Issue VI by Swoon Magazine

SWOON No. VI

TECHNO/LOGY GENESIS BREYER P-ORRIDGE 20 YEARS OF DETROIT TECHNO DOUGLAS J. MCCARTHY (NITZER EBB) PICTUREPLANE GLASS CANDY LIGHT ASYLUM NITE JEWEL DREAMERS

$6 No.VI 2012

this is our record store

YOUR SOURCE FOR MUSIC & MOVIES

Visit Amoeba and explore our two floors of Music, Movies and more!

CDs, LPS, DVDs & BLu-Rays

CDs, M

OnE blOck wESt OF SUnsEt & VInE in HOllYwOOd 6400 Sunset Blvd â&#x20AC;˘ (323) 245-6400

saVe 15% oN aMOeBA.COM use code SWOOn06 at checkout on Amoeba.com to get 15% off your purchase. MUsIC & MoVIes aLWAYs ShIP freE IN the U.s. - No MINIMUM! Code valid on Amoeba.com only. not valid in stores. Code expires 9/1/12.

s&T I ES , L P

FREE ALWAYS

URNTA

B L ES

UM .COM NO MINIM AMGOOENBMAUSIC AND MOVIES -

SHIPPIN

See site

for details

get $3 off at the store

Get $3 OFF your purchase any item over $4.99 when you bring this ad to Amoeba Hollywood! *not valid with any other discount offers or coupons. valid at Amoeba Hollywood only. not valid on Amoeba.com. limit one coupon, per transaction, per person, per day. expires 12/31/12.

SWOO N Founders Anya Ferring & Kelly McKay Editor-in-Chief Kelly McKay Managing Editor/Lead Writer Shaun Frente Design Director Elizabeth Candela anchorlinestudio.com Contributing Designers Charles Pollard Alexandra Morrill Sonam Sapra-Black Editorial Assistant Hodna Nuernberg Web Designer Daniel Murphy Advertising Gail Arco, Lindsay Aveilhe, Califa Weiss, Gina Zatarain, Shauna Cummins, and Jonathan Hirsch Cover image by Elizabeth Candela, Rachel Frank and Published by Swoon Media, Inc.

All content appearing in Swoon Magazine is subject to copyright. None of it may be reproduced in whole or in part without written authorization from the editors, artists and/or authors. The opinions expressed within are those of its authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Swoon Magazine, its editors, or its contributors. To order copies or subscribe via Paypal, please visit swoonmagazine.com. If you are interested in advertising with us, please contact advertising@ swoonmagazine.com. Send all submission inquiries to swoon@swoonmagazine.com.

Distributed by Ubiquity Distributors, Inc.

CONTRIBUTORS Shaun Frente is a Los Angeles-based writer, educator, cineaste, and audiophile. He is obsessed with the human voice, and loves cats. Kelly McKay is a Los Angeles-based photographer and the co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of Swoon. She enjoys photographing beautiful women, rescuing stray cats, and wandering the ends of the earth. kellymckay.com owleyes ≈ is an information primitive, manifesting the primal world into the digital world. immortalmortal.com Lindsay Aveilhe is a New York-based independent curator, writer and photo researcher. Recent curatorial projects have included Excavation: Material/Memory/Artifact, the Issue Project Room Benefit Auction and First Matter, a group exhibition at the pop-up gallery By Appointment or By Chance. She has written on topics from travel to contemporary art. lindsayaveilhe.tumblr.com Eden Batki is an LA-based artist and chef. Her work has appeared in The NY Times Magazine, Paris/LA , GLU, and various art publications. She went on a mini-tour with Light Asylum during which she documented them on photo and video. edenbatki.com Jeaneen Lund is a NY/LA-based photographer. She has been a Psychic TV fan since the late 80’s and had the pleasure of photographing Genesis Breyer P-Orridge in he/r home. She also photographed the incredibly talented Terminal Twilight for this issue. jeaneenlund.com Suzy Poling is an artist living in Oakland who works with photography, video, mirrors, light installations and collage. She runs a T-shirt line called Zone Shirts, and her long-term sound and performance project is called Pod Blotz. suzypoling.com Mecca Vazie Andrews is a Los Angeles-based choreographer, dancer, performance artist, and artistic director of The MOVEMENT movement. meccavazieandrews.tumblr.com Quinn Brayton (LA) has played in a number of musical projects most notably as a founding member of the Centimeters, New Collapse and currently backs up Frank Alpine on synth. You can usually find him with his head down quietly going through the local record store bins. He also has a cat (see pic). Charles Mallison is a photographer, writer, and hip hop artist based in Los Angeles, CA. charlesmallison.com Drew Denny puts herself in unusual situations to explore the boundaries between performance and being. She creates texts, films, and public interventions employing scripted narratives, musical score, improvisation and site-specific installation. Drew is currently directing a film in collaboration with Hazel Hill McCarthy III and the children of Mineros San Juan, Bolivia. mydrewdenny.com Micki Pellerano is a New York-based draughtsman, performance artist and filmmaker. Micki received conservatory training at the NYU Tisch School’s Experimental Theater Wing whose teachings continue to influence his work, along with his scholarly accomplishments in the study of esotericism. mickipellerano.wordpress.com Zeljko McMullen is a New York-based filmmaker, musician (Wish) and artist. shinkoyo.com Jason Louv is the author of Queen Valentine and editor of Generation Hex, Ultraculture and Thee Psychick Bible, and has written about technology and transhumanism for Esquire Online, Humanity Plus Magazine and Acceler8or. jasonlouv.com

Swoon Magazine 2034 Argyle Ave #212 Los Angeles, CA 90068

After a decade of living in New York, Jeralyn Mason relocated to Boston where she finally has room to display her excessive record collection. She divides her time between working at Rescue a boutique she co-owns with her brother - and hanging out with her cat Johnny.

Max Smith is a stylist. Having spent formative and fashionable years working in New York and Paris, Smith currently resides in Los Angeles where she dedicates herself to life, liberty and the pursuit of hats.

Swoon Magazine is a NY/LA-based independent music, art, fashion and philosophy media project. Swoon’s mission is to feature insightful writing on music, art and culture alongside luminous fashion photography and innovative art. swoonmagazine.com

Bianca Speciale is a hair-stylist at Trust Hair Salon in West Hollywood, and has also worked on numerous photo shoots, fashion shows and films. She lives by the motto, “Do what you love and you will never work a day of your life.” This passion emanates in everything that she does, whether in the salon or on location. Benjamin Gallardo grew up in Los Angeles, and loves eating out at restaurants in New York. His favorite chocolate bar is the kind with bacon in it. benjamingallardophotography.com Rachel Frank is a painter, photographer, jewelry designer, graphic artist and philosopher scientist living in Oakland. Her interests include big trees and big men. populationoneleather.com Megumi Wakabayashi is a Los Angeles-based make-up artist. She was born and raised in Japan, where she built her talent for painting people’s faces. megumimakeup.viewbook.com

www.swoonmagazine.com

letter

“Any technology not moving forward is moving backwards,” the faceless voice of current Lexus advertising assures us as a silver blip of four-wheeled efficiency blasts off into the vanishing point of the future, casting off a litany of obsolescence in its backdraft. Why does the image of a phonograph player tossed into the abyss need no explanation in this context, while, say, a saxophone, would be a non-sequitur? This little enigma is at the heart of this installment of Swoon, brought to you in willfully backwards print. When we originally conceived this issue, we were game to cover “technology” from the plow to the Gigapet, but as it evolved, the intersection of technology and music became the dominant chord. This is not just because so much of our favorite music involves technology in obvious, though in the end diverse, ways, but also because there seems to be something greater lurking in the riddle of why so many people register a powerful divide between “techno” based music and so-called organic forms. On the one hand, we shrink from facile futurist limitations—the idea that music must have a synth in there somewhere to be relevant—and yet we believe that the artists we’ve chosen for this issue are all somehow opening a way forward. Not that we feel that synthesizers and drum machines are necessities for progress, they just so happen to form the common thread between the myriad sounds that we were inspired to feature herein. As lovers of both techno and sundry forms of so-called “organic” musics, we aim to bridge the gap between these often mutually exclusive universes. So often we hear techno dismissed as “soulless robot music.” Let us explain: robot music it certainly is (in the sense that it’s made with machines more complex than say, an acoustic guitar), but soulless it isn’t--it’s full of soul refracted through the lens of technology--the soul of robots. But we are the robots! There’s no getting around this anymore. Digitally-based sounds (and even electronically generated analog noises) still make up some kind of dark continent for many, but they arise as organically from the soil of our tech-obsessed culture as their predecessors of wood, brass, and ivory (which were once “new media” as well). From the most simple to the most complex, the tools for music-making are all just that--tools. As inhuman as it may sometimes sound, all music is, thus far in history, still made by people. Electronic music provides new ways of connecting with the world--an antidote to the alienation of technology. As humanity becomes further entwined with technology on an ever-increasing basis, music gives voice to this hybridization of man and machine, and the archaic impulses of music and art continue to find new modes of expression. There is no loss of soul, only a change in medium. On a personal level, techno has provided some of our most transcendental, capital A Art experiences, and some of our most profound moments of connection have come vis-à-vis this “soulless” music. None of the musicians or artists featured here could exist in their present manifestations without some rarefied understanding of the word technology, and many are quite lucid in apprehending how merely emerging from a technologically-driven world impacts every aspect of their art, from how it is made to how it is heard. As a composite, these essays and interviews reflect a spirit of progress without planned obsolescence—perhaps because in the non-utilitarian realms of music and art, progress should make no sense—and it is this optimistic, non-linear spirit that Swoon believes is absolutely vital today. This issue is dedicated to Swoon’s co-founder, Anya Ferring, without whom this wouldn’t be possible, and to Arthur Magazine’s founder and editor, Jay Babcock, for pointing the way... --Kelly McKay & Shaun Frente, Spring 2012

Art by Mathjis Labadie

26 The Perfect Disaster (Part I) 74 Glass Candy Peter Walsh

FOR PART II OF THIS ISSUE VISIT OUR NEW WEB MAG: SWOONMAGAZINE.COM

(PASSWORD: ROBOTSOUL)

FOR EXCLUSIVE MUSIC DOWNLOAD & MORE

36 Genesis Breyer P-Orridge

16 Nitzer Ebb & Light Asylum

66 Alien Takeover

33 Terminal Twilight

50 Dreamers

www.swoonmagazine.com

30 New York Synth

62 Julia Holter

CONTENTS

8-9 The Freedom of Imagination Act By Jason Louv, art by Owleyes 10-12 Nite Jewel Interview by Shaun Frente, photos by Kelly McKay 13 Art by Christelle Gualdi 14-15 Stellar OM Source By Ramona Gonzalez, Photos by Mathjis Labadie 16-20 Converations in Music: Nitzer Ebb & Light Asylum Photos by Eden Batki 22-25 Thee Pictureplane By Lindsay Aveilhe, interview by Josh Kolenik 26-29 The Perfect Disaster: Confessions of a Plastic Soul Junkie

44-45 Artist Profile: Hazel Hill McCarthy III Interview by Drew Denny 47-49 Artist Profile: Tony Conrad Interview and photos by Zeljko McMullen 50-53 Dreamers, We Are The World Interview by Shaun Frente 54-57 The Perfect Disaster, Part II By Shaun Frente 58-60 Show Cave Night Gallery 61 Art by Suzy Poling 62-64 Julia Holter Interview by Charles Mallison

An Extremely Oblique Personal History of Two Decades of Detroit Techno Featuring Derrick May, Carl Craig, Moodymann, Underground Resistance, Kraftwerk, Magda, Daedelus and many more…

66-73 Alien Takeover Fashion photography by Benjamin Gallardo

by Shaun Frente

74-77 Glass Candy Interview by Shaun Frente and Kelly McKay Images by Martin D’Argensio

30-32 Feast of the Supersensualists: A Glimpse into the Underworld of New York Synth From Led Er Est to Xeno & Oaklander

By Jeralyn Mason and Micki Pellerano 33-35 Terminal Twilight Interview By Ricard Zee, Photos by Jeaneen Lund 36-43 Genesis Breyer P-Orridge Interview by Zeljko McMullen, photos by Jeaneen Lund and Christelle de Castro

78-79 Synth Punk Rarities By Quinn Brayton 80 Sam Cooper/Pharaohs Interview by Mecca Vazie Andrews 82-88 The Perfect Disaster, Part III By Shaun Frente

While we are avowed lovers of printed matter, this issue marks a momentous occasion in Swoon’s own technological advancement with the launch of our new web magazine--swoonmagazine.com (password: robotsoul). There you’ll find more original writing, art, videos, and interviews (OCTAVIUS, Chelsea Wolfe, Class Actress, WIFE, Owleyes & Suzy Poling, for starters) alongside music by this issue’s varied artists. If you like what you see here, please give us a hand by participating in our Reader Survey online which gets you a free copy of the Dreams Issue, out this fall 2012 (for your pleasure before the world ends...). We are currently accepting submissions for print and online from writers, artists, illustrators, dreamers, interviewers and designers. We also have positions open for advertising director/agents. Please send all queries and submissions to swoon@swoonmagazine.com Thank you for reading this issue of Swoon!

Art by Owleyes 8

www.swoonmagazine.com

THE FREEDOM OF IMAGINATION ACT By Jason Louv

1. Consider the whole of technology and mechanization as a time machine, beaming itself backward into the past, drawing the present towards it. A nonorganic future, invading the organic past. 2. There is a future in which the machine severs the human soul; another in which it serves the human soul. 3. In the first, you live in the same way that corporate-farmed animals currently live. In the second, you live the way you like. The deciding point between these two realities is the direct action of the human soul. 4. Soul is not in the body; the body is in soul. Imagination is the gateway to the soul and the vector of freedom. 5. In order for the time machine to sever soul, it need only lock the gate: imagination. This is why, though we live in an age of the greatest information proliferation in recorded history, we are slowly losing the ability to imagine. Information is not imagination; the most advanced content delivery systems in the world are useless if their very existence means the end of real content.

11. The imagination is the human organ used for direct perception of reality. The will is the human organ used, over time, to change that reality and crystalize it into matter. 12. Sex is the rocket fuel of both imagination and willâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;use it. 13. The image of the â&#x20AC;&#x153;self-destructive artistâ&#x20AC;? is a culturally implanted kill switch. Ignore it. Imagination is a weapon; you have been indoctrinated with these images so that if you discover the weapon, you will use it on yourself and save them the trouble.

6. The desertification of imagination is a problem just as real on its own plane as deforestation is on the physical one. The fragmentation and destabilization of concentration keeps human consciousness crippled. Though it may be deliberate, this is a mistake.

14. Do not permit the colonization and stripmalling of imaginary and interpersonal space. Man should be staring through telescopes, not into computer kaleidoscopes.

7. Question: All around you you see systems put in place to suppress, depress, confuse and distract the soul. WHY has so much effort been put into this? And WHY does it never quite seem to be successful? What can we deduce from this?

15. The old world is burning, and will soon be burnt down. Imagine better.

8. Answer: The soul must be perceived as a threat, and must also be stronger than any known attempt to suppress it.

16. Trade in Our Failed State for the Right to Hallucinate. www.jasonlouv. com

9. In brief: 10. Magic is imagination and will (repetition).

NITE JEWEL

Interview by Shaun Frente

Photos by Kelly McKay

Los Angeles synth artist Ramona Gonzalez chose her stage name with precision: her music is as beckoning and shiny, yet still as murkily seductive, as a neon sign above a Figueroa Street diner, circa 1981. Her recorded output is effortlessly genre-defying: the haunted, underwater Casio sound of her debut long-player Good Evening (2008) invited gerrymandering into the lo-fi domain of buddy Ariel Pink, but recent efforts weave in the most infectious, sleazy elements of early ’80s skate-jam R&B. Ramona graciously agreed to chat with Swoon about music at her Topanga Canyon digs, which she shares with husband and musical partner-in-crime Cole M. Grief-Neill. In a way, Nite Jewel’s living space perfectly matches her aural world: synths and sequencers from the past several decades piled into a rustic house in a woodsy community that will always have one foot in some Bohemian past. As we learned indeed, Nite Jewel’s music may rely on electronics, but it always comes from a sense of home. Swoon: I know this is an annoying interview question, but in your case I really want to know: what has influenced you? Ramona: I’m not annoyed.

Okay, then…It’s really because when I first heard you I was really amazed by the variety of contexts you bring, or maybe the lack thereof…On the one hand you have this association with the lo-fi scene; Cole plays with Ariel Pink, etc. but then all of a sudden you’re getting produced by Dậm-Funk; making stuff that I play at home when I go into sort of “quiet storm” soul tailspins… I mean, there’s not really a hint of R&B on Good Evening, unless I’m forgetting something, but the thing that strikes me is the funky direction of the new record doesn’t at all sound like pandering or posturing. It’s hard for me to really say what influences me since I’ve been listening to so many different kinds of music for such a long time…But going back to high school, I was totally into West Coast rap and began buying

www.swoonmagazine.com

Stone’s Throw records (Dậm-Funk’s current label); Madlib’s Madvillainy and Quasimodo, which is just Madlib… Madlib is an unqualified genius!

Totally! So anyway, I had been a fan of Dậm’s for a while and we share a lot of musical common ground. So when my friend Chris at Groove Merchant records in San Francisco was hanging out with Dậm, he pretty much pimped out my record, and after Dậm heard it we met up and completely vibed out…It was a purely musical connection: it’s not like Dậm would say, “Hmmm, let’s bring in a West Coast bass and mix it with some dub…” (Ramona breaks into a funny art-wank poser cartoon voice). We just had some deep overlap as far as our love of certain classics was concerned; it was totally natural. Okay! But then I peep my head out again and there you are performing Kraftwerk’s Computer World in its entirety at Hard Rock Café of all places! How the hell did that happen? (Laughs) That was all part of Hard Rock trying to be relevant or something…It started when this guy Gustavo Turner, a writer for L.A. Weekly, asked me to do a journalistic piece for Nite Jewel in lieu of a traditional ad. He realized, okay, if I was game to geek out like that, then I was game for anything, and he hooked up the gig. So there I was playing this thing that was…obscene to most people there …which they ended up liking; they were cheering at the end, over their fried chicken wings or whatever! A lot of people, especially the people I imagine at Hard Rock Café, don’t realize how much goes back to Kraftwerk… I mean, Kraftwerk is kind of undeniable in certain respects, especially an album like Computer World… When I was up there playing it—I mean,

I know when they [Kraftwerk] do it, it’s all programmed—but when I had to do these insanely interlocked syncopations, I was like “This is my shit!” It’s just a universal love of rhythms… Most people in L.A. see Nite Jewel as being sort of cross-over white music to funk and soul, and I see Kraftwerk like that. So your techno-pop roots run deep then? Not really, though! Really the music that goes the deepest for me comes from the stuff my parents were into—she’d kill me if she heard me call her this but my mom was a hippie… She was really into soul; she saw Otis Redding in concert and called Marvin Gaye “the High Priest,” but by the early 70s she was so anti-establishment that she just went all Eastern-Europe. So I grew up with a lot of gypsy music; going to these gypsy music camps. You’d spend a week in the forest in Mendocino with

a bunch of gypsies and weird people in cabins, learning these traditional Romany songs you wouldn’t hear any other way. I have a very natural relationship to a lot of world rhythms as a result of it. And what about your use of keyboards then—you play synths exclusively as far as I can tell… I played classical piano for twelve years, and that is going to have an effect on you. I ended up getting really attached to the Romantics and Impressionists because of this; Chopin, Debussy, Ravel…It sounds really like, whoa! highfalutin but it’s not. Where my hands go on the keyboard has a lot to do with them. If you’re a kid and play piano you’re going to develop a connection with certain composers; for me it was Chopin. Also Erik Satie—these little tiny changes that have a profound emotional effect, this deep sadness. Which goes back to my love of gypsy music,

cessible as possible?” You know what I mean? But if you choose not to pander to that stuff, you gotta have confidence. So then as far as experimentation goes, I really want to know about the sound of Good Evening, which I guess is the record that gets you dumped into the whole low-tech tent. The only things I’ve ever heard that sound quite like it are, I don’t even know if there’s a name for it…Like loungy awkward punk jazz and synth stuff from the early 80s, stuff that Factory would exile on their weird Benelux off-shoot. Oh, Antena maybe??? I was listening to Antena somewhere around when I made the record in fact…I mean I can’t say if it was exactly when…But yeah, a lot of obscure stuff from the 80s, and I mean like…1980. Bill Nelson, Verna Lindt, and so on. But the weird thing about those influences is that they were just one little keyboard line or one oscillator sound—little hints of genius that would change the sound of the record…But the way I would write songs just came back to the music I listened to as a kid. And what were you doing to make it sound like that—I mean you sit on all these sounds and you have these poppy songs dragged through the mud…It sounds like really bad compression… Oh it is! But it’s so obviously done that way! No it was not! the emotions anyway. I mean, even if it’s a “happy” song it still sounds sad or at least emotional on a core level…That comes from being oppressed. I think that’s one thing that I’ve always been drawn to, music by people that don’t have a voice any other way. And there is that aching element to your music, even on tracks that seem fluffy on the surface…So this is kind of a spin-off on Satie; I was going to ask if you had any run-in with minimalism, which can do kind of the same thing as far as building up emotion-wise. Minimalism to me is totally fascinating…I studied it in college as well as film music; I got really into Brian Eno and ambient music. It’s fascinating to me for the same reason I like the Detroit house stuff...because it’s not something I can really do! My initial goal with the new record on Secretly Canadian was to make a totally minimalist New Age sort of record… and it just didn’t happen, because I didn’t have the patience; I don’t get off on it. I think minimalism—the ability to repeat the same thing over and over again—is hard! You need some balls for that. So yeah, it’s just a matter of confidence. That’s funny, I don’t think I’ve ever heard minimalism pegged that way, a matter of confidence! I mean the old joke about minimalism and then techno too is, you know, if you play it for your mom, is “a kid could make that!” The same notes over and over and all. That’s it though; I do play my music to my mom! And with minimalism, a lot of people don’t even have the basics down so they try to cover it up with complex stuff and effects…It takes real confidence to just, you know, run a drum through a filter and, yeah, play the same phrase for ten minutes then say, “Yes, this is my music”… People nowadays making music start off asking (dork voice) “How can I make this chorus as ac-

www.swoonmagazine.com

Oh. So it just sounds cheap because it was…cheap. Yes. I am actually very technologically… what’s the opposite of savvy? Inept? Yes, inept… I think it’s because I put a block against technical stuff; I didn’t get a computer till I was 17 and I was born in ’84, so it was a choice…I was against technology in a lot of my ways because of my mom…She gave me the idea that devices and gadgets are escapist… Which they are! Cole on the other hand is amazing at all this stuff and keeps me grounded, which is why the newer material sounds different. Anyway, the way I recorded Good Evening was so bad that I think I made up some new shit…I didn’t use the instruments for what they were supposed to be used for… I wouldn’t tune things—everything on the record is out of tune…with each other. It wasn’t like “Whoa, I’m going to detune this” (the voice again) but more like “Oh, you’re supposed to tune this?” And that’s after the record’s been out for a year! But as we’ve said, the new stuff sounds so much more “studio,” in a good way, polished but not anemically so… Oh sure, you know, I’m finally learning how to use this stuff, because Cole’s dad was a technician so Cole breathes this stuff. I really stand behind what we’re doing now. But my mode of operation in the early days, for the most part, it was just idiocy. Nite Jewel’s new album One Second of Love is out now on Secretly Canadian nitejewel.com

Art by Christelle Gualdi

go. She’s got some deep knowledge of electronica, from 80s Disco to Acid House to European Techno, and she deejays around Holland and Belgium, getting people moving to her own style. At a recent East of Holland fashion party, she says, “I deejayed for 600 people, did my own thing for an hour and a half, whatever it was. It was mostly boring, typical club DJs. I tried different things; played “Strings of Life” by Derrick May, and people went crazy. I did a bit of acid and they were such an easy crowd. You’re building everything you mix for that one moment; you want it to last forever”. It’s that playfulness and love of minimal house that found its way onto her recent Clarity/Energy 7”, released by the Japanese label Big Love. It’s an excellent 7” that transports you to some dark club on an alternate planet, filled with smoke and beautiful people, all swaying and bobbing to the lasers and deep synth grooves.

Visionaire: STELLAR OM SOURCE

Christelle lives in Antwerp with her boyfriend, Eric, but in order to keep doing Stellar OM Source, she has started revamping her portfolio in order to return to architecture school in Paris. She says, “I would love to do music as a main thing, but reality is different. I already have a name for my architecture office: ‘Visionaire’. It would be 3-D and architecture

by Ramona Gonzalez

I was going through a New Age trip. During my European tour, my iPod was full of 80s California-based ambient synthesizer music that could relax me even in the most achingly uncomfortable airport situations. Upon my return, a Danish friend emailed me a track that fit perfectly into that canon of hypnotizing music that I had been obsessing over. It was “Xlandia” by Stellar OM Source from Heartlands Suite (2009). Upon first listen, I was instantly struck by loud, dissonant chords looped in stuttered rotation channeled in through an ominous piano patch. The darkness and mystery were pervasive, yet, after this had only briefly sunken in, the piece flew away into an extremely bold and ferocious three minute poly-synth improvisation. Other tracks on the record featured Iasosesque analog soundscapes glittering with hi-pass-filtered synth sparkles, huge Tangerine Dream type square wave pads with Eno style chord progressions. The whole album felt like New Age on steroids. After listening, I Internet-stalked Stellar OM Source (a.k.a Christelle), eyeing her impressive 3-D visual art compositions on her website that served as album covers. I finally got the sense that the wonderful Heartlands Suite wasn’t a happy accident, but rather a product of a process that had been built over many albums and much technical expertise.

Photo by Suzy Poling

Christelle has owned and used almost twenty different kinds of synthesizers, starting with her Roland Juno 6 inherited from her guitar player father who brought her up just outside of Paris. Still, she is not only an expert synth player, but has also studied violin, saxophone, and standing bass, which she pursued in a youth symphonic orchestra in Germany (she is proficient in five or so languages). Christelle’s knowledge of building patches on synths was also preceded by her pursuit of building as an architect in Rotterdam, an education which led to her founding of 3-D rendering companies in Holland and Paris.

and Eric would take care of the 3-D renderings and I’d do my own designs, but I’d like to do small scale. I used to look down at small scale designs in school, I wanted to do really big and international, but now I just want to design houses”. I asked her why: “I think it’s something more real. The idea of having a relationship with someone, your client, and say: how do you want to live the next ten to fifteen years? This is a really genuine relationship. With large scale, you are dealing with the site, the city council, etc. and you wonder, where is the artistic part? It’s all bureaucracy. I love space, it’s just in me. And something so deep: a house where you’re going to be every day. It’s more about deep, meaningful connections.”

