THE WILDHEARTS frontman Ginger has issued the following recording update:

"Day 12: Isolation Sickness.

Isolation fever begins to seep into the house like curdled smoke from a mysterious world somewhere outside of the present confines. A world where people mingle, internet exists, telephones link lovers in vital communication and television pumps information into the lives of the secluded.

Somewhere out there a tapestry of industrial sounds blend in familiar harmony, the soundtrack to a social picture in constant motion.

Here in the barren landscape of nowheresville we could be blissfully oblivious to mass worldwide devastation, to an aftermath of terrible warfare where hideously deformed mutant beings crawl from the remnants of all too recent destruction. The world could have stopped spinning on it's axis. Zombies could be roaming the earth. Giant Japanese monsters crushing every building in every seething metropolis. It could all be going on in the nearest City. We would never know.

Here all is quiet.

Eerily so.

The telephones have stopped working, although CJ has a weak signal that occasionally gives us access to civilisation.

Internet is a luxury not to be exploited. For a couple of hours a day the world of cyberspace is ours, teasing with promise, thrilling with information.

We are allowed to work until 4 PM, although it has been known to last until 5 PM on occasion, daily (except for Sundays. And National holidays), and from late afternoon until the fresh new morning conversation, held around a grimy wooden table under the last remaining lightbulb, is the final bastion of sanity. Talk of bright new futures, exciting and untapped resources and artistic merit permeate the darkness.

The quiet, threatening darkness.

Without sound or vision the evening grips like an evil parent. The threat much more terrifying than the punishment, which, of course, never arrives. There is only, ever, the constant drumming of the threat.

That awesome, desperate threat.

Slowly, resolve dissipates like oxygen.

Thrice told jokes no longer thrill.

A cold sweat spreads under unwashed garment.

A door creaks under the pressure.

Mice scuttle overhead through rooftop networks.

The silence suddenly begins to vibrate.

It's terrible hum oscillating in dark harmony.

Familiar and deadly.

Louder. Louder.

The direction of the dull, aching hum is impossible to pinpoint.

It is not inside the room. It is not outside the room.

The awful truth is the final thing to register before insanity battles zero defense.

The sound is coming from within the mind.

Collectively, we share the sound, the hum, the threat and the awesome darkness.

In silence we offer ourselves to the mercy of the silence.

And, of course, there is no mercy.

For there is nothing.

Ugh, can you imagine that? Thank God we have our bicycles.

Hurrah!

Ginger."