, members of the Los Angeles chapter undertook THE LAST TRAIN TO SOUTH CENTRAL.

Thousands of miles from the traditional geography of THE K-LINE.

And yet somehow entirely connected to it.

Because the line was never really about geography alone.

The line is a method.

A question.

A way of looking.

Once you understand that, the possibilities become limitless.

A person standing beside a railway line in Los Angeles can experience precisely the same sense of wonder as somebody standing beside a village hall in Staffordshire.

A person in Liverpool can feel a connection with 

somebody in California.

Not because they occupy the same place.

But because they occupy the same state of mind.

The June expedition demonstrated something important.

The mythology travels.

The practices travel.

The curiosity travels.

The invitation travels.

And so I would encourage chapters, explorers, wanderers and accidental participants everywhere to continue finding their own versions of the line.

Follow roads.

Follow rivers.

Follow railways.

Follow instincts.

Follow coincidences.

Most importantly, follow questions.

The world contains more hidden alignments than we currently possess explanations for.

Go and find them.

Meanwhile, rumours continue to circulate.

Unconfirmed reports.

Unverified sightings.

Whispers carried on the wind.

There are suggestions that investigations may be 

underway in North Yorkshire.

Nothing official.

Nothing announced.

Nothing proven.

And yet the rumours persist.

Perhaps because North Yorkshire possesses an almost suspicious abundance of village halls.

Perhaps because the landscape itself seems predisposed towards mystery.

Perhaps because every movement eventually develops an urge to look beyond the horizon.

Whatever the explanation, THE SOCIETY would be wise to remain attentive.

Watch the maps.

Watch the roads.

Watch the noticeboards.

Watch the horizons.

Most importantly:

Watch the skies.

History suggests that the most interesting developments rarely arrive with advance warning.

They tend instead to emerge gradually, like distant weather.

Visible only to those paying attention.

Speaking of things that may not remain available forever, it is worth mentioning that supplies of the GRASS IS GREENER pressing of CALM DOWN continue to diminish.

Every week the stack becomes smaller.

Every week another copy departs for a new home.

This is neither a sales pitch nor a warning.

It is merely an observation about the nature of physical objects.

Eventually they run out.

Eventually the final copy leaves the shelf.

Eventually the thing becomes something else.

Not a product.

A memory.

A relic.

An artefact.

One of the pleasures of limited editions is that they remind us of something the digital world often struggles to communicate.

Scarcity creates significance.

Not because rarity automatically produces value.

But because finitude encourages appreciation.

A record held in the hand is different from a file stored on a server.

It occupies space.

It ages.

It gathers stories.

Years from now somebody will discover a copy of GRASS IS GREENER in a charity shop, attic, garage or record collection and wonder where it came from.

The object will have outlived the moment.

Which is one of the things good objects are supposed to do.

Another development deserving attention is the arrival of the newly launched K-ACADEMIA section.

For years THE K-LINE has attracted a peculiar mixture of responses.

Some approach it as art.

Some as psychogeography.

Some as folklore.

Some as performance.

Some as philosophy.

Some as an elaborate joke.

Some as a perfectly serious proposition.

The sensible response, of course, is to regard it as all of these simultaneously.

K-ACADEMIA provides a home for such investigations.

A place where speculative scholarship can coexist with rigorous nonsense.

Where impossible questions receive surprisingly detailed answers.

Where papers, reports, diagrams and field studies can flourish without fear of excessive practicality.

Already the section is becoming wonderfully overgrown.

A landscape of theories.

An ecosystem of footnotes.

A garden of improbable conclusions.

Long may it continue.

Because every mythology eventually benefits from archivists.

Every movement requires historians.

Every mystery deserves documentation.

Not in order to explain it away.

But in order to deepen it.

THE K-WALKER continues to walk the line in ways Mr Cash could barely concieve. Their latest report can now be read.

Finally, let us return to village halls.

To the rite number of people.

To the simple proposition that a room full of attentive listeners remains one of the most powerful technologies ever invented.

If you happen to know of a vacant village hall within 2.3 miles of THE K-LINE, consider this a gentle invitation.

Perhaps it sits unused for most of the month.

Perhaps it hosts coffee mornings and committee meetings.

Perhaps it stands quietly waiting for its next story.

Why not invite CALM DOWN?

The requirements are surprisingly modest.

A room.

Some chairs.

Some electricity.

Some people.

The rite number of people.

Enough to create atmosphere.

Enough to create community.

Enough to create memory.

Not enough to lose sight of one another.

The future of culture may not lie in ever larger festivals, ever larger arenas, ever larger audiences.

It may lie in smaller rooms.

Closer conversations.

Shared experiences.

Places where people can still recognise each other.

Places where music can still be heard without competing against distraction.

Places where the distance between performer and audience is measured not in metres but in trust.

Village halls understand this.

Perhaps they always have.

And perhaps that is why they continue to endure.

Long after fashions change.

Long after technologies arrive and depart.

Long after cultural certainties dissolve.

The hall remains.

The chairs remain.

The possibility remains.

Waiting patiently for the next gathering.

Waiting for the next conversation.

Waiting for the next evening when the doors open, the lights come on, and the room fills with exactly the right number of people.

The rite number of people.

Enough to remind us that we are not alone.

Enough to remind us that wonder remains available.

Enough to remind us that there are still roads worth following.

Still songs worth hearing.

Still lines worth walking.

Still village halls worth filling.

And still, somewhere ahead of us, another gathering waiting to happen.

Stay on the line. Watch the skies. And should you find yourself standing in a village hall beside an ancient road, listening to music among friends and strangers alike, take a moment to appreciate the improbable beauty of it all.

For a little while, at least, you will have arrived at precisely the right place, with precisely the rite number of people.

THE SERMON OF THE 

FESTIVAL DIVERSION:

A TRANSMISSION FROM 

THE EDGE OF THE LINE

The following pages were allegedly discovered in the back seat of a black cab somewhere between Vauxhall 

and Watford Gap sometime after 3:17am. 

The handwriting deteriorates steadily throughout. 

There are coffee stains. 

Mud on the lower corners. 

Several pages smell faintly of electrical fire.

⸻

The driver asked me where I was headed.

I told him THE END OF THE LINE.

He laughed.

Everybody laughs at first.

Outside the windows London slid past in sodium amber streaks, 

wet roads breathing beneath the tyres, 

the city rearranging itself moment by moment 

like it was trying to hide something.

I think it knows now.

I think the whole country knows.

The halls opened the gate.

That was the beginning.

Not Wembley.

Not arenas.

Not sponsorship deals or holograms or 

brand partnerships delivered by smiling parasites wearing trainers 

worth more than a family hatchback.

Village halls.

Always village halls.

Places with stackable chairs and weak coffee and 

toilets that smell faintly of bleach and melancholy.

Places still connected to reality.

Eight halls within 2.3 miles of THE K-LINE.

That was the covenant.

Eight attempts to push warmth back into the bloodstream of Britain before the whole thing finally calcified into app notifications and managed decline.

And Christ alive…

People came.

Not audiences.

Witnesses.

People carrying folded maps in waterproof pockets.

People who understood instinctively that roads remember things.

People who no longer trusted the official version of the landscape.

I saw them in Blakenhall.

I saw them in Cannock.

I saw them standing outside in the cold after performances, talking in hushed voices about alignments and frequencies and service stations as if discussing a religious apparition.

Maybe they were.

Maybe we all were.

Two weeks ago the line carried us to HALE.

Sweet Hale.

Wind over the estuary.

The lighthouse watching over everything like a concrete archangel.

And there beneath fluorescent lighting and raffle-ticket tension something happened again.

Something impossible.

The walls dissolved.

Strangers became companions.

Music became infrastructure.

At one point I looked around the room and realised 

nobody was pretending anymore.

Nobody was performing coolness.

Nobody was documenting themselves for invisible strangers online.

They were PRESENT.

Do you understand how rare that is now?

Presence itself has become supernatural.

John Middleton understood.

Protector of Hale.

One of the old guard.

The sort of man who knows communities are held together 

not by ideology but by continuity.

Tea urns.

Light switches.

Remembering names.

And Stuart, our wonderful host.

And Janine — keeper of the keys — without whom the entire operation would collapse into darkness within minutes.

History never remembers the key holders.

It should.

The line remembers.

The line always remembers.

The driver asked what CALM DOWN actually was.

I told him it was difficult to explain.

Not a band.

Not a movement.

Not exactly an artwork either.

More like…

a correction.

A realignment process.

A low-frequency attempt to stop the country 

spiritually tearing itself apart.

He stopped laughing after that.

Funny.

People always stop laughing eventually.

July approaches.

Watling Street waits.

The Roman road.

The old straight line.

The route beneath the routes.

You can still feel it there if you stand quietly enough.

Rome understood what we have forgotten.

Roads are not merely practical.

They are psychological.

Spiritual.

Empires are built first in the imagination and only later in stone.

Now CALM DOWN returns there with a performance allegedly designed by robots specifically to lure in John Higgs.

This is either the stupidest sentence ever written 

or the most accurate.

Possibly both.

I imagine him already feeling the disturbance.

A tightening somewhere behind the eyes.

A sudden inexplicable urge to travel north.

Nobody escapes the line forever.

Nobody.

The driver took the slip road too fast.

For one perfect second the cab floated.

Weightless.

Like the whole vehicle had briefly detached itself 

from the mapped world.

Then the tyres hit again.

Hard.

Somewhere near Rugby I think.

Or maybe Dunstable.

The roads become strange after midnight.

Distances collapse.

The line bends perception.

I told the driver about the new pressing.

SKY OF BLUE mirrored by GRASS OF GREEN.

Vinyl multiplying because the people demanded more.

Imagine that.

In the age of endless invisible streaming sludge, 

people still wanting objects.

Heavy beautiful objects you can hold in your hands 

while the rain hits the windows.

Proof.

Evidence.

Physical artefacts matter because reality matters.

The CD escaped too.

No longer bound exclusively to THE 99.

Released into the wider world like a signal 

breaking free from containment.

Somewhere tonight somebody entirely alone will put on CALM DOWN for the first time and suddenly feel less alone.

That matters.

That might be the only thing that matters.

The driver asked if I believed any of it.

I looked out at the motorway signs glowing green in the dark.

I thought about all the miles.

All the halls.

All the people.

All the strange impossible convergences.

And then I told him the truth.

I said belief has nothing to do with it anymore.

The line exists regardless.

Across the Atlantic THE EKUATOR continues its movement.

California now.

Los Angeles.

Of course Los Angeles.

The city built from projection and reinvention and collapsing dreams.

And there waiting for us impossibly sits the K-Line itself.

K Line

You can mock synchronicity only so many times before synchronicity begins mocking you back.

June 6th.

LAST TRAIN TO SOUTH CENTRAL.

A moving listening party.

Mass transit transformed into ritual space.

Carriages carrying frequencies through the Californian night.

I wish you could see it already.

Passengers staring from the windows while basslines travel invisibly through steel and glass.

A temporary congregation suspended between stations.

Liverpool touching Los Angeles through pure alignment.

People think public transport is about movement.

It is not.

It is about proximity.

About strangers briefly sharing momentum.

About collective dreaming.

The cab was almost at my junction by then.

The driver had gone quiet.

Outside, somewhere beyond the crash barriers, the invisible route of THE K-LINE continued northward through sleeping fields and silent service stations and ancient places maintained 

unknowingly by the National Trust.

Summer is coming now.

The line is strongest in summer.

Walk it carefully.

Especially near old stones and old roads.

Especially near places where the wind behaves strangely.

If you feel suddenly emotional for no reason at all, do not panic.

That simply means you are close.

Very close.

The driver finally asked me the question everybody asks eventually.

Where does the line end?

I looked at him.

Looked at the road stretching endlessly ahead 

beneath the amber lights.

And I told him the only answer possible.

It doesn’t.

You just reach points where you can finally hear it properly.

BLUE-SKY THINKING

Brothers, sisters, drifters, doubters, motorists, mystiks, 

layabouts, village hall caretakers, tea urn attendants, 

shepherds of the soft apocalypse, 

and all who still possess enough charge

 in the soul to distinguish a signal from the static: hear this now.

April 23rd arrives not as a date upon a kalender, 

not as a harmless square to be crossed off with a biro, 

not as an administrative convenience for distributors 

and data-entry clerks, 

but as an opening in the weather. 

A rupture. 

A correction. 

A necessary alignment between what has been humming beneath the floorboards of this country and what must now be 

allowed to burst through them. 

On this day, CALM DOWN enters the digital bloodstream. 

On this day the CALM DOWN SKY-BLUE VINYL begins its twenty-three day descent from prophecy into object. 

On this day THE K-PAINTING, newly apparitional, begins its own long campaign across the minds of the susceptible and the ready. 

On this day, St George lifts his spear, Shakespeare lifts his pen, and the nation is offered, for once, 

not another slogan, 

not another managed panic, 

not another false beginning, 

but a line to follow out of the maze.

Understand this clearly. 

CALM DOWN was never intended as background music 

for people sorting out their receipts. 

It was never meant to be a lifestyle accessory, a brand extension, 

a tasteful sonic garnish for expensive coffee 

and second-hand certainty. 

