So, Genre is Obsolete is back, sort of, untethered from the editorial demands of a publication vying for attention is the marketplace of ideas. I am, of course, also vying for attention in the marketplace of ideas, but while I’m self-publishing this you can expect it to encapsulate all that I’m trying to say with these “reviews.” This is, one-dimensionally, a column about recent releases of experimental music that defy typical genre classification or subvert genre form, but more broadly, I am attempting to explore “genrelessness” as a metaphor for the lack of structural cohesion that defines the social decay we are experiencing in late modernism. This is cultural criticism. I’m not interested in simply telling you whether a piece of music is good or not. But rather, I prefer to use these obscure works of art as a direct portal into the mystifications of the contemporary social, cultural, and political realm.
In this column’s namesake essay, philosopher Ray Brassier writes: “‘Noise’ has become the expedient moniker for a motley array of sonic practices – academic, artistic, counter-cultural – with little in common besides their perceived recalcitrance with respect to the conventions governing classical and popular musics.” He continues, “It refers to anomalous zones of interference between genres.”
This analysis of the epistemology of the term “noise” doesn’t just give us a critical tool to isolate and understand the component parts that define noise and experimental music, but can also be applied as a metaphysical matrix to interpret, comprehend, and critique the dizzying contradictions of life in late capitalist America, and the broader West. “Anomalous zones of interference” is such a potent, forceful use of language that could be extracted from a much broader and complex interpretation of culture. We are living in a time when much of what passes as “radical art” is little more than propaganda for the left liberal elite, as the mode of production has internalized cultural leftism into its hegemony while society remains immiserated and alienated beneath the crushing despair of market capitalism. The “hipster right” has become the home of the nihilist aesthete. Free from the ideological constraints of the left liberal bourgeois, populist right wingers can indulge in the transgression of culture. It shouldn’t be surprising that some of the best art criticism happening anywhere is on hipster right wing podcasts like The Perfume Nationalist, because these thinkers and artists are outside of the hegemony.
And though my politics still fall into a left Marxist categorization, I now feel liberated from any radlib sentimentalism that may have been holding me back. I want to write about art and music and books that challenge the orthodoxies of bourgeois morality and leftist hegemony. I want art that flat rejects the world we live in, and seeks to incept within it a sense of dissent and rage. This column shall analyze “anomalous zones of interference” in avant-garde music and in the society at large. If you truly hold contempt for the social and political order (and no, that doesn’t mean you are “anti-Trump” or support BLM, as both those stances are totally compatible with the fealty demanded of you by your oppressors), if you want to make art that deconstructs it and exposes its lies, then I am your brother-in-arms. This column is a microcosm of a broader camaraderie being formed. We are politically and ideologically diverse, with numerous theories and analyses of what is wrong in our world, bonded by our opposition to the false spectacle around us. Schopenhauer believed that noise was the death of intellectualism, “pure distraction.” But no, now the whole culture has become the distraction, a fiction outlined by the ruling elite and scripted by its interlocutors in the media and the NGO industrial complex. They are our enemies, and noise is a weapon through which we challenge them to show us their true faces.
John Wiese Escaped Language (Gilgongo)
Sissy Spacek Featureless Thermal Equilibrium (Helicopter)
Sissy Spacek Prismatic Parameter (Gilgongo)
Through LA-based noise auteur John Wiese’s vast discography, we further our comprehension of noise as essentially a genreless entity. Noise is a philosophical ideal, not a specific style or genre. Noise is a transcendence of form, or a formlessness, to use Rosalind Krauss’ preferred terminology . It is, quite possibly, even a religion. Wiese has long used different instrumentations, stylistic approaches, and structural formats to conjure noise forth into existence, worshipping at its altar. In a plethora of recent releases, Wiese demonstrates how noise can spew forth from any and all manner of sonic arrangements.
The music that Wiese makes under his own name is slippery. Like the codeine promethazine that drips down the cracks of your mouth during those opiated splurges, it oozes. An Angeleno weirdo and peculiar intellectual of sorts, Wiese’s approach mirrors that of Los Angeles-based artists like Paul McCarthy (who he’s published books by) and Mike Kelley; Wiese is essentially a collagist, assorting the sounds of the world into their most psychotically hallucinatory permutations. He locates the chaotic truth of this world in these microtonal skrees.
