About Me
Teargas & Plateglass –- a collective once mistaken for a duo or lone artist, hidden away, with the properties of snake or serpent, reptiles, or purely imaginary beings combined in a manner startling and often grotesque -- surfaced around 2002.
Choosing its company carefully, through criteria often misunderstood, the band have produced songs and remix collaborations with an array of disparate artists including David Sylvian, The (International) Noise Conspiracy, Zap Mama, the Roots’ poetess Ursula Rucker, pioneer of modern harmonic music David Hykes, the Côte D'Ivoirean songstress Lil Gong, Tweaker, cha'abi moderne singer Natacha Atlas, and Elysian Fields’ Jennifer Charles.
With a stunning Sebastaio Salgado photograph for its cover, Teargas & Plateglass’ eponymous debut was a noteworthy underground release, referenced mostly by other artists: Danger Mouse (“heavy visual stuff…sounds like the end of the worldâ€), King Britt (“restores my faith that deep, dark music still moves the massesâ€), Chris Vrenna (“a soundtrack to the darkest places in my mindâ€), along with a few publications: XLR8R (“darkness mixed thick like a pool of blood… take with a stiff glass of Absintheâ€).
The band retreated until 2004, reappearing to perform unannounced eastern European shows guised under the names Septagon, Undecagon, Duodecagon, Enneacontagon, and Hecatommyriagon. No confirmable shows have taken place since then.
The band's new Black Triage album resonates with the backdrop of genocide, combining stark breaks and haunting vocals, poignant strings and melancholy synths. Provocative and intense, where moments of silence evoke not peace, but claustrophobia. The album draws inspiration from specter-like sources, among them the Tadjena massacre, Senghori, attackers who slashed the throats of children, Choeung Ek, throwing bodies in boiling pots. Logor Jasenovac, Omarska, Der Zor. Forced famine, Camp 22, parents abandoning children, Ov ara, old people refusing food in hopes of a younger generation surviving, Bialystok, and the corner of Melnikovsky and Dokhturov.
To compliment the visceral quality of Black Triage, the text for the booklet was penned by the renowned filmmaker Godfrey Reggio of Koyyanisqatsi fame.
Three music videos were produced for the album. The video for ‘One Day Across The Valley’ debuted at the 2007 American Film Institute Festival, which called the band 'a bold experimental vision'.
Introduction to Teargas & Plateglass Black Triage CD
By any measure, we live in an extraordinary and extreme time. Language
can no longer describe the world in which we live. With antique ideas
and old formulas, we continue to describe a world that is no longer
present. In this loss of language, the word gives way to the image as
the 'language' of exchange, in which critical thought disappears to a
diabolic regime of conformity - the hyper-real, the omnipresent image.
Language, real place gives way to numerical code, the real virtual;
metaphor to metamorphosis; body to disembodiment; natural to
supernatural; many to one. Mystery disappears, replaced by the illusion
of certainty in technological perfection.
Technology, acceleration do not affect our way of living - they are our
new and comprehensive host of life, the environment of living itself.
It is not the effect of technology on the environment, culture, economy,
religion, etc., but rather that all these categories exist in
technology. In this sense technology is new nature. The living
environment, old nature, is replaced by a manufactured milieu, an
engineered host - synthetic nature. In a real sense, we are off planet,
dwelling on a lunar surface of stone, cement, asphalt, glass, steel and
plastics, engulfed in the atmosphere of electromagnetic vibrations -
the soothing lullaby of the machine. The common notion tells us that
technology is neutral, that we can use it for either good or bad. We do
not use technology, we live technology; technology is our way of life.
Being sensate entities, we become our environment - we become what we
see, what we hear, what we eat, what we smell, what we touch. Where
doubt is prohibited, we become, without question, the environment we
live in. With our origins based in the natural order, should this
context radically change, the mysterious nature of the human being
shall also radically change - a change that will reflect the
transformation of nature itself, at a turning point or vanishing point.
Natural diversity becomes a burnt offering, sacrificed to the infinite
appetite of technological homogenization.
We now live the fiction of science. We are now, not in some remote
future, cyborgs. We are at one with our environment - we are
technology. In this wonderland, freedom becomes the pursuit of our
technological happiness. Our standard of living is predicated on
commodity consumption, as the shibboleth of the new religion is 'pray
for more'. In vehicles of ecstasy, with cinematic engines of inertia at
audiovisual speed, trans-port and tele-port blend into one. The
beginning becomes the end. The port disappears in the speed of light.
The nanosecond (one billionth of an 'old second'), technological speed,
transforms reality as it creates an ecstatic phenomena of compelling
and unparalleled intensity. By human measure, charismatic technique
portends the miraculous, as it engenders the condition of 'exit
velocity' - a condition that blurs human perceptions, shatters all
meanings, drains all content and breaks our bonds to earth. All
locations are subsumed into the startling terra firma of the image, a
demonic conformity that is the genesis of massman. In the shadow of the
mass, all previous definitions crumble. The 'time' and 'space' of
history exit to an homogenized zone of no return. In this supernatural
implosion of g-force, human moorings give way, sending humans
out-of-orbit into the void of technological space. The accompanying
loss of original habitat and our subsequent relocation into accelerated
space, throws nature into catastrophe, as it engenders traumatic stress
syndrome as the now normal condition of post-human existence.
Technique, while promising comfort and happiness, means power, means
control, means conformity, means destiny. Technology creates a
condition of war that is at once universal and unseen. The explosive
tempo of technology is war; the untellable violence of relocation in
technology is war. All of us are refugees driven from our human state.
Godfrey Reggio
March 2007
Santa Fe