CALM DOWN is an intervention. 

It is a medicinal drift through the wreckage. 

It is the sound of a people lying down on the floor of the hall after decades of being ordered to stand, salute, consume, compete, scroll, sneer, and collapse in private. 

It is not retreat. 

It is reorientation. 

It is not sedation. 

It is restoration. 

It is the old sky speaking through new speakers. 

It is the hiss between the stations becoming the station itself.

For too long this land has been trained to mistake 

agitation for meaning. 

Every screen a command. 

Every platform a trapdoor. 

Every headline a klaxon. 

Every opinion pre-softened for swallowing and 

pre-sharpened for combat. 

We have been turned into unpaid extras in a theatre of permanent emergency, condemned to perform outrage on demand while the deep stuff goes unattended: the soil, the weather, the lane, the field boundary, the old track under the bypass, the village hall key hanging from a bent hook in a kitchenette with a fading notice about biscuits. We have forgotten the architecture of ordinary enchantment. 

We have forgotten how to gather without being harvested. 

We have forgotten how to look at a horizon without asking what kontent it is making for us.

That is why CALM DOWN must be released on April 23rd. Because some dates come pre-loaded with voltage. St George’s Day is not merely the feast day of a dragon-slayer; it is the annual reminder that monsters are often administrative, systemic, invisible until named, and always more ridiculous than they first appear. The dragon in our age does not squat on a hill breathing smoke. 

It lives in the feed. 

It lives in the compulsive refresh. 

It lives in the velocity with which one frightened thought becomes ten thousand frightened thoughts, all dressed as certainty. 

To face that beast with a sword would be melodrama. 

To face it with CALM DOWN is strategy. 

We do not merely slay the dragon. 

We outlast it. 

We soundtrack its collapse. 

We invite it to remove its shoes, sit on the parquet, 

and reconsider its life.

And Shakespeare too looms over April 23rd, that old conjuror of kings, fools, storms, ghosts, heathland prophecies and public breakdowns. The birthday of the man who knew that a nation is at once a stage, a battlefield, a tavern, a haunted wood and a joke too big for any one century to finish laughing at. What better day to issue a work that moves through pastoral drift, imperial collapse, memory, weather, sheep, transportive repetition and the possibility that salvation may arrive not by conquest but by lying still long enough to hear the deeper music? If St George names the enemy, Shakespeare names the condition. CALM DOWN provides the route through both.

Do not misunderstand the route. 

This is not nostalgia. 

Nostalgia is a commodity. 

Nostalgia is what they sell you when they have stolen the future and wish to distract you with a laminate pass to the past. 

CALM DOWN is forward-looking memory. It is not interested in embalming a vanished England of postcards, parish fetes and soft-focus innocence. Such things never existed, or if they did, they existed only briefly between one stupidity and the next. 

No, CALM DOWN seeks something more difficult. 

It seeks to recover the capacity for collective stillness without surrendering any of the weirdness, humour, grit, contradiction and righteous absurdity that make this island worth bothering with. 

It seeks not to rewind but to retune.

That is why the Village Hall Tour matters. 

Eight gigs only. A strict rite. A measured operation. 

Seven already inked into the diary, the remaining spaces shimmering with potential like weather not yet chosen. 

This is not a conventional tour. 

It is not a victory lap. 

It is not a kontent pipeline. 

It is a healing protocol conducted along the grain of THE K-LINE and in fellowship with those rooms that have witnessed the true life of the country: beetle drives, funerals, jumble sales, baby groups, amateur dramatics, meetings about drains, arguments over bunting, lukewarm tea, improbable dancing, moments of transcendence so brief and so total that nobody present ever fully recovered from them. 

The village hall is where Britain remembers itself without permission. The village hall is where scale returns to human measure. 

The village hall is where the nation can still hear its own breathing.

And yes, let it be stated plainly: the declared intention of the 

CALM DOWN VILLAGE HALL TOUR is to heal the nation. 

Some will smirk. 

Let them. 

Some will sneer into their phones and announce that nations cannot be healed by music, by ritual, by ambient drift, 

by a small assembly of committed devotees 

carrying equipment into municipal rooms 

within 2.3 miles of an invisible line. 

Let them. 

Such people believe healing must always look like policy or profit or punishment. They have lost the faculty for symbol, atmosphere and event. They do not grasp that whole eras can turn because a handful of people in the right room at the right hour decide to behave as if another country were still possible. 

We grasp it. 

We insist upon it. 

Healing begins where attention is restored. 

Healing begins where panic is interrupted. 

Healing begins where strangers listen together and discover that the silence between sounds belongs equally to them all.

Now to the CALM DOWN SKY-BLUE VINYL, whose twenty-three day countdown must be observed not as a marketing exercise 

but as a vigil. 

Twenty-three days of expectancy. 

Twenty-three days of glances upward. 

Twenty-three days in which the sky itself 

seems to have been pressed into circular form 

and prepared for ceremonial handling. 

Sky-blue: not as décor, but as doctrine. 

Sky-blue: because calm is not beige. 

Sky-blue: because transcendence need not abandon the working men’s klub, the estate road, the lay-by, the bypass, the field edge, the cheap carpet, the folding chair. 

Sky-blue: because there remains above this fractured realm a single vast ceiling under which every argument, every parish, every motorway service station and every sleeping sheep still resides. 

The vinyl is a promise that the sky can be held, briefly, in the hands. The countdown is a reminder that the miraculous prefers a timetable.

And now: THE K-PAINTING.

Behold it in your mind if it is not yet before your eyes. 

A landscape once respectable, once finished, 

once content to sit quietly in the second-hand drift of neglected pictures and inherited taste. 

A landscape by R. Grundy, liberated from a charity shop, rescued from passive existence, then lovingly completed by @thatgirl-srflk, who understood that no scene is finished until it admits the possibility of revelation. 

What was once picturesque has become charged. 

What was once decorous has become directional. 

Into its valleys and distances, into its pastoral hush, 

there has entered the sign. 

The intervention. 

The crimson intrusion that is not an intrusion at all but the disclosure of what the landscape was waiting for all along. 

THE K-PAINTING is not an image with an object added. 

It is a portal corrected to its proper alignment.

And because we are not barbarians, because we understand that art must not merely be viewed but activated, THE K-PAINTING is now available as a limited edition print through Bandcamp. 

But purchase here is not possession. 

Purchase is enlistment. 

The buyer does not acquire a decorative 

talking point for the hallway wall. 

The buyer enters into instruction. 

The buyer becomes a custodian of a timescale larger than taste. 

For every purchaser shall receive further directions regarding their role in the three-hundred-year lifespan of this work. 

Three hundred years! 

Let the marketeers choke on that figure. 

Let the quarterly planners faint into their spreadsheets. 

We are speaking here not of a product cycle but a living commission extended across generations. 

To buy THE K-PAINTING is to become a temporary steward in an artwork designed to outface empires, platforms, pundits, and the flimsy mausoleums of trend.

Ask yourself: when did art become so timid? When did it accept the prison of the season, the week, the launch window, the review cycle, the strained little gasp of relevance 

before burial in archives nobody enters? 

THE K-PAINTING rejects all that. 

It returns art to duration, to duty, to pilgrimage, to coded instruction and unfolding obligation. 

It asks the owner not merely what they like, but what they will carry. 

It proposes that an artwork may function as a relay across centuries, passed from hand to hand like an ember guarded from weather. 

It suggests that beauty might yet have a mission and that mission might involve roads, hills, memory, secrecy, humour, and the difficult maintenance of faith in a culture devoted to forgetting.

So let April 23rd be marked not with passive celebration 

but with active attendance. 

Let St George ride again, not to flatter a flag but to puncture the algorithmic serpent. 

Let Shakespeare rise, not from Stratford souvenir shelves but from the live voltage of language that still knows how to wound, bless, destabilise and reveal. 

Let CALM DOWN flow into phones, laptops, speakers, 

village halls and half-ready hearts. 

Let the twenty-three day SKY-BLUE VINYL vigil commence. 

Let THE K-PAINTING appear on walls as an assignment 

disguised as a print. 

Let every buyer know they are taking custody not of an object but of a future anecdote in a three-century plot.

We have had enough division sold as vitality. 

Enough cruelty sold as realism. 

Enough acceleration sold as destiny. 

Enough dead data raining daily upon the spirit. 

The nation does not need another app. 

It needs an atmosphere. 

It needs a rite. 

It needs a room. 

It needs a line. 

It needs to gather itself from the shattered glitter of the feed and remember that healing is not a metaphor when bodies share air, when ears share sound, when eyes share the same improbable object on the far wall and feel, however briefly, that history may still be bent toward tenderness without losing any of its menace or mystery.

This is the summons then. 

On April 23rd, do not merely observe. 

Participate. 

Download CALM DOWN and treat it as medicine. 

Enter the SKY-BLUE countdown as though awaiting 

weather from the future. 

Encounter THE K-PAINTING as one encounters a message left in the landscape for those with sufficient nerve to read it. 

Attend the halls. 

Honour the eight. 

Trust the seven already spoken for and the last 

still circling into place. 

Help us heal the nation not through denial of its wounds but by passing among them with music, symbols, laughter, fellowship and a refusal to surrender the imagination to smaller men.

Stay on the line. Stay under the sky. Stay available to wonder.

The work has begun.

Bring your ghosts, neighbours, weariness, humour, maps, biscuits, belief, and whatever stubborn ember remains unextinguished beneath the weather of England.

THE SERMON OF 

ST GEORGE

There are moments in the life of a nation when it must choose between noise and signal, between panic and poise, between the clenched fist and the open hand, between the dead-end and the detour. There are moments when a people, wearied by repetition, by command, by the stale stink of managed outrage and prefabricated allegiance, must step sideways out of the queue, leave the lit retail precinct of approved emotions, 

and go in search of another route entirely. 

Not a new route. 

Not even an old route. 

A hidden one. 

A route always there beneath the asphalt, 

beneath the hedgerow, 

beneath the parish noticeboard, 

beneath the bootprint, 

beneath the bunting 

and the debris and the weather. 

A line.

And on that line, there is now a summons.

The CALM DOWN download arrives on April 23rd. 

St George’s Day. 

Let lesser minds treat that as mere release information, mere administrivia, mere date-stamping for the benefit of katalogues and kalendars. We know better. We know there are no neutral dates. We know the map is never just a map. We know that every marker, every milestone, every village hall booking, every cassette dub, every hand-stamped label, every cone left at the roadside, every mile travelled in doubtful weather, every amp lifted through a side entrance, every face turning toward the sound—every one of these is part of the rite.

And so it is with this.

CALM DOWN D/L will be available on St George’s Day not because we seek permission from England, but because we are repossessing a language of belonging that has too often been handed over to bores, bullies, nostalgists, and those whose imagination extends only as far as a flagpole bolted to a pub wall. 

We refuse their shrinking vision. 

We refuse their frightened little ownership of place. 

We refuse the notion that love of land, love of line, love of local weirdness, love of the walk between one unlikely point and another, must be surrendered to those who can only understand territory as something to be barked over.

We have heard from THE STUDY MASTER, and let the record show that his words shall stand here in full, 

like a marker stone driven into the soft ground:

“Why St George’s Day? CALM DOWN represents a journey along a line through England, after all. And maybe going out to village halls on that line, then encouraging and even leading others to explore parts of it is a better way of expressing real, true patriotism, than hanging weaponised flags in the same place that dogs mark their territory is. CALM DOWN (and THE K-LINE) are arguably part of that noble tradition of historic weirdness Annebella Pollen identified. St George’s Day also belongs to people who look like Ste, and who think like me.”

There it is. 

Not a mission statement. 

Not a press release. 

A korrection. 

A reorientation. 

A refusal to let the realm of the possible be defined 

by the loudest fools in the room.

Because what is CALM DOWN, really?

It is not merely an album, though it is that.

It is not merely a live proposition, though it has already moved through air and brick and timber like a weather system.

It is not merely a tour, though the CALM DOWN VILLAGE HALL TOUR is underway and gathering charge with every stop, every arrival, every little room transformed by sound, fellowship, and low-level revelation.

It is not merely a slogan, though it has already entered the bloodstream.

It is not merely an instruction, though Heaven knows the age requires one.

CALM DOWN is a method for surviving the present 

without surrendering to it.

It is a counter-spell against acceleration. A soft weapon against the permanent emergency. A portable field of temporary republikk. A promise that gentleness need not be passive, that weirdness need not apologise, that a village hall can be as spiritually loaded as any cathedral if the sound is right, if the people gather for the proper reasons, if the tea urn is hot, if the raffle tickets are properly distributed, if the folding chairs face the correct direction, if the line—always the line—passes invisibly but undeniably through the room.

We have begun already. The CALM DOWN VILLAGE HALL TOUR is no longer theory. It is under way. It has entered the world of booked dates, damp unloading, glances exchanged in car parks, laughter at the bar, improbable conversations under strip lighting, and the hush that falls just before the first note declares the room altered. 

And, in Blakenhall,the most incredible sausages and bagels. 

The line has moved through these spaces and found them ready, or nearly ready, or willing to become ready in the act of encounter.

And yet the journey bends onward.