It is rare that someone so technically proficient can manage to create music so haunting and visceral without getting caught in the sway of the fiercely academic quadrant of the brain. Christelle’s love of dance music helps her to remember the importance of just letting your mind

When Christelle came to Los Angeles to perform as Stellar OM Source, she instantly struck up many close friendships with the people involved in cutting-edge music here on the East Side of town. Her instant appeal

www.swoonmagazine.com

is her openness and acceptance of people and her desire not to schmooze but to establish just such meaningful connections. Shortly after she’d arrived in L.A., the front room of my quaint apartment became “Christelle’s room” and we would stay up nights recording hushed electronic soundscapes on 8-track cassette. The musical connection was psychic and beautiful. During the day, she kind of lived in her electronics, frequently at her desk with heaphones on, synching her synths and improvising. She would sit there for hours and hours. We mourned her departure. Whatever Christelle sets her mind to becomes vast and full of passion. She leaves her multi-dimensional mark all over her music: meaningful yet playful, beautiful yet biting, lonely but full of light. From the first listen and now still, Stellar OM Source remains raw and uncompromising, yet still an impressive journey through the intricate anatomy of synthesis and sound.

Photo by Mathjis Labadie

photo by TK

Listen at soundcloud.com/omsource

Light Asylum’s Shannon Funchess and Bruno Coviello, Nitzer Ebb’s Douglas J. McCarthy (inset)

CO N V E R S AT I O N S I N M U S I C :

NITZER EBB & LIGHT ASYLUM

Photos by Eden Batki

What Swoon had originally intended as a traditional interview turned into a sprawling epic of a conversation between two generations of electronic trailblazers. And why should we be surprised? In one corner is Douglas J. McCarthy, founding member of Nitzer Ebb, who 25 years ago began fusing the merciless industrial angst of Einstürzende Neubauten or Foetus with driving rhythms so danceable that several of their singles are still evergreens at old-school Detroit techno parties. (Douglas actually spent several years living in Detroit, where “EBM,” or the electronic body music NE helped forge alongside acts like Front 242 and Revolting Cocks, reigned supreme in a slithery interzone of fetish-ball goths, politically pumped neo-punks, and the more austere ravers.) Their militaristic, rallying tribalism still leads some people to assume some kind of fascist youth-brigade flirtations, but nothing could be further from the truth. 16

www.swoonmagazine.com

Douglas continues to bring Nitzer Ebb to a new generation, and is currently recording a solo album. The Nitzer Ebb sound still resounds as a source of inspiration to groups like Light Asylum, whose Shannon Funchess makes up the second voice in the melee of mutual admiration that follows. Even in transcript, you can hear the recidivist teenage gaga-ness as she gets to talk shop with a member of her take-no-prisoners pantheon of influences, but make no mistake: Funchess and keyboard virtuoso Bruno Coviello are an unqualified force of nature in their own right. True enough, the heavy attack of Light Asylum’s beats resonate with 80s-ness, and Funchess’s vocals have invited comparisons to the stylish severity of Grace Jones and the disco-priestess caterwaul of Nina Hagen. Live, the duo open the space for something powerful to descend, as dark and out of time as a Lovecraftian menace, but as inviting as their name suggests. In our era of endless retro crop rotation and composting, Light Asylum manage to make something new and commanding. The hypnotic Dionysian thrall woven by Light Asylum needs to be experienced to be understood, and their growing popularity in the Unites States and Europe is testament to the ecstasy they inspire. Although the synthesizers they employ are indeed digital (run through analog pedals and utilizing a drum-pad played live by Funchess), every accent is struck by the musician; each punctuation of musical impulse is articulated live by the performer. Recently signed to Mexican Summer and just out of the studio with reputed record producer Chris Coady, Light Asylum has much in store for the evolution of both their expanding fan-base and creative scope.

about the US until the fall. It’s killer. It hurts. It’s a hard slog. We actually did two tours on the last album. On the first one, we did twenty-eight shows in thirty-two days…and it wasn’t a big RV. It was one of the scariest times of my life, but fun. Why was it so scary? Winter, winter in an RV…I mean, (touring the US) it’s possible but it’s a lot of fucking hard work. And it wouldn’t necessarily change your profile much. But it’s like you say…if it wasn’t for people coming to Buttfuck, Utah, then no one would know. You have to put yourself out there. It’s those kids who are like, “Fuck, man! I just never thought I’d see you in this town!” Yeah. We definitely did some touring across the US this past summer. We’ve been to Buttfuck…and Utah. Yeah, Buttfuck, lovely town. And I’m sure we’ll have to go back. It’s not like we’re above it or anything…it just seems like every artist does so much better if they go to Europe first and then lets Americans find out later. What was it like early on? Were you guys booking your own shows, or…?

Without further ado, here is an accidental manifesto of keeping it real, staying alive, and maybe most of all, fucking shit up. Intro by Shaun Frente, Micki Pellerano & Jeralyn Mason Shannon: So, you know, I’m going to have to tour the US…I’m glad I lived in small town America at some point. I’m so happy your music found me out there. I don’t know how it did, but it did. Because there was some guy with an awesome record store who gave a shit… Douglas: Where are you from?

Oh, yeah. When we first started I was doing the booking, and it took me quite a few shows to realize that there was a contract that you were supposed to sign. But our initial shows were so small that the money was negligible. Then when we started doing slightly bigger shows and I was still booking them. We went to Spain and we were just like, “Wow…well, you know, if they give us a round-trip ticket… worse case scenario, we’ve gone to Spain!” We weren’t thinking about getting paid. Then we got signed to Mute, and once we were signed, they insisted we have a booker and that everything was proper. they insisted we have a booker and that everything was proper.

Spokane, Washington. I was born in Japan, but my parents and I travelled around a lot. I lived in Italy… My father was in the military—the air force—but we eventually landed in Spokane in the late seventies. Growing up there was cool. We had live shows and music. It was punk as hell. There was a great scene and it was awesome. Going to shows, kicking each other’s teeth out, skating and all that dumb stuff that happened in the eighties—all the fun stuff. I love skateboarding. Yeah. So, we’ll definitely have to do a tour for the kids. And then I just want to be in Europe for the rest of the year and not have to think

Did you feel like you were losing any power? I mean, being Nitzer Ebb and so DIY and anti-establishment…how did you feel about signing to a major label like that?

Aaaawww! Are you crazy? I would’ve seen you in ’87 or ’88!

Well, we barely did…we turned down some big deals before that. BMI tried to sign us, and we went into the meeting, just because we thought it’d be funny and it was like—

You didn’t do it in the US, did you?

Like, get a life! Yeah, exactly. Then when we signed to Geffen it got just insane. People were just like, “Oh, well if you’re gonna try and sign ‘em…we’ll try and sign ‘em now!” And it was like, what the fuck are you talking about? But when we signed to Mute and to Geffen, the main thing they talked about was artistic control.

We eventually did it, and it was fucking great.

Well, no, we were supposed to tour with them in whenever it was—’87, ’88—because we relented and said we’d do it—and this is the irony of all ironies—US Immigration wouldn’t allow us in the country because they said we lacked musical merit. Are you serious? Yeah, yeah. Sieg Heil! Dude!

And the first thing they wanted to talk about—knowing your aesthetic— was artistic control? Did they make you feel comfortable, or were they like “you don’t have it anymore”? It was important that we had complete artistic control. For them, the product they wanted was the product they saw. And if we didn’t sign to them and lost that, we’d be screwed. But then, having said that, we definitely had arguments. There was a lot of table thumping and walking out. We’d released “Join In the Chant” by ourselves and it had become a big hit in the clubs…so the first album we had with Mute was Control. We had signed to Mute after the first album and worked on the second one in their studios and it was fairly tense. Daniel Miller would come up and Brian and I’d be working in the studio and not realize that he’d come up into the room. He’d just be standing there in the doorway, looking at us. And we’d look up after a while and he’d just go “Bastards!” You’re kidding! That’s amazing! He waited for you to look up! Are you serious? Yeah. And then we released Control and Daniel insisted that it have “Join In the Chant” as an additional track because it was a massive hit in the clubs…this was like two years after it had been released and, so, it became this really big argument. Finally we said, “Okay, we’ll let you put this thing that actually opened our career on this new thing that is going to help our career in the future as long as we don’t say, on the cover, that it exists on it.” So it’s just a (surprise) bonus track. And he agreed to it. Then, when we saw the actual 12”, it had a sticker saying “Including ‘Join In the Chant’”, so we were just, like, what the fuck is this? And he went crazy, pretty mental and said—just before he stormed out of the office--”So what if we want to sell some fucking records!” Before he stormed out of his own office. That’s awesome. Yeah. It’s tricky, being with labels, it’s never easy. Mute’s a great label and it still was difficult. You know, our first thing when we signed to Mute was that they asked us to tour with Depeche Mode and we were like, “Nope, not going to do that. It’s too…it’s selling out.”

www.swoonmagazine.com

Yeah…it was crazy times. Back then it was really hard to get Europeans—even Brits—to come play in the States. We did come here in ’88 or ’89, but we’d first toured by ourselves. We did a headline tour, then we toured in ’90 on Violator… I would have seen you! I would have seen you! Like, in ’87, in Denver— when I was living in Colorado Springs—I drove like a hundred miles to see Depeche Mode. I was fifteen or sixteen. Yeah, you would have seen us, for sure. Aaaargh! That was my first arena show and it changed my life. If I’d seen you guys together…aw, forget about it! Aw, the world woulda been… We were a bunch of stuck-up little fucks when we started a band. We just hated everyone and it seemed that nobody knew as much as we did about everything…pricks! And now you have these great stories to tell… So, who did you feel your peers were? Who were you playing shows with, whether it was a tiny pub somewhere or a nightclub in Spain? Who were you throwing down with in the eighties? Really, it was very isolated at the time. There were certain bands that we’d have a very difficult relationship with. Like, there was always resentfulness. Was there a sense of camaraderie? On tour there was. There was this Swiss band called the Young Gods— amazing. We’d have a fucking great time playing shows. I did the lights for them, we toured together…We did some shows with Siouxsie and the Banshees in the early nineties. Siouxsie was bad, man. We used to stay up all fucking night with her and Steve (Severin). It was a lot of bad behavior. Ministry, you know, not so much, very difficult— Really?

there’s the Banshees, just standing there! And I was just like, “Can you sign this, please?” Oh, my god!

Oh, yeah, very— Just, like, ego? Oh, yeah, ego. Jourgensen, when we first met him, in Chicago, he was just standing there brooding, I mean, he’s only about, yeah…he’s smaller than you. And he was just standing, and he was like, “I’ll fucking hit you!” And walked away.

It was the first time I’d ever met anyone that I adored, so it was strange. But we never really played with that many bands…just, like, Big Black— Awesome! Crazy! So, (Steve) Albini was he insane? Yeah, Albini, you know, he’s an insane dwarf…

Are you serious? For nothing!

Oooh, that would have been an awesome show! So how was that?

Yeah. Because our first album was the one he wanted to make.

It was great. Head of David opened, then it was Nitzer Ebb and then Big Black.

Yeah, Jourgensen totally hates early Ministry, which I love. To death.Did you play with Siouxsie after you were signed to Mute? No, Siouxie was a little bit down the line. I mean, I’d seen Siouxie…I actually met Siouxie and Budgie and Steve on the Juju tour. I’d gone with my high school friend and we were waiting after the show. And the only thing I could afford to buy was a tour program. So, I had this tour program under my sleeve and we were waiting for my friend’s mum to pick us up. We were round the back of the theater, where the parking lot was, and this dude came out was like, “Alright then, you can come in.” And we were just like, “Huh?” So we walked in and just had no idea what was going on. I mean, I was fifteen years old, so I went in and

Wow! Was that in the US or in Europe? That was in London. Quite a lot of violence going on, not necessarily in a nasty way. But you’d be going to the gig, leaving the gig…there were a lot of opportunities to get beaten up. What you were doing? Well, they thought of everyone who didn’t look like them as being gay, so… Especially if you had that kind of hair or make-up, or you were wearing funny clothes of any description. So, did you fight a lot? Having to grow up playing this sort of music? Yes! Totally. There’s footage of us, actually, at a gig, fighting with the audience. It was very shit kicking stuff. There was definitely an attitude of “Why don’t you want to accept what this society can give you? Why don’t you want to be involved in any of it?” And, you know, “Why do you look like you live in a fucking gutter?” It was an affront to people that you didn’t want to look like you could get a job. Did skinheads like or dislike you? I mean, with all of your militaristic stuff, were they down with you, or were they not because you weren’t all about English nationalism?

I loved two-tone, I loved ska…loved it.

whatever, and that was just twenty cents a week. You could have that each and every night. You could read a newspaper that told you about all new music and then listen to a radio station that had the real music being played. Outside there were riots going on…it was a very rightwing government and it just seemed like the best kind of environment to start forming bands in. The juices were flowing.

I still wear a flight jacket, bro.

Right. Did it feel like the end of the world or something? Or no?

We grew up listening to a combination of fifties rock-n-roll and glam rock—which, at the beginning, there was a kind of cross-over between glam rock and the skinhead movement…there was a weird kind of visual transgression between the two, and musically as well. The seventies were really a mixed up time to grow up in England—musically. I used to come home from school in what would have been, I guess, the mid-seventies, and Marc Bolan had a kids’ show on TV called Marc, and there’d be David Bowie on it and stuff. And so we’d come home from school, and you’d be sitting there with some of those beans on toast or one of those British snackettes and watching fucking Bowie on television. And just eating your crisps. It’s such a small country and things happen very quickly. So, whereas in the States, things can happen bi-coastally or on just one coast and then drift across…in the UK, it happens really, really quickly. I knew about it because at that time, growing up—there were two very key elements in informing people. One, the main element, was the John Peel nightly radio show, and this guy was the first person who played Nitzer Ebb , the first person to play virtually every band I know. Siousxie and the Banshees, the Fall; John Peel’s music went from ska to rock-n-roll, to punk and post-punk, and a lot of electronic music. I’d tape the show so I had a massive collection of songs. And then the other thing, even though it’s been chastised a lot, and they’re an ass, was the British music press. They were very strong, specifically the NME. And there were Anton Corbijn pictures—he was a star photographer—so you could cut out Anton Corbijn pictures of Joy Division, David Bowie,

Yeah, definitely…we grew up with this whole idea that the Russians were going to bomb us.

The skinhead/punk movement kind of diverged in the UK. In a way, it almost started off on the west coast (of England). Rude boys, two-tone…

www.swoonmagazine.com

And there was always someone’s finger hanging out. Like Reagan’s finger… or Bush’s finger, like “Ohhh, I’m gonna push it, I’m gonna push it!” The whole time. Ronald Reagan scared the shit out of everyone…even people that were right-wing in Europe were scared because he was just obviously out of his mind. Anyway, I think that there’s a lot of positive things—this sounds awful—that come out of the world being in disarray. I think that it makes people question and it certainly makes artists create in a better way. You know…nothing like being happy to stop your juices. Okay. Last thing—what do you think the secret was to making a record that people would want to listen to for over twenty years now running? Making it the way you want to make it, trying to use the best methods of recording it, and keeping it as simple as possible. Word. lightasylum.com douglasjmccarthy.com

Photo by

THEE PICTUREPLANE

THE FANTASTICAL AND VERY REAL LIFE OF PICTUREPLANE’S

TRAVIS EGEDY By Lindsay Aveilhe

Interview by Josh Kolenik

THEE PHYSICAL MANIFESTO A conceptual breakdown/linguistic re-work of thee new mind theorems, concepts, and fashions utilized in the creation of Thee Physical The big personality and bigger music of Travis Egedy’s techno musical project Pictureplane is the stuff that inspires legends. Case in point: my first introduction to the fantastical personality of Travis Egedy was through an endearing comic book-style tale conveyed to me by his former tour mates Small Black. The tale is of the techno superhero Pictureplane whose powers include, among other things, spreading positive vibes, shooting glitter from his fingerless, leather gloved hand and easing his fans into a blissed-out state of trance in which it is “okay to touch each other.” In this story, Pictureplane flies to and from his secret Denver headquarter – Rhinoceropolis - where plans are devised to fight the angry advances of the neighboring Juggalos and where music is created to penetrate the mind, one beat at time, with thoughts of post-physicality and interconnectedness. The truth is Rhinoceropolis, or Rhino as they like to call it, is a thriving DIY art gallery and music venue at the center of Denver’s creative scene, and even if Travis Egedy can’t put on a cape and fly, he is a prolific musician sought after in places as far off as Moscow. In addition to Travis’ musical output, he is also an artist and, if I may, a cultural producer - as seen by the growing numbers of excited partygoers at his Denver club night, “Real is a Feeling”. Those who follow the output of Travis Egedy can confirm his claim that Pictureplane is a lifestyle. What is this lifestyle exactly? Peruse his blog

Plain Pictures (www.plainpictures.blogspot.com), read his manifesto Thee Physical, or take a look at his digital prints (www.nvrmnd.bigcartel.com/ category/designs-by-Pictureplane) and you will get an idea. The Pictureplane lifestyle embodies a hard-to-look-away-from mélange of punk, techno(logy), and sexuality; infused with uninhibited self-disclosure and a true fascination with all things subcultural. Produced and recorded by Egedy and mixed/ co-produced by Jupiter Keyes of HEALTH, Thee Physical is a thematic album rich in both sound and sentimentality through its homage to dance genres of the past. Whether you call it nü-rave or synthwave, Thee Physical is pure good times on the dance floor. Every song, including the standouts “Trancegender” and “Techno Fetish”, elaborates lyrically on ideas outlined in the Thee Physicalmanifesto: the need for touch in a digital world and the contradictions of connectedness inherent in our technology-obsessed culture. Don’t mistake the Pictureplane manifesto as an outline for utopia. It is an exploration of where we are heading technologically and culturally and a playful exercise in how to deal with it. It may not work for you, but it seems to be working for the throngs who have embraced the music and cult of personality of Travis Egedy. Former tour mate Josh Kolenik of Small Black sat down with Travis to discuss their tour together in Fall 2010, Travis’ new album Thee Physical, Juggalos, and our techno-obsessive culture:

Josh : You just put out a new record, Thee Physical. What have you been doing with yourself since the release? Travis: That just came out in July and it feels brand new to me. I just got home from a tour with Teengirl Fantasy and Gatekeeper, which went really well. People seem to really enjoy the record. It’s a positive experience for everyone. (Noise in the background) My roommate is just screaming in the background. J: Where are you living now? T: Right next door to Rhinoceropolis. I’m at Rhino right now, but I live in the fancy warehouse next door now called GLOB. J: So from Rhino to GLOB? T: Yes J: I’ve been to Rhinoceropolis once. We missed our first show their because our van exploded in California. T: You had to cancel! Josh : How long did you live there? T : I lived there for 5 years. I’m still there all the time. I just don’t sleep there. I live next door. It’s a beautiful place in the sense that’s uninhibited. It’s an experimental living situation, so anything is possible really… It’s a space where people live; it’s also an art gallery and a music venue. We have a nice PA here and we throw shows all the time. There’s a lot of history covering the walls here. J : So RiNo is the name of the arts district in Denver?

“People don’t think about it really, but hip hop really is electronic music.”

T: It is! But that’s purely coincidental. We already had the name Rhinoceropolis. And then the neighborhood was given the name RiNo, which stands for River North. But Rhinoceropolis was first! It’s weird. They’re not related. J: When we played there, we had a crazy runin with Juggalos. Does this happen all the time in Denver? [Juggalos are cultish followers of the horrific band ICP] T: We have some Juggalo neighbors that come around sometimes. They kinda stopped coming in. We had to kick them out. They tried to steal someone’s laptop once. They tried to stick it down their pants right in front of us. We were like: “Dude, what are you doing? Give that back, it’s not yours.” That night, with you guys [Small Black] at the bar right next to Rhino... that those Juggalo kids frequent. They’re very antagonistic to anyone that’s not a Juggalo. It’s status quo for them. Juggalos vs. the world, basically. If you’re not part of their scene, part of their clique, its total war for them. J: Didn’t one Juggalo offer you $200 to fight him and 11 other Juggalos who may or may not have been real? Travis: I was sitting by myself in our backyard, behind this chain link fence that separates us in the alleyway and these Juggalos come up being weirdly friendly at first, but also passive aggressive. They were offering me money to fight them. I told them, “I can’t really do that, man.” They started spitting on me, yelling “Come on pussy. $200!” A whole mob of them cracked out. They tried to climb over the barbed wire fence. J: Do you consider Juggalos to be the villains to Pictureplane and Rhinoceropolis? T: They shouldn’t be. It’s a subculture. They’re just really angry. And I’m not an angry person. So yeah, we don’t get along very well. They take one look at me and they don’t like me. So maybe they are the villains. J : What is the one thing about you that drives them crazy? T: If you wear tighter pants. They cannot get down with the tight pants. J: If you were going to sneak into Gathering of

www.swoonmagazine.com

the Juggalos, what would you wear to attempt to not get beaten up? T: I actually bought a Triple-XL Riddlebox Juggalo Hockey Jersey at a thrift store I’ve been wearing. Those things are like $100, I got it for a few bucks. Its so huge! It says Riddlebox on the back with a #3. It’s got the evil clown face on the front. If I wore that and some baggy pants, I could fit right in. It’s a uniform for sure, like any kind of subculture.

they were handed out at the opening on CDRs with the titles sharpied on, to make a joke about an already archaic media model. J : When I went to the opening, the really wonderful things were the environments where you watched the videos. Within these rooms, I felt immersed in this Home Depot/IKEA mass consumption furniture setting. Do you think your environment in Denver starts to seep into your music?

J: Let’s talk about Denver. How long have you been there? And what is the music/art scene like?

T: Pictureplane is a lifestyle. My life is my artwork. There’s a lot of bleeding over from my life to Pictureplane. They’re interconnected.

T: I’m pretty tapped into the community because I went to a small arts school here for painting. I studied fine art for years. A lot of the art scene in Denver is people who’ve come out of that school. It’s pretty underground, like in any city. Denver’s small, there’s not a lot of money for the arts. So it’s pretty experimental, because it’s not about selling work in galleries. It’s more about creating and having fun.

J : The new record, Thee Physical, is a real step up from the first, Dark Rift, production wise. The songwriting is killer. When you first got into it, did you set any parameters or rules that you wanted to get away from Dark Rift?

J: Do you think that informs the music as well? T: That’s the exact function of a place like Rhinoceropolis. There’s a crossover of art and music. It’s not a music venue, like a bar, where they just have a show every night. Here, art and music really blend together like in any other DIY space. J : Ryan Trecartin. You just did a remix of some of the music for his show at PS1. How did that happen? T : I have been a huge fan of his since art school. Discovering his work was mindblowing. He really nails something on the head about what it’s like to live in our hyper-culture right now, where everything is so fast and thrown at you from every direction all the time. Media saturation. Information overload. Ryan Trecartin was addressing this years ago, right around Web 2.0. No one was talking about that stuff at that time. I realized we have mutual friends in NY. I’d never met him, but I was asked to remix an audio file of his voice as an auto-tuned vocal sample. It’s not even like a remix, it was just like “Do whatever you want to this”. So I made a beat, chopped it up, put it on top of it. It was a big honor for me. I went to NY for the opening, got to meet him. Gatekeeper and Blissed Out did remixes and

T: No, all I had when I started doing it was this loose concept in my head. Before I started working on the songs, I was calling it my Dark Sex album. Which was the theme through the whole record, but I wasn’t trying too hard. The process of making a song is really organic. I don’t think about it too much, I just do it. J: Did you feel like there was a different approach because people beyond your local community had expectations for what the record might be before they heard it? T: That stuff will make you crazy. I was trying not to think about it. J: It feels like the moment you let that thought go is when you start to making your best stuff again. Things you’re pumped on. J: You mixed the record with Jupiter from Health? T: It was sick. I finished the album basically. It was sort of an experiment. We went to L.A. to see what would happen if we tried to mix and master the album in a different way from Dark Rift. Each song was dissected, all the different parts. And then Jupiter, in a different program I don’t use, really bumped up everything. We tried to make it more clean, polished and club-ready. The last record was so dirty. We wanted to keep that, but make it a little more nice. Re-recorded all the vocals with a nice mic. Couldn’t have done it without Jupiter.

That’s why the record is a lot better that Dark Rift. It just sounds better. J: You also worked with Zola Jesus on the song “Trancegender”. How did that happen? T: I hung out with her a year ago for a day in New York; walking around and talking. I’ve always liked her music a lot and thought it would be cool if she sung on a track. It had been a long time coming. There were a lot of samples I had used on the record I couldn’t get licensed. So we changed the melody and lyrics around and she sang the hook that was originally a sample. J: I think Small Black probably heard that song more times than anyone else in the world with that sample. It was exciting to hear that new voice replace the sample and make something new out of it. T: It almost didn’t happen. She was really busy working on her own album. I didn’t even record it with her. She just did it herself and sent over the file. It was a very modern way to do it. Just over email. Yasmine Kittles from Tearist, an LA band, is on the record too. She sings on “Body Mod”. She was in Denver and she sang over the song in my room. And I chopped up her voice and made samples that I placed over the song. J: What’s your favorite song on the record? T: I really like “Sex Mechanism”. It’s a crazy song. The breakdown is wild. Its probably one of the more experimental tracks I’ve made. I’m not even playing it live. Just a deep album cut. There are definitely songs we’ve done also that we haven’t even considered playing live. It takes so much to get an electronic song ready for live and if you don’t think it’s the right tempo/vibe for a live show, maybe it’s just best to stay on a record. J: “Post Physical”. That’s my jam on the record. T: Live it’s really soaring and emotional. I knew people were gonna like it. J: It’s a slow tempo, 80-90 BPM. As someone who makes dance music, does tempo enter into the equation from the beginning of your songwriting process? T: Yeah, totally. Tempos are interesting. That’s

why there’s whole different styles/scenes of dance music literally just based on the tempo. Whole different cultures based on the tempo. It affects your whole body, your heartbeat. I love hip-hop tempo, around 80-90 bpm. But you can also dance to that. There’s a lot of songs that are a little bit slower on Thee Physical.

