About Me
If you're looking for a band that needs to describe itself through sexy haircuts, redundant use of the word "brutal", complicated shoes, or images of victimized, naked women, you've come to the wrong place.Whether we like it or not, the cult of the machine is upon us. For all their analysis and detournement, Raoul Vaneigem and the Situationist International failed to reconstruct the tired repetition of pseudo-cyclical life and the all-consuming Spectacle. Passion and writing and revolution may have captured the wild hearts of Parisian students in 1968, but Capitalism and boredom are vengeful beasts, leaving Guy Debord with a suicidal bullet through the heart by 1994. Whether we like it or not, new situations are born around us everyday. These are not the wild-eyed children of Situationists but rather the speed-worshipping, gear-laden machinations of Marinetti and Fritz Lang. Priests of Deus ex Machina, dressed in wire and circuits and the polluted dreamings of those war-mongering Futurists, hold ink quills dripping to the monitor-glow of LCD screens in the new age of post-humanity. Where does the finger end and the function begin? Have we, the cyborg children of a lost generation, begun to become conscious of our automobile limbs and gasoline ventricles? Every day we the machine people speed faster and faster with hearts beating wild to the time of our combustion engines, and the road’s fearsome bend is ever-present. Yes, we will sing of the multicoloured polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals, but—when we sing of the vibrant fervor of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons—our’s are not songs of praise. We are not devotees of the red robed machine cult but mere documentarians of its complicated and complicating smoke-tendrilled existence. Although the critique may seem inherent to the medium, we are left again and again with the question of whether or not the whole lot of us can hack the master’s mainframe using the master’s software. So we furrow our brows and program our drum-machine, ready to spit out four seconds of grindcore gibberish with the vague hope that someone might respond to it. The black-clad singer of our hero-worshipping youth adjusts his white collar, intoning the likeness of the French Lettrist movements, and bends his thin frame. Where do we go from here? Derivé or just another tired wandering into the heart of the redundant elitist subculture? Yes, I realize that people are not commodities, figures, statistics, or make believe. But while you’re busy breaking the limbs of the Spectacle, so many of us remain paralyzed and integrated into the grinding gears of technology and representations. Still, I dance to your songs the same as I did all those years ago when Dennis Lyxzén seemed to reach right out of the stereo to grip my imagination and passions. Again, the roles and representations begin to seep in through the cracks. Life arbitrated by images. Friendships are mediated through technology rather than lived experience—cell phones, text messages, computer keys, glowing monitors, and the like. The wires are not confined to the apparatus itself for the boundaries are blurred. We are the apparatus—just as much as the chips and the hub and the code. It has changed us on a fundamental level and keeps our identities in constant flux. Download the upgrade. New technology makes old relationships obselete. When we commit to social upheaval, it is against ourselves that we rebel. The fashionista eyes the handsome hipster in black, and the same tired roles are repeated ad absurdum. Sex in binary. Like it or not, orgasms are not revolution. Mere copulation is not the pinnacle of human potential or lived experience, no matter what dogmatic text-thumping may spread thin across these suspicious days of war. We are not satisfied by the forced, senseless kisses and flirtations of pseudo-revolutionary identity constructs--of revolutionary Spectacle. Considering the forces involved, such activities—regardless of their purported, anti-hierarchical purpose—have degenerated to the point of USB docking. This exchange of data is not limited to the bourgeois; file-transfer of this sort applies to dissidents and punk rock romance as well. We demand nights of magick! Standing at the fabric-torn gates of Quiddity with the tired Jaff at our side, we sigh again at the knowledge of fashion and daydreams. Dare we penetrate the Gyre when tomorrow we realize that it was all fantasy? Slowly our memories drain of the experience, and—like most dreams—fade into the collective chasm of the unconsious. But we are not so naïve as to think that grindcore, which—at best—merely qualifies as bursts of atonal noise, will somehow provide an escape from these issues. Much less an effective means for struggle against Spectacle and ever-massing heap of technological apparatus. We are merely the cyborg people becoming aware of the machine-child growing inside each of us. Again and Again we question exactly who inseminated us with this binary information? With these plates of iron and wheels of velocity? Remember, however, that physics demand velocity to have speed and direction—otherwise the term does not qualify. There remains the very question of the musical medium to investigate, of course. Why open ourselves to the warp-taint of the Horus Heresy that seems to be contemporary grindcore? Although some may comfort themselves with a history of socially-conscious Anticapital, Scum, and Smashes the State, the modern associations with the subgenre are problematic at best. Misogynistic brutes have appropriated the term and corrupted any potentially positive connection to the title. We will not dignify these bands by listing their names, but they are easily identified by the victimized women spread uncomfortably across album covers, lyrics, and liner-notes. Rape and serial-killers will never be cool. Album covers with sleazy shovels over bloodied female groins are not a testament to anything but your own worthlessness—a vast, rotting monument to the utter meaninglessness of your pathetic lives. We understand and sympathize that the unrelenting weight of steel and Spectacle alienate one and all. As Guy Debord so aptly maintained, a person’s only connection to another is his or her complete lack of connection. We are united in our alienation. It is, however, unacceptable to deal with these crushing sensations by escaping into violent masturbatory fantasies. You can attempt to couch your pitiful state with Nietzchean references or horror movies or whatever else, but—in the end—all your music amounts to a big heap of nothing. We wouldn’t grace our garbage cans with it—let alone bother listening. We finger through the moving albums of our youth, staging the next battle for passion and rebellion. Six skinny hipsters live in posthumous vigor, and yes—this pulse will beat again. But we never did forget, did we? Is our aim, like dada, to destroy art without realizing it? Or perhaps like the Situationist International, to both destroy and realize at the same time? Do we demand the impossible, or do we simply expect it? Regardless of our intentions, art is dead. We hold the crimson blade. Four-second songs for the six-second people—the speed-driven ones with nowhere to go but home. Feuerbach relates God as humanity projected unto the stars, but can we say the same of us? Can we be understood as projections of light and shadow, information, role, and machine? What then of Spectacle and commodity society? Suddenly, realize that you’re nearing the end of the paragraph and that you need to glean something from this all. What is the Cambodian Pill Frenzy? Some bacchanalia of time and motion and drum-machine, perhaps. Wild-eyed cynics who are finally willing to yell and scream that art is dead. Or at least that’s what the answering machine said. Looks like this is it!!! I heard they’re a bunch of spoiled rich kids who need to get their ideology together before daring to question the fixed appearance of aesthetics and identity. Cambodian Pill Frenzy is already ending, and they’ll pull the tags from your mattresses before all is said and done. Motion, motion, stop. Always forward. The inorganic spreads its seed through the host, and another drone steps out into the world ready to replicate itself a thousand times over. Reproduction in the truest sense of the word. What are we, if not a blast beat? A battalion of frustrated workers pounding hammers to the time of commodity culture—the alienating rhythm of the production-line. The factory boss, however, is slave to another beast. Idol of circuitry and image. Whether we like it or not, the cult of the machine is upon us. Faster, faster, complete. Race to the end of the song and see who wins. Vivez sans temps mort. Art is dead… long live grindcore!!! Fight fire with fire and everything will burn. Yeah.This manifesto is very much for real.