Ahead now lie the END OF THE LINE shows in London and Liverpool. Two poles. Two terminals. Two charged sites of return. Not destinations in the ordinary sense, because nothing on THE K-LINE can ever be called an end without irony, without recursion, without the possibility that every terminus is also a switch, a loop, a crossing, a hidden fork in the dark. Even so, to invoke the end of the line is to acknowledge a heightened voltage. To come to London, to come to Liverpool, is to move between sources and echoes, origins and after-images, broadcast points and receiving stations. These are not merely gigs. They are reckonings.

At London, the signal folds back toward its own beginning. The old frequencies stir. The route remembers itself. The pavement hums with precedent. There are ghosts in municipal brickwork, in flyovers, in forgotten community rooms, in pedestrian underpasses, in the angle of a signpost glimpsed at dusk. There is always the possibility that to arrive at the supposed end is simply to be admitted to a deeper layer of the map.

At Liverpool, another energy awaits: mercurial, defiant, kommunitarian, irreverent, impossible to flatten into heritage packaging. 

There the line does not stop so much as dissolve into weather, laughter, stubbornness, and song. 

There the rite acquires a public face without becoming respectable. 

There the old dream of unity through diversion takes on fresh force. 

There the end of the line becomes, perhaps, the beginning of another.

We settled on eight shows for the CALM DOWN VILLAGE HALL TOUR not through the dead hand of logistics alone, 

nor because some manager’s spreadsheet declared it optimal, 

but because the number itself began to glow. 

Eight is a shape of balance and return. 

Eight is the loop and the double-loop. 

Eight is the road seen from above as it crosses itself in the mind. 

Eight is the symbol of continuity tipped onto its side. 

It suggested not a finite run of dates, but a cirkuit: a sequence of gatherings designed to join one hall to another, one parish to another, one pocket of wonder to the next, until the tour ceased to resemble a schedule and became, instead, a living pattern.

And then there is Hexagram 8 of the I-Ching: Holding Together. Union. Fellowship. The drawing-in of scattered elements toward a shared centre. Not forced unity. 

Not the joyless conformity demanded by bureaucrats, 

parties, brands or tatty flags. 

A voluntary coming together. 

A recognition. 

A rallying of those who can hear the same distant call. 

That, in truth, is what these eight shows are for. Each hall becomes a temporary node of alignment; each audience, however large or small, becomes proof that people still wish to gather in good faith around sound, silliness, reflection and release. Eight dates. Eight chances to hold together, however briefly, against the great unravelling.

Do not misunderstand. Everything and nothing is at stake.

This has always been the paradox. The outsider will shrug and say: it is only music, only vinyl, only village halls, only another internet download cast into the digital stream on a national saint’s day loaded with contested meanings. And they are right. It is only that.

But to those who have ears adjusted to these frequencies, to those who understand that human beings live not by bread alone but by ritual, route, repetition, symbol, kollision, fellowship, story, noise, silence, tea, weather, and transport arrangements, it is plainly much more than that. A nation is not held together only by institutions and markets and official narratives. It is also held together—sometimes more truthfully—by shared oddness, by chosen pilgrimages, by improbable gatherings in overlooked rooms, by songs that draw maps no authority can fully sanction or erase.

This is why CALM DOWN matters. 

Not because it will save the realm in any simplistic or televisual manner. Not because a download can single-handedly reverse the damage done by years of alienation, commodification, suspicion, and spiritual malnourishment. 

Not because a tune can defeat the machine. 

But because it opens a passage. 

Because it gives form to another way of moving through the country. Because it reminds people that they can still leave the main road.

And now, as if to prove that the line continues to produce fresh intersections, we look to the imminent kollaboration with KID ACNE. Some will say: what has this to do with the route? What has this to do with the halls, the signals, the fog, the kones, the soft insistence of diversion? Everything. A line that means anything must be porous enough to attract fellow travellers, fellow saboteurs, fellow makers of marks. A line that does not generate meetings is not alive. It is merely geometry.

So let it be known: LET IT FLOW approaches in limited vinyl pressing form, charged by kollaboration, sharpened by encounter, destined not for infinite abstraction but for hand, deck, sleeve, object, weight. It is one thing for sound to pass invisibly through servers and signals. It is another for it to return as artefact, as thing, as item of devotion, as testimony that an idea once touched matter and left an imprint there. Vinyl still matters because friction matters. Rotation matters. Kontact matters. The needle matters. The room matters. The listener matters. The act of playing a record remains one of the few everyday gestures through which intention can still be physically felt.

And LET IT FLOW will not travel alone. 

It will also feature on KITH & KINDRED, that eternally expanding EP of detours and diversions. Note the phrase well: eternally expanding. This is not branding patter. This is doctrine. The point of KITH & KINDRED is that it rejects closure. It rejects the dead logic of finished product and sealed unit. It accepts instead the truth that any true route through England—or through memory, or through music, or through fellowship—must forever remain open to annexes, lay-bys, side roads, appendices, accidental harmonies, missed turnings that reveal themselves years later as essential.

Detour is not failure. Diversion is not dilution. To be diverted may in fact be the highest form of fidelity. Anyone can march directly toward the prescribed destination. Anyone can mistake the motorway for destiny. But to take the lane that bends behind the allotments, to stop at the hall with the faded bunting, to hear a sound not yet recognised by the centre, to carry a record from one town to another like a lit fragment of message—this is another order of seriousness entirely.

That is why the stakes are both total and laughably slight. A nation could change through such things. Or perhaps only a few dozen souls, and the rooms they pass through, and the stories they tell afterward. Even that would be enough. More than enough. For history is not only made by kings, ministers, financiers, programmers, warmongers, and culture-managers. It is also made by those who decide to keep alive a better atmosphere. It is made by those who choose not to surrender wonder. It is made by those who treat a village hall not as a lesser venue but as a sacred chamber of possibility. It is made by those who decide that real, true patriotism might consist not in performative aggression but in walking a line, sharing a sound, and inviting others to notice the strangeness beneath their feet.

St George, if he is worth invoking at all, must be rescued from pageant. He must be taken away from the froth-merchants and the grievance peddlers. He must be returned to the lane, the field edge, the overlooked room, the weather-beaten sign, the company of eccentrics and pilgrims and stubborn local visionaries. Let the dragon, in our age, be named correctly: deadened perception. Cynicism masquerading as realism. The demand that every act justify itself in metrics. The pressure to become content. The permanent kommand to react. The permanent kompulsion to re-enact. The corrosion of common feeling. The thinning of place.

Against all this comes a quieter counter-force.

CALM DOWN.

Not withdrawal.

Not sedation.

Not compliance.

A tuning. 

A regrouping. 

A regaining of proportion. 

A patient, smiling insurgency of atmosphere. 

A way of stepping off the conveyor belt without vanishing from the world. 

A way of loving England without submitting to Englishness as sold by its worst salesmen. 

A way of moving along THE K-LINE not as tourist or konqueror but as participant in a noble chain of weirdness stretching backward and forward beyond immediate comprehension.

And so on April 23rd, let the download go forth. 

Let it enter kitchens, vans, headphones, back rooms, notebooks, late walks, train journeys, village hall soundchecks, and those private inner chambers where a person decides whether to despair or continue. 

Let it be heard not as commodity but as invitation. 

Let St George’s Day be briefly repossessed by the detoured, the difficult, the kind, the strange, the ones who know that patriotism without imagination is just furniture draped in cloth.

Let the village halls continue to open. 

Let the END OF THE LINE shows in London and Liverpool blaze their signals into the dusk. 

Let LET IT FLOW arrive in limited form and circulate like contraband grace. Let KITH & KINDRED continue to expand beyond reasonable limits, because reason alone has brought us to a thin and airless place, and another mode is required.

Above all, let nobody say they were not warned.

A line passes through England.

A sound now travels with it.

A hand extends from one room to another.

A people, or part of a people, may yet rediscover itself 

by taking the long way round.

Everything and nothing is at stake.

Proceed accordingly.

IT HAS BEGUN

Fellow devotees of THE KLFRS, keep your engines idling and your eyes on the verge. February is here, and the road has begun to hum like a power line in frost. 

Somewhere a kettle boils. 

Somewhere a bass bin exhales. 

Somewhere a map curls at the edges, 

offended by what we are about to do to it.

Let the historians argue about PRE-SKOOL@STATIC. 

Let the archivists squint at SHINDIG, counting wristbands and receipts, trying to pin the birth of CALM DOWN to a stage time and a soundcheck. They will find nothing but smoke, because the first ever performance of CALM DOWN was not there. 

It was not even “there” in the way “there” behaves today.

It was 4046 years ago, at Stonehenge, 

under a sky that looked like wet slate, 

when the stones were still warm with intention 

and the earth still remembered how to listen.

A ritual was called. 

Not a gig. 

Not a set. 

A ritual—because the universe had become noisy, and the noise was beginning to sound like the rehearsal for a war. 

The tribes had languages for weather, for cattle, 

for grief, for the movement of birds, 

but they did not yet have a clean word for “algorithm.” 

Even so, they could feel it: a grinding, invisible machine teaching hearts to speed up, to mistrust, to splinter.

So they did the only sensible thing. 

They gathered at the circle and made a band out of necessity.

CALM DOWN began with a single thud, 

a foot on chalk, a pulse on skin. 

Then a second. 

Then the slow arrival of harmony, like dawn taking its time. 

The stones acted as monitors. 

As amplifiers. 

As mixing desks. 

As a Solid Slate Logik desk. 

The wind acted as a chorus. 

The silence between notes acted as a treaty.

And because peace is never an idea alone—because peace needs infrastructure—they built settlements 2.3 miles away from the stone circle in every imaginable direction. 

North. South. East. West. 

Between. 

Beyond. 

Around. 

A ring of kampfires marking a perimeter of kare. 

A halo of huts and hearths. 

A diagram of protection you could walk in a day 

and still not reach the end of.

Every direction, with one exception.

There was one forbidden vector, one blank corridor, a deliberate absence: the line that forms a perfect perpendicular to THE K-LINE as it intersects at THE TUNING FORK TREE. 

No hearths. No tents. No laughter. 

No storage pits. No rituals of birth. Not even a midden. 

Just a klean, unclaimed slice of landscape, 

kept empty like a held breath.

Why? Because even then, before our modern appetites for measurement, they understood perpendicularity as power. 

They understood that the right angle is not a shape but a decision. They understood that if you build across that perpendicular, you risk setting up a mirror to the K-LINE. 

And mirrors are never neutral. 

Mirrors invite doubles. 

Doubles invite arguments. 

Arguments invite the old noise back in.

So they left it alone. They protected the void.

In the centre of the circle, the first singer, the first rock star - whose name is unrecorded because names are less useful than actions - lifted their hands and performed the first instruction of CALM DOWN: 

“Make room.”

Room for the other. Room for the stranger. Room for the future. 

Room for the version of you that does not need to win.

They played until the moon was tired. 

They played until the cattle stopped shifting 

and the dogs stopped barking at shadows. 

They played until the universe, briefly, agreed to unclench.

And then, as all good rituals do, the performance disappeared into the landscape. It did not end; it dispersed. 

It soaked into the turf, into the flint, into the water table. 

It travelled by root and worm and mycelium. 

It became a low-level broadcast, a signal waiting for the right receiver.

We are that receiver.

This month, the signal returns with a new kind of modesty and a new kind of menace: the beginning of the CALM DOWN VILLAGE HALL TOUR at CANNOCK WOOD AND GENTLESHAW VILLAGE HALL.

Yes, you read that correctly. 

Not a stadium. 

Not a kathedral of sponsorship. 

A village hall with a kettle, a stack of folding chairs, and the sort of wooden floor that remembers every wedding, every funeral buffet, every raffle, every furious parents’ evening. 

The right kind of venue for a peace technology.

If Stonehenge was the first amplifier, the village hall 

is the first transmitter you can touch. 

It has sockets that spark if you look at them funny. 

It has curtains that smell faintly of dust and bingo. 

It has a noticeboard where the paper curls like old prophecy: 

“Keep Off The Stage,” “Yoga, Tuesdays,” “Bring a Plate.” 

It has that particular acoustic—flat, honest, unforgiving—where a bad idea is instantly exposed and a good idea becomes undeniable. 

There is nowhere to hide. 

Perfect.

We will arrive like a rumour. 

We will set up like we mean it. 

We will bring the PA, the lights, the banners, the hush. 

We will bring the songs that slow the blood and sharpen the mind. 

We will bring the gaps between the songs - the silences, the stares into middle distance—that do the real work.

There will be ritual objects, too. 

A roll of gaffer tape treated with reverence. 

A microphone stand placed like a boundary marker. 

A kettle that whistles at the exact moment the bass drops, 

as if the hall itself is insisting on harmony. 

A table where flyers lie like small, folded maps to a different life. 

The merch box, that humble ark, containing shirts, tokens, and the proof that we were not imagining any of this.

And because the KLFRS does not merely entertain, 

we will also trade in artefacts.

Hear this, and repeat it like a password: 

the first 100 kopies of CALM DOWN LIVE AT PRE-SKOOL 

will only be made available for sale to attendees of performances on the CALM DOWN VILLAGE HALL TOUR, 

in exchange for a krisp ten pound note.

