purging 1999-2009: bonus podcast

The final episode of the Belsona Academy podcast for 2009 is now upon us, serving a dual purpose as a kiss-off to the decade and as a memorial to the last 10 years' victims of State-sponsored torture.

Here's the playlist for the show (not counting times at which tracks blend into one another- although I thought it'd be more 'fun' for you to sort this out on your own;) :

intro: Prof. John Gray on torture in the 21st century | Graham Moore + Z'ev: title 2 from the Shark Bite Tapes LP 'Mezzo' | Pita: Track 2 from the Moikai LP 'Get Out'| Whitehouse: "Execution" from the Susan Lawly / Very Friendly LP 'Quality Time' | Junko + Mattin: excerpt from "Too Late", from the self-titled Tochnit Aleph LP | Joke Lanz: "Sister (My)" from the Blossoming Noise LP 'Liederliches und Nichtiges von Joke Lanz + Rudolf Eb.Er' | Satanstornade: 'Testicular Fortitude (Edit)' from the self-titled Warp LP | Russell Haswell: 'FOG Micromedley' from the Tochnit Aleph compilation CD "The End Of The Fear Of God" | Scott Arford: "60 La Scala" from the 'Micro Bionic' book's companion CD | Ami Yoshida + Christof Kurzmann: "Untitled 6" from the Erstwhile CD 'A S O' | M. Behrens: "Dialectic" from the Oblast CD-R 'Kosovo Requiem' | BJ Nilsen + Joachim Nordwall: Side A of the Ideal 7" "Death Dub" | EVOL: "10" from the Fals.ch data CD 'Falsch 01' | RLW- "Atmosphäre" from the Table Of The Elements CD 'Pullover' | Hecker: "In Actu (Create 7.1 Edit)" from the Rephlex CD 'Recordings For Rephlex' | Daniel Menche: Track 1 from the Blossoming Noise CD 'Flaming Tongues' | Prof. John Gray outro

NOTE: being that these tracks are presented in incomplete form (regularly overlapping each other) and have been compressed as MP3 for this program, all attempts should be made to locate and buy original versions from the artists. Thank you!

Disc For A Decade: Falsch 01 (fb25)

It’s hard to believe, that even with this decade being marked by so many time-freezing shocks and horrors, it has gone by so quickly. And while it was a sobering decade for anyone who wanted to see just a little less ecological devastation, imperialist slaughter and triumphal stupidity, I think we can at least say that it was a good decade for advancements in sonic technology. It was one where a sonic culture distinct from both elitist poses and lowest-common-denominator prurience really began to take flight, to inspire new manifestations of similar activity whenever it loudly flapped its wings.

Just from the outset of the decade, things were visibly accelerating: 1999 seemed to be as good a year as any for music made on computers. This held true not only because of the increasing popularity of the personal computer as the stand-in for professional recording studios where ‘bands’ were concerned, but because the language of capital-C ‘computer music’ itself was expanding so dramatically and yet making itself understood to a whole new group of actors. The generation which had grown up on house music, raves and such communal trance-dance rites was, in its thirst for just about anything new and stimulating, discovering or rehabilitating the strategies of the 20th century avant-garde and presenting it with the more confrontational, ‘margin-walking’ demeanor of underground rock music. Of course, live and recorded music wasn’t the only source for this new aggregate of composers to draw upon. As I’ve written earlier, quite a few people who were in their 20s or 30s by the coming of the millennium had already experienced a hitherto unprecedented total sound environment: the video arcade or electronic gaming center. Whether one was there as an active gaming participant or as a spectator (or just wandering through for some other purpose unrelated to the machines on hand), it was clear that the electronic gaming center provided something special for students of psycho-acoustics.

Much of the computer music issuing forth in the late ‘90s –whether it was the stated intent or no- seemed like the heir apparent to the synthetic allure of the video arcade, stripping away the visual content but still retaining a feeling of total sensory immersion in a world of hopelessly ephemeral simulated life (3 ‘lives’ for a quarter used to be the rule.) It was an environment delineated by convulsive spasms of exaggerated or muted violence, by abrupt transformations of virtual scenery and risk / challenge level, by saturated colors and audio-visual distortions. Even if your eyes and ears were riveted to a particular machine, stuck in the ‘zone’ as it came to be called, there were still unmistakably human elements – the acrid smell of sweat and cigarette smoke, frustrated outbursts of profanity from defeated game operators- which provided the necessary frisson within this fledgling hyper-reality.