Escaped Language, a 2017 release recently re-published by Helicopter, is a live composition recorded at Présences Electronique Festival that condenses dimensions of pseudo-contradictory narrative implications. Its one 17-minute track opens awash in gorgeous, meditative ambience that erodes the walls of the ego, leaving space through which the chaos ahead can seep through. Lynchian lounge horn arrangements interweave with shards of noise and blue balled, throbbing bass. The arrangement’s closing two minutes are Wiese at his best, in which hissing noise blends into the overwhelming density of the atmosphere evoking the specters of Shirley Jackson’s Haunting of Hill House, enraged and violently obsessed with their own traumas.
With his long-running Sissy Spacek project, Wiese has explored the noise that can be extracted from something more resembling a trad rock format. Sissy Spacek is, functionally, a grindcore band. Its songs, historically, are blink and you miss them explosions of compressed metal and hardcore-influenced rock. While clearly deconstructionist in mindset – from Sissy Spacek’s first self-titled EP in 1999, Wiese seemed to be channeling the digital grindcore of Agoraphobic Nosebleed into manically collaged, stop-start freaked out blasts of noise – Sissy Spacek also sets forth conceptual conditions from which we can interpret the noise that is achieved, even if accidentally, in the more extremist sub-genres of guitar driven music. Certainly, on the topic of grindcore, the genre’s forebears often teetered on the edge of a rock format while the dizzying velocity and ferocious volume of the music constantly threatened it to tip over the edge, into the abyss of noise; or rather, the pit of genrelessness. Certainly, the first two Napalm Death records, Brutal Truth, and Agothocles all walked that tightrope between conventional rock form on one side and unnamable, libidinal chaos on the other.
Wiese has gifted us two Sissy Spacek releases over these last few pandemic-distorted, pandemoniac months. Prismatic Parameter, released back in March at the dawn of the “new world,” is indicative of the alien dimensions that Wiese has subsequently transported the Sissy Spacek project through, further and further away from anything normally associated with “grindcore” or even “noisecore,” since 2008’s masterful The French Record saw Wiese employing sound collage, electro-acoustic, harsh industrial beats, and the washes of coffin-like ambience that saturate the silence in-between black metal tracks.
Prismatic Parameter is a mammoth of a record, at an hour and 45 minutes it slowly pulls apart the synapses connecting the neurons in your brain, eventually resulting in a face melting anti-cathexis. The music finds a nexus between fucked electronics and the head-warped “fire music” free jazz of the likes of Brotzmann or Borbetomagus. Horn sections and an onslaught of jazz live drums weave through the mess of distorted electronics and sound shards, yielding a record difficult to digest but well worth the constipation. The dizzying percussion comes courtesy of the virtuosic improvisational percussionist Ted Byrnes, who through acts of heroic athleticism manages to keep this turmoil contained, to a degree. Also, Sissy Spacek’s oft-drummer Charlie Mumma, also the drummer of avant-garde black metal band L’Acéphale, is on here as well, allowing Wiese to explore this cosmic connection between the more extreme end of jazz and improvisational music and the more experimental ends of metal and extreme music (similarly to musicians like Weasel Walter and Mick Barr). This album is a helluva commitment, but in less music-drenched and horrendously depressing times I wager that it would become an object of cult fascination in the underground.
And while I know this section of the column is getting long (I don’t have an editor so fuck it, skip around if you want), I also have to mention Featureless Thermal Parameter, released early in August, that exists at the other end of Sissy Spacek’s sonic continuum: ferocious and berserk blasts of avant-sleaze noisecore. The album’s tracks are mostly under the two-minute mark, and employ no-fi black metal screams and guttural grindcore barks to hold conversation with the extreme metal that Sissy Spacek has long sought to destroy, stitch back together, and present as something new. On records like these, Sissy Spacek becomes the band for those who hear Extreme Noise Terror, or power violence bands like Spazz or Charles Bronson, and wish for something even less resembling traditional format. Pure annihilation of rockist sound, Sissy Spacek is as vital as ever.
Mosquitoes Minus Objects (Ever/Never)
Komare The Sense of Hearing (Penultimate Press)
In an essay she wrote on the pioneering “Cinema of Transgression” filmmaker Beth B, poet and former Teenage Jesus and the Jerks front-woman Lydia Lynch writes: “We used music and art as a battering ram and a form of psychic self-defense against our own naturally violent tendencies; an extreme reaction against everything the 1960s had promised, but failed to deliver.”
