INDUSTRIAL::MUSIC::LIBRARY

GRISTLEISM - Throbbing Gristle-Inspired Sound Toy/Looping Device!

2010-12-14T11:11:00.000-08:00

Gristleism (5.0 out of 5 stars)

"An Odd Thing, January 2, 2010

By C. Pilkington 'Music Enthusiast'"
((Review found on Amazon.com)):

I've enjoyed ambient music for quite awhile, and artists like Brian Eno are truly inspiring; even more in present times. His philosophy is that good ambient music should be something that is poignant when both focused on, or placed in the background.

I stumbled on this little wonder after reading quite a bit about the Buddha Machines that FM3 introduced to the world several years ago. This is an offshoot of that product, and instead of containing blissful, soothing tones, Gristleism carries some very creepy and overall strange sounds originally created by Throbbing Gristle. For weird people like me, it's a very interesting little gadget.

Before I continue, I have the red Gristleism; there are at least two other color choices at the moment, I just happened to pick the red one. Every Gristleism has a very simple plastic design: it has a volume adjuster (which also doubles as an on/off switch), a loop selector button, and a pitch/tempo shifting wheel; all located on top of this small, square device. The speaker is located on the front of the unit, and takes up most of the front. The Gristleism runs on 2 AA batteries, and has a unique design that fills the back of the toy. Even the box it comes shipped in has an ornate, but effective, design. That's the whole thing in a nutshell!

Now, how is this supposed to be interesting, you ask? Well, the Gristleism contains 13 loops; all ranging in length. You can use the pitch/tempo shifter and really bend each loop into something entirely different; thus, the lasting power of this toy seems to be quite large. You can play with it for just a few minutes, and get a good grasp on what the thing is capable of. But, if you dive into it over time, you'll realize that there's a lot you can do with it.

Now, when I get on the computer, sometimes I will just set up the Gristleism, and let it play in the background. It enhances your environment without being too much of a distraction (unless you set the volume really high). The Buddha Machines are obviously much better for this purpose, but I like the dark contrast the Gristleism has to the light of the Buddha Machines. If you have several devices, of either the Buddha or Gristleism variety, there's even more fun to be had.

Interview with Monte Cazazza (Slash,1979)

2010-11-29T11:11:00.000-08:00

SLASH Magazine (Vol. 2, #3) | January 1979

"From Oakland to England, from obscurity to being "very widely unknown", Monte Cazazza has a past. One of our finest investigative reporters lays it bare...

Next record due for release from Industrial Records is from Monte Cazazza, a reclusive Oakland artist whose performances have violated the sensibilities of indignant art critics, the entire acid-damaged Bay Area Avantgarde and jaded art-cliques from Menlo Park to Venice (Italy). He's been described as a "brilliant monster," "art gangster," and "a real sick guy," but one thing is unanimous: his personal appearances really rile people up.

His detractors just don't seem to get the point. Genet says it best: "To escape the horror, bury yourself in it." Like other artists who are obsessed with violent images, Cazazza's early life was riddled with hideous events and accidents, including witnessing a necrophiliac in action. Rather than choke down those nightmares, he spat them back out at the world.

Cazazza's reputation was spawned at Oakland College of Arts and Crafts when for his first sculpture assignment he created a cement "waterfall" down the main stairway of the building, making it permanently impassable and got the boot on the second day of school.

His formal education completed, he passed quickly through a mutilated rubber doll period then disappeared among dark rumours of hospitals and jails. He resurfaced with a blatantly commercial attempt to woo the whims of the wealthy with tasteful pornographic collages of orchids sprouting penises at a San Francisco exhibit. He was contacted by an ageing countess as a possible benefactress and lunched at her famous Oakland mansion while visions of dollar signs danced drunkenly around the plates. The Contessa died two weeks later.

Shortly thereafter in 1972 he achieved infamy when he was invited to attend an arts conference weekend-in-the-woods to share transcendental conversations on perspective and grant-writing while nestling paint-spattered jeans in pine needles and toasting hand-dyed marshmallows for "S'Mores" in an ultimate artsy outdoorsy atmosphere. Cazazza arrived with an armed bodyguard and sprinkled arsenic into all the food. At lunch he dropped bricks with the word "dada" painted on them on artistic feet. At dinner he burned a partially decomposed, maggot-infested cat at the table. His bodyguard blocked the exit, and several participants fell ill due to the stench. Photos and stories of this event were published as far away as Holland.

Genesis P-Orridge and Cosey Fanni Tutti of Throbbing Gristle read of Cazazza in Vile Magazine in 1974 when he was a classic Valentine's Day cover boy holding a dripping bloody heart that looked torn out of his chest. The Gristle's and Cazazza's mutual fascination with pornography and fascism prompted the limeys to pay a call to California to view in person the 15'x15' silver screw together swastika Cazazza constructed which could be rapidly dismantled in case of police raids or guerrilla JDL attacks.

Since their visit was at the height of the Gary Gilmore furor, they all photographed each other in blindfolds as though they were in front of a firing squad, complete with a real loaded gun pointed at their hearts to get better reactions. Postcards made of the photos were mailed immediately after Gilmore's execution to the warden of the Utah penitentiary and several newspapers. Over 6,000 T-shirts with the same photo were sold in England, and a picture of one was on the front page of the Hong Kong Daily News. Their mock photo was mistakenly considered the official execution photo according to P-Orridge.

T-shirt sales financed Cazazza's 1977 trip to England where he was let loose in Industrial RecordsP.S. (PLASTIC SURGERY), BUSTED KNEECAPS, F.F.A. (FIST FUCKERS OF AMERICA), HATE, and TO MOM ON MOTHER'S DAY. A Cazazza single will be released in March. studios with an engineer, a chainsaw, the innards of a piano which was played with hammers and violin bows, and other musical instruments. Ten songs were recorded with titles like

Also soon for release from the Throbbing Gristle umbrella corporation is a movie in which Cazazza and a 14 year-old boy are electrocuted. Monte also appeared in Kerry Colonna's DECCADANCE movie in a suit he made out of rubber tubing and razor blades.

Cazazza edited a fanzine NITROUS OXIDE in 1971 (far preceding Sniffin' Glue). He co-edits WIDOWS AND ORPHANS, a colour Xerox picture magazine. He also gives shows and illustrated lectures on Siamese Twins that he researched in medical libraries.

But still his reputation is so nasty that he rarely leaves his house, although he did go out on Halloween dressed as Kearney, the trash bag murderer. He wore a cheap plastic mask and carried a green garbage bag filled with animal livers and hearts (like Hermann Nitsch) and a bloody mannequin head used by medical students for practice in giving mouth-to-mouth respiration. Definitely the life of the party.

Cazazza's pet money-making project for the future is further exploration of "murder junkies" via a double bill of the stories of Edmund Kemper (a cannibalistic necrophiliac) and Dean Coryl, the Texas "candy man" whose brutal sex murders peaked at a chronic one-a-day habit until he had killed 27 teenage boys (before authorities stopped counting).

For artists who think their work is daring, Cazazza's is a double-dare. Those avant garde artists who use sex and violence as a chic intellectual playground for "art theory" are the first to head for the exits when confronted by Cazazza's work. His scientific expose of voyeuristic urges for sex and violence is no-holds-barred. And it is all done with a comic edge that amplifies the sounds of skeletons being yanked from the most repressed closets.

Cazazza never gives personal interviews. He bought a hot Ansa-phone and keeps it hooked up 24 hours a day. When he returned my call, I asked him if he wanted to make any statements for Slash. "NO, NO, NO," he said, "I don't need to talk, I don't need to make quotes. You see, I'm already VERY WIDELY UNKNOWN." - by JB *This article was reproduced by Industrial Records and included with Cazazza's "To Mom on Mothers Day / Candy Man" 7-inch single)."

((Republished here, without permission, orig. found at the Axis Archives, on Brainwashed.com ))

[technorati tags]: monte cazazza :: cazazza

REVIEW: Leather Nun - Slow Death/Ensaam I Natt (1979)

2010-09-05T05:26:00.000-07:00

**read the complete post here: SibLINGSHOT ON THE BLEACHERS: industrial music for damaged people

Most definitely not a cover of Jordan & Loney's doctoring of Jagger & Richard - a spasm inducing paean to withdrawl - this is a Jonas Almqvist composition.

The Leather Nun was officially excommunicated in Gothenburg in 1979. Loosely a quartet, the collective drew on input from a number of musicians. Their first release - the 12" from which the following is culled - was issued on Throbbing Gristle's Industrial Records; home to Thomas Leer and Robert Rental among others. The label folded in 1980 following TG's documented collapse. Appropriately, given their manifesto to "mutate and collage sound"*, IR0016 - the last of the vinyl pressings - was allocated "Nothing Here But the Recordings" by William S. Burroughs.

Ohm: The Early Gurus of Electronic Music

2010-08-15T13:26:00.000-07:00

Ohm: The Early Gurus of Electronic Music Special Edition 3CD + DVD

[Track Listings]

Disc: 1
1. Valse Sentimentale - Clara Rockmore
2. Oraison - Ens D'Ondes De Montreal
3. Etude Aux Chemins De Fer - Pierre Schaeffer
4. Williams Mix - John Cage
5. Klangstudie II - Herbert Eimert/Robert Beyer
6. Low Speed - Otto Luening
7. Dripsody - Hugh Le Caine
8. Forbidden Planet: Main Title - Louis Barron/Bebe Barron
9. Elektronische Tanzste: Concertando Rubato - Oskar Sala
10. Poem Electronique - Edgard Varese
11. Sine Music (A Swarm Of Butterflies Encountered Over The Ocean) - Richard Maxfield
12. Apocalypse-Part 2 - Tod Dockstader
13. Kontakte - James Tenney/William Winant
14. Wireless Fant - Vladimir Ussachevsky
15. Philomel - Milton Babbitt
16. Spacecraft - MEV
Disc: 2
1. Cindy Electronium - Raymond Scott
2. Pendulum Music - Sonic Youth
3. Bye Bye Butterfly - Pauline Oliveros
4. Projection Esemplastic For White Noise - Joji Yuasa
5. Silver Apples Of The Moon, Part 1 - Morton Subotnick
6. Rainforest Version 1 - David Tudor
7. Poppy Nogood - Terry Riley
8. Boat-Woman-Song - Holger Czukay
9. Music Promenade - Luc Ferrari
10. Vibrations Composees: Rosace 3 - Francois Bayle
11. Mutations - Jean-Claude Risset
12. Hibiki-Hana-Ma - Iannis Xenakis
13. Map Of 49's Dream The Two Systems Of Eleven Sets Of Galactic Intervals: Drift Study '31/69 c.... - La Monte Young
Disc: 3
1. He Destroyed Her Image - Charles Dodge
2. Six Fants On A Poem By Thomas Campion: Her Song - Paul Lansky
3. Appalachian Grove - Laurie Spiegel
4. En Phase/Hors Phase - Bernard Parmegiani
5. On The Other Ocean - David Behrman
6. Stria - John Chowning
7. Living Sound, Patent Pending Music For Sound-Joined Rooms Series - Maryanne Amacher
8. Automatic Writing - Robert Ashley
9. Canti Illuminati - Alvin Curran
10. Music On A Long Thin Wire - Alvin Lucier
11. Melange - Klaus Schulze
12. Before And After Charm (La Notte) - Jon Hassell
13. Unfamiliar Wind (Leeks Hills) - Brian Eno

DRONES- from Stockhausen to La Monte Young to Nurse With Wound...

2010-08-15T11:11:00.000-07:00

Theatres of Eternal Music

Say the word drone and, depending on your conversation partner, any number of possible responses might emerge: an entomologist's exegesis on the male honeybee's mating practices, the military expert's account of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, perhaps a musicologist's analysis of the drone-like features of the bagpipe, bluegrass banjo, and didgeridoo. Within electronic music circles, the word might elicit historical anecdotes populated by dramatis personae like La Monte Young and Terry Riley, plus nostalgic recollections colored by strobe-lit chanters and tambura players. Far from being an esoteric phenomenon of the ‘60s, recent works by Greg Davis, Deathprod, Robert Henke, Minit, and Growing suggest that the drone is still very much alive and, if anything, thriving. While there appears to be a resurgence of interest, it's also possible we're merely witnessing new additions to a genre that has never really gone out of fashion.

What constitutes a drone? To begin, sustained intonation that establishes a harmonic center for its accompanying elements; the drone might utilize a single note repeated indefinitely or, at the opposite extreme, all of the scale's notes spread across numerous octaves. Other key aspects include extended duration, modular repetition, and a focus on overtones. Influenced by the music of India, Indonesia, and Africa, the drone form's oft-used alternate tuning (Just Intonation) and vertical concentration challenges the tacit supremacy of a Western tradition that prioritizes horizontal development.

Young and Riley are regularly lumped in with Philip Glass and Steve Reich in discussions of minimalism yet the two pairs embody fundamentally different subsets. According to composer and violinist Tony Conrad, minimal music (of the Young type) involves tonality, repeating modes, and long pieces with middles but no endings or beginnings. Bereft of conventional development, the trance-inducing drone with its extended tones and layered pitches does change but glacially. In lieu of lengthy tones, the early works of Reich and Glass are founded on modal patterns that slowly shift throughout prolonged repetition to a similarly hypnotic effect. One might differentiate, then, between “drone minimalism,” with its tonal emphasis, and “pattern minimalism,” with its rhythmic pulsations. Of course, such theoretical distinctions prove less straightforward in practice. Reich's Four Organs, for example, straddles both drone and pattern variations since its organs repeat the same chord progression for 24 minutes with varying lengths of silence separating the chords. His voice pieces Come Out and It's Gonna Rain serve as better examples given their minimal means, yet here, too, repeating patterns morph into drone-like episodes.

Ambient music and drone genres also overlap, Greg Davis's Somnia drone “Clouds As Edges (version 3 edit)” a case in point. Certainly a piece can satisfy the drone criteria yet be ambient if it also meets Brian Eno's criterion that an ambient work should be “as ignorable as it is interesting” (Music for Airports, 1978). Davis says, “Aside from the more placid, meditative kind of music we often associate with drones, I enjoy that intense style, too, where it's so loud and overwhelming it's completely immersive.” Davis might just as easily be alluding here to the volcanic roar of Young's Theatre of Eternal Music ensemble, Lou Reed's 1975 scabrous feedback fest Metal Machine Music, or the droning riffage of Sunn 0))) and Growing.

Dream Syndicates

Each day, multitudes flock past the unprepossessing entrance to the Dream House, unaware of its musical significance. Located at 275 Church Street in Manhattan's TriBeCa district where La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela moved in 1963, the Dream House functions as an ongoing exhibition and performing space for Young's music and Zazeela's light installations. The loft's white interiors are bathed in Zazeela's colored lights and large speakers emit the ongoing frequencies of Young's drones; sounds resonate more loudly or softly depending on one's position in the room. (Another Dream House was operated from 1979 to 1985 at 6 Harrison Street, a six-story building where Young and Zazeela lived, though they kept the Church Street loft as a legal address.)

No history of drone music is complete without Young, even if voluminous documentation of the artist and his work is available elsewhere. Born in 1935 in a small log cabin in Bern, Idaho to a Mormon family and initially trained on saxophone (he even played with free jazz legend Eric Dolphy), Young discovered Anton Webern, Japanese gagaku, Indonesian gamelan, and Indian classical music upon his 1957 arrival at UCLA. Exposed to the ragas of Ali Akbar Kahn, Young developed a fascination for sustained tones and, with his 1958 landmark composition Trio for Strings (which eschews melody and pulse for static chords and sustained tones), arguably founded minimalism. A 1959 Darmstadt summer course with Karlheinz Stockhausen exposed Young to the radical philosophies of John Cage. (Young's Piano Piece for David Tudor #1, in which the performer offers a bale of hay to his piano to eat and a bucket of water to drink, clearly shows Cage's influence.) Young then moved to New York to study electronic music with Cage and briefly became involved in the Dada-influenced Fluxus movement.

Of course, Young wasn't the first to use the drone—it's fundamental to Indian music—but he can be credited with reviving it within Western classical music. Based entirely on four alternate-tuned pitches, “The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer” from The Four Dreams of China (1962, with a later eight-trumpet version issued on Gramavision in 1991) was his first drone piece in Just Intonation (which substitutes the equal temperament pitches of conventional Western music for tuning that Pythagoras quantified in ancient Greece and is used in many non-Western musics and by composers like Pauline Oliveros and Glenn Branca). With sustained overtones that eventually destabilize the listener's grasp of space and time, its harmonies evoke the electronic hums of hydro wires and power transformers that transfixed Young as a boy.

By 1962, Young was performing with a small ensemble that was eventually christened the Theatre of Eternal Music in 1965; aside from the voices of Young and Zazeela, the group variously included violinist Tony Conrad, violist John Cale, hand drummer Angus MacLise, trumpeter Jon Hassell, violist David Rosenboom, organist-vocalist Terry Riley, and others. Dedicated to realizing Young's The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys (an ongoing composition that Young initiated in 1964), the music conflated elements of improvisatory jazz, minimalism, Indian music, and psychedelia into one, with the group's ritualistic (and ferociously loud) bowed-strings-voice improvisations lasting for hours. (Around 1965, Young attached a microphone to his turtle's aquarium motor in order to tune his ensemble to its hum, hence the work's title). Later variations of the Eternal ensemble included the Theatre of Eternal Music Brass Ensemble (led by trumpeter Ben Neill) and The Theatre of Eternal Music String Ensemble (led by cellist Charles Curtis). Young's landmark composition remains The Well-Tuned Piano (the title parodying Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier), a raga-like, multi-tonal (and ongoing) work begun in 1964 and performed in 1981 on a Bösendorfer Imperial grand piano, a performance issued initially on vinyl and then as a five-disc set on Gramavision; that five-hour version is eclipsed by a 1987 performance issued on DVD that better matches the work's six uninterrupted hours (and includes the enhancing spectacle of Zazeela's light sculpture).

Of course, the Theatre of Eternal Music's other members established themselves beyond their association with Young, Terry Riley a case in point. Arguably his most important work, Riley's revolutionary 1964 In C comprises 53 melodic modules that can be repeated as often as desired by an undetermined number of instruments with the piece formally ending once all players reach module 53. In 1997, Conrad issued the four-disc set Early Minimalism: Volume 1, which includes the scorching sustain of 1964's Four Violins plus three 1990's extensions, each album given the name of a month in 1965. (The infamous falling-out between Young and Conrad is well-documented but merits brief mention as it helps clarify why relatively few of the Theatre of Eternal Music's recordings have been issued. Even though many group sessions were recorded, Young has refused to release them despite the protestations of his former colleagues. The discord is rooted in Young's assertion that he is the sole composer of the original performances; the others contend they are co-composers of what were collectively improvised sessions. A recording of the ensemble was issued in 2000, the 31-minute Inside the Dream Syndicate, Vol. I: Day of Niagaraand, while the recording's sound quality is abysmal, the document does capture the ensemble's glorious roar and its attempt to “freeze” sound.)