T: I was always into it. Even before Myspace, I was sharing my music out there for free download. There was this old site called Soundclick. You could put a profile and songs. I was up there in 2003. It’s really important for electronic artists. It’s made digitally, so it makes sense that is should be distributed the same way.

J: How did you get into making dance music from being originally into rap? I feel like we went the same way as a band. As a kid, I was definitely into hip hop first.

J: There’s no loss of quality over the internet. With that being the reality of current music consumption, it seems like music itself is going away from the organic and embracing technology. With there be a move the opposite way like there was against late 90s techno?

T: People don’t think about really, but hip hop really is electronic music. I was really into down-tempo stuff in high school like DJ Shadow, DJ Krush. Trip Hop producers. But what got me into dance music was dance rock stuff in 2004 like The Rapture, Liars and The Faint. It was influential in me upping the tempo. J: Techno Fetish. Let’s talk about it. T: I loved that term. The words together like that. It’s a fetish of technology or techno music. A techno-obsessive culture. While making the record, I was reading a lot of essays about the future of sex and technology. Ten years ago, dildos and vibrators were really just happening. And there’s been a real progression of that. In the future, real dolls, sex bots, fucking machines might happen. The sexualizing of technology.

T: If you’re still hung up on this whole analog vs. digital debate, I think you’re behind the times. J: It’s over T: It’s obnoxious. Debating film vs. digital cameras; it’s like “Come on, they’re both cool.” It’s hard to tell any sort of difference. In music, you can be jazz; freeform with electronics. J: I think even more so. You can do the impossible. What’s impossible for our fingers and brains. The computer becomes this crazy extension of our powers as musicians and writers. T: And that’s very organic to me.

J: As we go forward, that’s going to be a bigger part of consumer culture. T: As we go deeper into the internet, people are getting more and more connected, and individuals are getting more separate from each other. There will be a lot more satisfying your sexual needs through digital components. It’s very sci-fi, but it’s really real. J: In fifty years, do you think people will barely be having sex? T: Raw human sexuality will never go away. We’re human beings. I really like technology. It’s organic. It’s a reflection of our consciousness. As tech progresses, we advance alongside it; it’s a mirror of our own psyche. So yeah, if we’re having sex with robots, I think that’s totally fine. J: How has technology affected getting your music out there?

Thee Physical is out on Lovepump United and is streaming freely on the standalone site theephysical.com Tour of Rhino: http://blogs.westword. com/backbeat/2011/07/pictureplanes_travis_egedy_gives_a_guided_tour_of_rhinoceropolis.php Thee Physical Track List: 01. Body Mod 02. Black Nails 03. Sex Mechanism 04. Touching Transform 05. Post Physical 06. Techno Fetish 07. Real is a Feeling 08. Trancegender 09. Negative Slave 10. Breath Work 11. Thee Power Hand

Sweat Your Prayers: the DEMF’s (literally) Underground Stage.

The Perfect Disaster

Confessions of a Plastic Soul Junkie

An Extremely Oblique Personal History of Two Decades of Detroit Techno by Shaun Frente

Prologue: The Perfect Disaster

t’s never supposed to happen. And it’s always my last year. Together, these two sentences have grown to be something like a joke-mantra, really. My first year, the Detroit Electronic Music Festival’s first year, was to be a road-trip pilgrimage back home from Iowa City, only everyone, including the person with a car, bailed at the last second. Then there were those next four hand-to-mouth years in New York when it really didn’t happen, when I really thought that was that. During my triumphant 2005 comeback to the festival, I managed to break my nose in six places in an attempt to heal my dancedrained body through yoga, atop a stool at a Downriver karaoke bar.

www.swoonmagazine.com

(Downward, dawg!) Man, that one was really the last year. A few years later, in 2010, my disco-sister-for-life Katherine got the news she’d be starting her first grown-up job the day after our annual three days of jacking (roughly translated as “dancing”, non-tech people) and made the very grown-up decision to cancel, already-purchased, non-refundable plane ticket not withstanding. By that time, I had already been in the Detroit suburbs with my family for days, and for all of an hour, that was the last time once again. Come on, I’d been too old for this nonsense for the last decade, I had no car, no place to crash, and most important, no one to go with. But for me, you see, there was only one responsible thing to do: dig up my musty old punk-stenciled army backpack from my parents’ basement, pack up what little I had, what little I needed, and,

McKay otos: Kelly

In a way then, DEMF 2011—its twelfth; my eighth—was a big step backwards into legitimacy. I was going with my wife; I had press credentials…and on that glittery VIP bracelet hung something like a cover story for non-techno muggles and other respectable types. The fest itself and electronic music in general have, in that politicians-and-whores way, become legit enough that The New York Times and its ilk run tech-spreads with greater frequency. But the clincher was that I was scheduled for interviews with most of the DJ’s I’d requested, from favorite new sound-sculptor Margaret Dygas to old friendof-the-extended family, gospel-disco-house mainstay Terrence Parker. Daedelus, an L.A. dandy of laptop legerdemain whose disregard for genre is equaled only by a regard for old -school etiquette, agrees to see us on the fly. And ye gods, I have five minutes of Q&A with Carl Craig, the original director of the festival, whose place in the D-town pantheon cannot be underestimated. Perhaps more than any other single figure Mr. Craig encapsulates the past and present, the underground to the mainstream. He cuts up Ravel and Mussorgsky with German knob-twiddlers; he does (good!) remixes for Tori Amos; he wins Grammys. To me, he IS Detroit techno. Carl Craig

I want to make things perfectly clear: I am not really a masochist, and if everything is willing to go my way, at this point in my life I am happy to let it. Yet when things started to fall apart, it started to feel like home…and why not? It is home. So bring it on, I said to myself. And on it was brought. Our second photographer, whose blogsite hooked us up with passes can’t get in herself. Margaret Dygas, the person, ends up as mysterious as her music: first she recedes into a rabbit-hole of phone tag, only to reappear on the main stage as a tornado is headed right for us, in one of the few stretches of Detroit that doesn’t appear to have already been ravaged by an act of god. Daedelus’s portmanteau of trademark photoDerrick May op Victorian velvet and ruffles is lost in baggage limbo. And Carl Craig has a cold…

“The music is like Detroit...a complete mistake. It’s like George Clinton and Kraftwerk are stuck in an elevator with only a sequencer to keep them company.” – Derrick May Even before I started writing this piece, I swore this quote would remain an implication; a footnote at best. To anyone who knows anything about Detroit techno, you’re sick of hearing it, the shit goes without saying. Well, doesn’t it? It’s in Wikipedia; it’s in the documentaries; it’s the opening of the last history of Detroit techno I read last year, for god’s sake, in the very excellent Wax Poetics. A single line from a review of Lady Gaga’s The Fame, of all things, prodded me to include it: “Everybody was thirsty for music like this.” Look, I’m not naïve, but everybody? There is not a single person I know well who can hold down even a sip of Miss Gaga, and even the few people I know who are even brushed by Top 40 fare—my dad, say (“You see Maroon 5 on Letterman?”)—are apathetic at best. And herein lies the Photo by Bart Everly, barteverly.com

at 36, without a clue where I’d be sleeping the next two nights, get dropped off from my mom’s minivan in support of a culture most Americans wish would go away. You see, the mantra has a punchline, and that had yet to be intoned: this was the best year ever.

Top row ph

Joe Louis Memorial

dilemma of writing about pop music today: your audience is somewhere between anybody and everybody, if you’re lucky. Techno, especially Detroit techno, is a particularly weird thing to write about to a black box audience. It can be absolutely mainstream, yet for a lot of the general public it might as well be Gertrude Stein. Even worse, bad techno, which I think may be what people are most unwillingly exposed to, is the worst music in the world. Your meat and potatoes American thinks techno — that is, if the word registers at all — is what you hear when Keanu Reeves is driving in a fast car, or when that credible yet pneumatic brunette with the razor-shag and laugh-lines is sauntering though the gossamer of dissolving APRs and fine print for a car that, when performing its duties in the suburban streets, will at the very least look like it could go very fast if you wanted it to. (To be fair, that is techno. The terrible part of it.)

Swoon: “From my interactions with young people, I get the sense that being able to hear everything leads to kids not knowing about anything—it cancels itself out.” Daedelus: “Maybe, but at the same time the internet is getting rid of the middle-men; the tastemakers. Nobody buys anything, but they’ll listen to anything for thirty seconds. Of course this lends itself to electronic music, because you have this history of digging deep and finding weird sounds; it’s part of the tradition.” On the other hand, for those who might actually know what I’m talking about, I don’t want to simply retread the myths and 101

Photo by Kelly McKay

Daedelus material, though of course this is partially inevitable. To split the difference, I’ve taken a course that might seem like lazy journalism, but one that I think is apt for the territory. Given that it’s because of the internet that we’re paralyzed with information, why not figure the web into the equation? (Come on, this can’t be any worse that T.S. Eliot adding his own damn footnotes to The Wasteland.) So if you cannot rattle off thirty DJs off the top of your head, you might need to look a few things up.

For similar reasons, this isn’t a primer on the sound of techno per se — please take it in good faith when I say that you are better off simply listening to all of this sublimity of endless grey sparky clanking, the purity of the death-loop of a broken fax machine bleating out a doomed autodial, the beauty of the assembly line. That kind of thing. And moreover, I ain’t no musician, so largely I leave it to those creatures to elsewhere make sense of this weird universe. So perhaps even before proceeding, I entreat you to get lost in the following galaxy of music: swoonmagazine. com/detroittechno May’s epigram is so perfect not just because of the musical part of the equation (and I’ve always thought the George Clinton bit was a little off), but because of the “complete mistake” factor. May isn’t celebrating that much of a city that was once the American workingclass dream now looks like Warsaw 1945, due to a mass exodus spurred by a governmentbacked incentive to sell new homes in the suburbs and the alleged “white flight” in the wake of the infamous 1967 Detroit riot. (Since white families were fleeing the city in the 50s,

this is really just another way to blame everything on those “troublemaking colored folks”). And let’s not forget the cars… I would not think that May is happy to see General Motors’ dubious elevation as the avatar of a blind economic system, or the incalculable collateral damage rippled out by the Big Three’s local hegemony, then collapse. What May and the rest of the cult of Detroit mean is that in spite of, and a little because of everything being fucked to hell, Detroit is a beautiful enigma, a perfect disaster. The mythos of Detroit techno in large part depends on this Beyond Thunderdome entropic pulse of machines pumping onward as their human counterparts run down. Though it’s still a humanist post-humanism, it’s the thrall of a pulsing spirit that lives on beyond the organism. When you’re standing at the DEMF in the New Center of Detroit—a botox injection on a corpse, a propped up Potemkin village for tourist inspection in a bomb-crater of urban flight—listening to the most life-affirming music in the world, a music that “never should have happened” in a failed metropolis that never quite did, history is not lost on you. It’s both the hope and the failure of industry that vibrates through your bones. It’s why the joy is so deep: it’s not about escapism. The permanent home of the DEMF is Hart Plaza, a post-apocalyptic skate parklooking affair usually reserved for Doobie Brothers family picnic-concerts, transected by the People Mover—perhaps the densest manifestation of the D’s Operation Endless Snafu, and a clear case of pre-satirized reality. Throughout most of the New Center, you

will be able to see the white-trestled, cornily “Space Age”-looking monorail that is the People Mover snake by twice, which tells you how useless its perpetual little circle really is. For Detroiters (the ones who even give it any thought, anyway), the People Mover is a grossly expensive insult to irreparable injury, a quarter-assed symbol of futurism fobbed off on a city robbed of its future. For while car companies made Detroit possible, they also made it impossible; they helped make it a cadaver of a great urban machine denied a skeleton by its blind idiot god, a monstrous political machine by default. Or perhaps even by the machine of Capital itself. Because public transportation would compete with the auto industry, it never evolved beyond the bare bones of a bus system, and this is a large reason why many think Detroit never took on the urban hardiness of a city like Chicago or New York. By the 1980s, even a NYCstyle subway system would not be enough to infuse a new central nervous system, but that didn’t stop Mayor Coleman A. Young from unveiling his two-car Disney ride whose whole loop you could walk in an hour anyway. It’s like the city had been scrimping and saving to buy modernity for forty years, only to end up paying for the now retro-kitsch time capsule chosen with the down payment, the future of the past. The golden spike of insult, as it were, was then hammered in soon after its launch: the People Mover was revealed to have been built from South African materials (when that country was still under Apartheid), which didn’t go too well in the D. White steel and an hour of chaos: this already overbudgeted disaster had to be re-railed entirely with less offensive material, if not certified black metal, or Coleman was going to be given Dutch hell. When the People Mover is the official, straight-faced Plan A for urban renewal, you can imagine why even the stodgiest city council member would endorse even throngs of crazy ravers if they bring revenue, as well as a visible pulse, to Detroit. The People Mover

28 28 www.swoonmagazine.com www.swoonmagazine.com

single rave. So much for the cultural politics of “you had to be there.” But the strange reality is that I was there, and I knew it. For a suburban New Wave kid, the idea of techno wasn’t scary or unnatural, because at that age you embrace the alien and the alienating. But contrarianism aside, a lot of what people called Bryan Mitchell “techno” back in the day had a Carl Craig (as 69), DEMF Main Stage 2011 pretty punky pedigree at that: years before they were VH1 “Totally 80s” poster children, the Human ne of the rituals of going to the DEMF League were dumping blood on each other in grimy art-school lofts, and arguably the most entails spelunking in my parents’ definitive techno pop qua rock four-piece, basement the day before I leave, New Order, were as Joy Division all but a posifting through the relics of childhood faced oi! band for a few hours in the famed as the bass from the night before is still ebbing U.K. summer of punk. And so on. Then there from my eardrums. Like many suburbanites, was the fact that in those days before every my parents never throw anything away, and the subculture had exploded into eye-blearing resulting mise-en-scene (and pathos) is a bit like the scenes off Xanadu in Citizen Kane. Now that capillaries of microgenre, almost everything my father has been laid off from a land surveying this side of the mainstream was redlined into the left-over casserole of “college radio.” firm in a region where you have to borrow Before the internet, when the cool stuff money to sell a house, the nostalgia is laced trafficked through word of mouth, samizdat with a bittersweet sense that this biographymimeograph literature, and the small hours of in-detritus might also need to be downsized. NPR, you would likely find out about anything So this year, I combed through the stuff that from Siouxsie and the Banshees to the Dead belongs on the curb, the heavy dregs that Kennedys to techno godfather Juan Atkins’ break even the scales of sentimentality. Among Cybotron project from the same nebulous this was a packet of peer-review forms from network. In every sense, techno has always my freshman public speaking class in 1991 at felt like home. Wayne State University. Had I any pretensions of being a flesh-and-blood witness to the birth This may have been the case for a number of of Detroit techno, this was the smoking gun, cities in the U.S. in the years hovering around for even though my 9 out of 10 for eye-contact the “alternative revolution” of the early 90s, but had persuaded the bulk of my class to “give the cauldron of the Detroit area had its own rave a chance,” I myself had never been to a peculiarities. The strange bedfellows made by the suggestive mode of “Industrial” I’ll get to later, but more important, underground though it was, for whatever reason, that skeevy good ole boy washing dishes at Denny’s is addicted to Plastikman; girly-girls into radio pop and

At Home He’s a Tourist

“Party Store” Anywhere outside of Southeast Michigan, asking for a “party store”, if anything, leads you to one of those strange emporia for The Dirtbombs’ Party Store pinatas, streamers, balloons, and nitrous tanks. A glance at the Dirtbombs’ ecumenical paean to the dirty D translates this very transparent regionalism: it’s what we call a liquor store. But the Dirtbombs’ joke goes deeper than that. At the time when U.K. style “rave” was becoming the face of techno, Detroit people drew a lexical line in the sand to separate its happenings, which were modestly called “parties”. As you might expect, this often led to the following conversation; “Hey, my friends and I are throwing a party Downtown this weekend; you really should come.” “So, should I bring anything?” “No, it’s not like a kegger party or anything, we’re just having some DJs and chill people.” “Um, then it’s like… a rave?” (Visibly disgusted): “Yes.” Party hats off to Mick Collins and crew for giftwrapping perhaps the best Detroit-life pun possible.

ballet sneak off Downtown to sweat it up to Kevin Saunderson at City Club during the acme of first wave Detroit house, and for some inexplicable reason there is a strange hybrid Detroiter equally devoted to techno and death metal … The recent magnum opus Party Store by The Dirtbombs is perhaps the best index of this weird polyglot: it’s six sides of classic bleepand-bump Detroit techno and house covers reconfigured by an elder statesman of low-figarage-punk-soul, Mick Collins. What could have been a tongue-in-cheek novelty elephant is in fact a sincere, reverent Valentine, largely because this stuff is as much a part of Detroit as Stevie Wonder Continued on page 54 The Packard Plant

Hart Plaza

Bottom row photos by Kelly McKay

FEAST OF THE SUPERSENSUALISTS:

A Glimpse into the Underworld of New York Synth By Jeralyn Mason and Micki Pellerano Wierd began in 2003 as an informal affair at The Southside Lounge, a sparsely frequented dive bar in South Williamsburg. Solidified from its prior incarnation, Decadanse at Ivy South, situated in what was — in those days — something of a Williamsburg no-man’s land. Pieter Schoolwerth and Glenn Maryansky, the creators, assembled devotees of musical obscurities typified by genres like French and Belgian Coldwave, European and American Minimal Synth, including also shades of Post-Punk, Industrial and Neofolk. This burgeoning underground evolved to engender not merely an expanding multitude of disciples but a fresh creative adaptation of these exhumed musical nonpareils. Attention was drawn to bands that had fallen under the radar and new bands began to materialize from the scene’s early stirrings. Within a few years, the party grew from a humble gathering to an essential cultural installation of New York City, a platform for musicians and artists worldwide to converge within this treasured cultural niche.

and DJs alike are culled from the local New York scene as well as an international wellspring of personalities of either current notoriety or bygone cult status. Of the several home-grown New York bands spawned from this ornamented reservoir, a few stand out as exceptional. Here’s a closer look at some of our favorite sons. Perhaps the most colorful band in the New York synth scene is Led Er Est, comprised of singer/guitarist Samuel Klovenhoof with Owen Stokes and Shawn O’Sullivan on synths. With a sound ranging from the sadistically bleak to the euphorically melodic, this dashing trio of eccentrics harbors the obsessions of the scholar, the gourmand and the Christmas-sweater-clad recluse. Their most recent EP, May (Captured Tracks), ensnares the listener with opium-laden vicissitudes of sensual musicianship.

LED ER EST

Wierd, currently reigning weekly at Home Sweet Home in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, is now one of New York’s premiere underground thrusts. Every Wednesday, a live band is featured alongside guest DJs of notable accomplishment. Bands

www.swoonmagazine.com

Photo by Tom Kavanagh

Schoolwerth went on to develop the eponymous Wierd Records label, releasing contemporary output in alignment with the Wierd ethos, such as New York’s Epee Du Bois or Miami’s Staccato du Mal. And along with it, a prominent movement was conceived.

When posed the question of whether the current New York synth scene is a throwback to minimal synth acts from the early 1980s, O’Sullivan responded with: “We don’t consider ourselves, nor most of our peers, revivalists of any sort. Music does not exist in a vacuum. New forms are not generated spontaneously. All artists have their influences and historical points of reference. This ‘revivalism’ disparagingly ascribed to many new synth-oriented bands is frustrating and sometimes inexplicable. Punk drew inspiration primarily from the garage music released 10 years prior. It was hardly a formal innovation even then, yet bands still working within that tired idiom are rarely branded ‘revivalists’ with the vindictiveness you see directed at synth users. While we are indebted to many minimal synth and post-punk bands, we also seek inspiration in krautrock, EBM, techno, psychedelic folk, disco, and noise. The music we make could not come from a different era, and we do not look to merely invoke the past.” Look out for their upcoming single, due out on Monofonus this fall and a full-length LP to follow on Sacred Bones in April 2012. http://www.lederest.com

DEATH DOMAIN

Photo by Glenn Maryansky

Although Baltimore-based, Adam Huntley Stroupe of Death Domain has been a prominent participant in New York synth through his frequent performances and prolific releases. His stage set-up resembling a disarrayed laboratory; Stroupe, himself an accomplished scientist, creates an atmosphere of frenetic academia and cerebral disequilibrium. Death Domain’s subject matter, based exclusively on science (“Vampyroteuthis Infernalis” treats of an obscure and vampiric species of deep-sea squid), lends itself perfectly to the cold, methodical, and quite often droll music he creates. Despite the sinister, sociopathic exterior however,

Stroupe occasionally branches out from his solitary kingdom of seething test tubes to engage in collaborative endeavors. “I have a project with Zola Jesus,” he says, “that is strictly a ’60s girl group cover band. She has an amazing voice that adds to the completely stripped-down versions of the covers I make.” Of all the bands currently active in the genre, Death Domain is the most raw, base, and dare we say it, minimal. On the virtues of analog equipment Stroupe commented: “Analog just makes sense to me. Subtractive synthesis is very intuitive: if you have an idea for a sound, you know exactly what settings to create and what knobs to turn on the synthesizer. If you don’t, you are able to hear what you’re physically producing by the turning of a knob. It is simple and easy for me. I don’t know if it is on purpose, but I have no idea how to use MIDI and computer programs have too high of a learning curve that I’m not interested in using them. Analog to me means physical music. It isn’t being played out of a computer and you are able to recreate something live. You can also watch someone play an analog instrument and know exactly what they are doing with knowledge of subtractive synthesis.” Death Domain has just released a 12” on Dark Entries www.myspace.com/deathdomainmotif

Photo by Kristen Yoonsoo

YOU.

YOU. was one of the first bands to be released on one of New York’s chief independent labels geared heavily at minimal synth, Blind Prophet. The label, founded by Sean Ragon, the creative force behind Neofolk torchbearers Cult of Youth and proprietor of Brooklyn’s Heaven Street Records; has released a diverse array of bands from New York’s Pop. 1280 and Void Vision to Art Abscons of Germany, and Argentina’s Mueran Humanos. 31

Trever Millay and Brad Taormina, recently transported to New York via Detroit, bringing that city’s rich pedigree of electronic music in all its diverse forms. Thus YOU. reflects a sense of anxiety, decay, and dilapidated majesty redolent of Detroit’s looming dystopian aura distilled through a New Yorker’s lens of detached anemia.

XENO & OAKLANDER

Liz Wendelbo/Alex Gaidouk (courtesy D la Republica)

YOU. will be touring the US early 2012. www.myspace.com/treverchrisshow

MARTIAL CANTEREL

Xeno & Oaklander, on the other hand, explores a more lush territory. Dreamlike and ethereal, Wendelbo’s sultry whispers levitate through the network of musical complexities with an air of grace. Mythological landscapes of subconscious reality entwine harmoniously with pulsating rhythms in an alchemical marriage to forge dance music of a transcendental complexion. Both Martial Canterel and Xeno & Oaklander have recently released LPs on Wierd Records. www.myspace.com/martialcanterel xenoandoaklander.com

Photo by Liz Wendelbo

No documentation of the Minimal Synth scene in New York would be complete without mention of its indisputable Godfather, Sean McBride — also known as Martial Canterel, and one half of Xeno & Oaklander, in collaboration with his partner Liz Wendelbo. McBride is also a vanguard of the scene itself, a ubiquitous installment of the Wierd parties since their inception, and a forerunner of analog synth mastery in its current incarnation. While never derivative or unoriginal, Martial Canterel is a revivalist of the Minimal Synth paradigm, governing single-handedly an overwhelming display of analog equipment with the incomparable skill and savage energy of an inimitable mastermind. Self contained, personal and enshrined in a crystalline prison of Cold War isolation, McBride’s solo material exudes an exile of disciplined masculinity. 32

www.swoonmagazine.com

By Ricard Zee

Photos by Jeaneen Lund

TERMINAL TWILIGHT INTERVIEW

I first heard Terminal Twilight’s cover of Rockabilly legend Jody Reynold’s 1958 hit “The Fire Of Love” on a rainy day in a dirty, smoke-thick bar in Hong Kong. The second time was in a club in Berlin at 4am. It didn’t sound like a song you could listen to during the daylight. When they released their debut full-length, the House of Love LP, last August, it contained an accelerated, almost glammed-up version of “The Fire of Love” among its synth-pop weepies, dancefloor come-ons, cinematic interludes, and the epic 10-minute title track that tours through every genre from house to psych. I tracked the duo down at their home-base of Los Angeles to try to get some answers out of them. It seems like there is a lot of mystique around analog synthesizers even though they’ve been around for so long. We like them, they have such a broad range of sound, from huge train crashes to tinny space dust; they can make the most simple pure sound to incredibly complex interactions. An old analog with knobs and faders is so tactile but still very abstract – you’re removed from the sound in a way that’s less direct than acoustic instruments so it feels almost magical in the way that you can control it. But we use guitar and electric pianos too. We’ll use anything. We have a melodica here somewhere. Using electronic instruments helps us focus; we don’t have to wait for the drum machine to show up for practice. But we’re not synth fetishists or purists, we’re mainly interested in emotions and songs. We have our own internal process of what we think is ok and what we don’t like but it’s not a manifesto. So what’s not ok? For us, we’d never use a laptop onstage. It just doesn’t feel like an instrument on our end, and for the audience it seems weird to just see this big Apple logo onstage. It’s like you’re about to give a PowerPoint presentation. I know it’s useful for a lot of bands and much more practical but it’s not our style. It kills the vibe. We like musical hardware – most of our equipment is really old and in some state of malfunction. Most new equipment is really ugly and doesn’t look or feel right to us. We are a little fetishistic about the machines we use because we think they have beautiful personalities and it took a long time to acquire them, but that’s not the mission statement of the band. Synthesized sounds are so common these days, it’s not like when the Human League started and were really making a statement about technology and being anti-rock music. We don’t have any particular allegiance to a scene or genre. We listen to way more hip hop than minimal wave or Italo disco or whatever. I mean, we listen to some of that too of course. We love that Italian band Chrisma. They made so many different kinds of songs – disco, synth

www.swoonmagazine.com

punk, lounge – but it all makes sense together somehow. We live in a time when that kind of freedom is pretty accepted but they were doing it in the late ‘70s when the borders of music seemed more militantly defended. In terms of innovation, hip hop and house music seem more progressive and inspiring in terms of how they use synthesizers than most synth bands these days. I find it weird how bands working in that minimal synth style always seem to hate hip hop. Some people think Chrisma are ridiculous. Yeah, well everyone has different taste. They also have some great videos with the most outrageous dance moves. It’s like the Theatre of the Absurd. I think they were Surrealists. It’s like they’re pure id. And they’re always smiling and seem really happy. Maybe it’s just cocaine or too much espresso. How did you choose to cover Jody Reynolds’ “The Fire Of Love”? We met Jody Reynolds’ wife kind of randomly and she gave us some of his records and showed us his guitars and pictures of Elvis. This was shortly after he passed away. We immediately started working on our version of it after that. It just made sense to us. It was minimal and mysterious and had a lot of room to play in. We didn’t even realize The Gun Club did a cover of it until someone mentioned it later. Is there any irony to it? There is a certain tradition of synth bands covering Elvis or early rock n’ roll songs in kind of an ironic tone, but there’s also Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love” and Human League’s “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling” which are a little cheeky but seem pretty sincere for the most part. Maybe there’s something about the simplicity of some of those songs that lend themselves to being re-interpreted with electronic instruments, or maybe they’re just far away enough in time. We didn’t intend it to be ironic in any way though, we just loved the song. We also like that it was described as “Teardrop Rock.” We thought that was a good genre name. It seems like it introduced this Americana aesthetic into your music? We’ve been interested in that for awhile but weren’t sure how or if to make that part of the music. “The Fire of Love” let us do that but that’s also why we were attracted to that song in the first place. We love The Cramps and Tav Falco and Johnny Burnette, Raymond Chandler books, old Hollywood Noir. It’s kind of a cliché I guess but all the classic themes are there – betrayal, corruption, desire, redemption – it just depends on the execution. It’s weird how all that David Lynch stuff has become so popular in music lately. A lot of those films and music you mention are also about this alienation in modern culture. Is alienation still important in music? I wonder. Alienation’s a very Twentieth Century idea. We love Twentieth Century aesthetics. We’re confused about this Twenty-First Century but are trying to cope with it and avoid a nostalgic mindset. Everything is supposedly so social now but it actually feels just really narcissistic most of the time. We feel more comfortable being alienated. But maybe that’s not healthy. We are trying to be healthy though, we’re not nihilists. Audiences used to form cultures around their alienation but I don’t

know if that’s true anymore. Like kids who used to be obsessed with The Cure or Depeche Mode or whoever– those bands created a context that really spoke to its audience and gave them a space to inhabit. They probably prevented a lot of suicides. Music will always have that kind of affirmative power because it has a lot of life energy but I’m not sure bands speak to that kind of alienation anymore. There’s so much PR and self-interest. American hardcore music seemed like it was trying to address that alienation, maybe to provide a solution to it? Yeah, but that spoke mostly to boys and felt very aggressive and we’re more interested in the feminine. We do try to live by the DIY ethic though. We do everything ourselves – graphics, videos, recording, distribution. And we’re obviously pretty amateur musicians. We have a more romantic sensibility. Maybe that’s the biggest contribution of music from the eighties besides the technology – this romantic, feminine, feline energy… So many bands bury their vocals in a wash of effects. Do lyrics even matter?