Unlike the cabinet games, though, which haunted the arcades with their eerie anthropomorphic quality, the emerging new wave of computer music seemed to have no pretensions to presenting a ‘storyline’ or narrative, in the way that prior ‘concept’ records had done. Suites of individual tracks, when bundled into long-playing albums, usually presented subtly different, interchangeable demonstrations of technique rather than attempting to build a dramatic arc from start to finish. Although there was little communicative information to ‘hold onto,’ so to speak, there was much sensory information to receive, a fact which has given me a kind of perverse enjoyment when watching the more ‘rock’-minded critics try to sift whatever small nuggets of ‘cultural commentary’ that they can out of the bewildering rush of incoming sound events. The inability of pop culture critics to deal with this led to dismissal of it as –like so much pure electronic composition before it- a novelty item with a limited shelf-life, or better yet, as an illustration of some menacing anti-human ideal. Some insisted (as John Cage did upon hearing the bracing symphonies of Glenn Branca for the first time) that a world which ‘sounded like that’ would be a brutish and totalitarian one, wherein people routinely and foolishly strive for maximal conditions rather than optimal ones. In keeping with the famous proclamation of Francis Bacon, though, this music “paints the scream and not the horror”. It reminds us that not every apparently violent act is an expression of dominance or pre-emptive aggression- wild thrashing and convulsing have long been hallmarks of ecstatic rites in which the aspirant willfully submits to, or seeks a symmetrical ‘oneness’ with, superior forces. Moreover, not all of it is, or was, histrionically violent to begin with- many pieces coming out of the new computer music 'scene' were sweetly soporific concoctions made from slowly shifting harmonics or from layered sub-bass caresses. Mastery of all these different modes was never out of reach for the more accomplished artists to break through in the '90s and '00s.

Well- with this lengthy preface out of the way, I can now set out to do what I really wanted, which was to offer up a choice of one recording which really “defined” the previous 10 years’ worth of development in the computer music field. The Fals.ch 3” CD “fals.ch 01” (fb25) might seem like an odd contender for this title, but on closer inspection it embodies much of what made early 21st-century computer music what it was. For starters, there’s the clever circumvention of the ‘bigger is better’ aesthetic- an ecologically sound use of materials here presents the listener with a very generous listening experience (close to 3 hours of high-quality MP3). Sure, you needed a PC to act as the playback device for this (and one with a tray-loading CD drive, to boot) but it was safe to assume that anyone interested in this sort of music had access to a computer. The package design aimed for attractive austerity, limiting itself to text credits and a brief history of MPEG audio printed on a magenta background. Track titles themselves, with a couple exceptions, read like a litany of alpha-numeric prompts and orders, rather than following the pop tradition of the past several decades and acting as descriptors of an emotional state.

The roster for the disc is an impressive roll call in and of itself: Pimmon, Oval, Kim Cascone, Zbigniew Karkowski, cd_slopper (Florian Hecker and Oswald Berthold), EVOL, Voice Crack, fon (Formation Ohne Name), Satanstornade and still more besides. Bonus visual materials also exist in the form of QuickTime movies, animated .gifs and interactive synaesthetic games that mix generative sound and visual components. The sound pieces, though, remain the core selling point. Heard collectively (if you’re brave enough to listen to all 2.8 hours in one sitting), you can easily be overwhelmed by the incessantly unfolding and multiplying fragments of lightly-controlled chaos, so it’s probably best to wet one’s toes on a one-artist-at-a-time basis. Whatever your level of determination, though, a single serving of this kind of music can easily get you into a state where you perceive quotidian surroundings differently- at high volumes you tend to develop a newfound appreciation for the ‘molecular,’ or for breaking objects and organisms down into their component parts.

Put simply, it is a ‘psychedelic’ experience, and it’s not too much of a stretch to see the upwards-spiraling ‘Risset tones’ of Massimo’s track “Bonus”, or the icy chattering of Satanstornade’s heavily panned and chopped audio streams, as being new ‘soundmarks’ of the psychedelic mind state on par with the good old whip-lashings of Fender Strat feedback. Contained within the 3” circumference of this little plastic wafer is Homo Ludens at his / her finest, taking play seriously and, conversely, working hard to generate something that seems to flow effortlessly. It is noisy and ‘extreme’ music without the phony jock posturing of so many ‘extreme culture’ also-rans, and it is electronic music shorn of its stereotypical, hermetic coldness. Yes, there are paradoxes to be found in it, but ones that –unlike so much of what has happened from 1999-2009- have been relatively harmless, promising a wild, sustainable culture with fluid boundaries and ignoring all lesser imperatives. Keep your eye on the auction / trade / used disc site of your choosing for this one, it provides an object lesson in better living through electricity.

