Some comments on the themes of "Alien" and the new leaked "Prometheus" trailer

The name of this blog and the pic of the Space Jockey are all drawn from the movie Alien (which as a kid gave me my first sense of the connections between biology and technology), so I might be expected to comment on the leaked trailer for the prequel which has been doing the rounds in the last 24 hours, and disappearing at an equally rapid rate thanks to threats from 20th Century Fox . There was still a poor quality version left on YouTube when I last checked, but I urge anyone who might be interested to instead wait for the official release (which is why I am not posting that trailer here).

The original film was very important for my personal development and I would like to be able to say more about this once Prometheus is released. All I will say for now is that my expectations are not that high for this prequel because the key to the original's success was that it was largely based on H.P. Lovecraft's maxim, "atmosphere, not action."  So no need for exhaustive explanation either, which forces us to use our own imaginations instead. But how can the prequel respect this when everything so far suggests it will be attempting to explain everything. Drawing on the term used by sci fi critic Peter Nicholls, I can also say that what really fired my imagination as a youngster was the Nostromo crew encountering "a big dumb object" i.e. the Space Jockey on Acheron LV-426. This incredible sequence, the greatest I have ever seen, sticking with the terminology favored by Nicholls, Clute et al, instilled in me a "sense of wonder". This was  tempered by the knowledge that the warning signal meant there was no possibility of being enchanted by the kind of "cargo cult" qualities associated with the properties of other mysterious xenoarchaeological artifacts, not least the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Unlike Dave Bowman then, there is no lebensphilosophie style personal transfiguration from crossing a threshold, given how everyone who walks around the derelict is eventually killed by the alien; starting with the necrogenesis scene (better known as the "chestburster scene"), when male crewmember Kane gives "birth" to the alien that implants itself in his body in the derelict's egg chamber (although it could be argued on the basis of the deleted scene featured on the DVD that Captain Dallas [and Brett] is forced to undergo a metamorphosis by being incorporated into the creature's life cycle; however, this is so horrible that it is probably as far from the "exalted" sense implied by transfiguration as one can imagine). 

Mentioning Clute et al shows that over the years I've realized that Alien draws on certain conventions of science fiction, but this has only enhanced my appreciation of its qualities. In addition to being so prescient, as all good science fiction should be, with its theme of bio-weapons meets corporate malfeasance, I credit the film a lot for violating the formerly pristine, white environments usually favored in depictions of space travel, through its spectacular focus on body horror. And this raises another intriguing question: whose sense of horror is it really? Perceptive critics have responded by examining the racial coding of the xenomorph as black, whereas feminists are fascinated and appalled in equal measure by the film's equating of technology and reproduction. I'd recommend reading this comparable essay on John Carpenter's The Thing for more of a sense of the "body horror" that might be at stake in Alien as well (The Thing, incidentally, shares with Alien a linkage back to the xenoarchaeological themes of Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness"). Eric White ties together the issues of racial/species/gender identity in relation to evolutionary theory:

Evolutionary theory has often figured in science fiction as a powerfully resonant topic, a privileged point of departure for the staging of a variety of highly charged concerns and conflicts. In some narratives, the positing of a shared kinship between humans and other animals provokes revulsion at the implied refusal of any claim to human preeminence in the greater scheme of things. But the erosion of "Man" as a putatively ontological category and the prospect, moreover, of reality as a Joycean "chaosmos" of perpetual change or metamorphosis can also be depicted affirmatively. The theoretical elaboration of an evolutionary universe need not exclusively elicit horror and anguish. It may also prompt the speculative imagination to extrapolate a future for what might be dubbed "the post-human body becoming." In this essay I’m going to examine a number of exemplary responses in science fiction to the advent of modern evolutionary thought. Discussion will focus in particular on John Carpenter’s 1982 version of The Thing and Octavia Butler’s more recent XENOGENESIS trilogy as evolutionist narratives offering respectively traumatized and affirmative perspectives on a world in which, as Heraclitus long ago put it, "everything flows and nothing abides, everything gives way and nothing stays fixed."

http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/61/white61art.htm

It isn't clear to me though whether the author's enthusiasms are really stopping short of the kind of Deleuzian excesses that we saw Steve Fuller recently criticizing in the interview I posted on this blog. Sci fi then can clearly be mobilized either  in support of, or to express horror at, the kind of projects we humans strive for in the future. It can be worthwhile taking the time to seriously consider its implications.

