Nostromo

I've really been enjoying listening to Sleep Research Facility's album Nostromo a lot lately which--as you might have guessed--is inspired by the film Alien. As Kevin Doherty has revealed in an interview:

Those that have heard of SRF will probably know you through the Nostromo CD that was released by Cold Spring Records a while ago. This was, as the name suggests, promoted as a soundtrack prelude to the Alien film. Why did you choose to follow such a concept? Does Alien, or the imagery in the film, have any special place for you?

KD:  “Soundtrack prelude to the Alien film”, that's a terrific description. Yeah, "Alien" is my favourite film (I'm big into films and I really like good incidental music) and as a quiet haunting environment the ship "Nostromo", on which the story takes place, is second to none. Also, it seems to me to be really highlighted during the film's first moments – those introductory slow panning shots, there's a strange sense of abandonment so the whole project is kind of inspired by this opening sequence of scenes. Also one can't help but always associate deep space travel with some kind of hyper-sleep or suspended animation, so that theme is almost automatically present as well, though that wasn't really a deciding factor in choosing the subject matter (it's really about the ship, not the people sleeping in it). I suppose I tried to create an aural equivalent of these sensations one might feel, all alone exploring this vast dark place, cut off from everything and everyone -- nothing (apparently) happening, just you and the environment, no distraction, no conversation, not really overtly nightmarish but still curiously tense in some otherworldly and dreamlike way -- something lurks in the shadows but it never jumps right out to scare you, it's maybe a bit like sneaking around in the dead of night when everyone else is asleep, which can be fun and at the same time maybe a bit un-nerving in a compelling sort of way".


It's very hard to capture the kind of structure of feeling I attempted to evoke in my previous posting concerning the work of Darren Jorgensen, which I detect again listening to Nostromo. But how could it be otherwise, when you are dealing with something on the edges of semantic availability? No doubt there will be proponents of so-called "dark vitalism" out there who will soon turn their attention in earnest to this style of ambient music, leading to all sorts of imaginings along the lines perhaps of Deleuze and Guattari's invoking of how Lovecraft's... (should take me five minutes to try to plug into this style of thinking...first I have to create an appropriate search string; wait! I've found something already, ok, let's go then) (ahem!) ...stories become most abstract when he attempts to encounter the plane through the exquisitely minimal, imperceptible haecceities...but of course the plane cannot be encountered. Things emerge through the plane, but the plane does not exist unto itself. Deleuze and Guattari say of music that "there is a transcendent compositional principle that is not of the nature of sound, that is not 'audible' by itself or for itself. This opens the way for all possible interpretations" (TP 266). The horror of Lovecraft's cosmos comes because "it" is not. Through access to the different organisational principles of the cosmos, his protagonists are faced with the truly voluminous and thus mind-shattering infinity of variations and immanent-interpretations (not reflections) of states of perception.


This would be music as a liberating practice that opens gates to what Patricia MacCormack (who I have been borrowing from here) describes as "an infinite territory beyond representation, signification, and perception itself". Could it be that Matt Howarth is attempting a similar gesture in his stories about isolated characters who attain "enriched visions" through personal transfiguration? Howarth is a particularly interesting figure in this context I think because he has long incorporated electronic musicians as characters in his works, with Enriched Visions paying tribute to onetime Lustmord collaborator, and outstanding ambient composer in his own right, Robert Rich. Indeed, the book features a dialog between the two about the parallels between the stories and Rich's own compositions. A dark vitalist might go further by quoting MacCormack's observation to the effect "that these relations force alternate modes of perception without laying new structures of apprehension, finally leading to the function of art as catalysing becomings in the reader/listener by demanding alternate perceptions of relation with any and all entities". 


And so to an overview of the stories in question:

"A collection of short science fiction and surreal stories by Matt Howarth based on the compositions of ambient pioneer Robert Rich. Embark on a series of fantastic voyages, where you’ll encounter: the link between a massive brushfire and aboriginal cave art, a mathematician’s quest into the desert, giant lizards orbiting the Earth, an old man captivated by dancing moss in a park, a kidnapping in the new Ice Age, the music a lonely lighthouse keeper uses to while away the nights, the fate of the last Martians, the unnatural hunger of Dame Procol’s new lifeforms, a man in search of amnesia, an antique dealer specializing in artifacts from the 21st Century’s texplosion era, an alien spire that reaches beyond the sky, and more. This book also features story notes in which Howarth and Rich discuss the connections between the stories and the source music."