Cold World

Although I don’t write them myself, I’ve always had a certain weakness for lit-crit texts that try to rehabilitate various forms of non-institutional, anti-academic “low culture": hauling them in for laboratory analysis and discovering that layers of socio-cultural meaning and hidden associations are seething just below their once impenetrable surface appearance. At their worst, these sorts of books inflate minor aesthetic details into intellectual ‘crises,’ resulting in a perverse and unintended hilarity, and making their writers out to have ‘Princess And The Pea’ levels of hypersensitivity. At their best, these theoretical exercises in mashing together disparate elements inspire whole new experiments in recombinant art, and help to silence the moronic, defeatist cry of “it’s all been done before.” So, when I recently stumbled across Dominic Fox’s slim volume Cold World: the Aesthetics of Dejection and The Politics of Militant Dysphoria, I had high hopes for it to be the latter, seeing as it was giving equal weight to both the presentation of black metal and the activist writings – in the service of the Rote Armee Fraktion - of the resurgent Ulrike Meinhof. Those who are familiar with both of these celebrated underworld phenomena will probably already notice a few things they have in common: the recognition of distinct gaps between ineffectual ‘protest’ and catalytic ‘resistance,’ and seeing others' deaths as the only way of securing further survival for that which truly matters to them. Fox cleverly notes the famous RAF trope that “shooting and fucking are the same” (read: both share equal importance as revolutionary acts), and also notes the early Norwegian BM scene’s brief and fiery attempt to go far beyond the blunt anti-democratic, anti-monotheist protest encoded in their music. If we don’t attribute it directly to Meinhof, her insistence that “protest is when I say that something does not suit me…resistance is when I make sure that that which does not suit me no longer occurs”, could just as easily be taken up by someone on the opposite end of the political spectrum, and Fox certainly recognizes this.


The focus of Fox is squarely on the gap between the aforementioned protest and resistance, when one is confronted with a bleak and static world not of one’s own making, one that “…triangulates social withdrawal, emotional torpor and spiritual devastation, without […] being able to name any of these things as its pimary cause.” (pp. 37-38.) More interesting than Fox’s assessment of past RAF and black metal transgressions (and more relevant to this blog on electronic music- which I promise we’ll return to in a moment) is his take on the contemporary BM scene, one in which

“…the introversion (literally, ‘turning inwards’) of late black metal must be understood as a development of the genre’s original combative, anti-social stance. [Xasthur vocalist] Malefic’s withering scorn for Californian metal scenesters is extended, in Xasthur’s Defective Epitath, to the Californian ideology of New Age-y social progressiveness in general. The track titles include spiteful inversions and negations of New Age nostrums: ‘Legacy of Human Irrelevance,’ ‘Worship (The War Against Yourself)’, ‘Unblessed Be.’ But to wage war on oneself, and especially to worship the forces which war within and against the self, is to uphold an ethic of inner conflict and self-overcoming (not self-realisation) which is by no means simply nihilistic. What is more, this ethic not only mirrors but intensifies the early Norwegian black metallers’ ferocious attack on what they saw as the complacent mediocrity of a society once dominated by liberal Judeo-Christian moral values. (p. 52)”

It’s a shame Fox remains within the realm of rock music in writing his essay on dejection aesthetics (he also cites albums by Codeine, and, in true po-mo fashion, the storyboard to a Britney Spears video), because the above description could apply easily enough to the icier and darker fringes of electronic music. The ‘dark ambient’ niche carved out by musicians like John Watermann (“Calcutta Gas Chamber”) and Lustmord (“Heresy”) relies on a totally different tactical apparatus than the metal artists Fox refers to, but the raison d’etre is quite similar: the subterranean growls and ‘deep space’ yawns of ambient music’s more ‘negative’ exponents still aim at a kind of de-centering of the self which is, echoing Fox, not a purely nihilistic exercise. Of course there are some artists of ‘ritual / dark / death ambient’ who do market their music as being performative nihilism, but that's beside the point. As Fox suggests while discussing Xasthur, those who can claim any kind of success in the genre know how to take the apparently ‘frozen’ and anti-social act of deep introspection and to push it to an utmost limit where it is no longer a passive act, but a destroyer of some immobilizing, internalized form of falsehood. And we could also suggest this as a possible effect of listening to electronic artists who have no stated interest in any ‘dark’ forces, yet are more than capable of conjuring such ‘dark’ qualities of dread and disorientation through the sheer un-compromise of their music. See, for example, the ‘standing wave’ aesthetic of Mika Vainio’s many discs: sometimes they are so lacking in the introduction of new sonic variables during the course of a listening program, they seem like they exist outside of time- maybe a ‘dark’ and anti-social kind of aesthetic for those who are unprepared for it, but something that can actually be transformative if the listener perseveres and willfully uses it as a kind of interrogative tool on the self.