 Well, I guess until the new film comes out, I'll continue when I have moments to myself to take a relaxing  walk, plotting my own little psychogeographies as I go by listening to and dreaming about certain music that for me evoke the scene of the crew approaching the derelict (such as the opening track of The Tower by Mordant Music). And speaking of artifacts, don't masks have a slightly xenoarchaeological quality about them as well, in that they too can function as gateways/portals in rituals and fantasy literature that can open the wearer up to forces with the power to transform personal identity? But as I've already hinted in my reference to Kane, to describe the "facehugger" in this way would be a bit of a stretch; although it was probably inevitable that someone would make this anyway (which is clever and humorous in its own way, to be sure).

These have just been a few fairly spontaneous musings inspired by my viewing of the new Prometheus trailer and then looking for a further excuse to avoid going back to work. Not long ago, for the very same reasons, I threw together the following little piece, which combines a couple of motifs from Alien and Lovecraft. It doesn't really look too bad on a big monitor. I thought the storyline could be something like this:

"After surveying the outer systems for many long years, a team finally made it back to Earth to find out why they had lost all contact. This pic was taken in China, but the team discovered identical statues in every major city around the world. The cities had all been reduced to smoking ruins and the atmosphere was no longer breathable. It seems Earth's fate had something to do with the mysterious Cthulhu cult which had spread during the team's absence...."

Sounds of The Great Old Ones Tearing a Hole in the Space-Time Continuum

I created this pic and recommend clicking on it to see a larger version

I also recommend playing this accompanying track on headphones to get the full effect.

Find more songs like Wilful at Myspace Music

Becoming our own intelligent designers? A consideration of our possible cosmic development

As usual, it takes me a while to get back to topics I'd previously mentioned I might post on. Other commitments are always to blame. It was still quite a year for the Acheron team. We realized a dream of seeing Laurie Anderson performing live at the Sydney Opera House. We also took in China Mieville giving a live reading of selections from his latest book, Kraken. Fascinating as each was in their own right, for me it is always best when things can be brought together, rather than be treated as discrete episodes to be judged on their own respective merits.

Mieville mentioned how he uses Samuel Delany in his creative writing class at Warwick University. Derridata in turn leaked this information to one of Delany's confidants, and "Chip" himself was eventually tipped off! Great as that was, I was particularly interested in how Mieville briefly situated himself in relation to Lovecraft. He mentioned spending more time of late in Providence to get a "feel" for the place, so no doubt we'll soon see what dividends that yields for his upcoming "weird fictions". More forgivingly than was generally Lovecraft's want, Mieville also professed his atheism, while at the same time distancing himself from the "celebrity atheism" of Dawkins et al-- conceding that faith can play a positive role in some people's lives. In contrast, Lovecraft only begrudgingly allowed that Catholicism could inform aesthetics in a worthwhile sense.

Given Mieville's involvement in an upcoming academic conference called Spaces of Alterity, I'm wondering whether he or the other participants will be willing to build upon the aforesaid comments by considering how "the sacred" could inform conceptions of "counter-hegemonic space". I'm thinking here of those who have considered how our planet can be rethought by grounding "the possibility for a Global Ethic that will provide hospitality to all aliens, near and far". The relationship between "the sacred" and "astrobiology" appears set to become an ongoing concern. If you check out the website, you can see that Laurie Anderson was involved too. I mention this fact in part because it is suggestive of a certain consistency to the cultural tastes and interests of the Acheron team as well.

I would describe Anderson as a progressive artist, but whenever I find myself becoming more pessimistic about our prospects for venturing very far, I feel closer to Lovecraft. Afterall, his stories were predicated on panspermia bringing the human race into contact with higher civilizations that were indifferent to us. At no time did he suggest that we could ourselves learn to direct the process to progressive ends. In contrast, Meot-Ner and Matloff in effect follow Carl Sagan and Francis Crick by suggesting that panspermia could be used to create a "Noah's Ark" to save species threatened by changes to Earth's ecosystem, or even changes to the solar system, such as the death of the sun.