“We have a more

romantic sensibility. Maybe that’s the biggest contribution of music from the eighties besides the technology – this romantic, feminine, feline energy…”

Of course. They help the listener gauge the intelligence and sympathies of the musicians. But they’re rarely the leader of the song even if they sometimes seem to be. Music is primarily abstract and emotional, it speaks to our senses and manipulates our emotions. You can try to tell a specific linear story but that usually creates a certain type of song – like a Bruce Springsteen song. Most good lyrics are deceptively abstract, they add context to the emotions you’re feeling from the melody and textures of the music. One good phrase can often be enough, depending on how detailed you want to be. It’s up to the singer to make the line convincing. Someone like Alan Vega is a master at this. There’s been a resurgence in music with dark themes and Gothic imagery. What role does violence have in music? Why does every music video need to have a sea of blood? I know these are dark times but it feels like a lack of imagination. We’re not influenced by contemporary horror movies at all. There’s so much real suffering in people’s lives that glorifying violence feels disrespectful and grotesque. We love old Noir thrillers but those are more about psychology and relationships, not about hitting someone in the face with a hammer or torturing girls. Love is more painful and beautiful than violence. www.infinitesoundtracks.com Ricard Zee is an independent writer, poet and curator usually based somewhere in Europe. Ricard.zee@gmail.com.

Photo by Jeaneen Lund

P R E Y E R B S I S E N GE Interview by Zeljko McMullen

enesis Breyer P-Orridge is one of the most influential thinkers of our time. S/he has devoted h/er life to the advancement of art, of music, of consciousness, to breaking boundaries and, ultimately, to freedom of expression and of being. H/er life is her art. From the late 60s on s/he has worked with such cultural heavyweights as William S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Timothy Leary, and Derek Jarman. S/he co-created the anti-cult

www.swoonmagazine.com

R R O

E G ID

Photos by Jeaneen Lund & Christelle de Castro

Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth (TOPY), which encouraged radical free-thinking and acting in accordance with oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s own true will. H/er first band, Throbbing Gristle, as experimental as it gets, birthed Industrial music, though h/er favorite music is psychedelic prog rock. S/he has been an instrumental part of every latter-half 20th century counterculture--from continuing the work of her Beatnik mentors, to 60s psychedelia, to 80s modern primitive and industrial goth to

90s rave culture, pioneering h/er ideas within each context, never settling into a niche, but continuing to push further, keep creating anew. On the one hand, Genesis plumbs the depths of pre-history for the threads with which to weave the way ahead. At the same time, technology has been at the heart of many of h/er projects: cut-ups, technology of the body, beginnings of sampling in music, Industrial music, the technol-

ogy of magick. A truly confrontational artist, this has sometimes led to looking in the face of technology and humanity at their most horrifying, as Throbbing Gristle’s use of images of the “death factories” of Nazi Germany perhaps exemplify. With h/er “other half” Lady Jaye Breyer s/he broke new boundaries of gender and physicality--of the very idea of Self and Other. Their Pandrogeny project merged archaic dreams of a return to a time before the schism of sex with the realities of today’s plastic surgery. When Jaye died suddenly and tragically in 2007, the project went further--smashing the boundaries of corporeal existence, beyond death.

was offered a film contract by Spielberg, they offered to take her to California for three years to groom her as a new star. She did performance art at Jackie 60 right from the very beginning, so she was already a respected and notorious alternative culture person before we ever met.

started. And, at first, we wouldn’t use it, because they would tease me with it. So, we thought, “Oh, reverse psychology!” And we would go, “Oh yes, I’m Genesis,” thinking they would get bored with it, but it didn’t work. Genesis is still here!

So, it’s very, very important that it is “Breyer P-Orridge,” and as far as we’re concerned— and that is why we say “we”—she is still 100% involved in everything that happens. Now that we’ve settled the name, let’s get on with that.

So you decided to own it? Yes, and started signing paintings and drawings and poems as Genesis and then it took over. When we first started COUM Transmissions, we met this girl, Christine Carol Newby, at an acid test. You know that story? About her knickers falling down?

An essential theme throughout Genesis’ life and work has been the radical creation of community--from 60s communal living to TOPY, and looking now to our uncertain future s/he sees these new horizons of the tribe as survival strategies to be ignored at our peril. Needless to say, all of this has taken more than a spoonful of sugar to go down in the straight world: Genesis was once exiled from h/er native Britain for h/er art and was condemned as a threat to civilization itself. For those steeled enough to taste the maggots in the mind of the universe and committed to rising above it all, Genesis offers flickers of exactly what civilization may need to look like.

Names are very important; they say that names are your magical identity. Something that can change and transform, grow and become, and that seems to be a big part about what your work is about. It’s definitely one of the threads. It’s funny; it started with other people doing it to me, really... When we were at school in 1966, in a little suburb of Birmingham, England, we had just a few friends, and one morning they all came to school and they started calling me Genesis, and I was like, “What the fuck is Genesis about?” And they said, “We were all at this party on Saturday— you didn’t come—and we decided to have a game where we would write all of the names of the people we knew and the Biblical names that all fitted…and you got Genesis.” Well, that’s not a person, but they didn’t really get that bit. They ignored that question, but that’s how Genesis

No. Somebody at the university had been busted for trying to smuggle kilos of hash into England from Spain and was in jail. But in those days— must have been 1968 or 1969—they would say, “This is how much we want to be bribed to let you go,” so we needed like 2,000 pounds or something like that to set them free. So, we had this acid test party with lots of free acid and there were lots of mics, the usual stuff, jelly baths to jump in... We were dragging in half of a tree to decorate this place and make it more interesting, and we saw this very cute, skinny flower child leaning against the wall. Sort of bright yellow tights, velvet, classic Marc Bolan-type flower child and we looked at this girl and thought, “She’s really cute.” And the moment we were thinking this—she told me later—her knickers snapped,

Intro by Kelly McKay and Shaun Frente

So, we are here with Genesis P-Orridge. Genesis BREYER P-Orridge That’s a new addition to your name? Well, yes, in a way. The world tends to sideline biological females. Especially as we were legally married. People would go, “wife.” But that was a word that neither of us ever used. And it was Jaye who said, “No, other half.” Spouse is kinda wimpy, PC—whatever—and life partner is, eh, how do you know? So we came up with “my other half.” It’s only when we are together that we are whole and it was my decision alone, after she dropped her body to state very clearly that Lady Jaye is not only still absolutely involved in the work, but without her the work wouldn’t exist. Even Jaye mentioned it when she was in the flesh…she said, “Oh, a lot of people just think that I make art or music because I met you, and that I’m riding on your coat-tails.” But none of that is true. She was doing off-Broadway, she

Photo by Jeaneen Lund

and her panties started falling down. But we didn’t know who it was, so we went in with the tree, forgot all about that. So you undressed her with your eyes? Yes, just with my eyes, not a word. Yeah, just looked at her, and a few days later we were thinking, “Who was that girl that I saw?” We tried to describe her, and no one knew, so we started to call her “Cosmosis,” which is a word that came from COUM—a transfer of positive energy from one person to another, like osmosis in a plant—and everyone got to know that was the mystery woman and started looking for her. About two or three months later, we were at some event and there she was again. One of my hippie friends, Sam the Blam, went over to her and said to her, “Cosmosis!” She looked around—even though she had never heard the word before. “Genesis is looking for you.” And she guessed it was me from the party when her knickers fell down. And he came back and said, “Yes, yes, Cosmosis likes you,” and we said, “Tell her to come see me.” But we forgot to say where we lived...it was the days of being very stoned. But then, about three days later, there was a knock at the door and it was her. And she said she was obsessing over this message that we wanted to see her. She somehow knew somebody who thought they knew me, and she was compelled to get on this bus, and she was like, “Why am I doing this? I don’t even know this person!” But she had to go and she turned up on the doorstep. And we opened the door and said, “Cosmosis!” She came in and that was it. We actually made love before we got into the bedroom... She felt that she was bewitched, but we’re not convinced. We think she just felt it...but speaking of names, the reason we mentioned it isn’t so much that story but she became Cosey Fanni Tutti, first it was Cosmosis, and then for short, Cosey... And then a friend of mine, Robert Classen, an artist in London who was doing mail art as we were, sent a card saying, “Cosey Fanni Tutti.” When we met Sleazy [Christopherson], we called him Sleazy. There are a lot of people out there who we gave names and who still use them, even if they hate my guts. Even if their relationship with me as a person changes, they are very intuitively aware that the name that they have received has enough power and potency that they will not surrender it; it has become an integral part of what and how they do what they do—which we take as a big compliment.

www.swoonmagazine.com

Which is very interesting, since the name which was given to you is Genesis, and in the Book of Genesis, the first two people were one. They didn’t know a difference between self and other; their job was to name things. Adam and Eve were supposed to name the animals and Adam named Eve…and they were thought to be androgynes, before the Fall. Yeah. All of the very early Medieval and preMedieval paintings of the garden of Eden always represent God, Adam, and Eve as hermaphrodites with two genitals and breasts. It was only later on during the Inquisition phase of the “Holy” Roman Empire—not only did they kill everyone who disagreed—the women and the Cathars and so on—but they also destroyed every painting they could find with the original version of the Garden of Eden. There’s about five left... Well, the male likes to dominate, so they don’t want it to be a mixture. But the original story is perfect! That Adam and Eve are both--are aspects of one, as you pointed out. They are not two separate beings; they are both hermaphrodites with a slightly different emphasis. Each other’s other half. The other half, exactly. And in the picture that we found—we’ve only ever found one of these early paintings—God is, strangely enough, behind a bush, sneaking a peak at Adam and Eve and God has breasts and a vagina and a penis, as well. Kind of fascinating that, in the early, early versions of the Bible, there are people before Adam and Eve. Gosh, I wish we could remember the names…my friend Timothy Wiley has just written a new book about the source of evil and the angelic rebellion and the moment of reconciliation being upon us. There’s a book called The Book of Urantia, and in there is a more ancient version of the story of Genesis where there are human beings that mate with angelic beings to create a race of midway creatures known as the Brotherhood of the Velvet Fire. Once you start getting into the real origins of the so-called Bible, it gets really dense and very different than the everyday version. If you believe that God is angry, then you are not a Christian... Because Christ supposedly came to get rid of all that. It’s wrong; God’s not angry or

cruel or any of those things. No. He’s Love. And the New Testament is written by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John—none of whom ever met Jesus. They heard about him from people with a vested interest in glorifying His name. So then you get Saul, who becomes Paul and who hates women. And there you have the origins of the Vatican and the Roman Church, which, quite frankly, in my opinion should be up for crimes against humanity...severe, severe. They are probably responsible for more executions and violence and murders than anyone else. All of the Crusades, the destruction of the Cathars in the south of France, all of the people of South America - the Incas, the Mayans the Aztecs - all gone... And ongoing from there, all of the poverty...and babies’ deaths caused by, “You can’t use contraception!” We’re talking about tens of millions of human beings murdered by the Holy Roman Church, and yet they sit there in their little private city with autonomy, no taxes… A lot of gold… A lot of riches and gold. And they have all the hidden books with the true secrets of history. But we digress… Yes, names are important and if you get the right name, it does seem to give you the opportunity to leverage the creation of what you would like to have happen. With me, once we realized that Genesis [the name] was working and that we were getting poems published and starting to make paintings that people were interested in, we decided to become Genesis and to let go of who we were. It’s been a good decision so far. Maybe you’ve even read that when we met Brion Gysin back in the early 80s, in Paris, one of the very first things he said to me when we walked into his apartment was, “Do you know your real name?” And we said, “Yes,” and he didn’t say, “What is it?” That was it. When he asked me that question, it made me realize that he was highly aware of the path that we had just started, that he was a genius. We’ve met many, many remarkable people: Gurdjieff, Derek Jarman, William Burroughs, Timothy Leary…we’ve worked with them all. And many, many others, even shamans in Nepal. The two most incredible people that we’ve met were Brion Gysin and Lady Jaye. By far. Brion Gysin’s ideas of cut up and collage you’ve taken into every facet of art making, into the music

Photo by Jeaneen Lund

you just shared with us [Psychic TV]… Well, we first applied it to what became industrial music…I guess you could argue that the current band we have is a collage, too, finding the right people and putting them together in a crucible of a studio, something that could never exist in a different way... And the way that you improvise is a collage, too. Yes, of course! It’s funny, too, because Lady Jaye—we never came up with a name for her, she came up with her name—There are two things called Lady Jaye, one is from the comic character GI Joe, his counterpart is Lady Jaye, the other is a triangular rubber gadget with a pipe that you can put on your vagina to pee in a bottle which is called a Lady Jaye, as well. And so, when we met she said, “Well, you’re not gonna name me like you do everyone else.” Originally she was Miss Jackie when we met—from her working in the dungeons and so on—and after years, she came up with Lady Jaye. She was the only one that’s been involved with us that came up with it herself. We never felt the urge to even think of naming her, not quite sacrilegious, but not my role. We’re not that far from the first question, now are we? No, but I guess it must have been a good one. A big part of your work is identity. Absolutely, yes. The malleability of it and the

Photo by Christelle de Castro

BY 1967 WE’VE BECOME GENESIS AND WHAT “ ALSO HAPPENED, THEN, WAS THE FIRST TIME THAT WE WERE PHYSICALLY DECLARED DEAD. ”

Photo by Christelle de Castro

reclaiming or claiming of an identity and saying, “We reject everything we were directed to be and pushed into being and educated into becoming; we reject that and say no, it is my absolute right to decide what we are, what kind of being we are, what kind of being we are to

become, our path through what seems to be life, what seems to be here.” It’s hard for us to know, but somehow Neil Andrew Megson doesn’t work for the work that we’ve done; it doesn’t seem like the right name. Genesis is the first book of the Bible, but it’s also—more impor-

tantly—the book of Creation…so they gave me a name that says, “You are all about creation, making that which wasn’t there, because that’s what God does.” Making a thing by naming it and manifesting it in the world. So we surrendered to that and decided it was better to embrace it and embraid it like a machine into the future. By 1967 we’ve become Genesis and what also happened, then, was the

which put me into a coma. Because he had read that article, the doctor ran over to my house and did a sort of Pulp Fiction thing with the shot of adrenalin straight into my chest. They threw me in an ambulance and they took me into the ER, lying on a big gurney, and we remember floating above—the classic floating above—and looking down and hearing the doctors and nurses saying, “Who’s going to tell the parents that he’s dead?” And we’re thinking, “I’m not dead, what do you mean?”

“

THE ARTIST, THE MUSICIAN, THE THINKER, THE POET, THE CREATOR—WHOEVER THEY ARE—THEY ARE DOING DIVINE WORK, HOLY WORK. IT’S A CALLING. IT’S NOT JUST ENTERTAINMENT.

”

first time that we were physically declared dead. How did that happen? We were a sickly baby, as a lot of artists and thinkers and shaman are. Around the age of six or seven, they had this new wonder drug, it was the ’50s [before you were born] and it was called cortisone, a steroid. So they gave me these massive doses of cortisone every day. Which did, indeed, get rid of the asthma, but of course it would be illegal to give to kids now. So they gave me all of this stuff, and bit by bit we stopped having asthma attacks. In 1967, my thendoctor said, “You can stop taking those pills.” So, on a Friday we stopped. And on Saturday we felt a little strange, but didn’t think much about it. On Sunday we felt a lot more strange; we were getting ill. Monday morning we were supposed to go to school; my mother came and said, “Get up! Get dressed, you have to go to school.” Said, “Can’t go to school...feel really, really ill.” My mother went downstairs. A few minutes later, my sister heard a thump—me falling and hitting the floor. And here is where a strange sequence of good luck comes along: as luck would have it, my sister came up to see what the thud was and it was me on the floor turning blue, and as luck would have it the doctor lived directly across the street, so she ran to tell him that I had fallen down, and as luck would have it, he was late for work and also that weekend had just read an article about a side-effect of cortisone. It had destroyed the outer layer of my adrenal glands— the part that keeps the body going. So over the weekend all of my organs began shutting down

You learned to fly. Haha, yes, I’m there floating and watching it. The doctors came out and said, “We’re really very sorry, you have our condolences, but Neil died.” And then someone called from the ER and said that I was back...but we don’t remember how we came back. But now that you’ve become a new person, in a way, Neil did die, right? Yes, exactly. Maybe you remember him? We don’t really think he exists any more. We think Genesis took over.

existence. The idea of, “Oh, we’ll get a degree to try and make Mum and Dad happy. And then maybe get a job...” No! From that moment on, it was only creation... What’s the worst thing that could happen? Would we starve to death? Very, very hard in Western society to starve to death. Or be homeless? Well, homeless we can do. Either way, if you’re doing what you want to be doing, it’s okay. Could you imagine if everyone in the world lived that way? We probably wouldn’t have so many problems… It would be fascinating! So that was a really critical moment. That was the day that we lost any kind of interest in trying to cushion the effect on parents of what we thought we should be. When we legally changed our name to Genesis P-Orridge my mother actually cried. She saw it as a big rejection. But she got over that. Did you go on to have a good relationship with her? Yes! She died last year. She was ninety-two. Died in her sleep with a smile on her face. When we told her that the Tate had bought our archive she said, “Well, it’s about time. So they should. You’ve always been ahead of your time. It takes them a few years to catch up.” She was from the pre-war generation. So, in the beginning, it was very strange for them... Some journalists would pound on their door and say, “We’re from the

I think we go through many different lives and die and rebirth again into something new… It seems definitely to be true; in one physical body we have more than one lifetime. When we were dead, there was a gap...was it Neil that came back? Or some other entity or being? We don’t know... What we know is that when we woke back up in the hospital, we were Genesis. We thought immediately, “That’s it, no more compromises... We’re going to do only all the creative artistic things that we want to do for the rest of our life.” The doctor came in and explained that we had died but were very lucky to come back. We took that as a reinforcement of the Sufi idea of “live everyday as it’s your last and that’s the day you’ll be judged.” So, based on that, we couldn’t make any choices anymore that weren’t in favor of creation. Trying at least to add something new, more pure, more useful in any way, just trying to make more sense of Photo by Jeaneen Lund

www.swoonmagazine.com

News of the World and we wanna know if your son has always been a sex maniac?” And my mum would say, “We have no idea, but we love him.” What was the first situation you found yourself moving into, communally, after this period of dying and having a rebirth as a new person? That would have been the HoHo Funhouse. Right. And what kinds of things happened there? Well, we went to the university—supposedly to study sociology and economics and philosophy—but after a couple weeks, we realized that that was a terrible mistake. So, did you stay there and do something else? Yeah, we got in with the activists. It was the late sixties and in Britain there were a lot of student protests. We had sit-ins, we did this and that...trying to cause trouble. Then we met the Exploding Galaxy, a performance art troupe. They came up in the summer of ’69 and asked if there were any people who would join in their performances. So we did and they said, “Come to London and join our commune! There’s creation every day.” So we hitchhiked to London and joined them. And from then on, all we’ve done is art. Do you feel that your work is about liberating the mind from social convention? And through freeing your will, do you feel that your work invites others to have that same breakthrough for themselves? We certainly hope that what we do inspires other people to know that it’s possible. The best you can do is set an example and say, “Look what happened to me!” We rejected all the stereotypical paths we’d set off on—we could have carried on with our degree and become advertising agents or whatever, but it’s our belief that creation—the reason it’s the first book of the Bible—is that it’s the most precious first holy activity. The world has got to create. The artist, the musician, the thinker, the poet, the creator— whoever they are—they are doing divine work, holy work. It’s a calling. It’s not just entertainment. It’s not a way to be famous. It’s not a way to get rich. It’s a way to heal your tribe, your community. And that’s an incredible responsibility and it’s something not to be taken lightly. We feel that the artist—whichever media they use— is like the shaman, the speaker, the leader of the tribe. And their tribe might be punks, their tribe might be goths, their tribe might just be people

Photo by Christelle de Castro

that are young—whatever, but you will find, everywhere, that there’s a certain pool of human beings who relate enough for them to speak to one another…and you cannot overtly change people, but you can—as we said before—show them, by example, that it’s possible. We’ve never had jobs since 1968…except being Genesis. You’re living your life as a piece of art. Exactly. We’re one of the very few…we’ve never known anyone else except me and Jaye who did. We’re pretty well versed in our art history and we’re pretty sure we’re the only ones. Which is not boasting, or anything…it’s just we’re really serious about this. Over the course of your long period of living your art, it’s gone through so many transmogrifications. Like, industrial music came and you used machines and technology to make things that people had never yet experienced. Like taking the sounds of— Making samples, I would guess. And then going using technology to amplify your intentions? What would you say technology does as far as furthering one’s will or one’s ideas? We only got to learning about that after the Hyde Park fiasco. We joined the Exploding Galaxy and then shortly after that they changed their name to COUM Transmission. It was a really, really rigorous commune. It’s worth talking about because this is where we think we’re going next—into new forms of collective community. When you walked through the door, you handed over everything you owned. Money, whatever…and all your clothes, into a big box. All the walls that could be knocked out had been. If you went to the toilet, other people could see you. In the bathtub, they could see you. There were

no bedrooms anymore, so you had to sleep somewhere different every night. We weren’t allowed to own anything. If you wanted to get the subway to someplace else, you had to convince everybody that you needed that money…and they’d say, “Well, can’t you walk?” And you’d have to say, “Well, I’m in a hurry, I’ve got to get there.” They’d do everything possible to stop you… And when you woke up, you’d have to go to the box and whatever clothes were there were what you had to choose from. And you also have this thing where they would go, “Stop!” and then you’d freeze and they’d interrogate you: “Why are doing it that way? Where’d you get that food? How come you’re wearing what you wore yesterday? Surely you can do something better with your imagination.” Bam! Bam! Bam! It was so rigorous. We saw people actually have nervous breakdowns. Are you in communication, still, with anyone you met during that time? No…But they definitely had a huge—and good—influence on me. It made me question constantly. The basic idea is, is this a habit? Are we doing this because we’ve done it before or because it’s easy? Is it easier than the other way? Why are we choosing to do it like this? Who are we? Do we need to be whatever we were yesterday? It really broke down the idea of preconceptions in a really helpful way. And that is with me forever. We find that we’re always thinking, “Is there another way?” And, you know, we switch and switch and switch identities— even genders—back and forth. Nothing’s fixed. So when people say to me, “Why don’t you still do the same music you did with Throbbing Gristle?”… because that was relevant then.

