Shorts and a little helicopter hat - they're this season's essential radio accessory

Edit: This post makes Lee look like my tech monkey while I'm the big presenting ego. This isn't balanced. Lee is a fully fledged second half to my first half, and together we present as one. A bit like a blubbery Ant and Dec.

Every night this week, I have spent two hours blithering into a micromophone like an idiot possessed.

The first five days of the Theatre Of Noise (explained concisely here) have fizzled to a close. Thanks to a clever use of scripting and flaggelating ourselves with cutting self-criticism, the output's been a few notches above our usual fare.

Monday's show, our first since our 2007 podcast, was like an old shed in Venice: stilted and ever-so-slightly rusty.

Thanks to an image of me dressed in shorts and a little helicopter hat (cheers, Lee!), Tuesday's show exploded into merriment. Our production values on this show were probably tighter than anything we had done before.

Wednesday's show was a slow-burner, measured and steady.

Thursday's was a stonker. It trod the wafer-thin line between proper comedy silliness and filling the airwaves with spluttering giggles. It is my co-presenter Lee's job to drive the desk and give me just enough space for my adrenaline-fuelled comedy rants, and to use his charming form of grumpiness to reign me in when the show needs more control. You could say I was "on one", and Lee coped admirably.

We even managed the health and safety nightmare of Friday's Chainsaw Challenge, which saw our resident toolman Fil The Destroyer let rip with a jigsaw on Michael Bolton's 1991 hit single Time Love And Tenderness (results pictured above).

This is how Lee steers our ship:

INT. STUDIO - EVENING

ME: We're two minutes ahead of schedule. What are we gonna do? What are we gonna do?

LEE: That's pretty good. Don't worry about it.

ME: WHAT ARE WE GONNA DO?

LEE: It's only two minutes.

I bounce up and down, sweating profusely.

ME: Whaddawegonnadoo, whaddawegonnadoo, whadwegondoowhadwegondoo--

LEE shoots me in the head.

All in all, then, we're pretty relaxed about the whole thing.

On an unconnected note, Portishead are about to drop their first album for 360 years. Here's a startling hymn to rhythm from Beth and co, and like all of my mpSundays, it will only be available until the very next mpSunday. And yes, I know it's Monday.

mpSunday (right click and save as): *plop* this mpSunday has now gone. Click here for the latest mpSunday.

DEEPER FRIED FAT: LITTLE BIT, T SHIRT

Oh to be torn up by wolves and fed, bit by bit, through an old lawnmower

While I'm busy with radio things, there are a few gramophone releases you and I ought to catch up on.

AGF's fourth album Words Are Missing is a dizzying array of shattered sound and industrial ambience. The harmonies come from vocals torn up by wolves and fed through a lawnmower. The fragments that remain are alluring but ever-so-slightly unsettling.

Harmonic 313 is a side project from Mark Pritchard, better known as one half of Global Communication. His EP1 is a triumphal throwback to the early days of techno, when it was all about Detroit. So yes, it sounds all a bit Juan Atkins without the smoothness, but it works for me.

A whole manbag packed full of Thom Yorke remixes have been released in the last couple of months. Meddling with the lazy-eyed Oxford boy's music are Burial (unfairly labelled as a 2step Massive Attack), Four Tet, Christian Vogel and Newport Pagnell's DJ Surgeon.

The utterly ironic thing about electronica remixes of Radiohead's frontman is that, whatever you do, you just end up making it sound more like Radiohead. Which is a good thing, and you should sniff them down in record shops now.

Finally, Clark is breathing fire again on his new offering, Turning Dragon. He has put all niceties to one side, has walked into the Women's Institute (electronica sub-committee) meeting, and machine-gunned everyone to death with bad-tempered percussion and ADD-level techno.

Listening to his album is like trying to nail gun exploding fireworks inside the Crystal Maze dome. It's hyper, blunder-bus propeller-injected fun and is a real treat from start to finish. Have a listen to Volcan Veins from that very album.

DEEPER FRIED FAT: CLARK'S TED

Smokin' tracks and molten nonsense: Theatre Of Noise and F1 Losers are go

Well, bless my trousers, it's that time of year when everything explodes at once.