Once you start following these debates, you soon realize that any receptiveness to such notions is dependent on how you interpret "the sacred":

Should this "sacred" quality slow or stop all our attempts to control, modify or manipulate life, or to use it for cosmic development? These questions strike me as judicious, but are also associated with the notion of transgression as presented by the French philosopher Roger Caillois (Caillois, 1939); in this sense, the human being is prompted and encouraged to become fully aware of the act he commits, so as to choose not to act.

I find it ironic then (during my more optimistic, or rather, "utopian" moodswings) that even the proponents of the "selfish gene" theory will attempt to appear responsible by urging us to adhere to the cautionary principle: i.e. notwithstanding natural selection, we are not just driven by our genes, insofar as we are also cultural beings that must be held accountable for our choices and acts. But if the end result is merely a deferential attitude to the order of Nature, how desirable is it really? Surely the greater challenge is to think of how directed panspermia could forge cosmic development as a counter-hegemonic practice; a space irreducible to privatisation, commodification, homogenisation etc? I anticipate that the "Spaces of Alterity" conference will reference Nick Dyer Witheford's Games of Empire, which envisions gaming environments as an example of such spaces. That is fine, as far as it goes. But it stops well short of the ambitious economy of scale Kim Stanley Robinson has in mind when he presents terraforming as a utopian project. To my mind, this distinction makes Robinson the most important science fiction author working today.

For some, building on an impetus for terraforming/directed panspermia will mean hitching the Intelligent Design wagon to Fred Hoyle's The Intelligent Universe. I understand the basic reasoning, which would aim to show the continuity between us taking control of cosmic development and the will of God. In a comparable vein, the conjoining of Islam and science fiction is notable. Others, such as Robinson, are likely to be more muted so far as any specific privileging of religion per se is concerned.

Be this as it may, this group would probably, at least in principle, broadly assent to us collectively becoming our own "intelligent designers". This is light years away from the central message of Lovecraft (and arguably much of "weird fiction" as well) or what is for many the classic sci fi movie of all time-- 2001: A Space Odyssey. Just watch the Flash animation in Part IV and you'll see what I mean.

I won't speculate any further then about what I'd like to see featuring in the "Spaces of Alterity" conference. So I'll just reiterate that I enjoyed China Mieville's talk. Kraken inspired me to create an image of Cthulhu laying waste to Sydney. I'm also posting a few pics of China giving his reading.

Hyper-real religions?

It's taken me a long time to post this link. I can agree with some of what Mark Dery says here, perhaps unsurprisingly, given how much I had enjoyed his take on the pop culture presence of Nazism (previously posted on this blog). Kraken Rising: How the Cephalopod Became Our Zeitgeist Mascot adopts a typical [postmodern] media studies approach to popular culture, which certainly yields some valuable insights. It demonstrates how the [unfortunate] predominance of McLuhan as media theorist in the academy is parallelled in cyberculture. According to Dery, computer geeks who believe the "medium is the message" are only too happy to identify with their slimy, tentacled counterparts:

"...the octopus was the poster animal for the...techno-transcendentalist strain in digital culture. Embodying the profoundly anti-modernist (and inescapably religious) dream of healing the rupture between language and meaning, signifier and signified, the octopus “does not transmit its linguistic intent, it becomes its linguistic intent.” This, said McKenna, is “the essence of a more perfect Logos, a Logos not heard but beheld.” Forgetting that visual imagery is no less culturally contingent and historically contextual than words, he envisioned the use of VR to “change vocal utterance into visually beheld colored output,” which he believed would “telepathically” communicate linguistic intent through “the unambiguous topology of meanings beheld,” as if visual representation and subjective meaning were a seamless whole, and not subject to the same semiotic slippage that bedevils language. Anyway, we can dream, can’t we? “In the not-too-distant future, men and women may shed the monkey body to become virtual octopi swimming in a silicon sea.”