Photo by Christelle de Castro

And the things that you’re doing now are really organic…everyone’s playing things in real time. And we think that’s a result of this incredible fluidity that we’ve learned. Of not having any preconceptions, and living absolutely in the moment. And being able to just traverse, swim, float with…well, no matter what. So what do you think of the music people are doing now using electronics and technology…? Well, you know, when TG came out, it was the punk rock thing…learn three chords and form the band. And it was interesting. All these punks were outraged. They were like, “That’s not music!” So you’ve got damned Generation X and everybody going, “That’s not music!” And now there’s this anti-music that’s just as accepted as music… We weren’t so much looking at technology… we were just looking for something that wasn’t based on traditional sources of rock and roll, which would be rhythm and blues, and so on. We thought, “There has to be a way to do some

www.swoonmagazine.com

Photo by Jeaneen Lund

music that reflects our experience of life in the West after the Second World War. Remember, where we grew up, in Manchester, in the ‘50s, we played in bomb craters. They were still rationing for years. You could only get chocolate, get meat, once a week. So we had a very different experience: austerity. Until the ‘60s when there was certainly an explosion of excesses... With TG it was very much, “What makes a rock band a rock band?” And our answer to ourselves was: “the drummer.” As soon as you have a drummer, you end up having to follow those beats and those rhythms. So we were like, “Well, we’ll get rid of the fucking drummer!” And what else? Well, guitarists. They’d learned to play and do all these riffs. So we’ll get a guitarist that doesn’t know how to play. And then we thought about cut-ups, of course. So Sleazy got Walkmans to mix a tape machine through a mixer which became an instrument. It’s the beginning of sampling. Chris Carter built his own synth with all these modules. We liked it at the time because it was so unemotional. And then there was a bass guitar and we left it with

no pick-ups. And by accident we got a hold of a bass guitar with no pick-ups, and we never fixed it, it had this amazing sound with a lot of sustain. We used what was around. Cosey went to Woolworth’s and got a guitar for fifteen dollars. And then said it was too heavy, so we got her an electric saw and shaved off all the excess wood. What do you think about having emotion in your music now? Stuff that you’ve done recently sounds very emotive… Well, TG had emotion, too. Sometimes more than others. Times change and strategies change. TG was definitely very aggressive. And in terms of the vocals—the stories we would tell—we were definitely influenced by the Velvet Underground…Lou Reed’s doing a diary, a journal sort of vocal. And then we thought, “Why not take it even further and have no limits to what’s discussed?” We’d become journalists of anything and everything that intrigues you or shocks you or hurts or excites you…to find out how and why that happens. One of the things we were all about in TG was that we took the vocal from ev-

ery possible limitation. And for a while that was an amazing strategy. We’d get reviews saying things like, “These people should be locked in a cage. They should be thrown away. Even an ape with severed arms could play better than this.” We were also interested in the idea of including the industrial revolution. Music’s based on rhythm and blues, which is from the slaves in the cotton fields…have we moved on? Who’s thinking about our experience? Of the broken down railways and blasted buildings, factories and so on… There must be a way to make music about that. And so that was our search—for something that did that and resonated with people. And then calling it industrial music was a gift from the gods, really. Was it because of the industry? Yeah, the music industry, bringing out records like people making cars in industrial factories and so on. Also we were interested in the idea of making music to play in factories so that it cancelled out the noise of the machines, turned it into music so it was a more bearable environment. All of those things went into the “What should we call it?” And we were walking across Hackney Park with Monte Cazazza and we were like, “It’s got to have a name or it won’t work.” And he says, “Well, you keep saying ‘industrial,’ don’t you? So why not call it ‘industrial music’?”

and no shame, do you ever think that there will be a time when that will be a global thing? Absolutely. Have you been to Third World countries? It happens there already in a lot of places. If you go into the jungles of Thailand or Burma…they have no other choice but to live communally. Do you think it would ever happen in America? Oh, yeah. It’s coming. The economic idea that we’re riding on, which is causing all these fluctuations right now is based on a complete fallacy, which is that you can always have increased growth and increased consumption no matter what. That goes against the rules of nature. You cannot have infinite growth and infinite consumption because there’s a limit to what’s available—resources—and the longer they try to maintain this myth of endless growth and consumption, the further we get towards the collapse. And it’s going to happen. We cannot invent stuff that’s not there. You can’t feed people you’ve got no food for. You know, the whole system is based on illusions and lies. In the same way you talked about creating art, there’s another group of magicians wearing black suits and they’re creating money out of nothing. Well, you know, when New York was founded by the Dutch, the system of currency was beaver skins and shells worth x that you could buy

“

IT WILL COLLAPSE. IN FACT, IT’S COLLAPSING FASTER THAN WE THOUGHT. WHAT’S THE BEST WAY FOR PEOPLE WHO CARE ABOUT EACH OTHER TO DEAL WITH THAT? TO CREATE THEIR OWN COMMUNITIES, AND SHARE THEIR RESOURCES. IT’S BETTER TO LEARN HOW TO DO THAT NOW. So it’s Monte who plucked it out and decided that’s what it should be. And it’s weird to think now, all over the world, there are bands that say they play industrial music, there are industrial festivals, labels, clubs, clothes… And all of that just because we thought, “Well, what is it that we really want to do? What do you really need? Is there anything that you don’t need?” So we stripped it away...and little did we know...we had no idea. What do you think about the future? This idea of this community—commune—that you told us about, when you had no possessions and no money

”

y with. Something like twenty beaver skins for a house…or a big, huge pile of shells. So, currency is completely ludicrous. It’s a really weird agreement between people. And at the moment they’re switching it to gold. But gold has no more intrinsic value than a stone. It’s just stuff. It’s still an illusion. So the whole economic system on the planet is based on everyone choosing to believe that it has some kind of value. Whether it’s paper, gold, shells, beaver skins, twigs…whatever. If you take a Picasso painting to the Amazon or to one of those tribes that are hidden away, they’ll just say, “Gee, that looks funny.” It’s just a piece of paper, it’s worthless…that’s its value.

But someone else will give you a hundred million dollars. Same piece of stuff. And if you took those hundred million dollars to the Amazon, it’s just a hundred million pieces of paper. And then they would laugh, probably. They’d burn it. So, the illusion of the world is falling apart? Absolutely. And, so, you have to think, “Okay, so, when it collapses, who’s going to be ready?” Motorcycle gangs. For better or worse, whatever their morals, they’re going to be okay because they have fast, cheap transport, loyalty, and they’re prepared to be violent to defend themselves. Other gangs, probably, too, and survivalist groups in various parts of America. But not people that live in the suburbs. I’m waiting for the day when we can be like, “This piece of paper? I’m sorry. It’s worth nothing. What do you have, what can you exchange?” It will collapse. In fact, it’s collapsing faster than we thought. What’s the best way for people who care about each other to deal with that? To create their own communities, and share their resources. It’s better to learn how to do that now. We’ve done a lot of experiments with community and communal living and it’s really hard to sustain. But in a world where there’s no other currency and there’s no longer any guarantee of petrol or gas and where everything has to be either taken or exchanged, how do you deal with that? The best thing, we think, is that people start to create small, trusting, autonomous units in preparation. And obviously, cities are not the best place to be when it goes down. So you have to think about where to go. People need to really start considering who they would like to be with—who would be their extended family, who would be their tribe—and what it would look like and how it would function. What would be the disciplines and what would be the restrictions? Really start a discussion now. People have to learn really quickly how to protect themselves. And, quite frankly, even if it doesn’t collapse, that’s what should happen. A world with autonomous units of people who are like-minded and creative and looking towards the future—that’s a world that makes a lot more sense. That’s why we have the One True TOPI Tribe training—to start to get people thinking about community, instead of just consumption of music or art or whatever. Let’s try to build something and take care of each other. genesisbreyerporridge.com

HAZEL HILL MCCARTHY Interview by Drew Denny

Hazel Hill McCarthy III delivers an absurdist’s appraisal of contemporary pop culture via multi-media event curation, video artwork and design. Locally notorious in Los Angeles for curating the profoundly profane Show Cave with Eric Nordhauser, Hazel now orchestrates global touring art events that combine video, music, installation, publication and performance under mischievously clever titular umbrellas introducing audiences across Europe, Asia and Latin America to Show Cave’s cultish brand of uncomfortable indulgence. Delivering her social commentary from the gutter rather than the soapbox, Hazel utilizes a satirist’s sense of humor, a hedonist’s knack for pleasure and a contemporary artist’s lust for spectacle and innovation in her quest to expose audiences to her delightfully painful perspective on the banal grotesquery of post-modern existence. I saw you in Holland for Sonic Horticulture, in Mexico for Licker License, and you just got back from India?! Can you name all the countries you worked in during 2011? USA, Mexico, Netherlands, Italy, UK, Germany, Nepal and India! Its been a global art trek-fest that’s taken me to a lot of interesting places where I was able to meet amazing locals. There are so many artists out there working with each other to make an amazing experience happen. There’s a network that actually lives outside of the computer world and it’s been such an experience to really get out there and physically contact those individuals and gain a larger perspective on my own work as an artist. Tell me about the piece you made for Sonic Horticulture. How did you become interested in cymatics? I started working with video and cymatics for Sonic Horticulture when you invited me to participate in Reclamation’s Terrarium in the Netherlands. I needed to take the idea of sound and video further than usual. I did some research on cymatics, specifically of work by Hans Jenny. Cymatics [from Greek: “wave”] is the study of visible sound and vibration, a subset of modal phenomena. Typically, the surface of a plate, diaphragm or membrane is vibrated and regions of displacement are made visible on a thin coating of particles or liquid. Different patterns emerge in the excitatory medium depending on the geometry of the plate and the driving frequency.

footage of the American Flag projected on a metal tray containing liquid. This tray was placed on top of a speaker that amplified live music that was being performed within the space during the event. The moving image was projected onto the surface of the liquid and, thus, was disrupted by the liquid’s response to the sound waves emanating from the speaker, with different frequencies creating different patterns. This disrupted video projection was then projected onto the gallery wall for the audience to see. The other video work I did using cymatics can be viewed on my website titled Tweak My Nips. It uses desaturated, mirrored moving images by Hans Jenny from the 1960s where he uses lycopodium [a fine powder from club moss spores] on a taut rubber membrane creating the illusion of nipples. What led you to take the show on the road? I took various shows on the road to get some exposure for the artists and tap into some new art communities. It’s easy to overlook shows that only live in one physical space. To add variety by taking shows to new places makes the experience more fulfilling for everyone involved. How are you and your work received in these far-off lands? I feel that my work is received really well by everyone abroad. I think that there’s an energy out there that connects people who have similar aesthetics and lifestyles. I’ve had really intense connections with so many people that I’ve met abroad. Recently, I’ve connected with artist Markus Stein who runs an online radio show called DIY Church.

I made several video installations, one of which was shown live during Sonic Horticulture called There’s No Place Like Ohm. I used looped found

III

www.swoonmagazine.com

hazelhillmccarthyIII.com

You’ve been working with Genesis Breyer P-Orridge since designing her book Thee Psychick Bible. How did you meet? What do you love about working with her? I met Genesis through Kelly McKay of Swoon actually. Kelly asked me if I ever designed a book and I said, “No...but I studied typography at Art Center under the greats, Roland Young and Lou Danziger!” I first met Gen in London at a Throbbing Gristle gig at Heaven....such a great performance. Gen said that I had amazing legs and then we knocked back a few White Russians. A month later I spent two weeks at h/er flat in Brooklyn going through archived materials and piecing together material for the book. We bonded over obscure references to life and living. Our senses of humor and crude observations of our own mortality brought us together.

ges swallowed that token of life.

HAZEL AND GENESIS

How do loss and pain inform your artwork? I think pain and loss are a part of everyone’s work. There’s no hot-key to life that can just “control-alt-delete” in a nice way. My work operates on the macabre sense of humor that examines the absurdity of living and our need to memorialize our existence. How have your travels affected your work? Are you producing material while traveling? I’ve been working on a series called Rubbing that I started in 2006. It’s a documentation of the places I visit, using wax crayon on paper to make impressions. It’s mostly of signs with text or maybe a bold image that’s cut from a surface. It’s my way of interacting with the environments I’m in. Traveling allows me to explore the inherent typographic

What has Gen taught you? Gen has taught me the meaning of love. S/he has also shown me complete trust which is difficult to find in people. This appreciation we have for each other started with h/er complete commitment to me working with her on Thee Psychick Bible, which became such a successful book and visual testament to h/er work. S/he is always a complete inspiration on how to live a free life. What did you and Gen get up to in Nepal? Gen and I recently met up in Kathmandu. I was going through a pretty intense time with my father-in-law, Ted, who had fallen ill with asbestos-related cancer. I helped take care of him right up until the day I left for Kathmandu. I was so torn....the trip was planned well before any of us knew that Ted was as ill as he was. The day before I left, I had the honor of cleaning the old man’s ass...a week later he passed away. Gen was very ill too at this point. We had to rush h/er to a nearby clinic...it was such an emotionally and physically draining time! My husband, Douglas McCarthy, had planned to meet me in India after my trip to Kathmandu. After attending his father’s funeral, he met me in Mumbai. We traveled for three weeks, just dealing with the grief of losing a father, father-in-law, father-figure. There was a lot of guilt on my part that I wasn’t there when Ted died. Douglas and I had our own puja ritual on the Ganges in Varanasi, one of the most holy places in India. Neither of us are religious, but there was something that we needed to do together to complete some process and to acknowledge a life that has passed. Douglas had brought Ted’s deathbed blanket and we wrapped it around a stone from the bank of the Ganges, folded in a picture of Ted and released it into the river. We watched in silence as the Gan-

LICKER LICENSE nature of memorial structures. The artificiality that these structures represent as edifices of humanity reflects a failed attempt at immortality; a lifetime reduced to a few words. What are you making these days? I’m continuing the Rubbing series and have a solo show titled In Rubbing Memory with Synchronicity Space in Los Angeles in the fall! It will be a multimedia installation experience that incorporates video and the impressions on paper. There will also be several special events sprinkled in.

Hecuba â&#x20AC;˘Modern

Seeing Hecuba perform constitutes a vivid demonstration of two symbiotic souls whose captivating sound and jarring delivery amalgamate to verge on the sublime. These artfully driven individuals harness a hypnotic musical presence (which, in the era of Auto-Tune, is a needed breath of fresh air). For Jon Beasley and Isabelle Albuqueruque, technology is a large abstract dimension with perilous wonders of unrestricted possibilities, defining but not dictating their mastery. Music aside, Jon and Isabelle lay host to multitudes of technologicallybound threats: cinematography, web design, art direction and the newly added direction of Germ Label (founded with partners in crime, Robbie Williamson and Megan Gold). Their new record Modern will be out on Germ Label this spring. --Bianca Guillen hecuba.us

www.swoonmagazine.com

INTERVIEW WITH TONY CONRAD: LEGENDARY DE-CONSTRUCTIONIST AND INNOVATOR IN TECHNOLOGIES OF MUSIC, FILM AND ART Interview and Photos by Zeljko McMullen

Anyone who has dipped their feet in the avantgarde of the past forty years will struggle to find more than three degrees of separation from visionary artist, composer, sculptor, film-maker and thinker Tony Conrad. In the early 60s, amidst a deck of jokers comprised of John Cale and LaMonte Young entitled the Dream Syndicate, Conrad was an integral component of the American Minimalist movement that included Young, Steve Reich, and Terry Riley. Within that same period, Conrad was equally active in the thick of New York’s experimental film world, working on Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures and directing his own The Flicker, a work no round-up of structuralist film can do without. He made one album in a traditional sense, but given that it was a legendary collaboration with German noise pioneers Faust, it was hardly traditional and perhaps unnecessary to follow up. He has made films consisting of paper weathering over

Edited by Angela Vitacolonna

years. He has created paintings by walking through cities with canvases on his feet and “dream music” derived through mathematical intervals. He may very well have been responsible for giving the Velvet Underground their name. To this day, Conrad is as uncompromising as ever, as this unconventional interview attests. Tony: So, what did you want to know? What’s the idea? Swoon: What do you think about the Hindu concept of maya, or world as illusion? Whoa, I don’t even think about that. I’m too busy thinking about my head. What do you think about other people?

I don’t care about anybody else. No. You think you’re different from other people? Yes, that’s right. And if you think that’s bad, then I’m sad. But I’m not sad for me, I’m sad for you. That’s my biggest emotion for other people--to be sad for them. So what do you think about the idea of binary or dual opposites? Oh my God, that’s all I’m dealing with, just these logic opposites. This is an analog synthesizer here that I built. I did one performance with it and smoke came out and nothing could make me happier, but, you know it has to be redesigned. It just went up in flames! It made a lot of smoke and sound.

Tony Conrad as the Scientist - still from forthcoming movie Two Profiles: Tony Conrad & Genesis Breyer P-Orridge by Zeljko Mcmullen

Tony conrad as the Magician - still from forthcoming movie We Are Fools based on the major arcana of the tarot by Zeljko Mcmullen and Severiano Martinez “Learn at first concentration without effort: transform work into play; make every yoke that you have accepted easy and every burden that you carry light!” - Anonymous from Meditations On The Tarot (1985)

So it doesn’t have anything binary inside of it?

think?

Well, because it’s not like that, it means that it’s all about that. Because everything that’s not about something is about it. It’s like the other half, that’s the binary part. So, if there are two things, one is not, and one is; then everything is like that and it’s binary. This is the zero of the binary. Because there may be 1s and 0s in the digital system, but there are no 1s and 0s in the analog system at all. And that makes it pure other, which is the zero on the next higher level.

Oh uh, I think that we have...

And what’s the 1 in your system? If you are zero what is your other half? Digital! So you are not at all digital? I’m not at all digital, but see, that’s because I am! Because it’s the other half. So, you equally are the things that you are not? That’s true, that’s true, that’s true blue, so I see-it’s not absurd that I’m a nerd. It’s not absurd, it’s just inferred. So, is there competition or cooperation between zero and one? Oh yeah, yeah...well you can make it a question of your point of view. Yahoo, point of view. Hehe, ha ha. I don’t mess with it. What do you

www.swoonmagazine.com

synthesizer in this way. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10: yes. Direct analog audio synthesis. Synthesis is a mode of creation?

Oh, I’m not asking you I’m asking the reader. I don’t know what they think. They don’t care about me, they are thinking that they hate me now. They are thinking all of a sudden: “We thought we would like him, but we hate him after all.” Aren’t you?! Aren’t you?! CONFESS: yes you are thinking that you hate me. You wish I was dead. Okay, I will inhale some more lead, and it goes to me head. Oh, oh, oh, but you will all be dead, too, you know. That’s the way that it’s going to go....These little capacitors [from the synthesizer] are some of my favorites. They only have positive and negative; and, uh oh, this one has come released. See, you glue things in place but then they come released.

It’s low tech, I admit. But, you know, it has a keyboard function, too, that really drives it way over into the other realm--because each of these keys, you might say, is digital, they are off or on, but you know everything has its limits. This is a capacitor for the ages. What does a capacitor do? Well, really it’s just two pieces of tin foil that are slapped together with something in between, and when you put electricity on them, they attract each other. The plus and the minus attract each other and the electricity stays there. It would rather stay than go away.

So, does that mean that it has transcended duality? Yes, yes, well they already transcended duality because they are analog, so the best thing they can do is to become released. This is a weird situation to be in, especially for a component. Yes, it is trying and trying and trying to hold a charge, but now it’s unglued and at large and it can’t hold its charge. Oh, well, this knob here is probably responsible for the flames. I’m not going to actualize it right now, because it would be too frightening for you. Wheew, these things spin around, magnets spin around, yeah, the whole thing makes a sound. It’s like unbelievable to actually have composed a ten channel

And what happens to it when it’s in there? Does it make sound? Ah, no, that’s just all it does is keep itself in there. Yep. It’s like a prison for electricity. Yep, it is. It’s like a little prison. And like a prison, if you let the electricity in and out very rapidly, it does something really strange. If you go in and out of prison, after a while it doesn’t make any difference. And the same way, the high frequencies go right through the capacitor, but the low

frequencies stay. Lifers...Oh my god, this is resting on a crystal! A giant crystal. Oh, it’s hot. Is a crystal a form of technology? Uh, no...that’s nature. “Teknos” you know, it comes from a Greek word. The Greeks invented technology? I don’t know... They weren’t thinking of the same things that you and I are thinking when they use a word like that. They were not thinking of a lot of things that we think about everyday. Like Pythagoras? Pythagoras wasn’t thinking at all. He was kind of dumb. He just sat there, and he was jealous of people who talked, so he just got other people to sit and listen. And he would tell them, “Okay, if you listen and don’t say anything for five years, then I’ll talk to you...” Can you imagine? He was an egoist of a certain strange sort. Yes. Do you think he had any ideas that were worth waiting five years to hear? Uhhhhh, oh, now that’s a question isn’t it? We don’t really know. He never wrote anything down. He probably didn’t know how to write, that jerk. He wasn’t very forthcoming. All of his best ideas were so secret. He would threaten people with death if they revealed his secrets and, of course, the only secrets were the things that would disrupt his power circle. But, you know, he got a lot of things started, indirectly. Talking about things in a negative way can sometimes start them going in a positive way. This is really frightening. Suppose Hitler had been like that. Then maybe he would have talked about Nazism and Fascism in a hysterical way and then people would have gone against it. It didn’t work in his case. I don’t know why. Same thing with Republicanism... I keep hoping that if they talk about it enough that people will go in the opposite direction. An insurrection. Make a correction. But no such luck. It is a stupid situation. I think I just soldered myself.

death...or about people that don’t care about death, which is always alien and strange for people. They see somebody that doesn’t care if they are going to die or not and then that person has the power of their own moral fortitude in front of them and there is nothing to stop them except, like, you could just kill them and they don’t care. But as they are dying, then they change their mind, of course, and they think, “Oh no! I want to change the rules! Let’s come back and do this again.” And you say, “Next lifetime--maybe you, next time, lifetime, maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe... okay.” And they think “Oh yeah, I forgot about the next lifetime. Yeah.” But then their forgetting is permanent. Because the next lifetime may come--but it may not. Probably doesn’t come. But they didn’t notice that either, that the next lifetime didn’t come. And that damn explosive belt was heavy anyway and it was a pain in the butt to go through all of this, no second lifetime, no virgins or whatever. We get these strange versions, no versions, no forty virgins. These are the most powerful stories that you can get about what will happen to you after you die. My favorite story is about St. Augustine, who in fact had the idea of pre-birth guilt. Before you were born, you were already guilty because you were the result of carnal love and that was a sin. And that was somehow your fault and you were responsible for that. And you have to wash that away--that horrible stain. It was a fantastic gimmick because it sold for centuries. And it sells even now. I can hardly believe, but it does. People will believe it and they feel guilty anyway. People feel guilty but, strangely, not even just Christians, but also Jews and a lot of other people too. You know... it’s a way to feel. So, if you get it connected to an ethos, then it becomes part of your story.

And as far as Augustine’s story, it’s fun to trace back and see where it came from in his own personal story. He was an African guy--yeah, you know, they’re sexy! Yeah, he used to hang out with a lot of young men. And, like a lot of young men who liked other young men, he also loved his mother. She was a saint. In fact, she is a saint-Saint Monica. And they had a child. Because his father was not a Christian. He was a-something or, rather, he believed in Evil and Goodness as two sides of the universe. So, I’m sure then, when he was having sex with his mother he thought about this and he realized that only through his mother’s beliefs could he then, blah, blah, blah--receive redemption--blah, blah, blah. Eventually, when he ran away from Africa to Italy, she cleverly followed him--even though he tried to dump her by going out and getting on the boat early in the morning, she came along. Their son, “Gift of God” was his name, like “Deodato”, somehow died unfortunately--oooh. There was a lot of weirdness in their relationship. You can read about it in The Confessions, like all confessions, a text devised to conceal what should be confessed. Nothing was confessed, except, “I was bad, oh, I was bad.” “Oh, how were you bad? Hanging out with the boys? Were you bad with the boys?” Oh, what about the mother? Dumps the woman who was the mother of the child. And you know what he was guilty of? You couldn’t even speak the words back then. But, today, there are a lot of people whose father is also their grandfather. Or whose mother is also their grandmother. If your mother is your grandmother, then the womb got used twice for, like, weird things... Maybe even three times. So, anyway, this story doesn’t have anything to do with money. For more about Tony and his work visit tonyconrad.net.

Is there anything else you’d like to share? Sure, sure... I’d like to tell you a story. It’s going to be a story about...let’s see. I bet you’d like to hear a story about love. About love or about money. Money or crime or death--the threat of

by Shaun Frente Illustration by Albert Reyes

www.swoonmagazine.com

hey grow more perversely protean

from them a call to engagement, sometimes with things others like to ignore:

just as so many bands around

they “put the audience in action; let the slaughtered take a bow.” In the end,

them are prudishly procrustean.

their art speaks for itself, but Robbie and Megan have been so kind as to

But calling them “a band” is not

speak for it as well...

giving them enough credit. At the very least, they are an experience, an experiment, a boast, a strategy. They play at by-the-numbers venues, at quasi-legal-raves, at museums. They are a troupe, they are a hymn, they are a cabal of friends… When the “they” in question erupted onto the L.A. underground in 2007 as We Are The World, as realized and galvanizing as four Athenas from the head of Zeus, the enterprise comprised musicians Megan Gold and Robbie Williamson, alongside dancers/choreographers Ryan Heffington and Nina McNeeley. During that phase, the energies of music and dance were inseparable: cloaked in veils,

Swoon: Aside from being dreamers, or the world for that matter, it’s difficult to say who you are in standard genre terms. Even in today’s splintered micro-tag world! Does this ever present practical problems? Megan: Practicality is in the brain of the beholder and it’s only when we don’t embrace our essential nature that our path becomes less clear. Robbie and I have been writing music together for over ten years and our sound has never fit into a genre box with a pretty bow all wrapped up to further satiate the listener’s comfort zone. We’ve always been genrebending and ahead of our time. We strive to challenge ourselves and each other, therefore challenging the listener.

burqas, masks and an unsettlingly aggressive facelessness, We Are The

Robbie:

World’s members made up a high-BPM tableau-vivant, reconfiguring down

It really comes down to your definition of “practical” and “problem.”

to the beat with the precision and angularity of a Rubik’s Cube on meth. As

Fortunately, we’re so used to the fact that our music doesn’t fit into

a constellation defined by flow and change, it seems only natural that the

any real scene that it’s just what it is at this point. We also get really

project would grow vines and rhizomes with lives of their own, which is one

uncomfortable when we write something that would fit nicely into a

way of looking at Dreamers, the front-burner concern of Gold and William-

genre--combine this with an innate lack of desperation to be part of a

son these days. Though Dreamers’ sound and presence are of a different

group and you have a perfect storm to form a band floating in space like

timbre than WATW, some theatricality remains. Under any name, expect

a can of rare cobra meat.

Video stills by Dreamers

Megan:

In particular, I’m interested in why there was a need, or at the least an

We actually do have to work not to approach songs as verse/chorus/

impulse, to cordon off both your projects under two discrete banners. In

verse. This Dreamers record was a walk in letting in the right amount

your WATW gigs, there was a pulsing tightness, the songs were more of a

of our pop tendencies. We wanted to make a generally more melodic

piece with hands-in-the-air ravey anthems, the choreography was precise

record, while maintaining our usual what-the-fuck-ness. That’s how a

and sharp. When I first started going to your shows, it was impossible to

song like “Appaloosa” made it onto the record.

step into the same We Are the World twice… But at the same time, in the

I’m interested in what the card-carrying techno world wants to do with you. Robbie, I know you speak the Berlin-Detroit idiom fluently; you did a show with Jimmy Edgar for chrissakes… But I know the beat-faithful can be a

period before you officially launched Dreamers, there appeared a different kind of tension… I don’t mean to say things got sloppy at all, but more dirgey-arty-gothy. Can you talk about this?

little dogmatic in their expectation; tribal almost… So, what is your rela-

Robbie:

tionship with the techno world? I’ve always second-guessed that under any

The need just really came from the desire not to have a narrative to the

name, your project is too “pre-recorded” to make sense to a lot of people

music. Life obviously gets rather busy when you get older, so I think we

who see bands, but too much of a band for people whose idea of electronic

just wanted an outlet for a less complicated process.

music is decks and effects… So…?

