As a warm up for our upcoming TAMTAMTAM 6 “Halloween – Timetravel Gone Wrong” on the 31st of October we will release a Podcast Serie and an ongoing Comic Strip each Wednesday now, which will be a little Feature to get all of you into the mood.

The Package is compiled by the 3 J’s (John-Eric “Halloween Mastermind”, Joe “Mr Ben Butler and Mouspad” and Johannes “Hermann the German”)

Comic Strip(by John-Erik)

Podcast   (by Joe and Johannes)

Science Fiction Story (which is included in the Podcast – by John Eric

*also as a little update: Ben Butler and Mousepad (Joe and Bastian) confirmed that they will play at the 31st.

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Tracklist of the Podcast pt 1

haruomi hosono – cochin moon
chris & cosey – put yourself in los angeles (intro)
phillip glass – lady day / man parrish – hip hop be bop (don’t stop) pt. II
steve hillage – fourever rainbow (intro)
crash course in science – mechanical breakdown
magma – mekanik kommandoh
black dice – nite creme
cromagnon – fantasy / caledonia
kiem – time doesn’t heal
roger limb – nyssa is hypnotised (bbc radiophonic workshop)

The Time Traveler’s History of the Future

(featured in the Audio Podcast)

[The following account was transcribed from an audio cassette tape discovered by archaeologists digging in Western Australia. Although the surrounding strata was dated as having formed between 500 million and one billion years ago, the tape, embedded in solid rock, could not be accurately dated.]

PART I

… where was I? Ah yes, how to travel in time. The problem is that we’re thinking about the present as a location in time – a place in history. But no, the present is always the present, so it must be something else – yes, YES – the present is a rate of travel in the fourth dimension!
So in a way, we are all time travelers – speeding through our universe at a rate of one second per second …
But I was impatient. I wanted to travel at a rate beyond the present – to visit a future that I would never reach within a normal human lifetime, if traveling at the normal rate. Unfortunately, my early experiments yielded results in the opposite direction. With the aid of a psychotropic solution as the de-chrononization agent, I did manage to travel in time, but on a path inverse to the rate of travel I intended. I became trapped in a three second loop for seven days. It almost drove me mad …
- – -
For the record,  I didn’t make the time machine. If it hadn’t been for The Event, my research would not have progressed. I would have been stuck in the present. I should have been stuck in the present.  It was too improbable to be coincidence. Sure, some people are lucky, but the laws of the universe don’t  bend to accommodate even the luckiest among us. I was studying biological samples that I had brought on my ill-fated time excursion (no discernible effects), when I was temporarily blinded by a white hot flash in the middle of my lab. When I regained my vision, a giant hexagonal jewel hovered inches above the floor. The surface emitted light, but didn’t seem to reflect any. It was a uniform matte silver, barely casting shadows on itself. I found the only break in it’s uniformity, a tiny panel, pressed it and a side of the vessel opened like an aperture. Before I could look inside, two corpses toppled out. They were dressed in some kind of opalescent fabric the likes of which I had never seen. Whoever they had been, they were too badly decomposed for me to discern much. If their suits hadn’t been holding them together, I would have found two piles of bones in the seats. The instruments inside the jewel told me exactly what it was – a time machine. No, how could this be a coincidence? Time machines don’t just appear in the labs of scientists trying to discover time travel! I had a hunch that there was more to this. Someone must have sent it for me …
- – -
I encountered a race of humans a few hundred years further into the future. I ventured into the community from my machine’s clandestine location in the nearby woods. I wouldn’t take any chances with being discovered as an outsider again. This precaution proved futile when I saw the first inhabitants of the time. I noticed two humanoids walking towards me on the otherwise abandoned path. I immediately noticed the translucent bags sitting on (or was it growing from?) their heads. Shaped somewhat irregularly, the bags were filled with some kind of gas, and moved, seemed to breath really, ever so slightly. When they noticed me, the elder one screamed and his younger counterpart fainted. I should have been more discreet. I should have realized that my form would have been just as shocking shocking to what passed for normal in that epoch.
- – -
… they were covered in what looked like a horrible fungus – spreading from their necks to snake down their backs and arms, sometimes sprouting and fanning out. I would have believed that the humans had been conquered by mold if it hadn’t been for their completely serene demeanor and obvious intelligence. Clearly, the human/fungal relationship was symbiotic. As hosts, the humans received ample energy from the parasites, allowing for a boost in brain power not seen since the Cognitive Revolution of 30,000 years before my time. All the problems we called “the human condition” were no longer a part of life. The symbiotic relationship with a lower organism was echoed in their culture and architecture – perfectly integrated into the natural world. Even fashion was affected. Some people trimmed their fungus like topiary, often growing them into magnificent capes. In fact cape length seemed to be a status symbol. The fungus appeared to be, if not the source, then at least a major catalyst in humanity’s astronomical (and peaceful) development.
- – -
I was mightily encouraged to see humans thriving like this and hurried several hundred years deeper into the future, eager to see our humble race, the descendants of curious apes, rise to ever more glorious heights. But what I encountered was a crushing disappointment. The zenith of the Cape Age and its many developments was in ruins. Living furtively among the empty shells of a once great nation were a frightened and filthy people. Living in conditions, and with skills, not much better than our cave-dwelling ancestors. What had happened? I skimmed the interim period from the comfort of my ship. Watching backwards to witness the symbiotic relationship falter. Some virus had affected the fungus, making it sick, it started to die, and with it, all the accumulated knowledge of mankind. The humans had taken their mental enhancements for granted and now were utterly stranded without the aid of  their parasitic benefactors.
- – -
I ventured several thousand years deeper into the future. I had been shaken by my last encounter with people and wanted to put some time between myself and that particular version of humanity. I  felt that the human race could use some time to find their bearings again. I stopped the machine once I spotted a copse of trees sprout up nearby – a good hiding spot. The machine’s scanners didn’t pick up any of the telltale signatures of human habitation – radio waves, heat signatures from dwellings. I got out to investigate and saw nothing. No people, no buildings, not so much as a rusty soda can. Back inside the machine, I toggled back and forth by a decade or so to get a feeling of the surroundings, but it was all the same. A pristine, green and tranquil world. Was the future bereft of human life? Had we finally destroyed ourselves, leaving the healing planet in peace?
My answer came at nightfall. When the red sun set, the night sky came alive, not with the familiar constellations, but with the gleaming traffic of satellite cities, the future of humanity spread in vast nets of light across the night sky. Pointing my machine’s antennas skyward, i was able to pick up a startling cacophony of broadcasts. The human race lived on, quickly filling a previously vacant evolutionary niche – sub-orbital …
- – -
Needless to say, seeing other times is merely tourism and eventually gets boring. After several weeks of traveling (in my timescale) I decided to tinker a little. I chose projects that would not alter the course of history (not too much). I bought three DiscDroid DJ Bots from a retailer in about the year 4500 and took them to 18th Century Vienna, where I enrolled them in the finest music academy. With a real education and some culture, I wanted to see what these glorified appliances could do. I was not disappointed. In fact, I plan to bring them back to my time where they can bestow a new form of music upon the charlatans calling themselves “artists” these days.
- – -
My experiments have had drawbacks. The more I tinkered with time, the more anomalies I discovered. I am now positive that my doings have caused these glitches in time – glitches in time – glitches in time – glitches in time …