Of course, I'm equally intrigued by the slippages between ethology and cultural anthropology, just as much as I was in the adoption of the generic "alien" as the mascot of rave culture. Both creatures are tool users afterall, making it easier to compare and contrast their respective cultural significance (the "alien" was previously highlighted on this blog). Dery also references the spread of Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos in this context, arguing that it runs parallel to, but is not congruent with, the cephalopod "meme" (the use of this term is itself a clear indicator of neo-Darwinism's pervasive cultural influence). According to him, its adherents are more ironic in their attitude to moral truth and literal fact.

What does the sociology of religion have to say about all this? I am thinking here particularly of Adam Possamai's "Yoda Goes to the Vatican", which briefly touches on Cthulhu cultists. He too sees the Internet as playing a formative role (hence the Baudrillardian resonance of "hyper-real" religions) in the growth of such alternative religions, particularly among young people who are equally savvy with technology and pop culture.

To my eyes though, it is unfortunate that he and Dery- the latter ironically refers in passing to "memes"- make no real allowance for the "science as culture" thesis, commonly associated with STS (Science & Technology Studies), which could have shed some light on the central conceit of the Cthulhu Mythos. Afterall, nowadays various science advocates, not least Richard "memes" Dawkins and Paul Davies, give greater credence to the idea that life originated from outer space (with Dawkins crediting a sophisticated alien civilization) rather than from God:

Here is another science fiction representation of directed panspermia:

Dery is therefore a little off target when he claims that all Cthulhu cultists are necessarily postmodern ironists: why settle for irony when the idea of panspermia means one can now selectively draw on scientific authority to legitimate their own brand of "cosmic horror", irrespective of how willfully perverse and implausible this appears to the rest of us? And dare I mention Cthulhu cultist Darrick Dishaw, who dreams of the day when he can perform human sacrifices in his rituals, along with other unsavory practices? I can't see any irony at work here.

Moving along, this is not really that surprising, given how science has in some cases clearly mutated from occulture. Consider, for example, alchemy's relationship to the development of modern chemistry, and how figures such as Aleister Crowley were feted by the literati of their day; comprised of theosophists and amateur scientists. Indeed, the occult periodical press came into being to publicize occult ideas, to support emerging occult institutions and settle disputes within a counter-public sphere of occultism, and to legitimate occult knowledge in the dominant public sphere in quasi-scientific terms of validation.

In a similar vein, Darwin's legacy has tended to reinforce Lovecraft's influence on another religion cited by Possamai- namely, the Church of Satan. Like Crowley before him then, Anton LaVey drew on literary and (pseudo) scientific influences.The Church's doctrines are accordingly not theistic, but rooted instead in mechanistic materialism. This emphasis eventually led to a split in the Church, which resulted in the formation of the Temple of Set. The latter attempted to highlight intelligence as a distinctive attribute of human beings, but I can only guess that this stance made them seem a little out of step with the neo-Darwinian sentiments of most Satanists (or perhaps they were simply less opportunistic). This may have been their undoing (in contrast-- tellingly-- LaVey may have died, but the Church of Satan remains an ongoing concern).
I do agree with Possamai though that these religions cannot be dismissed as mere escapism. My point is not that the burden of proof shifts to theism alone, or that relativism is the only option (as implied by the characterization of "hyper real" religions). When assessing the relative merits of any of the belief systems I've discussed here, the important distinction is between:

"...philosophical rationalism of which the hallmark is deduction, and the inductive empirical workaday of normal science. This blurring leads one to easily dismiss theism on scientific grounds. Fern Elsdon-Baker rightly, in my view, points out that while some versions of theism can be empirically refuted (e.g., literalism which supports Young Earth Creationism), others can only be philosophically denied (e.g., philosophical Deism). The empirical inductive tools of science are of limited scope, and to assert that something is a scientific question does not make it amenable to scientific methods. Words are not magic".