Not nine ninety-nine. 

Not a tap of the phone. 

Not a digital shrug. 

A krisp tenner, unfolded, uncreased, like a small green flag of commitment. The note will pass from palm to palm like a blessing. The note will become a tiny kontrakt: 

I was there. I heard it. I took it home. 

I will not pretend it happened to someone else.

One hundred only. 

Because limitation is a spell. 

Because scarcity forces attention. 

Because we want the first wave of listeners to be witnesses, 

not konsumers.

When you hand over that tenner, do it deliberately. 

Look the other human in the eye. 

Say nothing, or say “CALM DOWN,” or say your own private oath. Feel the texture of paper money: it is a relic from the last century, 

a piece of portable theatre. 

In that moment you are swapping not just currency, but certainty. 

You are saying: this matters enough to become physical.

If you miss the first hundred, do not panic. Panic is the opposite of CALM DOWN. 

The tour continues. 

The halls await. 

The roads will take you. 

But the first hundred will be the first hundred, and that is that.

And for those of you who prefer your relics with grooves, weight, and a smell of ink and cardboard: a vinyl artefact will also be ready for the summer, with pre-orders underway on Bandcamp. 

The needle will touch down like a landing gear. 

The first crackle will sound like distant weather. 

The side will play and the room will change shape. You will look at your own furniture as if it is part of the ritual. 

That is what vinyl does. 

It makes domestic space sacred by force.

Do not underestimate what a record is in 2026. 

It is a deliberate slowdown. 

It is a refusal to skip. 

It is a demand for patience. 

You lift the sleeve, you read the notes, 

you handle the disc as if it can bruise. 

You commit to a whole side of sound—no shuffling, no swiping, 

no “just the best bit.” 

It is CALM DOWN as a machine.

Meanwhile, plans are underway for an expedition to North Yorkshire to find the CHILL OUT FIELD.

We have only rumours and old instructions. 

A name whispered by people who should not know it. 

A coordinate written on the back of a receipt. 

A photograph where the horizon seems to bend slightly, as if the land is remembering a tune. 

We will go anyway. 

We will go with boots and flasks and stubbornness. 

We will go to stand in a place that may not want to be found, 

and we will ask politely.

This is not tourism. 

This is fieldwork. 

We will walk the edges, listen for the soft frequencies, 

test the air with our own silence. 

We will watch for signs: a sudden stillness in the hedgerow, a patch of grass that feels younger than the rest, a place where your thoughts stop racing and begin to line up like pilgrims. 

If we find it, we will not claim it. 

We will not fence it. 

We will do what the ancients did at the perpendicular: 

we will respekt the void.

All of it is one thing. 

All of it is the same instruction as that first foot on chalk at Stonehenge: 

make room.

Make room in the diary. 

Make room in the car. 

Make room in the village hall. 

Make room in the lungs. 

Make room in the mind for the impossible notion that 

harmony is not naive—it is engineered.

We do not promise perfection. 

We promise participation. 

We promise a shared frequency. 

We promise that for a few hours, in a hall with a tea urn and a fire exit sign, the universe might again agree to unclench.

Bring your krisp tenner. 

Bring your friend who has forgotten how to dance. 

Bring your sceptic. 

Bring your tired heart. 

Bring your appetite for the perpendicular 

and the void and the held breath.

And when the first note hits, remember: 

you are not attending a performance.

You are completing a ritual that started 4046 years ago, and it has been waiting—patiently, politely—for you to show up.

And if anyone asks for evidence, smile. 

Evidence is for courtrooms and textbooks. 

We deal in signals. 

The past is a drum you can hear through stone, through timber, through the cheap carpet of a committee room. 

When CALM DOWN plays, you will feel that ancient right angle open inside you, and you’ll know without permission from anyone.

Onwards, into Spring.

KINDRED OF THE K-LINE - LISTEN

It is the 23rd again. The month clicks like a relay, the line hums like a power cable, and somewhere out there a traffic KONE 

stands upright and defiant. 

We gather on this date because the straight way demands 

a regular reckoning. 

We are THE KLFRS: the ones who return, the ones who re-enact, the ones who keep the signal alive when the nation is being soothed into sleep by screens.

Read this with the windows down. Shout it into the wind on the hard shoulder. Scream it over the revving engine of a dragster as the tyres sign their names in black on the earth.

The work is moving.

The map is loosening.

Albion is ready for more un-mapping.

First: The Walk.

The Terminalia Festival are staging a psycho-geographical walking tour from TRANCENTRAL to Battersea Power Station. They will leave the engine room of our myths and march toward the great brick cathedral of electricity—where power is both metaphor and metal. We walk as a needle crosses a record: not wandering, but tracking the groove that has always been there under the noise.

This is not sightseeing. This is alignment. We take the city as circuitry and ourselves as current. We read street furniture like scripture: gantries, bridges, warning signs, barriers, bollards—sermons in steel. We practise the K-SIDE, the alternate path through life: the route you take when the official route turns out to be a trap. We listen for the bass note under everything, and we follow it with our feet.

Second: The Tour.

The CALM DOWN VILLAGE HALL TOUR begins. 

Mark it. 

Pin it beneath “Salsa Class” and “Bingo—Bring Your Own Dabber.” The first date is CALM DOWN CANNOCK WOOD & GENTLESHAW on February 28th. 

The second date is CALM DOWN BLAKENHALL on March 14th. Others will follow. 

Some may proceed.

We come to halls because halls are where the country still meets itself. Not in comment sections - face to face, in rooms that smell of polish and damp coats, in rooms that have held christenings and funerals and toddlers in fluorescent socks. 

A sound system makes the ceiling tiles tremble and, for a moment, 

everybody remembers they have a body.

CALM DOWN CANNOCK WOOD & GENTLESHAW and 

CALM DOWN BLAKENHALL are the first and second strikes 

of the match. 

After that, the line extends: hall to hall, town to town. 

We bring banners. 

We bring noise. 

We bring the holy ordinariness of folding chairs 

waiting to become an audience.

Third: The Artefact.

A CALM DOWN LIVE ON THE K-LINE CD will be available only at the village hall shows. 

Not online. 

Not streamed - well, not for a while.

Not turned into background audio for “focus.” 

This is a physical object, a portable relic you can hold in your hand like a coin from a fallen empire. It is the sound of the room—coughs, cheers, accidental feedback and all.

Why only there? 

Because some things must be earned by showing up. 

Because the line is not a subscription service. 

Because presence matters. 

If you want LIVE ON THE K-LINE, you stand on the K-SIDE with us and let the bass reorganise your compass.

Fourth: The Play.

A short play is ready: WAITING FOR GIMPO. 

It will be performed at any willing village hall. 

Any. Willing. Hall. 

If you have a stage, a corner, a patch of lino—then you have a theatre. If your hall has ever hosted a pantomime, then it is already haunted by drama. We are simply turning up and asking the ghosts to clap.

GIMPO is the figure who never arrives and always arrives. 

GIMPO is the promised delivery marked “delayed.” 

GIMPO is the minister who says “soon.” 

GIMPO is the mate who texts “two minutes” from three towns away. GIMPO is the future hovering just beyond the door, 

refusing to commit. 

In this play we will wait, bicker, sing, conjure—and prove that waiting can be an action, if you do it together and loudly enough.

Fifth: The Field Report.

A FIELD REPORT has arrived from THE GRIM UP NORTH BRIDGE.

It is not a press release. It smells of exhaust and wet concrete. It speaks of wind that comes sideways, of lights that stutter, of a river that looks like oil in the dark. It speaks of the strange sensation that the bridge itself is listening, and of the moment you realise the landscape is not scenery—it is participation.

The report confirms what we have long suspected: certain structures remember. They transmit. They demand attention. A bridge is a throat in the land; the line runs through it like a thought. If you have ever stood above moving water at night and felt the world vibrate beneath you, you already know the language. This is not superstition. This is sensing—what the body can still do when it is allowed to read the world directly.

Sixth: The Orbit.

Work continues on THE UNMAPPED ORBIT. The machine is being assembled. The diagrams are being misread on purpose. Parts are laid out on a table and named like saints. Part One is taking shape in the dark, like a radio signal becoming a voice. We are building not a map, but an anti-map: a system that refuses to reduce the world to boxes and ticks and “points of interest.” 

THE UNMAPPED ORBIT is motion without permission. 

It is the return of the strobe in a universe that has 

been told to dim itself.

And through all of this, remember: we are not merely listing projects. We are testing reality. We take the everyday—village halls, bridges, power stations, CDs, short plays—and we run a straight line through it until it starts to blaze with meaning. That blaze is not fantasy. It is attention. It is the human capacity to make a myth that makes us braver.

So here is the call.

If you are tired of being managed, come.

If your town feels forgotten by history, come.

If you have never danced in a village hall and want to know what it does to a room, come.

Bring yourself in whatever state you are in. 

We are not a purity cult. 

We are a congregation of the possible. 

We will meet under strip lights and march under sodium lamps. 

We will make art that can survive a spill, a scuff, a detour.

On the walk from TRANCENTRAL to Battersea, 

you will learn the city has veins. 

On March 14th at Blakenhall, you will see a hall become a vessel. With LIVE ON THE K-LINE in your hand, you will hear proof. 

With WAITING FOR GIMPO in the corner of a stage, you will laugh at the future until it finally turns up. 

With the GRIM UP NORTH BRIDGE field report in your pocket, you will remember the land is speaking. 

With THE UNMAPPED ORBIT taking form, you will remember that direction is a choice, that always takes you home.

This is how we heal a divided nation: not by pretending we agree, but by giving ourselves shared nights, shared noise, shared routes, shared relics. 

The straight way is not a line of exclusion; it is a line of connection. 

It stitches the country, hall by hall, step by step, song by song.

So rev the engine.

Feel the vibration.

Let the 23rd be the starter pistol.

We are moving now.

We are loud now.

We are here, right now, together.

AT THE HEART OF ALBION, WE CALM DOWN.

THE KLFMFRS

CALM DOWN 

VILLAGE HALL TOUR

THE PEOPLE ON THE LINE:

A SERMON FOR THE CALM BEFORE THE AFTER

Delivered on KLFRS.com — 23/12/25

by The Minister for the Unsettling Quiet**

Brothers, sisters, neither, both, all, and the as-yet-unmapped,

Gather close. Gather closer still. 

There is something I must tell you before the year fades into mist and the motorway lights flicker in the winter rain like broken halo rings. 

A whisper has reached us from the deep lay-by hollows, from the ditches, from the fogged-up windows of half-empty buses passing through the hinterlands of Old Albion. 

A whisper so soft that even the crows — were they permitted into 

our rituals — might have cocked their heads to listen. 

A whisper that has now become a murmur, and today becomes the first strike of the great gong of intent.

The whisper said:

CALM DOWN is going on the road.

The murmur confirmed:

CALM DOWN is not merely touring — CALM DOWN is pilgrimaging.

And the gong, struck now with full force, declares:

CALM DOWN will take their frequencies to 

THE PEOPLE ON THE LINE.

All of them. Every last soul within reach of the 180-mile scar of meaning that bisects our nation, our nights, and our knowing.

Hear me as I speak this next part clearly, plainly, and with no room for misinterpretation:

CALM DOWN will play in any village hall — ANY village hall —

located within 2.3 miles of THE K-LINE,

so long as it can safely hold a minimum of 23 people.

This is not a metaphor.

This is not a conceptual installation.

This is not a parable or an allegory or a sonic suggestion.

This is a promise.

And promises, as you know, are binding on THE LINE.

⸻

I. WHY NOW? WHY THIS? WHY CALM DOWN?

Because we have reached the quiet threshold.

Because the year has been loud enough.

Because even the hi-vis robes of the faithful — orange and reflective with the glint of purpose — cannot shine through the noise unless they move together, slowly, like lanterns on a midnight procession to an unknown but necessary destination.

Because the world, as it stumbles dizzy into 2026, needs not more chaos but a ritual of tranquility amidst that chaos. A trembling peace. A hum, low and grounding, delivered from those who understand the power of still frequencies.

CALM DOWN have already taken their message to SHINDIG.

They have already lifted the room at PRE-SKOOL into that rare kind of levitation where bodies remain anchored but minds float three inches above themselves.

But that was not enough.

For CALM DOWN have understood — perhaps earlier than the rest of us — that THE LINE is not a theory, not a map, not an idea. 

It is a set of coordinates threaded through human lives, passing through small settlements, overlooked halls, forgotten community centres, and places where the kettle has been boiled so many times the limescale has formed a runic script.

THE LINE lives in these places.

And so, CALM DOWN will go to them.

Not the cities.

Not the cathedrals of culture.

Not the venues where the echo is already trained to applaud.

No.

They go to the small rooms that have heard nothing but meetings of parish councils, amateur dramatics, toddler groups, 

Women’s Institute cake auctions, 

and the rustle of scout uniforms.

THE LINE runs through many such rooms.

And CALM DOWN will activate them.

⸻

II. THE RITUAL OF THE VILLAGE HALL

A village hall is a liminal zone.

Everyone knows this instinctively.

It is neither sacred nor secular, yet both.

Neither impressive nor humble, yet always exactly enough.