Bridging the Gap

John Cale brought his viola but more importantly Young's concepts to the Velvet Underground before moving on to a storied solo career of great recordings (Fear, Slow Dazzle) and collaborations with Eno (Wrong Way Up) and former VU partner Lou Reed (Songs for Drella). Rather perversely, Reed himself kept the drone flame alive with the 1975 release of Metal Machine Music, two albums of seething noise that outraged his Transformer fans and found them returning to the record stores in droves demanding refunds. (The Loop Orchestra's John Blades says, “I clearly remember it turning up in all the second-hand record shops in Sydney just after it was released” while Greg Davis recalls it playing once in a Chicago bookstore he was working in at the time, much to the bewilderment of the store's customers, one presumes.) The ongoing debate over the work's legitimacy was re-ignited in Berlin, 2002 when the German New Music group Zeitkratzer performed the piece live, with Reed joining in on guitar.

Drones awareness spread to prog- and art-rock aficionados with the 1972 release of Tangerine Dream's double-album Zeit (arguably supplanted by 1974's seminal Phaedra) and the 1973 release of No Pussyfooting, comprised of two drones generated by Robert Fripp's guitar and Brian Eno's loops and synths, while krautrock fans discovered Tony Conrad through his Outside the Dream Syndicate collaboration with Faust in 1974 (reissued with a bonus track on Table Of The Elements in 1993). The drones phenomenon held steady throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s due to influential works by the Hafler Trio, :zoviet*france, Nurse With Wound, Phill Niblock, Glenn Branca, Charlemagne Palestine, Earth, Keiji Haino, and others. During the ‘90s, the barren dronescapes of Thomas Köner's gong-generated Nunatak Gongamour and Teimo releases offered a diametric contrast to the comparatively warmer ambient-drone-techno hybrids Zauberberg, Königsforst, and Pop created by Wolfgang Voigt under his Gas guise.

In the early 1980s, Australian radio programmers John Blades and Richard Fielding started experimenting with tape machines by cutting, rearranging, and rejoining pre-recorded tape to generate loops. Developing their ideas further as the Loop Orchestra, the pair made its 1983 debut with four reel-to-reel machines playing slowly evolving constructions. Far from static, the group's loops ebb and flow hypnotically. “I believe our music is only drone-like due to the nature of tape loops,” says Blades. “There is a slow progress and evolution through the duration of a piece, but I prefer the term ambient as this is the effect created by most of our music. After all, the so-called ambient music of Eno (Discreet Music, Music for Airports) is really very dronal.”

In spite of technological advances, the four compositions on 2004's Not Overtly Orchestral were generated using those same reel-to-reel machines. Why do so when newer technologies are available? According to Blades, “We have a great affection for the technology of reel-to-reel machines, a technology which has been largely left behind by the digital age. The machines are beautiful pieces of sculpture; the loops are simple, very organic, and very human. The digital technology is purely a black box and too easy and cold. Also, tape loops and reel-to-reel tape machines are historically significant as the history of electronic music dates back to musique concrete.”

“We're dedicated to creating a body of work that cannot be instantly identified with any past or current movement or style or era,” adds Fielding, “a music that has no patina of contemporariness, no obvious technological or technical development, no mastery of technique, and no mature style.”

Blades says, “We generally try to keep the music as free of associative and identifiable elements as possible. Our first record (released in 1991) included a 20-minute piece called “Suspense” created from tape loops made from suspense and horror movie music from the 1940s to the 1980s (films like Creature From the Black Lagoon); in this case identifiability was part of the intended effect. On the other hand, “Bride” was created using loops from the soundtrack to the 1936 film Bride of Frankenstein; with all the loops layered and the music fragmented, the original score became unrecognizable. It depends on the theme, then, whether loops remain identifiable or not.”

New Practitioners

Asked about current drone artists, Blades says, “At the moment, the most significant artist creating beautiful, intricate layerings of electronic sound is Minit.” The group, formed by Jasmine Guffond and Torben Tilly in 1997, uses sampling, digital processing, and electro-acoustic techniques to create meditative soundscapes, four of which are heard to fine effect on the recent Now Right Here. The epic title track is the most impressive, a 20-minute drone whose shimmering tones grow into a dense mass until a bass line appears, anchoring the piece magnificently. While the piece is largely abstract, the timbre and color of its French horns remain readily identifiable. “The use of French horn was instrumental in the process of developing the kind of ecstatic build-up that we wanted,” says Tilly. “Klara Logan played the horn to an already existing bed of sound, and it was her playing that in turn modulated the development of the piece as it leads up to the introduction of the bass line.”

Asked to describe Minit's sound, Tilley says, “When Jasmine and I began the Minit project around 1997, our music was (and to a large extent still is) built almost entirely out of looped samples. Over the last five years, we've attempted to make the loop less obvious, more intricate, and to produce a denser, richer texture, which is perhaps less electronic sounding. The drone works well as a kind of stable firmament under which details can be inscribed and transformations can occur.

“I feel like we are developing our own kind of spectral music, spectral in the sense of paying attention to all the minute details of color and grain within a particular recorded sound. So in a way for us the 'drone' just naturally comes out of this approach, as time and rhythm are sublimated by tone and color.”

Arriving on the heels of Curling Pond Woods' campfire hymns and Beach Boys homages, Davis' Somnia may have caught some listeners by surprise. In fact, the album was created in tandem with his Carpark albums, even if the timing of the releases makes it appear otherwise. (An early version of “Clouds as Edges” was issued as a six-minute single in 2001.) Somnia brings to fruition Davis 's long-standing passion for the genre, an interest that began as early as high school when he discovered Indian classical music, modal jazz, Aphex Twin's ambient works, Reich, and Eno.

Davis bases each Somnia piece on a single instrument yet alters its sound so completely via computer that the result sometimes bears little resemblance to its origins. Speaking between tour stops in Montreal and Boston, he says, “I did constantly ask myself,'‘How far do I take this process?' I was trying to reach the point where the instruments' sound qualities were radically transformed but not beyond the point where you could no longer recognize the original instrument. Its tone color, I believe, is still apparent in the end.” His audacious instrument choices included a bowed psaltery for “Archer” and a toy harmonica for “Diaphanous (edit).”

Describing his production approach to “Archer,” Davis says, “I wanted to create a piece that shimmered with rich overtones, so I sampled myself playing every diatonic note on the bowed psaltery, and then used a MAX/MSP patch to generate a drone, which I then processed towards its final form.” Even more arresting are the whistles and moans of “Mirages (version 2)” that were generated from a Schaaf punch-card music box (which generates sounds when holes are punched out of staffs displayed on cardboard strips and then fed into the music box). “Using music box samples, I wanted to transform the stereotypical associations we have with music boxes,” he says, “and using spectral graphical processing and resynthesis techniques, ended up creating a haunted quality.”

Somnia not only includes long tracks like the 22-minute “Campestral (version 2)” but also short pieces like the 4-minute “Furnace.” “I struggled a lot with song duration and album length,” Davis admits. “‘Campestral' had a long melody to begin with, and with time-stretching, transposing, and layering, it ended up being a naturally longer piece. At the same time, I liked the idea of incorporating shorter pieces to show that an immersive and effective drone can still be created in four minutes.” His interest in the project extends to the stage as well. “Each night I've been creating a new piece using real-time processing on one of the instruments I've brought on tour (bells, glockenspiel, harmonica, melodica, stylophone, Egyptian double reed flute, gongs, farfisa, autoharp, guitar, et cetera),” he says. “Sometimes I'll also incorporate field recordings and improvisations into the live tapestry.”

Robert Henke (a.k.a. Monolake) shares Davis ' enthusiasm for bringing drone material to the stage, although for him the ideal scenario for presenting Signal to Noise would be a multi-channel setup with the audience completely surrounded by sound. Even though the drone is most powerfully experienced live (as its duration isn't determined by album running time), the two slowly mutating works on Signal to Noise are definitely immersive. For the album's 32-minute title piece, Henke used a Yamaha SY77 to generate timbres he then filtered, pitch-shifted, and processed to create drifting, wave-like clusters, while static bursts and rumbles on the more programmatic “Studies for Thunder” were sculpted to mimic thunderstorms. Henke's interest in drones stems from a fascination with gradually evolving structures, even if their forms are different: “For me, a pulsating, repetitive club track, the music of Steve Reich, a Thomas Köner soundscape, or distant urban traffic noises are all equal sources of inspiration and delight.”

While Davis 's Arbor and Curling Pond Woods are on Carpark, Chicago-based kranky seems the more fitting home for Somnia given the label's roster of drone-related artists like Stars of the Lid, Charalambides, and Growing. By the title alone, Growing's most recent album, The Soul of the Rainbow and the Harmony of Light, begs associations with Young and the psychedelicized ‘60s period, even if the title derives from an 1893 essay by Bainbridge Bishop on his 1877 color organ invention (a device capable of playing sound and corresponding light together or separately). While group members Kevin Doria (bass and guitar) and Joe Denardo (guitar) embrace the drone's primal power (the roar of “Anaheim II,” for example), their seething shards of guitar and waves of delay are loud but not dissonant or cacophonous; their “ambient doom” sound is rapturous, elemental in force and ethereal in effect. The album opens with “Onement,” an 18-minute epic of shuddering guitars, harmonium-like drones, and cymbal noise that eventually engulfs all other sounds. The harmonium sound reappears in the more incantatory “Epochal Reminiscence,” where crystalline tones appear alongside gargantuan guitar slabs.

The group's interest in drones is evident on its 2003 debut The Sky's Run Into The Sea but that interest emerged long before. As a developing bass player, Doria gravitated towards artists like Sonic Youth, Earth, Glenn Branca, Young, Riley, and Pandit Pran Nath; likewise, Denardo was captivated by Earth's 1993 Earth 2 special low frequency version (Sub Pop) and he's “still wearing out the grooves on (Terry Riley's organ improvisation) Persian Surgery Dervishes.” In addition, he says, “It's always wonderful to see Sunn 0))) play, to feel its awesome power.” When asked about memorable drone-related experiences, Denardo cites a visit to the Dream House, and in doing so echoes Davis, who visited there with Keith Fullerton Whitman and David Grubbs.

An Eternal Voice

The sum total of artists working in drone-related genres is immense, as evidenced by an inquiry into the practitioners' favorites. In addition to Minit, Blades cites Brendan Walls and Scott Horscroft; Fielding's eclectic list includes Birchville Cat Motel, the Dead C, the Master Musicians of Joujouka, Harvest Music of Chad, Tuvan throat singing, Inuit women, and Sufi music. Tilley says, “I'm very interested in what Radian is doing, because the group is merging the sonic and spectral with the rhythmic and melodic.” Greg Davis cites the impact of Alvin Lucier's Music on a Long Thin Wire and The Tamburas of Pandit Pran Nath and mentions Rafael Toral, Fennesz, Hazard, Keith Fullerton Whitman, Growing, and more in a long list of favored contemporary drone artists.

Given the fervent level of artistic enthusiasm for the genre, one wonders if there has been a surge of recent interest. Davis contends that there have always been practitioners even though current technologies allow drone music to be more easily produced, a sentiment shared by Henke and Denardo. “There have always been practitioners but, even more than the media deciding what to cover, I think the ‘listening public' is paying attention,” says Denardo. “In certain parts of the country, people consistently come to our shows, and Earth and Branca have never stopped doing this type of music.” Henke similarly notes the media's intermediary role as a factor: “If you are a music journalist and on your table are ten Eurotrance CDs and one drone record, which one will you remember?”

“The resurgence of interest in drones goes hand-in-hand with a resurgence of interest in minimalism,” says Blades. “In recent years, there has been an increase in total listening, and drone listening requires total immersion in the sound environment. I also believe that, with the global atmosphere of violence and terrorism, meditative and total listening experiences are more highly regarded.” Blades cites artists like :zoviet*france, Hafler Trio, Nurse With Wound, Bernhard Gunter, Oren Ambarchi, and Phill Niblock as carrying on the drone tradition.

Why does the drone have such enduring appeal? “Its music and sound environment is very minimal and pure, devoid of fashions or trends like glitch,” says Blades. Another factor is its vast spectrum of stylistic possibilities, that it can simultaneously accommodate the unearthly, funereal epics of Deathprod's Morals and Dogma and the stately beauty of Jóhann Jóhannsson's Virðulegu forsetar. Maybe its longevity is rooted in something more primal: Denardo says that the most inescapable drones (and those which keep us from any true silence) are the low pulses of our circulatory systems and the high hums of our nervous systems. Or perhaps, as Davis says, it's because “the drone is the eternal voice of the universe.”

Further Reading :

Four Musical Minimalists by Keith Potter (Cambridge University Press, 2002).
Minimalists by K. Robert Schwartz (Phaidon, 1996).
“Dream Encounters: La Monte Young meets Mark Webber,” The Wire, December 1998, issue 178.
“Early Minimalism,” The Wire, April 2001, issue 206.
“Inside The Dream Syndicate,” The Wire, April 2001, issue 206.

Web info:

Greg Davis
Growing
Robert Henke
Loop Orchestra
Minit

Just Intonation/Kyle Gann
La Monte Young/MELA (Music Eternal Light Art) Foundation

Further Listening:

Greg Davis: Somnia (kranky)
Growing: The Soul of the Rainbow and the Harmony of Light (kranky)
Robert Henke: Signal to Noise (Imbalance)
The Loop Orchestra: Not Overtly Orchestral (Quecksilber)
Minit: Now Right Here (Staubgold)

John Cale: Day of Niagara: Inside The Dream Syndicate,
Vol. I (Table of the Elements)
John Cale: Dream Interpretation: Inside The Dream Syndicate, Vol. II (Table of the Elements)
John Cale: Stainless Gamelan: Inside The Dream Syndicate,
Vol. III (Table of the Elements)
John Cale: Sun Blindness Music --> New York in the 1960s, Vol. 1: Sun Blindness Music
Tony Conrad: Early Minimalism, Vol. 1 (Table of the Elements)
Tony Conrad (with Faust): Outside The Dream Syndicate:
30th Anniversary Ed. (Table of the Elements)
Terry Riley: In C (Sony)
Terry Riley: In C: 25 th Anniversary Concert (New Albion)
Terry Riley: Persian Surgery Dervishes (NewTone)
La Monte Young: The Melodic Version of The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer from
The Four Dreams of China (Gramavision)
La Monte Young: The Tamburas of Pandit Pran Nath
(Just Dreams)
La Monte Young: Theatre Of Eternal Music (Shandar)
La Monte Young: The Well-Tuned Piano (Gramavision)

Related Listening:

The sheer number of drones-related recordings verges on astronomical but a representative list might include:

Glenn Branca: Symphony No. 5 (Altavistic)
Charalambides: Joy Shapes (kranky)
Rhys Chatham: An Angel Moves Too Fast to See,
Selected Works: 1971-1989 (Table of the Elements)
Deathprod: Morals and Dogma (Rune Grammofon)
Stuart Dempster: Underground Overlays from the Cistern Chapel (New Albion )
John Duncan: Phantom Broadcast (Allquestions)
Earth: Earth 2 special low frequency version (Sub Pop)
Faust: Ravvivando (Klangbad)
Fripp and Eno: No Pussyfooting (Eeg)
Fushitsusha: The Wisdom Prepared (Tokuma)
Gas: Zauberberg (Mille Plateaux)
Philip Glass: Music in Twelve Parts (Nonesuch)
Keiji Haino: So, Black Is Myself (Alien8)
Harmony Rockets: Paralyzed Mind of the Archangel Void
(Big Cat)
Ryoji Ikeda: Matrix (Touch)
Jóhann Jóhannsson: Virðulegu forsetar (Touch)
Thomas Köner: Nunatak Gongamour (Barooni)
Alan Lamb: Primal Image (Dorobo)
Jean-François Laporte: Mantra (Metamkine)
Alvin Lucier: Music On A Long Thin Wire (Lovely Music)
Roy Montgomery: Scenes From The South Island (Drunken Fish)
Phill Niblock: Young Person's Guide to Phill Niblock (Blast First)
Nurse With Wound: Soliloquy For Lilith (Idle Hole)
Pauline Oliveros: Deep Listening (New Albion)
Jim O'Rourke: Happy Days (Revenant)
Paul Panhuysen: Partitas For Long Strings (XI Records)
Charlemagne Palestine: Schlingen-Blangen (New World)
Pelt: Empty Bell Ringing in the Sky (Vhf)
Folke Rabe: What?? (Dexter's Cigar)
Steve Reich: Early Works (Nonesuch, includes Come Out
and It's Gonna Rain )
Steve Reich: Four Organs/Phase Patterns (NewTone)
Janek Schaefer: Above Buildings (Fat Cat)
Stars of the Lid: The Tired Sounds of (kranky)
Sunn 0))): Flight Of The Behemoth (Southern Lord)
Sunroof!: Bliss (Vhf)
Tangerine Dream: Zeit (Sanctuary/Castle)
Rafael Toral: Violence of Discovery and Calm of Acceptance (Touch)
David Tudor: Rain Forest (Mode Records)
Vibracathedral Orchestra: Dabbling With Gravity & Who You Are (Vhf)
Windy & Carl: Consciousness (kranky)
Richard Youngs: Advent (Jagjaguwar)
:zoviet* france: The Decriminalisation Of Country Music (Tramway)

February 2005

~Re-posted without permission, from an article found on Textura.org: http://www.textura.org/archivespages/abcd/dronesarticle.htm

Industrial Music (A Condensed History)

2010-08-15T11:04:00.000-07:00

Read the full post by [gay til death] on Industrial Music For Industrial People - The Something Awful Forums...

"...Industrial music is a widely varied style of music which today doesn't really have a common thread other than it sounds 'dark', originally it was experimental, confrontational, abrasive, and vulgar. Started in the late 60s and early 70s by radical 'post-hippie' artists in England (COUM Transmissions, later becoming Throbbing Gristle) and San Francisco (Monte Cazazza, who collaborated with Throbbing Gristle and it's members for many years)), it spread through out the UK and Europe without making a huge impact in the US until the 80s (save for a few artists and mainly in San Francisco with Monte Cazazza, who coined the term Industrial Music, and Boyd Rice).

