Music Is Over!
Ben Arzate
A cross-dressing noise musician and a young woman with facial scars walk into a bar. This isn't a joke. It's Ben Arzate's new book "Music Is Over," a transgressive subway ride through a soot-blasted, violent, sexually deviant, urban, nightmare. Everything down this rabbit hole is dilapidated, bruised, rusted and torn, from the trains and buildings, to the hearts and souls of its inhabitants. Like a reverse Alice in Wonderland, where instead of finding a land of wonders, our heroes fall into a grimy, post-industrial world of brutality and late-stage capitalism gone awry. Toto, we're not in Tokyo anymore, and the way back definitely isn't clear. Arzate is going to make his readers feel filthy, and it's going to be real hard to get the blood and dirt out from under their fingernails.
—Michael Allen Rose, Author of Jurassichrist and Rock And Roll Death Patrol
Between 2001 and 2013, the leader of the Japanese noise band The Gerogerigegege, Juntaro Yamanouchi, disappeared. Where did he go for over a decade? Perhaps he met a victim of the Slit-Mouth Woman and they took a night train to nowhere. Perhaps they stumbled on an industrial wasteland of a city filled with strange doctors, mysterious foreigners, psychotic policemen, and unfriendly residents. Perhaps they became caught between violent struggles they barely understood in their journey to go back home. One can only speculate.
Malarkey Books is proud to present Music Is Over!, a surreal picaresque horror novel by Ben Arzate. It’s very weird, it’s totally bizarre, it’s kind of violent, and it’s weirdly touching. It’s all of these things but more than anything it’s just a cool book.
Cover design by Mark Wilson.
Typesetting by Michael Kazepis.
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ISBN: 9781088015346
124 pages
Available in the Malarkey Books store, as well as from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop, Indiebound, and other retailers.
“Every book is an invitation. Music is Over! is no different. It is a delicate, meticulously curated and balanced mixture of the banal as well as the fantastical… in an almost blink-and-you-might-miss-it sort of way. The Japan you didn’t know existed, as imagined by Arzate! You quickly become ensorcelled, without even realizing that what is happening is actually happening. This is a world in flux, forever transmogrifying… like a cult film you accidentally stumble upon, late at night, long after the final sign-off. There is an obvious mastery of the craft. An invisible and very intense layer of magic. A world-building that makes the illusion that much more grandiose. Once more, every book is an invitation. Make sure to not miss this one!
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