There is something else that the overuse of "postmodern" tends to lose sight of. As Mark S. Morrisson has argued, the dialectic is between esotericism and the exoteric. The former involves ideas of secret knowledge that are directly experienced, leading to union with the divine. The latter refers to the public dimensions of religion, including church institutions and publicly propagated knowledge. This is a process that has been going on in counter public spheres since the late nineteenth century. The advent of the Internet has of course aided the dissemination of these ideas, but I believe the novelty of the situation should not be exaggerated through an over-reliance on McLuhan-esque cultural critique. Testing the concept of "self-religion", as developed by Paul Heelas, with reference to Morrisson's dialectic, seems like a more worthwhile exercise. Self-religion initially appears incompatible with the kind of "real externality" characteristic of "cosmic horror", but I can't really comment until I read Contemporary Religious Satanism: A Critical Anthology, edited by Jesper Aagaard Petersen.

In any case, Possamai's focus is more on how religion started to openly mesh with popular culture in the 1960s. With him and Dery specifically mentioning Lovecraft, it's also interesting to note (in addition to the i09 article on Lovecraft in Japan) the following:

Tatsumi's book [Full Metal Apache] is useful not only as a guide to works we might otherwise have overlooked but also to works we thought we knew well. He makes us aware, for example, of Yasuo Nagayama's "postcolonialist rereading" of "Godzilla," particularly Nagayama's insight that the monster may have had his genesis not in a nuclear mishap but rather in "a pseudoreligious and pseudoscientific theory championed by 19th-century Shintoist Masumi Ohishigori" -- new information for most readers.

"Deeply influenced by the rise of Darwinism and paleontology, Ohishigori," we learn, "came to invent an amazing theory that located the origin of man in dinosaurs born of Japanese gods." Some of these divine dinosaurs, Ohishigori's followers believed, survive deep in the ocean, and when one recalls that Godzilla seems to have emerged from the sea, one feels certain that the monster's creators had Ohishigori's theory somewhere in the backs of their minds.

Whether this amounts to cosmic horror in the truly Lovecraftian sense remains to be determined. If I ever get round to looking at this a bit more closely, I'd be interested in investigating the extent to which the passage of such pseudo religious and pseudoscientific ideas into the Japanese public sphere mirrored the process described by Morrisson, and whether they too could be construed in the terms of Possamai and Dery.

Stephen Hawking's Aliens

I'm not usually one to blow my own trumpet, but it seems there are some scientific grounds to support what I had to say before about generation starships and bioships. Looking through a recent issue of the Journal of Cosmology, I was particularly interested in Blair Csuti's response to physicist Stephen Hawking's comments about the probability of alien life forms being hostile toward us. For those in need of some more context, you can catch up here:

In his contribution, entitled "Darwinism and Hawking's Aliens", Csuti makes much play of the fact that natural selection would compel alien species to place their own interests above those of the indigenous population of Earth. This programmatic assertion means less to me though than his argument that:

"...racing to Earth at near-light speed, it would take our would-be exploiters tens of millions more years to turn up on our doorstep. Unless they have very long life-spans, that would require a generational space ship with little prospect of returning to their home planet with whatever booty they had considered valuable enough to undertake a long and expensive expedition".

So I was right to suggest the meeting could only take place on an exoplanet. Therefore I'd like to add another twist to my Alien scenario, by suggesting that the Space Jockeys and their xenomorph cargo were the products of the evolution of the "astrochickens" originally dispatched by humans to explore the exoplanets (Freeman Dyson style). However, their evolution is so advanced that it takes considerable time and effort for a human to understand. I think back on the ending of the original Planet of the Apes movie, and there are some similarities to what I am proposing here for the Alien prequel. I just think my idea is a bit less obvious and therefore not as open to parody. You might recall, for instance, The Simpsons' musical version of Planet of the Apes, in which the sole surviving human astronaut breaks into song after at last discovering the shocking truth that the planet is not so alien afterall, but merely a future Earth where evolution has gone haywire: "You see I was wrong/it was Earth all along/they finally made a monkey out of me".

I won't comment here on Quatermass and the Pit either.

The added kick is that my version plays up to the importance of the Precautionary Principle that is supposed to regulate science, which is now generally regarded as "post-normal" because of the potential dangers it poses. It is this aspect that the evangelical presentation of Dyson ignores. Dyson goes out of his way to "blind" the audience with the wondrous nature of science, suspiciously resembling a telepreacher shaking down the true believers for the donations that will fund scientific research and shore up the expertise of scientists. So I hope Science Studies can make something of the latest instalments of the Alien franchise (remember, Social Epistemology once ran a piece on Kim Stanly Robinson, so sci fi can be useful in reinforcing critical attitudes).