In the late 60s there was COUM Transmissions, a radical artist collective. The two most important members were Genesis P-Orridge and Cosey Fanny Tutti. These two along with Peter Christopherson (aka "Sleazy", and Chris Carter they made up the musical aspect of COUM Transmissions. Eventually COUM became Throbbing Gristle. Every Throbbing Gristle show was recorded and eventually released on cassette on their label Industrial Records. These dudes had a huge impact on the experimental music scene in the UK, US and Europe. Like minded individuals and copy cats popped up and a scene was born.

For the next 30 years industrial expanded and evolved (or devolved in some cases), ranging from pop music masquerading as something 'dark' or 'sinister', to some of the most vulgar and abrasive music out there. After Throbbing Gristle broke up and went their separate ways, many said Industrial had died, and thus retroactively we call anything after the TG break up post-industrial (I have to say I don't like this term, it stinks of something made up on Wikipedia or some forum 20 years after the fact).

So! From this point we have a huge amount of music to explore, since dozens of sub-genres have sprung up since TG's last performance. Most notably we have neo-folk, power electronics, electro-industrial, EBM, dark ambient, death industrial, rhythmic noise, darkwave, and minimal wave. This isn't inclusive at all, and a few are debatable, but genre semantics is for nerds.

To get you all started, here are some important releases with a lil blurb about them.

70s:
Throbbing Gristle - 20 Jazz Funk Greats
Probably their most accessible, if you can call it that. After seven years of chaotic improvised life performances their sound by this point had been channeled and was more 'musical'. Closest thing to this really is Kraftwerk, especially Autobahn, but maybe because both those albums came into my life at the same time.

Throbbing Gristle - Mission of Dead Souls
Their last live performance, historically important.

Throbbing Gristle - Heathen Earth
My favorite release by them probably, I believe it may be a bootleg but I'm not sure.

Cabaret Voltaire - Extended Play
One of their earlier releases, cold, minimal, lots of weird home made sounds and cut up tape loops. They would become more musical as they went on, by the mid 80s they had become synth pop (don't be put off, The Crackdown, their first synthpop release is amazing) and by the 90s were making IDM. Each one of their releases up to Code are great.

Cabaret Voltaire - The Mix-Up
One of the best industrial full lengths of the era

SPK - Factory/Retard/Slogun 7'
The best of their early singles. Before moving into less musical territory (and way before the electro rap single), they were essentially a post punk band, but jesus christ are they harsh here. This thing is ridiculously ahead of its time.

Come - Rampton
Mainly important due to its members and the label Come Org that was started to put these out. Included William Bennett (of Whitehouse), Daniel Miller (of the Normal, and founder of Mute Records), and JG Thirlwell (of Foetus). Comparable to the Residents I guess, weird rock music deconstructed.

80s:
christ there is so much here I'll just give a select few, most importantly the former members of TGs new pursuits.

Psychic TV - Force the Hand of Chance
After TG broke up Genesis P-Orrdige and Sleazy came together with Alex Fergusson of Alternative TV and some other people and formed the band/cult/art collective/whatever Temple ov Thee Psychic Youth and the band Psychic TV. This release is one of my all time favorite albums, mixing straight forward pop songs (like really poppy, string sections and lots of pizzicato) and psychedelic industrial, this is one of the more bizarre albums I've heard. I can't imagine buying this in 1982 after only knowing Genesis from his work in Throbbing Gristle.

Chris & Cosey - Techno Primitiv
Chris Carter and Cosey Fanny Tutti were the other half of TG, their secret relationship being partly responsible for the breakup in the first place. Minimal synth pop, with some of Cosey's cornet playing shown off! Their first 3 or 4 releases are all I've explored, so I can't give you a definite rec here.

Coil - Horse Rotovator
Made up of Sleazy and a Throbbing Gristle groupie, Jhonn Balance, and formed while both were in Psychic TV. Horse Rotovator is their best 80s album, but their first three full lengths, Scatology, Horse Rotovator, and Loves Secret Domain are all excellent. Paussolini's Death (Ostia) is the best track here.

There are so many albums that I could recommend from here it would take days to complete this post. So lets start the discussion! Lets avoid the NIN and KMFDM and Rammstein chat though, looking to expand people's horizon here or just circle jerk about your favorite MB tape

Some youtube links:

an awkward Whitehouse performance
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRbWvLKWS1k

the BEST Whitehouse track, well not best, but I'm really enjoying their output from the last few years
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGNKgah948s

probably the most seen Throbbing Gristle video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8klW9trVTQ

SPK - Slogun, amazingly ahead of its time
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZWmYEUoweg

Cabaret Voltaire - Do The Mussolini (Head kick)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxsYrfKf_pc

DAF - Tanz Der Mussolini, early EBM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwAJXV070OY

Laibach - Geburt Einer Nation, a Queen cover I believe, classical Martial Indsutrial
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YE_j0xIsJA

Les Joyaux De La Princesse, excellent group, combining ambient, martial industrial, marching songs, french pop from the 40s and 30s into a a great atmosphere. mostly focusing on the Nazi occupation of France
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pqNK4pQbVY ..."

** [click here] to read or add to the whole thread...

REVIEW: BOYD RICE (NON), w/ Death In June, Blood Axis, Anton Lavey

2010-08-09T12:34:00.000-07:00

Industrial « :::KILL UGLY RADIO:::: "h1
Boyd Rice
February 14, 2007

Music, Martinis And Misanthropy
Tesco

1990-mmm.jpg

Bad boy Boyd Rice as Rod McKuen with anti-social personality disorder. Frankly, it’s hard to take Rice’s schtick at face value. If you don’t, you can both enjoy his music and have a laugh. The seething-with-hatred People shouldn’t be listened to at work on a Monday morning. I’m warning you.

Other highlights include Disneyland Can Wait and the best-ever song by Lee Hazelwood I’d Rather Be Your Enemy, rendered all the more frightening when sung by a pleasant looking man who happens to dress like an occult SS officer.
Some other touchstones on this album are Anton laVey, Heraclitus, Ragnar Redbeard and the Carpenters. This is also a meeting of the Death In June/Sol Invictus/Blood Axis glee-club (Douglas P, Tony Wakeford, Michael Moynihan), plus Rose McDowall."

MUTANT SOUNDS: CAROLINER RAINBOW HERNIA MILK QUEEN-REAR END HERNIA PUPPET SHOW, LP, 1986, USA

2010-08-09T05:50:00.000-07:00

MUTANT SOUNDS:
CAROLINER RAINBOW HERNIA MILK QUEEN REAR END HERNIA PUPPET SHOW (LP) 1986

throbbing gristle - discipline

2010-05-14T07:34:00.000-07:00

Live at Kezar Pavilion in San Francisco,5-29-1981

Kezar Pavilion,
San Francisco, U.S.A., 29 May 1981

Promotional leaflet

THROBBING GRISTLE May 29 1980 San Francisco
In my life I've been to many a concert but in many ways a live performance by the British group, Throbbing Gristle, is different. I got there early and noticed Genesis standing near the sound board that was situated in the middle of the hall, I was almost tempted to play the part of the rock fan and run over and fall at his feet but that's not what TG is all about so I carried on. In watching him talk with the sound people there seemed to be an air of relaxed authority about the man. As if he knew exactly who he was and where he's going. (So enough bull shit now to the show).
Two S.F. punk bands opened and I was not impressed, to the extent that I put some cotton in my ears to dull the din. The only excitement was when the bassist broke his guitar and Genesis had to load him his.
Finally they ended and the stage was cleared. The cotton came out of the eras and I was ready. The stage was sparse, considering TG's music, there were a few black cases that seemed to hold different boxes of knobs and dials. Cosey had a case set down in front of her which held five foot pedals, her guitar was an odd shape hardly and body to it and her horn connected to the control panel was present. Peter had a few more dials to play with plus some noise makers and four Sony cassette players that seemed to be connected to a switching network. Chris was a bit back stage and I couldn't see exactly what he had. Genesis had his bass guitar which seemed to have an extra pickup at the bottom of the strings and also had some foot pedals to play with.
The music, well as usual it's hard to distinguish the new songs from the old. Devastating is probably the best word to describe the music. It overwhelms you, from the screams and blasts of 'Heathen Earth' to Genesis' soft voice echoing back and forth across the hall. I don't know what to make of Genesis, I guess you could say he puts 100% of himself behind his music and vocals but there's something special in the way he delivers a song in the way his emotions seem to flow from him and into the audience. The band as a whole were very comfortable on stage although Cosey looked a bit bored with it all. But towards the end she seemed to be playing more and I did see her smile once or twice.
During one break between songs a member of the audience yelled out 'What A Day' and a nice little conversation ensued between Genesis and the audience. With Genesis saying he'd forgotten some of the words the audience pretty well sang the song themselves. But Peter had already started the tapes for the next song and 'What A Day' died before it started.
You know for the life of me I can't remember anymore about the actual music. I can remember closing my eyes during one piece and floating off into the 4th dimension (no drugs here just TG). I can remember jumping up and down because of the intense beat, and I can remember screaming along with the rest of the audience as they yelled back at Genesis during 'Heathen Earth'. The show ended within the usual 60 minutes with a short version of 'Discipline'.
At the end there was no screaming for more. I think the audience was too mesmerised by the last 60 minutes to really do anything. The group stayed on stage and started packing things up. Genesis talked with the audience for a while and I spoke with peter for a few minutes. As I said at the beginning it wasn't your average rock concert, it was more a happening, an event and one I'll remember for a long time to come.
So in closing I'd like to thank Genesis P-Orridge, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Chris Carter and Peter Christopherson for coming to the States. God knows I doubt if they profited from this trip but I do hope they come back again. I don't worship them but I do feel they're above most musical groups and I hope they stick around for a few years yet.

Alex Douglas

Throbbing Gristle have ceased to exist. They are now pursuing solo projects.

Vox 7, August 1981

Set included:
Dead Souls
Guts On The Floor
Circle Of Animals
Looking For The OTO
Vision And Voice
Funeral Rites
Spirits Flying
Persuasion U.S.A.
The Process
Discipline (Reprise)

Concert ticket

"The Art of Noises " by Luigi Russolo :: Italian Futurist

2007-10-28T04:44:00.000-07:00

'The Art of Noises'
Luigi Russolo

Dear Balilla Pratella, great Futurist composer,

In Rome, in the Costanzi Theatre, packed to capacity, while I was listening to the orchestral performance of your overwhelming Futurist music, with my Futurist friends, Marinetti, Boccioni, Carrà, Balla, Soffici, Papini and Cavacchioli, a new art came into my mind which only you can create, the Art of Noises, the logical consequence of your marvelous innovations.

Ancient life was all silence. In the nineteenth century, with the invention of the machine, Noise was born. Today, Noise triumphs and reigns supreme over the sensibility of men. For many centuries life went by in silence, or at most in muted tones. The strongest noises which interrupted this silence were not intense or prolonged or varied. If we overlook such exceptional movements as earthquakes, hurricanes, storms, avalanches and waterfalls, nature is silent.

Amidst this dearth of noises, the first sounds that man drew from a pieced reed or streched string were regarded with amazement as new and marvelous things. Primitive races attributed sound to the gods; it was considered sacred and reserved for priests, who used it to enrich the mystery of their rites.

And so was born the concept of sound as a thing in itself, distinct and independent of life, and the result was music, a fantastic world superimposed on the real one, an inviolatable and sacred world. It is easy to understand how such a concept of music resulted inevitable in the hindering of its progress by comparison with the other arts. The Greeks themselves, with their musical theories calculated mathematically by Pythagoras and according to which only a few consonant intervals could be used, limited the field of music considerably, rendering harmony, of which they were unaware, impossible.

The Middle Ages, with the development and modification of the Greek tetrachordal system, with the Gregorian chant and popular songs, enriched the art of music, but continued to consider sound in its development in time, a restricted notion, but one which lasted many centuries, and which still can be found in the Flemish contrapuntalists' most complicated polyphonies.

The chord did not exist, the development of the various parts was not subornated to the chord that these parts put together could produce; the conception of the parts was horizontal not vertical. The desire, search, and taste for a simultaneous union of different sounds, that is for the chord (complex sound), were gradually made manifest, passing from the consonant perfect chord with a few passing dissonances, to the complicated and persistent dissonances that characterize contemporary music.

At first the art of music sought purity, limpidity and sweetness of sound. Then different sounds were amalgamated, care being taken, however, to caress the ear with gentle harmonies. Today music, as it becomes continually more complicated, strives to amalgamate the most dissonant, strange and harsh sounds. In this way we come ever closer to noise-sound.

This musical evolution is paralleled by the multiplication of machines, which collaborate with man on every front. Not only in the roaring atmosphere of major cities, but in the country too, which until yesterday was totally silent, the machine today has created such a variety and rivalry of noises that pure sound, in its exiguity and monotony, no longer arouses any feeling.

To excite and exalt our sensibilities, music developed towards the most complex polyphony and the maximum variety, seeking the most complicated successions of dissonant chords and vaguely preparing the creation of musical noise. This evolution towards "noise sound" was not possible before now. The ear of an eighteenth-century man could never have endured the discordant intensity of certain chords produced by our orchestras (whose members have trebled in number since then). To our ears, on the other hand, they sound pleasant, since our hearing has already been educated by modern life, so teeming with variegated noises. But our ears are not satisfied merely with this, and demand an abundance of acoustic emotions.

On the other hand, musical sound is too limited in its qualitative variety of tones. The most complex orchestras boil down to four or five types of instrument, varying in timber: instruments played by bow or plucking, by blowing into metal or wood, and by percussion. And so modern music goes round in this small circle, struggling in vain to create new ranges of tones.

This limited circle of pure sounds must be broken, and the infinite variety of "noise-sound" conquered.

Besides, everyone will acknowledge that all musical sound carries with it a development of sensations that are already familiar and exhausted, and which predispose the listener to boredom in spite of the efforts of all the innovatory musicians. We Futurists have deeply loved and enjoyed the harmonies of the great masters. For many years Beethoven and Wagner shook our nerves and hearts. Now we are satiated and we find far more enjoyment in the combination of the noises of trams, backfiring motors, carriages and bawling crowds than in rehearsing, for example, the "Eroica" or the "Pastoral".

We cannot see that enormous apparatus of force that the modern orchestra represents without feeling the most profound and total disillusion at the paltry acoustic results. Do you know of any sight more ridiculous than that of twenty men furiously bent on the redoubling the mewing of a violin? All this will naturally make the music-lovers scream, and will perhaps enliven the sleepy atmosphere of concert halls. Let us now, as Futurists, enter one of these hospitals for anaemic sounds. There: the first bar brings the boredom of familiarity to your ear and anticipates the boredom of the bar to follow. Let us relish, from bar to bar, two or three varieties of genuine boredom, waiting all the while for the extraordinary sensation that never comes.

Meanwhile a repugnant mixture is concocted from monotonous sensations and the idiotic religious emotion of listeners buddhistically drunk with repeating for the nth time their more or less snobbish or second-hand ecstasy.

Away! Let us break out since we cannot much longer restrain our desire to create finally a new musical reality, with a generous distribution of resonant slaps in the face, discarding violins, pianos, double-basses and plaintive organs. Let us break out!

It's no good objecting that noises are exclusively loud and disagreeable to the ear.

It seems pointless to enumerate all the graceful and delicate noises that afford pleasant sensations.

To convince ourselves of the amazing variety of noises, it is enough to think of the rumble of thunder, the whistle of the wind, the roar of a waterfall, the gurgling of a brook, the rustling of leaves, the clatter of a trotting horse as it draws into the distance, the lurching jolts of a cart on pavings, and of the generous, solemn, white breathing of a nocturnal city; of all the noises made by wild and domestic animals, and of all those that can be made by the mouth of man without resorting to speaking or singing.

Let us cross a great modern capital with our ears more alert than our eyes, and we will get enjoyment from distinguishing the eddying of water, air and gas in metal pipes, the grumbling of noises that breathe and pulse with indisputable animality, the palpitation of valves, the coming and going of pistons, the howl of mechanical saws, the jolting of a tram on its rails, the cracking of whips, the flapping of curtains and flags. We enjoy creating mental orchestrations of the crashing down of metal shop blinds, slamming doors, the hubbub and shuffling of crowds, the variety of din, from stations, railways, iron foundries, spinning wheels, printing works, electric power stations and underground railways.

Nor should the newest noises of modern war be forgotten. Recently, the poet Marinetti, in a letter from the trenches of Adrianopolis, described to me with marvelous free words the orchestra of a great battle:

"every 5 seconds siege cannons gutting space with a chord ZANG-TUMB-TUUMB mutiny of 500 echos smashing scattering it to infinity. In the center of this hateful ZANG-TUMB-TUUMB area 50 square kilometers leaping bursts lacerations fists rapid fire batteries. Violence ferocity regularity this deep bass scanning the strange shrill frantic crowds of the battle Fury breathless ears eyes nostrils open! load! fire! what a joy to hear to smell completely taratatata of the machine guns screaming a breathless under the stings slaps traak-traak whips pic-pac-pum-tumb weirdness leaps 200 meters range Far far in back of the orchestra pools muddying huffing goaded oxen wagons pluff-plaff horse action flic flac zing zing shaaack laughing whinnies the tiiinkling jiiingling tramping 3 Bulgarian battalions marching croooc-craaac [slowly] Shumi Maritza or Karvavena ZANG-TUMB-TUUUMB toc-toc-toc-toc [fast] crooc-craac [slowly] crys of officers slamming about like brass plates pan here paak there BUUUM ching chaak [very fast] cha-cha-cha-cha-chaak down there up around high up look out your head beautiful! Flashing flashing flashing flashing flashing flashing footlights of the forts down there behind that smoke Shukri Pasha communicates by phone with 27 forts in Turkish in German Allo! Ibrahim! Rudolf! allo! allo! actors parts echos of prompters scenery of smoke forests applause odor of hay mud dung I no longer feel my frozen feet odor of gunsmoke odor of rot Tympani flutes clarinets everywhere low high birds chirping blessed shadows cheep-cheep-cheep green breezes flocks don-dan-don-din-baaah Orchestra madmen pommel the performers they terribly beaten playing Great din not erasing clearing up cutting off slighter noises very small scraps of echos in the theater area 300 square kilometers Rivers Maritza Tungia stretched out Rodolpi Mountains rearing heights loges boxes 2000 shrapnels waving arms exploding very white handkerchiefs full of gold srrrr-TUMB-TUMB 2000 raised grenades tearing out bursts of very black hair ZANG-srrrr-TUMB-ZANG-TUMB-TUUMB the orchestra of the noises of war swelling under a held note of silence in the high sky round golden balloon that observes the firing..."