Ultimately, though, I understand why Fox doesn’t bring up any specimens of dark ambient, austere drone music, etc. into this discussion: the insurrectionary power of these musical forms has largely remained on the psycho-spiritual plane and has not had nearly as much interest in transforming the political landscape through what Meinhof would have accepted as resistance. We could debate endlessly whether the individual ‘inner war’ illuminated by this music is more important to resolve than the conflicts which rage in public forums and city streets, but that would be much more suited to a panel discussion, and way outside the scope of this one weblog entry.

There are some clever points raised in Cold World besides those listed above, but, unfortunately, there are some glaring flaws as well. Fox occasionally indulges in the kind of ‘virtuoso’ vocabulary that I loathe. That is to say, wording that never convinces me it has any ‘progressive’ use beyond its use as a kind of ‘secret handshake’ for identifying oneself to others in the same academic niche: the words “facticity” and “cacotopia” are a couple of standouts here. Fox also chucks out some awkward statements here and there, that flirt with tautology (on page 45: “…it is very clear why adolescent revolt so often involves of [sic] a turn towards the symbolism of death: such symbols […] serve as portals to the land of the dead.”) Fox has at least done his research on black metal, namechecking such perennial ‘kvlt’ obscurities as Mutiilation, and can easily spot the identity politics of ‘authenticity’ that plagues this scene (especially its fetish for murky non-production and has clearly read the main sociological tome on the subject, Lords of Chaos as co-authored by ‘radical traditionalist’ author Michael Moynihan. Ditto for the accurate synopsis of the many RAF facts and legends. The most disappointing thing about the book, though, has to be its puzzling and hasty (non) conclusion, which I’ll allow you to read for yourself- suffice it to say it involves a nutty bit of reasoning that seems to have a tenuous connection to any of the previous arguments.

++++++++

NOTES IN THE MARGIN: I couldn’t help, before putting this book down, noticing the dour Zero Books manifesto which closes out the text, reminding us that “the informal censorship internalized and propagated by the cultural workers of late capitalism generates a banal conformity that the propaganda chiefs of Stalinism could only have dreamt of imposing.” Oh my. Far be if from me to suggest cultural life in the capitalist West is something beyond reproach, but resurrections of the old “aren’t we all living in one big gulag” argument make me laugh out loud. Please, my literary critic friends… as if you could even survive for 5 hours in a real gulag. Now, on the other hand, under the Stalinist regime this slim text of 65 odd pages probably would be available for free to ‘cultural workers’, and wouldn’t bear a ridiculous suggested list price of $14.95. So maybe the Zero Books collective has a point here.

T.B.W.B. at Brainwashed 2009 Readers' Poll

OK, let's face it: the chances of my winning this poll are comparable to the chances that the U.S. military will shutter its hundreds of bases spanning the globe by the year's end, and that said military will also stop being used as a private security force to prop up corrupt dictators (that is to say: very unlikely.) It seems like the only criteria for being considered in this contest is that you had to release a full-length record any time this year, and as you can see, that unfairly pits my humble and off-radar material against the musical fantasy objects of the entire Lowell-via-London music hipster axis.

All the same, if you'd like to go to Brainwashed and nominate my 'Strangelet' CD for one of the year's best, I will do nothing to stop you. And while you're at it, my desperate financial situation mentioned in the previous blog still stands, so if you were to buy one of these (or chip in to the 'emergency fund', which will entitle you to a copy- see details here) it will help to make things a little less miserable here.

Sadly, I haven't paid much attention to Brainwashed since editor Jon Whitney called me an 'idiot' for some trifling offense years ago, and in this decade I've found it to be an unnecessary intermediary in a music world where, if you're curious about some 'deeper' aspect of a musician's career, it's not incredibly difficult (or any less rewarding) to satiate your curiosity through your own journalistic efforts...wink, wink.

notes in the margin: speaking of the Strangelet CD, many thanks to the very kind and clever Artemiy Artemiev at Electroshock.ru, for spinning the album's most difficult cut on his Moscow radio show this week.

chipin time: T.B.W.B. emergency / survival fund

Well, I've been delaying doing this for quite some time, but unfortunately I'm in the worst financial shape of my life again, thanks to new out-of-the-blue expenses which threaten to set me back several thousand $ (which, of course, I don't have.) Combined with the looming costs of uninsured dental work, equipment repairs, etc., I stand to have my savings obliterated, and to be unable to feed myself or my dog companions. While I don't want to pile on the melodrama, given that many of you are experiencing similar hardship (and are probably justifiably tired of hearing pleas like this one), I do need to start resorting to emergency measures for staying afloat.