Megan:

Robbie:

We were about halfway done writing the new record when we played

It really comes back to your question about practical problems. It just

those shows. This thing happened—a kind of phoenix rising—where

isn’t a problem for me, it is what it is and I’m very happy. Jimmy Edgar

it just didn’t feel right to play the new songs with theatrics or dance

remixed the first single off the record, “City Of Hope.”

incorporated. The record turned out pretty aggressive. Robbie and I

Megan: To answer your question in terms of the industry, yes, of course. You captured the conundrum quite succinctly—too this for that, too that for this. So, what resulted was the ignition of the fire that has become Germ, the label that we have started with Hecuba’s Jon Beasley & Isabelle Albuquerque.

www.swoonmagazine.com

are really not down with what’s going on politically and economically in this country. We’re fucking angry about this war and the new “conflicts” and the Federal Reserve, etc, etc, etc. I also have a certain mourning for how promising the world seemed not so long ago. Maybe I’m just way more informed now and I can’t disassociate this cultural condition from performing. Whereas Clay Stones challenged gender, sexuality and relationship norms, the new Dreamers record is much more overtly

We Are The World at LACMA

Photos by Kelly McKay

political…although if I step back I think those themes are more subtle to

Gaga, which is really bizarre given that you can’t really name a truer avatar

the ear than they are to my heart.

of “the industry” we’re talking about. Can you disclose how that even hap-

What we want from our experience playing live has changed through all

pened and why it didn’t happen?

of this. We have a desire to look the audience in the eyes and scream,

Megan:

“FUCK THIS FUCKING CORRUPTOCRACY! WHO’S WITH US!?!”

It’s true. Gaga’s boyfriend at the time was into us and he’s friends with

Ryan’s approach to WATW’s visual content is very visceral--a constant,

our then-manager. They broke up and that was it. It’s pretty crazy to

transient stream of esoteric beauty. He creates magical environments

think about as an opportunity to turn all those minds inside out. But I

from that place, but he is not politically minded. Nina is super busy with

certainly believe that everything happens for a reason and the power-

her new live projections and dance-integrated outfit WIFE. So, by very

monsters that be made the right decision. It would have been an offer

natural causes, we’re all focusing our attentions elsewhere for now.

too weird not to accept, but not our audience at all.

Megan, I think you’ve mentioned that you were supposed to tour with Lady

Dreamers self-titled record will be out on Germ Label this May.

and Mitch Ryder, to the people who know. (It’s also a damn good record.)

What accounted for all of this? There is of course the big-fish-in-a-small-pond hypothesis. In other words, in a city this depleted, it makes sense that its remarkably resilient creative energies coalesce. There is, of course, the underdog hometown pride that can slice across cultural boundaries. But maybe the most magical element of all was the power of Detroit radio. And here we are again in the land of true myths: indeed, legendary disc jockey Charles Johnson, aka “The Electrifying Mojo,” twisted radio logic and galvanized a generation by playing R&B, funk, and new wave alongside the first landmarks of Detroit techno. However, Mojo’s famous approach was anything but Jack FM- style roulette eclecticism: he played the music he truly liked, and the result was to shore up the continuity between Depeche Mode and Rick James, not the obvious differences. The problem with myths, however, is usually not that they aren’t true, but that they leave out the fine print. There’s the fact that DJ Ken Collier, though since overshadowed by Mojo’s larger than life persona, was breaking fledgling techno artists on the air even before the Electrifying One. Then there were the young turks Mojo took under his wing and let loose on the airwaves, notably co-founder of the uncompromising collective Underground Resistance, Jeff Mills, who donned the appropriately murky on-air moniker “The Wizard.” Furthermore, while you can never run out of homilies to the glory of Mojo’s 80s heyday, the truth is that the space opened up by Mojo lasted into the early years of this

The Hacienda

millennium. John Collins, another veteran of the Underground Resistance army, fondly recalled to me how, somehow, he and other tech artists got away with broadcasting live sets in their entirety from clubs like the Warehouse. Indeed, the “second wave” of Detroit tech radio was in some ways even more radical. Giving the lie to genre-barricades was one thing, but letting unknown turntablists dive into the trenches of a single genre, playing relentless sets of bootieshakes-per-minute ghetto house in well-nigh prime-time… Brother, that’s from another planet. But not only was it homegrown, it was there in the middle of the FM dial. This is, of course, unthinkable now, and we knew it was crazy then.

The simple truth is that, in a way, the Detroit underground has always hidden in plain sight, and I assumed the “real” techno music must be lurking elsewhere. Just when quasi-legal downtown venues like the Packard Plant and the Music Institute were throwing parties a stone’s throw from where I went The Packard Plant to college, here I was longing to escape to Manchester’s Hacienda, the now-defunct club run by post-punk charlatan Tony Wilson and New Order. Even then, I was fully aware that U.K rave more or less owed everything to a few Brits who started slipping exports from Chicago and Detroit into club sets. These days, I can hardly bring myself to listen to Happy Mondays, for instance, Wilson’s cash cow of the hour; to rave what the Sex Pistols were to punk. In reality, the Mondays were a gang of drug-

54 54 www.swoonmagazine.com www.swoonmagazine.com

Photo by Aidan O’Rourke, aidan.co.uk

Continued from page 29

Photo by Peter Walsh You can buy limited edition prints of many rock ‘n’ roll icons at www.peterjwalsh.com/shop.html

THE PERFECT DISASTER

dealing football hooligans masquerading as a rock band who opportunistically “re-invented” themselves as rave messiahs when Ecstasy and acid house swept across the U.K in the late 80s. Even in their born-again faux-techno guise, their relationship to underground club music was a purely cash-from-chaos ruse. Yet while the very Detroit originals the Brits were ripping off were reaching their first peak, I was busy scribbling the Mondays’ slogan “The Rave Is On” on the back of my jacket and even changing the spelling of my name in deference to the lead singer of those Mancunian pirates. O Detroit, please forgive me! Not that I was alone in missing the boat, to the degree that I truly missed it, in looking over to the Big Pond. Remember, it was Germany’s Kraftwerk that was trapped in the elevator alongside George Clinton, and no one—no one—denies that initial European alchemy. And that’s just the bumper-sticker version of roots: the proto-trance pulses of Italo and disco maestro Giorgio Moroder and the icy synth droning of the pre-rave Factory style records are high on the Detroit totem pole. But “rave”, that pointedly regressive cartoon of literal bells and whistles, not to mention pacifiers, was a slap in the face to the D-town vanguard, and it was a slap that pied-pipers of youth culture like Tony Wilson were

808 State’s Graham Massey

demanding to be thanked for delivering. In 1990, Wilson had the chutzpah to host a step-right-up! snake-oil media event entitled “Wake Up America, You’re Dead!”, wherein Derrick May and house pioneer Marshall Jefferson were given the memo that while Detroit and Chicago had been necessary, U.K. rave was now the only game in town. Reading the transcript of the disastrous event today, it’s hard to say what was more offensive to Derrick: the crass hucksterism that motivated these promoters, or their fiat that techno and Ecstasy are inseparable. “I don’t believe in natural highs,” quipped one of Wilson’s toadies. “You should have to pay for them.” These men were pushers in every loathsome sense. If there is anything that all Detroit heads can agree on, it’s that love of music-not drugs or money--comes first. Moreover, the Founding Fathers of the D, most vocally Derrick May, were unequivocal in their belief that Ecstasy poisoned the culture—and at the very least, after the British “Summer of Love” had shined its be-happy-or-die rays over the globe, techno and drugs were one and the same for much of the general public. I’ll return to this later, but Myth Debunker #645: yes folks, the people who make Detroit techno do not really do drugs, and many preach against them. Perhaps back on the mythic plane there was some poetic injustice here: England poisoned the purity of high-on-life Midwestern dance with drug culture in nationalist-Oversoul revenge for the New York Dolls (well, Johnny Thunders, really), single-handedly H-bombing the world of English punk. Whatever the case, Derrick told the Brits to go fuck themselves and stormed off; Happy Mondays gradually degenerated into truly un-listenable crackheads (yes, literally), the love at the Hacienda descended into drug-deal shoot-em-ups, and both it and Factory Records went belly up forever. But, arguably, America hasn’t really woken up—and to this day, many Americans still believe that electronic music was something that happened somewhere else.

Swoon: “Why does America hate techno?”

Daedelus: “Ok, two things…it’s really hard to define; it’s a huge genre that really isn’t even a genre—it includes all kinds of electronics. Here’s this vast breadth of music and people want specificity; they want love songs or drunk songs and that’s pretty much the extent of it. People want music to function very specifically. And then there are all these weird sounds and no lyrics: it’s full of full-frequency, disturbingly low bass, ultra piercing sounds and this is way out of your average sonic comfort zone. It’s like, the fear of the Other.” So why wasn’t I buying crates of Detroit techno albums in 1990? The question itself is loaded with all of the answers – a few of which may be unpleasant to some ears. First off, if your relationship to music is simply “buying albums,” you will never understand Detroit techno. Here’s one of the great ironies of the rockist politics of authenticity: the “phony, soulless” experience of techno is arguably more dependent on the live experience, of the Gestalt of real physical bodies reacting to the music, each other—and being in the world. It’s something you have to do. While you listen to techno at home, it’s always a kind of shadow of the full-frequency transmission. Even if you have the most killer stack of underground white labels in your possession, playing them alone in your bedroom misses the mark. More to the point here, in those early days, there weren’t that many good Detroit tech albums, simply because there weren’t that many albums, period. As Simon Reynolds points out in his Generation Ecstasy, techno is more about the interplay of ever-changing tracks, and often a song may only unfurl a few bars before morphing into a new collision of rhythms. It’s about the DJ-crowd alchemy of flows, shocks, and breaks; it’s about The Mix. Really, many of the best techno “albums” are just that—mixtapes of other people’s records, often ripped warts-and-all right from the soundboard. And there are some excellent compilations of the early stuff from Juan Atkins and Derrick May, say. But in the beginning—I mean the late 80s to the early 90s—the strongest techno albums often came from the U.K., and since the album was mainstream America’s preferred mode of consumption, so came the illusion that techno was a thoroughly Continental invention. So when yours truly bought his first acid house long-player, it was 90 by Manchester’s 808 State. A pretty great record; arguably one of the first full-on techno

K ra ft w er k

M an ue l G ot

ts ch in g

K la us S ch ul

tz e

We Are The Robots: A Special Relationship

ut here’s where things start to get really weird, and where the global alchemy of techno music darts down stretches of a transcontinental, inter-cultural Autobahn that no map can fully explain. I’m referring to the very strange links between Germany and the Motor City that have prompted some of the most cynical people I know to proclaim with a straight face that “techno will save the world.” Let me begin exploring some connections that have been less remarked upon, perhaps because they exist in that invisible hinterland that lies between electronic music and rock, a blind terrain for strict devotees of either camp. It’s no secret that in the late 60s and early 70s, Detroit was Detroit Rock City,

producing some of the most balls-to-thewall guitar-driven music the world had ever heard, namely, the Stooges and the MC5. But in the meantime, back in Germany, something strangely similar was going down. A generation of variously psyched out hippies were concocting new forms of music that were equally extreme and novel, a semi-genre that, largely after the fact, was corralled under the signifier “Krautrock,” a label that applied to groups as diverse as Faust, Kluster, Can, Ash Ra Tempel and –you guessed it—Kraftwerk. Here is not the time for a primer in that freaked-out sub-universe, but suffice it to point some key points. Take the three-piece psychedelic powerhouse Ash Ra Tempel, for example. Their first album delivers as much holy punishment as can be done with a drum kit and guitars, and has been called “the best album the Stooges never made.” And yet within the next decade, Ash Ra’s Klaus

But here comes the heavy race stuff. In case you haven’t noticed, techno usually gets boiled down to being “white” music. Not just white, but coldly Teutonic, menacingly Bismarckian even, and for the drive-by observer, maybe Derrick May

Bart Everly

Kevin Saunderson

Schultze had shed his potent skins to make spaced-out alien synthscapes, while axeman Manuel Gottsching went on to create 1981’s E2-E4, an hourlong masterpiece of hypnotic electro-pulsing that could have emerged from Detroit’s tech avant-garde ten years later. Also emerging from an art-rock background, bands like Can and Kluster plunged deeper and deeper into electronics, and to this day, occasionally play in the studios with young puppies of techno-experimentation. Finally, it’s often forgotten that Kraftwerk, before re-inventing themselves as the unchallenged synecdoche of Euro-electronica, were themselves testing out the waters of psychedelia proper on a few lesser-heard records in the early 70s (the band has for reasons we may imagine, suppressed these chinks in their seamless silicon). In short, something about these two post-industrial, automotive centers mysteriously produced an uncannily similar trajectory of sounds and aesthetics; two undergrounds that seem to share a common soil.

56 56 www.swoonmagazine.com www.swoonmagazine.com

And in a way, that guy—who spoke in the exact same Alpha dog-in-a-glass-booth cadence as do all sportscasters—was right. You cannot overestimate the importance of Kraftwerk as a kind of clearing of the tab. Kraftwerk’s Rolf and Florian owe not one cent to Mother Africa. Not one bleepin’ bleep. John Tesh is more indebted. And it was precisely Kraftwerk and the placid washes of what’s called motorik (that’s right, driving music) that served as the foundation for Detroit in the early 80s, as these black teenagers pillaged the icy synthwaves of Europe in much the same way as Jagger and Richards did, in reverse, two decades earlier. The fact is that the majority of the big name Detroit DJs have always been black, yet what we call Detroit “purists” are those who stick with the spartan, stripped down synths of Kraftwerk. When too much of da funk creeps in, it’s no longer “Detroit” anymore. (This Blake Baxter

too is a sub-myth, as the rich legacy of Detroit house music—still to come in our story—will attest.) Luckily, along with “Trans-Europe Express”, we also learned from the Germans that such ideas of purism can all too easily slip into Nazism even if only in a metaphoric way. Techno is about the joy of miscegenation at its very heart—or, maybe more accurately, it makes any questions of a racial “sound” or ownership far from black and white. Not to say that race is negated or that the real bodies involved in its production or consumption are beyond consideration. It’s just that the standard operator’s manual of culture and race (not to mention class and gender, you cultural studies people!) cannot account for the mechanics at work here. And there is always precious White Guilt: few people to my knowledge have ever leveled claims of cultural theft against the black folk who borrowed from Europeans, in the same way that has been done to the Stones or Elvis Presley, simply because after all that Whitey has stolen, it’s too damn embarrassing to ever bring up. But speaking of racial bodies in motion, back to the libretto: it’s the early 1990s, and while the faithful of the Detroit underground Derrick May are manically

preaching in the street, the American underground-at-large is getting all gooey over plaid-clad Seattle butt rock and Brit Pop, from Blur to…uh, the Manic Street Preachers… So, what does the rising tide of young, black and talented architects of Detroit tech, now in its Second Wave, do? They start making sorties, both in person and via vinyl emissaries, to the bizarro-world of Europe. The British pop charts were so fucked up at that point— well, a schizophrenic Top 40 is as English as Evelyn Waugh and bad teeth, really—that lyric-free nutzoid raver tracks could sidle up next to godawful pop puke like Roxette and Wilson-Phillips. Don’t be misled: artists from the D have no qualms about getting paid if it be on their own terms and if the Limeys and Frogs were going to cough up royalties and treat Derrick and Kevin like royalty, no one was complaining. And then, again, was Germany; there was the second, and far more constructive, Berlin Airlift--this time of beats. During WWII, remember, the Big Three overhauled their auto plants to spew out war machines and the D was the “arsenal of democracy”, supplying the materiel to bomb Germany into…what Detroit looks like now. This too may connect Detroit and Germany: these are places where you must deal with your past, or else. Continued on page 82 Photo by Scott Spellman

Eddie Fowlkes

Juan Atkins

Bart Everly

it’s easy to see why. Years ago I heard some Detroit classic rock DJ airing his precis of the history of popular music and he referred to Kraftwerk as “Nazis in trenchcoats” who stormtrooped over the authentic, organic flow of the People’s music, corrupting it forever. The pure and unmediated spontaneity, in other words, of Paul Rodgers, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, and Eric Clapton: the British, white boutiquedilettantes whose musical foundations were the black mud of Delta blues.

www.swoonmagazine.com

Est ab lish ed 20 03

SHOW CAVE NIGHT GALLERY

is Eric Nordhauser, Hazel Hill McCarthy III and fiends.

Photos by Kelly McKay

Eric Nordhauser

Douglas J, McCarthy & Hazel Hill McCarthy III

Photos by Felix Myklehar

William Marshal of OCTAVIUS — Show Cave’s ever-present and mysterious sound wizard

Rising out of the grime and glitter of the Los Angeles metropolitan landscape at the beginning of the 21st century, SHOW CAVE creeps from one decaying architectural corner of Southern California to another. Eric and Hazel’s curatorial instincts through SHOW CAVE have attracted a dedicated cult following and are a magnet for like-minded souls from around the world. Currently disembodied, SHOW CAVE continues to force-feed the uncomfortable and introduce a new age of spectacle as a mobile, multi-media entity. showcave.org FACING PAGE (L to R): //TENSE//, New Age Wolves Night, Johnny Dirt, Travis Egedy, Santi Vernetti, Anonymous, Actually Huizenga, Freddy Christy, Matt Furie

With a focus on subversive music, video, performance and visual art, SHOW CAVE’s 7 year history has included artists and friends such as Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Douglas J. McCarthy (Nitzer Ebb), William Marshal (OCTAVIUS), Keenan Marshall Keller, Terminal Twilight, Eric Wareheim (Tim and Eric’s Awesome Show), Animal Charm, Chanel Eddines, Paper Rad, Aids 3-D, Date Farmers, Albert Reyes, Gatekeeper, SFV Acid, Light Asylum, //TENSE//, White Ring, Floating World Comics, Owleyes, Pictureplane, Glass Candy, AJ Liberto, Haters, Frank Alpine, Nite Jewel, Teen Inc., Legowelt, TLR, Pacific Housing Authority, Bronze, Pregnancy Pact, Present Moment, Sleep Clinic, Jenny No No, Amber Halford, DJs Adam and Job, DJ Douggpound, Aiyana Udesen, Matt Furie, Synchronicity Space, Dame Darcy, Jesse Wiedel, King Dude, Kathleen Daniel, Mathwrath, Tommyboy, Jules Marquis, Bobbi Woods, Jon Clark, Dev01ded, Alejandro Garcia Contreras, Drew Blood, Geneva Jacuzzi, Mario Zoots, Modern Witch, Fervent Moon, Drone Dungeon, Santi Vernetti, Icy Lytes, Nathan Maxwell Caan, Nic Chancellor, Abdi Taslimi, Jacinto Astiazarán, Terrible Whore, Hooliganship, Laura Brothers, Drippy Bone Books, *E Rock, Violet Tremors, Too Young to Love, Aboveground Animation, 69, Empty Bird, Mikki and the Mauses, Imagine the Band, Hard Place, Actually, Weltenbuerger, Rocky, Kittens and Telefantasy Studios.

TOP clockwise: Eric Nordhauser, Shannon Keller, Albert Reyes, Matt Furie, Keenan Marshal Keller, Date Farmers. Video Stills: from left to right: ROW 1: Rich Bott, Jules Marquis, Hazel Hill McCarthy III; ROW 2: Eric Nordhauser, Extreme Animals, Nathan Maxmell Caan; ROW 3: Eric Wareheim, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Tommy Blackburn (Tommyboy). BOTTOM PHOTOS: Dallas Acid (Kelly McKay), Gatekeeper, Show Cave’s last night in Eagle Rock, and Eric Nordhauser (Kelly McKay).

www.swoonmagazine.com

By Suzy Poling suzypolingmagichour.blogspot.com

Julia Holter Interview by Charles Mallison

When I first saw Julia Holter, randomly, in the cozy, now-defunct Club Ding-a-Ling, I had no idea what I was about to experience. I was so swept away by the heavenly beauty of her songs that I just cried, to an embarrassing degree. Her ethereal voice, so delicately entwined with the dreamy reverb of synth keyboard and echoing effects, put me in a psychedelic trance. The projections of space flickering behind her only added to the sublimity of the experience. I was glad to be in the dark, amongst friends, while this music pierced something lodged deep in my heart, streaming it out from my eyes. Healing music. Her relationship to electronics fascinates me. While her tools are primarily electronic, her music has more in common with folk, psych, drone, musique-concrète, modern classical, chamber music, even dreamy 80s pop, than what we usually think of when we hear “electronic music.” She is an avant-classical pianist with an amazing voice who makes some of the most soulful synth music I’ve ever heard. Through her drum machines and synthesizers I hear flesh and blood. I imagine wandering alongside ancient castle walls. Her sound is quite romantic, so soft and lilting, even in moments of grainy, crackling dissonance over densely layered tracks. The visuals behind her that first magical night I saw her play should accompany her always-- her music is as far out, grand and full of sparkling light as any distant galaxy in the sky. Intro by Kelly McKay

EARLY WORK What were you listening to during your formative years? I went to a lot of new music concerts of atonal music. It seemed really exciting at the time. The Rite of Spring, things that didn’t have a strong tonal center. I love jazz but I don’t know a lot about it. [When I first heard] Live-Evil by Miles Davis I was sitting at lunch and my friend came up and put headphones on me and I listened to this funky atonal craziness. It was so cool and I thought, this is amazing, I want to write!

www.swoonmagazine.com

You started in music by studying composition. Can you talk about being purely a notational composer and writing songs to be performed by other people? In high school I sang a lot, but secretly. I would sing Joni Mitchell songs and play them on the piano. It was for fun and I didn’t take it seriously. I didn’t write songs at all. Right when I was applying to schools I decided to go into composition. I hadn’t really written anything but I knew I wanted to go into music. So I went into composition and ended up hating the academic classical atmosphere. The music school was great but the composition atmosphere was very boring. The classical ideas of the way music develops just didn’t seem to fit with what I wanted to do. They always seemed to jeopardize the intuitions. A lot of music made in institutions has this stilted, modernist bent where they’re trying to be complicated all of the time. You can’t just have four notes on the page, you have to have 5,000. The first piece I ever wrote was for oboe and cello. It was actually four short pieces about different parts of California. It was my first time away from home and I was homesick. I had one piece about [my native] LA and that was this sassy ostinato. It was sweet and simple. Then I wrote this big chamber piece. It was this huge mammoth piece of crap. It was full of notes and clangy and fast and awful. My early music is like anyone’s early music. It’s sort of shitty because I was trying to figure things out. Did you encounter a lot of 20th century classical composers in college? Steve Reich? John Cage? Cage is awesome. Cage is what saved my college experience in music. I felt like in academic composition there was always an imposition on things, but with John Cage there’s no imposed force. There’s something I love of his called “mesostics,” which is a randomly generated poem that you make from a text. You use this process and it turns into something else. I think you end up using intuition as well, though some people might argue with me. It was very natural to me. It just fit in with my way of

working. For some people the academic thing works. They take texts from Walt Whitman or something like that and they set it to music. And it’s always like this: (high-pitched operatic singing). It’s always crazy over the top and virtuosic, instead of singing like you really feel it. You have a really amazing range. (Laughter) Thank you. I didn’t mean to go so high.

FIRST SONGS How did you transition from being a composer to being a singer/songwriter and performer? I started recording on Easter day one year. I found some Christian lyrics to an Easter song and I wanted to make my own song out of it so I downloaded Audacity and just sang into my computer. I started recording some weird stuff. I would take a book of Schoenberg Klavierstücke and I would play chords from it and sing over it. I would do isolated chords and put a terrible beat behind it, from a little Casio keyboard. It was the only thing I had at the time. I would just play it out and sing, “Klavi Er Stücke,” and the expression markings in the music itself. That’s the way I found the lyrics. I still work this way where I borrow stuff, take it almost to the point where you don’t recognize it. There’s some of that on the Eating With Stars EP. I’m totally shameless how I come up with words. I borrow from people and I borrow from different cultures and I don’t care. I cite them if it’s relevant. The first time I ever saw you perform, it was at the Smell and you had a harmonium. What inspired you to play a harmonium? I was in college and I went on a trip to India. I got the harmonium there. I had never played Indian music, but I wrote a song in Hindi, using the glossary from a Hindi phrasebook. I took words, like flower names, and built this song. I sang in in public for the first time ever with the harmonium accompanied by the other students on the trip. It was totally natural to me. I just loved it. It felt totally weird because I was singing in Hindi, in front of these Indian musicians who have this incredible tradition of music. It was hard for me to do it well, but it wasn’t hard for me to want to do it.

Photo by Charles Mallison, Montage by Rachel Frank and Elizabeth Candela

It’s all electronic. I used this Casio synthesizer that my parents got it for me when I was 16 for the horns and the beats. It has built-in beats? Photo by Kelly McKay

LIVE ACT

Whenever I see you live, you have a really simple setup--a keyboard, an effects pedal, a microphone and an amp. I like it like that. I don’t like too much technology in my way. If I want to loop something, my first thought is, “I just need someone playing with me. I don’t want to loop this.” Especially my new songs. They have some intense percussive parts and I just can’t bring them out live. I’d rather just play as a human. I’ve been having fun at my live shows now because I just sing the songs and play them almost like a folk musician, playing them as I can play them.

Yeah. It’s cheesy. I didn’t use it for a long time until I discovered that the beats sound really good. It has some nice reverb. How many tracks did you have on “Maria?” Probably about 60-70. A lot of times I have five different drum tracks...usually I have around 20 vocal tracks, though for “Maria” there’s only one long part of me singing. One track for my piano, one track for bass, then I’ll have maybe two string pads, three or four horn sections, and a lot of layered chorus sounds on top of each other. So you played all the tracks on “Maria”? I play all the tracks on all of my songs, unless noted. “Maria” has a harmonica part too. I played it for the first time on there.

Can you talk about playing a full-sized synthesizer versus playing an actual piano?