We want to attune and regulate this tremendous variety of noises harmonically and rhythmically.

To attune noises does not mean to detract from all their irregular movements and vibrations in time and intensity, but rather to give gradation and tone to the most strongly predominant of these vibrations.

Noise in fact can be differentiated from sound only in so far as the vibrations which produce it are confused and irregular, both in time and intensity.

Every noise has a tone, and sometimes also a harmony that predominates over the body of its irregular vibrations.

Now, it is from this dominating characteristic tone that a practical possibility can be derived for attuning it, that is to give a certain noise not merely one tone, but a variety of tones, without losing its characteristic tone, by which I mean the one which distinguishes it. In this way any noise obtained by a rotating movement can offer an entire ascending or descending chromatic scale, if the speed of the movement is increased or decreased.

Every manifestation of our life is accompanied by noise. The noise, therefore, is familiar to our ear, and has the power to conjure up life itself. Sound, alien to our life, always musical and a thing unto itself, an occasional but unnecessary element, has become to our ears what an over familiar face is to our eyes. Noise, however, reaching us in a confused and irregular way from the irregular confusion of our life, never entirely reveals itself to us, and keeps innumerable surprises in reserve. We are therefore certain that by selecting, coordinating and dominating all noises we will enrich men with a new and unexpected sensual pleasure.

Although it is characteristic of noise to recall us brutally to real life, the art of noise must not limit itself to imitative reproduction. It will achieve its most emotive power in the acoustic enjoyment, in its own right, that the artist's inspiration will extract from combined noises.

Here are the 6 families of noises of the Futurist orchestra which we will soon set in motion mechanically:

1 2 3 4 5 6
Rumbles Whistles Whispers Screeches Noises obtained by percussion on metal, wood, skin, stone, tarracotta, etc. Voices of animals and men:
Roars Hisses Murmurs Creaks Shouts
Explosions Snorts Mumbles Rustles Screams
Crashes Grumbles Buzzes Groans
Splashes Gurgles Crackles Shrieks
Booms Scrapes Howls
Laughs
Wheezes
Sobs

In this inventory we have encapsulated the most characteristic of the fundamental noises; the others are merely the associations and combinations of these. The rhythmic movements of a noise are infinite: just as with tone there is always a predominant rhythm, but around this numerous other secondary rhythms can be felt.

Conclusions

1. Futurist musicians must continually enlarge and enrich the field of sounds. This corresponds to a need in our sensibility. We note, in fact, in the composers of genius, a tendency towards the most complicated dissonances. As these move further and further away from pure sound, they almost achieve noise-sound. This need and this tendency cannot be satisfied except by the adding and the substitution of noises for sounds.

2. Futurist musicians must substitute for the limited variety of tones posessed by orchestral instruments today the infinite variety of tones of noises, reproduced with appropriate mechanisms.

3. The musician's sensibility, liberated from facile and traditional Rhythm, must find in noises the means of extension and renewal, given that every noise offers the union of the most diverse rhythms apart from the predominant one.

4. Since every noise contains a predominant general tone in its irregular vibrations it will be easy to obtain in the construction of instruments which imitate them a sufficiently extended variety of tones, semitones, and quarter-tones. This variety of tones will not remove the characteristic tone from each noise, but will amplify only its texture or extension.

5. The practical difficulties in constructing these instruments are not serious. Once the mechanical principle which produces the noise has been found, its tone can be changed by following the same general laws of acoustics. If the instrument is to have a rotating movement, for instance, we will increase or decrease the speed, whereas if it is to not have rotating movement the noise-producing parts will vary in size and tautness.

6. The new orchestra will achieve the most complex and novel aural emotions not by incorporating a succession of life-imitating noises but by manipulating fantastic juxtapositions of these varied tones and rhythms. Therefore an instrument will have to offer the possibility of tone changes and varying degrees of amplification.

7. The variety of noises is infinite. If today, when we have perhaps a thousand different machines, we can distinguish a thousand different noises, tomorrow, as new machines multiply, we will be able to distinguish ten, twenty, or thirty thousand different noises, not merely in a simply imitative way, but to combine them according to our imagination.

8. We therefore invite young musicians of talent to conduct a sustained observation of all noises, in order to understand the various rhythms of which they are composed, their principal and secondary tones. By comparing the various tones of noises with those of sounds, they will be convinced of the extent to which the former exceed the latter. This will afford not only an understanding, but also a taste and passion for noises. After being conquered by Futurist eyes our multiplied sensibilities will at last hear with Futurist ears. In this way the motors and machines of our industrial cities will one day be consciously attuned, so that every factory will be transformed into an intoxicating orchestra of noises.

Dear Pratella, I submit these statements to your Futurist genius, inviting your discussion. I am not a musician, I have therefore no acoustical predilictions, nor any works to defend. I am a Futurist painter using a much loved art to project my determination to renew everything. And so, bolder than a professional musician could be, unconcerned by my apparent incompetence and convinced that all rights and possibilities open up to daring, I have been able to initiate the great renewal of music by means of the Art of Noises.

Brion Gysin's Dreamachine: Notes by Genesis P-Orridge

2007-10-25T12:21:00.000-07:00

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

WHAT IS A DREAMACHINE?

HIS NAME WAS MASTER

BRION GYSIN'S DREAMACHINE WITHOUT TEARS

THEE ONLY LANGUAGE IS LIGHT

BACK IN NO TIME

QUESTIONNAIRE

NOTES ON THE RECORDINGS

NOTES ON THE DREAMACHINE ITSELF

THE DREAMACHINE AS INSTALLATION IN PUBLIC

CREDITS

Minimal Man - "Slave Lullabyes" (1986) [*download]

2007-10-23T13:09:00.000-07:00

Many thanks to Lost-In-Tyme for posting. Review plus 2 links from which you can download the full LP...
>> Minimal Man - "Slave Lullabyes" (1986)n

Z'EV INTERVIEW

2007-09-01T20:50:00.000-07:00

found here >>
WE'RE GONNA BE TIMELESS: 03.17.07: Guest Z'EV

“Tone Generator” of S.P.K. Interviewed

2007-08-20T18:29:00.000-07:00

Recent interview with SPK via Tone Generator...

[Read more over on: :::KILL UGLY RADIO:::]

ROBERT RENTAL - 1979 DEMO TAPE [MP3]

2007-07-28T23:31:00.000-07:00

Posted over on MUTANT SOUNDS: ROBERT RENTAL/"Mental Detentions", Tape, 1979, UK

Rhythm and Noise - Naut Humon - Z'EV

2007-07-01T16:44:00.000-07:00

Where South San Francisco ends, desolation begins. In November 1980, flyers began appearing on neighborhood telephone poles announcing an upcoming Rhythm & Noise show. "Crisis Data Transfer," the poster promised. No location was given, but a recorded phone message provided detailed directions to "The Compound."

The Compound sits among a grim terrain of decaying housing, abandoned warehouses, electrified chain-link fences and packs of wild dogs. It was R&N's first show. Upon arrival, walkie-talkie-wielding attendants drove our cars away, leaving us to warm our hands at scattered timer fires. The scheduled showtime came and went and still we waited and shivered in the damp Bay air. Finally, a huge steel grate door was raised and we entered into billowing smoke and ten channels of surround-sound. The interior was banked with video screens of all sizes and enough sound equipment with which to construct a small village, most of it with that homemade hacker's look to it. "Vaudeo" they called it: video narratives set to live and manipulated soundscapes. The music screeched, droned, undulated, and even, on occasion, harmonized -- always with some semblance of a beat. Rhythm & Noise -- a well-named ensemble. The Compound is scarier than ever now that crack kings control the territory. The video screens are gone and the cavernous interior is jammed with hanging steel drums, hollow tubes, huge springs, wires -- wires everywhere -- and a baby grand piano. A control tower houses an intimidating array of sound equipment -- analog, digital, sampling, synthesizing, hybridizing, mixing boards, keyboards. A Mac II waits in the wings.

Naut Humon, quintessential sound traffic controller began my tour slamming his arm down on a keyboard and manipulating the sustained sound for two roller-coaster minutes. Then he layered digitalized samples into an oscillating techno swamp. Synthesizers added electronic pterodactyls to the mix. Past sessions with percussionists, singers, and other musicians were called up to lend texture and spark. Finally this work in progress, "Running on Radar," treated the ears to soundwaves come full circle: noise tamed into post-modern lyricism. Naut Humon is the thread tying R&N together through the years. Z'ev, Nik Fault, Rex Probe, Michael Belfer, Comfort Control, and Diamanda Galas have been collaborators, but Humon is Rhythm and Noise:
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"...In the early '70s Z'EV entered the picture. He was working with all these metal assemblages. He'd tune these racks of scrap until they were welded sculptures with sound functions. I'd quit Cal Arts so I could invest my money in equipment. We formed a group called Cellar M to combine live percussion with electronic manipulation. We did some good work, but dissonance wasn't hip yet." --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Q: How fully did you work out the pieces you performed with Z'ev?
A: There were definite flight plans, but they had room for spontaneous combustion.
Q: When did Rhythm & Noise emerge as a distinct entity?
A: In 1976, Nik Fault, Rex Probe, and I began a heavy period of research and development. We sold a lot of what we had and began to build most of our equipment. We started to develop The Compound, though we didn't actually perform until 1980. The punk/industrial movement was strong by that time, so we got some recognition, but people still couldn't understand it emotionally. At least not the way they could understand Led Zeppelin or whatever else they were used to listening to.
Q: You hadn't recorded anything yet?
A: Right. That's where Throbbing Gristle had an edge. They had a product. We had always avoided that. It wasn't until 1984 that the Residents convince us to record on their label Ralph Records.
Q: Is it possible to point to any roots for your music?
A: Our roots are more in timbre than in rock 'n' roll. We were definitely aware of people like Stockhausen and Xenakis. I listened to Hendrix, but the thing that was interesting was that he was adding noise to the blues and making it popular. I saw a bridge between Hendrix and Stockhausen. The challenge was to understand noise in an emotional manner.
Q: What distinctions do you make between live and recorded versions of your pieces?
A: Live performance should be different from what you experience in your living room. On the one hand, you have to create links to the past, to what is familiar, but live music should offer a sense of involvement, of immediacy, of surprise. It fascinates me how many rules you can break.
Q: You've talked about the concept of "dissonant convergence."
A: These are not necessarily contrary terms. R&N is realizing-embracing more mass harmonic structure because we are working to understand the harmonic of noise as well as the dissonance. The question is, do dissonant sounds form harmonics or a larger dissonance? You have the effect and the after-effect. Each sound becomes a memory capsule that you place in your own spectrum. It meshes with each subsequent sound. You determine its esthetic. One man's noise is another man's poison. Another question is, do you always need a beat, a rhythm, a pulse to make the relationship with the timbre, to make it speak to you or to the masses? It's hard to break out of pop shells. People don't understand things that aren't part of their existing paradigms. They want to be able to hum it, to remember it from high school days. I like how hip-hop is played through jam boxes so loud that distortion becomes part of the esthetic. In Cairo, the muezzin chants through loudspeakers so tinny and loud that noise becomes part of the prayer. And boom cars -- it's no longer, "My Cadillac is bigger than yours," now it's, "My noise is bigger than yours because I have five woofers." It's an intentional misuse of the technology. It proves that attitude depends on how you listen. You might like the music you hear while inside a club, but it might sound like noise if you live across the alley. We sound like noise to a lot of people."

[MP3]: Rhythm & Noise - Remembrance
[MP3]: Z'EV: "The Invisible Man - Selection 2-18-78"

||||

Industrial Culture | "True Stories About True Gore", by Jack Sargeant

2007-06-24T16:44:00.000-07:00

"Why do we watch a car accident on the freeway, or rush to see a fire, to drink in the tempestuous loveliness of terror, or simply to catch a glimpse of our destiny?" - True Gore

"That's my primary goal. To get on people's nerves. So I always try and have something in them which I'm sure will get on somebody's nerves. And it's not a success unless people...or somebody...walks out, as far as I am concerned" - Monte Cazazza.

Opening with the credit "The Gore Brothers Present..." True Gore (1986) is the logical heir to the mondo movie, that bizarre genre that welds together the freak show, anthropological curiosity, and pure, salacious voyeurism. Directed by Matthew Causey, with Monte Cazazza credited as "creative consultant", the low-budget True Gore is reminiscent of the later, more notorious, mondo movies such as Faces Of Death (Conan Le Cilaire, 1979), and its many sequels. While these now-legendary genre films were produced for box office release most were considered too extreme, even for the sleazoid crowds inhabiting the scummy cinemas of 42nd Street and Times Square, and it was on video that they found their audience, in recognition of this True Gore, like many of the mondo movies of the late eighties, was produced directly on video(1).

Divided into four sections - The World Of The Dead, The Eroticism Of Decay, Art And Death, and The Science Of Death - True Gore feigns an attempt at structural coherence, but the optical effects created using a video synthesizer and designed to mask the identity of the film's unnamed narrator, the purposefully clichéd narration, and the occasionally misspelled subtitles belay its low budget. However, this should not be used as a reason to decry the film, so much as it should be seen as a signifier to other mondo texts, which themselves are in part characterized by their less than pristine appearance, indeed the style adds to the illicit thrills offered by the genre. Like many of the later mondo films, True Gore focuses primarily on images of injury, death and decay(2), however, in addition to those images familiar to the genre, the film also contains many segments culled from Monte Cazazza's own underground filmmaking practice(3).

The first section of the film - The World Of The Dead - consists of re-photographed images culled from medical textbooks and police training manuals, forensic pathology and medical education films, and some original footage shot in a morgue. These grisly images of damaged and rotting flesh are followed with clearly faked footage of a suicide victim laying in a blood filled bathtub, casually slashed wrist dangling over the side of the bath, blood dripping onto the linoleum floor(4). Where this section becomes most disturbing is in its usage of the aural footage of Jim Jones' last speech as 956 members of the People's Temple commit suicide slurping cyanide contaminated fruit juice. The suicide soundtrack - dubbed over photographs depicting various iconographic elements of the People's Temple, including their discipline room - was culled from Cazazza's extensive archive, and was also released as a picture disc by the World Satanic Network Service(5).

As the film's second section starts the narrator states, with a showman's faux cynicism, "in the underground of the world these films are created for the sickest minds". This is followed by a collage of shots taken from the legendary First Transmission video, produced by the Temple Of Psychic Youth(6), and depicting scenes of ritualized SM sexual experimentation. These images are familiar to anybody who witnessed Psychic TV in their pre-acid house daze. Cazazza was, of course, a regular collaborator with P. Orridge and Psychic TV. The accompanying extra-diagetic soundtrack consists of Cazazza's "Sex Is No Emergency". This segment also contains images - "from Amnesty International" the narrator states - depicting a man being suspended over an oil-drum filled with water, before being dunked and beaten. For added effect a snake is thrown over the drowning man's head. The footage is fake. The victim is Cazazza. This scenes is followed by some genuinely disturbing images of vivisection: a live pig is tied down and military scientists stand over it holding a blow-torch, which is then played slowly across the squealing animals flesh which rapidly blackens, burns, and splits open. Next a cat has its scalp pealed and a chunk of its brain removed, as the narrator observes such experiments appear as senseless exercises. These images of genuine cruelty appear all the more horrific because of their juxtaposition with the fake footage.

True Gore's third section, Art And Death, focuses once more on Cazazza's underground movies, as the narrator wryly comments, "at least it was self inflicted" the sequence is culled from Cazazza's 13 minute Super 8 collaboration with Tana Emmolo Smith, SXXX-80 (1980), a film which gleefully depicts what many would consider polymorphic sexual dysfunction as home movie, and was produced as a result of equal parts ennui and mischief on Cazazza's part. The extract presented in True Gore depicts Cazazza digging at a sore on his penis with a metal scalpel, and Smith letting a gigantic black centipede scuttle over her labia. Mimicking the fake-decorum of the death film genre, Smith's vagina and Cazazza's penis, both of which are visible in the original short film, are hidden behind tastefully positioned black squares, this is after all not a sex film(7).

The extract from SXXX-80 is followed by a sequence taken from the 40 minute video Night Of The Succubus (1981) which documents a chaotic performance between Cazazza, Survival Research Laboratories and San Francisco Industrial band Factrix. From this ostensibly performance art documentation the film returns to the theme of necrophilia and lustmord. The ensuing footage, supposedly depicting two psychotic paraphyliacs, is faked, with a female necrophile played by artist Debra Valentine, and a male murder played by Cole Palme, who, despite being in shade, should be familiar to the film's audience, having just appeared in the previous scene playing bass and singing with Factrix. The performances given by these actors are convincing primarily because the scenes were shot in one take, with the actors reading from a script, the occasional stumbled words and phrases serve to create a haunting, confessional atmosphere.

The film introduces the thematic of AIDS as the latest plague threatening to annihilate humanity. Notably, given the media treatment of the virus as "gay" and "junkie plague" at the time of True Gore's production, the film draws attention to the fact that AIDS is a disease that can attack anyone "we are all victims", drawls the narrator. Genuine autopsy footage ends the section of the film.

The Science Of Death - True Gore's final section - consists primarily of stock footage depicting the shivering survivors of the Nazi Death Camps, which is intercut with images from Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph Of The Will (19 ). This is followed by what the narrator describes as "our homage to the Scientific Age". To the Atom Smashers' song "A Is For Atom" the film juxtaposes images from Cold War propaganda films with scientific cartoons explaining radiation, and images of the burned and mutilated survivors of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

The film closes with the narrator walking through a graveyard, and telling the audience "to live in fear of death is a waste of life". A short, sombre scene follows, depicting row-upon row of tombstones. The soundtrack consists of church bells. The camera spins through the graveyard and positions the viewer gazing out from an open grave. This cuts to the image of a laughing mechanical clown, once more suggesting the carney roots of the mondo genre, and the wound black humour of True Gore's aesthetic. End.

Notes:
(1)Other direct to video mondo film's include Nick Bougas' excellent Death Scenes (1989) and Death Scenes 2 (1992), and the Brain Damage production Traces Of Death (1993).