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

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".

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.

Intense material hailing from the Portuguese speaking lands......

I ducked out during the day a week or two back to go the movies. I won't talk about the film I saw (truth be told, it didn't really make much of an impression on me), and this was a strange feeling because what I found far more evocative was sitting in the front row of the virtually empty cinema listening to my iPod while I waited for the show to begin. The blank screen and the quietness of my surroundings acted as a feedback loop to the dark ambient soundtrack I was listening to. I had barely recovered from the brilliance of Les Joyaux de la Princess when Thermidor's 1929 kicked in. I hereby declare Thermidor the most stunning new artist I have heard for a long time. This even extends to the album's concept art, which is very reminiscent, to me at least, of Sam Von Olffen's steampunk style, which I posted on this blog before. I'm trying to chase more information about Thermidor, but I think the artist wishes, like Les Joyaux, to preserve anonymity as much as possible. Be sure to check out Thermidor's website to get a better idea of what I'm so enthused about.

OK, I described Thermidor as offering a dark ambient soundtrack, but it's hard to see the style as complementary to that mad visionary José Mojica Marins, try as I might. Any connections are tangential, aside from their speaking the same language, suffice to say I would be curious to know how this Brazilian filmmaker has been received in Portugal. As far as explicit musical affinities go, I don't think Rob Zombie would hesitate to admit how he has been influenced by Coffin Joe. For now at least I'll have to content myself with posting Pt 1 of a fascinating documentary about a director who has been described thus:

"Marins’ furiously subversive anti-religion/anti-government interpretation of the genre took shape in the midst of a brutal dictatorship and remains wholly without parallel.

Over his nearly half-century-long career, he has created some of the most inspired, inflammatory and hallucinatory imagery in the history of fantastic cinema. His Coffin Joe character is equal parts the Marquis De Sade, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Salvador Dali and Friedrich Nietzsche, channeled through a love for confrontational horror films and the darkest of carnivalesque spook show iconography".

Of nihilism, Snog, Heathen Harvests and Transcendental Fascisms

I've started to have a few second thoughts about that "Chilling out in the Cities of the Dead" post. Provocative as Ultra Red's [selective] reading of Deleuze may have been in that instance, I have since come to the conclusion that to remain more consistent with the biological themes of this blog it is necessary to look at what remains when nihilism strips away everything except the laws of cause and effect: i.e. Nature. Bulent Diken's observation in his book Nihilism seems especially pertinent in this context. He highlights how the enemy/friend relationship becomes de-subjectified in the transition to post-politics:

"And it is in this movement, which is also the movement of nihilism, that distinctions such as reality/representation, biology/politics, terror/war against terror tend to disappear today. After all, the canceling of differences is a nihilistic principle par excellence [as noted by Deleuze]" (p. 88).

By extension, investigating the "post-political" rationalization behind the "transcendental fascism" that presents itself as a Third Way between liberal capitalism and communism could prove a fruitful line of inquiry. I see this form of neofascism as equal parts derived from Heidegger and Strasser. There is some affinity as well with the dark ambient I raised in the earlier post in many cases, and moreover, neofolk/martial industrial bands (Death in June, Sol Invictus, Der Blutharsch etc), along with other forms of electronic music. For example, a more disturbing spin could be put on the satire featured in Snog's Kings of Hate, given that the clip was directed by none other than self proclaimed "transcendental fascist" Richard Wolstencroft. Another song entitled The Human Germ (available on YouTube) appears thematically suggestive to some degree of Pentti Linkola's philosophy. In fairness to David Thrussell though I should probably chase up some more background to avoid reliance on guilt by association alone.

So let me turn my attention instead to someone else who is demonstrably comparable to Mr Linkola. I just happened to watch Wolstencroft's rabidly imaginative film Pearls Before Swine last night, which reminded me that the lead actor, "industrial musician" Boyd Rice, has gained some notoriety for his establishment of a thinktank advocating social Darwinist principles (particularly Redbeard's Might Is Right! credo), and also for acting as the public spokesperson for the Church of Satan.