FOUND TEXTS

It’s funny because I think of it as a piano, but not a very good one. I use it because I don’t have a regular piano. I grew up with a piano so this is the next best thing. The piano sound on this keyboard--I don’t like it very much, so I use the effects pedal, put a little something on it.

I listened to “Maria” and that was fun. I didn’t even realize that the lyrics were nonsense until you started singing “scherzo”.

RECORDINGS You had a new record, Tragedy, out recently and two more coming out this year. Do you record with the same kind of minimal approach that you take to your live shows? The way I record is totally different from my live setup, in the sense that I have a bunch of tracks. My first recordings tended to get very large--like 160 tracks. I’m getting better at condensing them, but I tend to orchestrate and have a lot of different sounds going all the time. What was the production like on your song “Maria”?

www.swoonmagazine.com

I do a lot of stuff with phonetic translation, [from many different languages]. I take the sound of what they’re saying and turn it into English, which is, of course, totally subjective because I alter it according to feelings too, but it’s so beautiful and I couldn’t come up with it on my own. With “Maria” it’s playful, with other songs like “Days of You” it becomes really emotional for me. These random pairings of words and the way syntax totally changes but can still mean similar things--like, “Why Sad Song?” I never would have come up with a song called “Why Sad Song?” but it totally sounded like what they were saying. And I found out that the song is called “Sadness” [in Tibetan]. The words may be different but the spirit of the original carries through. Is that the same way you did Tragedy? Tragedy is different. At the time I was reading Greek tragedies. I based Tragedy off of Euripedes’ Hippolytus because it has to do with

powerlessness and helplessness. The goddess Aphrodite wants to curse all of these people because she’s jealous of another goddess, so she creates a whole series of events. Hippolytus falls in love with her husband’s son because she’s been cursed by Aphrodite. And she can’t help it, being in love, so she he kills herself. It’s so amazing, I can write about that. I like writing songs about sensory deprivation. Or about when you’re deprived of something and there’s this obstacle in your way. I have a new song that’s about how you can only see your lover through the mirror. I love this stuff. I don’t mean to love it. I’m embarrassed by it but I come back to it all the time. You’re doing a record right now inspired by Gigi. I’ve never seen the movie or read the book, but are you basing it on-Both. It’s a short story by Colette. The original inspiration was that I watched it as a child. You know, we have these fixations. At the time I never thought about the story, I just loved Gigi and her mannerisms. As a little kid I would be running around saying (French accent) “I don’t understand the Parisians” and singing lines from the songs. A lot of my friends are writing music from their childhood. It’s like you never quite get away from your first memories of what music is. I think that there’s a lot of intuition and imagination and making work that you love, that you’re devoted to. What really are we remembering from our childhood? How accurate is it? My songs come from my imagination. It takes a while to execute them, but with most of my ideas, the initial vision will just come to me. As an adult you start analyzing things, putting them into context. You have goals that you have to meet. That’s one part of your brain. But there’s another part that’s childlike and playful and that’s the part for making music. Tragedy is out now on Leaving Records, and the Ekstasis LP just came out on RVNG Intl. juliashammasholter.com

ALIEN TAKEOVER PHOTOGRAPHY BY BENJAMIN GALLARDO STYLING BY MAX SMITH HAIR BY BIANCA SPECIALE MAKE-UP BY MEGUMI WAKABAYASHI MODELS: ALEX AND VIVIANE AT NEXT PRODUCED BY KELLY MCKAY SPACECRAFT SCULPTURE BY NIKOLAI AND SIMON HAAS, COURTESY OF RYAN HEFFINGTON

www.swoonmagazine.com

Alex wears dress by Faluni & Shane Peacock Viviane wears catsuit by Marco Marco

Vivane wears gold lame cape—stylist’s own www.swoonmagazine.com

Alex wears turqouise pendant choker by Gypsy Global Chic, gold leather & chain top by Maggie Barry 69

www.swoonmagazine.com

Viviane wears dress by Falguni & Shane Peacock

www.swoonmagazine.com

Viviane wears brushed satin dress by Erika Ikeler for 8 Limbs Boutique, Los Angeles Alex wears grey silk jersey dress by Pierreancy

Illustration by Eric Nordhauser

Interview by Shaun Frente and Kelly McKay Video Stills by Martin D’Argensio

From a conversation between Swoon editors in the afterglow of an excellent Glass Candy performance: Shaun: I could write a book about Glass Candy. Kelly: Why? Shaun: They’re the best group on the planet right now. Kelly: That’s a pretty grandiose statement. Shaun: I can’t think of anyone better. They can do no wrong. If they put a foot an inch in any other direc74

www.swoonmagazine.com

tion, I may actually despise them, but they’re exactly where they need to be. I was overwhelmed with this tonight. They present authentic fakeness, the perfect antidote to the culture of fake authenticity. I mean that they use sounds and modes of music, like disco, that people often, usually for very bad reasons, deem plastic or nihilistic or vapid and use them to make pop music to elevate our species. They’re the ne plus ultra hipster band but they’re really not that at all. They understand pop secrets and could decide to do the things that are so evil, but they don’t.

woon: First of all, thank you for existing; you two are an undeniable glittering prize in our universe! When Glass Candy is mentioned at the Swoon bunker, we might as well be moaning the name of a teen crush – hell, that barely counts as a simile… Anyway, B/E/A/T/B/O/X is a towering presence in our musical pantheon – the Swoon house vinyl is perhaps the most dog-eared piece in our stacks--not to mention cat-chewed. Honestly, we are salivating over the prospect of Body Work in a way that takes us back to high school (teen-glee again)… So here’s the inevitable question: even though you’ve been trickling out increasingly devastating EPs and singles since B/E/A/T/B/O/X, it has been four years and counting (and we are counting…) Are you having any jitters about having your next child after so long? Glass Candy: We are right on schedule for our third. It takes us about five years to make each full album. We have to live with the songs for that long. One of the singles from Body Work called “The Price” was written for B/E/A/T/B/O/X in 2006, but it didn’t fit with the direction we were going for that album. It was too aggressive, so we sat on it for a few years. We have about forty five songs that are on the firing squad for Body Work. Twelve to fifteen of the most appropriate tracks have to make it through our rigorous obstacle course of touring and editing before they can be called proper album tracks.

way we hear it in our heads. We love punk and consider ourselves to be a punk band. We are permanently outside of everyone. That doesn’t seem like it’s going to change. We just do what we feel like doing and let people decide for themselves where and if they need to file it. Music is music. We are Glass Candy and we love anything with a voice and a heartbeat. It’s all the same. Anyone who expresses confusion about movements or camps is only showing their fear that the world might pass them by. But it already has. Change is constant. Life is temporary. And that’s beautiful.

We’re curious… Is there any kind of consistency to “the Glass Candy fan”? Are we just a big motley world clique, or have you profiled your devotees somehow? All the kitties in Candyland are very different. One common thread, though, tends to be writers, designers, painters, photographers, sculptors, directors, etc. People working hard on their things with glass music as a wallpaper to their lives and dreams. For whatever reason, it took a lot of people forever to see the historical continuity between punk and club culture—like, maybe not until 24 Hour Party People came out did it dawn on many people that there was such a connection, maybe because so many people feel the need to put “rock” and “dance music” into safely discrete boxes. Glass Candy’s trajectory is along similar territory; your move from a no-wave artsy unit to a dynamic disco duo…and that incredible story of Johnny tossing away his broken guitar after having his rib smashed by it! That’s downright mythic; it’s like the road to Damascus story. But as much as you’ve evolved, there’s still a remarkable sense of continuity in almost all of your work. In addition to riffing on all of this, could you tell us if you’ve experienced any friction from the sometimes mutually exclusive guitar/rock/indie/artpunk and synthesizer/disco/techno/ ravers? We have used drum machines on every record since 1999 with our first single. Over time...we have learned how to make electronic music the

Photo by Kelly McKay

Glass Candy’s long-awaited new LP BODY WORK is out this spring on Italians Do It Better Be sure to check out Johnny Jewel’s second band Chromatics’ shimmering new record: Kill for Love And last, but certainly not least, check out After Dark--a compilation by their fine label released last year

Another thing we find so striking—unparalleled, really—about Glass Candy is your seemingly paradoxical marriage of artifice and sincerity. A song like “Covered In Bugs” takes us back to downtown performance art, you know, La MaMa at its peak or something. Very studied; detached. But overall, even though you’re obviously playing with the past in la mode retro, Glass Candy is miles away from the smug irony of many contemporaries who use disco as kitsch and kitsch alone. (We won’t name names…) Take the “our bodies, ourselves” intro rant on B/E/A/T/B/O/X… we hear at least a tip of a tongue swirling in cheek, but at the same time it’s from the heart. Please tell us anything you can about this remarkable tone of yours! Everything we say is sincere. We are not interested in irony. But we know how to have fun with what we do. But that’s just one piece of the puzzle. Sometimes it’s cathartic, sometimes menacing, sometimes isolated, sometimes celebratory. All of the moods and emotions are necessary for a complete image. In the esoteric world of musical criticism, we tend to have a hard time grasping joy in art. But joy is just as powerful of a tool as any other. And equally difficult to convey as artists. We don’t care about kitsch. “Covered In Bugs” is about feeling the world closing in around you and even your own skin feeling like a prison. Paralyzed by confusion and unable to appreciate the simple things in life that are at the core. Very curious about Ida’s renunciation of technology (no cell; no computer). When and how did that come about, and why? Can you speak to the tension between how technologically-based your music is and your personal distance from technology? We love technology. But we started recording in 1989 and have just been using the same tools since then. It’s what we know and feel comfortable with. For us it’s all about efficiency of expression. The tools

we use are more direct for the way that we work. In terms of computers and cell phones...Ida never got either one when they came out, so Johnny had to get them so we could stay in touch. One of the reasons this interview took so long is because Ida writes her interviews down on paper in Portland and mails them to Johnny in Montreal. How does your collaboration function being that you live in two different countries? Do you wait to work together in person or email back and forth? If the latter, how does that fit in with your distance from technology? We write separately and collage when we are together. On stage, on tour, in the studio, on the plane...anytime we are together, we are brainstorming like crazy. Then we return to our corners and sort out the pieces. Then we meet again. We did this when we both lived in the same city. Johnny and Ida don’t hang out together. We work together and write together. We’d like to know more about your favorite music and your relationship to techno. What do you love, what can’t you stand? We are not record collectors. We don’t know anything about techno or disco. We like what we hear at the clubs, but couldn’t tell you the names of the songs. We don’t hear any music we can’t stand. It’s all made by people and they all have something to say. Some people are better at expressing themselves than others and those are the tracks that really inspire us. Body Work conjures ideas of the healing arts...massage, reiki, rolfing, acupuncture etc. Is the title a reference to any of those things? That’s exactly what the title is about! Your graphic design looks to be influenced by photography--specifically Guy Bourdin and Helmut Newton. Can you talk a little about the inspirations behind your design? All of our records have to look eatable. That’s the golden rule for our

www.swoonmagazine.com

design. We love Warhol and the fashion photographers you mentioned. The sense of fantasy and the dreamlike state is very appealing to us. Also, the cut-up art comes to us via punk through Dada. Erwin Blumfeld is also incredible. Editorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s note--a few weeks after reading this I dreamt that I ate all the images we made for this piece. Little round tasty crisps they were...only to find out they were the only copies! So relieved to wake and find it wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t so. Italians Do It Better: vivaitalians.blogspot.com Gorgeous photos by the Glass family: primitivedesire.blogspot.com

A ubiquitous figure in the Los Angeles underground, Quinn Brayton is a musician (Frank Alpine) and obsessive record collector: from the looks of his digs, one gets the feeling that the vinyl sees Quinn as the guest. From the archives, here is a cherry-picked tour of a criminally neglected corner of the musical universe.

that the phrase “synth-punk” gets bandied about. And yet there were surely punk bands that used synth, which was kind of the antithesis of what punk was supposed to be, at least in that dogmatic dog-collar and mohawk definition. There is no way to dispel the myth of “punks against synth,” but there have been plenty of bands that have bridged the gap between punk and New Wave, holding on to the rough, raw DIY ethos of the former without slamming the door on the more sophisticated and intellectually refined possibilities of the latter. In doing so, these bands

Although these days you can see the word “synth” as a prefix attached to just about any genre (synth-goth, synth-core, etc.), it’s rare if ever

1. RICH AND FAMOUS-Very Complex/ Nuclear Bondage- 7” (1978) File this under WTF? After countless listens I am still not sure how to categorize this. Is it acid damaged folk synth? Post-Rock Hippie Wave? To further confuse matters, the B-Side “Nuclear Bondage” comes out of nowhere with an abstract experimental synth piece that would fit nicely in any Throbbing Gristle fan’s collection. They released two other 45s I am aware of, both recommended. 2. ALGEBRA MOTHERS (aka A MOMS)Strawberry Cheesecake/Modern Noise-7” (1979) “Strawberry Cheesecake” is an obscure Punk/ Wave classic with infectious keyboard line. “Modern Noise” takes a more artsy No Wave approach but definitely is worth your time. 3. THE GIRLS- Jeffrey I Hear You/Elephant Man-7”(1979) Twisted art punk from Boston, released on Pere Ubu’s legendary Hearthan label. I also highly recommend the Reunion LP released in ‘86, which compiles several great studio tracks and live material. 4. THE DODGEMS-Science Fiction (Baby

www.swoonmagazine.com

SYNTH PUNK

You’re So)/Hard Shoulder-7” (1979) One of my favorites. Synth wave from the UK or possibly the far reaches of outer space. They also released a great 45 called “Lord Lucan Is Missing” in 1980. Both are fairly easy to find. 5. LAST FOUR (4) DIGITS- Big Picture EP -4 song 7” (1980) Killer proto-punk, Killed By Death Recordssounding, but with synth. Standout track is “City Streets”. 6. MYDOLLS-Nova Grows Up-3 song 7” (1980) Legendary Houston female-fronted dark art punk with a strong social/feminist slant. I am baffled as to how this band is somewhat overlooked in the history of women in punk. Look for the “Imposter” 7” and the excellent 12” from ‘83 Speak Softly And Carry A Big Stick, both of which I highly recommend. Also, keep an eye out for the MYDOLLS in a very brief appearance in Wim Wenders “Paris,Texas”. 7. PINK SECTION- Self-Titled 5 song 12”(1980) Totally fun Bay Area Punk/Wave. They also put out a great 7” in 1979 and appear on the

excellent Can You Hear Me? Music From The Deaf Club live compilation from 1980. 8. SURFACE MUSIC-I Am A Janitor/Slim Boy7” (1980) Fun & catchy novelty S.F. punk/wave. “I Am A Janitor” is an absolute lost classic. 9. INDUSTRY-Self-Titled 5 song 12” EP (1980) Excellent synth wave from Little Neck, NY. Fans of minimal synth take note, but I think this one would appeal to many. “Ready For The Wave” is the standout track, in my opinion. Swirling synths, robotic drums, fake vocal delay effects (they just repeat words and back away from the mic: trust me it’s awesome!). In a nutshell, all kinds of straight-up fucked up. Great record. 10. BOUND & GAGGED-Self Titled 4 song 12” EP (1980) Hey kids! Were you aware that the No Wave existed in places other than New York? Allfemale Boston No-Wave masterpiece that should be on everyone’s top 10 No Wave round-ups. What the hell is wrong with you people? Abrasive, jagged, and angular art punk. They also have a couple of great tracks on Modern Method Records’ Wicked Good Time

to a wider palette. Often the results were more complex, interesting, and challenging than by-the-numbers punk, without care for where it belonged. Collecting these records has always been a lonely pursuit - as they tend to violate most collectors’ rigid parameters. Here are just a few treasures worthy of rescue from obscurity:

created a sub-genre of their own, frequently lumped into the broad category of post-punk, but I make the case that synth-punk is worthy of consideration in its own right: after all, some of these acts were there from the beginning, so the “post” is sometimes a misnomer. What appeals to me the most with this kind of music is that, like me, it is strange and unclassifiable. I’m intrigued by the experimentation with instruments and the use of synths, which gave these musicians access

By Quinn Brayton

RARITIES 11

from 1981. 11. OBSERVERS OBSERVING OBSERVABLESEP-4 song 7” (1980) The first track “Watch Out For The Other Guy” sounds like a Residents-inspired mindfuck, and the entire EP gets even stranger from there. Kinda sounds like Zappa-influenced minimal synth if you can wrap your head around that one. 12. NULL AND VOID-Happiness & Contempt-6 song LP (1980) Great California Devo-esque punky dorkwave. Give “Procreation” a try at your next Stratego party. 13. I.U.D.-Precious+2- 7” (1981) Art punk weirdness from Orange, California. Dual female vocals with a quirky, somewhat Liquid Sky soundtrack-ish synth, bass, and drum machine instrumentation. Somewhat of a Holy Grail amongst collectors, so good luck finding it. 14. RED ASPHALT-4 song 7” (1981) S.F. synth punk at its finest. 15. INFLATABLE BOY CLAMS- 5 song double 7” (1981)

Post-Pink Section demented art punk weirdness. Standout tracks are “Skeletons”, and a hilarious spoken word piece entitled “I’m Sorry”.

minimal synth 7” in 1979 called Fully Coherent that should also be mentioned. Unfortunately, copies fetch somewhere around $200 so keep your fingers crossed that somebody reissues it.

16. IXNA-Mi Ne Parolas/Ixna Portal Echo-7” (1981) S.F. art wave sung in Esperanto. No shit. Weird, fun, funky and disjointed. Released on San Francisco’s excellent Dumb Records, which also released records by Novak, Bob, and the Survivors, all very much worth your attention.

18. NERVOUS GENDER-Music From Hell LP (1981) The crowning achievement in synth punk. Harsh synths and confrontational lyrics, NG make it very clear that they do not like you. Did you know Phranc was in this band? Contrary to “popular opinion,” side two (Beelzebub Youth) is actually NG as well.

17. THE THING FROM THE CRYPT-LP (1981) Absolutely phenomenal UK art punk LP including such stellar post-punk acts as Exhibit A, Sad Lovers and Giants, S-Haters, Gambit of Shame, and more, but the reason I bring this LP to your attention is the inclusion of “Pepsi Cola” and “Squash” by the Soft Drinks. “Pepsi Cola”, in my opinion, is the quintessential synth punk track. Very fucking punk and in your face, with the instrumentation consisting of vocals, synth and drums. No guitars!!! The Soft Drinks were a three- piece consisting of members of anarcho-punk legends Rudimentary Peni and The Magits. Plenty has been written about Rudimentary Peni, so I will spare you, but the little-known Magits released an excellent dark

19. JACKET WEATHER-When Shadows Move- 6 song 7” (1983) Mid to slow post-punk with synth played on a Casiotone, giving it a cold, brooding, yet serene feeling. 20. SHORT-TERM MEMORY-Effect Of Excess-10 song LP (1984) Synth wave out of Kansas, of all places. A couple of dud tracks but overall a delightful record. Standout tracks are “I Don’t Care” and “Banzai!”

SAM COOPER/PHARAOHS

Mr. Sam Cooper has been a magical fixture in the Los Angeles music scene since his heart told him to move to yonder California to surf in 2004. Folks may have caught a glimpse of him at Amoeba Records, where he worked preserving and sharing the grand musical tradition many moons ago, or perhaps you’ve eyed him gingerly cutting a feverish rug at Michael Stock’s post-punk fiesta Part Time Punks. Sam Cooper also composes right and true tunes for which audiences and dancers shiver-shake. L.A. based dance companies The MOVEMENT movement and the L.A. Contemporary Dance Company have had the pleasure of tripping the light fantastic to his sonic wonders. His solo project Big Swell has driven folks into wild movement and heavy trances with precisely blood curdling, supremely magnificent sound. As of 2008 Sam Cooper and Alejandro Cohen of the non-profit web radio collective Dublab have been utilizing their complementary talents to develop the magnetic sound of the Pharaohs. Toms and kitties, dandies and Delilahs, a conversation with Mr. Sam Cooper on electrifying sounds and the Pharaohs: In your solo project, Big Swell, you were performing experimental electronic compositions that were somewhat aggressive and frenetic. What do you think brought about this transition to create electronic dance music? I first started making sound compositions in high school with my friend Peter, a mad genius that had a keyboard synth and a DAT recorder. I remember we made a piece that was supposed to be a train station. I would make chugging sounds and put it through reverb, and we recorded vocals saying different train destinations. I remember thinking “I don’t even have to be a musician to do stuff like this.” This idea blew my mind and I began to experiment further with sound...white noise, pink noise... this mixed with snippets of records being played backwards with random tones, like whale songs, became my first sound collage. This was about five years before I first heard Stockhausen’s Elektronische Musik. It was a pure, unshadowed exploration in tone. Years later, I started listening to Philip Glass and Steve Reich a lot and loved the way they both used arpeggios for sound and rhythm. It’s like sound DNA. My work slowly became more rhythmic. With more tones and patterns your brain starts creating a map when you hear it. I use geometry and numerology to write patterns and create dimensional sound baths. That was the beginning of my obsession with writing electronic dance music. You released a tune with the Pharoaohs called What??? on the label 100% Silk recently, yay!

by Mecca Vazie Andrews Photo by Eddie Peel

What??? was the second rebirth of the Pharaohs. Ale made some loops and made a basic pattern with them. We just wanted to write a banging dancefloor mover. This is mostly Ale’s wizardry; he’s a badass. I’m very excited to put it out there. Wanna share some musings on all things sonic, sir? Electronic music is the synthesizing of electronic current--literally restraining and amplifying electricity through oscillators, transistors, and resistors. I really feel that music has a direct link to the human soul. Either listening to or creating it has a more direct connection than words or conversation. Music can command an unrealized subconscious surrender. The ritual of finding the sounds and recording them is pure exploration in sound. Sound archeology is to unearth the perfect tone and explore it in as many ways possible.

www.swoonmagazine.com

pharaohms.com dublab.com Listen at: juno.co.uk/labels/100%25+Silk+US/ scroll down to hear What???

THE PERFECT DISASTER Underground Resistance

Continued from page 57

Baby’s First Rave: An Ethnographic Excursion

M. and I had barely known each other in high school—her erstwhile best friend had dumped me for my skinhead arch-enemy, her older sister once promised to devirginize me after our Algebra II class (never happened). To be honest, I can’t even remember how we ended up reconnecting after several years, and more specifically, how we ended up driving Downtown in search of a party. Miraculously though, everything that would follow in the next twelve hours remains mnemonically intact. It was a surgical sortie of rare rave precision: a swoop in to now defunct hipsterhub coffeehouse Zoot’s produced a Xeroxed flyer, an address, even directions through Detroit’s Caligarian maze of one-ways and cataracted freeways. (Folks, tech kids can be damn near scientific in planning these things; have to be in fact.) By twelve or one, we were in an abandoned VFW hall a few wrong turns past the corner of Livernois and nowhere, and within twenty minutes of our entry, M. had procured for us two capsules of the cleanest LSD I have ever tasted, compliments of an obvious party lifer named Kenny. Even before the drugs hit, Kenny looked like a gym-sculpted orange Push-Up glowing in the dark and the filth. But it didn’t take long for the chemicals to kick in, and it didn’t take long for me to forget that Kenny ever existed. For I had found It. This place had been off the power-grid, any grid really, since the 70s, and the juice was courtesy of a wheeled-in generator. Some of the power was siphoned off to the sporadic C-clamp garage light on the ceiling, leaving all but the main room in quasi-blackness; leaving shadows for teen Latino boys to fuck in the half-flooded, half-open stalls of the bathroom. But the lion’s share of the electricity was reserved for, demanded by, the non-negotiable terms of the Beat. And god damn, I felt it. I had stared into the whites of the eyes of Marshall stacks bearing enough white noise and feedback to break up a kidney stone, but feeling the Beat is a different matter. If your

82 82 www.swoonmagazine.com www.swoonmagazine.com

Photo by undergroundresistance.com

efore I moved from Michigan, the D was not going to let me move away without a proper send off, or flip-off really. At the last minute, in my quest for the Real Deal, my fantasy was delivered on a plate. And quite appropriately, I got served…

nature and nurture have somehow made you receptive for transmission, once you have that much bass have its way with you, making you sloppy seconds to a roomful of other bodies, making the walls sweat… It’s all over babe. You have been imprinted. From then on, even lousy lounge house at a sushi restaurant will give your legs a little zap, your chest a humming shoom. It’s like the fucking Manchurian Candidate. A good indoor rave makes Bikram yoga seem breezy: you can emerge into a Midwestern winter wearing only your underwear, which was what M. more or less did, and feel very, very nice. The problem was that the minute we would go back inside, M. fell into the beat surrender, duly overheated, then bounced back into the night, at which point some uppity clove-smoking Royal Oak couple admonished us: “Do you even know where you are?” At which point M. well-nigh rolled into a bush and puked, which was about the time a local resident appeared, identifying himself as The Amplifier, though the .22 dangling out of his front pocket preceded him. “Girl, why you got your titties out?” The plain truth was that it really was too hot inside for M. to cope, which The Amplifier took in, spat out a few crap rhymes, and took off. Suddenly, M. decided she could not stay any longer: inside meant dancing which probably meant death, outside meant sneering hipsters and hip-holstered hip hoppers. And maybe death too. So after I convinced M. that her

driving was a bad idea (definitely death), we hitched a ride back to M.’s house. Only now we had to get her car back from Detroit. We then sat until we thought we were coherent enough to hatch a reasonable plan, but obviously this was not long enough, since the resulting stratagem involved calling in a favor from an old buddy now working as a repo-man in Detroit, and towing her car back to the suburbs. By the time our crackheaded convoy rolled up in front of my parents’ house, my dad was already up and watering his prize Japanese maple in the front yard. I guess I lived in a don’t ask, don’t tell environment.

White Hunter, Black Truth?

ithin the year, I moved away from Michigan for grad school, and that was to be the first and last full-on warehouse party I ever went to while living in Detroit. But even that’s an overstatement, since I was all but dragged away before I could dive in. In that same period, I bought my first true Detroit tech album, Carl Craig’s masterpiece More Songs About Food and Revolutionary Art, which I carted off to Iowa City, Iowa, along with a memory-image that would plague me for years: that tableau vivant of gyrating kids in the womb of the Real Detroit; that keyhole-peep into the “authentic” world I could have known. Or so I thought.