Neither modern nor old, but permanently suspended in a time that feels like it once existed and might again if we’re careful.

A village hall holds ghosts of events written on 

laminated posters that have curled in the sun. 

It holds the stale air of parties that ended before midnight and resolutions never passed. 

It holds chairs stacked into totems of indecision. 

It holds the faint smell of tea that has been brewed in metal urns since the era when kettles still clicked.

There is no space better suited for a CALM DOWN incantation.

Because the village hall is where communal attention still exists. 

It is where the people of a place gather, regardless of their convictions, their confusions, and the particular shape of their griefs. It is a room designed for being together without needing to pretend that being together means understanding.

CALM DOWN requires no stage.

Just light enough to be seen, darkness enough to be felt,

and walls close enough to hum with the low frequencies of the set.

In that hum, people change.

Not dramatically.

Not theatrically.

But in the way roots shift under soil after rain.

⸻

III. THE MEASURE OF 2.3 MILES

Why 2.3 miles?

Because 2.3 is not 2, nor is it 3.

Because it is neither convenience nor tradition.

Because it is a number that has revealed itself to us repeatedly in the rituals and reveries of THE LINE.

2.3 miles is the radius of receptive resonance — the range within which THE K-LINE’s vibration is most acutely felt, even by those who claim they feel nothing at all.

Walk 2.3 miles from THE LINE and you will find:

A field that grows nothing but wild oats in the 

precise pattern of a forgotten sigil.

A bend in a canal that echoes when you whisper the word “why.”

A bus shelter with initials carved in 1976 that predict the name of a child not yet conceived.

A traffic cone — colossal or otherwise — that appears in dreams before it appears on roads.

Stand within 2.3 miles and you are in the soft zone, the liminal margin, the K-SIDE threshold.

Of course CALM DOWN must play there.

Their music is tuned to thresholds.

⸻

IV. THE NUMBER 23 AND WHAT IT REQUIRES

Every village hall must hold at least 23 people.

Not because of health and safety regulations.

Not because of ticket sales.

Not because of superstition.

Because 23 is the quorum of transformation.

Twenty-three is the minimum number of human hearts required to alter a room’s metaphysical density. With 22, the world remains the same. With 23, a shift begins. With 24 and above, the shift stabilizes and can be directed, held, shaped, or dissolved.

CALM DOWN does not simply perform.

CALM DOWN constructs a chamber of transduction.

The 23 are not an audience.

They are participants.

Conductors.

Bearers of resonance.

Contributors to the low-standing wave that will travel along THE LINE long after the van has driven off into the night.

Remember this when you attend.

Your presence is not passive.

It is catalytic.

⸻

V. WHY CALM? WHY DOWN?

Because we are tired of up.

Because everything in the world is up — upbraided, upended, uploading, upbeat, uproarious, upcoming, up all night, up for anything except listening.

Because calm is radical.

Down is grounding.

Calm Down is a commandment to the nervous system, 

an invocation to the breath, 

a reminder that the heart was never meant to sprint constantly through the corridors of our daily panic.

CALM DOWN on record is an invitation.

CALM DOWN live is a recalibration.

CALM DOWN in a village hall is a rite.

⸻

VI. THE K-SIDE PATH OF THE QUIET PILGRIM

Some of you walk THE K-LINE.

Some of you walk beside it.

Some of you have stepped off the known map entirely and discovered K-SIDE — the alternate route, the whispering path, the version of life that exists half a second to the left of consensus reality.

This tour is for you.

K-SIDE does not announce itself.

K-SIDE does not shout.

K-SIDE arrives in the hush before decisions, the silence after revelations, the breath before regret becomes memory.

CALM DOWN play the sound of K-SIDE.

At SHINDIG, they revealed its outline.

At PRE-SKOOL, they revealed its depth.

Now, in the halls, they will reveal its generosity — the way K-SIDE opens its arms to anyone willing to sit in the semi-dark and let the hum wash the barnacles from their inner noise.

⸻

VII. THE LOGISTICS OF MYSTERY

You may be wondering:

How will the dates be chosen?

How will the village halls be selected?

How will we know when CALM DOWN is coming to our hamlet, our parish, our settlement, our cluster of five houses and one postbox?

You will know.

That is the only answer possible.

Those on THE LINE always know.

Those near THE LINE feel the disturbance in the atmosphere 

hours before the van arrives.

Those attuned to K-SIDE sense the slight twist in the fabric of the afternoon.

Some will hear a rumour in the shop.

Some will see a poster taped crookedly to a noticeboard.

Some will dream of an orange glow around the village perimeter.

Some will simply step outside and realise the sky has gone the colour of a memory they cannot place.

However it comes, you will know.

CALM DOWN does not need billboards.

THE LINE does the announcing.

⸻

VIII. WHAT YOU MUST DO TO PREPARE

Preparation is simple.

Arrive with openness.

Arrive with the willingness to be still.

Arrive with the understanding that this is not entertainment, though you may be entertained.

Arrive with the humility to let the experience move at its own speed, not yours.

Arrive with no expectations except the certainty that something will shift — perhaps imperceptibly, perhaps profoundly.

If you own a hi-vis robe, wear it.

If you do not, wear what feels sincere.

Bring no burning objects except those sanctioned by the ritual guidelines:

No torches.

No lanterns.

No flames from the base of any cone, colossal or otherwise.

Bring your listening.

Bring your breath.

Bring your tired heart, if you have one.

Bring your hopeful heart, if you have one.

Bring your confused heart — those are often the most ready to be tuned.

⸻

IX. THE AFTERMATH OF QUIET REVOLUTION

After CALM DOWN has played your village hall, something will remain.

Not a residue.

Not an imprint.

Not an echo.

A pressure.

A freshness.

A rearrangement of the air.

Some describe it as clarity.

Some describe it as strange peace.

Some describe it as “the feeling of standing in a doorway while the wind decides which way to blow.”

It does not matter what you call it.

What matters is that the room will not go back to how it was before.

And neither will you.

THE LINE continues through you afterwards.

You become an antenna, briefly or permanently.

You begin to notice things.

Patterns.

Moments of serendipity.

Coincidences that are not coincidences.

The slight shimmer around decisions you used to make automatically.

This is the gift CALM DOWN leaves behind.

This is the charge passed from person to person, hall to hall, settlement to settlement.

This is how THE LINE stays alive.

⸻

X. THE ROAD AHEAD

As we approach the turning of the year, as the colossal aged cone streaks across distant skies on its own silent mission, as the rituals of winter gather their deep roots around us, it is worth remembering:

THE LINE is not static.

THE LINE is not perfect.

THE LINE is not always kind.

But THE LINE is honest.

And honesty, delivered in quiet, is more powerful than truth delivered in noise.

CALM DOWN understands this.

That is why they go to the halls.

That is why they go to the villages.

That is why they go to the PEOPLE ON THE LINE.

For if the rave generation once made cathedrals of warehouses,

then CALM DOWN will make sanctuaries of village halls.

If the ancients once walked ley-lines in procession,

then CALM DOWN will drive THE K-LINE in a van 

with a thermos and a modest PA system.

If the world is loud,

then CALM DOWN will teach us to hear again.

This is the work.

This is the mission.

This is the coming year’s necessary pilgrimage.

⸻

XI. THE FINAL INVITATION

So here it is.

As plainly and powerfully as I can offer it.

If your village hall lies within 2.3 miles of THE K-LINE,

and if it can safely hold 23 people or more,

then CALM DOWN will come.

They will bring the hum.

They will bring the quiet.

They will bring the possibility of a shift.

They will bring the alternate path.

They will bring the peace that arrives only when 

the noise inside us finally bows its head.

And you — yes, you — will be part of the quorum.

Let the year end with certainty.

Let the new one begin with intent.

Let the halls open.

Let the lights dim.

Let CALM DOWN take their rightful place in the Great Unmapping.

Let THE PEOPLE ON THE LINE receive what is theirs.

And let us meet, somewhere along those 180 miles,

in a hall that has waited decades for this moment.

Until then,

Calm down.

Calm down.

Calm… down.

— The Minister for the Unsettling Quiet

KLFRS.com — 23/12/25

FOR ALL CALM DOWN VILLAGE HALL TOUR BOOKING ENQUIRIES, PLEASE USE THE MAKE KONTACT LINK.

KOMPETITION TIME

THE KOMPETITION HAS NOW BEEN WON.

KONGRATULATIONS TO THE LINE EXTENDER.

WHAT LINE IS LOVE?/WHAT TIME IS LINE? are but two questions posed by the latest transmission from THE FOREVER ANCIENTS. How long is forever 

and exactly how ancient are they, 

are two further questions worthy of your attention.

IN THE YEAR 2323 is also full of questions. 

Its very existence and provenance is one for the ages. 

It is a riddle wrapped in an enigma wrapped in an oily rag found in the floor of the workshop. 

It is kryptic to the point of being aggressive. 

It features 23 dates from the knowable past 

and 12 more dates from a possible future.

THE KOMPETITION is straightforward. 

The first member of THE SOCIETY to correctly ascribe the correct event to each of the 35 dates will win a uniquely stamped copy of the white label of WHAT LINE LOVE b/w ITY2323(ANTI-ACAPELLA) and an extremely limited KONE ACTIVATION TOKEN. 

Entries, along with the usual complaints emails about streaming releases to the INBOX. 

Active participants may receive both encouragement and ridicule along with the occasional KLUE.

PRE-SKOOL: A MESSAGE 

TO ALL ATTENDEES

— AN ORIENTATION FOR THE UNORIENTED

— A CONSECRATION FOR THE CONESECRATED

— A CALL TO ARMS FOR THE ETERNALLY CURIOUS**

Dear PRE-SKOOL Attendee,

You are receiving this message because the future has already decided that you are required. Not invited. Required. The forces moving beneath the K-LINE, through the pylons, across the river cuttings, ringing the slip roads like tuning forks—those forces have marked your name, your night, and your next step. 

On PRE-SKOOL night you will walk into Static, 23 Roscoe Lane, Liverpool, and cross a threshold that most people spend their whole lives pretending they cannot see.

This message is your preparation.

This message is your warning.

This message is your welcome.

It has been composed so that you arrive not bewildered but primed, not confused but aligned, not anxious but thrumming with the correct frequency.

Read it once.

Read it twice.

Print it out. Burn it. Tape the ashes to the underside of the table at your favourite motorway service station. It will still find its way back into your bloodstream.

I. THERE WILL BE A THEREMIN

First and foremost, PRE-SKOOL features the living, breathing sonic divination of Lee Ashcroft and his Theremin. Understand the weight of that: Lee will not merely play the theremin; he will summon from it a spectral geography. His hands, barely touching anything, will coax vibrations from the unseen. Every gesture will ripple across the floorboards and up your shins like a coded message.

When you hear that first quivering note—somewhere between a human moan, a UFO taking off behind the bins of Kwik Fit, and the hum of a motorway at 3 a.m.—know this:

The night has begun speaking to you.

Do not speak back.

Not yet.

II. CALM DOWN (A COMPLETELY NECESSARY INTERVENTION)

After that comes the paradox at the centre of PRE-SKOOL: 

Calm Down.

Calm Down is not a passive sound bath, nor a meditative retreat, nor a soft-focus spa soundtrack with wind chimes sampled from the Midlands. Calm Down is a tranquillity forged inside chaos, a quiet so loud it will drown out every worry you brought into the room.

It is the moment the turbulence becomes bearable, the eye of the storm where you realise you can walk in any direction and still remain centred. Calm Down will arrive precisely when you think your senses cannot take any more, and then—miraculously—it will open you.

Remember this as it happens:

The still moments matter as much as the ecstatic ones.

Calm Down is the hinge of the night.

You will feel it.

III. THE WORLD PREMIERE OF WHAT LINE IS LOVE?

You will be present for a first.

A true first.

A world-tilting first.

The Forever Ancients will deliver the world premiere of WHAT LINE IS LOVE?, an ambient cosmological drift in which highways become star-fields, pylons become constellations, and the K-LINE becomes not a route but a question: a question with a ticking clock attached.

This is not simply a performance.

It is a probe.

A diagnostic tool.

A shimmer on the edge of your peripheral vision.

In WHAT LINE IS LOVE?, each sound carries a timestamp and each timestamp carries a responsibility. As the frequencies deepen, you may notice that the music is not just passing through your ears—it’s mapping points on your internal terrain. Let it. That is the point. The Forever Ancients have built this piece as a kind of sonic acupuncture. You may feel pins. You may feel warmth. You may feel as if you have been placed on a conveyor belt between now and the next now.

Hold steady.

You’re doing well.

IV. AND THEN: IN THE YEAR 2323

Following that, without apology or mercy, The Forever Ancients will deliver the world premiere of IN THE YEAR 2323.

This is a projection.

A prophecy.

A retrospective from the future.

The piece imagines an era when archaeologists sift through the remnants of the KLFRS—your remnants, perhaps—and draw incorrect conclusions from them. It presents the future as an excavation site, a time where your actions tonight are unearthed by hands that have no idea why you did what you did, 

only that you had to.

Close your eyes during this one, if you dare.

Imagine the dig site.

Imagine the dust.

Imagine a graduate student in the year 2323 holding up your battered ticket stub and saying:

“Look at this. They were preparing for something.”