(2)Earlier mondo movies - produced in the sixties - whilst presenting some violent images, also luxuriated in scenes of indigenous cultures (and especially those cultures for whom nudity is a norm), nudist colonies, occult ceremonies, and safari scenes, all of which have subsequently became visual staples on television. The genre's interest in sex and sexuality boomed in the early seventies, with titles such as Alex De Rezny's Sexual Encounter Group (1970), Sex And Astrology (1970), and Sexual Freedom In Denmark (1970), as well as Pat Rocco's Sex And The Single Gay (1970), but was rapidly rendered as pointless with the explosion and subsequent availability hardcore pornography in the seventies (following the massive success of Gerard Damiano's Deep Throat which - in 1972 - served to partially legitimize hardcore, and also served to show the massive market for such movies). Finally it was the continued taboos surrounding violence and death that remained, and these have subsequently become the focal point of mondo movies. This thematic eruption is also due to the increasing availability of footage depicting violence and death, due - primarily - to the popularity of video technologies which are utilized by news gathering teams, as well as the emergency services, thus guaranteeing a virtual glut of available visceral footage.

(3)Cazazza has directed, produced, and collaborated on a string of movies, including, amongst others: Revolt 2000 (1974) in which he acts like a terrorist and builds a bomb using information from Assassin magazine, the film is now lost. Diary Of A Rubber Slave (1976) subsequently stolen, Mondo Homo (1976) - another engagement with the mondo genre, filmed in secret at the notorious gay bar The Slot, the film was one of the first to depict fist fucking - subsequently stolen. Mystery Movie (co-directed with Genesis P. Orridge, 1976, whereabouts unknown). Death Wish (1977), consisting of re-photographed tv footage. Black Cat Tea (co-directed with Mary Quayzar, 1979/80), Behind The Iron Curtain (1980), SXXX-80 (co-directed with Tana Emmolo Smith, 1980), Night Of The Succubus (co-directed with Factrix, 1981), and Catsac (with Michelle Handelman, 1989) . In addition Cazazza has produced and collaborated with Handelman on Blood Sisters (1991), and collaborated with Psychic TV on the videos Terminus and Eden Three (1987).

(4)The usage of re-constructed / fake footage is one of the central aspects of the mondo genre in its latter incarnation as a grim sideshow of annihilation.: "Although many of the sequences involving killings were fabricated, the filmmakers attempted to make distinguishing fake from fact as difficult as possible" (David Kerekes and David Slater, Killing For Culture, An Illustrated History Of Death Film From Mondo To Snuff, Creation Books, 1995 (first published 1994) p.113).

(5)The World Satanic Network Service aka Vagina Dentata Organ released a string of records documenting various extreme events, including Cold Meat, which consisted of the sound of somebody breathing - and dying - whilst on an infribulator, and came as a picture disc depicting photographs of Maralyn Monroe and Elvis Presley in death.

(6)This video depicted various rituals undertaken by members of the Temple Of Psychic Youth, and was frequently screened, in both whole and part, during the early eighties. In 19 however a copy fell into the hands of a right-wing fundamentalist group, who used the tape to `prove' Satanic abuse.

(7)It is an oddity of the mondo genre that, whilst depicting death with glee, depictions of sexual organs are less common, with producers and directors frequently choosing to hide them behind visual effects, this reaches its zenith in Death Women - a Japanese film of unspecified date and direction - which depicts extreme images of female corpses - strangled, crushed, torn, ripped, savaged, and burned - yet tastefully pixellates any images of the corpses' pubic region and vaginas.

©Jack Sargeant

Minimal Man [MP3s + Webpage]

2007-06-19T23:11:00.000-07:00

Check out the tribute page I made for MINIMAL MAN (aka PATRICK MILLER) on mySpace, which currently has 4 tracks up for listening (not downloadable):

She Was A Visitor
Ascension
Show Time
High Why

*I will also be posting 1 or 2 Minimal Man mp3's sometime soon, on this blog...any requests?

Minimal Man: He Who Falls / She Was A Visitor (7") [MP3]

2007-04-25T16:50:00.000-07:00

>> download here [10mb] 

 debut single / 1980 / Monster Music 

Iannis Xenakis: Phillips Pavilion, Poème Electronique, Edgard Varèse [Brussels 1958]

2007-03-13T20:27:00.000-07:00

The Philips Pavilion was more than a building at the fair -- it was a multimedia experience displaying the technological prowess of the Philips company by combining light, sound, and color.

Le Corbusier's involvement in the Philips Pavilion is often overestimated. In reality, most of the designing was carried out by his collaborator Iannis Xenakis (b.1922) a Greek architect and music composer working in Le Corbusier's office at the time.

These photographs taken from a 1958 issue of Philips Technical Review depict the Philips Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World's Fair. Located in a small site next to the Dutch section and away from the center of the fair, the pavilion hosted a futuristic multimedia display featuring images, colored lighting and music and sounds called the "Poème Electronique."

Some of the greatest artistic minds of the twentieth century were involved in its creation, including the architect Le Corbusier (1887-1965) and the composer Edgard Varèse (1883-1965). But most importantly, the Philips Pavilion represented an important artistic phenomenon through its synthesis of architecture, visual media and music.

The purpose of the pavilion was to exhibit the technology of the Philips corporation, a Dutch electronics company specializing in everything from sound production to fluorescent lighting to X-ray technology. Philips' aim was obviously promotional, integrating corporate advertisement into an exhibit much like the pavilions by General Motors and Ford at the Chicago fair of 1933 and the New York fair of 1939. But rather than having a traditional pavilion that would display their products for the visitors to browse through, Philips chose to create an integrated work of modern art that would utilize its wide array of technologies. Therefore, the Philips pavilion had no exhibits per se; rather it was a kind of exhibit in itself; an all-encompassing showcase of what the Philips corporation could offer.

For the execution of this unique undertaking, Philips selected the French architect Le Corbusier, one of the greatest modern designers of the twentieth century. Philips executives approached him in January 1956 to design, in the words of artistic director Louis Kalff, a "spatial-color-light-music production" for the Philips corporation (Treib 2). Le Corbusier was by this time near the end of his career, but also at the height of his powers, as demonstrated by his recently completed masterpieces including the Unit‚ d'Habitation in Marseilles (1946-52) and the chapel of Notre Dame du Haut in Ronchamp, France (1950-54). Philips executives no doubt expected a first-class design from Le Corbusier, but they also expected him to direct the entire concept of the Poème Electronique and all of its images and lighting, in addition to the architecture. In effect, Philips gave Le Corbusier carte blanche to create their pavilion, insisting only that he utilize the various technological media the company was producing.

Le Corbusier's involvement in the Philips Pavilion is often overestimated. In reality, most of the designing was carried out by his collaborator Iannis Xenakis (b.1922), a Greek architect and music composer working in Le Corbusier's office at the time. Xenakis would later become famous for his use of rigorous mathematical concepts and relationships in his music, but at this time was not well known. This may be part of the reason that he receives less recognition for the design than he probably deserves, coupled with Le Corbusier's prestige and public exaggerations of his own role. Le Corbusier was more concerned with what was going on inside the pavilion and cared little about its exterior appearance. Even the spectacle inside was not completely his own, for the music was by Edgard Varèse, a well-known composer at the time and a pioneer in the field of electronic music and the use of non-instrumental sounds, exemplified by Ionization (1930-31) and Deserts (1949-54). It was Le Corbusier, however, who insisted that Varèse be chosen to compose the music, for Philips wanted to enlist the talents of the more famous but less radical British composer Benjamin Britten. But after succeeding in his plea, Le Corbusier left Varèse a completely free hand in composing the music.

Although Xenakis was the principal designer of the Philips Pavilion, the architecture didoriginate with Le Corbusier's general concepts. These consisted of descriptions of a "stomach" to contain the Poème Electronique, with a twisted path for entrance and exit and warped, curving walls on which to project the colors and images. This basic concept was about as far as Le Corbusier's architectural involvement went. The shape of the building would be left for Xenakis to determine. The pavilion was to serve as a small auditorium, where approximately five hundred seated visitors could see the images projected on all the walls around them, as if it were an irregularly shaped planetarium. His point of departure for the structure was a series of conjoined hyperbolic parabaloids-curved planes mathematically generated entirely from straight lines-that would form a tent-like enclosure for the stomach-shaped floor plan. The sloping walls of the hyperbolic parabaloids would satisfy Le Corbusier's idea of irregular warped surfaces for the projection of images. The geometric form also appealed to Le Corbusier's desire for mathematical rationality while the dramatic slopes and contours of the pavilion related to a more expressionistic idiom.

The execution of the design proved to be problematic. Xenakis' own structural solution involved a tensile structure of steel cables strung from steel posts at the ends of the "tent" to form the hyperbolic parabaloids. It was rejected on the grounds that the interior would require more solid, acoustically insulating walls. Le Corbusier and the sound engineers wanted a structure of concrete to keep exterior noise from interfering with the presentation. But the complex shapes of Xenakis' hyperbolic parabaloids made it impossible to build a conventional poured concrete structure. The solution that would satisfy both Xenakis' ideas and the acoustical requirements of the Poeme Electronique was a system of precast concrete panels hung in tension from wire cables. Because hyperbolic parabaloids are generated by straight lines, the method of using precast panels was easy to implement. This ingenious compromise was devised by Hoyte Duyster, the chief engineer for the Philips project. The panels were constructed in a hangar shed from a simple sand mold that matched the curvature of the pavilion. Once the panels were cast around the sand mold, they were numbered, shipped to the construction site and quickly assembled. They would hang on steel cables strung from thin concrete ribs that were cast in place. These ribs are visible in the photograph where the walls converge at the ends of the pavilion. The result was a quickly and efficiently constructed building that fulfilled the requirements of the Poème Electronique.

While the design of the pavilion was underway, Le Corbusier was busy figuring out what would be happening inside. Le Corbusier wanted the Poème Electronique to consist of an eight-minute film made up of an array of still photographs highlighted by changing washes of colored light on the interior surfaces of the pavilion. The underlying concept related to Le Corbusier's own view of the progress of humankind through history and into the future. However, the Poème would not be a presentation of concrete images associated with events or historical developments. It was meant to be abstract and highly symbolic, with groups of stills chosen to make a statement about humanity. These images, including such diverse subject matter as tribal art, baby faces, animals, machinery, Charlie Chaplin and even a mushroom cloud, were arranged in rather confusing combinations and juxtapositions. For example, Charlie Chaplin and the mushroom cloud would be shown next to each other in an attempt to show the absurdity of modern warfare. The eight minutes was made up of seven sequences: "Genesis," "Matter and Spirit," "From Darkness to Dawn," "Manmade Gods," "How Time Molds Civilization," "Harmony," and "To All Mankind." The actual filming of the images was carried out by Philippe Agostini, a celebrated filmmaker who further enhanced the visual potency of the PoŠme with his techniques of quick montage, innovative framing methods, and rotation, reflection and movement of the images. The color projections were integrated into this grand scheme and were laid out in a sequence that would help dictate the mood of each image or series of images. All visual media utilized Philips' latest projection equipment. The final result was a highly original visual arts spectacular showcasing Philips technology, but more importantly an artistic expression of Le Corbusier's vision of humanity, laced with all its propaganda and personal biases (including images of Le Corbusier's designs meant to suggest mankind's hope for the future).

The audio component of the Poème Electronique however, was completely devoid of the influence of Le Corbusier. Varèse was given free reign in this respect, composing the music sporadically from the time he accepted the commission in 1956 to when it was recorded in late 1957, while the pavilion itself was nearly complete. The music was purposefully to have no relationship to the visual components of the presentation, so that the entire ensemble would not be one of coherence, but one of abstraction and juxtaposition. The eight-minute composition consists of a combination of electronically generated sounds and "concrete" sounds, or real-life sounds and noises that have been recorded. While to most ears the "music" sounds like a lot of swirling and tapping noises with bizarre human voice sounds, it is actually a carefully structured composition with a recurrence of themes leading to variations and climaxes. But the music also had a spatial dimension, in that different sound sequences were directed out of one of the hundreds of speakers that were mounted on the pavilion walls. The effect was a sense of "moving music," where sounds would whisk across the space in a manner that would enhance the rising and falling aspects of the composition itself. The music was the final dimension in this showcase of Philips' technology, for it was all recorded using the company's high-tech audio equipment, and projected from their sound reproduction equipment and speakers. And although it had no direct relationship with the rest of the Poème Electronique, Varèse's music was integral to the final ensemble because it presented a audio component that was as equally modern and abstract as the architecture and images.

The combination of Xenakis' architecture, Le Corbusier's visual ensemble, and Varèse's music provided a very memorable experience. Millions of people visited the Poème Electronique, and all agreed that was new and different. The general public was for the most part baffled by the bizarre images and sounds. Howard Taubman of the New York Times called it "the strangest building at the fair," and remarked that "the sounds that accompany these images are as bizarre as the building" (17). This attitude is generally representative of the public response to the building. The response of critics specializing in art and architecture, however, was extremely varied. A Swedish critic characterized the pavilion as "a deeply fascinating realization of a dream which has tempted artists since...Wagner: the dream of the total work of art" (Romare 175). Although this view is typical of the pavilion's supporters, its detractors often focused on specifics rather than the ensemble in its entirety. The architecture in particular was harshly criticized for its awkwardness and uncomfortable ambiguity between structural rationality and free-form expressiveness. Italian architect Ernesto Rogers thought that "where the result should have been a fluid sequence of convexities and concavities..., there are disturbing elements for reinforcing....It is not a fulfilled architecture, it is not a clear composition; it is only the indication of new architectonic dimensions" (4). Rigid tectonics and smooth, curving surfaces tended to cancel each other out. Varèse's score would exercise the most lasting influence of any aspect of the Philips Pavilion. While not enthusiastically received by the public, it influenced an entire generation of avant-garde composers with its use of electronic music, including the American John Cage and the German Karlheinz Stockhausen. In the end, the area afforded least attention and recognition by the Philips corporation became the most memorable part of their exhibit. The Philips Pavilion is mentioned only briefly when discussing the career of Le Corbusier, as a footnote to an already distinguished career. But the Poème Electronique by Edgard Varèse was one of his greatest accomplishments.

The Philips Pavilion was demolished on January 30, 1959. Like most world's fair buildings, it was a temporary structure never meant to remain standing beyond the duration of the fair. But because it was demolished, the work of art is lost forever. We can see pictures like these, look at Le Corbusier's images, even listen to Varèse's score, but the complete ensemble integrated into a single space surrounding and moving around the visitor is something that can never be recreated. Therefore, the Philips Pavilion and its Poème Electronique remain an artistic achievement that have left their mark on precisely eight minutes of history.

~Aaron Zephir

VIDEO: Poeme Electronique (Edgar Varese)

2007-01-13T21:05:00.000-08:00

REQUIRED VIEWING: "Poeme Electronique", by Electronic Music pioneer Edgar Varese & Le Corbusier. (Originally presented in 1958 at the World Expo in Belgium)

Varese & Le Corbusier - Poeme electronique

Industrial Culture Handbook: Monte Cazazza (RE/Search #6/7)

2006-10-30T21:43:00.000-08:00

MONTE CAZAZZA

[PARTIAL BIO]:

In 1977 Monte entered the studios of Industrial Records to record 'Plastic Surgery,' 'Busted Kneecaps,' 'Fistfuckers of America', 'Hate', and 'To Mom on Mother's Day.' His first 45 is out of print. A film was made with Throbbing Gristle where Monte and a 14-year-old were electrocuted. He plays also in the film "Decadence" of Kerry Colonna with razor blades.

[DISCOGRAPHY]:

TO MOM ON MOTHER'S DAY (45, Industrial Records, IR 005, 1979)

SOMETHING FOR NOBODY (EP, Industrial Records, IR 0010, 1980)

MONTE CAZAZZA LIVE (C60 cassette, Industrial Records, IRC 28, 1980)

CALIFORNIA BABYLON (LP, in collaboration with FACTRIX; Subterranean Records, Sub 26, 1982)

STAIRWAY TO HELL (SS 45-007, special package with 45, from Sordide Sentimental, France; 1982)

MONTE'S VIDEOTAPES

Videotape of performances at the SCALA CINEMA and Live at OUNDLE SCHOOL

NIGHT OF THE SUCCUBUS (produced in collaboration with Factrix, 1981)

PERFORMANCE ART EVENTS

Large display titled "Defend Yourself" featured board with knives stuck in it (free for the taking). Mannikins dressed as winos and bag people left in alleys with hidden cheap cassette recorders playing tape loops of screams and ranting and raving. Spring 1972. Oakland, CA USA.

FUTURIST SINTESI. Galeria 591. Sex-religious show; giant statue of Jesus got chain sawed and gang-raped into oblivion. Dec. 21, 1975. San Francisco, CA, USA.

RADIO AD TV ASSEMBLAGE AND DANCE. Shattuck Ave Studios. Giant wall construction of televisions and radios playing for 3 days (& nights) straight. June 25, 1976. Berkeley, CA, USA.

MANIC MOVEMENT. Collaboration with Kimberly Rae. Berkeley Square. Kim tied up on spring-mounted platform; Monte appears squirming on floor in black body bag, cuts self out, cuts Kim loose, then destroys toys and props with hatchet to loud Romper Room record. Ended in fire. Jan 30, 1981. Berkeley CA USA.

CONCERTS/MUSIC

KEZAR PAVILION Performance spectacular with Mark Pauline and Factrix. First time working with Mark. War machines; spinning swastika with Monte inside; Scott & Beth B. films; also showing of "Behind The Iron Curtain" by Monte. Dec 6, 1980. San Francisco, CA USA.

BERKELEY SQUARE. Guest appearance with Factrix. All music, more sedate show. Dec. 12, 1980. Berkeley, CA

ED MOCK DANCE STUDIO. "Night of the Succubus" in collaboration with Factrix. Films, slides, organic robots, dance by Kimberly Rae, dart gun used for the first time by Monte, electro-shock, dental surgery on dead animal-machine. Member of audience angrily attacked 'robot' with chair, shouting that it wasn't 'erotic'. Video available. June 6, 1981. San Francisco. CA USA. p. 80

MINIMAL MAN

2006-08-11T16:44:00.000-07:00

Patrick Miller, avant-garde leader of underground 'antimusic' ensemble Minimal Man, was born in Glendale, California, on 2 January 1952 and studied art at Sonoma State University, where he concentrated chiefly on silk-screening.

After moving to San Francisco in 1979 he immediately began to experiment with music and film. Minimal Man began as a vehicle to produce soundtracks for these films, with the realization that anyone could do so given access to the tools. Miller also began to collaborate with a wide variety of punk, new wave and industrial musicians, including Tuxedomoon, and by October Minimal Man were performing at the legendary Deaf Club venue, and elsewhere.