Here is where I stand today. The first round of royalty payments for my book will arrive in March of next year. While that doesn't seem that far off, in the present situation it's an eternity. Finding even menial jobs in my area has been a nightmare, and I have very few possessions that I can sell as a stop-gap measure to have cash rolling in. I do not, nor have I ever, qualified for unemployment benefits.

People who know me can probably attest to the fact that I'm a ridiculously frugal person. I don't like borrowing anything that I feel I can't return, or offer something of similar value for. I've never used a credit card as anything but a glorified 'debit' card, and as a means of proving fiscal reliability to apartment landlords and so on. I've never been addicted to any of the commonly recognized vices, and have taken serious steps to avoid getting mired in dependent behavior that would become a drain on my friends. So, again, it is difficult for me to ask for a no-strings-attached contribution.

Instead, let me offer you what little I can in return for your help. If you've been following this space or the main Belsona site recently, you probably know that I'm planning on releasing a series of vinyl record albums featuring some truly exciting innovators in the field of radical / unorthodox electronic music. Anyone contributing $15 or more (up to $50) will be entitled to a free, signed and personalized copy of the first record when it appears- since you'd be 'investing' in its release, I think this is only fair. I'll also send you a signed / personalized copy of my Strangelet CD, which I have in stock now.

Can't contribute that much? Ok, let's do this then: Anyone contributing from $1-14.99 will have their names included in a special 'tribute' show on the 2nd season of the Belsona Academy podcast, and will have their names listed in the credits of the next Belsona vinyl or CD release.

Can you contribute, holy of holies, more than $50? In that case, you will be entitled to signed / personalized copies of everything I write, record, and release for the next 5 years. Since I plan to get rather ambitious if/when I survive the present disaster, this is an investment that could end up working in your favor. Oh and the above offer of the Strangelet CD is valid for this contribution, as well.

Finally, let me just indulge in some pipe-dreaming for a moment and imagine a world where someone would contribute, say, $150 or more. That person would be entitled to signed / personalized copies of every multiple edition I release until my death. I'm not joking or trying to be 'cheeky' in the least. This would include limited edition silk-screened t shirts, books, CDs, vinyls, handmade collages/artworks- anything at all that bears the T.B.W.B. imprimatur, also including compilations and split releases. Again, an investment which -if you enjoy following my humble work- could work out nicely for you.

So, there you go. The chip-in widget above, which sends me money via PayPal, is pretty self-explanatory. If you want more details or wish to offer payment by some other method, please contact me here.

Apologies for the interruption, and have a great day.

Immersion Into Noise

As you probably know by now, there is a whole new crop of books, both released in the last few years and to be released in the near future, which share many of the phenotypes of Micro Bionic, yet take drastically different linguistic / narrative approaches and reach different conclusions. I don't see these books as "competition" -in fact I'm glad that there's such a surge in interest for my pet topics- and once we start getting into the more overdetermined areas of electronic music culture, like 'noise', it seems like there can't be enough different original 'takes' on the subject. For his new (as-of-yet unpublished) text Immersion Into Noise, Joseph Nechvatal (who you might also know for his part in the Tellus cassette magazine, and for the similarly ambitious Towards an Immersive Intelligence) tackles the subject of saturated audio with an unflinching intensity. Certainly I have done my share of bitching about 'heavy theory' texts in the past, but only when such writing serves as a diversion from serious inquiry rather than as a supplement to it. For his part, Nechvatal is capable of tossing some quite impressive epistomological hand grenades, whose explosive impact almost matches the sensory exhaustion caused by the subject under exploration.