No wave, while often recognizable as an austere, atonal, and fiercely distorted kind of noise punk made with rock instrumentation, is more an ideological position than it is a recognizable genre. From its early origins in the downtown Manhattan of the 1970s, it already counted vastly different sounding bands amongst its ranks. The viciously deconstructed punk of Mars had little to do with the spastic lounge jazz of The Contortions, and the modern composition infused punk jams of Theoretical Girls sounded little like the nihilistic guitar sleaze of Teenage Jesus. But what united these bands, and all artists that would employ no wave sensibilities later (from the Chicago neo-no wave of The Scissor Girls and The Flying Luttenbachers to current bands like Guttersnipe), is a deep skepticism of there being any inherent radical potential within music or subculture. Only through the annihilation of tradition, or “genre,” can the transcendent and radical be attained.
This is the connection that UK-based trio Mosquitoes have to no wave. In no way are they hauntologically recreating music of the past, but rather the band employs the no wave philosophy to unearth new terrain in the quest towards anti-rock enlightenment. The trio’s recent 12” EP, Minus Objects, is utterly fragmented, with each musician seeming to create separate parts that barely weave into one another, while a persistent gnawing darkness engulfs the composite whole of the sound, like the extraterrestrial color of Lovecraft’s The Colour out of Space.
Two of the group’s members met at Fushitsusha show in the late ‘90s, and like Keiji Haino’s group, there is an aspect of the dark side of psychedelia here. The sound is so alien to what is normally associated with rock, it seems to exist within an abyss that threatens to pull you into it, deeper and deeper, until your ego dissipates into the ether. A fitting soundtrack to the horrifically untethered sensation that follows a DMT hit, connecting you with a world without us that humans are barely capable of interpreting. This is a music with a kind of cosmic pessimism. The opener, ‘Minus Object One,’ interweaves squiggles of synth noise, slow, throbbing base, and nonsensical shouts, an introduction to a dimension beyond. But the album works best when Mosquitoes immerse themselves in dank atmospherics, enveloping the listeners in an otherworldly dread that I’ve seldom ever heard achieved by rock music. Mosquitoes are, in a way, a no wave answer to The Caretaker or the painterly dark ambience of Aseptic Void.
Komare is something a companion band to Mosquitoes (“Komare” is the Czech word for mosquitoes), but in reality is the same project minus one part. Born on a day when guitarist Clive Phillips couldn’t make it to Mosquitoes rehearsal, Komare finds the other ⅔ of the band Dominic Goodman and Peter Blundell focusing solely on electronics to further fragment and minimize the group’s sound. The results are every bit as fascinating. Komare isn’t “better,” but instead demonstrates the multifaceted ways in which these musicians can approach the aesthetic that they’ve now been refining for years. This release finds the group processing human vocals through mechanic effects, begging us to hallucinate a future in which such binaries no longer hold any meaning. One could make the typical William Gibson reference here, but Komare works in pure abstraction, giving us only the sense of the future, rather than a narrative of it. Anxiety, of course, is the prevailing feeling of late modernism. Certainty has been liquidated into the amorphous flows of the market, reprocessed as looming, muted dread. This anxiety saturates Komare’s sound, which is hard to pin down. With so much empty social justice rhetoric being espoused in avant-garde music, one longs for the no wave sensibility that renders such ideas meaningless. Mosquitoes/Komare seize the awful zeitgeist by shattering the walls of form, finding a new art in the intermixed and indistinguishable rubble that remains.
Ceresco Union Ceresco Union (Maternal Voice)
Ceresco Union Spinning Gears (Tesla Tapes)
I was very happy to hear from Joseph Charms who put me onto his new project Ceresco Union, but also rather sad that he was done with his band Errant Monks. Errant Monks’ albums The Limit Experience and Psychopposition were absolute favorites of mine in 2019. Those albums chronicled Joseph’s battle with alcoholism and delirium tremens and dripped with an atmospheric psychosis. Walls of noise brushed up against punk-techno throbbing aggression and Joseph’s embittered but resolved spoken word musings. They crackled with the cacophonic emotional range of a man wracked with paranoia as his central nervous system pieces itself together again. But they also were imbued with the strength and sense of purpose of someone dedicating all his energy towards his quest for self-emancipation.