Minimal Man became one of a select handful of influential groups from this era to bridge punk and industrial music with aggressive blasts of noise and electronic effects. As the core of Minimal Man, Miller sang (and screamed), played keyboards and manipulated tapes to create their dissonant, unsettling, experimental sound. One critic described the result simply as 'antimusic.'

The band name was inspired by people who lived in the low income Fillmore district of San Francisco. Though often without basic needs, these were people creative in adapting to life on the street. Miller's conception of Minimal Man was a character with 'everything against him.'

The debut Minimal Man album The Shroud Of was originally released by Berkeley label Subterranean Records in 1981, when the core band comprised a trio of Miller with Andrew Baumer and Lliam Hart. Guest musicians included Tuxedomoon members Steven Brown and Michael Belfer (Sleepers), along with several others who reflect a revolving door policy with regard to personnel that Miller actively encouraged. Bond Bergland and Cole Palme also played in Minimal Man prior to founding Factrix.

The cover of The Shroud Of features one of Miller's signature paintings. Writer Neil Strauss recalls: 'They were all variations on one image: a featureless head or mask, usually wrapped in strips of bandages that were peeling off to reveal a discoloured, decomposed face. It was a self-portrait. It wasn't even a mask; it was what lay beneath the mask (at least in his darkest moments) - a paranoid, dark, disturbed shell of a human being."

In January 1983 Minimal Man recorded a second album, Safari, a more conventional set than the debut, with Miller and Baumer now joined by a guitarist and drummer. In 1985 Miller relocated to Europe, settling in Brussels alongside Tuxedomoon, and recorded Sex With God (1985), Slave Lullabyes (1986), Hunger Is All She Has Ever Known (1988) and Pure (also 1988). The European albums range in scope from hardcore EBM (so-called electronic body music) to more ambient instrumental tracks, while Pure revisits earlier recordings made in San Francisco. Live shows from this period usually saw Miller backed by various Tuxedomoon members including Steven Brown, Peter Principle, Luc van Lieshout and Bruce Geduldig.

At the beginning of the 1990's Miller returned to the United States, first to New York and then back to California. Regrettably no further Minimal Man records appeared, and instead Miller worked in the movie business as a set dresser. Sometimes there were difficulties: "I invented Minimal Man as this wild person, and then I actualized it and took all kinds of drugs and stuff, because I felt guilty for not living up to this fiction."

Patrick Miller was an artist of considerable talent, as a musician, as a painter, as a visual artist. His art was his life, and his life was his art. Passionate, empathetic and volatile, he died at his home in Eagle Rock, California on 14 December 2003.... His passing was marked not by one but two articles in the New York Times.

James Nice
October 2004

Go to Minimal Man catalog

Return to LTM homepage

Angus MacLise - "Astral Collapse" CD (review)

2006-02-24T11:50:00.000-08:00

Smothered Under Astral Collapse

For those of you who like Throbbing Gristle, Coil, William S. Burroughs, Aleister Crowley, magick and experimental electronics, this is right up your alley.

Angus Maclise was a composer, master percussionist, poet, mystic, calligrapher, occultist and former Velvet Underground member. His music runs the gamut of the experimental realm: drone, electronics & noise, tape cut-ups, spoken word, minimalism. Though he created a vast body of work from the 60's to 70's, it went unreleased, the master tapes sitting in a box in someone's closet. Only recently has his music been seeing the light of day via several releases on the Quakebasket label. The latest, Astral Collapse, compiles his more electronic/noise workouts:

1. Smothered Under Astral Collapse - Angus recites his Tibetan Buddhist poetry over prepared tape cut-ups. His source material for the prepared tapes is Tibetan chanting and some odd drum loops. The way he manipulates it gives it a really churning, eerie feeling.

2. 6th Face Of The Angel - Pure droning. 17+ minutes of transcendant, tape-delayed organ with little intricate change ups in oscillation and resonance.

3. Beelzebub - This is the only percussion piece on the album. The way he plays the drums and then sonically treats the mix creates a feeling musique concrete or early electronic pulse music. it's very glitchy.

4. Cloud Watching - a beautifully sinister piece. it's a murky blend of organic instruments that just twinkle and drone along in a hazy impressionistic cloud.

5. Dracula - Trial by noise. Angus rips apart the air with an ARP modular synthesizer. This kind of destruction wouldn't be heard again until Coil's Constant Shallowness Leads To Evil.

6. Dawn Chorus - several layers of prepared tapes cut up into a collage of white noise, eastern drone and field recordings from the East. Angus leads us back into more Tibetan poetry before letting us go.

You can really hear the sound that COIL would take on and expand. It foreshadows the concepts of Moon's Milk: Spring Equinox or Under an Unquiet Skull, Astral Disaster (they are eerily similar in more than just name) and Constant Shallowness Leads To Evil....to quote Jhonn Balance, Angus was a "liminal genius".

~Reviewed by: Philippe Landry (2/24/05)

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**For more info, read an earlier post focusing on the history of Drones and on the genre's creator, LaMonte Young (teacher/mentor to John Cale & Angus Maclise), and LaMonte's "The Eternal Theater", etc.

FM EINHEIT (Einsturzende Neubauten) - INVISIBLE RECORDS - Martin Atkins (PiL, Pigface)

2006-02-21T20:06:00.000-08:00

Martin Atkins has come a long way from being a fresh-faced 18 year old drummer miming on American Bandstand during a surprise appearance of Public Image Limited. When he left PIL, he started the Invisible Records label as his contribution to release independent music unseen in the mainstream. Through his Pigface band he has networked with a small army of freelance musicians from the underground rock and industrial scenes, so that now Invisible is the American home for Test Dept, Mick Harris/Scorn, Skinny Puppy's Ogre (aka 'R' with Atkins), and Psychic TV's Genesis P Orridge. After 10 years the label is celebrating their milestone with the humbly-titled the Lowest Of The Low tour, which will play three dates in Canada during April featuring Pigface (with Gus Ferguson from Test Dept), the long-anticipated Scorn, the techno/industrial group Not Breathing, the breakbeat-oriented Bagman, Vancouver's Dead Voices On Air and former Einsturzende Neubauten member FM Einheit.

FM Einheit or "Mufti" to his friends, will be coming with his first new band since he left Neubauten during the sessions for their boring 1996 album Ende Neu. FM had been the chaotic element in Neubauten for 15 years, charging their live shows with an imposing physical presence by throwing himself into his drumming on metal percussion and amplified springs. With fellow percussionist, NU Unruh, he invented custom-made instruments and researched unique sound sources — even using his fists to thump out a rhythm on Blixa Bargeld's chest for the track "Thirsty Animal."

"To rebuild music in a new way was the thing that I was most interested in Neubauten," he said from rehearsals in his Steinschlag ("stone beat") studio in Bavaria, in Southern Germany. "To do something and in the next moment just to let the whole thing collapse and look at it from a different angle. I started the original sessions for Ende Neu but I left during the recording. I just didn't see any stepping forward in Neubauten. It wasn't collapsing and rebuilding anymore. I just got a bit bored with it."

Now Neubauten's original spirit of experimentation can be heard on Einheit's work with Andreas Ammer, including the award-winning productions Apocalypse Live and Radio Inferno (an update of Dante's classic that features narration by BBC broadcaster John Peel). Since Einheit's involvement with Neubauten's 1990 collaboration on playwright Heiner Muller's postmodern version of Shakespeare, Die Hamletmaschine, Einheit received a number of commissions to do music for theatre, dance and radio. Over a period of five years he created music for Muller's adaptation of the Prometheus myth, Edward Bond's Lear, an interactive dance/theatre production Sensation Death, a version of the Faust legend (featuring Blixa as Mephisto!) and several others yet to be released. Invisible has just recently issued another Ammer/Einheit radio production, Deutsche Krieger ("German Warriors"), which was made for Bavarian Broadcasting. The project is an ambitious attempt to encapsulate 20th century German history in three personalities: Kaiser Wilhelm, Adolf Hitler and Ulrike Meinhof.

"The idea was to use original sound sources to let history speak for itself, because every time you open a book, all the information is channelled by the author. But while we worked on these three parts, we found we were researching the history of recorded media. So from the First World War you have gramophone discs based on the invention of Thomas Alva Edison. And from the Second World War you have recordings that were played on the radio. And the third part was from TV."

Like Radio Inferno, Deutsche Krieger is a mix of spoken word, quoted music and original sound. Although it is in German the disc is nevertheless interesting for the research into the broadcast sources: in the case of part one, "Kaiser Wilhelm Overdrive," speeches were recreated after the fact; part two "Adolf Hitler Enterprise," contained equally fake reports from the war fronts, including bogus newscasts from submarines done War Of The Worlds-style in radio studios. Ammer/Einheit react to this fake history with their editorial selection of backing music and by putting re-edited words in the mouths of the speech makers.

"It was no problem to get the commission to do the first and second part, but when we wanted to do the third part about the Baader-Meinhof terrorists, which for us was most important because it was the part of history we had lived through, then we got a lot of problems. Nobody wanted to broadcast a piece about the Baader-Meinhof. This is something that makes you think."

Ulrike Meinhof was a '60s social activist who got caught up in the student protests against the imperialist war in Vietnam. When the German police fired on, and killed some protesters, she and the Baader group went underground and began a series of actions that included bombings and bank robberies.

"I remember it very well, because I was born in 1958, and they died (in jail) in 1977. The whole state of Germany was in hysteria. The media coverage was really oppressive and frightening. I remember my mother would say, 'if you don't go to sleep Ulrike Meinhof will come and get you.' People went in the street to celebrate after it was known they were dead — 'great, now we've got those pigs and they're dead.' It was quite difficult to get the original voices of the terrorists when they were underground. Of Baader, for example, there is nothing. Meinhof did a lot of TV and radio features before she was underground. She would say things like 'if you don't have the possibility to be on TV everyday, if you don't have the possibility of mass media, then why don't you use the only possibility you have, which is go on the street and take direct action.' So at that point she was sort of mixed, she would be sympathetic, but she didn't say you have to bomb. If you want to change something you have to be really radical about it, but I can't sympathise with killing people that aren't responsible. The right way is to change yourself and act in a new way."

On the way from Invisible is Ammer/Einheit's Odysseus 7, as they take the Greek epic into outer space! Music from Einheit's new band of little-known Swiss musicians (including a second drummer, female singer and human beat box) will be released later.

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SPK - Interview [1980]

2005-12-24T19:05:00.000-08:00

SURGICAL PENIS KLINIK

This interview took place after their set at a Final Solution gig in Heaven, Charing Cross, supporting Throbbing Gristle and A Certain Ratio [23.12.80].

Heaven is normally a meat-market gay disco and it must rank as the most sordid venue I have ever been to - I'll certainly have doubts about going there again. It was unbearably hot, smoky and very dark towards the end of the evening it was literally impossible to see from one side of the hall to another. Decor (and background music) rather over-the-top disco. All in all, probably just about sordid enough for a Throbbing Gristle/SPK gig.

Incidentally a couple of years ago this. place used to be called the (Global Village and had occasional gigs then too - the last time I saw the Users was in there. My, how it's changed.

I first became interested in Surgical Penis Klinik when their single "Meat Processing Section" came out in the summer last year (although it was recorded in their native Australia in 1979). This was in fact their second EP, the first (No More/Contact/Germanik) was released on their own label Side Effects Records early in 1979.

Tonight their set was quite an experience, to say the least. It is probably best described as an all-out attack on your senses. First, there was the sheer volume of sound - the constant low-frequency noises that were played at deafeningly loud volume. The sound itself - deliberately loud so as to cause distortion - more like the "Slogan" side of Meat Processing Section than the "Factory" side, but always with the booming low frequency noises in the background, that were missing on the records. The ligbts and the strobes were pointed straight at the AUDIENCE and not the group...

Current line-up:
Operator - Synth/Tapes/Rhythms
Mr Clean - Production engineer
Wilkins - Guitar/Bass

Genesis P-Orridge told me once that this group were the most deranged group that he'd ever come across. After seeing their set, and doing this interview, I almost agree...

Charlie: How long have SPK been going?
Operator: First started in January 1979 I think, but the first time we played together was June l979 and that was with me, a psychiatric nurse, a guy called Nehil who was a mental patient - schizophrenic, and two punk guys we got to help us, who left soon after to become pop stars.
Charlie: Who with?
Operator: They've got a group of their own in Australia called Secret Secret who are just making a lot of money in the clubs.
Charlie: Are you all Australian?
Operator: No. Wilkins is English, comes from Bristol, and Mr Clean and I don't come from anywhere in particular. We consider ourselves stateless.
Charlie: You were born in Australia, weren't you?
Operator: That's not necessarily true. But don't push it. That's an assumption that we wish to maintain.
Charlie: How many copies did you make of your first single?
Operator: We did two EP's in Australia - three tracks on each - and we made 500 copies of the first one and 500 of the second one, and then we had to do a re-release of 500. Then I came to England on my way to France, to live there - and Genesis of TG wrote to us and said he wanted to do a re-release in England of the second one, so we said yes. The second one has three tracks on the original - the third track was a throwaway which was fucked up after I left and re-mixed by the psycho guy, before he killed himself.
Charlie: He killed himself?
Operator: Yes... and actually recently we had another guitarist who killed himself, so that's why the group's so unstable all the time.
Charlie: Why did they kill themselves?
Operator: Don't know. They didn't tell me. They didn't leave me anything in their wills either, which is annoying.
Charlie: Who writes the lyrics? The words of some of your songs on the first single are a bit over the top.
Operator: Those lyrics were written mainly by Nehil who was the Schizophrenic, but we were working in collaboration all the time. I handled the music, he handled the lyrics. But all the lyrics are over the top. It's just that some of them are sung in German so they'd be over the top to a German, I suppose.
Charlie: There's no point in going over the top in a foreign language.
Operator: Why not?
Charlie: It doesn't seem over the top then.
Operator: But lyrics function as a dictatorial device - if you've got a set of lyrics, they'll tell you what they mean. You've then got no choice about any particular meaning in the piece of sound. So if you write lyrics in German, bad German at that because I can't speak any German, then the audience is free to take whatever meaning they want to from whatever the sound is.
Charlie: Your microphone was very distorted tonight. Was that intentional?
Operator: No, not particularly, but you can't help it when you've got that much noise going on. You can't get a good mix on a mike like that. Plus I'm shouting quite a lot in German because I like the language - it's a little fetish of mine.
Charlie: When you sing in German do you understand exactly what you're singing?
Operator: They're translated from an English idea, but they're usually cut up afterwards, so they probably don't mean anything to a German person either.
Charlie: So do you ever wan to play in Germany?
Operator: I have had thoughts about going to Dusseldorf because that's where DAF and Pyrolator are working, but I'm not sure whether I like their stuff anymore, I just don't like England all that much.
Charlie: Then why are you here?
Operator: I don't like places with any characteristics, I'd like a place that didn't have any characteristics, so I wouldn't feel oppressed by any particular culture, or anything like that. I'm not expecting to find anything, though.
Charlie: It's probably freer here than most places, though.
Operator: It depends what you mean by free. A lot of the things we're doing now are about information overload. For example tonight there was a tape which you probably couldn't hear properly because of the distortion, it was a compilation of chemical warfare and side-effects of psychotropic drugs which is an indication that if we're all excited about chemical warfare, it in effect started in mental hospitals in 1952, with people subjected to it all the time. Another case is a cut-up between several porno loops, hard core and the soft core that you get on advertisements, so we packed them all together, which is the state that you have in the so-called free society. You're just bombarded with shit all the time. And that's what we're saying. We're not trying to dictate any particular set of lyrics to anybody at all.

Charlie: So what kind of a place would you want to live in?
Operator: We'll all end up living eventually inside the head. A head without a world. I have no material needs at all - I live on £5 a week. In London that is some achievement, so they tell me.
Charlie: Do you ever get bored?
Operator: Never. You only get bored if you're expecting something better. And there isn't anything better, everything's the same.
Charlie: Isn't that a negative attitude? I get bored sometimes.
Operator: You must be looking for something. You must have your highs. I think I'm a pluralist to the extent that as much diversity is the best thing. It's categorisation, lines and so on that you get in the music scene in London which kill you. I can contradict myself one second after I've said something, because consistency is just another closed way of thinking.
Charlie: Doesn't consistency mean that you know what you're talking about?
Operator: Consistency generally means sticking to a set line, for example Marxist or left wing line, left wing / right wing - it's all the same - everybody's realising that now.
Charlie: Well I believe in some things and not in others.
Operator: Noem Chomsky, who's a really left wing linguist just signed a manifesto of the Fascist party in France saying that they should be allowed to continue. Because he says it's the only way it'll be controllable - there's no point in trying to stamp it out, that's the way to go about things. That's the way I think.
Charlie: Allowing any party to exist doesn't necessarily mean that you agree with what they are saying.
Operator: Exactly. That's why I wouldn't follow either opinion. One day I'd say that not allowing it to happen is OK. You can't make a decision either way. On any subject. It might help to fill in a bit of background here on why I think this way - it comes from experience in mental hospitals where no decision is ever right. For a schizophrenic person, for example, there's nothing you can do or say to a schizophrenic person that will help them, and being silent doesn't help them either. So what do you do
Charlie: What experience have you had with schizophrenic patients?
Operator: In general... I worked with a lot of alcoholics... senile dementia... manic depressive psychosis... schizophrenia... Schizophrenics are quite interesting. It's a series of superimposed masks with no personality behind - all they can do is switch from one to the other. They're not happy with any of them - they're unhappy with any of them. It's just a series of options - they don't believe in any one of them, they don't think any one of them is better than the other - they don't have anything behind it to stabilize on.
Charlie: Do you identify with them in any way?
Operator: Yes. There is considerable biological evidence that there is an entire schizophrenic system in everybody which surfaces more dramatically in some than in others. Yes, I think most people are schizophrenic to a certain extent. Not the classic split personality bullshit, but in the sense that at times the overcoating devices, the rationalities just break down and they'll go haywire - go crazy. One of our songs is called Retard, about a guy who just went crazy-killed somebody - no motive, nothing at all. He's spent thirty-five years in a mental hospital, paying for it. They couldn't have let him out though, he might have done it again. It's these dilemmas, no-win situations which intrigue me. That's what our music's about.
Charlie: So what are you intending to do now, as a group?
Operator: We'd like to do another gig, on our own, cos we were fucked around a lot tonight. When we were playing, in what position, and all this sort of thing - in other words we were shoved to side and they forgot about us. Not that I mind - I just don't like feeling some asshole's pushing me around. I didn't complain, or anything like that, but I'd rather control it myself.
Charlie: Where would you want to play?
Operator: Interesting venues, hopefully. Not the Marquee, or that sort of stuff. I'm looking into... they've started to rent out the old World War Two underground shelters under London. There's a huge network of them. I'd like to play down there, and if anybody got tired they could wander off and have a look. Some are run by the GLC, some by the police. They're useful for storage, mostly. But anywhere that comes up, I'm willing to play. I got approached by a guy tonight waning to put us on a compilation album of futurism, like Eric Random and Naked Lunch and stuff... I don't want to be labelled as futurist, just like I don't want to be labelled with Industrial.
Charlie: So you won't be doing anything more with Industrial?
Operator: I don't think so, no. It's a mutual agreement, we don't want to lump everything together - we want to diversify.
Charlie: Why did you release that second single on Industrial?
Operator: Publicity really. I couldn't afford to do it . It's not money, I think I made £15 out of the whole thing, even though they didn't have any pressing charges. We sold quite a few but I never saw any money - but that doesn't bother me because it was only to get a name.
Charlie: It didn't get much publicity in the music press.
Operator: It only got mentioned in Sounds - one line, it didn't get mentioned in the NME or Melody Maker, possibly because they had their big strike at exactly the time it was released.
Charlie: Would you have wanted more mentions?
Operator: Oh no, not really. It's a very difficult situation where you're trying to stay underground but still get a few people to know you. It's a situation where you say you want exactly 5000 people, no more and no less, any more and you're selling yourself and any less and you're wasting your time. It's difficult, cos you've got to tread that line all the time.
Charlie: So what about the future?
Operator: It depends on everybody else really. I'd like to diversify and do video, and maybe do some soundtracks for the video, I'm also writing two books, one on music, one on words - it's a hybrid of philosophy and fiction. Just on different types of thought, rather than the narrow ones we're restricted to at the moment. I like violent change, convulsive thought... ripping from one thing to another so nobody can tie you down and say "You are this, you are that", so if you gave me this interview tomorrow I'd probably tell you something completely different.