Incidentally, the respective contributors to the issue in question of the Journal of Cosmology, provide more than a series of reading strategies to apply to the Alien prequel. They might also serve as useful templates for sci fi authors and readers interested more generally in how to characterise our potential relationships with alien lifeforms.

They sure make for more compelling reading than the works of Erich Von Daniken, which are not only racist in their assumption that the non-European peoples did not develop any science of their own (arguing instead that it was bestowed upon them by alien races), but also a direct ripoff of Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos. As this article proves, Von Daniken was an opportunist who noticed the warm reception of the mythos among French sci fi fans, which he in turn exploited to his own ends.

I hope my reimagining of the Alien universe is more compelling too than the "ancient astronauts". For me, it is not necessarily any conscious alien intervention in the evolution of the "astrochickens" used for exploration and/or terraforming, shifting the focus to our own inability to understand the contingent nature of the processes we've set in train. All of this was missing from Alien, where the emphasis was on the company's deliberate acquisition of the lifeform for military purposes. Sure, the plan was sinister, but there was a rationale behind it one could at least understand. I am suggesting, drawing on Hawking, a failure prior to this series of events to even recognise something as a form of life. The latter might gradually coevolve in more dramatic ways with our space exploration; thereby affording us a monstrous glimpse of the next stage of our development as a species.

To uncover this truth results in madness.....will the prequel capture this Lovecraftian sense of "cosmic horror"? To do so, it would have to effectively dispose of the character who learns the truth, otherwise the "unique" hybrid status of Ripley in Resurrection would appear more implausible. Only time will tell.

To lose planetary contact and soar into the void

My previous post quoted Ridley Scott talking about how the Alien prequel will prominently feature terraforming. I don't know to which end yet, but his tantalising comments have ensured that terraforming has weighed heavily on my mind of late. As a fan of Kim Stanley Robinson, I nurture progressive dreams of what we could accomplish on Mars, but there is another side of me that is more pessimistic. I've been watching the new series Voyage to the Planets (not to be confused with the similarly titled American and British programs) and I find myself becoming very enthusiastic about what we are now able to observe, only to then experience the disappointment of how tantalisingly out of our grasp anything more ambitious appears to be. I just can't see enough marshaling of collective will, capital and expertise, in my lifetime at least, for terraforming to become a practical reality. Indeed, I scoffed the other day when I came across an old issue of The Good Weekend supplement of the Sydney Morning Herald circa 1986, which dutifully reported that "Soviet and American scientists agree that Moon colonies should be fully operational by 2010"!! I dare anyone to watch the Mars episode, letalone the upcoming one on Jupiter- to get an idea of how inhospitable these planets are (not to mention inaccessible)- and retain your confidence that you will be a witness or participant in something truly miraculous. I suspect that, like me, you will experience a sense of Lovecraftian "cosmic horror", in the full knowledge that we will [probably] not venture very far.

The conflict arose in me at an early age. I read Lovecraft as a teenager, which afforded me, like everyone who reads him, a glimpse of the horror lying beneath the placid surface of everyday life. When I was 17 though I came across sociology for the first time, and I started to grow more balanced as per the Gramscian ideal of "pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will". There was one book that really did it for me: I started to appreciate that power was immanent within society itself (rather than alien beings, mysterious forces or whatever), and this meant that it could be called to account. The Two Faces of Deviance was written by a criminologist, and it critiqued liberal "band aid" type solutions by using the analogy of someone standing on a riverbank who catches a glimpse of what he thinks might be a person drifting by. Every time he dives in to rescue someone, another appears. Realising that he can't continue in this fashion, the man resolves to walk upstream to discover the source of the problem so he can stop it from happening. In other words, he gains an appreciation of structural violence by treating causes, rather than mere symptoms.