A full critique will be forthcoming when I finish this one (I am still busy arranging future events for my own book and music projects)- but for the moment, here is a pertinent excerpt from the book's introduction, which elegantly overlaps with some of the caffeinated suppositions I've made in my book, this blog, and elsewhere:

"[The] self-connected epistemological-strategic approach is based on the premise that behind all noise art, either representational or abstract, is the hypothetical exploration of the introspective rhizomatizing world of the imagination under the influence of today's high-frequency, electronic/computerized environment. Any analogue-to-digital conversion process transfigures various physical quantities into homogeneous numbers. And numbers, it must be remembered, are abstractions that have no solid tangible actuality. Moreover, since it is difficult making sense of today's swirling, phantasmagorical media society, the general proposition behind noise art may best be to look for a paradoxical summation of this uncertainty by taking advantage of today's superficial image saturation; a saturation so dense that it fails to communicate anything particular at all upon which we can concur - except perhaps its overall incomprehensible sense of ripe delirium as the reproduction system pulses with higher and higher, faster and faster flows of digital data to the point of near hysteria.

Perhaps the result of this ripe information abundance is that the greater the amount of information that flows, the greater the non-teleological uncertainty which is produced. Hence noise. So, the tremendous load of imagery/sound/text information digitally produced and reproduced all round us today ultimately seems to make less, not more, conventional teleological sense. Information as knowledge is myth.

The history of art is, of course, full of new epistemological shifts and I maintain here that the shift in perspective which noise provides is just such a shift, replete with a newness based on a long preparatory gestational development. Indeed, it seems to me that as human psychic energies are stifled and/or bypassed by certain controlling aspects of mass informational technology, such a personally transgressive ecstatic phenomena will most likely increasingly break out in forms of noisy thinking - resulting in noisy art."

-Joseph Nechvatal, Immersion Into Noise (pp. 25, 26)

See above links for more details, of course...

in cars

Having lived in urban Japan for several years, while moving in and out of the myriad electronic music circles that lurked in its margins, it was always interesting taking note of how people with little budget - and even less personal space - managed to record their often incredibly noisy sound works. The sounds of said underground included (but were by no means limited to) epic bouts of primal screaming, the chthonic tumult of improvised metal-on-metal percussion, impenetrable walls of low-register electronic synth growl and high-register 'skree', or the mutant language of fillips and moans erupting from horns and given further alien accents with an assemblage of FX pedals. Much of this could, of course, be recorded and/or rehearsed on a computer or porta-studio with a good pair of studio monitor headphones to listen back to the results, but much of it was decidedly physical as well, requiring personal rituals of floorboard-stomping and uncontrollable bodily thrashing (for 'uncontrollable,' read 'careening into and bouncing off the walls') to satiate both the practicioner and the music gods themselves. Naturally, just a hot minute of such sonic boisterousness, if coming into earshot of the nearest neighbor, would have resulted in a quick dispatching of the police to the scene.

So, certain stars within the 'noise' / free music' / 'garage electronics' constellation resorted to unorthodox measures as a means of compromise, wherein they could both get their necessary catharsis and not be served with an eviction notice. The practice of recording to tape (and later to MD recorders, laptops, and the like) in moving cars was one such resourceful way of getting the job done. Just thinking about it tends to produce comical visions of people who, howling into a mic and flailing about in the backseat of a moving 'Town Cube', don't notice as it pulls up next to a family of Sunday drivers at a red light and earns their terrified glares. Recording or rehearsing while in motion seems like a haphazard exercise, given all the literal bumps in the road that one has to deal with, yet it once again seems to have fulfilled some ritual function: the 'open road' (even if clogged with traffic much of the time) becomes a metaphor for relative freedom / lack of stasis in other areas of life. The sensation of acceleration and smooth, quick forward movement, however slight, must have acted as an extra stimulus to the spontaneous generation of ideas and their subsequent conversion into sounds.

Still, I wondered why people would go through all the trouble of driving haphazardly throughout the city 'making a joyful noise' when there were other less costly alternatives to this. If it was a politically-charged statement or protest against, say, poor urban planning or the societal expectation of total conformity, I doubt it really made much of an impact: freely howling / bashing / blaring artists driving by in nicely sealed cars didn't make a fraction of the noise that was made by their hedonistic counterparts in the local bike gangs, and in the lurid-colored vans that parked outside of shopping centers blasting Eurodisco. Recording and rehearsal studios were prohibitively expensive for the 'drive-by noisers' I talked to, yet most of them had all the rudiments for recording to hard disk in their own homes, and didn't really need to bother with this kind of activity.