I didn't do the interview again, so I'll never know now whether that is true. Anyway Surgical Penis Klinik gigs are very thin on the ground to say the least - this was the only one they've done in England so far - so the best way to find out what they're like is to listen to their "Meat Processing Section" single which is still available on Industrial. I prefer the "Factory" side, which I still consider to be one of the best things to be released in 1980. Operator prefers the other side "Slogan" which is probably nearer the live sound.

======================================
Postscript. I went round to operator's place in Vauxhall a couple of weeks after the gig/interview... The group did not want pictures of them to be published, as one of their primary aims is to discourage identification with the star and other heroic images, and promotion of self-importance in individuals... They have shaosen three images, one for each of them. Fourth member 'Tone Generator' rejoining the group from Australia at the time of press.

Chainsaw 11, February 1981

COIL: An Interview

2005-11-12T01:12:00.000-08:00

[COIL - Scatology]

An Interview With The Band COIL
UnCoiled!

JOHN BALANCE AND PETER CHRISTOPHERSON
IN CONVERSATION WITH
JAS. MORGAN AND DIANA TRIMBLE

The difference between MONDO and magazines like Rolling Stone
can clearly be illustrated by comparing their list of the year's top ten
records with ours. First of all, we don't have one. And if we did,
R.E.M. wouldn't be anywhere near it and Coil would have achieved
Gold Disk status-alchemical gold. Their most recent release, Love's
Secret Domain (domestically available on Wax Trax!) is a fascinating
aural descent into a rather delightful and exalted Inferno.

This is a realm inhabited by rabid Spanish guitars, Annie Anxiety
impersonating herself as drugged-out Mexican whore, sampladelic
mixing techniques, warped electronic voices, neurologically correct
noise, didgeridoo, oboes and bowed strings cast South of Heaven,
Burroughsian cut-ups of film dialogue, all fornicating somethin' awful
in a multidimensional sonic landscape, and presided over by those
charming and intelligent Goat-Gods, John Balance and Peter "Sleazy"
Christopherson.

Those familiar only with John and Peter's past lives as members of
Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV, may be surprised that in this
chaotic landscape the lamb lies down with the lion. Pieces of
surprising beauty-such as "Dark River," sounding like the grinding
and scraping of the celestial spheres or some monstrous bells-are also
to be discovered amidst the musical mayhem.

Once granted an audience we enjoyed a lively hour and one half
unraveling the social, psychedelic and sexual notions of the secret
celebrities at Threshold House, London. And now Ladies and
Viruses, the Anti-Popes of Pop_

-Diana & Jas.

MONDO 2000: As a magazine that promotes freedom of information
we are interested in the way in which the media is often used for the
opposite end, to control, repress and distort information. What's the
climate in England right now?

PETER CHRISTOPHERSON: I don't think that in England there is
anything that appears to be a coherent plan or organized government
system, it's just that the media is so biased and so narrow that it tends
to view things with the most stupid and fundamentalist attitude.
Those things [repression & distortion] kind of happen by default
really.

JOHN BALANCE: I disagree with Peter because the state here has
been set up since 1800 or something as a like royal espionage thing,
which turns into MI5 and I think that in England far more than in
America what they call "transgressional publishing" hardly gets
started before there's a backlash. And I'm very suspicious of any
magazine or someone from England who will call us up and want to
talk to us with view to publishing radical viewpoints, because I think
they're in serious danger. Like Burroughs said, "If you're not
paranoid, there's something wrong with you." It's getting stupid! I'm
getting extraordinarily paranoid, but I think I have a perfect right to
be. And look, if it gets to the press and the whole media circus, then
that's just second hand information, the first hand has been
suppressed or will never see the light of day. But there's a very long
tradition of that kind of control. From the very first printing presses
in the 15th or 16th century, a control has always been exercised over
the method of distribution of information. Operation Sun Devil was
the beginning-you know the computer seizure stuff-of something
much large. I think it's a pre-echo of something that's going to become
legislation in several years.

M2: How do you see this coming about?

JB: I could see where the holding of corporate computer codes or
something will be an offense, a federal offense in itself.

M2: There's been an interesting case relating to that here in Berkeley
recently, involving some students. They're trying to determine the
legality of searching and ransacking electronic files and they're finding
that the same legislation that would apply to someone coming in and
burgling your house is somehow not considered applicable.

PC: Yes, exactly. I mean obviously the authorities bring it down on
the side which suits them best. They don't consider the fact that
electronic information may not be viable or that transmitting
pornography in digital code across a telephone or something is in fact
not the same as distributing pornography. None of these things have
been tested.

JB: Actually, they have. In fact there have been cases here recently
prosecuting people in possession of disks and files that could be
decoded in a pornographic way.

PC: It always falls in their favour. I mean why don't they get
prosecuted for decoding the code? If it remains as code then it is
nothing. It is in the ether. It's pre-existing. It's all a panic born of
confusion. There are myriad accesses and these people just want to
close down everything that they feel is threatening which is obviously
a human response but not one that I'm in favour of.

M2: Yeah, we have a situation that's come up here concerning smart
drugs. The FDA has not officially outlawed a number of compounds
that have shown some promise in intelligence increase and cognitive
enhancement. But we saw an internal memo from the FDA customs
and the U.S. Postal Service with instructions to just confiscate people's
prepaid packages. Has that been happening over there too?

JB: All of our packages are opened if that's what you mean.

PC: I mean the reason that all this stuff has never been classified by
the FDA, isn't it because the AIDS activists have managed to be
allowed to bring certain drugs in and that includes the nootropics and
stuff?

M2: I think that has a lot to do with it. There's a whole underground
chemistry movement that's taken off in Northern California relating
to AIDS research.

PC: Well, no doubt they're going to be clamping down on that.

JB: There's been no lobbying campaign even on behalf of the AIDS
activists to get anything into the country here. It's only just by chance
that there's still a legal loophole. As soon as any serious media
attention is drawn to it's so-called abuse, no doubt they'll close those
loopholes. It's considerably more financially viable to have these drugs
tested in the public the way that they're being tested now rather than
having to set up trials in prisons and what have you. So, I feel the
reason that they are allowing a certain amount of minor usage in this
way is to find out what the risks are without involving any expense.
We're all guinea pigs.

BITE ME! BEAT ME! ARREST ME!

M2: In your fax to us you mentioned some rather ridiculous laws that
have recently been passed regarding personal sexual choices.

PC: Yes, the S & M rulings. There was a celebrated court case here
called Operation Spanner in which Lord Lane ruled that consensual
acts of Sadomasochistic sex which involved sexual gratification, as
opposed to any other sort of gratification, were criminal acts. And the
consequences of this ruling actually meant that having hickeys, you
know, love bites, became a criminal charge which the police could
become involved in. I mean you don't have to have charges brought
on a personal level, the police can come in and see what's going on
and arrest you.

M2: Does it seem that they're seriously trying to enforce this or is it
more of a symbolic ruling?

PC: It went to the highest ruling in the land. It's going to the House of
Lords.

JB: But the important aspect of it that hasn't really been considered is
that there's a distinction in law between having a sexual motive for
consensual assault, which is hurting someone else with their
permission, and any other kind of motive. For example if you go to
the dentist or a plastic surgeon obviously you're accepting pain on a
consensual basis, but it's not illegal. But the implication and what you
can extrapolate from that, is that your state of mind or your thought
or your attitude towards a certain action is what's illegal rather than
the action itself.

PC: So you've got thought crimes.

JB: And it's very similar in a way to the notion of having an illegal file
in your computer, regardless of whether it could be read or decoded
or not. It's just the very fact of the potential of what you believe it to
be that's illegal. We're in a far more nebulous and vindictive and
dangerous state that we've ever been before really.

M2: And what's the public reaction to this, or is it under wraps?

PC: The sort of news on the grapevine in the legal arena was that
people were really shocked by it and there's been a definite trend
towards picking up any cases of this nature so far. There's been a sort
of 90 degree swing again, but who knows, a precedent has been set,
and precedents get followed by bigots.

JB: And the national pastime in this country is lethargy anyway.

M2: As it is here.

BIG BROTHER & THE TELEPHONE CO.

M2: Can you give us any insight into what's recently happened with
Temple of Psychick Youth and some of the trouble they've been
having? We had heard from our associated spy network that some sort
of a raid had gone down at the home of Gen and Paula of P.T.V.

JB: [Laughs] The phone just went dead when you said "Psychick
Youth." But we haven't had any connection at all with that
organization for about eight or nine years now and are not really very
interested in it to be honest. I mean the media picked up on it in the

usual stupid media way: Satanism, devil worship, blah, blah, blah.
Not picking up any facts whatsoever, but I actually don't know the
real facts. If Gen's in America he can probably fill you in a little bit
more.

M2: Has there been any overflow, any suspicion of what you all are
doing there?

PC: We don't know, we haven't had any active flak from that yet, but
we're assuming they're moving behind the scenes of course.

JB: We know for a fact that our involvement [with P.T.V.] and lack of
it has been well known in legal circles for some time, so we're not too
worried about it to be honest.

M2: This bit that was run in the media about Satanism, was that a
series of television programs?

PC: No, there was one television program which started it, by some
guy named.Andrew Boyd.

M2: Was he with a "Christian" group?

JB: Andrew Boyd, although he's an English guy, has been associated
with Christian Fundamentalists and Christian publishers in the U.S.
and by some strange coincidence, the day after his program was run,
in which Psychic T.V. were not specifically named but were connected
by association with Satanism, his book on Satanism was published.
And the television production company which made the program
closed down the day after.

PC: He conned Channel 4 into allowing him to make the program
which he said he had two years in solid research and evidence to back
up. The "evidence" in the program consisted of a woman who was sort
of nameless and anonymous or given a pseudonym who was basically
reporting from what seemed to be a mental hospital about ridiculous
allegations which he couldn't back up, wouldn't back up. And the
whole program had this sort of like Hammer Horror, 1972, Vincent
Price-type playground with dry ice and children's voices in the
background and then it would cut to this perfectly innocuous Psychick
Youth video from 1983 which featured Derek Jarman, the well-known
filmmaker, giving a sermon. It was completely ridiculous.

JB: But you know in the way that the media works, to some extent
there is a kind of guilt by association. So if you present totally
separate facts in the same program, in the same context, a certain
amount of people will always see that there's no smoke without fire.

M2: Speaking of Derek Jarman, have you been working with him?

PC: Yeah, he's got a lot of archive material we're going to be
soundtracking and we have a reissue of our first record called How to
Destroy Angels, which he promised to do the artwork for.

JB: We try to encourage working on all different kinds of film projects
obviously.

M2: You also mentioned Gus Van Sant as someone you wanted to
work with, have you had contact with him?

PC: A certain amount through William Burroughs but not as much as
we would like. Greg Araki has just done a film called The Living End.
He's done a sort of gay Thelma & Louise, about an HIV positive
couple going across America and blowing away homophobics. It's
really a good, nihilistic, on the edge sort of film. It was supposed to
play at the London Gay & Lesbian Film Festival last week but for
some obscure reason it was cancelled and they wouldn't tell me why.

JB: It might have been a customs problem I gather.

PC: Yeah, I guess the film was too contentious for our bloody
customs.

JB: But that's definitely one we should recommend because our music
and quite a lot of other good music is incorporated.

M2: What about working with William Burroughs?

JB: I've known William for a long time, sort of off and on, and we've
collaborated on photo projects and various other things.

PC: We did hot knives with him. [Laughter all around]

JB: When I had Industrial Records we produced a record of his
seminal early tape cut up experiments with Gysin and Ian Somerville
and all those guys.

PC: And he keeps in touch with us, he sends us postcards and
semi-official lithographs and stuff, but it's very difficult to pin him
down. He's always sort of in a netherworld even when you meet him.
[Laughter all around] I'm never really sure that he knows who we are,
but then again we get invited to parties with him and Nick Rogue and
Bertolucci. I think he rates us in some way!

M2: Have you seen the film Naked Lunch?

PC: No, we haven't yet, no.

JB: We were hoping to do the soundtrack but he got that Howard
Shore guy again. We held out in vain hope that Burroughs might
recommend us for it. As far as I'm aware the film is striving for a more
mainstream appeal, so we probably wouldn't have helped in that
respect.

M2: I liked Clive Barker's comment about your soundtrack for
Hellraiser being bowel churning.

JB: He meant it as a compliment by the way.

M2: Yes that's how I read it. [More laughter]

JB: I just wanted to make sure. Clive has told us that frequently when
he tours the U.S.A. doing book signings and lectures, he's quite
bemused by the number of Coil fans that come up and ask him to sign
copies of our Hellraiser record. In excess of the number that ask him
to sign copies of the book, I think.

THE ELECTRIC RUNES

M2: I'm simply mad about your last record and had a question about
some of the Blakean references; a lot of his ideas about Energy seem
to relate to your ideas. I'm curious about your connection to that
material.

PC: I think we're just travelling in the same mystical English paths.
Energy's Eternal Delight_ we keep playing around with that. It
reduces everything to the basic fundamental human frequency. We've
said the last album was about electricity and drugs.

M2: Yes! I had vaguely assumed "Teenage Lightning" to be about
lightning that wasn't quite grown up yet, and was delighted by your
explanation that it was really about the electricity created when you
rub two teenagers together!

PC: I think that Blake was travelling similar paths himself and that
we'll probably continue in the same vein, oscillating wildly.

M2: Do you think you would set any more of his poetry to music? I
noticed that you used a few lines from "The Sick Rose."

PC: Quite a few, yes. You're one of the first people to mention it as
well though. "The Sick Rose" is one of my favorites, it's one of the
best poems ever written. So, I think he'd give us the thumbs up over
that.

M2: You mention a connection between drug energy and electrical
energy. Would you describe how you see that connection and how you
treated it in your record?

PC: I started to be obsessed with these things when I was about 11 and
I had taken a huge overdose of Psylocibin mushrooms and I
remember putting my hand into a sort of electronic green grid, a
hexagon grid that appeared on the floor about a meter above it. I
stuck my fingers into it and it fitted completely. And ever since then
I've been obsessed with these things. With frequencies and tissues. I
just think they can be reduced quite quickly to energies like this.

JB: We have quite a large collection of electronic stimulating brain
machines and in many cases the effects are very similar to those that
can be achieved chemically.

M2: Are you doing anything with the neuron impulses to the optic
nerves?

JB: The optical ones really don't work as well as the electromagnetic
and straight magnetic ones, in which you put your head into an
oscillating electrical field. They're a bit over the top actually in some
cases. [Laughter] The guy that makes them here in London, Tony
Bassett is a kind of mad inventor who graduated to doing brain
machines from doing audio machines. He claims that a time travel, or
perception of time travel effect is achievable.

PC: I've experienced this. They give out massive doses of all the radio
waves and he says they recharge your soul and your spirit. You can
actually have OOBEs on them after about an hour on your own. But
if you're going through a group therapy with him it will happen in
about 45 minutes. He once had a journalist from one of the scurrilous
Sunday newspapers here, who he took back to being a German
soldier. The guy had gone there to do a disparaging expose' on him
but came away so convinced by it that he wrote a really positive piece.
He actually expierienced being killed and said that the physical thing
was so strong for him he almost gave up journalism. These are very
powerful machines.

JB: The effect of pharmaceutical substances is to rearrange energies
that are already present, so in one sense that is more natural but in
another way it acts sort like a bank loan, in that you have to pay the
stuff back later. And even with smart drugs temporary gains have to
be measured against the perception of subsequent loss when you stop
taking them.

M2: I want to ask you about other alternative ways of tapping into
altered states, non-chemically, either through the use of ritual or other
methods, also about childhood altered states.

PC: When I was a child we used to do this sort of death ceremony
where you would lie on the floor and people would press on you and
they'd say, "Oh, he looks ill, he is ill, he looks iller, he is iller, he looks
dead, he is dead" and then they would levitate you!

M2: This is amazing!

PC: Yes we would sometimes lift the person up about 6 feet in the air
and they were only 4 feet tall to begin with. And the person being
lifted actually felt like they were flying. When the teachers found out
about these things going on in the playground, they were banned
immediately. They became taboo and so we used to go into the woods
and do it. We'd also do hyperventilation, where we would breathe
really deeply and hard and then someone would squeeze your chest
when you jumped up from a crouching position, and those were
liberating experiences for me because you'd be reborn every bloody
time! I mean they did set me off on my errant course or whatever.

M2: Thank God.

PC: Thank God, yeah!

JB: I think these experiences are universal, I don't think they're
confined to particular areas. I mean it's all about what you can do
with a pre-teen body. But we won't get into that! [Laughter all around]

M2: Create some electricity!