Most of all, I’ve grown to wonder why the hell Underground Resistance doesn’t make a bigger deal about it. You can’t just run around in black-block face masks and camo pants (equal parts Baader-Meinhof and Public Enemy), pal around with Kraftwerk to this day, drop tracks called “Afrogermanic” and expect everyone to take it at face value. Then again, maybe I’m the jerk for overintellectualizing instead of simply embracing. Okay, I have a press pass this year; at least a sporting chance at the inner secrets of the Detroit-Germany illuminati. And in my allotted blip of take-a-number face time with Carl Craig, I was posed to do so. Again, amidst releasing the widest range of relevant material and owning it with live sets for the greatest span of time (this sounds strangely like the definition of utilitarianism), Craig cuisinarts old Can landmarks of studio witchery in a way in which the past makes the present come alive, rather than the usual pedestrian way around. For years, he’s bobbed through 70s dub reggae-infused tech arm in arm with Moritz von Ostwald—a guy who looks like he could head the sinister German multinational in a George Clooney thriller—to virtually invent a new music idiom, dub-tech, as bound up in Kingston as much as Düsseldorf. He is a Rolodex brimming with transcultural passports. And I mean, while a lot of talking heads of the scene – Derrick May and Mad Mike Banks break this shit down in their rants, I dreamed for some reason that Mr. Craig would produce some kind of magic answer, once and for all.

charm with Bridgette and John Collins, I got the following phone call: “Hey, have you heard of Underground Resistance? Would you like to interview one of them?”

John Collins

Given the time with Carl that had been earmarked for me, it would almost literally have to be a magic answer; a Gnostic mind implant. As cogent a veteran as Carl Craig is, I was setting myself up for a culturalepistemological version of Five Minutes in the Closet, and at best I might grope my way to the First Base of Truth. The buzzer would have gone off before I could even have elaborated this question—largely because, what is THE question? — but more important, what wisdom of any magnitude can a single human reveal within the duration of a smoke break? I was still trying to find that authentic secret behind the curtain—behind that proscenium of jacking bodies I was dragged away from in that condemned building years ago. So when a sudden illness scuttled his entire press docket, in reality what I probably lost was a chance to gush over someone who makes my life better. But a loss it was. Nevertheless, in the midst of a tornado, the hand of fortuity pointed us to the palace of the Wizard for answers. Well, sort of. On the second day of the festival, as a posse of black clouds closed in to ambush Hart Plaza, my wife took a guided bicycle tour of the hallowed grounds of Detroit techno, which included on its itinerary the headquarters of Submerge Records, a distributor for key Detroit labels including Metroplex as well as its own imprint. But it’s also more or less the Underground Resistance bunker, the HQ for Mad Mike Banks and his sister Bridgette. (Jeff “The Wizard” Mills amiably parted ways with UR years ago, so he was not on hand.) Newbie to all this stuff that my wife is, she didn’t realize the historical relevance of the site, so after she’d worked her

Photo by Amy Hubbarth

Look, I’m really not trying to overplay this whole thing, but let’s go back to this. There are still people in this country who can’t hear the word “Germany” without thinking “Hitler.” Still. So even on the most superficial, connect-the-dots level, you have to really take in the signing of a “mutual admiration pact” between Berlin and Detroit. You really have to weigh the meaning of German festivals like the Love Parade and clubs like Tresor in their taking on the role of ambassadors of the next generation of Detroit techno to the world—in some cases back to the U.S. And when perhaps the most vital Berlin-Detroit liaison was brokered by the most militantly, even quasi-militaristic fight-the-power tech collective ever, Underground Resistance, you have to ask why people don’t make a bigger deal about it.

When we arrived at Submerge the next morning, I quickly realized that if I’d been hunting for some one-stop-shopping source of Detroit tech authenticity, this was it. Adjacent to a small black church, the brownstone that houses Submerge and its reliquary of first-pressing vinyl rarities is nondescript; anonymous—fitting for the UR mystique of veiled identities and disdain for publicity. Though John and Bridgette were paragons of gentleness, you could tell they don’t normally do this kind of thing. It took a few minutes of finagling before we were buzzed in through the heavy-security door, which was surely there for good reason: handwritten signs throughout the building warned UR residents of a carjacking and shooting that had gone down right outside the previous day at 2 pm. Even the house cat didn’t appear to have it easy: there was a zombie-movie chunk missing from his head, but like the people we saw coming and going (including the reclusive Mad Mike), he went about his daily business without complaining. There was an almost monastic aura of gravity inside, even the feeling of an unspoken rule to speak as little as possible, ironic for an outfit dedicated to dishing out tinnitus. On the previous day, fellow UR soldier Mark Flash reminded us all from the main stage that you never know when your last day might be, so make every day a party. When you see the ongoing, unglamorous hustle that goes into making the Detroit underground happen, that cannot be heard as escapist E-tard bullshit; it’s the way to stay sane. Now I wonder why the hell I asked what “the underground” meant anymore: I mean, I was sitting in its foyer. As John told me, UR is committed to the underdog, the underrepresented, the under-the-radar. Indeed, back in the 90s when A&R scouts from the majors were scrambling to sign artists in anticipation of an American techno explosion that never happened, Underground Resistance rejected a tidy sum from a mega-label, on principle. This might put a weird spin on Collins’s matterof-fact, disdainful pronouncement that “the underground will never really happen in the U.S...” I mean, if the underground “really happens,” doesn’t that mean it’s become mainstream, which in the paradigm of American music translates to signing to a major label? Or does he simply mean that a way of

doing things, of making sounds, will never really come into its own in American culture? In other words, the underground has never left America. But in the specific sense of Detroit techno, something has never really taken, and in a way it seems like it never will, as it did perhaps in Germany. So I approach the odd reception of the music in local terms: why is it that at the DEMF, there is a distinct color line, one that more or less coincides with the security barrier? That is, almost all of the DJs from Detroit (and in general to a large degree) are black, and almost all of the audience is white? John brings up the socioeconomic factor, that especially these days $40 a day tickets is a lot for people in the city. That’s probably a large part of it, but I bring up that in almost any context, even when money is not so much a deciding factor, the demographics are the same. “Well, techno music…” he pauses. “Techno music…to some black people, they just don’t get it.” To reference Citizen Kane again, I had been chasing after some simple “Rosebud” answer to an incredibly complex question. I must admit, however, that John Collins gives us an incredibly complex answer nonetheless.

From the Rust Belt to the Corn Belt

he truth is that by the time I spoke with John Collins, I had long been disabused of the illusion that the underground, the authentic, is only what happens in dilapidated warehouses, through secret handshakes and frantic phonecalls. Most of all, I had learned that it doesn’t

Tresor, Berlin

have to happen somewhere I was not. I had full knowledge of Detroit techno—I had even made it my religion. But following the divine logic of The Perfect Disaster, I had to leave Detroit to do it. By about the time I was finishing grad school in Iowa City, I had grown cozy with the little Terrence Parker circle of people who gave the good haircuts, a coterie of chic chicks and gay boys we affectionately called the Hair Mafia. They were always playing the most amazing house music in the salon, which I always bugged them about. “Have you ever gone to Gabe’s?” Gabe’s Oasis was a holein-the-wall dive bar that was mostly home to local bands and the occasional Stereolab or Sleater-Kinney show. But on Sunday nights, it became “Rotation,” where for five or ten bucks you could see not just corn-belt DJs playing Detroit-Chicago house and tech, but a steady stream of actual Detroit and Chicago DJs. Within about two weeks of pilgrimages to this duly named oasis of no-attitude, pure-love dance fanatics, I was fully converted, and for the next two years, I was a born-again discohouse diva. We were a family; we were the faithful. Here was heaven right in my lap, only this time I didn’t pass it by. It’s true I was hesitant at first to believe that my raver fantasy was happening at all, not in Manchester, not in Detroit, but in a wholesome little college town. But here goes yet another myth down the drain: a lot of the most significant techno scenes have happened

Photo by Douglas Wojciechowski

in legitimate or at least quasi-legitimate places. The Music Institute in Detroit, Tresor in Berlin, the DEMF itself: these places all testify that the underground is not about elitism or secrecy. In fact, that’s part of the revolutionary potential of the best techno scenes—everyone can be accepted. As Terrence Parker marveled to me, one of the first things that struck him about his own first visits to the Music Institute back in the day was that it “didn’t matter if you were black or white, Indian or Asian, straight or gay… It was just about the music, not you know, some Saturday Night Fever fashion show.”

There were two key figures from Detroit that figured prominently in Iowa City then, and they almost stand as models of two visions of Detroit and its complexity. One was Terrence Parker, the other was Kenny Dixon, Jr., better known as Moodymann. To begin with, I should say that both of them are known as house DJs, not techno, and that for whatever reason, Detroit house—that happier, bouncier, more R&B inflected style of electronic music—is often overlooked, or overshadowed by that other mecca of house, Chicago. For a lot of the best DJs, the line between house and techno and anything for that matter is just a line to be blurred. (For “outsiders”, it’s all the same too, in the same way that all serious-sounding orchestral music is “classical.”) Terrence is a true troubadour, spinning music that emits pure joy around the world, whether it’s old school house jams to CeCe Peniston radio hits, or, increasingly with the years, gospel house. That’s right, hallelujah, hands-in-the-air gospel music with dance beats. It’s weird, Terrence is as Christian as you can get—he rotates Bible quotes on his webpage—and as I told him, I am what most people would call an atheist, but when he tells me he’s “doing God’s work of lifting people up,” I don’t give him that wincing smile such comments usually provoke in me. For Terrence has made me feel the rapture, and his regular

84 84 www.swoonmagazine.com www.swoonmagazine.com

ever heard, even if some nights he may just feel like playing Teena Marie. Photo by Aaron M Jones

Theo Parrish

“I support niggas…and I support niggas from the D… I sure ain’t talking about motherfuckers who just got here… and I sure ain’t talkin’ about motherfuckers from the suburbs...” – Moodymann, “Misled”

With his insane touring schedule, pilgrimages to the little it can seem that, town of Iowa City like Jesus, Terrence brought me salvation on Parker is everywhere. more than one occasion. Conversely, for a long I don’t mean I make a time it almost seemed special exception for like the enigmatic Christianity on some Moodymann did not personal basis here, Moodyman’s Silent Introduction exist. On the one but in that same way I hand, Moody’s monumental “Shades of Jae” sometimes say “God bless you” to strangers seemed to be playing at every 4 a.m. afterwithout any irony, I thank God for Terrence hours basement party I went to around the Parker. People may accuse his brand of feelY2K hump. His music was everywhere. But his goodery as “not serious,” but he’s the only records were nowhere to be found; the DJs person I know who’s literally taken a bullet in Iowa had to keep their coveted white labels for Our Music: way back in the 80s, when he locked up lest they be stolen. And most of all, refused to play Run DMC at a house party, the man never ever played sets anywhere. For some fool shot him. Anyway, I think that a lot years, Katherine and I dreamed of seeing Mr. of people have some perverse bias that art must make you feel bad at some level, or that if Dixon live. When he finally conceded to play the main stage at the 2007 DEMF, it seemed you are overtaken with happiness then it can’t too good to be true. It was. After about fifteen be art. For the record, Terrence Parker can minutes of heckling from Moody’s skronking spin some of the most sophisticated mixes I’ve

pseudo-free jazz ensemble, we walked away. Yet this seemed to be part of Moody’s plan, so it was a let-down and a satisfaction at the same time. Along with his cohorts Theo Parrish and Rick “The Godson” Wilhite, (collectively known as Three Chairs), Kenny Dixon Jr. makes records that confound every notion you might have about house music, soul, and dance music, yet they never really leave the parameters of these genres behind. Minutes and minutes of repetitive loops will go by, teasing you with a delay of gratification, and then suddenly you are in a gooey heaven of irresistible rhythms, diva wailings, and Curtis Mayfield samples. Within the single groove of one side of vinyl— and Moody is exceedingly vinyl-centric—the maestro makes direct pronouncements against all music that doesn’t come from the heart, but also tells you that he is under no obligation to make music for people to dance to. The only obligation Moody, Theo, and company seem to have is to black music, however they want to define it, and to Detroit. But Moodymann rips apart many people’s preconceptions of what “black music” might be. Often, “experimental” music is seen as the domain of white, academic musicians; of museums and Phillip Glass. But with his cut-ups, direct-address voice-overs, and studio wizardry, Moodymann is heart-andsoul avant-garde, even if some nights he just feels like playing Teena Marie.

Joe Gall

Whither or Wither? Skrillex headlining the DEMF 2011.

Photo by Lars Borges

Magda

The Real Detroit: Movement

Hilariously enough, as I hobbled out of the subterranean sweat-pit, I found myself face to face with my old professor of art and critical theory from Wayne State, an avant-garde Bay Area poet who had, in the 90s, made the conscious effort to get a job teaching in Detroit, the city from which he said he could truly “understand America.” It’s been fifteen years since I’ve seen him, and he doesn’t seem to have aged a day, and those same bullshit-proof badger eyes set a little too closely in front of a rat-trap mind are still intimidating. “What are you doing here?” I ask with warm surprise of this sixty year-old man. This set was not by a canonized saint of the underground like Derrick May or a pandering blingy concession like Benny Bennassi or any headliner, for richer or poorer, that the Free Press would highlight for those reclining into their cultural armchairs; this is for Magda, someone you still have to “just know about”. Suddenly I’m in my early 20s again; those shifty eyes and pursed lips again punished me for asking the obvious: “I have to see where this thing is going!”

n 2009, Katherine and I celebrated the 10th year of the DEMF, as I imagine did many others. The following year, I did the festival for the first time without my disco-sister, alone with approximately 95,000 members of my big dysfunctional family. Or so was the figure estimated by Paxahau, the current and most enduring of the party’s organizers. Paxahau also estimated that 2010 was also the 10th anniversary. Well, I don’t rely on Paxahau to count, but I do count on them to bring together one of the greatest music festivals in the world, which they seem to do year after year. The originators of Detroit techno, including Derrick May, Carl Craig, and Kevin Saunderson, have all tried their hands at running the show, but each of them gave up dealing with the business end of the affair for various reasons, leaving the organizational headaches to “a bunch of white kids from the suburbs” (I’m not supposed to disclose who said that). There is indeed some tension as to how “Detroit” the festival remains: not just how much local talent is promoted in the line-up, but also whether inviting unarguably mainstream DJs like Skrillex or Moby is true to spirit. Needless to say, there is a lot of money and politics bound up in this, a lot of talk of “what’s best for Detroit.” With some quibbling, I fully stand behind the company’s mix-up of mainstream, crowd-pulls, perennial locals, and wild-cards from around the world. Only by 2010, the year my partner in crime seemed to have retired for serious adult reasons, I really doubted whether I was too old for even the best techno hootenanny in the world.

86 86 www.swoonmagazine.com www.swoonmagazine.com

Margaret Dygas

Photo by Sophia Drevenstam

It’s true that I left a little early in 2010, but to my credit I had not slept for three days and even the teenage legs around me were buckling under the bass-bruising being dished out by Magda, a meek little Polish woman who grew up in Detroit, who can

play louder, harder, bigger, better sets than just about anybody, race, sex, or provenance notwithstanding. That’s another thing about techno: it doesn’t make sense without bodies to go along with it, but given that being a DJ doesn’t require too much physical exertion, a 50 year old man looks a lot less stupid sitting at a Technics deck than flopping around a stage power-kicking, and you rarely hear things like “that chick can rock as hard as a dude.” On the other side of the tables, it’s another story, and as Madga did what Magda did best, my own body could neither keep going nor stop from trying.

I failed to ask what he meant exactly by “this thing” or where he thought it might possibly going. Maybe it was combined haze of sleepdep and having been validated by the presence of someone with twenty years on me, but I think my silence simply meant: I know what you mean. If you have not picked up on this by now, “Detroit techno” means a lot of things to a lot of people, and while the fine print is a definite concern, I still hold that the majority of we faithful believe it means something profound, maybe because it seems so powerful and yet still a little impossible to pin down. So for me, what is this thing and where is it going? This is heresy in a strictly-Detroit sort of way, but my perfect moment in 2011 swirled around a set by Margaret Dygas, another Polish pixie whose inclusion in the festival was a testament to the plasticity of “this thing” as well as to the continued daringness of the curators. On vinyl, Dygas is decidedly antidance, anti-commercial, and anti-song. It’s menacing but delicate, pretty paranoia—as if tape-loop Industrial pioneers Cabaret Voltaire had made Detroit-Berlin techno in 1975 (instead of actually making cheesy Chicago-wannabe house in 1985). Terrence Parker suggested to me that after the first D-Germany contact, the music refracted back from Europe was “darker,” less uplifting, and while I think the European mutations of the Detroit sound do layer in a sleazy, slinking, cruising the red-light-district eroticism, the “darkness” was there from the get-go, in Juan Atkins say, or even in the first fully fledged Detroit techno track ever, “Sharevari.” Look, the “Real Detroit,” “Made in Detroit,” even “Defend Detroit” ethos cannot be ignored, but I don’t think a purist, ghetto-ization of the

not? And it didn’t help that the evidence was consistent: in the two years K. has graduated to jacking emeritus, the heavens poured down, thankfully to remind me how much fun it is to dance in the mud, sober or otherwise.

music is going to help the ghetto, and I think it ignores the irreducible alchemy that is the global underground. So I’m trying to figure out why Paxahau has quixotically slated this rank-and-file avantgardist on the main stage for an extended set smack in the thick of the boogie hour. They hadn’t. The Margaret Dygas that had been hypnotizing me in my living room was replaced onstage by a second Dygas, permanently lit cigarette curled in an impish sneer, à la Belmondo, armed with several boxes of hardand-bouncy house. The crowd doesn’t know who the hell this girl is; they don’t care, and that euphoric, electric sense of divine chaos sparks among the bodies – dancing, stumbling, collapsing even. Some token fool tries to assdance on a slippery security rail; minutes later she’s still trying to gyrate on the paramedic stretcher, neck-brace and all. Through all this, my wife is lost, driving deeper and deeper into a tar baby of bad directions; exits that aren’t there. And remember, there was the tornado, which are generally a big deal anyway. But I had personal business with this particular twister.

Graffiti in the basement of Submerge headquarters.

Both photos by Kelly McKay

In addition to tolling the end of a personal epoch, Katherine’s absence meant something else: I couldn’t make it stop raining anymore. Memorial Day Weekend in Michigan is notorious for rain, so for every DEMF, the deluges were always guaranteed, the “have fun in the mud” send-offs from the suburbs were as part of the ritual as anything else. And it has in fact rained at various times throughout festival’s history, just never when Katherine and I were in the same place: we were the Wilhelm Reich Wonder Twins. When we drove the first year, a green-black storm system threatened to swallow Southeast Michigan whole, until our car crossed the state line, at which point the clouds parted like a set-painting in a Bible-camp play. And so it was every year: weather predictions out of Revelations, but then Katherine’s plane would touch down and our symbiotic orgone blast would dispel all but sprinkles. You must know that I’m being tongue in cheek. But you must also know that within some deviant cluster of grey cells in my brain, perhaps superstitious hold-outs or perhaps mutant clarions of a next step in consciousness, I have believed that using the vast energy reserves of the techno aether, Katherine and I can change the weather. I mean, it’s complete batshit, but then again, why

But it’s these reality-suspending moments— when people are telling you to evacuate because a tornado is locked in on a mile radius of where you’re standing— that the crackpot bits in your operator’s manual flip open. And thus began my toreador’s approach to tornadoes: dance with them (boompty

that has unnecessarily been ensnared in the web of “youth culture.” Some of us give up entirely, though it saddens me when I hear people say “Yeah, I had to quit that stuff when I quit doing drugs.” Were these people ever really there? At the very least, I think the veterans among us, even if as home-listening fellow-travelers, still want to “see where this thing is going;” still feel the tugs of shadowtruth and solidarity when we see a “Techno Will Save the World!” bumper sticker. Can any music save the world? Probably not, but given the sociopolitical implications of the Detroit-Berlin-axis global underground, and the liberating joys of this exchange, “the joy the world takes in giving itself to itself”, the world clique of techno scintillates with little

house is effective here), taunt them, arrest their gaze and deflect them elsewhere. And fled it did. I am a hardnosed rationalist yet I believe at some level I told a weather formation to hightail it Downriver. The Church of Detroit Techno has one up on other religions in that it does not demand you accept the impossible, but assures you that you can believe in something. Magic powers regained or no, this last year I finally felt like I didn’t have to explain myself to the non-believers anymore; that it was okay to plan for the next time. According to the logic of the story so far, that should herald my retirement, should it not? Too legit not to quit? And anyway, what is the cut-off point to be too old to “live techno,” even casually? I was among the first generations to grow up in this culture, and today I see many brothers and sisters my age also a little wielded out by the prospect of being a 40 year old “raver kid”. We’re all kind of figuring out how to integrate into our lives this powerful, still young culture

kernels of a possible future world of salvation. But why lock in on the future, what about salvation now? One myth of Detroit is more important than any others, because of the miracle therein, and because it happens to be true. Here is a “failed city,” where throughout acres upon urban acres, you can see nature muscle the vine-and-thistled leveraged buy-out of those colonial homes and party stores from which civilization has dumped its shares. Yet a music thrives because of that city, a music that is as sincere and truthful and rapturous as it is uncompromisingly, livingly experimental. In comparison, I think I’d run better odds betting on my tornado power. Detroit techno does more than just incite hope or merely remind us it exists. It is not just a picture of what “hope” looks like outside of a four-color campaign poster, but maybe a model for understanding what hope should, or even must come to mean.

Coda: Freakazoid Power (A Christmas Miracle) “The next year she bought a new stomach/ From Liverpool, made in Detroit” – John Cale, “Ghost Story”

ere I a different person, a less procrastinating writer, these words would have been written on a different machine in a different city. They would have been composed on a salvaged Compaq, now deceased, and these little pensive stares away from the screen would be out my kitchen window onto the Capitol Records building. It would probably still be dark now, but the day before would have been sunny. It would not be snowing and freezing, as it is here at my parents’ house, in the room I grew up in. But then, these would be different words. I don’t think my dad would like Moodymann. The Motown my father likes is the Motown that, as I mentioned, mavens of Detroit techno like Derrick May disown to various degrees: The Tops and Temps, early Smokey Robinson and such, all that squeaky suit-and-tie 60s frat party stuff. God bless it, but I just don’t get it in the same way. And this is a generational difference I’ve come to accept. But there is one way in which Mr. Dixon and my dad are of a piece: “All you people talk about how great Detroit is; why don’t you live here?” (That’s both of them talking in my head.) It’s true. I left. I don’t even have the cred to make fun of Kid Rock, who still lives here and apparently pulls in a lot of money for the D, somehow. Then again, the Motown soul that Moodymann keeps alive, samples, is the 70s Motown recorded when Berry Gordy had taken the company to Hollywood: the eternal block party that filters in between Moody’s tracks is the aching, post-riot, post-Detroit Marvin Gaye of “What’s Going On,” not “Dancing in the Street.” So we’re back to the start: the birth of Detroit techno depends on the city’s legacy, but it is bound up in its disintegration; in things falling apart. (Weird. My dad just walked in to tell me he needs a few minutes to call “Marvin.” Which of course is just the acronym for Michigan’s computer-voiced unemployment line. Irony is perhaps not dead, but is at the very least automated.) So, falling apart. For the past three days, I’ve been dealing with the most pain I’ve ever endured, owing to the twin forces of sciatica and a pinched neck-nerve courtesy of my cheapo flight home. I tried to drown it in Vicodin, but the thing about Vicodin is that is makes you so goofed out that you can’t concentrate on the pain, because you can’t concentrate on anything, but it doesn’t make the pain go away. The first day of my trip was chiefly composed of my stumbling around my brother’s house, nodding meaningfully through a cocoon of drugs as myriad invisible wasps needled up and down my nerve paths like an “Eat at Joe’s” neon sign. All the while, my cherubic little dervish of a three-year-old nephew would not leave me alone: “LET’S DO RRRRRRRROBOT MOVES, UNKA SHAUN!” Cool raver uncle guilt was not quelled by the veil of Vikes either.

88 88 www.swoonmagazine.com www.swoonmagazine.com

When Max was dropped off at my parents’ for babysitting the next day, the talons in my neck had loosened a bit, but the other human bodies around me were not doing so well. My father now has arthritis in his knees, and my mother got hit with a doozy of an eye infection and had to drive herself to outpatient. Max will not stop yelling for the robot moves, and I am in little better state to provide them than dear worn out Pop-pup or whatever they call my dad here now. Max asks where my mom is; I tell him she went to the store where they sell robot eyes. I tell him that it’s okay for people to fall apart because we can just buy new robot parts. This leads to playing robot doctor. Which leads to an idea, or an excuse, or something. I can see that Pop-pup needs a break, and I need to run away from feeling broken. Mostly though, I think I just knew what the little fucker was talking about. So I told him that robots made music. We went back to my room, and Youtubed the video for Herbie Hancock’s wacko-electro jam “Rockit,” one of the most essential mixin’-and-scratchin’ WJLB Strong Songs of the early 80s. A stone cold skate jam; a masterpiece. With a video full of robots: “Crazy robot! Breakfast robot! Weird lady underwear robot!” After Max made me play the video two or three times, he was robot literate. It was time to move on. I’d never known that Kraftwerk made a video for “The Robots,” and I never expected to be screaming “WE ARE THE ROBOTS!!!” fists, asses, in the air, with anyone who shared my DNA. I never expected to put on new-school Detroit techno and minimal German blipopuses to a kid whose favorite band is the Wiggles, and have to tear him away from it. “MORE ROBOT MUSIC UNKA SHAUN, MORE ROBOT MUSIC!” After two hours of this, things were coming out of his mouth that I thought I’d hallucinated. “Get on your knees! And move your butt! Put robot music on regular radio!” I was laugh-crying so hard at that point that it took me a second to realize the pain in my neck was almost completely gone. “Freakazoid power makes Unka Shaun better!” Haters, tell Max and me it did not. Above everything, I didn’t expect a day later this little guy would remember any of this. At the time, I didn’t think I would remember it either because I didn’t believe it was happening. This little man, as free from programming as a three year old can be these days, came back demanding noises and rhythms and textures that most people I know recoil from. This time, he was armed with just as much energy and a huge “Transformers Rescue Robot” named Heatwave. This was too much. “Max, there’s a song all about Heatwave by a group called Martha and the Vandellas! Let me play it for you…” The Vandellas, the Motown of old, tinned their way through about five bars before Max put his feet down in defiant rejection. He was not having the D of old. But within two or three thumps of Jimmy Edgar, those little feet were thrashing away at the bedsprings. We locked eyes and giggled and freaked and vogued until the grownups came back and broke up the party, but by then it didn’t matter. I knowed he was a robot inside.

AMY ARROW .COM