From Monday night for three weeks, I will be presenting the Theatre Of Noise. Here is the blurb written by my own fair hands and those of my dashing co-presenter Lee:

"Spewing from their radio dungeon, rising from the swamps like Ant and Dec's blubbery brothers, back once again like a renegade master, Lee and Eyan bring you smokin' tracks and molten nonsense.

"With games like Chainsaw Challenge, Sin Lose Or Draw and Rejoice And Be Gladiator, and music from the likes of Becoming The Archetype, Mae, Neon Horse and We Are Scientists, the fifth annual Theatre Of Noise is like nothing you have heard before."

That last bit is probably a lie. Listen in on 87.7FM at 9pm weeknights from Monday if you're in Manchester, or you can listen to us live on the internet. I'm also designing a website, which should be ready to go soon.

Expect copious updates on the Fat Roland blog until you are so nauseated with them, you will be necking dry cornflakes to make yourself puke.

Meanwhile, if you like cars that go fast, then totally ignore my Formula One Losers League. You have to be pretty quick to enter (deadline is any day now), but pretty slow to succeed: it's a fantasy league where your team has to be the worst one you could possibly muster.

You can actually win money for crashing in the Losers League. Meanwhile, the radio shows will be like listening to a slow motion car crash for no financial return whatsoever.

DEEPER FRIED FAT: VOLUME ONE, LOSERS LEAGUE

God sent Jesus Christ but the techno gods sent a single solitary extra black dot

The internoggin is abuzz with the activities of Sean Booth and Rob Brown, known to head-nodders everywhere as legendary Manchester bleep merchants Autechre (video still pictured).

They named themselves after hammering random letters on a keyboard. By that logic, I ought to be called Diohsihasd rather than Fat Roland.

My semi-bearded pal Fil once blue-toothed me a great mobile phone background with two huge curvy letters 'ae', which as any fule knows is the chemical symbol of Autechre.

The file corrupted somewhere in the ether between our phones, and a single solitary extra black dot appeared on the image. This accidental progression made it true to the incremental changes in loops typical of the band's music, and we knew a great big techno god was watching over us.

Anyways, as an old American friend and fellow Homestar Runner fan always used to say, anyways, they have a new album out. It is called Quaristice and is available from all good thingies.

If a new album isn't good enough, you should also download the 30 minutes of rich techno they spewed out on Mary Anne Hobb's Radio 1 show. Discover this at Acid Ted or at Fried My Brain 1.0.

While you're there, if you look really hard, and I mean proper hard, as if you're looking for the guy hiding behind Wally, you will see links to their marathon February podcast.

I enjoyed the uber-cheesiness of some of their song choices, despite my decrepit internet wires committing suicide every five minutes, abuzz or no abuzz.

DEEPER FRIED FAT: A PROJECT, TEN PLACES

"I am the trigger for your gun" suggests a relationship that isn't exactly balanced*

Pancake Day, National Novel Writing Month, Healthy Eating Day, National Ketamine Month.

These are events to be respected and celebrated. Especially the last one.

That's why I'm standing on the steps of my palace, gleaming trumpet in hand, and declaring March the National Month Of The Whip.

I caught their barnstormer Trash on XFM whilst me and a few chums were bombing it down to Wales this weekend. Whilst there is every excuse to gnash teeth and rip clothes at the demise of a great radio station, there is every reason to be optimistic for The Whip.

The Whip are the best thing to come out of Manchester since Doves. They're like Gary Numan and Underworld falling into a blender, being poured into Apollo 440's cup, topped with Daft Punk's nuts, and drunk by New Order's Peter Hook.

You can boogie with them at The Warehouse Project on March 21st or buy their debut long-player X Marks Destination two weeks today.

Or you can ogle them in a cracking performance (whip, crack, geddit?) at last year's DPercussion in this here video link here.

I really should buy some fancier robes for announcements of national significance. These are covered in cat hairs.

*the actual line is "I have become the trigger for your gun" but this didn't fit into the space. Editorial decision. Or summat.