SPICE CADETS

M2: Have you had any experiences with synaesthesia?

PC: I had a very critical experience the other week.

M2: How would you describe it?

PC: I felt a sort of magnetic field in the whole place, my solar plexus
was pulling towards the center and I could see bands of energy like
magnetic fields around the earth or something.

M2: Where were you?

PC: Well, I was in a club. And there was a group of people, and as the
group got more concentrated I was pulled towards it with increasing
velocity. And it was really overwhelming and it started to feel like my
fingers and my external being were being pulled towards it, but my
internal being was still solid and upright. Very peculiar.

M2: Do you ever get sensory blendings? Do certain musical keys
correspond to particular colors, do you see music, hear visual
material?

JB: Smell the music, yeah. [Laughter]

PC: My most common one is bending of the music into the
physical-the music starts to turn into shape.

M2: Does there seem to you to be any grammar or syntax to how
music bends into physicality?

JB: We're unfortunately rather undisciplined about these things.
When we're involved in those sorts of things we're involved in a lot of
other perceptions, and we're not in a controlled environment.

PC: In other words, we're out of it. [Laughter]

M2: Relating altered states to S & M now, I was wondering if you had
any comments on activating the pain threshold as a method of
achieving altered states and also if you were aware of our local "pain
shaman" Fakir Musafar?

PC: Yes, we know about his stuff. It's definitely an area that did
interest us. It's too illegal to interest us now! Literally, I mean you
would have to go abroad to explore it further.

M2: You've spent a lot of time in Thailand I understand.

PC: Yeah, we go there for the pain threshold. [Laughter all around]
That and the food. Synaestheseia, smart drugs and pain thresholds all
come into one via the food. I've had seriously mind altering
experiences with the food over there.

JB: I don't think anybody really appreciates quite what the chemical
processes are that are involved with spices of those kinds. We've
described ourselves as Spice Cadets in fact because we've
experimented quite heavily in that area.

PC: Like the Aztecs, their religion was based on chocolate and chilis
and sacred mushrooms and I don't think the chilis should be
underlooked here! It was the combinations they had. The whole
control system was sort of based on chili torture.

M2: Chili Torture?

PC: Oh God yeah! They shoved stuff like seventeen different sorts of
chilis up your anus for adultery or whatever. Or pulling whole strings
of chili through your tongue. It was all sort of par for the course over
there.

CHAOSTROPHY

M2: What is this project you're doing about the Black Star or the
Black Sun?

PC: Ever since we first did Coil, we always used the Black Sun as a
symbol, originally we got it from Crowley. But ever since then it seems
that a lot people keep coming up to us and they've had tattoos of
Black Suns. It seems to be a sort of millennium badge and I want to
do a book wherein I invite people to give us their interpretations about
the symbol. We've been discovering a lot of mythology about it as
well. I could go on for ages and ages about it. But it's basically Odin_
a dark rider_ the midnight sun_ nightmares_

M2: And this is a book you want to publish?

PC: Yeah, I want to publish it. But it's strange because we never really
pushed it as a symbol and then chaos magicians in London, the IOT
started using it as their symbol and calling it the chaosphere.

M2: What is the IOT?

PC: They practice what they call chaos magick which is a slight
reaction against Crowley's Golden Dawn-related magick and it's far
more personal and far more shamanic.

M2: And are you involved with this group?

PC: I'm affiliated. I'm an honorary member, I don't practice with
them.

M2: About the pagan movement in the U.K., or the magickal
movement, whatever you prefer to call it. I don't know if you want to
talk about this personally but if you do, whether you practice within
an organized setting yourself?

PC: I would talk about it, but I actually don't practice within an
organized setting because the people I admire are like Austin Spare
who's the sort of archetypal early warlock. He was practicing in the
1920's. Even Crowley thought he was a bad sort [laughter] because he
could actually conjure up dead entities, and slime would pour down
the walls and stuff.

M2: That could ruin a tea party.

JB: It could ruin a tea party and it could also ruin a lot of paintings.
I've got several of his paintings and every place that he lived, the
whole place seemed to be dripping with water. He could never get rid
of these, like, water elementals. But I'm not sure about the pagan
movement here, it's not as on the edge and exciting as what appears
to be in America, we occasionally get these sort of gay, Pagan,
pandrogynous-type magazines from America which really excite me.

M2: Yeah, there's the whole Faerie movement which is quite active.

JB: And I don't know if it's because England is repressing it or just not
delivering the goods or if people are scared to express it.

M2: But an interesting thing about the English movement is the fact
that there's so much history to it, and there are so many ancient sites.
But Stonehenge you can't even get to! And the authorities know that
these places-whether they know directly or just sort of
instinctually-these places are dangerous to be revitalized. You know,
the whole order would crumble because real order would be restored.
It would be, you know decentralized anarchy. Are you hopeful that
this will happen?

JB: Oh Definitely! I don't know when. I'd love it to happen! Anything.
But half of Salisbury Plain is a bloody military zone anyway. And
there really is a suppression about the places that you can visit.

M2: Last time I was in England, someone had gotten in behind the
fence at Stonehenge and spray painted "LIVE" on the stones, and the
way the media talked about it was that someone was trying to write
"LIVERPOOL" had been apprehended before they could finish!

JB: That's very typical of the media. I suppose they thought he'd run
out of wall or something.

JB: In regard to English pagans, although there is a tradition of the
English eccentric they are generally seen very much as people on their
own. People that do not work within a framework or sort of standard
organization. For the last 500 years, the people in control of English
society have always been the church and the government.

PC: Elizabeth the 1st was a witch and so her government was one with
witchcraft at its helm. She had John Dee and Edward Kelly who were
sorcerers of the highest degree at her beck and call and when they
weren't she had their hands cut off. And I still think there's a tradition
carrying on. The Royal Family now who are far less empowered, still
have mystics and advisors of what you might call a very suspicious
nature behind them. I think these people are the white witches still
ruling this country. I hope so anyway.

M2: It's funny, it reminds me of the scandal about Nancy Reagan's
astrologer. Everybody was so shocked and I was like, are people
really surprised that the people in power are using these methods?

PC: Yes, Nancy Reagan and Yoko Ono.

M2: Now there's an unholy alliance! [Laughter]

JB: I'm sure they swap notes. But what you have to do is see the
people in these situations for what they really are. We certainly feel
that it's a bad time for us to put ourselves in a position of danger by
associating ourselves with a movement. Everybody's an independent
character who's able to make the decisions based on the way that they
see the world themselves rather than the picture of it that's presented
by the media.

PC: I mean, there comes a time where we feel we will lay our heads on
the block and stand up and be counted. But I think it's best not to do
it in your country as it were. Maybe we'll come across to America and
make a point there. Because to do it here is like shitting on your own
doorstep. You have to sort of suffer the consequences and they can be
dire. Just labelling yourself or allowing yourself to be labelled.

M2: In terms of the Anarchist movement over there then, how
connected is it to a magickal or pagan movement?

JB: There are definitely some links, but who's to say if they're the
effective links?

M2: In S.F., there's a quite interesting subset of magickal anarchists
who are trying to redefine culture in some new ways.

PC: Right! Americans for some reason have a much better grip on
presentation as it were.

M2: Sometime's that's all there is. [Laughter]

PC: But they know how to present themselves. Here, there's perhaps
an opinion or a groundswell of energy or whatever but it's quite
disorganized and it can never get together in a seriously organized
way.

JB: And even if it did it would be suppressed.

PC: The Temple of Psychick Youth proves that when you form a body
which the state sees as sinister it will come down on it in whatever way
it can. Be it legal or illegal you know. If you pull people's strings
they'll react really. it doesn't make for the most exciting life actually,
but we spend most of our energies trying to appear other than what we
actually are.

M2: Would either of you express an opinion of the current British
house scene?

PC: In England, it's going very demented.

M2: In what way?

PC: Too much electricity. Too much energy. I mean, it's how many
years along the line, five, and it's getting far more seriously
psychedelic in what I consider to be the purest way. The music is
seriously taking people out of any sense of reality any more. And the
machine/human interface is so complex and so, not decadent, but
detailed that something really interesting is happening. I'm just
worried that the energy is being generated with no actual aim or
release.

M2: It's like doing an energy raising ritual without grounding the
energy. You have to wonder where it's being sent.

PC: Yes right. It's like the height of the 60's, everyone saying you
know, levitate the pentagon and stuff, it's all very well, but no one's
even saying that anymore. I just wonder where it will be directed , or
whether the opposition now, the authorities, will pick up on the power
and just turn it against them.

M2: So then you see the need for some more leadership, some more
focus in it?

PC: Well yes, just a purpose! You know. I mean, there's a huge
reservoir of energy here, far more than I've ever seen, it's overspilling
and I've seen people go mad in the streets and sort of smash through
plate glass windows and stuff. With far more regularity than I would
ever imagine.

JB: But the house scene in this country has been allowed to grow and
allowed to happen and relatively large amounts of drugs are allowed
to come into the country and be sold because people would rather this
energy was expended in the middle of the night in a club rather than
on the streets with a Molotov Cocktail or whatever.

PC: The Metropolitan police we've heard have unnoficial guidelines
which say they don't bother with Ecstasy and Acid and stuff because
the prevalence of it in the population has caused serious lessening of
violence on the football terraces and stuff. People who were
traditionally football hooligans have been taking MDMA and have
caused no trouble whatsoever.

JB: It leaves them much easier to control. And also afterhours
drinking has gone down considerably, violence along with it.

PC: Yeah, I mean they were complaining that like 20,000 people
would meet in an aircraft hangar. The only complaint about that was
the fact that there was noise, you know, any 20,000 other people and
there would have been violence, stabbings and stuff, which never
happened with the Acid House thing. But they see something going on
and they want to control it, you know.

M2: This also relates to another topic I wanted to talk about. The use
of music in magick and as a tool for inducing heightened states of
awareness and how this can consciously be done?

PC: It's such a huge subject. I did a course a couple of years ago with
a woman called Jill Purce. Although I have reservations about her
methodology and where she got it from, the physical effects that the
course had on me were so immense, they couldn't be discounted. She
taught me overtone chanting and stuff and sort of unlocking the
chakras using sound. I did it for just over a week and it completely
cleansed me. I was having dreams of like violent volcanic eruptions,
and blood rituals and decapitations and disembowelments and stuff
and it was explained that these were all typical cleansings, where my
body was sort of being hacked apart and shared among people, and
these were all good.

M2: So how possible then do you think it is to really consciously try
to utilize music to try to focus our energy collectively?

PC: It was introduced to me that there was an exact science which
could be used. We were doing stuff with the Kundalini energy and
cleansing each chakra. And at the end of two days of this I couldn't
work out why I had a big bruise at the base of my spine. It was like the
vibrations where my body had been in contact with the floor made a
really serious bruise. The vision in my eyes was changing as well. I had
in mind a project to gather up from around the world all sorts of
similar vocal magickal correlation type things because I have a friend
in Sweden whose girlfriend could clot blood by singing down the
telephone, stop blood flowing. And things like this. It's from a sort of
Laplander farming religion.

M2: I'm interested because I'm a vocalist, and I've been exploring
ways of using the voice to do very specific things.

PC: I think you can get really specific. It depends on your mindset and
your cultural references, although I think thay are cross cultural as
well basically. As long as the nervous system is loosely related I think
you're going to come across similar situations! There's a woman in
England, Freya Aswynn, who deals with Runic systems and she's
attempting to use a similar sort of overtone chanting to re-find how to
actually chant the runes, because they're obviously a very physical
phenomena, apart from just being a vocal or alphabetical system.
There are obviously, you know, specific correlations that can be
explored.

M2: On Love's Secret Domain you work with a number of outside
musicians. How have you found them?

JB: Unfortunately, it's not correct to say that. We wish we were. But
generally what happens is on any specific project we have to go out
and find people that we think would be suitable for it and we're
constantly on the lookout for people who have similar sensibilities and
general ideas but that can bring in new or different musical
strengthsand quite often this happens in the so called coincidental
manner. For example on L.S.D. the digeridoo player that we used we
just happened to see on a cable TV program and wanted to get in
touch with him and tried to get in touch through the cable station but
were unable to do so and then about a month later when we were in
the studio we went out totally by chance to get something to eat and
we bumped into him in the street, so you know, those opportunities
are not to be missed really. Cyrung, who played on the album is really
amazing. We were a bit worried about folding it up and cutting it up
and everything and he sort of said no, no do whatever you want with
it, take it somewhere else. I think people sort of think that our music
is fundamentally sampled, and although it's true to say that the
structures are Macintosh sequence-based, we certainly don't have any
precious attitude towards computers. If it's possible to fuck them up
then we will. And likewise, we'd rather use a live musician when
they're going to bring qualities that the computer is not able to do.

M2: How did you end up working with Annie Anxiety? She
contributes a great vocal track.

JB: When we come to do an album we always, as I said, choose
around and we'd known her since like Crass days and we liked her
persona, she sort of has a set persona and we decided to make use of
it.

M2: Was that track improvised?

JB: Yeah. I played her the base of the track, you know, the
instrumental version and I said to her "I've got a few ideas, like
disappeared people in Central America and stuff, shell shock." And
she just sort of played off those two lines really. Oh yeah, she got
drunk in the studio and came out with it in about an hour. [Laughter]

JB: When we have people with whom we feel we have an empathy we
like to set up a sympathetic circumstance in which they can do their
thing for like a few hours and then we take that and sort of
manipulate it, cut it or whatever. It's really a good way of working. It
was the same with Cyrung and the same with the Spanish guitar player
that we used on the record.

GOLDEN TRIANGLE

M2: Which one of you is it that appears in the "Windowpane" video.

JB: Me, John.

M2: Where was that filmed?

JB: Actually on the Golden Triangle, between Burma, Laos and
Thailand in the River Mekong there's a small island, a sand island
which is actually the Golden Triangle where the gold and opium
smugglers would meet. A sort of no man's land between the three
countries, and we hired a boat out there and filmed on it. Fortunately
there weren't any smugglers there at the time. Anyway it's quicksand
and I was thrashing about a bit and trying to dance in time with a
small ghetto blaster on the shore which I could hardly hear and I was
looking down at this quicksand trying to pull my legs back up before
I sank and later on all our Thai friends were saying "My God, you
went out there!" Because loads of people die out there. The sands shift,
the whole island shifts. And theres always a good chance of getting
shot at by the Burmese guards who haven't got anything better to do,
and might just do it for the hell of it during their lunch break.

M2: Did you go into Burma?

JB: Yes we did a whole field recording tour in Burma. We recorded a
track of a sort of animist pagan monk at a place called Pagan. There's
this whole mountain dedicated to dragon spirits and animal spirits
that has a carved dragon staircase round it up to the top and we
recorded the monks chanting for the end of the world on top of it. The
day before we arrived the government announced that all currency
notes above the value of about 50 cents were worthless so the country
was in some turmoil when we arrived. A few months before they had
a temporary student uprising. You're only allowed to go to certain
places in the country and you're always accompanied by a guide. And
the length of visit at the time was limited to six days.

PC: The whole place looks like 14th century Thailand or something.
Immaculate walled cities with moats and plains that just stretch on
forever with no roads or anything. It's really unspoiled-apart from
potholes caused by gunfire.

JB: Rangoun is pretty much how it was when the British left it in 1918
or 1924 whenever it was.

LIVE SHOWS & LINGUISTICS

M2: Do you want to perform live ever?

JB: We have very mixed feelings about the whole nature of live
perfrmance because there are several sides to it from the point of view
of energy distribution, but at the same time there is such a stigma for
us involved with the notion of concerts and especially anything that
has a sort of rock association. It's difficult for people of our limited
resources to be able to stage something that sufficiently breaks
through those barriers to reach a new sphere of performance. We,
generally speaking, don't enjoy watching other people's concerts and
really don't see why people would enjoy watching ours if they were the
same.

M2: Would you then be more interested in doing a multimedia thing?

JB: If we could yeah, but even with multimedia in the conventional
sort of indie music sense, you know of putting up a video wall, or
screens of super-8 projections and stuff, really it's not telling people
anything that they don't already know and haven't already seen a
million times. Probably Hollywood has the resources to make those
things look good, we don't really and the people that try although it's
a valiant attempt in many cases, it's sort of doomed to failure before
they begin I think.

M2: You have to meet our local visual design genius Charles Rose.

JB: Well, put him on to us!

M2: I'd come!

M2: What was the inspiration for the title of your instrumental,
"Chaostrophy"?

PC: Your magazine. [Laughter]

M2: I'm flattered. I coined that word!

PC: Oh I did as well! [Laughter]

M2: Double parked in a parallel universe.

PC: What do they call them? Neologisms?

M2: Or portmanteaus.

PC: I've got hundreds of them.

M2: Jas. collects them too, you should compare notes.

M2: What is your interest in playing with language in this way?

PC: Well just sort of getting back to babble. About five years ago I
was really into writing whole books that appear to be nonsense but
when you go back and look there's a lot of interesting stuff there. But
it's basically babble. There's a story that Brion Gysin tells of listening
to the radio in Marrakesh before he could speak Arab fluently and
even when he wasn't stoned being very struck by the fact that even
though the radio was only broadcasting in Arabic from time to time
there would be what appeared to be a complete sentense in English.
Certainly that's what Chaostrophy is about. There's a tremendous
amount of layers in our music, specially that track, where words have
been recorded and either buried in the mix or folded in in some way
sublimated to the theme of the music but nevertheless what we hope
is that some aspect of the message will remain. It's like we've taken
away all the pointers, all the signs and indicators but we've left the
actuall purpose behind which I hope people can pick up on.

FANCY DOGS

M2: What contemporary music do you find exciting?

JB: We like the music of the Eskimo peoples.

M2: The throat singing?

JB: Yes, amazing stuff. I think there's not enough research in that
area. Absolutely amazing stuff.

M2: What about Pygmie yodeling?

PC: Our dogs do that. We have two Basenjis which are originally
Pygmie dogs. A tribe called the Azendi-who are Pygmies with a
reputation for witchcraft even among the other tribes who live around
them-and the dogs we have are the witch doctor's familiars.

JB: They are sometimes called the Congo Barkless Dog, they do not
bark but they yodel. When they are in a high emotional state they
make these very strange yodelling sounds.

M2: Well, so much for our joke question.

JB: I think the main reason these dogs are kept in modern times-apart
from a few witch doctors and shamen-is because the women of the
tribes use the dogs for licking their babies bottoms clean and I'm not
going to say any more on that subject.

M2: I don't think Lord Lane would approve of that.

JB: No, we don't want our dogs taken away from us with a care order!