I like to picture sociologists and [future] terraformers alike adhering to this operating principle. But the character Anselmo Quemot in Asimov's The Naked Sun, a sociologist by trade, reminded me that a lack of institutional structure can foster anomie and a sense of losing control. This was really brought home to me after playing Half Life. I never fully comprehended the structure driving events. The irony here had to do with the fact that, as Richard J Hand points out in his "Proliferating Horrors: Survival Horror and the Resident Evil Franchise", this genre draws on Lovecraftian archetypes, but returns to the player a sense of control by allowing them to manipulate the environment to their own ends, as they gradually penetrate the heart of the mystery driving the storyline. Ever since, usually once a week, I have a dream reliving the part of Half Live where the player passes through an enormous underground cavern at the base of a research facility. Some kind of gigantic turbine is slowly rotating, with the sound of the machine punctuated by the ripping apart of bodies in its mechanisms. As you look up, you see bones, along with blood and gore, raining down.

What kind of an infernal machine is this? No answer was forthcoming, even once I completed the game. I feel this dream is a foil to the redemptive model of rationality I had earlier taken from The Two Faces Of Deviance. The fact that I still haven't solved the mystery feeds the compulsion to repeat; this serial logic sees me constantly adding new aural and visual elements to the dream. Most recently I passed by the Half Life machine, and heard the echo of power electronics style vocals coming from above, like what you would typically hear in the work of William Bennett and Kevin Tomkins. These were harsh commands, screams or whispers, that I was unable to decipher (hence heightening the sense of mystery).

Please note though, I am not saying that my survivalist fantasies have taken over my life, only that they sometimes furnish the pessimistic component of my Gramscian equilibrium. There's no total commitment to tragedy here. And yes, I have read The Influencing Machine and am fully aware of its significance when mapping what Seltzer describes as "the body machine complex". Hopefully my thinking is reflexive enough to treat it as an imaginative extrapolation, rather than the deus ex machina Viktor Tausk associated with schizophrenia.

This corpse grinding machine, along with my fascination for the Space Jockey mythos, may suggest an intuitive foothold on the meaning of cosmic horror. There's also some great passages in Perdido Street Station that are highly evocative of the mysterious torture associated with infernal machines. By the way, don't bypass the bleak aesthetic of films such as Moon. All well and good. I'm left wondering though: could it be that cosmic horror opens the floodgates to another malady of being? Any sense of bounded selfhood is liable to collapse because cosmic horror implies that the project of autonomy, characteristic of modernity, is revealed to be illusory. In this vein, recall the opening 6 minutes of Saturn 3: a motiveless and unfeeling act, problematising any distinction between an individual and his remote environment...Roger Caillois described a comparable syndrome in terms of the predatory behaviour of certain species, such as a mantis paralyzing its prey. Caillois speaks in terms of mimicry and legendary psychasthenia:

Dark space envelops me on all sides and penetrates me much deeper than light space, the distinction between inside and outside and consequently the sense organs as well, insofar as they are designed for external perception, here play only a totally modest role." This assimilation to space is necessarily accompanied by a decline in the feeling of personality and life. It should be noted in any case that in mimetic species the phenomenon is never carried out except in a single direction: the animal mimics the plant, leaf, flower, or thorn, and dissembles or ceases to perform its functions in relation to others. Life takes a step backwards.

I think of Caillois sometimes too while listening to the music of Darkspace. Unlike most "black metal", their focus is on the cold and bleak description of space. I read their work accordingly as a commentary on how legendary psychasthenia opens up in such lethal spaces after bearing witness to cosmic horror. Which is to say, their music:

"...does what most Depressive/Ambient/Suicidal Black Metal fails to do. It is a preview of death, as Atheism perceives it. No thoughts, no feelings, no emotions, nothing. Gravity withdraws itself and the void opens up".

I'm fascinated as well by the fact that a neoclassical darkwave group, such as Black Tape for a Blue Girl, could morph into a side project called As Lonely As Dave Bowman (referencing the character from 2001: A Space Odyssey). Again, a very cold aesthetic, albeit imbued with a touch of pathos.