Some possible answers to my question came about while flipping back through the catalog of Yasunao Tone's actions entitled Noise, Media, Language. I was happy to see that this kind of activity had a clear precedent in the interventions of the wily old Fluxus master and his companions in Group Ongaku. Writing in an essay entitled "Experiments in Agitation," William A. Marotti notes the following:

"While the Anpo protests [against the renewal of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty in the early '60s] filled the streets by the Diet and the Prime Minister's residence, the members of the collective took their distinctive experiments and improvisation to the streets. They had been in the habit of borrowing the light van from Tone's family business (Gosan'ya Shouji) to conduct private improvised tailgate performances to different locations -for themselves alone- but on this occasion, according to Tone, they all climbed into the van and, with Tone at the wheel, rode through the streets performing their distinctive music. Lacking loudspeakers, their performance ebbed and flowed unnoticed and unheard by other drivers, distant demonstrators, or residents as the van sped along the streets. As fusions of art and political action go, this would seem to have been a fairly unproductive experiment. Yet to understand the ways that this action made sense is to return us to the complex world of art, politics and the everyday world from which many of Tone's lifelong interests and experiments originate.

[...]

On the one hand, the action makes some sort of sense as protest only if one appreciates the aspirations of the moment: to fulfill a political legacy inherited from the historical avant-garde. On the other, their attempt to bring their art into contact with the movement within the city's expanding arteries -where economic change was bringing about massive transformations in work and life patterns- joined with a broader tendency to investigate art and interact with the spaces of daily life." (p. 30-31)

Life As We No It 2

I will admit to having some intimate involvement as a selective consumer of Boyd Rice’s works. His early noise compositions, on releases like Physical Evidence, still seethe with a strange eroticism that seems to leak ectoplasmically from my speakers- other things that sent the proverbial ‘thrill up my leg’ were his collaboration “Sickness of Snakes” with Coil, his side-splittingly funny confrontations with Denver radio evangelist Bob Larson, his starring role in the original Re/Search book of Pranks, and his general refusal to go along with the ‘90s distrust of all happy, jaunty cultural products as being insincere and manipulative. Whenever possible, I’ve also tried not to confuse the works of Rice’s many pale imitators in the “right-wing, left hand path” milieu with any of his own, and have been unaccommodating of those poseurs who supposedly “just happened” to stumble upon his “Shangri-Las meet Oswald Spengler” aesthetic shortly after he made such proclivities a matter of public record.

However, I’m increasingly finding that, with personalities as contrarian and elusive as Rice, individual actions should be judged on their own merits and not weighed against the collective merits of his oeuvre. His latest slim book of misanthropic musings, No, is patterned after a book of sayings by Marcus Aurelius and broken down into counter-intuitive, 2-4 page indictments of just about any subject that could polarize inhabitants of the West in the 21st century: ‘rights,’ ‘democracy,’ ‘hopes and dreams,’ ‘idealism’ etc. Throughout the book, Rice is funny in a mordant yet Seinfeldian kind of way (a colleague was recently mentioning to me how Rice’s vocal cadences, in person, eerily echo those of Jerry Seinfeld.) No’s opening page contains hails to the author from perennial annoyances like Kim Fowley and Brian M. Clark (probably best known for his role as a Boyd Rice acolyte, and for being verbally gored in another well-known author’s online forum by artist Sean Tejaratchi). Normally, this would function as a perfect “Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here” for discerning readers, but the curiosity factor remains strong enough to ignore these unintentional warnings.

Anyone who has had to endure their share of sanctimonious behavior and busy-body interventionism from thugs of either the Left or Right will enjoy having someone to voice their grievances in the vengeful terms that Rice profers. Rice doesn’t suffer fools, or even Suicide Girls, gladly, but once the sugar high from this realization has worn off, you start to realize how much Rice’s once-shocking ideas have been dulled by their assimilation into the strident mainstream commentary of 24-hour news networks and endlessly proliferating Internet message boards. For example: his anecdote about the girl who stands outside in the shivering cold to collect signatures for a petition “against global warming” is worth a chuckle, but cleaves too close to the kind of stuff that is either embellished or outright fabricated by the bunker mindset of people like Rush Limbaugh (well, then again, the author bio in the back of the book does claim Boyd lives in an underground compound in Denver.) Rice’s devastating candor throws down a gauntlet that I doubt most talk radio show hosts would be willing to pick up, but when he rails against such typically American nuisances as whiners, tipping, and fashionistas, one can’t help thinking we’ve been down this road many, many times already. Any given episode of South Park now irreverently tackles similar social foibles, along with a more clever attempt at resolving them (surprising that Rice hasn’t made an appearance on the show yet, given the Colorado connection- I for one would pay good money to see it.)