With alcoholism behind him, Errant Monks is dead, and Cereso Union lives. With two new releases, Ceresco Union on Maternal Voice and Spinning Gears on Tesla Tapes, Charms constructs an abstract sequential narrative to those earlier Errant Monks releases. Though the alcohol dependency is mostly successfully vacated from his neural reward pathways, he is in the awkward and alienated headspace of early recovery. This is strange music, not as extreme or loud as Errant Monks, but marked by a sense of unease and self-consciousness.
I’m reminded of the months I spent in social isolation following my final opioid withdrawal. I lost more friends in those months than I did in my darkest days in my dalliances with junk. Why? Well, it’s hard to explain. CNS depressant drugs, like smack or booze, dulls the edge off the common anxiety and unsureness we experience as human beings, and when you lose that buffer, you start to act….. Strange. I’d cry at inappropriate times, you see, I’d over-share my struggles with drugs to people who barely knew me. If you met me at any point between August of 2012 and February 2013, the first things you would have learned about me were my name, and that I was a recovering junkie. You become alien to yourself, walking the autism spectrum back to some sense of emotional normality. It’s a horrendous experience, really, which makes it all the harder to not backslide back towards the warm embrace of the chemicals. That’s what Ceresco Union evokes for me.
Disgusting Cathedral Adventurer’s Despised and Rejected
Alex Lee Moyer’s documentary TFW NO GF shocked leftoids and liberals alike earlier this year by positing the theory that the alt-right and incel phenomena that have played out across the internet sphere over the last few years might just be connected to a set of specific economic and material conditions. When American leftist magazine Jacobin tweeted this groundbreaking take on the film (which they postponed for five months after the film’s release, emphasizing the publication’s typically abject cowardice in the face of their woke and decidedly unsocialist readership), their followers were just aghast! “WOMEN ARE POOR TOO AND DON’T SPEND ALL DAY POSTING VIOLENCE ON SOCIAL MEDIA!” exclaimed one particularly exasperated reader, in a post not unusual given the overall response to the tweet. But this is where Moyer’s documentary was so successful. How could any Marxist not view this subculture through the prism of economic failure? How could the material conditions of a jobless, hopeless, uneducated and poor group of young men not warrant a materialist critique? Moyer forced the DSAers to reveal themselves. They aren’t socialists, they are liberals, viewing the world through the binary of good and evil.
One of the film’s most recognizable characters, internet poster Kantbot, became the closest thing to a breakout star that could realistically be produced by a film about dejected, angry, male youths. Kantbot fancies himself something of a crackpot philosopher, a self-help guide for the perpetually unemployed and unlaid. Throughout the film, he recalls directing his followers away from hate posting about women on 4Chan and towards the philosophy of his influences like Friedrich Schelling and Immanuel Kant. Kantbot can best be interpreted as a sublimation of the incel’s alienated condition, directing the incel towards idealist philosophy and transcendence. “It’s all going to be ok, it’ll all be ok,” he repeats to the camera towards the end of the film, replacing bottomless hopelessness with just the vaguest sense of light at the end of the darkness.
However much I might be reaching with this long-winded metaphor, self-described “dungeon-synth” project Disgusting Cathedral appears to do for rank, hideous, sickly electronic sounds what Kantbot does for incel ideology. The isolated parts of debut album Adventurer’s Despised and Rejected; casio keyboards, Eurotrack synths, Nintendo DS music apps, obsolete FX, and tape manipulations; shouldn’t amount to much more than the dank, squiggly, head fucked electronic noise that I usually write about in this column. And yet, those components congeal into something…. More. This music is deeply unsettling, no doubt, but it’s also exalted, cosmic, and beyond. It’s so depressing what passes as “psychedelic music” in 2020 (I mean what isn’t depressing in 2020, really?). It’s all just post-Loop, wah wah guitar-driven rock music, or Sunburned Hand of the Man-esque freak folk 15 years too late. Psychedelia shouldn’t be a genre, but an extra-dimensionality. Todd from Ashtray Navigations told me that he sees psychedelic music as “music in 3D,” and that’s what I’m looking for. Music with dimensions, and drama. Music that sucks you into a void before caressing you in its womb and spitting you back out into a new world, or the same world, but an altered version of it. That’s the kind of psychedelia that Disgusting Cathedral is putting forth. There are perhaps some formal precedents here in young James Ferraro’s noisy duo The Skaters (with Spencer Clark), or perhaps Helm’s early project Birds of Prey (with Steven Warwick), but there are perhaps even more chemtrails and psychic distortions here. I really dig this.