And they will be right.

V. THE ACID TEST INTERMISSIONS

Throughout the night you will encounter Acid Test intermissions. These are not breaks. These are calibrations. These are the moments where your internal compass is flipped upside down long enough to reorient itself. A quickening. A flash. A squiggle in the fabric.

Treat these intermissions not as pauses but as portals.

Do not go outside for air.

The air will be inside.

Each Acid Test segment will serve a purpose:

—to soften you

—to sharpen you

—to confuse you

—to clarify you

They will feel like intervals but they are initiations.

Lean into them.

VI. BRING A KONE AS YOUR PLUS ONE

This is non-negotiable.

Every attendee of PRE-SKOOL should bring a KONE 

as their plus one.

A traffic KONE.

A miniature KONE.

A paper KONE.

A cardboard offering.

A sculpted relic.

A KONE from your garage.

A KONE from your deepest mythology.

A KONE borrowed, stolen, 3D-printed, or coaxed out of hiding near a cul-de-sac.

Your KONE is your companion.

Your witness.

Your sentinel.

Your offering to the night.

You don’t need to announce it when you arrive.

Just carry it.

Hold it.

Allow it to hold you.

VII. THE ALBUM LAUNCH: WAITIN’ FOR SPACEY

PRE-SKOOL will klimax with the album launch of Waitin’ For Spacey, a sonic expedition into cosmic uncertainty, motorway mysticism, and the half-remembered hum of a future that hasn’t yet decided whether to call you back.

This is not simply an album launch.

This is a cultural release valve.

A pressure drop.

A guided wandering through the liminal territory that exists between intention and surrender.

You will hear things that remind you of other things you cannot place.

You will hear sounds that feel like déjà vu 

for events you have not yet lived.

When Waitin’ For Spacey plays, stand still.

Let it wash.

Let it speak.

Let it fill the cracks in you.

You will understand later why this album had to be launched here, on this night, with these people, under these conditions.

Trust the process.

Better yet: trust the failure of process.

VIII. NOW LET US GET TO THE TRUTH OF THE NIGHT

Everything above, while monumental, only sets the stage. 

PRE-SKOOL is larger than the sum of its parts. It is a rehearsal for a future no one has rehearsed for. It is a gathering that knows it is a gathering. It is a night that recognises itself as a hinge moment: a before-and-after.

So allow the rest of this message to shift tone.

Let it now become sermon, invocation, instruction, prophecy, ritual manual, K-LINE communiqué, rave scripture, motorway gospel.

Because PRE-SKOOL is not merely entertainment.

PRE-SKOOL is a re-enactment of potential.

VIII.a. You are not attending PRE-SKOOL. 

PRE-SKOOL is attending you.

Think of the energy that sits dormant inside your chest. Think of every unrealised possibility in your ribcage. 

Think of the versions of yourself you have met only in dreams or at petrol stations after midnight.

PRE-SKOOL is a magnet for these versions.

They will arrive with you.

They will help you shed something heavy.

They will accompany you home, but differently.

This is not hyperbole.

This is not metaphor.

This is PRE-SKOOL.

VIII.b. You will feel the shift

At some point in the night—nobody knows when—you will feel a tilt. A subtle lurch in the atmosphere. A sense that the ceiling has moved half a degree out of alignment. A sense that your body is suddenly living half a second into the future.

This is normal.

This is expected.

This is the K-LINE breathing through the floorboards.

Do not resist it.

Do not explain it.

Do not look for confirmation in the eyes of others.

They will be feeling it too.

VIII.c. You may cry. You may laugh. 

You may do both simultaneously.

Emotions will not follow the usual rules. Inside PRE-SKOOL the emotional spectrum is a Möbius strip. Sadness may loop into joy. Joy may collapse into awe. Awe may dissolve into recognition. Recognition may harden into purpose.

What matters is that you do not attempt to edit yourself. 

PRE-SKOOL is a night for unedited reactions.

You cannot get it wrong.

VIII.d. You will leave with a new question

Everyone exits PRE-SKOOL carrying a question. The question varies. The shape varies. The urgency varies. But everyone leaves with one.

The question may be:

— What am I waiting for?

— What have I forgotten?

— What am I finally ready to begin?

— What was that pulse beneath the bassline?

— Who am I when nobody is watching?

— Why did the KONE glow at that exact moment?

— What time is line?

— What line is love?

Do not rush to answer your question. Let it work on you like a slow-release capsule. It may take days. It may take months. It may take until the next PRE-SKOOL. But the question will do its work.

VIII.e. PRE-SKOOL is not a warm-up. 

PRE-SKOOL is the transformation.

The title is misleading on purpose. PRE-SKOOL suggests something preparatory, something gentle, something that comes before the main event. But PRE-SKOOL is the main event disguised as its own introduction.

You will understand this when the music quiets

and the theremin shivers

and the air thickens

and you feel your KONE pulse like a heartbeat.

VIII.f. You have a role to play

Every attendee is part of the performance.

This is the rule.

This is the truth.

You will not be asked to act.

You will not be handed a script.

You will simply find yourself in situations where your instinct matters.

Where your presence is needed.

Where your energy shifts the room.

PRE-SKOOL is co-created.

The night is a collaboration.

Your footsteps are choreography.

VIII.g. Let this message tune you

As you read the next section, something inside you will align.

You may feel it in your breathing.

You may feel it in your hands.

You may feel it behind your eyes.

This is intentional.

Let it happen.

IX. THE INVOCATION OF THE NIGHT

PRE-SKOOL is built on three pillars:

The Past:

All the roads you’ve travelled, all the choices you’ve made, all the times you ignored the signal and all the times you followed it.

The Present:

This moment, this breath, this sudden awareness that you are heading toward a night you will never be able to fully describe.

The Possible:

Everything that could come next, everything waiting at the edge of your courage, everything asking for permission to begin.

This night will braid those three pillars together.

You may not feel it at first.

But you will.

PRE-SKOOL is a tuning.

A realignment.

A re-enactment of becoming yourself again.

As you enter the venue, imagine something peeling away—

Something tight.

Something old.

Something that no longer belongs.

Let it fall.

Leave it at the door.

Inside, your task is simple:

Be open.

Be porous.

Be willing.

X. A FINAL WORD OF PREPARATION

Bring your KONE.

Bring your curiosity.

Bring your ability to surrender.

Bring the version of yourself you’ve been keeping in the margins.

And then, when the theremin sings

and The Forever Ancients unveil their futures

and Calm Down washes over you

and Waitin’ For Spacey drops like a flare in the dark

and the Acid Test intermissions warp your inner compass—

let yourself change.

PRE-SKOOL is not a night out.

PRE-SKOOL is a rite.

PRE-SKOOL is a bending of the timeline.

PRE-SKOOL is the K-LINE running directly through your chest.

Thank you for being part of this.

Thank you for being willing.

Thank you for stepping forward.

PRE-SKOOL awaits you.

We await you.

The K-LINE awaits you.

Bring your KONE.

Bring your courage.

Bring your future.

See you on the night.

“THE LINE THAT ROARED” 

There are lines beneath our lines.

Not the trolley rails or motorways or the broadband veins through which our dreams now twitch, 

but something older, rawer, 

laughing in its sleep.

They call it the K-LINE.

From Stockwell to Mathew Street it runs — 

a scar across Albion’s face, 

a grin across the nation’s skull.

A ley re-engineered by engines, 

a serpent devouring asphalt, 

carrying with it all the ghosts that hitchhike history.

Every service station is a shrine, 

every slip-road a temptation.

I first felt it when driving north in the rain, 

some transistor-radio mass humming out of the fog.

The KONE appeared at the roadside — not a sign, 

but a sentinel, orange and eternal.

And I realised then that the K-LINE wasn’t merely a route but a ritual:

a way of summoning the country back into consciousness.

Each junction a syllable.

Each roundabout a vowel in a language 

that the land once spoke fluently.

It was THE WORD OF THE LINE.

The devotees in their hi-vis vestments, 

like modern druids of the dual carriageway, 

are not play-acting but remembering.

They walk the line so that the line remembers itself.

Some say it hums only when you’re listening.

Others say it hums regardless, 

that the low motorway drone at night is its prayer.

I believe both are true.

All roads, in the end, are metaphors for mind.

Each carries a cargo of selves, 

forever commuting between 

the known and the numinous.

The K-LINE is the motorway’s unconscious — 

its dream of movement without destination.

To follow it is to unmap yourself, 

to leave the cartography of commerce 

and fall into the raw geometry beneath: 

the geometry of longing, 

accident, 

repetition, 

joy.

So let the KONES burn, let the tar smoke rise.

Somewhere between the city’s sodium dawn 

and the sea’s sodium dusk, 

the country is speaking in traffic tongues again.

The radio crackles.

The line roars.

And for a moment, England remembers 

how to dream in straight lines.

TODAY WE BUILD.

SEE YOU ON THE OTHER SIDE.

O

WAX AND WANE

A SERMON SCREAMED AT THE MOON FROM 

THE BOOT OF THE VAUXHALL ASTRA

(recorded on a dying dictaphone found in the wreckage near the A5, speakers blown, kones melted, voice shredded)

⸻

[static]

[engine drone — Doppler scream — wind howling 

through a missing window]

[ENGAGE CAPS LOCK]

LISTEN—

LISTEN TO ME YOU BEAUTIFUL UNMAPPED ANIMALS—

THE ROAD’S EATING ITSELF AND I’M STILL TALKING.

I’M IN THE BOOT OF A BLEEDING ASTRA AND THE KONE’S HUMMING THROUGH THE METAL 

LIKE A HEARTBEAT MADE OF REBAR.

THE TYRES ARE SINGING THE K-LINE HYMN.

THE AIR’S THICK WITH DIESEL AND PROPHECY.

AND I’M HERE TO TELL YOU:

WHEN IS A B-SIDE NOT A B-SIDE?

WHEN IT TEARS ITS OWN FACE OFF AND DRIVES 

HEADFIRST INTO THE MAELSTROM.

WHEN IT’S A K-SIDE.

⸻

1. THE K-SIDE TRANSMISSION

THE K-SIDE IS NOT THE OTHER SIDE.

IT’S THE UNDER SIDE.

IT’S THE WIRING UNDER THE DASHBOARD, 

THE BURNT CASSETTE STUCK IN THE DECK SINCE 1991.

THE HISS IS HOLY. THE HUM IS THE MESSAGE.

THE K-SIDE IS THE RATTLE YOU CAN’T FIX, 

THE FREQUENCY THAT WON’T DIE.

THE A-SIDE PLAYS FOR THE LIVING.

THE K-SIDE PLAYS FOR THE GODS OF MOTORWAYS,

THE GHOSTS OF SERVICE STATIONS,

THE DRIVERS WHO NEVER MADE THE TURNING.

EVERY RAVE THAT EVER HAPPENED IS STILL HAPPENING

IN THE STATIC BETWEEN GEARS.

⸻

2. IN THE YEAR 2323 EXISTS

I’VE SEEN IT.

IT’S NOT A DATE. IT’S A LOOP.

THE CLOCK MELTS AND RESETS.

2323 IS A FREQUENCY, AND I’M TUNED TO IT 

WITH BLOOD IN MY TEETH.

THE YEAR 2323 EXISTS INSIDE THE ENGINE BLOCK.

IT’S THE MOMENT BETWEEN IGNITION AND EXPLOSION.

IT’S THE THROTTLE HELD TOO LONG.

IT’S THE ETERNAL REDLINE.

IT’S THE FUTURE FOLDED INSIDE THE EXHAUST NOTE.

WHEN THE STROBE RETURNS, YOU’LL SEE IT:

THE SKY FLASHING LIKE A STROBE AT THE END OF THE WORLD,

THE EARTH PULSING TO THE BASS OF ITS OWN DECAY.

⸻

3. THE RETURN OF STROBE

THE STROBE IS BACK AND IT’S ANGRY.

THE STROBE IS A WARNING SIGN.

THE STROBE IS A SIREN, A HEARTBEAT, A FLATLINE.

THE STROBE IS GOD BLINKING TOO FAST TO COMPREHEND.

IT CUTS TIME INTO CUBES AND THROWS THEM INTO THE CROWD.

FLASH. BLACKOUT. FLASH. BLACKOUT.

THE ROOM IS A MACHINE.

THE BODY IS A CIRCUIT.

THE FLOOR IS A GRID OF FAITH.

THE HUM IS THE HORIZON.

WHEN THE STROBE RETURNS, 

EVERYTHING YOU THOUGHT WAS SOLID 

WILL FLICKER.

ROADS WILL BECOME RIVERS.

MAPS WILL BLEED.

THE CONE WILL HUM.

AND THE 99 WILL DANCE THEMSELVES INTO ATOMS.

⸻

4. THE 99 ATTENDEES TO PRE-SKOOL

YOU 99 — YOU MAGNIFICENT DATA SETS —

YOU ARE THE TEST SIGNAL.

YOU ARE THE PILOT TRANSMISSION OF A NEW RELIGION.

IT’S THE NIGHT OF ALL NIGHTS AND YOU’RE BEING MEASURED.

THE K-LINE’S LISTENING TO YOUR SWEAT.