DEEPER FRIED FAT: RIP TONY, GRAAH UM

If you ask me, people on the internet should talk about the internet more

In a phenomenally pointless bit of internet drivel, I feel it important to mark the sixth anniversary of fatroland.com.

Really, I wouldn't continue reading. Carry on to more engaging sites, like trousers for spiders or dating sites for people with cleft pallets, that kind of thing.

In fact, anyone who devotes an entire post to the fact they launched their URL on 02/02/02 just so they could remember the date deserves dragging outside by their eyelashes and shooting in both elbows.

Fatroland.com doesn't deserve a cake. It purports to be a blog about electronica, but it instead it's pervaded by a faint whiff of bottom drivel with added pointless pub quizzery.

Still, I like it, and every now and then I get it out of its box and let it run round my bedroom.

You see, many great things have lasted six years, like the Second World War, Guantanamo Bay and June Sarpong's stint on T4.

So happy birthday fatroland.com. I remember when you used to be a proper internet site, with scrolling text and rollover 'mystery meat' graphics.

Sigh. How you've shrunk.

DEEPER FRIED FAT: ALIENS INVADED

They did it with compost, you know

Fresh from seeing the Coen brothers' stupendous return to form in No Country For Old Men, I found myself staggering down internet ginnels and dead ends until I found this video.

UNKLE's Rabbit In Your Headlights features French actor Denis Lavant getting smashed up in a tunnel and being taunted by Vince from Queer As Folk.

It reminds me of the scene in No Country where the blood-soaked Llewelyn Moss is staggering on the highway near the American / Mexican border; the sense of isolation he feels as the cars drive past is palpable.

I also posted this because VFX artist Gavin Toomey slapped a bit of emulsion on this video. He's also known as Vessel and his comment a couple of posts ago led me, via Google, to his impressive IMDb listing as a visual tomfoolery boffin.

Although, don't make the same mistake I did and read 'compositing' as 'composting'.

DEEPER FRIED FAT: REQING OUT, BATTLES ATLAS

Adam's backside causes a rumpus - or should that be a medial rectus?

Adnam's Broadside, affectionately known to the pub's staff as Adam's Backside, was nearly my downfall at the quiz this week.

Still, myself and my co-host 9/10ths managed to grasp onto reality for long enough at our monthly tryst of trivia on Wednesday. He's posted his questions there, and I'm posting mine here.

The typical score on this general knowledge round was about 45%, or eight points, so it isn't a walk in the skate park. Don't let that tempt you into the evil of Googling.

Answers in the comments section please: I will post the proper real answers there in about a week.

1
The invention of which drink reportedly caused its inventor to exclaim: “Come quickly, I am tasting the stars”? (1 point)

2
Do these African countries have a larger or smaller population than the UK? (4 points)
A – Ethiopia
B – Nigeria
C – South Africa
D – Zimbabwe

3
Where in the human body would you find a posterior compartment, a medial rectus muscle and a bulbar sheath? (1 point)

4
Name me the three most common computer passwords in the UK according to PC magazine. Clue: one is a noun, one is a sequence of numbers and one is a sequence of letters. (3 points)

5
Polar bears (2 points)
A – What does Allen’s Rule have to do with polar bears’ legs?
B – What colour is a polar bear’s fur?

6
If you were to see Pegasus carrying the First Lord in modern day Britain, what would you be looking at? (1 point)

7
In a Boots poll of 4,000 adults, what percentage of smokers had kept their habit secret from their parents, even into adulthood? (2 points if you’re spot on, 1 point if you’re within 5%)

8
What is the most popular boy’s name in the UK? Is it: Jack, James or David? (1 point)

9
In what year was the Ford Transit introduced to the UK? (2 points for the correct year, 1 point if you’re a year out)

10
What word connects a US rapper, a flavour abandoned by Coca Cola, a Cameron Crowe film and Obelix’s mother in the Asterix comics? (1 point)

Edit: I've snaffled all the answers into the comments bit of this post, so look there for the solution. If you are posting your own answers, don't look for fear of spoiling probably the most fun you'll have all year.

DEEPER FRIED FAT: PLEASE DIARY