Meanwhile, Rice regularly notes things like the fact that punks and hippies are virtually interchangeable in their ethos and tendencies towards failed utopianism, yet fails to really glean anything from this observation besides what we already know (i.e., today's revolutionaries are tomorrow's ancien regime.) This kind of thing would have been manna from heaven while I was still in high school (as, indeed, his regular Re/Search contributions were), but we are no longer sloshing through the amniotic cultural malaise of the late ‘80s-early ‘90s. People like myself want to emerge from harsh experiences, literary ones included, with more than just a poetic agreement that man has made the world into hell- we want real alternate perspectives and new tools for rising above drab survivalism and paranoia. No, even though the title alone should make clear that a nihilistic conclusion might be in store, is depressingly light on this kind of prescription, even of a fascistic burn-it-all-down variety. According to Boyd, our ignorance of life’s realities that “require mere recognition…never belief” has fucked us all (“cursed”, in his grim assessment.) Well- ok, and then what? Both Reg Morrison (“The Spirit In The Gene”) and John Gray (“Straw Dogs,” “Black Mass”) have made recent literary observations equally laden with terror, but ones that somehow managed to be a balm for the soul as well.

The problems with No, unfortunately, do not end there. Just a minimal amount of research makes it able to find Boyd guilty of duplicity: in his musing on ‘Information,’ Rice puts forward an unnamed colleague (who, by the wording Rice uses, pretty much anyone can tell is Genesis P. Orridge) and claims he is ‘full of shit’ for his belief that authorities want to withhold information rather than believing, as Rice does, that the more advantageous strategy for them is to deluge people with an unnavigable surplus of such. Rice’s claims might have a little more bite if he wasn’t photographed as being brother-in-arms with GPO on his site’s news page, and elsewhere using GPO’s past endorsement of him as a kind of vindication of his life’s work. Another example of duplicity comes from Boyd’s constant lauding of McDonald’s (and former CEO Ray Kroc in particular) as a paragon of success, and notes how other people are disingenuous in their trendy contempt for the fast food chain (e.g. the lines in German McDonald’s restaurants that Rice claims are ‘twice as long’ as the lines in their American counterparts, despite the ongoing identification of McD’s with cultural imperialism.) That’s all fine and good, but when Rice lashes out at corporate monoculture masquerading as cultural diversity (“group identity is supplanted by economic imperative…tradition is traded off in favor of prosperity” [p. 26]) it seems pretty odd that he routinely patronizes a restaurant which is synonymous with the phony "monoculture = diversity" game. I wonder what Rice would have to say about the new self-congratulatory, McDonald’s-endorsed book “None Of Us Is As Good As All of Us,” and if it would cause him to reevaluate his assessment of McDonald’s as the Social Darwinist’s eatery of choice. Of course, it’s also funny noting how Rice continues to support the factory-farming, forest-leveling corporation when also being something of a defender of Nature and ecology – strange that I’ve never seen or heard anyone take him to task on this curious inconsistency, my guess is that the desire for peer group approval within the Industrial subculture overrides the urge to bring things like this to light.

The problem of inconsistency is where Rice plays his trump card, though: among his conclusions to the book is one where he states that we are enslaved to our binary / dualistic modes of thinking, and thus incapable of recognizing totalities. But does Rice’s acknowledgment of man’s detrimental duality, and tendency towards irreconcilable acts, let him off the hook for being, say, a pro-ecology anti-humanist and traditionalist who regularly enjoys eating his meals from a major player in the destruction of both ecology and distinctive folk traditions? In doing so, is Rice merely being -as his hated peers within ‘90s alternative culture so often were- ironic?

Worse than this is when Rice makes claims that are uncited and factually inaccurate. On p. 98 he derides Nietzsche as

“…a man who claimed that when taking a woman to the bedchamber, he must be armed with a whip. What?! Sex advice from a man who lived with his sister, never married, or had girlfriends [sic]? Do you imagine that his advocacy of the superman was any more well-informed than his dating tips?”

Now, had Rice taken time to source the correct quote from Thus Spoke Zarathustra rather than recalling it off the top of his head, he would have known that it reads more properly as “you are visiting women? Do not forget your whip” (1969: 93.) He also would have known that “Nietzsche” himself did not say this, nor even the book’s titular character, but an old woman approaching Zarathustra, in a much more complex narrative situation than the simple sado-masochistic one that Rice and other commentators have ascribed to it. But, sadly, such quality control frequently goes out the window in No- if not in the form of mis-attributed quotes, then certainly in the form of typos that plague nearly every page in the book, along with poorly formatted pages. I have to wonder if this is the doing of a proofreader / editor at the book’s publisher, or just a rush job on Rice’s behalf- either way, it does a little too much to undermine the auhoritarian tone of the book.

Now where did I put that copy of Pagan Muzak...