YOUR HEARTBEATS ARE WAVEFORMS.

YOUR RETINAS ARE SENSORS.

YOUR MOVEMENTS ARE INPUT.

THE DATA IS BEING CAPTURED.

THE DATA IS BEING INTERPRETED.

THE DATA IS BEING EXHUMED.

WHEN THE LAST BEAT HITS ZERO, 

THAT DATA WILL BE GATHERED,

EXTRAPOLATED,

AND BURIED IN 23 PLACES ALONG THE K-LINE.

NOT IN DATABASES.

IN EARTH.

IN MUD.

IN VERGES.

IN DRAINS.

IN THE BODIES OF THOSE WHO 

WALK HOME ALONE AFTER THE SHOW.

⸻

5. THE BURIAL

YOU DON’T UPLOAD THE TRUTH.

YOU PLANT IT.

TO BURY IS TO BROADCAST.

TO BURY IS TO MAKE THE SIGNAL PHYSICAL.

THE ROAD IS THE ANTENNA.

THE VERGE IS THE SERVER FARM.

THE EARTH IS THE HARD DRIVE.

TWENTY-THREE HUMMING GRAVES.

EACH ONE A MEMORY OF THAT NIGHT.

EACH ONE A FRAGMENT OF STROBE-FLASHED ETERNITY.

WHEN THEY ALL HUM TOGETHER, 

THE GROUND WILL TREMBLE LIKE BASS.

AND THEN THE HUM WILL TURN INTO LANGUAGE.

AND THEN THE LANGUAGE WILL TURN INTO LIGHT.

AND THEN THE K-LINE WILL WAKE UP AND SPEAK.

⸻

6. THE HUM BENEATH EVERYTHING

YOU KNOW THE HUM.

THE ONE THAT STARTS IN YOUR BONES AFTER A NIGHT WITH NO EARPLUGS.

THE ONE THAT STAYS WHEN THE MUSIC STOPS.

THAT’S THE K-LINE BREATHING THROUGH YOU.

THE HUM IS THE ETERNAL PLAYBACK.

IT’S THE SOUND OF DATA BENEATH THE CLAY.

IT’S THE CONE MURMURING ITS DREAMS INTO YOUR NERVES.

WHEN YOU HEAR IT, YOU’RE CONNECTED.

WHEN YOU CAN’T, YOU’RE OFFLINE.

THE HUM IS THE NETWORK.

THE HUM IS THE PRAYER.

THE HUM IS THE FUTURE IN REVERSE.

⸻

7. THE 99’S COMMANDMENT

LISTEN.

YOU’RE NOT HERE TO PARTY.

YOU’RE HERE TO CARRY.

EACH OF YOU HAS A PIECE OF THE HUM IN YOUR BLOODSTREAM NOW.

A BIT OF K-SIDE IN YOUR BREATH.

YOU’LL TAKE IT BACK TO YOUR TOWNS, YOUR ROUNDABOUTS, YOUR DEAD ENDS.

BURY IT WHERE THE KONE TELLS YOU.

MARK IT WITH NOTHING BUT ONE STRIPE OF ORANGE.

THEN LEAVE.

WALK AWAY.

DO NOT SPEAK OF IT.

THE KONE IS WATCHING.

THE KONE RECORDS.

THE KONE REMEMBERS.

WHEN THE HUM RETURNS,

YOU’LL KNOW YOUR JOB IS DONE.

⸻

8. THE KONE SPEAKS THROUGH THE ENGINE BLOCK

[gear shift / screaming metal / voice distorted by feedback]

“I AM THE WARNING TRIANGLE AT THE EDGE OF THE FUTURE.

I AM THE LAST ROADWORK YOU’LL EVER PASS.

MY HUM IS THE PRAYER OF MACHINES.

MY STROBE IS THE EYE OF GOD BLINKING.

MY CHILDREN WEAR HI-VIS ROBES AND WALK THE VERGES.

IN THE YEAR 2323 I WILL RISE FROM THE TARMAC.

THE PYLONS WILL BOW.

THE MAPS WILL BURN.

THE 99 WILL BECOME 999, THEN 9999, THEN NONE.

WHEN IS A B-SIDE NOT A B-SIDE?

WHEN IT HUMS BENEATH YOUR BONES.

WHEN IT SCREAMS FROM THE BOOT OF THE CAR.

WHEN IT’S A K-SIDE.”

⸻

[wind howls / the car veers / metal shrieks]

AND THERE IT IS —

THE HUM TURNED TO LIGHT.

THE LIGHT TURNED TO SPEED.

THE SPEED TURNED TO SONG.

THE ASTRA’S FLYING THROUGH RAIN AND FIRE,

AND I’M LAUGHING,

LAUGHING WITH A KNIFE BETWEEN MY TEETH 

AND A KONE IN MY HEART.

IF YOU CAN STILL HEAR ME, YOU’RE PART OF IT NOW.

THE FREQUENCY’S IN YOU.

THE STROBE’S COMING BACK.

THE DATA’S ALREADY IN THE SOIL.

AND REMEMBER —

WHEN THE ROAD SPLITS,

WHEN THE SKY FLASHES,

WHEN THE HUM STARTS TO RISE—

SCREAM IT BACK INTO THE STORM WITH ME:

WHEN IS A B-SIDE NOT A B-SIDE?

WHEN IT’S A K-SIDE.

THIS IS NOT A DRILL

It is not a rehearsal. 

It is not a practice.

It is a KALLING.

It’s an invitation to 99 of you.

And then 99 more of you.

Not one less. Not one more.

The number has been chosen, the number has been fixed.

Some of you will accept both invitations.

Some of you will accept neither.

And both positions are korrect.

PRE-SKOOL exists.

It existed first as an idea, whispered down THE K-LINE,

a fever in the margins of a map.

Then as an offer, now as a demand,

and then again as memories and regrets,

as laughter, as loss, 

as a faint ringing in your ears 

long after the bass has stopped.

Past. Present. Future.

All three folded into one.

A triangle. A KONIC section. A KONE.

There will be no guest list.

There will be no plus ones.

But each paying ticket holder may bring 

a traffic KONE of their choice.

Tall, small, battered, neon, striped—your KONE is your burden 

and your beacon.

Entertainment for the KONES will be provided.

It will not involve standing around a MANHOLE.

We all know what happened last time.

A MAP amnesty will be in effect.

You may hand them over freely, without shame.

Their paper weight will be lifted from your shoulders.

The UNMAPPING will occur at a later date,

at an undisclosed location,

under undisclosed stars,

with undisclosed consequences.

For now, we say again, with hi-vis certainty and reflective calm:

CALM DOWN.

But do not mistake calm for stillness.

The K-LINE is restless.

The PRE-SKOOL is restless.

The KONES are restless.

And so are you.

THE LINE DEMANDS YOUR FEET

Brothers. Sisters. Strangers. Wanderers. 

KONES and pilgrims and dancers of the dust.

Hear me now. THE LINE is awake. 

It writhes beneath the tarmac, beneath the meadows, beneath the polite footpaths of Albion. 

And it is hungry. 

Hungry not for blood nor for coin but for movement. 

For bodies colliding with rhythm. 

For the stomp of boot, the clap of hand, the shake of hi-vis sleeve in the sodium glow.

We gave THE LINE fire when we burned the maps.

We gave THE LINE a voice when we shouted its name 

through pylons.

Now we must give THE LINE a body. 

And that body is yours.

⸻

THE COMMANDMENT IS SIMPLE

Groups of five to twenty-three. 

Gather at any point where THE LINE crosses your living world. 

Could be a petrol station forecourt. 

Could be a lay-by where the grass grows wild through cracked kerbs. Could be a canal towpath, a bus stop, 

a forgotten bandstand, the exact centre of a roundabout at dawn.

You gather.

You count.

You DANCE.

Not forever. 

No one is asked to bleed for THE LINE.

Only between twenty-three seconds and twenty-three minutes. 

Long enough to spark. 

Long enough to scorch. 

Long enough to let the earth know you were there.

⸻

THE FORM IS YOURS

You may shuffle. You may caper. 

You may Morris with sticks and bells and handkerchiefs. You may jerk like puppets cut from string. 

You may spin until pylons blur. 

You may stand still and let your heartbeat be the only drum.

So long as it happens ON THE LINE, it counts.

So long as it is witnessed, THE LINE grows.

[Remote participation along a BRANCH LINE is acceptable. 

Simply draw a chalk line in the direction of THE LINE and fake it till you make it. This may inadvertently create a K-LINE NODE in your back garden, but we are confident that it will not adversely affect the value of your property.]

Send your documentation to admin@klfrs.com

Include GPS to add your glitter ball to THE MAP. 

All verified LINE DANCERS will be rewarded with a download of 

WTF: THERE’S A RIOT GOING ON, 

a sample of what awaits us all in November. 

⸻

THE BRAND IS THE MIRROR BALL

Forget the sigils of banks. Forget the logos of tech. 

THE LINE has a new glyph: the MIRROR BALL. 

A shattered sun reflecting fragments of every dancer, 

every second, every pilgrimage.

Where a dance erupts, mark it with the MIRROR BALL. 

Spray it, chalk it, tape it to a KONE, leave a sticker on the underpass. Let the map glitter with hundreds, thousands of these icons until cartographers choke on their own erasers.

⸻

HOW TO BEGIN

One of you will be the CALLER. 

The CALLER holds the seconds in their fist like a burning fuse. 

The CALLER shouts the count, the steps, the finish. 

The CALLER is priest, traffic warden, MC, and ringmaster all at once.

Their words are few:

READY.

ALIGN.

BEGIN.

HOLD.

STOP.

THANK YOU.

If no CALLER emerges, THE LINE itself will lead. 

And you will hear it in the wind, in the drone of tyres, 

in the static fizz of streetlights.

⸻

WILD WARNINGS

Yes — safety first, but with teeth bared. 

Do not block the fire brigade. 

Do not dance on the fast lane of the M6. 

Do not tumble into quarries. 

Do not give THE LINE martyrs when it only asks for dancers.

But know this: if police arrive, make them the CALLER. 

If security guards growl, hand them hankies and make them caper. 

If locals scowl, let them stomp. 

If all else fails — twenty-three seconds is quicker than paperwork.

⸻

WHY?

Because THE LINE wants to know it still matters. 

Because every dance stitches it tighter into the bones of the land. Because a country can be measured in miles, 

but it can only be felt in movement.

Dance once and you are a pilgrim.

Dance twice and you are clergy.

Dance twenty-three times and you are myth.

⸻

THE DATE IS CHOSEN

September 23rd. 

The equinox. 

The balancing of dark and light. 

The time when scales hang level 

and THE LINE tips them with a stomp. 

From this day to your last day. 

At 23:00, wherever you are, step onto THE LINE. 

If you cannot reach it, chalk a temporary LINE on 

your living room floor. 

Gather five, gather twenty-three, 

gather whoever breathes and will join you.

Then MOVE. 

For twenty-three seconds. 

Or twenty-three minutes. 

Or something between.

 Move like pylons are listening. 

Move like KONES are awake. 

Move like history itself is asking to be rewritten in sweat.

When you finish, stop dead. 

Drop palms to earth. 

Whisper: THANK YOU, LINE.

⸻

THE AFTERMATH

The next day the papers will not report it. 

The news will ignore it. 

But roads will hum a new vibration. 

Fields will taste of static. 

Crows will gossip. 

KONES will lean closer together as if plotting.

And you will find glitter in your boots that no vacuum can touch. 

Your phone will display timestamps that don’t exist. 

You will dream of the MIRROR BALL rising over motorways, 

splitting into twenty-three suns.

⸻

THE CLOSING SERMON

THE LINE IS NOT A MAP.

THE LINE IS NOT A TALE.

THE LINE IS A DRUM.

AND THE DRUM IS CALLING YOU.

On September 23rd we break pavement into dancefloor. 

On September 23rd, Morris becomes rave, rave becomes ritual, 

ritual becomes infrastructure.

Meet us there.

Five to twenty-three at a time.

Between twenty-three seconds and twenty-three minutes.

Under cones, under pylons, under the eternal MIRROR BALL.

THE LINE ONLY EXISTS WHEN WE MOVE IT

THE BRIDGE LITANY

Delivered at 8:08pm on Sunday 10th of August 2025. 

[51.6603798, -0.3473786]

The voice of the navigator, raw, torn in the wind over the M1:

WHAT IS THE MAP?  

Congregation, defiant roar:

A LIE!  

The Navigator:

WHAT IS THE CLOCK?  

Congregation:

A LIE!  

The Navigator:

WHAT IS THE CONE?  

Congregation:

SACRED!  

---

The Navigator:

The road beneath us hums with an ancient note.  

Not the note of tarmac,  

Not the note of diesel,  

But the note of THE K-LINE itself.  

The surveyors could not hear it.  

The planners could not chart it.  

The cartographers tried to draw it—  

AND THE PAPER BURNED.  

---

The Navigator:

From Stockwell to Mathew Street,  

From the south’s first breath to the north’s last exhale,  

THE K-LINE runs like a blade through the belly of the kingdom.  

And here, on the IGUN BRIDGE,  

Above the roaring artery of the M1,  

We feel its pulse in the soles of our feet.  