I consider it no more coincidental that these misanthropic forms of cultural expression have come together than the fact that fellow travelers, the Process Church, later morphed into the Best Friends Animal Sanctuary. Mix nihilism in with the paganism, Deep Ecology, transcendental fascism etc then and you have the makings of a lethal cocktail. I'll give some credit to Michael Moynihan though; he was very forthright in the sense that Gods of the Blood could never have been written without him. I've been listening to (Moynihan's) Blood Axis's Gospel of Inhumanity a lot lately, and the sampling of The Wicker Man on that album is starting to make more sense. Because time is of the essence I can't comment here on Troy Southgate or related controversial figures. I'll try to save that stuff for upcoming posts and recommend checking out Heathen Harvest for a foretaste.

Semper Eadem & Spektral Magikal

chilling out in the cities of the dead

Other commitments have swallowed up my blogging energy of late, but I've just read an extraordinary essay that breathes new life into many of the interests featured on this blog. I was doing some research for a new post on dark ambient music, but it seems I'll have to put that on the backburner. Until an opportunity arises then, here is something that speaks to me theoretically, in a way that nothing else I've read in the musical blogosphere has ever managed to do thus far.

Having read the piece I can now start to weave together thoughts about soundscapes in my mind. For example, let's imagine The Place Where the Black Stars Hang as a soundscape of space archaeology, and then relate these thoughts to the album's conditions of production and consumption. This essay allows me to hear Thomas Koner, Burzum, Lull et al in a new light. It's not as simple though as applying the insights of Roger Caillois, for example, given the dystopic inflection of these artists under review. Actually, allow me to rephrase that. I believe that the Caillois style reading of "play", "imagination" and "nature" is functionally equivalent to the interpretation of Myst in the book Digital Play, meaning that the de-centering [sic] of any signs of human labour in such instances follows on from the Doom-like entropic misanthropy of "isolationatism" evoked in dark ambient. Perhaps it's no coincidence then that artists in the latter genre are prone at times to abjuring rational planning and collaboration, substituting instead chaosmagik, [Nazi style] paganism, Deep Ecology etc. I'll hopefully get to say more about this later after refining my model thanks to an interesting essay by Michael Moorcock on the inherent limitations of libertarian and survivalist science fiction (i.e. there seem to be considerable crossovers between the latter, the virtual worlds featured in games, and dark ambient soundscapes).

But first, here's a representative sample from the mindblowing essay in question:

Perhaps one reading of the death of ambient is precisely in the failure to articulate an urban pastoral. The shift from an ambient music based on a pastoral idyll to an almost regressive pessimism could be attributed to a form of the pastoral which condemns the city, unable to sound within its steel canyons a harmonious ideal. However, this would not explain the pleasure produced by these dystopian soundscapes. One could argue that the New York art establishment only embraced ambient music in 1994 when this sort of dystopianism assumed declarations of avant-gardism.

Ambient music may bite the dust, nonetheless the ambiance of the city continues to surround us. If our cities are deceased and our ambiance DOA, then it is because spectacle culture purports to have raised the scene of social exchange to the plateaux of trans-national labor forces and global markets. In this environment, the interest owed on our musical enjoyment is in fact a global debt. A vital task for the composers of ambiance, then, would be to conduct a psychogeography of global space. One strategy for such a psychogeography of global space would involve an alliance of artists (ambient and otherwise) incorporating the culture of lawlessness and violence promoted by trade accords like the North American Free Trade Agreement and the World Trade Organization. By claiming a subjectivity out of NAFTA, artists could devise strategies of cooperation (the mystifying buzz word of free markets) based on an erotics of ambient sound. This strategic cooperation would empower local artists through international action which utilizes and undermines the same capitalist flows.

Something must be done, if only to rescue our enjoyment from the deceptions of "chance" sublimation. As Deleuze and Guattari suggest, the death enterprise serves only the designs of sublimation and capitalist appropriation.

In the world of popular music, it seems our entire culture preoccupies itself with the business of pronouncing death. From the subcultural death of ambient music and the mainstream embrace of electronica as a reaction to rock's demise, all the way through to the received wisdom that the Left is dead. Rather than properly asking from where this wisdom originates, we all too often devour these sound-bytes and spit out the logic of capital.

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/