That's probably enough for today. You're now free to judge for yourself if the cosmic horror and/or Caillois labels fit everything I've referred to. As for me, I'll wander off to check if a soundtrack takes shape in my mind as I watch the Jupiter episode of Voyage to the Planets tonight. Derridata once offered a description of the following track entitled "Black Star" by the Modified Toy Orchestra that is much in the spirit of what I've tried to convey here:

"it's a couple of guitar chords played from a toy with a guitar sound chip (the Texas Instrument voice embedded in the track repeats "you found a black star") but put through a reverb and it sounds so celestial, so crystalline like an alien transmission signalling through cosmic echoes of background noise pulsing through the void".

Whatever I have resurrected... is sure to come calling for me.....

Shadows moving in the woods.....

Work has been draining lately (dissertations, journal articles, a book etc), so to sustain myself I've been trying to follow up on as much music as I can in my [limited] spare time. I read a capsule review in The Wire (Adventures in Modern Music) of Pulse Emitter's Decaying Ships that just blew me away, so I know what to chase down next. According to the reviewer, the album 's soundscapes evoke a storm lashed, remote alien planet. In other words: Acheron. I am dying to hear this as soon as possible.

What else? Well I couldn't neglect to mention Brighter Death Now's Great Death trilogy. It originally surfaced in the mid 90's, but I'm only making its acquaintance now. There is some great material spread over the three discs, but the highlight for me is track 4 on disc 2, entitled "Moratorium". Given the prominent sample from The Evil Dead (a tape recording of an isolated researcher living in a cabin, "far from the groves of academe", reading from The Book of the Dead and then describing what he has resurrected, having initially noticed "shadows moving in the woods"), it's appropriate to mention in the same breath as Acheron, as Lovecraft's Necronomicon provides a common reference point. Death industrial is certainly not everyone's cup of tea by any means. What interests me most though is the conceptual crossovers with other forms of electronic music. I do have Pulse Emitter's Planetary Torture, so perhaps a comparison with Decaying Ships will not be too much of a stretch in a musical sense as well. Speculation only at this point, as I eagerly await confirmation!


The renowned Australian writer on occult matters, Nevill Drury, made an interesting documentary called The Occult Experience, which features H.R. Giger. I recommend watching it along with this interview with Dan O'Bannon which discusses, among other things, Lovecraft and Giger.

Inner Ear Infection

This was a promotional video executed for the track "Yog-Sothot" from the Nyarlathotep release by the stellar French electronic music composer Gwenn Tremorin of Flint Glass. This 2006 joint release is available on Brume & Funkwelten Records. An excellent dark atmospheric embodiment of novelist H.P. Lovecraft's cthulhu mythos. Remixes by Ah Cama-Sotz, Disharmon, This Morn' Omina, Empusae, and Xabec

There is some chance that as of next week personal developments may deprive me of a further 50 hours or so I could have devoted to updating this blog, so I was relieved to catch sight of the blog Inner Ear Infection, the most interesting blog on music and related matters I've seen since Infinite Frequencies. Then I learned that the young Canadian guy responsible for IEI hasn't updated this year, so I'm despairing of how many of the blogs I would like to monitor on a more regular basis seem to languish as archives. Be this as it may, the archive is quite large, and from the blogger profile one can get to Bruce's homepage, which features a selection of his more academically oriented writings. The standout for me was his piece on themes of miscegenation, amounting to a kind of "Darwinism in reverse", in the work of H.P. Lovecraft (and therefore in keeping with Acheron's interest in bioculture more generally; that particular case also makes it more abundantly clear than even Houellebecq's extended fan letter to Lovecraft, how much of a thematic influence the old master was on the younger reactionary postmodernist). Such theoretical meditations are in turn neatly complemented by IEI's highlighting of select Lovecraftian "dark ambient" artists, such as Flint Glass. Perhaps some of the other more avowedly "industrial" artists make for a mixed bag, quality/conceptually speaking, but this doesn't diminish my interest in tracing any correspondences with the marvellous Isolationism compilation I picked up, when was that, ten years ago or so?

As this blog's primary function is as an exchange network among a group of friends, I have no idea off the top of my head if IEI is already on the blogroll of Simon Reynolds or other likeminded folks, and it follows with this audience in mind that I don't really [have to] care either.

http://innerearinfection.blogspot.com/

http://flintglass.free.fr/