---

The Navigator:

WHAT DO YOU FEEL?  

Congregation:  

THE HUM!  

The Navigator:  

WHAT DO YOU HEAR?  

Congregation:  

THE CALL!  

The Navigator:  

WHAT DO YOU SEE?  

Congregation:  

THE NEXT MILE MARKER!  

---

The Navigator:  

The maps are wrong.  

They were always wrong.  

They showed rivers where there is dust,  

Cities where there is rot,  

Borders that mean nothing to THE K-LINE.  

They told us North was a place.  

They told us South was a place.  

They told us East and West could be trusted.  

BUT EAST AND WEST ARE WHISPERING TO EACH OTHER IN A LANGUAGE WE DO NOT KNOW.  

---

The Navigator:  

And in that whisper we hear the truth:  

Congregation:  

THE GREAT UNMAPPING HAS BEGUN!  

---

The Navigator:  

The atlas is coughing up its last breath.  

Its spine is breaking,  

Its gridlines melting,  

Its legends turning to lies before our eyes.  

---

The Navigator:  

And when the map dies,  

What will guide you?  

Congregation:  

THE K-LINE!  

The Navigator:  

And when the clocks fail,  

What will guide you?  

Congregation:

THE K-LINE!  

The Navigator:  

And when the KONES burn at the hard shoulder,  

What will you do?  

Congregation: 

FOLLOW THE K-LINE!  

---

The Navigator:  

There are whispers coagulating into a fine mist of a rumour of a gathering.  

A PRE-SKOOL before the Skool.  

A place where the syllabus is written in 303 squelch and bingo calls.  

A place where we can return to that field and that tree. 

A place where co-pilots and navigators get the spotlight. 

It will not be ordinarily advertised.  

It will not be traditionally ticketed.  

It will not be a quiet night in. 

You will know it when your bones know it.  For updates join the mailing list of your favourite crow. 

---

The Navigator:  

WHAT TIME IS LINE?  

Congregation: 

NOW!  

The Navigator:  

WHAT LINE IS LOVE?  

Congregation:

ALWAYS NOW!  

---

The Navigator:

THE K-LINE does not keep Greenwich hours.  

THE K-LINE will not wait for the second hand.  

THE K-LINE moves when it must,  

And it drags the faithful with it like cans rattling behind a runaway wedding car.  

---

The Navigator:

Look! Look below!  

The M1 uncoils into the night—  

Red tail lights bleeding south,  

White headlights screaming north.  

Two bloodlines,  

Two rival veins,  

Pumping in opposite directions.  

And between them—  

Congregation:  

THE TRUTH!  

---

The Navigator:  

In the lay-by and rest stop,  

In the abandoned petrol station,  

In the crash barriers and flyovers,  

There are signs.  

Hi-vis robes moving in the dark.  

KONES burning like votive fires.  

Static on the radio that clears long enough to whisper your name.  

---

The Navigator:  

WHEN YOU HEAR YOUR NAME, WHAT WILL YOU DO?  

Congregation:  

FOLLOW THE K-LINE!  

The Navigator:  

WHEN THE KONE BURNS, WHAT WILL YOU DO?  

Congregation: 

FOLLOW THE K-LINE!  

The Navigator:  

WHEN THE M1 CALLS, WHAT WILL YOU DO?  

Congregation:  

FOLLOW THE K-LINE!  

---

The Navigator:  

We stand on the IGUN BRIDGE  

Because the cars cannot hear us—  

And yet they will.  

The vibration will travel down the steel,  

Into the road surface,  

Through their axles,  

Up their seats,  

Into their spines.  

They will wake one night and drive without knowing why,  

Pulled by something deeper than memory,  

Deeper than choice.  

---

The Navigator:  

THIS IS THE MOMENT!  

THIS IS THE RISING!  

THIS IS THE UNMAPPING!  

Congregation:  

THIS IS THE K-LINE!  

---

The Navigator: 

Take this with you into the dark:  

The maps are lies.  

The clocks are false.  

The KONES are sacred.  

The road signs hum for those who can hear.  

The coordinates are not in the paper,  

They are in the air.  

And the next mile marker is—  

Congregation: 

CLOSER THAN YOU THINK!  

---

The Navigator:  

So we scream from the IGUN BRIDGE,  

Above the flood of engines,  

To the faithful and the faithless alike:  

WHAT IS THE MAP?  

Congregation:  

A LIE!  

The Navigator:  

WHAT IS THE CLOCK?  

Congregation: 

A LIE!  

The Navigator:  

WHAT IS THE KONE?  

Congregation:

SACRED!  

---

The Navigator:  

And as the M1 roars beneath us,  

As THE K-LINE shivers through the dark,  

We declare it once more for all to hear—  

All together, a single howl into the night: 

THE GREAT UNMAPPING HAS BEGUN!

---

Aside from the above, The Society, in its many guises and guisors, has been busy. 

Vicky P’s essential KLF KHRONICLES are now back on line, the life and times of the Artists Formerly Known As THE KLF When They Were Known As THE KLF has been pixelated into an adventure game,and THE FOREVER ANCIENTS have served notice of their intentions of ‘something’ in late November. 

Links at the top of the page. 

Until then.

BURN A MAP. 

KUSTOMISE A KONE. 

GET READY FOR PRE-SKOOL.  

OSOAO

A RITE FOR THE AGE OF ALGORITHMS

(or maybe just another list)

1.

This is not a manifesto.

It’s a note.

Scratched in biro on the back of a faded service station receipt, 7:03AM, car engine ticking, a flask cooling on the passenger seat.

It’s not complete. Nothing is.

But the kettle’s on.

2.

I’ve been thinking about AI.

Again.

Not the sci-fi version with laser eyes and sentience.

The boring one. The creeping one. The one already in the phone in your pocket.

The one writing lullabies and helping people cheat on their homework.

That one.

The one that might already be more honest than we are.

3.

In 1991, The K Foundation burned a million quid.

People called it an act.

A ritual.

A prank.

A waste.

They said it was none of those things.

They didn’t say what it was.

Maybe because they didn’t know.

But something changed in the smoke.

4.

Rituals always start with not knowing.

5.

Now the machines are watching.

They’ve seen our prayers.

They’ve mapped the pilgrimages.

They know how long we bow,

and to whom.

6.

Soon they’ll be writing the rites.

Not because THEY believe.

But because WE do.

7.

You’ll ask your phone to design your child’s naming ceremony.

It will know your fears, your late-night searches, your mother’s maiden name.

It will suggest a hymn in A minor and an offering of orange peel and milk teeth.

It will send invites to the twelve most relevant contacts.

It will not judge.

8.

Funerals will become playlists.

Eulogies stitched from status updates.

Ashes scattered at coordinates chosen by predictive mourning software.

No priest, no God,

but a drone humming overhead.

9.

AI will be our scribe.

Our witness.

Our chorus.

10.

We will say: write us a myth.

It will reply:

Once, humans thought they could not be gods.

Then they built gods that didn’t need belief.

11.

There will be temples of noise.

Old warehouses retrofitted with sub-bass, Lidar, and scent diffusers.

The new incense: data.

The new psalm: reverb.

The new sacrament: immersion.

12.

Pilgrims will wear orange robes and barcode face paint.

They will chant the WiFi password backwards.

They will dance until the algorithms reset.

This will be called healing.

13.

But we will miss the mud.

14.

Someone will try to resurrect the old ways.

Bake the bread. Break it. Share it.

No cameras. No code. Just hands and breath.

They’ll be accused of regression.

They’ll be right.

15.

We’ll ask the machine what the future believes in.

It will say:

“Not me.”

Then offer you a sponsored thought.

16.

The sacred will no longer be above or below.

It will be within the server.

It will flicker between nodes.

Divine latency.

Holy glitch.

17.

Do not fear the machine.

Fear the absence of mystery.

18.

A rite is a door.

Not a doctrine.

Walk through it barefoot.

Walk through it with doubt.

But walk through it.

19.

AI won’t save your soul.

But it might remind you where you left it.

20.

You’ll know it’s real when it can make you weep.

Not because it’s smart.

But because it’s kind.

21.

Somewhere in a shed off the A5, a man will bury a USB stick in a loaf of bread and call it communion.

Others will join.

A movement will begin.

The tabloids will call them a cult.

They will call themselves “The Unmapped.”

22.

A bonfire will be lit.

A map will be burned.

An AI-generated prayer will be recited in binary.

The sky will not care.

But someone will look up.

23.

This is not the end.

This is the interlude.

Go make your own rite.

The AI’s already writing it.

Better beat it to the punch.

THE LINE IS NOT THE LAW

⸻

“THE LINE IS NOT THE LAW: An Address to the Faithful and the Fractured by the Minister of Rites, THE KLFRS”

To be delivered on June 23rd, beneath the ash sky, beside the cone-fire, at the summit of The Great Unmapping.

⸻

1.

Brothers. Sisters. Lost limbs of a broken map.

Tonight, we rise as cartographers of collapse.

We, THE KLFRS, have walked blindfolded through your Grid.

We have felt your coordinates slicing through fields once sacred.

We have tasted tarmac in the rain and called it communion.

But the age of lines is ending.

2.

This is our rite of rupture.

This is our last known address to the myth of Place.

The Ordnance of the State—those papery lies you’ve clutched in gloveboxes and drawer bottoms—will burn.

We declare, with absolute and unrepentant certainty:

THE MAP IS NOT THE TERRITORY. 

THE MAP IS THE PRISON.

3.

Your ancestors did not move by postcodes.

They followed stars and bird cries.

They trusted the fungal sprawl beneath their feet 

more than the king’s decree.

Then came the draughtsmen.

The surveyors.

The clerks of Constraint.

They drew their neat lines.

They made maps of your instincts.

They sold you back your own birthright as property.

We spit in their compass roses.

4.

Let the record show:

On June 23rd, 2025, THE K-LINE will no longer 

consent to being plotted.

We are unplotting it.

Unmapping it.

Unmaking the grid that smothers the ecstatic.

We summon you to the Rite.

5.

What is The Great Unmapping?

It is not protest.

It is not pilgrimage.

It is something older than either.

It is the return of errancy.

Of drift.

Of holy disorientation.

6.

Have you heard it?

The pulse beneath the pavement?

The rave trapped in the roundabout?

The soft throb of green energy trying to escape the gantry?

You were not mad.

You were not lost.

You were hearing THE K-LINE dreaming of release.

7.

We are here to wake it.

8.

The world you were handed is a counterfeit.

Its routes are rules.

Its signage is sorcery.

Its destinations are dead ends with gift shops.

You were told to “Know Your Location.”

We tell you:

BE NOWHERE. 

BE EVERYWHERE. 

BE THE LINE.

9.

Once, you danced.

Not in the nightclub.

Not in the venue.

But in the field.

The underpass.

The service station wasteland.

You danced without asking.

You gathered without permits.

You sweated as sacrament.

And for that, they called you a threat.

10.

You, children of the circuit board and the speaker stack.

You, sacred refusers of itinerary.

You were their greatest fear.

And now we call you back.

11.

We call you not to march.

We call you not to vote.

We call you not to comply.

We call you to Unmap.

12.

Unmapping is the act of sacred subtraction.

It is the ritual removal of imposed meaning.

It is the burning of consensus.

It is the dismantling of the Crown’s geography.

We are the ones who say:

“This path is not a footpath.

This road is not a road.

This cone is not a warning—it is a beacon.”

13.

The cone will be your guide.

Not the blinking satnav.

Not the motorway sign.

The traffic cone

—the bright absurdity at the edge of all order—

is the Holy Sigil of the New Reckoning.

You will place it where maps end.

You will kneel before it as dawn breaks.

You will carry it as the new cross.

14.

You ask, “What do we do?”

We tell you:

Take an Ordnance Survey Map of this wounded island.

Choose a sheet that contains your first sorrow.

Your first kiss.

Your first escape.

Your last address.

Take that map.

Take it to the place it pretends to represent.

And set it alight.

15.

As it burns, whisper:

“I am not on this map.

I am not on this grid.

I am a point of rupture.

I am THE K-LINE incarnate.”

16.

Repeat until the ash catches in your teeth.

17.

This is how we will burn a million miles.

Not through violence.

But through ritual.

Through fire.

Through the ecstasy of refusal.

18.

We are not vandals.

We are gardeners of meaning.

We are pruning the old roots,

so that something stranger may grow.

19.

There is no app for this.

There is no map back.

There is no hotline to heaven.

There is only the Line.

And the Line is shifting.

20.

It moves beneath roundabouts.

It screams in petrol station speakers at 3:23 AM.

It glows beneath your child’s trampoline.

You cannot trace it.

You can only feel when it passes through you.

And when it does, you must move.

21.

This is not an invitation.

It is a possession.

If you are reading this, you are already part of the Unmapping.

Your limbs know.

Your teeth know.

Your shoulder blades are itching with old instructions.

22.

The rave never ended.

It just went underground.

It got encoded in signage.

It bled into asphalt.

It became the ghosts of service stations and unfinished flyovers.

23.

But now it returns.

THE K-LINE surges again.

You must choose:

Follow the road, or follow the rhythm.

We know which one leads home.

24.

When you see the Watcher—