Metadevice Ubiquitarchia (Malignant Records)
A lockdown record courtesy of Metadevice, also known as Portugal-based noisenik André Coelho, stripping any recognizably human features from the Metadevice sound in favor of the warped, decayed electronics that are indicative of a genreless culture in a dying world. While Metadevice’s previous album Studies for a Vortex made use of spoken word vocals in its documentation of a culture slowly wilting away piece by piece, Coelho leaves this album empty of language. Language, this music suggests, fails to capture the all-encompassing suffocation of the contemporary political moment. Wittgenstein wrote that “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” But what happens when the only world left is the ephemeral one that I’m currently mainlining my thoughts into, as I type away? This, the digital, is the only real. Locked in our homes, isolated from our common man, we inject our subjectivities into the information highway. Metadevice illustrates our bodies sublimating into our screens, like Videodrome without any choice given. We mutate, or we vanish into null. Outrage, confusion, misery. Nothing is material. It’s all happening in there, in here, a cold, dead atmosphere where nothing happens and everything happens all at once.
JK Flesh Depersonalization (Hospital Productions)
When I was an adolescent metalhead, Godflesh were one of the first “good” bands that I really got into. I was a subscriber to Terrorizer Magazine because it begrudgingly covered nu-metal bands like KoRn and Slipknot in efforts to hold onto a broader readership. I bought Godflesh’s final album of its initial run, Hymns, because Jonathan Davis was an outspoken fan of the band, and the name “Godflesh” fascinated my perverse 12-year-old brain. That album was a revelation, it was heavy but sublime, it sizzled with imagination and pulsated with sensuous rhythm.
Throughout my early life, I relied on famous musicians who I realistically could know about to introduce me to the underground through their interviews. Kurt Cobain gave me The Butthole Surfers and Flipper. Thom Yorke directed me towards electronic music, like Aphex Twin and Autechre. Thurston Moore made the case for Japanese noise. But perhaps more than all of them, Justin Broadrick was my most important tastemaker. Everything from punk rock like Crass and Discharge, industrial music and early power electronics like Throbbing Gristle and Whitehouse, dub, techno, Broadrick demanded I broaden my tastes. Even just being a Broadrick fan could open the floodgates to the sounds beyond, given his vast discography and diverse stylistic range: the grindcore pioneering of early Napalm Death, the industrial hip-hop of Techno Animal, the lush, guitar droning shoegaze of Jesu, and the ferocious torrents of noise in Final. Being a Broadrick fan is a commitment to dexterity and open-mindedness.
With that fawning text out of the way, let me declare that it is Broadrick’s aggressive techno project JK Flesh that holds the mantle of being my favorite music that Broadrick has ever created. Why, you ask? Well, what is so special about these vicious dance beats is that they seem to embody every aesthetic realm that Broadrick has ever explored. The aggression of Godflesh, the grooves of Techno Animal, the expansiveness of Final; they’re all here, compressed into these rhythms. Broadrick’s techno is minimal, but inhabits so much. I’ve struggled to make a “genreless” case for techno, given that it is so recognizable as an easy-to-pinpoint genre. But nevertheless, what techno can do at its best is to vacuum disparate genres into its formula, absorbing new bodies into its organism, each component part adding to the multi-headed beast while maintaining its structure as a single entity.
JK Flesh’s newest release Depersonalization is brief, taut, and rife with sonic potentialities. Though not on the masterful level of Rise Above, it makes a potent case for JK Flesh as the apotheosis of Broadrick’s vast sonic terrain. It, as a project, is at the top of a pyramid that the artist slowly climbed towards his entire career. It’s like he learned to sculpt away at his sonic signifiers, revealing their true essence, and took those essences and carved them into something mesmerizingly sharp and clear. It’s dance music imbued with the essence of all the energy of extreme music and all the limitlessness of the avant-garde. It’s the genre of techno that suggests the philosophical territory of genrelessness.